Hulme’s “Doubleness”

IN THE CONCLUSION to T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead discusses the ways in which Hulme (typically characterized as a critic who influenced Ezra Pound’s Imagism) has been remembered. Noting that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s record of casualties in World War I (of which Hulme was one) recognizes him as “One of the War Poets,” Mead recounts the other ways in which Hulme has been defined: as an “Imagist,” a “Vorticist,” a “modernist,” and even a “fascist.” For Mead, the recognition of Hulme as a war poet is a “suggestive alternative tag,” opening the door to think about Hulme as a war poet “in a profounder sense, the poet of discord, whose incongruous images were meant to clash as much as chime.”

As a scholar who works in the adjacent field of Victorian studies but certainly is interested in Hulme’s place in modernism, I find this articulation of Hulme’s identity intriguing. Mead’s argument, laid out in the introduction of the book, is that our understanding of modernism can be transformed by a better understanding of the complexity of Hulme’s thought, which evokes the wide variety of tags by which he has been remembered. As Mead explains it, Hulme generally has been seen as a writer who moved from an avant-garde to a conservative perspective over the course of his career, and scholars have incorrectly judged his work as “contradictory” or “confusing” because of the competing elements in that work. For Mead, these elements should be seen, instead, as a sort of “doubleness,” an “interest in both chaos and order” that can serve “as a paradigm for the larger cultural movement” we call “modernism.”

The first three chapters of Mead’s study discuss in detail this doubleness. Chapter 1, “The Discord Club,” focuses on Hulme’s university career from 1902 to 1904, during which he founded a “riotous dining society” and was expelled because of this group’s “public disruptions.” This chapter examines Hulme’s early notebooks, kept during his travels to Canada and Belgium in 1906–1907 after his expulsion, and his first lecture, given in London to The Poets’ Club in 1908. These works reveal two central metaphors in Hulme’s work, the cinder heap and the chessboard, which capture his interest in both the chaos and order of early twentieth-century culture. Through a discussion of these metaphors, Mead makes clear the ways in which other thinkers (as wide-ranging as Henri Bergson, Francis Galton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Théodule Ribot, and Max Stirner) influenced Hulme’s early career but also the ways in which Hulme’s ideas departed from theirs. For example, Hulme embraced Galton’s notion of the “composite portrait,” in which multiple photographic portraits were layered to create a “sociological type,” but he did not embrace Galton’s eugenic perspective. Mead’s larger point, both in this chapter and others, is that people with competing ideologies can be in contact with and influence each other without necessarily converting each other to their respective ideologies.

Chapters 2 and 3, titled “Orage and Hulme—From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic” and “The Politics of Classicism,” continue Mead’s emphasis on how Hulme’s work reveals a more complex understanding of culture and politics than the typical avant-garde-to-conservative narrative about him suggests. Chapter 2 highlights Hulme’s writings in the New Age, the “socialist” periodical edited by A. R. (Alfred Richard) Orage, to which Hulme was a regular contributor beginning in 1909. Mead shows how Hulme and Orage shared many of the same influences (they both embraced aspects of Bergson’s vitalism) while still disagreeing about other concepts (such as the concept of Original Sin). Mead puts particular emphasis on Hulme’s use of Bergson in his 1909 articles, which helped Hulme articulate the role of the individual in relation to socialist politics. Mead also uses the similarities and differences in Hulme’s and Orage’s perspectives at this...