Early in 1912 T. E. Hulme, sent down from Cambridge eight years earlier for a range of public and private misdemeanours, applied to his old college, St John’s, for reinstatement as an undergraduate.1 As part of this application he used a letter of recommendation from Henri Bergson, whom he had met, for the second time, at an international congress of philosophy the previous year in Bologna.2 Hulme had attended as a member of the Aristotelian Society, to which he had been elected in June 1910. The Aristotelian Society was a key institution in academic philosophy in Britain in the first part of the century. Its chairman was G. E. Moore, an influence upon the Bloomsbury group, but also a key figure in the subsequent development of British philosophy away from continental figures such as Bergson and towards logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. Another pivotal anti-Bergsonian, Bertrand Russell, became President of the Aristotelian Society in 1911. Writing in 1956, Moore had no recollection of Hulme, and perhaps it was Hulme’s interest in Bergson that caused Moore to eradicate this member from his memory bank; in later years Russell did remember Hulme, if only to call him ‘an evil man who could have created nothing but evil’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 1).
During 1911 and 1912 Hulme seems to have been preoccupied with philosophy, mainly with Bergson, more perhaps than at any other time in his life. For example, from October 1911 to February 1912 he published a series of ‘Notes on Bergson’ in the New Age and ‘A Personal Impression of Bergson’ in the Westminster Gazette (November 1911); gave a series of lectures in London in November and December 1911 that were published as ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’; and in the same period probably composed the important essay, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’. It was a good moment to be an English Bergsonian, as the French philosopher visited England in 1911 and gave immensely popular lectures in Oxford, Birmingham and London that became regarded, according to Mary Ann Gillies, as ‘social events as well as intellectual exchanges’ (Gillies, 2003, p. 97). As Russell grumbled in a letter from October of 1911, Bergson’s lectures ‘are reported in the daily newspapers – all England has gone made about him for some reason’ (1992, p. 386).
Readmitted to Cambridge in April 1912, Hulme seems to have entered into the philosophical life of the university with gusto, publicizing his own interest in Bergson widely. He had already given a paper on ‘Anti-romanticism and Original Sin’ to the Heretics Club on 25 February 1912 and, on the next day, a paper on Bergson to the female students of Girton College. At this time Hulme was working, along with F. S. Flint, upon a translation of Bergson, which was to become An Introduction to Metaphysics (1913). That this was not popular in certain philosophical circles within Cambridge is indicated by a tirade in The Cambridge Magazine by H. M. Lloyd, a fellow member of St John’s College: ‘I was somewhat scandalised to learn that the name of this college is to be associated … with the translation into English of writings which surely cannot add to its reputation wherever sound philosophy is held in esteem’ (1912, p. 296). Hulme’s preface to An Introduction to Metaphysics did indeed list his address as St John’s College, Cambridge; the progress of ‘sound philosophy’, of the analytical ordinary language school associated with Moore and Russell, seemed not to have been unduly held back. However, the presence of another supporter of Bergson, albeit a philosophic amateur as Hulme styled himself, might just have been one of the motivations of Russell’s famous demolition of Bergson’s philosophy as ‘irrational’ in a paper read to The Heretics Club in Trinity College, on 11 March 1912.3 That Russell’s lecture in the Heretics series closely followed that of Hulme, the known Bergsonian, cannot, surely, have been a coincidence. The Heretics was presided over by C. K. Ogden, who had started the Cambridge Magazine in 1912, and with whom Hulme corresponded late in 1911 over the topic of his lecture to the society. After Hulme’s lecture Ogden wrote up an account of the topic for the Cambridge Magazine, and he plugged Hulme’s ‘two forthcoming volumes on Bergson, which we shall await with interest’ (Lloyd, 1912, p. 201).4 Hulme wrote to thank Ogden for the invite, apologizing for being unable to attend the next lecture – Russell on Bergson (Ferguson, 2002, p. 125). It seems that Ogden may well have deliberately followed Hulme with Russell to engender philosophical debate and controversy; watching the philosophic amateur, perhaps complete with knuckleduster, listening to Russell’s disdainful dismissal of Bergson, seems something of a loss all round.
We can view Hulme’s final flirtation with Cambridge (he left again under another cloud in November 1912) and the hostility to his interest in Bergson as symptomatic of different currents and tendencies within British thought in the prewar years. Bergson’s influence is often interpreted as being confined to the literary and artistic sphere, influencing writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot and George Bernard Shaw.5 However, Bergson was read and commented upon by a number of key British philosophers in the period; the French philosopher, for example, considerably influenced Russell’s early collaborator A. N. Whitehead.6 Russell certainly took Bergson’s work seriously enough to comment upon it, reading it extensively towards the end of 1911, meeting the French philosopher and having dinner with him in London. When Russell first went to the cinema in 1912 he commented that its sense of reality as a continuous process bore out Bergson’s philosophy (1992, p. 422). The basis of Russell’s critique of Bergson was that, although it showed ‘constructive imagination’ (1992, p. 387), it demonstrated little of philosophical method; Bergson’s view of the world was like that of a poet, full of analogies and similes, and profoundly ‘anti-intellectual’.7 As a result, in part, of Russell’s efforts, Bergson dropped off the map of British philosophy after the First World War, to be replaced in the 1920s and 1930s by the cool analytical work of Russell, Logical Positivism and the Vienna Circle.8
But this story is perhaps too neat, and certainly does not capture the complexity of modernist theories of language – both literary and philosophical – in this period, and the role of Bergson’s philosophy in these theories. I want to view Hulme’s writings in the years leading up to 1914, in essays such as ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’, for how their views on language articulate certain important trends and attitudes within modernism. This is not to suggest that Hulme had a developed and rigorous theory of language, but that his attempt to think about the ‘new age’ of modernity involved thinking through the issue of language, a problematic also shared by many contemporary philosophers. Hulme’s writings repeatedly display a keen awareness of the definitional problems involved in discussing modernity. He notes, for example, the trickiness of the terms, ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’, adding that ‘I ought really to have coined a couple of new words’ (CW, pp. 59-60). The opening of ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ refers to the ‘extreme indefiniteness of the vocabulary’ (CW, p. 191) one is obliged to use when discussing art. Many modernists who pursued Pound’s dictum to ‘Make it New’ interpreted the command to mean closer attention to the very material of language: reforming, revising or inventing new linguistic paradigms became crucial to the strategies by which modernism achieved self-definition.
In others ways, linking Hulme to the main current of Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century is not as peculiar as it might seem. Karen Csengeri, for instance, hints at the possible intellectual affiliations between Hulme, Russell and Moore in this period, noting Hulme’s awareness of some of Russell’s work on logic and mathematics (1994, p. xxviii). This is demonstrated in the series of articles printed as ‘A Notebook’ in the New Age (1915-16), in which Hulme admits to finding himself, after an initial disagreement, to be in agreement with Moore and Russell over their search for an objective basis for, respectively, ethics and logic (CW, pp. 440-1). Russell’s interest in the logical character of propositions is recognized by Hulme as an attempt to rid logic of any underlying anthropomorphism or humanism: subjects such as ethics and logic are thus, notes Hulme, ‘placed on an entirely objective basis, and do not in the least depend on the human mind’ (CW, p. 443). Although Hulme and Russell later had an intemperate exchange over pacifism and the war in the pages of the Cambridge Magazine, Hulme, with his background in mathematics, seems to have recognized Russell’s attempts to reform language along logical lines as somewhat similar to the dry, hard language of classical verse he had himself espoused.9 Hulme’s view that his aim in writing was ‘accurate, precise and definite description’ is similar in attitude, if in nothing else, to Russell’s contemporaneous ‘theory of descriptions’ (Russell, 1918, pp. 99-112).
More than Russell, however, the figure that has dominated Anglo-American philosophy of language in the twentieth century is that of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is interesting to note, with one of those coincidental felicities of history, that during Hulme’s return to Cambridge the young Wittgenstein first appeared at the university, to study the philosophy of mathematics with Russell. On 18 October 1911 Russell was having tea with Ogden in Russell’s rooms in Trinity College, when they were interrupted: ‘an unknown German appeared, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German. He turned out to be a man who had learned engineering … but during his course had acquired, by himself, a passion for the philosophy of mathematics & has now come to Cambridge on purpose to hear me’ (Monk, 1990, pp. 38-9).
Wittgenstein was registered as an undergraduate at Trinity College from February 1912, after studying engineering in Manchester. He not only attended Russell’s lectures on the philosophy of mathematics but, according to Russell’s letters, seemed to hound him, both after his lectures and in his rooms, particularly infuriating Russell with a claim that ‘nothing empirical is knowable’; the frustrated Russell reported to Ottoline Morrell that, ‘I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn’t’ (Monk, 1990, p. 39). However, during the course of the first term in 1912 Russell warmed to Wittgenstein’s passionate attachment to philosophical argument, so much so that by the end of the term he felt that he had taught the young Austrian all he could. Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell of Wittgenstein: ‘I love him and feel he will solve the problems that I am too old to solve – all kinds of vital problems’ (1992, p. 405). Proving that there was not a rhinoceros in the room may have been one such problem.
There is no evidence that Hulme and Wittgenstein ever met but it is intriguing to speculate upon whether their paths crossed at Cambridge during the early months of 1912, and what the likely result would be of a meeting between such strong personalities. Wittgenstein would probably not have been interested in attending a lecture on Bergson (who never seems to have been mentioned in his work, even dismissively), but the tortured Austrian intellect may have been attracted by a philosophical discourse upon ‘original sin’. Wittgenstein’s other interest in these months, however, was in psychology, and he conducted experiments upon the role of rhythm in musical appreciation in a laboratory at Cambridge. In these he was helped by the psychologist C. S. Myers, another fascinating intellectual figure in Cambridge at the time, who gave a paper on ‘The New Realism’ in philosophy to the Heretics Club on the night after Hulme’s paper in March 1912. Michael North argues that Myers was significant in transposing an anthropological model onto psychology, and may have influenced Wittgenstein’s later, more ‘anthropological’ philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations.10 When Hulme had returned to Cambridge in 1912 he indicated to his philosophy tutor that he wished to take courses in psychology and mathematics, as well as concentrating upon philosophy. Hulme’s interest in psychology probably derived from Bergson, particularly his theories of the body and the physiological aspects of thought. A year later, in October 1913, Hulme attended a congress on aesthetics in Berlin where he heard Myers lecture on ‘A Contribution to the Study of the Origins of Music’, a paper probably deriving from the experiments with Wittgenstein. Hulme wrote to the conference chairman for copies of this, and other papers. Again the overlap with Wittgenstein’s interests is notable. From a background in mathematics both thinkers developed an interest in the form of language and expression, and its reform or clarification, as a means of increasing philosophical communication.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) was the first major statement of his approach to the linguistic problems of modernity. It is a key text for twentieth-century western philosophy, but it is also in many ways, an amazingly modernist piece of writing in style as well as conceptually. In a number of clear and austere paragraphs, logically and sequentially numbered, it aims to show how most philosophical problems occur because ‘the logic of our language is misunderstood’ and that ‘what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence’ (1961, ‘Preface’). Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘picture theory of language’ was designed to clear up these issues with its insistence upon an accurate delimitation of the logical form of all philosophical propositions. Clarity, of course, was the watchword of Imagist aesthetics, forged in the care and attention devoted to words and expression found in Hulme. That Wittgenstein’s theory is visually based (in later years, when he rejected the Tractatus, he said that a ‘picture held us captive’) can again be linked to the emphasis upon visuality in language found in Hulme. To Wittgenstein’s ‘A proposition is a picture of reality’ (1961, 4.01), we can compare Hulme’s claim that poetry is a ‘visual concrete’ language that ‘always endeavours to arrest you, and make you continuously see a physical thing’ (CW, p. 70).
Another Cambridge connection between Russell, Wittgenstein and Hulme, and a figure also interested in linguistic reform and psychology, was C. K. Ogden, who as editor of the Cambridge Review had met Hulme on a number of occasions. Hulme’s first book, Speculations, was published posthumously in 1924 in Ogden’s influential and long-lived series of books for Routledge and Kegan Paul, the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. Just two years earlier the same series published the Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s first book, and the only one published in his lifetime. Ogden, along with the young F. P. Ramsey, had overseen the English translation.11 Ogden’s role in Cambridge was, as George Wolf notes, as a ‘kind of functional centre of intellectual movements’ (1988, p. 85) in the pre-war years.12 His interests in philosophy, psychology, feminism, politics, literature and linguistics were all reflected in the heterogeneous nature of the work published in the Cambridge Magazine, and in the variety of speakers invited to the Heretics group. In particular it is Ogden’s view of the fundamental importance of language, and its revision, that makes him a modernist comparable to more literary figures such as Hulme. This shared interest in language is shown in Ogden’s comments upon Hulme’s lecture to the Heretics Club: ‘He emphasised the importance of much repetition of certain words – words of power – in the formation of prejudices and ideals, and the general clouding of our judgements … Dynamic, Vibration, Rhythm … were words which he abhorred and on this note of abhorrence the paper came to a close’ (Ogden, 1912, p. 201).
From the late 1920s Ogden’s main energies went into the study of ‘words of power’, or more precisely the power of words, shown in his promotion of Basic English, a drastically reduced version of English designed as a lingua franca. The 850 words of Basic (British American Scientific International Commercial) were promoted by Ogden, and later I. A. Richards, as a solution to international conflict and the rising threat of another world war.13 Large numbers of books on Basic were published from Ogden’s Orthological Institute in Cambridge, with titles such as The ABC of Basic English (1928), and Debabelization (1931). The pedagogic effect of Basic English in the context of Britain’s declining imperial status is certainly worth further research; Winston Churchill, for example, urged support for Basic when he addressed Harvard University in 1943. Hulme the Tory would most probably have disapproved of another attempt to perfect life by social and political engineering, but he might have been enthusiastic about the purified quality of the resulting language. Like the Tractatus and Russell’s work on a ‘logically perfect language’, Basic is yet another attempt to reform language by reduction of superfluities. Basic differs from the purely philosophical projects of Russell and Wittgenstein in its aim of assisting to resolve social problems: not purifying the dialect of the tribe, but English in order that it become a world language. It is not too fanciful to view Basic’s 850 words as yet another form of Hulmean ‘small dry things’. As North argues, Ogden’s Basic project ‘echoes the aesthetic campaign on behalf of “complete clarity and simplicity” that Pound had been pursuing’ (1999, p. 60).14
So far I have sketched a nexus of historical and biographical connections between Hulme and other thinkers upon language in pre-war Cambridge. I want now to turn to a more specific account of what these links and acquaintances might amount to in terms of understanding Hulme’s position within modernist theories of language. As the editors of this volume note, Hulme’s work often demonstrated a pragmatist suspicion of language and a view that ‘linguistic renewal lay at the basis of any wider social renovation’ (Comentale and Gasiorek, 2005, p. 11). This was a view shared, although with differences both of approach and political vision, by thinkers such as Ogden and Wittgenstein.
During those early months in 1912 when Wittgenstein was beginning to clarify the philosophical project of the Tractatus, Hulme was probably composing ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, his most famous essay.15 This may be mere coincidence, but there are deeper links between modernist writers and thinkers who began to consider that, in Wittgenstein’s words, ‘Language disguises thought’ (1961, 4.002). Indeed, it might be argued that investigation into language, thought and modernity was a central concern in early twentieth-century British modernism.16 A proper assessment of Hulme’s role within these investigations involves setting his fragmentary comments within this wider context of the linguistic revolutions of modernism.
In a series of stimulating and widely quoted essays in the 1980s Raymond Williams sketched out a provocative template for the social and cultural analysis of language in modernism. Williams suggests that the character of the metropolis – London, Paris, New York and so on – effected a profound change in the formal properties of modernist culture. These changes were prompted by the many cultural innovators who were immigrants to such cities, and fed into the theme of alienation that is so noticeable in many modernist works of the period. In addition, argues Williams, the effect of this interaction between the outsider and the city focused on the available mediums of expression:
Liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practices. (1989, p. 45)17
It is worth noticing how Hulme, with his pronounced North Staffordshire accent, fits this picture of the artist liberated from a ‘provincial culture’ by the London of the pre-war years, quite as much as Americans such as Pound and Eliot. Hulme was also aware of the problems of ‘linguistic emancipation’ and of how the ‘thought or vocabulary of one’s period is an extraordinarily difficult thing to break away from’ (CW, p. 268). Williams asserts that although the perception of language as a medium was noticed more intensely by those for whom English, say, was a second language, even to native speakers ‘the new relationships of the metropolis, and the inescapable new uses in newspapers and advertising attuned to it, forced certain productive kinds of strangeness and distance’ (1989, p. 46). The productivity of these perceptions emerged in a sense that language was not a ‘customary and naturalized’ phenomenon, but a set of arbitrary conventions, and thus amenable to experimentation and alteration. Novels, for example, did not have to track the spread of generations across decades, as in Dickens, but could set their entire action on a single day (Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway); a poetic snapshot composed in ‘free verse’ – for example, Hulme’s ‘A City Sunset’ – might more accurately capture a poet’s impression of a city than the ballad stanzas employed by many 1890s poets of London, such as John Davidson, Laurence Binyon, or Richard Le Gallienne.
The modern artists that Hulme championed in the pages of the New Age were equally preoccupied with how ‘strangeness and distance’ provoked experimental work within the media of painting and sculpture; artists such as Jacob Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, and Wyndham Lewis were also, in different ways, outsiders to the London within which they worked. We can also note Hulme’s argument, (derived from Worringer) in his essay ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, that the so-called ‘strangeness’ of the new geometrical art of Epstein and Lewis is precisely because of a certain form of ‘distance’: the tendency to abstraction in these works derives from a separation between humans and external nature, and from a rejection of the humanist desire to ‘empathize’ with natural forms. For Hulme this detachment is part of an on-going process whereby one of these two tendencies – abstraction or empathy – is found in the art and society of any period. For Williams, however, aesthetic and linguistic ‘strangeness and distance’ is explicitly conditioned by the social and historical determinants of modernism and modernity, and particularly by what he refers to as an intensified pressure towards the end of the nineteenth century to see the work of art as ‘artefact and commodity’ (1989, p. 46). This is a point to which I will return below.
Clearly Williams’s arguments have a very general tenor, but we can find many examples of modernists to flesh out his account. And, as he notes, the phenomenon he is describing is found in ‘thinkers’ as well as poets and painters. We can recall Wittgenstein’s first meeting with Russell, ‘speaking very little English, but refusing to speak German’, and speculate upon how far Wittgenstein’s profound scrutiny of language as a medium – the logical form of all propositions analyzed by the Tractatus – derived from his own ‘strangeness and distance’ from the customary culture and language of English philosophy at the time. North, for example, stresses how Wittgenstein often utilized his deep sense of himself as an estranged and ‘foreign’ speaker of English as a mode of philosophical argument, particularly in his later work: in the Philosophical Investigations, for instance, Wittgenstein writes, ‘A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”’ (1967, para. 123).18
Equally, the eccentric form of the Tractatus as a work of philosophy can be viewed as another modernist experiment deriving in part from Wittgenstein’s detachment from the prose ‘home’ of English philosophy; certainly nothing that Russell ever wrote came near the stylistic shock of Wittgenstein’s prose, with its pithy and enigmatic propositions: ‘The world is the totality of facts, not things’ (1961, 1.1); ‘Objects are simple’ (1961. 2.02); ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (1961, p. 7). It is perhaps not too fanciful to view the Tractatus as a form of Imagist prose, fulfilling Hulme’s view that ‘It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things’ (CW, p. 68). Certainly I. A. Richards perceived Wittgenstein’s lecturing style to embody a poetic tendency, shown in the title of Richards’s poem on Wittgenstein in Cambridge, ‘The Strayed Poet’. As Ray Monk notes, the poetic nomenclature fits certain aspects of Wittgenstein’s personality and style, as befitting someone who once remarked that, ‘philosophy ought really to be written as a poetic composition’ (1990, p. 291).
The crystalline purity of the Tractatus not only resembles Imagist theories of poetry in its style, but also recalls another of its features, its view of the relation between words and the world. As Pound, praising Ford Madox Ford, put it later in Canto LXXXII the Imagists trusted more in res than in verba, a tendency also manifest in the atomistic thrust of the Tractatus. It was an attitude that Wyndham Lewis also detected in Hulme, commenting that, ‘We were a couple of fanatics and of course I am still. We preferred something more metallic and resistant than the pneumatic surface of the cuticle. We preferred a helmet to a head of hair. A scarab to a jelly-fish’ (1967, p. 104). Or, as Hulme put it bluntly in his ‘Notes on Language and Style’: ‘Dead things not men as the material for art’ (CW, p. 27).
Perceiving language as a resistant medium could, as Williams demonstrates, result in many different tendencies. One significant trend is what we might call a reification of language, where the attention given to language results in a desire to turn words into things. ‘Language is made out of concrete things’, wrote Pound in 1915 (Pound, 1950, p. 49), summing up a certain inclination to reform language to ‘something more metallic and resistant’, in Lewis’s phrase. For Pound, Hulme and others the central problematic of language was its need to be reformed for the purposes of clarity; for many this led to a kind of obsession with the physicality or thingliness of language: In Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and in the related theories of a ‘logically perfect language’ articulated by Russell (Russell, 1918, pp. 52-3), it often appears that the imprecision of words when they refer to things in the world might be alleviated by somehow making words more like the things to which they refer. There is a kind of extreme nominalism that haunts one form of modernism, where language is treated as a set of discrete entities or atoms, to be pinned onto objects in the world. Hulme saw nominalism, along with empiricism, as a ‘hereditary endowment’ of English amateur philosophers (CW, p. 440). Unfortunately for Hulme, this tendency is also found in the Austrian Wittgenstein, and his picture theory of meaning as outlined in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein writes that thoughts are expressed in propositions, and propositions are composed of ‘simple signs’, the primitive building blocks for language which he calls ‘names’: ‘A name means an object. The object is its meaning’ (1961, 3.203). The way in which simple signs are arranged, or ‘configured’ as Wittgenstein puts it, corresponds to the configuration or arrangement of the objects to which they refer: words are mirrored by things, and the logical form or shape of words in a proposition somehow mirrors the fact or idea that it is representing. Crucially, Wittgenstein writes that the ‘requirement that simple signs be possible is the requirement that sense be determinate’ (1961, 3.23). In order for the ambiguities of language to be overcome words must be seen as ‘simple signs’, ‘small, dry things’ that picture and resemble objects in the world.
How are we to understand this obsessive figuring of words as things, a strategy that often slides from a theory of how words represent things, to a view that words should ideally be treated as thingly entities? In other words, what is the meaning of a modernism committed, in Pound’s terms, to ‘the welding of word and thing’ (1950, p. 158)?
One useful heuristic is to return to Williams’s notion that the work of art in modernism is increasingly conceived as both ‘artefact and commodity’. Desires to draw words closer to things are reactions to a world in which the experience of language is of something that is seemingly dematerialized. Marxist critics, such as Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, have argued that the reification of language in modernism is a compensation strategy to the dominant commodification of early twentieth-century capitalist societies. One form this resistance takes is by emphasis on the work of art as a linguistic artefact against its perceived degradation into a commodity. As Eagleton argues: ‘To fend off such reduction to commodity status, the modernist work brackets off the referent or real historical world, thickens its textures and deranges its forms to forestall instant consumability, and draws its own language protectively around it to become a mysterious autotelic object, free of all contaminating truck with the real (1985, p. 67). More recent work in modernist studies has questioned the gulf that Eagleton institutes here, between ‘the real’ and the language of modernism or between mass culture and a minority modernist art practice, suggesting that modernists were entwined within, rather than just resistant to, practices of the cultural marketplace of the early twentieth century.19 However, in the case of someone like Hulme it is certainly true that he perceived the language of modern art and poetry, and its qualities of innovation and difficulty, to be distinct from more public discourses. In ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ Hulme asserted that:
Language, we have said, only expresses the lowest common denominator of the emotions of one kind. It leaves out all the individuality of an emotion as it really exists and substitutes for it a kind of stock or type emotion … The average person as distinct from the artist does not even perceive the individuality of their own emotions … The artist … should be a person who is able to emancipate himself from the moulds which language and ordinary perception force upon him and be able to see things freshly as they really are. (CW, p. 202-3).
For Hulme poetry is ‘always the advance guard of language’, emancipating art from the common language of prose, or what he called ‘counter language’, in order to express new thoughts. Poetry is a discourse that can ‘Transfer [the] Physical to Language’, as one of the headings in ‘Notes on Language and Style’ puts it, is able to preserve ‘an entirely physical thing, a real clay before me … an image’; for Hulme, a word ‘is a board with an image or statue on it’, when he speaks in prose all that passes is the board, and the ‘statue remains in my imagination’ (CW, p. 27). Only in poetry can the visual and the physical, the statue, be communicated, and for this to occur a form of reification of language must happen. In this way Hulme’s theories paved the way for an Imagist poetry that thickened its textures, in Eagleton’s words, and became a series of small, mysterious objects that could not be instantly consumed by readers used to the stock types of ordinary language.
The source for the theories of reification articulated by critics such as Jameson and Eagleton is a lengthy essay by Georg Lukács from 1922. Lukács’s essay on reification can be read, partially, as a text displaying many of the concerns of modernist aesthetics. Jameson asserts that this essay, along with Lukács’s literary criticism, revolves around the conceptual opposition, derived from Hegel, between the concrete and the abstract (Jameson, 1971, p. 163). For Sanford Schwartz, in his panoramic exploration of the ‘matrix of modernism’, one of the key philosophical bifurcations in all modernist poetics and in much of early twentieth-century western philosophy is precisely that between abstraction and concrete sensation (1985, p. 6). Lukács’s use of this modernist binary derives from Marx’s analysis of the commodity-form: the commodity represents the ‘formal equality of human labour in the abstract’ (Lukács, 1971, p. 87). But this abstraction is also a structure of concretion, since the ‘formal act of exchange … suppresses use-value as use-value and establishes a relation of concrete equality between concretely unequal and indeed incomparable objects’ (1971, p. 104).
Lukács’s critique of commodification is a modernist one, in the sense that it focuses upon form. Every object, writes Lukács, ‘exists as an immediate inseparable complex of form and content’, but commodification of thought and society produces an ‘indifference of form towards content’; real content, he argues, exists as a ‘material substratum of the object’, a deep and concrete amalgam of form and content (p. 126). In this way Lukács echoes other modern thinkers such as Bergson or Freud who search for meaningful depths to meaningless surfaces. Lukács’s criticism that reification ignores the ‘material substratum’ of objects also finds an obvious comparison in Imagism’s search beyond poetic abstraction for a language replete with, in Pound’s phrase, a ‘Direct treatment of the “thing”’ (Pound, 1972, p. 129).
Hulme’s importance for Imagism consists in the fact that he provides the basis of a theory of language that grants value to Lukács the poet within a modern commodified society. Politically, Hulme differs greatly from Lukács, but in his analysis of the role of poetic language Hulme also offers a critique of the abstractions of commodification and a justification, with political implications, for a poetry rooted in the ‘concrete’. Public language, argues Hulme, was reliant for its continuation upon the poet: ‘Poetry [is] always the advance guard of language’ (CW, p. 27), since ‘plain speech is essentially inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors … that it can be made precise’ (CW, p. 26). When metaphors are no longer new they become an abstract discourse, since ‘abstract words are merely codified dead metaphors’ (CW, p. 96).20 Poetry epitomizes a language which resists abstraction through its creation of metaphors, a task assisted by the visual dimension of metaphor: ‘every word in the language originates as a live metaphor, but gradually of course all visual meaning goes out of them and they become a kind of counters. Prose is in fact the museum where the dead metaphors of the poets are preserved’ (CW, p. 197). A ‘counter’ language is Hulme’s term for abstract forms of language, and also suggests a modern, reified rationality of mathematics or money. Poetry is not a ‘counter’ language but is rooted in the ‘visual meanings’ of metaphor; for the poet, ‘Each word must be an image seen, not a counter’ (CW, p. 25). Images are valued since ‘Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images’ (CW, p. 29); language is therefore at something of a remove from this source and, notes Hulme, ‘We replace meaning (i.e. vision) with words’ (CW, p. 24).
This theory of visual meaning is, of course, significant for the development of Imagist aesthetics – it derives from Hulme’s reading in nineteenth-century French philosophers such as Theodule Ribot, Hyppolite Taine, and most importantly, Bergson.21 In Bergson’s Introduction à la Metaphysique, translated by Hulme in 1913, Bergson asserts that ‘the Image has at least this advantage, that it keeps us in the concrete’ (1913, p. 14).22 In ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ Hulme claims that the French philosopher shows reality to be ‘a flux of interpenetrated elements unseized by the intellect’ (CW, p. 193). The intellect is an analytic faculty capable only of understanding the world in terms of conceptual abstractions. Reality can only be grasped by intuition, a faculty of concrete experience that bursts through the everchanging surface appearances of objects to capture their ‘real duration’ (durée réelle). Bergson’s model, which rejects surface for depth, and in which formal intellect is ousted by sensual intuition, approaches Lukács’s search for the ‘material substratum’ of objects.23
Bergson argues that such a search is hampered by language, which works to deceive our sensual experiences. Hulme’s essay stresses this failure at length. Our ordinary perceptions of the world are mediated by language, a ‘communal apparatus’ (CW, p. 200) that only ‘expresses the lowest common denominator’ (CW, p. 202) of a sensual emotion. Only the artist can see through these ‘stock types which are embodied in language’ (CW, p. 202). The artist can ‘emancipate himself from the moulds which language and ordinary perception force upon him’ (CW, pp. 202-3), and once emancipated from linguistic abstractions, the artist can communicate an ‘actual contact with reality’ and therefore offer ‘an intimate realisation of an object’ (CW, p. 203).
Hulme’s argument here recalls Williams’s characterization of one significant tendency within modernist writing in relation to language: a view that everyday language is a blockage to some true underlying consciousness or state of feeling, and that literature must seek to break through these restrictive barriers through new modes of expression (1989, pp. 73-7). The poet’s ‘intimate realisation of an object’ is clearly a form of this position; it also recalls Wittgenstein’s search for the logical form of the proposition underlying all linguistic representations. And a similar position, though not explicitly related to language, is found in Lukács’s search for the material substratum of objects viewed as abstract commodities. Hulme’s particular vision of this quest was to focus upon poetic language in an attempt to show that ‘beauty may be in small, dry things’ (CW, p. 68), a view most fully articulated in the essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’.
In this essay Hulme retains the notion of a ‘realisation of objects’ by means of a visual and concrete language, but the Bergsonian influence is now replaced, to an extent, by an aesthetic politics of ‘classicism’. Alan Robinson has argued that Hulme’s aesthetic preference for Tory classicism should be situated within the wider social and political changes in the years running up to the outbreak of war.24 Continued suffragette action, the first Labour members of Parliament in 1906, waves of industrial strikes throughout 1911-12, and the prospect of mass enfranchisement threatened by the Liberal party posed a threat to the aristocratic old regime. Perry Anderson argues that in response to assaults upon aristocratic privilege, certain writers, like Hulme, began to advocate an aesthetic rooted in classical, conservative values. Interestingly, Anderson sees this adoption of a ‘partially aristocratic colouration’ of modernist culture as part of a reaction to commodification as much as to liberal reforms of the political landscape: ‘the old order … afforded a set of available codes and resources from which the ravages of the market as an organizing principle of culture and society – uniformly detested by every species of modernism – could be resisted’ (1984, p. 105). Hulme thus represents a cultural moment that Pound was to name in 1914 as the emergence of an ‘aristocracy of the arts’, a group ready to take over from the declining ruling body, but eager to employ a similar vocabulary against commodification (Pound, 1914, p. 68).
Hulme starts ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ with the stark claim that after a hundred years of romanticism, classical values are ripe for revival. Romanticism, for Hulme, is a kind of hazy belief in the perfectibility of human beings, a ‘spilt religion’ in which concepts such as heaven and hell are mixed up, a confusion which will ‘falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience’ (CW, p. 62). If romantic thought lacks Imagistic ‘clear edges’, romantic verse is organized around ‘metaphors of flight’, again ignoring properly delimited borders. Romantic verse constantly refers to the word ‘infinite’, while classicism is bound, both aesthetically and politically, by a sense of man as ‘an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal’ (CW, p. 61). Classical verse is ‘dry’ and ‘hard’, displays a profound sense of the finite, and can express clarity and precision, even using the clumsy ‘communal thing’ of language (CW, p. 69). In its finite materiality classical verse approximates to the very essence of poetic, as opposed to prose, language. Now Hulme proceeds to distinguish poetry and prose once again:
In prose as in algebra concrete things are embodied in signs or counters which are moved about according to rules, without being visualised at all in the process. There are in prose certain type situations and arrangements of words, which move as automatically into certain other arrangements as do functions in algebra. One only changes the X’s and Y’s back into physical things at the end of the process. (CW, pp. 69-70)
Prose is rationalized abstraction that lacks visual form and is thus a language in which ‘concrete things’ are dematerialized. Communication in prose is then an ‘automatic’ procedure, conforming to fixed mathematical processes. It is a good parody of the commodity, which as exchange-value ignores the coarsely sensuous material of the object for its abstract value as congealed labour-time.25
For Hulme formal abstraction can be countered by poetic language: ‘Poetry … may be considered as an effort to avoid this characteristic of prose. It is not a counter language, but a visual concrete one. It is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process’ (CW, p. 70). Schwartz comments that this passage shows Hulme’s distance from Bergson: ‘Associating abstraction with movement and sensation with fixity … Hulme seems far more attracted to stasis rather than motion, form rather than flux’ (1985, p. 56). Poetic language can ‘arrest’ the abstract processes of prose and, once arrested, a more accurate picture of ‘physical things’ is obtainable. Hulme is still indebted to Bergson for the idea of a ‘language of intuition’, but departs from Bergsonian thought in his usage of the concept. A visual poetic language is a substitute for a more corporeal discourse, seemingly reducing the sensuous capacities of bodies to the faculty of sight alone. The argument recalls Fredric Jameson’s claim that the visual pleasure one takes in colourful and sensual images, such as those of modernist painting, is designed to ‘restore at least a symbolic experience of libidinal gratification to a world drained of it’ by the effects of reification (1981, p. 63). But the libidinal compensation that Hulme offers only replicates the processes of reification itself: an arresting look that prevents one being subject to an ‘abstract process’ by producing a form of stasis occurring from a reifying gaze.
This problem is shown in Hulme’s example of a visual concrete aesthetic:
If you are walking behind a woman in the street, you notice the curious way in which the skirt rebounds from her heels. If that peculiar kind of motion becomes of such interest to you that you will search about until you can get the exact epithet which hits it off, there you have a properly aesthetic emotion. But it is the zest with which you look at the thing which decides you to make the effort. (CW, pp. 70-1)
Poetic language is a compromise for a more physical language of the body, one rooted in the act of looking. The gender politics of this example is of course the problematic issue here, with the sexualized gaze – the ‘zest’ of looking – determining the appropriate aesthetic emotion. This is clearly a gendered form of ‘libidinal gratification’, deriving from an active male look that arrests female movement. This is shown in numerous places in Hulme’s work, as when he refers to words as physical things, ‘Want to make them stand up … e.g. walking on dark boulevard. Girl hidden in trees passes on other side. How to get this’ (CW, p. 32).26 This slightly sinister example requires what we might call a language of tumescence, of the kind that Hulme argues for earlier: ‘A man cannot write without seeing at the same time a visual signification before his eyes. It is this image which precedes the writing and makes it firm’ (CW, p. 25). ‘Solidity’, he sums up, is ‘a pleasure’ (CW, p. 26). His criterion for successful poetry in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ is thus based upon this conflation of visuality, desire and solidity: ‘Is there any zest in it? Did the poet have an actually realised visual object before him in which he delighted?’ (CW, p. 71). Realizing an object, as a metaphor for recovering its commodified ‘material substratum’, reifies (female) form as an object for (male) contemplative zest.
The point here is not simply to invalidate Hulme’s theories by reference to his less than progressive gender politics.27 Rather it is to indicate one of the possible consequences of the modernist reification of language. Another issue at stake here is how far Hulme’s ideas about the materiality of language fed directly into Imagist poetry, an issue that is difficult to resolve given the disagreements amongst the main protagonists of the movement. F. S. Flint, in his premature history of Imagism in 1915, argued that Hulme was the ‘ringleader’ and that he insisted ‘on absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage’ (1915, p. 71). Pound initially praised Hulme in similar terms, stating that the word ‘Imagist’ had been invented ‘on a Hulme basis’ (Harmer, 1975, p. 214). Pound certainly attended Hulme’s lectures in the winter of 1911, writing an account of them in the Egoist.
Aside from such accreditations of influence the more significant feature of Hulme’s work was its clear theorization of the benefits of a poetic language of concrete visual objects; the pleasure of solidity in language was something Pound and other Imagists constantly upheld, seeing it as the way to a more direct poetic discourse. For Hulme this solidity took different forms at different times in his work: the early insistence that all ‘poetry is an affair of the body’ (CW, p. 21) seemed indebted to Bergson’s materialism; this was then followed by the claim in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ that the new poetry resembles sculpture, more than music, in the way it has to ‘mould images … into definite shapes’ (CW, p. 56). Certainly this sculptural vision of verse was taken seriously by Imagists such as Pound, and also by, for example, Richard Aldington, who wrote in 1914 that Imagist poems display a ‘hardness, as of cut stone’ (1914, p. 202).
This is also a fine description, to an extent, of Wittgenstein’s view of language in the Tractatus, although this text is possibly more architectural than sculptural in form. The connections I have tried to suggest between Hulme, Russell, Ogden and Wittgenstein all concern the nature of language in the ‘new age’ of modernism. In Hulme’s final essays on modern art there is an acute awareness that the abstract art of Epstein, Lewis, or Bomberg represented a novel aesthetic vocabulary, and that in order ‘to define the characteristics of a new movement’ a precise attention to definitions is required. What Hulme repeatedly figured as the ‘break-up’ of an attitude, that of the Renaissance and its humanism, demanded a breaking up of old views of language, and a clarification of the new. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein argued that without ‘philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries’ (1961, 4.112). This was a view equally held by Hulme: it fed into the central tenets of Imagism, which in Pound’s version displayed a ‘hard light, clear edges’ and a ‘trust in the thing more than the word’ (Pound, 1950, p. 89). The reform, reduction or reification of language was a theme shared by these diverse thinkers, part of a general consciousness that the material of language required rethinking in order fully to address key issues in the contemporary social world. We can interpret this consciousness, I have argued, in terms of two, related, arguments: Williams’s analysis of the impact of the city upon linguistic experimentation, as well the views of Lukács, Eagleton and Jameson upon aesthetic responses to commodification in the early twentieth century. Hulme’s contribution to this modernist ‘revolution of the word’ is surely worth attention for its articulation of significant trends and attitudes. It shows how illuminating is the juxtaposition of a philosophic ‘amateur’ with a few professionals.
1 See Alun Jones, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme, p. 21 and Robert Ferguson, The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme, chapter 2, for information on these misdemeanours.
2 For Bergson’s letter see Hulme, Selected Writings, (ed.) Patrick McGuinness, p. xv. For Hulme’s two articles from 1911 on the Bologna Congress see ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’ and ‘The International Philosophical Congress at Bologna’ in Collected Writings.
3 This was published as The Philosophy of Bergson in 1914.
4 This, and subsequent issues, contained a large advertisement from the publisher Stephen Swift and Co. for Hulme’s translation of Bergson and for his Introduction to Bergson, said to be in press. This latter volume never appeared.
5 For information upon the impact of Bergson in the English speaking world see Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism, 2003; Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism, 1985; and Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality, 1987, chapter 1.
6 See Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: The Early Years 1872-World War I, 1967, p. 166. Russell and Whitehead published the influential three volume work on logic Principia Mathematica (1910-13).
7 For an overview of Russell’s criticism see his chapter on Bergson in A History of Western Philosophy, 1946, chapter 28.
8 See G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Language, Sense and Nonsense, 1984, pp. 2-3.
9 For an overview of this wartime disagreement, see Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, 2002, pp. 235-42. Ferguson doubts that Russell and Hulme ever met.
10 Michael North, Reading 1922, 1999, chapter 1. As North notes, Myers was also one of the founders of workplace industrial psychology (pp. 57-8).
11 See North, Reading 1922, pp. 33-9, for an account of the ramifications of the translation of the Tractatus. For the correspondence between Ogden and Wittgenstein on the Tractatus, see Wittgenstein, Letters to C. K. Ogden.
12 For an overview of Ogden’s work, see the essays in P. Sargant Florence and J. R. L. Anderson (eds.), C. K. Ogden: A Collective Memoir.
13 Ogden was also important in the disciplinary development of English studies, as shown by his collaboration with I. A. Richards on two key texts, The Foundation of Aesthetics (1922) and The Meaning of Meaning (1923).
14 North links together the Tractatus, Ogden’s work, and Poundian modernism as projects sharing a kind of zeal for ‘debabelization’ (pp. 61-4).
15 According to Karen Csengeri, Hulme composed ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ late in 1911 or early in 1912, perhaps giving it as a lecture in July 1912 in London. See Collected Writings, p. 59.
16 For discussions of these issues, see April McMahon, ‘Language: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”’ in David Bradshaw (ed.), A Companion to Modernism; and Roy Harris (ed.), Linguistic Thought in Britain 1914-45.
17 For a sympathetic critique of Williams’s arguments, see North, Reading 1922, pp. 11-15.
18 See North, Reading 1922, pp. 40-1.
19 For versions of this argument, see Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 1998 and Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism, 2001.
20 Schwartz traces this point to Remy de Gourmont. See The Matrix of Modernism, p. 57.
21 See Wallace Martin, ‘The Sources of the Imagist Aesthetic’, 1970, p. 180.
22 In Matter and Memory, Bergson suggest that matter is ‘an aggregate of “images”’ (p. 9).
23 Schwartz argues that Hulme’s interpretation of Bergson is a creative misreading, which signals a shift from ‘the subjective to the objective side of experience’. Bergson thought that the artist could slice through the abstract perceptions of everyday life in order to grasp the underlying durée of existence; the artist thus apprehended a subjective flux of experience. Hulme, argues Schwartz, ‘seems less interested in recovering real duration than in rendering the objects of perception as precisely as possible’. For Bergson duration was a temporal and fluid phenomenon; Hulme emphasized the spatial fixity of artistic forms. His concrete poetry aimed at stopping ‘you gliding through an abstract process’ (Schwartz, 1985, p. 134).
24 Alan Robinson, Poetry, Painting and Ideas 1885-1914, 1985, chapter 4.
25 See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume 1), 1976, pp. 130-8.
26 See also Hulme’s comments on the ‘two tarts walking down Piccadilly on tiptoe’ (CW, p. 28).
27 Reading Ferguson’s recent biography clearly reveals Hulme’s very traditional view of the roles he expected for women, especially those of his lover Kate Lechmere.