Speculations

Speculations

ESSAYS ON HUMANISM AND

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART

By

T. E. HULME

Edited by

HERBERT READ

With a Frontispiece and Foreword by

JACOB EPSTEIN

T. E. HULME

From a Bronze by Jacob Epstein.

CONTENTS

Frontispiece, Portrait of the Author, from a Bronze by Jacob Epstein

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

HUMANISM AND THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE

MODERN ART AND ITS PHILOSOPHY

ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM

BERGSON’S THEORY OF ART

THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTENSIVE MANIFOLDS

CINDERS

APPENDICES—

A. REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE

B. PLAN FOR A WORK ON MODERN THEORIES OF ART

C. THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF T. E. HULME

INDEX

FOREWORD

HULME was my very great friend, and what I can say about him is entirely personal.

What appealed to me particularly in him was the vigour and sincerity of his thought. He was capable of kicking a theory as well as a man downstairs when the occasion demanded. I always felt him to be my chief bulwark against malicious criticism. He was a man who had no regard for personal fame or notoriety, and he considered that his work lay entirely in the future. His whole life was a preparation for the task of interpretation which he had set himself. He would make reckless sacrifices to possess works of art which he could not really afford; he bought not only my own works, but also those of Gaudier-Brzeska—and this long before Gaudier was well known.

Hulme was a terror to fumistes and charlatans of all kinds. His passion for the truth was uncontrolled.

I recall dozens of little personal things characteristic of the man—but particularly our first meeting. I was at work on the Wilde monument. Hulme immediately put his own construction on my work—turned it into some theory of projectiles. My sculpture only served to start the train of his thought. Abstract art had an extraordinary attraction for him: his own brain worked in that way.

At one time, in company with a group of imagists, he composed some short poems with which, had he gone on, he would have made what would be called a literary success. But this seemed to him too facile. Like Plato and Socrates, he drew the intellectual youth of his time around him. We have no one quite like him in England to-day.

JACOB EPSTEIN.

INTRODUCTION

THOMAS ERNEST HULME was born on the 16th September 1883, at Gratton Hall, Endon, North Staffordshire. He was educated at the High School, Newcastle-under-Lyme, and at St John’s College, Cambridge. In March 1904 he was sent down from Cambridge, along with other undergraduates, for indulging in a brawl. He spent the next two years in London, studying in accordance with his own inclinations. In July 1906 he went to Canada, where he stayed three months. He returned to England for a few weeks, and early in 1907 he went to Brussels, where for seven months he taught English and learned French and German. When he came back to London he began definitely to study those subjects on which his interest was settling. In April 1911 he attended the Philosophical Congress at Bologna and stayed in Italy travelling for about three months. Early in 1912 he sought to return to Cambridge, and he was readmitted largely through the intervention of Professor Bergson, whose letter of recommendation on that occasion is some indication of the impression Hulme was already creating:—

Je me fais un plaisir de certifier que je considère Mr T. E. Hulme comme un esprit d’une grande valeur. Il apporte, àl’étude des questions philosophiques, de rares qualités de finesse, de vigueur, et de pénétration. Ou je me trompe beaucoup, ou il est destiné à produire des œuvres intéressantes et importantes dans le domaine de la philosophie en général, et plus particulièrement peut-être dans celui de la philosophie de l’art.

Hulme’s temperament was not one that could submit readily to an academic mould, and his university career was never completed in an orderly sense of the word. He left Cambridge shortly after his return and proceeded to Berlin, staying there for nine months and acquiring a wide knowledge of German philosophy and psychology. He then settled for a while in London, where his forceful personality and witty conversation began to form a group and to influence a generation. Then came the war. Hulme joined the Honourable Artillery Company and went to France shortly after Christmas 1914. He was wounded during the Spring of 1915 and upon recovery he was gazetted to the Royal Marine Artillery. He returned to the front late in 1915 and was killed near Nieuport on the 28th of September 1917. Hulme was a militarist by faith and acted upon his beliefs with a rare enthusiasm. Many notes, devoted to the technical problems of artillery practice and to strategy in general, testify to his serious interest; and in the Military Notes, contributed to The New Age and The Cambridge Magazine under the nom de guerre of North Staffs during 1915 and 1916, he gave an intellectual defence of the militarist ideology which caused surprise not only to the militarists, to whom it was as strange as it might be deemed unnecessary, but also to the pacifists, who had regarded themselves as constituting a close corporation of the intelligentsia.

Meanwhile Hulme had not desisted from his more strictly intellectual pursuits. In 1913 he had published in a translation Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics,* and in 1916 appeared Sorel’s Reflections on Violence,† translated by Hulme with a critical introduction. These two volumes, apart from the Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme, five poems,‡ printed in 1915 as an addendum to Mr Ezra Pound’s Ripostes,§ and apart from various articles contributed to periodicals, make up the sum of Hulme’s published work.

He left behind him a great mass of notebooks and manuscripts from which the present volume has been selected. From a Notebook on Notebooks, which was among the material, it is possible to reconstruct something of Hulme’s aims and methods of work. His plan was to keep:

(1) A daybook, which he always carried with him, and into which he entered every thought or observation as it occurred to him.

(2) A corpus, into which as much of the daybook as on second sight seemed worthy was to be entered; this to be indexed.

(3) When a general idea began to emerge from the accumulation of notes, then a new notebook or file was to be opened and all ideas that could be subsumed under that general idea were to be transferred.

(4) From this notebook the final work would be written.

Unfortunately this Notebook on Notebooks shows signs of being one of the last things written by Hulme, and certainly the system was never put into complete operation. What existed when I began to edit his papers was a collection of hundreds of loose notes, varying in size from pieces of paper no bigger than a postage-stamp to complete folios of notes on one subject. Many of the notes had already been written up as articles in the New Age; others had been made the subject of lectures; the majority are mere indications of thoughts—key-words and key-phrases. But certain general ideas did exist, and at least six works or series of works were taking shape. These were:

I.    Modern Theories of Art (see Appendix B).

II.   A General Introduction to the Philosophy of Bergson.

III.  A book on Jacob Epstein and the Æsthetics of Sculpture.

IV.  A book on Expression and Style (the Psychology of Literature).

V.   A series of pamphlets on anti-humanism, anti-romanticism, and pre-Renaissance philosophy.

VI. A philosophy or Weltanschauung, in an allegorical form.

Towards the first book there exist in manuscript various notes on modern æsthetics and the essay on Bergson’s Theory of Art now published. The basis for the second book had been formed as a series of four lectures on the Philosophy of Bergson, which were delivered in London during 1913; from the notes used for these lectures it has been possible to piece together the essay now printed as the Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds. The book on Jacob Epstein was in an advanced state of preparation at the time of Hulme’s death, but the manuscript perished with him. Of the more original works he was engaged on, the book on Expression and Style only exists in the form of rudimentary notes—mere indications to the author of a train of thought associated with some image or expression. The series of pamphlets was planned rather than executed: no doubt the essays now printed as Humanism and the Religious Attitude, and Romanticism and Classicism, would have been issued in the series, which was, however, to be a complete critical examination of Renaissance ideologies and a rehabilitation of pre-Renaissance philosophy. There are indications of its trend and scope in the Introduction to Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, reprinted as Appendix A. Lastly, there was the work to which Hulme devoted most of his thought and which he kept constantly in view. This was to be a personal philosophy, cast into an allegorical form perhaps analogous to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and having as its final object the destruction of the idea that the world has unity, or that anything can be described in words. The notes for this book stretch over a considerable period—perhaps ten or fifteen years—and are constantly rewritten and amended. They were never given any final form, and apart from the name Aphra, who was to be the central figure, nothing of its allegorical structure can be discerned. The more coherent fragments have been gathered together in this volume under Hulme’s own title Cinders.

To attempt any exposition of the Speculations now thrown to the lions does not fall within my province. More than is usual in such writings, they speak for themselves. If Hulme had one foe exposed before all others to his consistent invective, it was obscurantism. He was not, by design, a systematic thinker. He was, in one sense at least, a poet: he preferred to see things in the emotional light of a metaphor rather than to reach reality through scientific analysis. His significance is none the less real; he knew very certainly that we were at the end of a way of thought that had prevailed for four hundred years; in this, and in his premonition of a more absolute philosophy of life, he had advanced the ideals of a new generation.

I wish to express my thanks to Mrs Kibble-white and Miss Pattinson, who have supplied me with biographical material and helped me in other ways; to Mr A. R. Orage, with whose assistance I began the work of editing; and to Messrs George Allen & Unwin for permission to reprint the Introduction to Sorel’s Reflections on Violence.

NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION

IN this new edition I have corrected a few misprints. In 1925 I published the Notes on Language and Style referred to on page xiv in The Criterion (Vol. III. page 485) and later they appeared as a pamphlet (University of Washington Chapbooks, No. 25, Seattle, 1929). It is not likely that any other material remains to be published.

HERBERT READ.

* London (Macmillan & Co Ltd).

† London (George Allen & Unwin Ltd).

‡ See Appendix C.

§ London (Elkin Mathews).

A PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

The history of the philosophers we know, but who will write the history of the philosophic amateurs and readers? Who will tell us of the circulation of Descartes, who read the book and who understood it? Or do philosophers, like the mythical people on the island, take in each other’s washing? Are they the only readers of each other’s books? For I take it, a man who understands philosophy is inevitably irritated into writing it. The few who have learnt the jargon must repay themselves by employing it. A new philosophy is not like a new religion, a thing to be merely thankful for and accepted mutely by the faithful. It is more of the nature of food thrown to the lions; the pleasure lies in the fact that it can be devoured. It is food for the critics, and all readers of philosophy, I suppose, are critics, and not faithful ones waiting for the new gospel.

With this preface I offer my new kind of food to tickle the palate of the connoisseurs.

HUMANISM AND THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE

HUMANISM AND THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE

A METHOD

ONE of the main achievements of the nineteenth century was the elaboration and universal application of the principle of continuity. The destruction of this conception is, on the contrary, an urgent necessity of the present.

Originally urged only by the few, it has spread—implicit in the popular conception of evolution—till it has attained the status of a category. We now absorb it unconsciously from an environment already completely soaked in it; so that we regard it not as a principle in the light of which certain regions of fact can be conveniently ordered, but as an inevitable constituent of reality itself. When any fact seems to contradict this principle, we are inclined to deny that the fact really exists. We constantly tend to think that the discontinuities in nature are only apparent, and that a fuller investigation would reveal the underlying continuity. This shrinking from a gap or jump in nature has developed to a degree which paralyses any objective perception, and prejudices our seeing things as they really are. For an objective view of reality we must make use both of the categories of continuity and discontinuity. Our principal concern then at the present moment should be the re-establishment of the temper or disposition of mind which can look at a gap or chasm without shuddering.

I am not concerned in these notes, however, with gaps in nature, in the narrow sense of the word. I am thinking rather of general theories about the nature of reality. One of the results of the temper of mind I have just discussed is that any general theories of this kind which assert the existence of absolute gaps between one region of reality and another, are at once almost instinctively felt to be inadmissible. Now the method of criticism I wish to employ here is based on the fact that most of the errors in certain subjects spring from an almost instinctive attempt on our part to gloze over and disguise a particular discontinuity in the nature of reality. It was then necessary first of all to deal with the source of this instinctive behaviour, by pointing out the arbitrary character of the principle of continuity.

What is this Method? It is only possible here to describe it quite abstractly, leaving the details till later. Certain regions of reality differ not relatively but absolutely. There exists between them a real discontinuity. As the mind looks on discontinuity with horror it has attempted to exhibit these opposed things as differing only in degree, as if there is in reality a continuous scale leading from one to the other. From this springs a whole mass of confused thinking in religion and ethics. If we first of all form a clear conception of the nature of a discontinuity, of a chasm, and form in ourselves the temper of mind which can support this opposition without irritation, we shall then have in our hands an instrument which may shatter all this confused thinking, and enable us to form accurate ideas on these subjects. In this way a flood of light may be thrown on old controversies.

A necessary preliminary to this, however, must be some account of the nature of the particular absolute discontinuity that I want to use.

In order to simplify matters, it may be useful here to give the exposition a kind of geometrical character. Let us assume that reality is divided into three regions, separated from one another by absolute divisions, by real discontinuities, (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. Imagine