Henri Bergson and British Modernism by Mary Ann Gillies (review)

HUMANITIES 269 lease of one, would simply have been an encumbrance. Managers tended to be people who disliked touring and played golf, like George Alexander of the St James's. The built-in flaw of the deconstructive project seems to be that, to decode the past successfully, you need to imagine its inhabitants as too stupid to recognize the codes they're writing. The essay which gives the liveliest sense of the Edwardian theatre is John Stokes's study of the career of Rebecca West as a feminist theatre critic. There's no decoding her - she was the greatest code-breaker of them all. And a live fact, worth bushels of theoretic generalizations. (RONALD BRYDEN) Mary Ann Gillies. Henri Bergson and British Modernism McGill-Queen's University Press. xii, 212. $44.95 At the end of a lecture delivered at University College London in 1911 to an audience whose members included Sir Francis - making according to The Times his 'first appearance since his accident' - and Lady Younghusband , 'Professor Bergson ... was loudly cheered on rising.' Society women in France, according to Mary Arm Gillies, 'sent their footmen down to the theatre to hold a seat for them at Bergson's lectures.' But such 'Bergson marna' did not survive the war, and by the 19205 Bergsorusm was no longer a force in either professional philosophical circles or society. Why? According to Mary Anne Gillies in Henri Bergson and British Modernism, Bergsonwas simply the victim ofhis ownpopularity, and 'the 19905 should see him restored to his proper position.' However, even at the height of his fame, there were doubts about his philosophical rigour. Bertrand Russell, for one, argued in 1912 that his 'imaginative picture of the world, regarded as a poetic effort, is in the main not capable of either proof or disproof.' Of course it was precisely Bergson's 'poetry' which so captivated his contemporaries , but during the same pre-war period avant-gardist movements such as futurism were finding poetry in the very mechanical world so abhorred by Bergson. ThusT.E. Huhne, an early and enthusiastic translator of Bergson and the 'forerunner of a new attitude of mind' according to T.s. Eliot, was by 1912 championing the use of geometrical and mechanical forms in painting and sculpture. Insuch a cultural milieu, Bergson's attacks on nineteenth-century mechanism and Darwinist determinism must have seemed increasingly to have comefrom the rear of the avant-garde. Indeed, there is a whole strand ofmodernism, rmming from Hulme through Eliot's 1920 quatrain poems and Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley to Wyndham Lewis's mechanical "tyros" of the 19205, which was extremely hostile towards Bergsonism of any kind. The culminationof this was Lewis's Time and Western Man, a monomaniacal work which, by simply reversing Bergson 's privileging of time over space, intuition over reason, and interiority 270 LETTERS IN CANADA heroine of Woolf's Orlando muses on or her "'............... 1.. ' notes that nature of this idea is clear.' IEliot was clear when he wrote that !-'v...................>L .....0,-.1'''........ '''' ,....,nY·""and more cmnpretl.ensi'V'e m(llrE~ct, in order to to dislocate mE!anlffij2;." He thus concurs with tlel~gsiDn, meant to convey an the delicate SmiU€!S KQ'r"crcnn could be seen as an influence upon it very clear that one of the most modernist texts is the enormous YAyr.... ,..I", duree and clock-time or Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw's Book Reviews: Vol. 2: lUUa.-LY-'U Edited Brian State Universi1tv ...