‘Who will write the history of the philosophic amateurs and readers?’ asks Hulme in the draft preface to his unwritten book; and despite his ambitions to be a ‘heavy philosopher’ it seems likely that an amateur he would have remained, led always by the instincts that prescribed philosophical conclusions to him and happy enough to let the professionals supply arguments and proofs. He seems in this respect to be an entirely emotional thinker, announcing what he finds desirable at any particular moment, and attentive mainly to the puzzling shifts and contradictions he notices in these desires and interests. It is easy to underestimate his competence and application as a consequence of this, especially as A. R. Orage, at the New Age, was content to indulge his undisciplined ramblings and publish them as ‘instalments’ of a project that appeared to be getting nowhere. There seems no doubt that when Hulme became interested in a subject he would read all he could about it (witness the extraordinarily comprehensive bibliography of Bergson in the English translation of Time and Free Will); but an amateur he remained – the kind of Englishman who is always founding a club, as Pound put it. What was distinctive was that the concerns of his clubs (especially, of course, the informal salon held at Mrs Kibblewhite’s) were serious ideas, not the hobbies and sports that usually preoccupy English clubmen. There is also something not quite sporting in his attitude to those he disagrees with (‘You think that, do you? You——!’) (CW, p. 153), or his belief that a ‘real vital interest in literature’ is proved by an outbreak of fist-fights in a lecture-hall (CW, p. 60). He may have been violently intolerant of opposition, but there is a kind of egalitarian generosity of spirit in the way that he makes us privy to his developing thought processes. Bertrand Russell’s opinion of him as an ‘evil man who could have created nothing but evil’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 242) seems bizarrely wide of the mark.
J. B. Harmer, in his study of Imagism, says that Hulme ‘gave up poetry in a fruitless search for intellectual satisfaction’, and he asserts that Hulme will survive by his poems rather than his ideas (p. 52). The essays in this volume show that to be an oversimplification, but it is true that the syntheses (or balanced antitheses) of ideas Hulme was looking for are best served through imagery rather than philosophical argument – at least as he developed it. But the fact that the same imagery can be found in the early notebooks (particularly ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’) as well as in more formal prose pieces – shows that a simple division between poet and man of ideas is artificial. Hulme’s poems are ideas, but treated with such delicacy that explication (betraying them to the ‘extensive manifold’) is a questionable activity.1 But explication of the overlapping modes of thought and imagery Hulme employed is nevertheless the purpose of this chapter.
In Hulme, then, we have an example of a thinker whose ideas are all, and always, secondary to emotion, feeling and physical impulse. Even his belief in permanent, transcendent values and in God rests on this: ‘It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities’ (CW, p. 61). Hulme has long been thought of as a self-contradictory thinker, and in response to this, attempts have been made to show his inconsistencies as the product of commentators’ demands that ideas he had outgrown should be consistent with what he believed later in his development. Certainly the arrangement of Speculations obscured the fact that Hulme was developing and changing his ideas and exploring their implications until the end. But there are inconsistencies along the way, at any particular moment, as well, and it is only as a process of sorting out and reconciling these inconsistencies as he begins to become conscious of them that Hulme’s development acquires any sort of coherence. What Hulme finally does, in what Karen Csengeri misleadingly (in my view) calls his ‘mature philosophy’, is to wall up his various beliefs within separate discourses, claiming that they are quite independent of each other: ‘There must be an absolute division between each of the three regions, a kind of chasm. There must be no continuous leading gradually from one to the other’ (CW, p. 425).
The three regions referred to are ‘(1) The inorganic world, of mathematical and physical science, (2) the organic world, dealt with by biology, psychology and history, and (3) the world of ethical and religious values’ (CW, p. 424). It is not a mature philosophy but a step towards abandoning philosophy altogether in favor of religious faith and practice (CW, p. 432). Because of dissatisfaction with the ‘nightmare of determinism’ implicit in region 1, region 2 is invented, and an unpredictable evolutionary novelty is assigned to it; the (Bergsonian) discourse that is the correlate of region 2 implies a creativity and unlimited potential for man as a life form. But it also makes values a by-product of evolutionary processes and hence lacking in any absolute claim on us. As a corrective, resort is made to a transcendent region of absolute values which makes the ‘creativity’ of region 2 look like a tiny and uninteresting variation of a fundamentally fixed condition.2 Each region has been psychologically needed by Hulme in order both to limit the others and to supplement what is unsatisfactory in each of them; but even as he delineates the three ‘separate’ regions he recognizes the similarity of regions 1 and 3 (in that for him they both have an absolute ‘objective’ character), and it could hardly have been long before his psychological need for region 2 dissipated. Indeed, he had already devoted nearly the whole of the fifth of his ‘Notes on Bergson’ (5 Feb. 1912) to a psychological analysis of how the ‘nightmare of mechanism’ could suddenly cease to be nightmarish, and stated that ‘the simplest way of dealing with mechanism is frankly to accept it as a true account of the nature of the universe, but at the same time to hold that this fact makes no difference to ethical values’ (CW, p. 151).3 What he has momentarily forgotten is that only with the freedom postulated by region 2 can human beings be logically subject to the ethical values of region 3. If there is an absolute gulf between these regions, and each is a separate language game, it is philosophically feeble to resort to one in order to escape from the limitations of the others. (This is leaving aside the contentious question of whether these regions are, anyway, actually separate.)
As always with Hulme (and this is one of his main attractions), in ‘A Notebook’ we are told the process of how and why he has reached his new position and come to believe that mind is a repository of transcendent values, and Hulme himself recognizes that, as the result of a process, his assertions, though ‘a first step away from subjectivism … still remain tainted with it’ (CW, p. 421). Parallel to this, when he predicts a ‘classical revival’ in culture, the classicism that is to come will recapitulate his own development and not look very classical because it will have ‘passed through a romantic period’ (CW, p. 65).
Hulme’s late ‘philosophy’, then, is a classification of desires, tidying them up conceptually so that they know their place. It is only thus, presumably, that he can make sense of the fact that he has been capable of irreconcilable impulses. Insofar as those impulses have found expression as ideas, he had, during his short writing life, allowed them expression as occasion demanded, hence his ‘contradictions’ – notoriously between his Bergsonism and his anti-romanticism – so that even in some of his earliest writings there are apparently anomalous intrusions of ideas that will later become central preoccupations. When he first set out, however, he was more ready to let contradictions meet, and it was thus that they became fruitful.
In his desire for clear, absolute distinctions in the late ‘Notebook’, Hulme disparages ‘region 2’ (the one to which he is now confining his Bergsonism) as a ‘muddy mixed zone’, while his other two regions exhibit geometrical perfection. The middle zone is ‘covered with some confused muddy substance’ (CW, p. 425). ‘Mechanism’ is no longer a ‘nightmare’ for Hulme – it was never his chief nightmare – and he no longer accepts the claims of Bergson to lift life and ‘matter’ into the realms of spirit. The image of ‘mud’ that Hulme uses here is of great significance – if we begin to read him in a literary rather than philosophical way. For it takes us back to the early notebooks and papers published as ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’, from which Bergson is absent.4 Mud, along with ashes, there stands for the undifferentiated substance into which all phenomena can be resolved. Bergsonism thus begins to appear to be a huge detour in the development of Hulme’s ‘search for reality’, as he finally moves towards assuaging his fears through a resort to entirely traditional belief systems and religious practices (using, as an amateur, whatever philosophical ideas are expedient in justifying this to himself). The claims of Bergson to assuage his fears by electrifying the muddy region 2 with élan vital no longer appeal to the Hulme of ‘A Notebook’.
To say that Hulme did not succeed in solving his problems through a coherent and original philosophy is simply to confirm that he is not a great philosopher (no one has claimed this status for him, however), not to deny the reality of the problems. It is always possible, of course, that had he survived the First World War he would have produced a convincing philosophical solution to the problems, but failing this, we need to return to the melting pot of his speculative industry, where literary reading is required to supplement philosophical sorting. For Hulme, imagery was primary, not simply illustrative of arguments. Hence his Johnsonian criterion, ‘What would … a carter in the Leek road think of it all?’ (CW, p. 8).
By approaching him through imagery we can see that the chief nightmare for Hulme appeared not to be mechanism but isolation in a universe that has no inherent characteristics or human qualities. This universe is figured in the early notes as cinders or mud. ‘Cinders’ appears to be his preferred image because it carries the suggestion of separation and discontinuity, whereas mud (though equally intractable and a more traditional image for an ur-substance) suggests homogeneity without discontinuity. (The image also carries other connotations to which I shall return.) Hulme’s original conception of language appeared to be more Nietzschean than Bergsonian. Language, a web of communication between people with desires and purposes in common, constructs pathways among the cinders, and these socially constructed conveniences are taken to be reality, whereas they are simply short cuts that get mapped in culture. Because language is common, and because the evolutionary goals of human beings and other life forms remain constant, Hulme believes he has escaped the charge of total relativism that Protagoras’ principle of ‘man the measure of all things’ implies (CW, p. 8). Whether this is justified or not, the important thing is the communal basis of this construction of an expedient reality through language: ‘Through all the ages, the conversation of ten men sitting together is what holds the world together’ (CW, p. 14). Hulme was, as I have mentioned, characterized by Ezra Pound as ‘the Pickwickian Englishman who starts a club’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 58). Robert Ferguson reprints Hulme’s ‘Rules 1908’, which formed the constitution of the ‘Poets’ Club’: twelve rules that, from the first (‘The Club shall be called the “Poets’ Club,” and shall consist of not more than fifty members’), to the last (prescribing the method of electing new members), with, in between, details of the officers and titles, place and times of meeting, procedures at dinners, price of dinners eaten and dinners missed, length of papers to be discussed and protocols for contributions from the floor, number of guests to be invited, in one short page conjures up from a chance shared interest the picture of a stable, well-ordered society ready to deal with any contingency, housed in its own comfortable premises ‘above Rumpelmeyer’s’ in St James Street, London. The document is a microcosm of Hulme’s conception of the construction of reality – and reading it we cannot help (probably wrongly) inferring the existence of a well-disciplined and carefully structured reality, an efficient going concern.
The tone of ‘Cinders’ is frequently disparaging of such inferences insofar as they are applied macrocosmically, and Hulme is often insistent on the need to set aside the ‘disease’ of language that overlays the cinderheaps and substitutes itself for them. But it is essential to realize that, however skeptical he was about its ultimate foundations, the club was essential for him: indeed it was essential because of his skepticism and the underlying fear of isolation in an ocean of ashes. ‘Living language is a house’, he decides (CW, p. 33), and ‘the bad is fundamental, and … the good is artificially built up in it and out of it, like oases in the desert, or as cheerful houses in the storm’ (CW, p. 10). When he writes, in one of the fragments that Alun R. Jones collected under the title ‘Images’, ‘Old Houses were scaffolding once / and workmen whistling’ (Jones, 1960, p. 180) it is not difficult to guess the reaction of the ‘carter in the Leek Road’. Whether he thought it worth bothering with or not, he would take it as a simple statement of fact. I do not wish to dissolve the fact into allegory, even while I wish to insist on certain resonances to the lines. Only with some knowledge of Hulme’s thought could any metaphysical implication be definitely assigned to the image, which can be unfolded without reference to it. First, we have here a contrast between what is solid (and reliable) now – the old houses that we imagine standing four-square and enduring – and its earlier non-existence except as space enclosed by scaffolding. Emotions cluster round this contrast. Second, we have an image of the workmen, co-operating in the erection of the wooden scaffolding, perhaps climbing to a dangerous height while they build up the house inside, and insouciantly whistling while they do so. The security of the old house contrasts with its precarious process of construction out of (it would seem) nothing. The juxtaposition of the images is as important as the images themselves, though this textbook characteristic of imagism is not something I am particularly concerned with at present, since I am here interested in Hulme’s positive presentation of the construction of a dwelling for us amidst the cinders.
Such a dwelling has more needs to fulfil than purely utilitarian ones. We have seen that for Hulme the instinct for belief in the deity is part of humankind’s fixed nature. In ‘Notes on Language and Style’, a view of the dome of Brompton Oratory apparently floating in the mist suggests to him the process by which the construction of reality through language also goes beyond the utilitarian human dwelling so that it encompasses a location for the deity: ‘And the words moved until they became a dome, a solid, separate world, a dome in the mist, a thing of terror beyond us, and not of us. Definite heaven above worshippers, incense hides foundations. A definite force majeure (all the foundations of the scaffolding are in us, but we want an illusion, falsifying us, something independent of foundations)’ (CW, pp. 27-8). We have here again the image of scaffolding, rooted in nothing but ourselves and when dismantled leaving the overarching dome apparently a thing-in-itself, independent enough of its constructors to cause them ‘terror’. The stage of making this dwelling ‘other’, of removing the scaffolding, Hulme associates with ‘art’: ‘the mist effect, the transformation in words, has the art of pushing it through the door’ (CW, p. 28). The ‘door’ would seem to be the way into another world, the ‘imaginary land which all of us carry about in desert moments’; art gives ‘a sense of wonder, a sense of being united in another mystic world’ (CW, p. 34). This branch of the argument is already beginning to generate its own reversed reflection, however, to which it will be necessary to return. The dome we have built is the heaven above the worshippers, and it inspires terror. This, as we know, is going to be a real terror for Hulme, but the terror is going to be more fundamental than the attribution of its origin, for the vault of heaven at this early stage of his thought can simply be resolved into a misprision of one of the tracks left in the cinders by the networks of language, a product of the constitution of the club.
Hulme’s emphasis on the power of language to construct a ‘dwelling’ for us calls to mind Heidegger’s essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in which Heidegger reaches back to what he calls the ‘primal nature of these meanings’ (Heidegger, 1975, p. 148), which are available through the etymology of German words but are silenced in the everyday traffic of language as verbal counters. Similarities there certainly are, particularly in the shared view of language as carrying meanings that have declined into latency, and Hulme’s appeal to the carter in the Leek Road may superficially bear comparison with Heidegger’s touchstone of the peasant farmhouse in the Black Forest. The difference is that for Heidegger the Earth is our home, and insofar as the true nature of our dwelling on it is revealed by language, it is so revealed, not constructed.5 Hulme, on the other hand, lives in the world of as-if.
For Hulme there is something heroic in the achievement of raising oneself so one floats above the chaos of cinders. It happens by moments, and the role of art is to prolong them: ‘the musical note, perhaps Art’ (CW, p. 9). Hulme’s love for military music and street bands is reflected in several of his notes: ‘thank God for the long note of the bugle, which moves the world bodily out of the cinders and the mud’ (CW, p. 18). Parallel to his remark about the carter in the Leek road, and showing a similar down-to-earth approach, Hulme instances boys going home from the music hall whistling a tune they have heard there as a paradigm of the relation between poet and reader (CW, p. 39).6 A further street image he returns to frequently is that of attractive women and their clothes as they walk: ‘A girl’s ball-dress and shoes are symbolic of the world organised (in counters) from the mud’ (CW, p. 12). Style, particularly their dress, removes them into the ‘other world’ (CW, p. 36): ‘The air of absolute detachment, of being things in themselves. Objects of beauty with the qualification at the basis of it. Disinterestedness, as though saying: We may have evolved painfully from the clay, and be the last leaf on a tree. But now we have cut ourselves away from that. We are things-in-themselves. We exist out of time’ (CW, p. 28). The analogy flows directly into Hulme’s conception of the ‘staged’ nature of literature, in which ideals ‘must wear high heeled shoes which make them appear free movers, and not sprung from that low thing earth’ (CW, p. 30).7
It is noticeable that these ideas and images do not clearly separate the realm of the aesthetic from the realm of everyday reality. The communal imposition of the trackways of language over the mud or cinders builds up the world we perceive; when this is done with enough flourish and conviction (and when a permanent or shared impulse in humanity becomes fixed and recognized as a result of this), we leave contact with mud and cinders and enter a floating world above it. But the processes appear to be the same: the girl’s dress and shoes are (like ordinary language) counters, but they lift her out of the mud and cinders as an example of art. Pursuing Hulme’s train of thought in this direction (reserving, still, a consciousness that it is by no means the only direction it takes), we can note that the result of such uplifted moments is ‘ecstasy’, a word that appears frequently in the early notes. It is momentary and vulnerable, and is achieved when consciousness of the cindery chaos is suppressed: ‘Happiness and ecstasy at present unstable. Walking in the street, seeing pretty girls (all chaos put into the drains: not seen)’ (CW, p. 13). The poet expresses ‘wonder and ecstasy’ (CW, p. 24), and the ‘whole essence of poetry’ for Hulme is the ability to prolong – as in ‘the long note of the bugle’ (CW, p. 18) – such moments: ‘The art of dwelling on, drunken ecstasy on one point’ (CW, p. 37).
Apart from the hint of terror in the passage on Brompton Oratory, these citations have all revealed a spirit of contentment in the condition of existence in the man-made world of linguistic artifice, above the cinders and the mud, though there have also been hints of its precariousness. Examining Hulme’s acknowledged poem ‘The Embankment’ we can see a sardonic recognition of this precariousness in the image of the ‘fallen gentleman’, once no doubt a member of a club, now down and out.8 It is almost astonishing how the first two lines of this poem draw together the predominant images for the world of artifice Hulme has celebrated in ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’: ‘Once, in a finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy/ In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement’ (CW, p. 3). As with the case of the old houses, it is the sheer literalism of the imagination at work here that seems so startling after we have seen Hulme working through these same images as analogies to clarify his thought in his speculative notes. Here if anywhere William Carlos Williams’s apparently fatuous slogan, ‘No ideas but in things’, takes on credibility, for the images create the thought without allegory. In due course we shall also need to relate this achievement to Hulme’s well-known opposition to abstraction in language.
The ‘system’ or direction of thought I have been tracing leaves experienced reality contingent on a community of impulses and instincts developed for evolutionary ends of the particular species, man. Hulme does not attempt a philosophical solution to the problem of the initial differentiation of a form of life from the chaos of cinders, and in the context of the poems and notes this deficiency need not concern us.9 But he does take seriously the contingency of phenomena on impulses that have (being evolutionary) a grounding in the body itself. And in this he again seems to be closer to Nietzsche (who is frequently concerned with ideas as the correlative of the healthy or the sickly body) than he is to Bergson: ‘all peculiarities of the human organism must have their counterpart in the construction of the world’ (CW, p. 13); this idea he classifies as ‘mystical’. It is perhaps a mystical point of view because it leads to consequences Hulme does not wish to test, a kind of ultimate humanism that suggests too harmonious an image of the universe. Philosophically he will not accept this: ‘The absolute is invented to reconcile conflicting purposes. But these purposes are necessarily conflicting, even in the nature of Truth itself. It is so absurd to construct an absolute which shall at each moment just manage by artificial gymnastics to reconcile these purposes’ (CW, p. 13).
Philosophically, this is a critique (or repudiation) of F. H. Bradley, and it carries implications about the coherence of the idea of the ‘human’ that are reflected in Hulme’s later anti-humanism and in his separation of ‘regions’ in ‘A Notebook’. He recognizes these consequences when he states that ‘Man is a weathercock, standing in the middle’ (CW, p. 19). But if we re-invert the idea here, grounding it again in the physical, the reference to gymnastics connects it to the frequent images of dance in the early notes (these images find their way less directly into the poems). Dance, as a physical expression related to the body’s fundamental impulses, is the ultimate example of the reality that floats above the cinders: ‘Dancing to express the organisation of cinders, finally emancipated (cf. bird)’ (CW, p. 17). The mystical idea of the congruence of the human organism and the macrocosm, and the belief in the possibility of a total expression through the (dancing) body is associated with Hulme’s cryptic mentions of the ‘red dancer’, the embodiment of his idea of metaphysical expression: ‘the red moving figure is a way of grouping some ideas together, just as powerful a means as the one called logic’ (CW, pp. 34-5). It is the image of the ‘cosmic dance’ (CW, pp. 34-5) associated with the idea of total identity of the human and its reality. It is the epitome of what Frank Kermode called the ‘romantic image’, instanced in the 1890s’ fad for Loïe Fuller, later for Isadora Duncan and frequently appearing in the imagery of pre-modernist and modernist works of art and poems.10
The position thus far retrieved from these writings is well-summarized in William Empson’s lines from ‘This Last Pain’: ‘All those large dreams by which men long live well / Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell’, and his invitation to ‘build an edifice of form / for house where phantoms may keep warm’. Outside the house, Hulme believes, all is cinders and primeval cold (CW, p. 11). He entertains the Empsonian notion of cultivating illusion as a means of sustaining comfort and happiness: ‘A judicious choice of illusions, leading to activities planned and carried out, is the only means of happiness, e.g. the exhilaration of regarding life as a procession or a war’ (CW, p. 16).
Our Bergsonian idea of Hulme (an accurate enough view in its way), leads to an emphasis on his dissatisfaction with this ‘counter world’ of artifice that removes us from the more fundamental ‘cinders’ of reality. In his Bergsonian phase Hulme applied Bergson’s critique of the intellect and its mode of understanding to his own division of the world into cinders and counters. For Bergson the world of counters and the intellect is a limited world, governed by the laws of physics and matter. This is the world, not of vitality and life, but of mechanism and death. By an act of intuition and concentration, however, it is possible to get behind this world to a more fundamental, uncircumscribed region of life and creativity which the intellect normally solidifies and maps onto the phenomenal world in which we normally live. The theory is now familiar in the feminist versions of it that derive from Lacan. The disparity is obvious: for Bergson the pre-intellectual or pre-linguistic world is one of life and creativity, but for Hulme it is a place of ashes and death: ‘Death is a breaking down into cinders’ (CW, p. 9), while the counter world of language (at least in the material we have been considering) is a place of exhilaration, excitement and happiness. It is not difficult to see how Bergson’s conception of a phenomenal dualism in which an ur-substance is overlaid by a sign-system that usurps it would be seized on by Hulme as equivalent to his own dualism, but it is essential to realize that the values attaching to the poles of Bergson’s duality are almost exactly the reverse of those of Hulme. This, I suggest, is what Hulme himself begins to realize in his image of the Bergsonian ‘region 2’ of ‘A Notebook’ as ‘confused muddy substance’ (CW, p. 425).
But throughout ‘Cinders’ Hulme does disparage the pretensions (and complacencies) of the counter world in the face of the cinders it spans, and this attitude certainly has a Bergsonian equivalent that in his formal writings he is prepared to exploit. It leads to a quite different idea of the nature of ‘art’ from the one so far proposed. So, as expounded in ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, instead of being a phenomenon of the counter world, art is ‘a more direct communication of reality’ – reality being for Bergson the ‘flux of interpenetrated elements unseizable by the intellect’ (CW, p. 193). Art in this theory is not a construction but the demolition of a construction that has become an obstruction. Were it not for the barrier of the counter world we have made (the extensive manifold) we would be in direct contact with reality, and ‘art would be useless, or rather we should all be artists’ (CW, p. 198). In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, apparently written around the same time (1911), Hulme has entirely gone over to this view of art, which he now dissociates from the counter world; poetry ‘is a compromise for a language of intuition that would hand over sensations bodily’ (CW, p. 70). No doubt it is possible by careful teasing out of arguments (by what Hulme calls ‘artificial gymnastics’) to mediate between these views about art, but it is not necessary. Hulme needed them both at (more or less) the same time. Psychologically what is at the root of both is a desire to make vivid, to avoid the merely habitual and the settled grooves of customary perception. The point that is most important to note, however, is that for Bergson the revelation of reality would show it as embodying the values of life, creativity and freedom, while in Hulme’s Bergsonian version of art what would be revealed is terrifyingly inhospitable to humanity. Hulme’s Bergsonian artist is expelled, or has withdrawn, from the world of human associations, as is made clear in the poem ‘Madman’, where the frightened speaker sees past the social world of ‘those who have not yet withdrawn’ and is overcome by ‘cold’ (Jones, 1960, p. 170).
It is well-known that the naturalistic image for the primordial substance that exceeds the mapping powers of human language was, for Hulme, ‘the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of Western Canada’ (CW, p. 53); the ‘flats of Canada are incomprehensible on any single theory’ (CW, pp. 10-11). His rough pre-Bergsonian metaphysics, though identifying ‘cinders’ as a primordial substance, also recognizes that the feeling it induced in him must correspond with some human impulse or instinct (though he does not go as far as Nietzsche in speculating what the evolutionary function of thoughts and feelings that harm us might be). To put the matter in a paradoxical and circular formulation, the notion of ‘cinders’ and alienation from the human are themselves the product of the human superstructure over the cinders. The division, the fundamental fissure is in humanity itself, recognized in Hulme’s noting ‘The two moods in life’, one of which is the ‘withdrawn into oneself mood’ of ‘ennui, sickness and disgust’ that is ‘the fundamental ennui and chaos out of which the world has been built’; while the other is the ecstasy and happiness of those moments of exaltation already discussed. ‘Man is the chaos highly organised, but liable to revert to chaos at any moment. Happiness and ecstasy at present unstable’ (CW, p. 13), and, later on the same page, ‘The sick disgusting moments are part of the fundamental cinders – primeval chaos.’ What Hulme objects to is the complacency that restricts humanity to the second of these moods. One of his images for this comfortable insulation is the railway line: ‘a railway leaves out all the gaps of dirt between’, he complains (CW, p. 14), and it is clearly his ambition to give a more accurate feel of the ‘dirt’ or cinders between: ‘Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose – a train which delivers you at a destination’ (CW, p. 70). Hence the frequency in the early notes of the stress on conveying in as tactile a way as possible the gritty, cindery reality that the passenger normally ignores. Most walks that Hulme mentions are cold, however. It is, as well, the explanation for his frequently expressed desire for the language of poetry to be made of ‘clay’: it is seeing the real clay, that men in agony worked with, that gives pleasure (CW, p. 26). Here is where Hulme’s dislike of abstract language originates.
The two impulses corresponding to these moods, to transcend, and to return to the muddy earth, generally alternate in Hulme’s verse as a pattern of hubris receiving its comeuppance. He may express the emotional emptiness and anomie this leaves in its wake, or, more stoically, stand aside and smile knowingly. Hulme’s highest claims for the counter world built up so that it becomes a floating world projected from humanity are high indeed, extending, as we have seen in the example he extrapolates from the dome of Brompton, to the vault of Heaven itself. But these vaunting images always, in the end, disappoint and the tracks lead into the cold and cinders. One of the examples he puts forward in his description of a strategy of attaining ‘happiness’ – for him apparently, as for Swift, the capacity for being well-deceived – is ‘the exhilaration of regarding life as a procession or a war’ (CW, p. 16), and the music that seems to have achieved this exhilaration for him was less a ‘finesse of fiddles’ than the military bugle call or the marching band. He records his joy in Bologna when a military band marches past: ‘I regard processions as the highest form of art’, and tells how he missed the opening of the philosophical congress in order to watch it (CW, p. 108). The other side of the coin is given in ‘In the City Square’, which begins with the triumphal image of the ‘start of the great march/ The cries, the cheers, the parting/ Marching in an order/ Through the familiar streets’ but continues into disillusion as the march proceeds ‘alone’ out onto the moonlit moor, with torches extinguished. It concludes in the cold with a vision of the warrior dead, calling into question the destination of the route (Jones, 1960, p. 169). The poem may be compared with A. E. Housman’s ‘On the Idle Hill of Summer’, which also treats of marching soldiers going towards death. The Housman poem does not come out well from the comparison; in particular, its final triumphant line asserting redemption of the dead strikes a false, forced note.
In ‘Cinders’, following his mention of a dancer expressing an organization of cinders, ‘finally emancipated’ (CW, p. 17), Hulme notes the transitory nature of such achievements: if they comprise a track, like the route of the marchers they can be disrupted, peter out or lead simply into the questionable cold:
All these sudden insights (e.g. the great analogy of a woman compared to the world in Brussels) – all of these start a line, which seems about to unite the whole world logically. But the line stops. There is no unity. All logic and life are made up of tangled ends like that.
Always think of the fringe and of the cold walks, of the lines that lead nowhere. (CW, p. 17)
When the dancer appears in Hulme’s poetry it is as an anthropomorphized version of the sky (hence the world), seducing the poet into one of those moments of apparent insight that he both loves but knows will disappoint or merely distract. Particularly she is the sunset in three of his poems: the acknowledged ‘City Sunset’, ‘The Sunset’ and ‘Sunset (II)’. In ‘Town Sky-Line’ she is ‘Flora’, but in all the poems her flirtatious behavior is in the brave vibration of her dress, the clouds. As Hulme said, the real level-headedness is ‘not to be intoxicated with clothes’, and this resistance is intimated in the three sunset poems. In ‘Sunset (II)’, a mildly misogynistic characterization of the sunset as flaunting ‘like a scarlet sore’ and expecting admiration of its beauty ‘like a wanton’ is contrasted with a preferred workingman’s sunset returning ‘at eve/ After labour’ (Jones, 1960, p. 177).11 In ‘A City Sunset’ the alluring fancy is entertained with less resistance, but she is finally dismissed as ‘a vain maid, lingering, loth to go’ (Jones, 1960, p. 155). In ‘The Sunset’, the most poised, impersonal but mannered of these poems, her identity as a dancer is made explicit, since she is ‘A coryphée, covetous of applause’ (Jones, 1960, p. 174).12 She asks too much for herself and is ‘loth to leave the stage’; hence the ‘hostile murmurs of the stalls’, where, presumably, Hulme is sitting, as usual attempting to disrupt the performance.13 The wistful acknowledgement of the partiality of all those experiences that redeem the world from cinders occurs in the beautiful final paragraphs of ‘Cinders’, collecting together many of the images that have preoccupied him:
The road leading over the prairie, at dusk, with the half-breed. Travel helps one to discover the undiscovered portions of one’s own mind. Scenes like the red dance leap to the centre of the mind there to synthesize what before was perhaps unknown.
Must see these different manifestations of the cinders; otherwise we cannot work the extended clay.
A melancholy spirit, the mind like the great desert lifeless, and the sound of march music in the street, passes like a wave over the desert, unifies it, but then goes. (CW, p. 22)
I have laid some emphasis on Hulme’s ‘clubbish’ tendencies; but he was also inclined to disrupt those clubs of which he was a member. Clubs foster just that complacency that disgusts him. In his 1908 lecture on modern poetry to the Poets’ Club, far from observing the decorum apparently encouraged by the formality of the rules he laid down, he begins with what is virtually an insult to the president of the club by baldly asserting an unqualified rejection of the president’s view of poetry. In a later essay he records how his faith in Bergson’s philosophy was rocked by attending a lecture given by the great philosopher and finding himself surrounded by a hall full of like-minded disciples: ‘What these people agreed on could not be right’ – this is not a club of which he wishes to be a member (CW, p. 156). At Cambridge Hulme had been president of the ‘Discord Club’, and it was probably only in a club with such an oxymoronic title that he could have felt happy. Its activities, as recorded by Ferguson, went beyond undergraduate high jinks and drunken horseplay. The deliberate, and apparently sober, outrages it (or Hulme in particular) committed against convention, decorum, law and property amount to an extraordinary anarchist gesture against the complacencies of the rule-bound order – the network of codes – that constituted Edwardian bourgeois society.14 His later gestures are quieter (though intermittently outrageous), as he finds his place in that society. Nevertheless:
In the quiet land
There is a secret unknown fire.
Suddenly rocks shall melt
And the old roads mislead.
Across the familiar road
There is a deep cleft. I must stand and draw back.
In the cool land
There is a secret fire. (Jones, 1960, p. 166)
The image of the disrupted track is familiar from the early notebooks, but that of the volcanic threat beneath is not. As always we need to recall Hulme’s working premise that all that is ‘perceived’ outside is a projection answering to what is first an impulse from within the person: the ‘familiar road’ is not just Edwardian England but Hulme himself. The new image of volcanic fire contrasts sharply with the cold cinders that he usually imagines as the bedrock for his trackways, and it draws our attention to the anomaly of his choice of cinders as an image for the primordial. For of course cinders cannot be primordial since they are what remain from a prior conflagration or volcanic eruption, but Hulme normally shows no consciousness of this. Despite the tendency to philosophical idealism (an evolutionary version of idealism) in Hulme’s early thought, there is also, as here, a suppressed sense of something prior and inaccessible, beyond the phenomenal horizon.
This prior ‘something’ has its place in Hulme’s thought as the correlate of the instinct to believe in the existence of deity. The deity is like some version of the romantic sublime in being beyond signification, but insofar as it has characteristics it partakes of the same doubleness we have found in Hulme’s experience of the world as cold, alienating cinders and as redeemed, if only at moments and precarious points, from that. This does not develop into a full-scale Manichaeism, but there is a hint of a Gnostic belief in a hostile as well as a beneficent deity. The realm of deity is the vault of heaven and stars. In ‘The Embankment’ the speaker, exiled from the warmth of the human club, calls on God to ‘make small/ The old star-eaten blanket of the sky/that I may fold it round me and in comfort lie’ (Jones, 1960, p. 159). From the manuscript notes Jones publishes, the connection with the ‘flats of Canada’ and the cindery chill they imparted is evident: the gods are the ‘blanket makers in the prairie of cold’. The manuscript indicates at least some skepticism on Hulme’s part, not perhaps about the existence of deity, but about the reality of the comfort it offers: ‘Religion is the expansive lie of temporary warmth’ (Jones, 1960, p. 159). It goes without saying that God will not turn the sky into a moth-eaten blanket to warm the down-and-out gentleman.
The obverse of this image of the gods providing comfort and warmth to those exposed on the cold prairie is seen in the poem ‘At Night!’ This opens with a vision of a dead tree ‘silhouetted on the hill’s edge’ recalling diseased veins on a white corpse.15 The poem concludes:
The tearing iron hook
Of pitiless Mara.
Handling soft clouds in insurrection.
Brand of the obscene gods
On their flying cattle,
Roaming the sky prairie. (Jones, 1960, p. 167)
‘Mara’ is presumably the agent of these inimical and cruel gods, herding their cattle and branding them, taking them to the slaughterhouse where they will be slung on her iron hook.
Hulme’s major criticism of romanticism in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ is that it reserves to man what should be attributed to deity and installs the idea of progress towards perfectibility in humanity. He uses a theory of repression to explain the appearance of the religious emotions in secular (humanistic) regions. It is, of course (wittingly or not) a criticism of his own rudimentary metaphysic, which is a kind of Berkeleyan idealism in which God has been replaced by an evolving humanity. Gods, if we follow this direction of Hulme’s thought, are, as much as phenomenal reality itself, the projections of instincts (the fright of the mind that created the first gods, or, more beneficently, a simple, permanent instinct to believe in God). The yearning for the infinite that Hulme dislikes in romanticism by this account must take place within the limits of the human, in other words, and this is what Hulme dramatizes in ‘Mana Aboda’, in which the sky – that symbolist site of impossible yearning, instanced in Mallarmé’s ‘L’Azur’ (‘Je suis hanté. L’Azur! l’Azur! l’Azur! l’Azur!’) – becomes a goddess much like the ancient Egyptian Nût, ‘whose bent form the sky in arched circle is’. She is also the ‘woman compared to the world’, an image that had seemed such an insight, apparently, when thought of (in Brussels, Hulme reminds himself). The poem is a comedy of projections and transferences. The romantic poets are there with their roses, but the ‘unknown grief’ is that of the goddess. The romantic ideal of union with the infinite is, as always, unconsummated, but the attempts of the poets are belittled by comparison with the despair of the goddess: ‘I weary of the roses and the singing poets –/ Josephs all, not tall enough to try’ (Jones, 1960, p. 157). Joseph, of course, was not the father of Jesus Christ; it took union with the more than human before redemption could enter the universe. Poetry is subtly and humorously put in a less exalted place than religion, but romantic concerns are still recognized, and, as I have suggested, the idea that the whole drama actually takes place within the limits of human imagination is by no means ruled out. The poem has a narrator who tells us that Mana Aboda, the goddess, ‘seems’ to mourn for an unknown grief, and it is only by his report (‘I heard her cry’) that we are let into the secret of her supposed weariness.
Hulme is not very successful in making a clear-cut distinction between romanticism and classicism (but then who is?). His own themes belong to the afterlife of romanticism. Michael Roberts shrewdly noted that his poetry does ‘drag in the infinite’ (and we have seen that religion seems to get spilt into it as well). He adds that: ‘In all Hulme’s poems, the ‘infinite’ things – beauty, sky, moon and sea – appear, but where a Romantic poet would try to make familiar things seem important by comparing them with moon or sea, Hulme reverses the effect and makes the infinite things seem small and homely by comparing them with a red-faced farmer, or a child’s balloon, or a boy going past the churchyard’ (1982, p. 228). The boundary between romanticism and modernism is no easier to fix than that between romanticism and classicism, but the big difference is that the transition to modernism was willed, even while a romantic Weltanschauung, in Hulme’s word, still lingered on the stage, loath to go. The model available to Hulme and his generation for extricating culture from that was the dandified sardonic aestheticism of the 1890s. Hulme claims for his rejection of romanticism (and for his ‘classicism’) that with it ‘you never seem to swing right along to the infinite nothing. If you say an extravagant thing which does exceed the limits inside which you know man to be fastened, yet there is always conveyed in some way at the end an impression of yourself standing outside it, and not quite believing it, or consciously putting it forward as a flourish’ (CW, p. 63). It does not sound far away from the method of the aesthetic movement. T. S. Eliot was heavily indebted to the dandified symbolisme of Jules Laforgue, and treated the stock romantic props with heavy irony: ‘The moon has lost her memory/A washed out smallpox cracks her face’ (Eliot, 1990, p. 27). It is not surprising that he should have admired Hulme’s poems so much, for Hulme’s image of the moon leaning over a hedge ‘like a red-face farmer’ performs the same deflation without Eliot’s lingering aura of ‘decadence’. Again, Hulme’s poem ‘The Embankment’ is not so far removed from Wilde’s epigrammatic ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’, and its ‘fallen gentleman’ is an archetypal relic of that era; but how different is the spirit of the poem from anything that had gone before. Hulme learnt a style from despair and taught poetry how to be modern.
The tradition of poetry most often identified as having learned from Hulme how to be modern leads from the Imagism of Pound (with offshoots blossoming and shedding petals into a Chinese jar), through William Carlos Williams, to culminate at Black Mountain in the poetics of the ‘archaeologist of morning’, Charles Olson. That tradition acted as if the cure for the ‘language disease’ – the tendency of the ready-made to deliver its meanings without friction and thus without effect – must be a return to the primal. The ‘primal’, conveyed somehow directly, is the ‘thing’ with its effect, rather than mere meaning. There is indeed warrant in Hulme for regarding an unmediated transfer of experience as the real objective of poetry, which at one point he says is ‘a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily’ (CW, p. 70); the body feels effects, not meanings. For Hulme, syntax and the ‘connections in language’ are mere secondary refinements that ‘only indicate the precise relation or attitude or politeness between two simultaneously presented images’ (CW, p. 29). The tradition that derives from such an approach strives like Antaeus to return to primal ground as the source of power. Contributors to that tradition may take the ‘primal’ to be the human sensorium, or its correlate, human language traced down to where its roots draw direct nourishment from the earth, before it branches into an airy interlacement of syntax, or they may see it as an original occulted location for the human in nature, traceable in myth or other inscriptions of pre-history.16 But it is far from certain that in this primal dissolution of the human superstructure our best selves, or even our best poems, are to be found.
Hulme has been too readily identified with this tradition, however (notably by Donald Davie in his sceptical corrective to it, Articulate Energy), as the present reading of his early work has, I hope, shown.17 For if he values Antaeus, he also values Antaeus’ antagonist, the heroic Hercules who lifts him above the cindery Earth into the airy other world of spirit.18 Hulme’s best poems turn their struggle into an evenly-balanced ju-jitsu or an elegant, wistful pas-de-deux.
1 See ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’ (CW, p. 172).
2 The famous epigraph of ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ in Speculations, ‘The fright of the mind before the unknown created not only the first gods, but also the first art’ (p. 73), frankly acknowledges a psychological – and hence natural – origin to the supposedly transcendent region 3. Since the Csengeri text of this lecture, in the absence of the original manuscript, follows the Speculations printing, it is not clear why the epigraph is omitted in the Collected Writings printing. When Hulme wrote ‘A Notebook’ he had become convinced that the arguments of Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl had secured the objective status of region 3.
3 Interestingly, in the same ‘note’ he predicts but denounces the position he will arrive at in ‘A Notebook’: ‘this combination of a belief in mechanism and a belief in absolute values … is just irritating sloppiness’ (CW, p. 153); in ‘A Notebook’ he tries to avoid this sloppiness by asserting that the two beliefs have no connection with each other.
4 Karen Csengeri dates ‘Cinders’ to 1906–7 but says that Hulme ‘added [to] it in the years following’ (CW, p. 7); ‘Notes on Language and Style’ she dates to c. 1907. Hulme began reading Bergson in 1907. For a rewarding account of ‘Cinders’ as a precursor of modernist and postmodernist disruptions of logos, see Dennis Brown, ‘T. E. Hulme’s “Cinders”’, 2003.
5 This is not to say that Heidegger is unconcerned with construction; but his constructions locate us in what is there; Hulme’s lift us out of what is there (cinders), for his ‘primal’ is not hospitable to us.
6 Compare the workmen whistling as they construct the house, the sea ‘feigning joy’ by whistling, imagined by ‘The Man in the Crow’s Nest’ (Jones, 1960, p. 161), and the resolve of the ‘Madman’ to ‘hum in the presence of God, it will sustain you’ (Jones, 1960, p. 170).
7 It is not for me to defend Hulme’s ogling habits. But it should be noted that he presents these as examples of deliberate display on the part of the women. There is (or at least he believes there is) a contract between him and them, and they are part of the same game, members of the same club, although their roles differ. This is to be contrasted with that variety of ‘male gaze’ he exalts as ‘the real levelheadedness: to be able to analyse a pretty girl at first sight, not to be intoxicated with clothes, to be able to imagine the effect of dipping in water’ (CW, p. 15).
8 It is ‘acknowledged’ in the sense that it is one of the five he consented to have published as his ‘Complete Poetical Works’ in 1912.
9 He makes a brief attempt at exploring the philosophical consequences of this in ‘Cinders’, concluding that man and man’s world were ‘gradually built up at the same time’ (CW, p. 12). By positing a prior ‘life-force’, Bergson gave his own solution to the problem.
10 See Frank Kermode, ‘Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev’, 1971.
11 A draft of this poem (Jones, 1960, pp. 178–9) contains the lines ‘Along the fretted edge of the city’s roofs/ About the time of homeward going crowds’, which reappear in the ‘acknowledged’ ‘A City Sunset’. Presumably the finished ‘Sunset (II)’ was produced after the draft was pillaged.
12 A coryphée is a ballet dancer who ranks above a member of the corps de ballet and below a soloist.
13 Ferguson records that in 1904 Hulme appeared before a magistrate after his disorderly conduct in and outside the Empire Music Hall. He denied the charge of drunkenness and was fined 5 shillings (p. 28).
14 See Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, chapter 2.
15 There is more to be said on Hulme’s feelings about trees, which tend to have an ominous quality (see the passage about ‘a waiting engine in the trees … like an animal waiting to kill’ (CW, p. 42)). Hulme needed this threatening sense of reality as a contrast to more ecstatic moments. If life were all ecstasy the conflicts that make up the self would disappear. This is the idea behind ‘Conversion’ (Jones, 1960, p. 160), which sees the speaker overcome by ecstasy at the beauty of ‘the valley wood’. The result (sardonically exaggerated) is stifling. The conversion, presumably, is from a view of trees as diseased and ugly to a more romantic one of their absolute ‘beauty’, a view which would make Hulme’s survival impossible. See Peter Nicholls’s discussion of the modernists’ fear of a ‘narcissistic suppression of otherness’ in Modernisms, 1995, pp. 187–92. It is notable that T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Death of St Narcissus’ is reputed to have originated partly in Eliot’s admiration for Hulme’s poem.
16 For Charles Olson the primal was all of these things (and at a certain point of regression their unity would presumably become apparent). For a typical restorative agenda, see the collection of notes gathered in Olson, Proprioception, 1965.
17 Donald Davie, in Articulate Energy, 1955 (revised in Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy, 1992) is, for the sake of his argument, too ready to identify Hulme entirely with what is only one side of his double-sided conception of poetry.
18 ‘Allegorically, the subject [of Hercules overcoming Antaeus] can be interpreted … on a Neo-Platonic plane as spirit overcoming flesh’ (Boorsch, 1992, p. 298).