Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past

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MODERNISM AND THE IDEOLOGY OF HISTORY Louise Williams explores the nature of historical memory in the work of five major Modernists: Yeats, Pound, Hulme, Ford and Lawrence. These Modernists, Williams argues, started their careers with historical assumptions derived from the nineteenth century. But their views on the universal structure of history, on the abandonment of progress and the adoption of a cyclical sense of the past, were the result of important conflicts and changes within the Modernist period. Williams focuses on the period immediately before the First World War, and shows in detail how Modernism developed and why it is considered a unique intellectual movement. She also revisits the theory that the Edwardian age was a difficult period of transition to the modern world. Finally, she illuminates the contribution of non-Western culture to the literature and thought of the period. This wide-ranging and inter-disciplinary study is essential reading for literary and cultural historians of the Modernist period.    is Assistant Professor of British and Intellectual History at Central Connecticut State University.

MODERNISM AND THE IDEOLOGY OF HISTORY Literature, Politics, and the Past

LOUISE BLAKENEY WILLIAMS Central Connecticut State University

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521814997 © Louise Blakeney Williams 2002 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2002 - isbn-13 978-0-511-07347-2 eBook (EBL) -  eBook (EBL) isbn-10 0-511-07347-X - isbn-13 978-0-521-81499-7 hardback - isbn-10 0-521-81499-5 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my parents

Contents

page viii ix

Acknowledgements Abbreviations



Introduction 

“Immaterial pleasure houses”: the initial aesthetic dilemma



 “A more dream-heavy hour”: medievalist and progressive beginnings



 “Pedantry and hysteria”: contemporary political problems



 “A certain discipline”: radical conservative solutions







“A particularly lively wheel”: cyclic views emerge

 “Our own image”: the example of Asian and non-Western cultures 

In “the grip of the . . . vortex”: the proof of Post-Impressionist art

 

 The “cycle dance”: cyclic history arrives



 “The Nightmare” and beyond: the First World War and mature cyclic theories



Conclusion



Notes Index

 

vii

Acknowledgements

It is impossible to acknowledge all of the people who made this project possible. But I especially would like to thank David Cannadine; without his acute criticism and patient encouragement of the extraordinarily lengthy first version of this book it would never have been completed. Laurence Dickey’s fascination with intellectual history, his exacting academic standards, and his confidence in my abilities as a writer and thinker were invaluable in inspiring me to take the approach I have. Robert O. Paxton, R.K. Webb, J.W. Smit, and Steven Marcus all provided essential assistance by suffering through the first draft and making insightful suggestions for its improvement. This book, however, would never have been begun without Stephen Koss. His sheer delight in all aspects of British history and culture was infectious, and his ability to combine academic rigor with humor and kindness was inspirational. His early death was truly a great loss to the historical profession. I also would like to thank the staff at the British Museum for their help in providing access to unpublished papers, and the librarians at the British Library, University of Keele, University of Hull, Cambridge University, Oxford University, Columbia University, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin all for their important assistance. Finally, I must thank my family and friends for their support through such a long project, the faculty of the History department at Central Connecticut State University for being friends as well as colleagues, and my parents for their unflagging interest in, and unquestioning encouragement of, everything I do. Last, but hardly least, none of this could have been done without Dr. No, who never once used that word about this book.

viii

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in the notes: CEP E&I ELH Letters I

Letters II

P/SL

UPI UPII

Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound ed. Michael John King (New York: New Directions, ). W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier Books, ). English Literary History The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. vol. ., ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. vol. ., ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: The Letters, –, ed. Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, ). W.B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. I, ed. John P. Frayne (New York: Columbia University Press, ). W.B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. II, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, ).

ix

Introduction

Edwardian Britain, despite a century’s distance with which to judge it, remains an enigmatic period for the historian. As early as  George Dangerfield challenged the simplistic myth of “the Edwardian garden party,” the “golden afternoon” before the deluge remembered through the tarnished lenses of those who had experienced the First World War. Dangerfield found the story of Britain between  and  to be “a far more curious drama” than that of a country “dancing its way into war, to a sound of lawn-mowers and ragtime, to the hum of bees and the popping of champagne corks.” Rather, the period as he described it was one of confrontation and conflict, tension and transition. For Dangerfield above all the drama revolved around the fact that “true pre-war Liberalism” “was killed, or killed itself, in .” A similar murder was committed in the intellectual history of the period. Among one group of thinkers in particular a “strange death” occurred in their concept of history. On or about the year  the idea of progress died. Fortunately, death is not the only story in Edwardian Britain. And it is possible to view the age not simply as the sunset of the preceding century, but also as the dawn of much that we consider modern. As Dangerfield himself acknowledged, the “extravagant behavior of the post-war decade, which most of us thought to be the effect of war had really begun before the War. The War hastened everything – in politics, in economics, in behavior – but it started nothing.” The emergence of the Labour Party, the foundation of the Welfare State, even the origins of fascism have been the emphasis of historical studies of the pre-war period as much as has been the demise of the Victorian era. Birth was evident in the literary history of the age as well. Modernism, the characteristic literary movement of the first half of the twentieth century, had its origin in the years immediately preceding the First World War. Those features of literature that are associated with the “high” Modernism of British writers in the s and s, such 



Introduction

as non-representationalism, “abstraction and highly conscious artifice,” “abrupt juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated particulars,” “stream-ofconsciousness narrative in the novel” and unrhymed verse, originated in the “drama” of Edwardian Britain. It was in this movement, British literary Modernism, that can be found one group of Edwardians among whom the idea of progress died and a different concept of history was born. In opposition to progressive notions, the Modernists found much more reality in cyclic views of the past. As one literary critic has succinctly pointed out, “modernism . . . abandons the idea of a linear historical development, falls back upon notions of a universal condition humaine or a rhythm of eternal recurrence.” Moreover, it is commonplace to be informed that such characteristic Modernist practices as the “mythical method,” the “method of ideogram and anachronism,” and the “time shift technique,” in addition to the explicitly circular structures of many novels and long poems, reflect a non-progressive concept of time and the past. It is important to note that the Modernists were not merely innovative creative writers devising a new and unusual literary technique. They thought and wrote a great deal about politics, society, religion, and philosophy. And their abandonment of progress and adoption of a cyclic sense of the past went well beyond technique alone. The Modernists formulated their views of the universal structure of history as a result of a complex emotional and intellectual response both to the tradition in which they had been brought up, and to the important conflicts and changes of the Edwardian age. In observing the disturbing and often confusing challenges of this period, the first British Modernists found progress to be an historical structure unsuited to their needs and perception of reality. Cycles were far more satisfying. This is a work of intellectual history, which examines the origins of this new historical view among the Modernists in an attempt to illuminate one aspect of the “curious drama” of Edwardian Britain. Thus, it is an intellectual history of intellectuals and history. While the Modernists’ attitudes towards history have been the subject of studies in the past, most commonly the concern has been to shed light on the writers’ mature creative work. As a result, chronology and historical background are often ignored. This work, however, considers the Modernists as thinkers, as well as artists. Moreover, it applies the techniques of intellectual history, which have provided much insight into the writings of philosophers and political theorists, to the work of creative writers. It is hoped that what has resulted is a new understanding not only of this group of very important

Introduction



literary figures, but also of the nature of the period in which they were living. This, therefore, is a work of history, not literary criticism. Moreover, it takes the form of a collective intellectual biography. By examining all the writings of a representative group of thinkers over a short span of time it attempts to point out how and why their thought collectively changed direction. In the end this study illustrates Dangerfield’s thesis of the Edwardian age as a period of disturbing transition. The Modernists themselves viewed the time in which they lived as one of chaos and confusion. Ultimately, they used history, and in particular the idea of cycles, as a means not only to discover order in the face of disorder, but also to innovate in their own creative writing, to ensure themselves, and artists in general, a more important place in the world, and, finally, to provide a sense of hope for the future. While some observers may judge the Modernists’ critical writings and their uses of history as superficial and naive, they are important for a number of reasons. First, the development of their views of history illuminates some of the problems of the period as they were felt by informed observers who were not necessarily professional politicians or philosophers. Moreover, the Modernists’ writings also can illustrate some of the subtle ways in which history has been and can be used – to solve perceived problems and meet a variety of, often unconscious, needs. Finally, Modernist views of history were crucial in the development of one of the most important innovations in artistic practice of the twentieth century. All of this warrants a full study of the genesis of their historical thinking. Five authors have been selected as a representative group of Modernists to form the focus of this study: W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford (n´e Hueffer), Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, and D.H. Lawrence. They have been chosen for a number of reasons. First, they are all acknowledged by literary critics as having made important contributions to Modernist theory and practice. In addition, because this is a study of the origins of Modernist views of history, the representative group must have lived and published works in Britain well before the beginning of the First World War. This is true only of the group selected. Other acknowledged Modernists such as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf either were not in Britain before  or had not published anything substantial by that date. Moreover, the five Modernists selected were part of the same generation. They were all born within twenty years of one another (Yeats and Ford in  and  respectively, Hulme in , and Pound and Lawrence both in ). And although they originally came



Introduction

from different areas of Britain or America, they all lived and worked in London for much of the time between  and . Finally, these five authors have been chosen collectively to represent early Modernism because they were, in fact, part of a loose intellectual group. Although they were not a self-conscious coterie agreeing on a name or a strict program to describe their work, Yeats, Ford, Pound, Lawrence, and Hulme had close personal and professional connections with one another. They all knew each other or knew of one another. They were all well aware of one another’s work and ideas. They wrote for the same set of journals, went to many of the same places professionally and for entertainment, and they had many of the same friends in common. Moreover, they felt an affinity between their work and ideas. Among those authors actively publishing literature in London in those years, the five Modernists acknowledged one another, and were acknowledged at the time by others, as having many ideas in common, as being different from other writers, and as representing an important new trend in literature and thought. These five authors, therefore, had the opportunity and desire to share their views and theories with one another. Although their ideas originally may have developed from their own individual interests and backgrounds, they all were brought closely together immediately before the war. It is not surprising, therefore, that a common set of assumptions about history resulted. It is these common ideas, emotions, or attitudes that are the focus of this work. What has been sacrificed, therefore, is a comprehensive analysis of the very real differences between the authors and those features of their thinking that make each unique. This has been intentional, both in the interest of space, and because this is the study of a group; the emphasis, thus, is on the commonality of their opinions. Much critical writing has been done on each individual author and this body of work should be consulted for an understanding of the differences between them. Because it is the origins of the Modernist view of history that is under consideration, this study focuses on the years  to , although it has been necessary to discuss some ideas well before  and some after . Nineteen hundred and nine has been chosen as a starting date because it was then that the five Modernists first met, or became aware of, one another;  is the ending date, naturally, because it is the start of the First World War. Moreover, because the Modernists have been treated as intellectuals as well as literary figures, all of the works of the five Modernists have

Introduction



been considered in these years to point out their changing ideas of history. This includes journal articles, letters, private papers, memoirs, and non-fiction, as well as their poetry, drama, stories, and novels. It is important to note, however, that the genesis of their historical views was a complex process involving emotional and intellectual responses to contemporary developments in a wide variety of areas including politics, society, religion, and aesthetics. Thus the discussion of their ideas of history necessitates a consideration of their attitudes towards all of these topics as well. As a work of contextual intellectual history, moreover, it has been necessary to examine the social, political, and intellectual context to which the authors responded, in order to discover what might have prompted the changes in their ideas. The construction of this context has been carefully limited by the five Modernists’ own writings. Only those subjects and events that they commented upon explicitly or that they took an interest in have been considered part of the context. Unlike a literary critic such as Sanford Schwartz who studies a wide “matrix” of ideas which were “in the air” at the time and that he has selected because of a perceived similarity to the thought of the Modernists, I have only discussed those ideas and occurrences either that the authors wrote about or of which there is strong indication that they were aware. Therefore, not all of the features of Edwardian England have been included as part of the context considered. For example, some of the five Modernists wrote explicitly about the Boer War, the  Parliament crisis, the ideas of Henri Bergson, or the Theosophical Society. All of this has been examined. Articles in journals they were known to have read and on subjects in which they were interested at the time also have been considered. But if Einstein’s theory of relativity has not been mentioned, or if Nietzsche or the Suffragette movement are considered only briefly, it is because the five Modernists either did not discuss these ideas or events or mentioned them infrequently. The study follows a roughly chronological organization, although it does not do so strictly. This is because it is a collective, rather than an individual, biography. In order for the common thought of all five authors to emerge, the chapters are organized around topics, rather than around writers. Because the five Modernists did not comment on all topics, or did so at different times, it has not been possible to proceed in a strictly chronological manner or to include every author in every discussion. What this means is that some Modernists feature more in some discussions than others. For example, D.H. Lawrence seems remarkably absent



Introduction

in the beginning of the work, but, like Athena from the head of Zeus, emerges suddenly almost fully grown at the end. Ford Madox Ford, on the other hand, fades from view somewhat as the study progresses. In the end, the presentation of the origins of the historical thinking of the five Modernists in this work may resemble Ford Madox Ford’s “Impressionistic” rendering of the past more than anything else. It aims at giving the reader an impression or general feeling of the chronological development and of the common ideas and emotions of the authors. However, unlike Ford’s histories, the impressions and conclusions of this work are based on careful research done for each author in a strictly chronological fashion. The genesis of the five Modernists’ views of history occurred slowly and often was quite subtle. It is important at the outset, therefore, to be aware of what are the general components of different views of history in order that the often minor changes in their thinking can be properly weighed. That the five Modernists theorized about the nature of history was hardly innovative. In fact, they were joining the ranks of numerous artists, as well as philosophers, theologians, and historians who constructed speculative philosophies of history. In this the Modernists were doing more than just reflecting poetically on “the mutability and transience of all things.” Rather, they were attempting to answer fundamental questions “about patterns and purpose and meaning” in the past, in order “to render the whole historical process meaningful in the sense of ‘intelligible’.” Moreover, the Modernists’ conclusion that history moves in cycles also was not particularly new. In fact, it has been argued that “there are three possible patterns” of history; “either history has proceeded in a certain direction, or it has repeated itself in succeeding peoples and periods, or it has been formless and chaotic.” The latter view does not lend itself to speculative philosophies of history, the fundamental aim of which is to reduce “the whole of the past to an order” and to predict “things to come.” As a result, speculative histories are almost exclusively either progressive or cyclic. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the British literary Modernists of the early twentieth century were not the first to speculate that cycles were the fundamental feature of the past. Nevertheless, while the five Modernists were not unique in holding cyclic philosophies of history, they were the first to do so in quite a long time. Since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment the most common pattern of history was that of progress. There have been, however, a number of different progressive views. Inspired by the discovery of laws

Introduction



of nature for the physical world during the Scientific Revolution and encouraged by the belief that similar laws could be found for all areas of human existence, European thinkers such as Turgot, Lessing, Smith, Condorcet, Herder, and Comte developed theories of linear progressive improvement. In other words, they speculated that if the scientific method was applied properly and existing conditions were changed according to the laws uncovered by that method, the world would rapidly improve. Such views of progress culminated in the nineteenth-century Darwinian and social Darwinian theories of positive evolution, and in the progressive assumptions of British Whig historians such as Buckle, Macaulay, Freeman, and Maitland who carefully plotted the development of the British political system from its primitive origins to its perfection in the present day. The “optimistic belief in progress which laid its mark on so much nineteenth-century historical thinking” was reflected occasionally in literature. For example, Tennyson wrote in his  poem “Locksley Hall” of the “glorious gains” that British civilization had achieved through the growth of wisdom and science, and he expressed confidence that if he could look “into the future, far as human eye could see” he would witness “all the wonder that would be.” George Eliot, writing in , was optimistic that “every phase of human development is part of the education of the race in which we are sharing; every mistake, every absurdity into which poor human nature has fallen, may be looked on as an experiment of which we may reap the benefit.” However, few nineteenth-century thinkers or artists were entirely unequivocal about positive progress, and a number had become so disillusioned that they even speculated about the linear decline of civilization. One historian even argues that a “European-wide . . . anxiety about degeneration” existed, which “reached something of a crescendo in the s.” The fact that an entire school of artists were named “Decadents” says much about theories of history at the end of the century. These writers did not, however, abandon underlying assumptions of progress. The only difference was a change in direction; the world was growing progressively worse, rather than better. While linear progress was very popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries especially among the general public, it was not the most common pattern of history among artists and thinkers. In fact, the philosophy of history that gained most adherents in the nineteenth century combined linear advance with cyclic regression or repetition to create a spiral pattern. The first widespread group to develop spiral theories were



Introduction

the Romantics. M.H. Abrams, in his extensive study of Romantic theories of history, Natural Supernaturalism, argues that the most characteristic pattern of history of authors such as Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Schelling, Schiller, and Fichte was progress in the shape of a spiral. In this view of history, improvement occurs after a decline or fall from a golden age. When humanity returns to the principles of the former age, a new golden age results, superior to the first one because of the knowledge gained by the fall. No further falls will occur and progress will continue indefinitely. The fall, therefore, is “fortunate” because without it the future could not be permanently better. The early nineteenth-century Romantic writers were not alone in speculating about the spiral pattern of history. In fact, most later Victorian thinkers and artists developed their own varieties of this theory. For example, according to one literary critic, the “paradox of the fortunate fall underlies Ruskin’s whole concept of the Gothic,” because he believed that it was possible to reverse the decline following the Middle Ages and restore the world “to a glory far greater than that possible had there been no prior transgression.” Other Victorians held similar views, but proposed that, not one, but many “fortunate falls” had occurred. Perhaps influenced by Hegel’s dialectic pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, many nineteenth-century authors believed that throughout history two principles, one positive and one negative, alternated with one another. Arnold’s Hebraism and Hellenism, Carlyle’s systole and diastole of faith and unfaith, Pater’s centrifugal and centripetal, Ionic and Doric, Asiatic and European, and Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian impulses all fit this pattern. Each of these thinkers continued to propose that the tradition they found preferable had increased and been perfected over time because of the lessons learned during each negative “fall”. And they were hopeful that the struggle of opposites would be resolved or, to use the Hegelian concept of ‘aufheben’, annulled, preserved, and transcended, and progress would result. Thus, most Romantics and Victorians could not avoid the nineteenthcentury optimism in the likelihood, as Matthew Arnold put it, of “the growth towards perfection.” In fact, Arnold like so many others made it clear that his aim, which was “the aim of great culture,” was progress – “to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail.” And despite much pessimism about the present, most Victorian writers were confident, like Thomas Carlyle, that “the happiness and greatness of mankind at large have been continually progressive” and that “a new and brighter spiritual era is slowly evolving itself for all men.”

Introduction



The historical theories of the early twentieth-century British literary Modernists were indebted to many earlier authors and appear similar to them at first glance. However, there are some very significant differences. Despite being called ‘modernist’, their philosophies of history had a greater affinity to pre-modern thinkers than to any eighteenthor nineteenth-century figure. Many literary critics point out the debt that Modernists such as Yeats and Joyce acknowledged to the early eighteenth-century philosopher, Giambattista Vico, who it is claimed developed one of the only modern cyclic theories of the past. However, the Modernists’ theories were quite different from his. A close reading of Vico reveals that within his “corsi e ricorsi,” or repetition of the divine, heroic, and human ages, are common assumptions of progress. Because Vico believed that with greater historical knowledge it was possible to make fundamental changes, improve upon the past, and thus avoid the final degenerative age of a future cycle, his views cannot be considered strictly cyclic, as were those of the Modernists. Some historians even have argued that Vico’s importance is not as a cyclic thinker, but as a precursor of later progressive theories; his “books were the vehicle by which the concept of historical development at last entered the thought of Western Europe.” Similarly, a recent study concludes that his “cycles were not cyclical but spiral-like.” Vico’s theories, thus, resembled Romantic and Victorian views of history more than anything pre-modern or Modernist. It was only in the pre-modern period that thinkers were willing to accept the strictly cyclic nature of the past. This was certainly the case in traditional and non-Western societies, such as those of Persia, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. It also has been argued that “the eternal return is a universal ingredient of mythic thought” and was the most popular theory in the Greco-Roman world. Most pre-Socratic philosophers wrote of a universal pattern of a cyclic coming together into unity alternating with a decay into separation. Plato’s theory of the great year and recurring destruction of worlds, Aristotle’s cycle of political revolutions, Polybius’ rise and fall of states and empires, and the Stoics’ theories of the periodic return to an original state of innocence were all cyclic as well. That some twentieth-century Modernists were aware of the pre-modern origins of their views of history is made clear by Yeats’s  exposition of his theory of history, A Vision, which includes an overview of all of these ancient ideas and more. As with progressive views, there are a variety of cyclic theories of history. Two patterns are most common – the “cycloid” and “sinusoidal” types. A cycloid pattern of history is one in which “history goes



Introduction

through . . . [a] sequence of beginning, middle, and end only to start over with a repetition.” In other words, these theories posit the growth, maturity, and decay of one civilization or tradition and the repetition of that pattern within that civilization or another. These theories were most common in the later Greco-Roman period and the Renaissance. They also can be easily transformed into spiral pattern with the addition of some form of progress over time as occurred in much Romantic and Victorian thought. In the late nineteenth, and especially the early twentieth century this cycloidal thinking re-emerged. For example, Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Recurrence suggested that throughout time all events are repeated infinitely. However, Nietzsche did not elaborate on this idea fully enough for it to be considered a speculative philosophy of history, and there is debate about whether he even meant it to be taken literally. Moreover, his theory of the Overman implies an acceptance of progress; a consciously willed evolutionary process that overcomes and transcends the present may result in a better future. Thus, Nietzsche’s thought is not unequivocally cyclic. It is only with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West in  that a fully developed cycloidal philosophy of history appeared. Spengler found in nine separate cultures a cyclic “pattern analogous to the life cycle of a plant or animal;” all grew, matured, and decayed. Arnold Toynbee in the s and s found a similar organic “pattern of growth, breakdown, and eventual decay and dissolution,” but expanded upon Spengler by examining twenty-one civilizations of the past. The historical theories of the early British literary Modernists, however, were different even from those of other cyclic thinkers in their own era. This is because, rather than claiming that history followed a cycloid pattern, the Modernists, like thinkers of a much earlier period, developed sinusoidal views of history. They accepted an “alternation (or fluctuation) view” of the past in which “there is a movement in history wherein one set of general conditions is regularly succeeded by another, which then in turn gives way to the first.” In other words, rather than theorize about one eternally repeated life cycle, an alternation view postulates the existence of two sets of phenomena, principles, or traditions that cyclically alternate throughout time. One tradition is predominant for a number of centuries or years and then it is replaced by the other tradition. The first tradition will return, the second one will then follow it, and this alternation will continue for ever. The Modernists’ views of history, therefore, were quite unique for the period in which they were written,

Introduction



and they marked a fundamental shift from the ideas of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. This becomes especially apparent when the key assumptions underlying the cyclic views of the early British Modernists are examined. In rejecting theories of progress, the early British literary Modernists also abandoned a number of ideas that formed the basis of those theories. What is common to all progressive notions of history is the belief that significant change takes place over time. When Tennyson declared, “all truth is change” he revealed the basis of his theory of progress. Equally important, progressive change is cumulative; chronologically later periods incorporate the changes (either good or bad) of earlier periods and thus are fundamentally different (either better or worse). Because change is cumulative, therefore, chronology or the sequence of time provides value in history. Upwards progress holds that “whatever is later in time is prior in value”; decadence assumes the reverse – that which is earlier in time is more important. Thus, the place of an occurrence or idea in absolute time is crucial in these views of history. Moreover, because events in the past contribute to the nature of the present and are incorporated into it, the past and present are essentially incomparable. As a result history is fundamentally irreversible. Later time periods are so different from earlier ones that there is no possibility of ever returning to the past. In cyclic views, however, history is reversible because, while change may occur over time, that change is not cumulative. Change occurs when one set of principles or tradition replaces its opposite. While this change can be apocalyptic because it can involve great destruction, it is not so in the sense that something fundamentally different results. Despite any devastation when the two traditions alternate, neither tradition is altered or incorporates within itself anything fundamentally new. As a result, the essential features of the past may return and history can, and does, reverse itself. This does not mean that a tradition when it returns will be exactly identical to its previous appearance. In the early Modernists’ theories in particular, the best description is of “similar recapitulation,” rather than “sheer reiteration.” As historian Frank Manuel explains it, “there is a certain core of meaning that remains the same over the centuries, but only a certain core.” Surface details may vary with each return. The five Modernists believed that the cycle that would appear in the near future would incorporate many features of the modern world, especially industrial technology. However, they made it clear that this did not mean



Introduction

that there would be a fundamental change from the essence of the past tradition that had returned. Because each tradition remains always the same, and because the past neither causes the present nor is incorporated into it, chronological sequence is unimportant in cyclic views. Each tradition is uniform in the sense that all ages within the same tradition are equivalent regardless of when they occurred in time. They are essentially different, not from one another, but only from ages in the alternate tradition. These differences, moreover, are not determined by the place of an age in the chronological sequence (by whether it occurred later or earlier in time), but by the traditions themselves. As a result, events or ideas from periods separated by vast amounts of time can be compared and utilized equally. There can be no anachronism in juxtaposing aspects of two ages that are hundreds or even thousands of years apart as long as they are part of the same tradition because they have identical value. Chronology, thus, is irrelevant. Finally, cyclic views of history differ from progressive ones because they are closed rather than open-ended, and because they are not teleological. In progressive views, it is usually assumed that a final end of history, either in an earthly paradise or utter disintegration, will ultimately take place. In the present day, however, cumulative change is not considered to be finished and the exact nature of the end-result of the historical process is unknown and open. In cyclic views of history, on the other hand, because all values are already in existence in past cycles or in the two traditions, no new ones can develop over the course of time. And because change is not cumulative, there can be no final product to the historical process. Again, history cannot be apocalyptic in the sense that it incorporates significant or final change. Cyclic alternation will continue indefinitely, and there is no possibility of anything new resulting. All that will happen in the future is already known in its essence from the past. History, therefore, is a closed process that easily can be foretold. Sinusoidal theories of human history may have been particularly appealing to pre-modern thinkers because they readily accommodate a belief in the existence of a supernatural realm that contains ultimate truth. In fact, cyclic views of history almost always are accompanied by an assumption that behind the temporary changes of the human world a superior reality is present, which is permanent and unchanging, exists outside of time, and in which all things occur simultaneously. This certainly was the case, for example, in ancient Greece when philosophers “more and more . . . became obsessed with the idea of a changeless universal order;” “almost everything in philosophy became subordinated

Introduction



to . . . explaining the ‘transitory flux’ of experience in terms of the ‘unchanging realities’ that lay behind it.” Thus, while progressive views value change above all, or what the Ancient Greeks would call “becoming,” cyclic views of history give preeminence to a fundamental stability underlying all change – “being.” Change was considered inferior to stability, for example by the preSocratic philosophers, because it was deemed to be the cause of division from unity into destructive struggle. Cyclic views of history reflect this preference for stability because their structure makes the human past, like the cosmos in general, fundamentally changeless despite the appearance of change. Moreover, by positing a stable equilibrium between two opposed principles or traditions that constantly recur, they ensure more harmony than progressive theories, the ultimate goal of which is the overcoming or expulsion of one of the two principles of life – that of evil or strife. Rather than struggle against one of the cosmic opposites, cyclic views balance both into a unified whole that accepts and incorporates each. Strictly cyclic views of history are difficult for the modern mind to accept. With no freedom to enact fundamental change, no hope of permanent improvement, no ultimate expulsion of evil or disorder, no resolution of conflict, and no promise of an earthly paradise, cyclic theories can appear deeply pessimistic. The Modernists’ cyclic theorizing also may not be sympathetic to the Post-Modern sensibility; their strict dichotomizing between two fundamentally opposed principles can appear simplistic and unrealistic. However, these are not the only ways to consider their views of history. In fact, the early British literary Modernists found a belief in historical cycles to be a realistic and optimistic alternative to their deep disillusionment with the contemporary world and their pessimism about the possibility of improving it. By providing order while accepting the inevitability of disorder, cyclic theories seemed a perfectly reasonable way to ensure meaning and stability in a confusing period of change. Moreover, what will become evident from this study is that the five Modernists’ views of universal history were related to their new literary techniques. In fact, there are important similarities between them. Literary critics have shown that Modernism’s apparently random style is far from chaotic but is, rather, a highly ordered and controlled pattern. It is not just a mirroring of a perceived chaos in the modern world. The Modernists did perceive chaos, but their technique was a new way to incorporate it into a meaningful pattern. Their cyclic views of history



Introduction

also were ways to ensure order while accepting the chaos that they perceived around them. For various reasons, the five Modernists feared the changes of the period in which they lived and interpreted them as signs of confusion and anarchy. Their cyclic theories of the past were a defense against that confusion that incorporated, rather than annulled it. From the study of these five authors’ theories of history, therefore, the nature and extent of the break between Modernist and Enlightenment thinking becomes strikingly apparent. The Modernists themselves were cyclically returning to older patterns of thought. Their thought, thus, was simultaneously very old and very new. The cyclic views of the five Modernists examined in this book developed gradually. They all began their careers with fundamentally nineteenth-century historical assumptions and developed their new ideas slowly over a long period of time. As a result, in their early thinking, holdovers of previous ideas, and tensions between old and new assumptions are evident. To plot the development of their historical innovations, therefore, a sensitivity to subtle changes is essential. This is why this study has considered some important elements other than comments openly rejecting progress and suggesting the cyclic nature of history. The following ideas, which are components of cyclic theories of history, have been taken into consideration as evidence of growing cyclic views: the sense that two distinct and constant traditions existed in the past; the idea that the universal order is essentially constant; the dislike of change and belief in, and preference for, a superior permanent and timeless reality; a sense that absolute time or accurate chronology is unimportant or a belief that ages with similar values are equivalent regardless of the passage of time; and a sense that ideas or occurrences in equivalent ages can be compared without anachronism even though separated by a vast amount of time. The development of all of these assumptions has been related to the political, social, and intellectual context that may have inspired them. Who exactly were these five Modernists? How might they have shared ideas and opinions? A brief account of the main characters is necessary at the outset. By  Yeats, Ford, Hulme, Pound, and Lawrence had begun to form a group. This might have been considered surprising. All five authors had very different personalities, came from different backgrounds, and two were of slightly different ages. Initially, therefore, there was no obvious reason why they would get to know one another or share similar attitudes towards history. Two forces served to bring the authors together. One was the vitality of the London art world. The

Introduction



other was Ezra Pound. According to one contemporary, “unaware of the approaching disasters of the First World War, a wave of creative activity seemed to be sweeping London.” And she added that “Ezra’s driving force was everywhere.” In many respects this was true. It was very often Ezra Pound’s “driving force” that acted as a catalyst for the five Modernists. Pound arrived in London in late September  after having traveled from America to Italy the previous year. Prior to that time he had received a Master of Arts degree in Romance languages from the University of Pennsylvania, held a teaching position at Wabash College in Indiana, and pursued post-graduate studies in Proven¸cal and medieval Spanish literature. Despite this academic background, when Pound moved to London at the age of twenty-three he was quite an eccentric figure. He came from a respectable upper-middle-class American family, but, like many a middle-class youth with artistic leanings, when in Europe Pound confidently took on the role of a bohemian. Ford later recalled that at the time Ezra would approach with the steps of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point and a single, large blue ear-ring. . . . He threw himself alarmingly into frail chairs, devoured enormous quantities of your pastry, fixed his pince-nez firmly on his nose, drew out a manuscript from his pocket . . . and looking down his nose would chuckle like Mephistopheles and read you a translation from Arnaut Daniel.

Pound had few literary contacts when he first arrived in London. One of his first activities was to deposit a book of his poems (which he had privately printed in Venice the year before) in bookshops around London hoping to gain some attention. In this way he met Elkin Mathews who was a publisher and owner of a bookshop. In turn Mathews introduced Pound to a London literary organization called the Poets’ Club on February , . Although Pound was not very enthusiastic about the Poets’ Club, it did help him to widen his circle of acquaintances. In particular it was through this organization that he met T.E. Hulme. Born and brought up in Staffordshire, Thomas Ernst Hulme was twenty-six years old in . He was from an old landowning family, and, like Pound, had been absent from England prior to , traveling through Canada and Europe. His educational background was not literary; he had attended Cambridge and University College, London in mathematics, philosophy, biology, and physics. By , however, he



Introduction

too had settled in London, had decided that his main interest was poetry, and had become an early devotee of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson. Hulme was also quite an impressive personality. But rather than cultivating Pound’s bohemian extravagance, Hulme developed an image of almost authoritarian strength that was frightening to some people, but that concealed a genuine kindness and humor. The artist, Jacob Epstein, a close friend of Hulme’s, described him about this time: “Hulme was a large man in bulk, and also large and somewhat abrupt in manner. He had the reputation of being a bully and arrogant because of his abruptness. He was really of a candid and original nature like that of Samuel Johnson, and only his intolerance of sham made him feared.” Because of his interest in poetry, soon after arriving in London Hulme joined the Poets’ Club and quickly became its secretary. Early in , however, he had become dissatisfied with the conservative nature of the Club, and by the end of March , he formed his own club, later referred to as the “Secession Club.” This was an informal, loosely organized group that met weekly at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant throughout the spring and summer of . It was on April , , according to Pound’s biographer, that Pound first came across this group and met Hulme. Although Pound’s initial introduction to the club was not an unqualified success, he did attend other meetings sporadically in . Moreover, Pound’s meeting with Hulme was not without result. Their friendship did develop elsewhere and lasted, even though Hulme soon gave up poetry for philosophy, until Hulme’s death. Although Pound was introduced to Hulme first, the person he most wanted to meet when he came to London was W.B. Yeats. He had already studied Yeats’s work and had sent Yeats a copy of the book of poems he had printed in Venice in . Yeats replied, describing it as “charming”. It was over six months later, however, that they actually met. Yeats was forty-four years old in  and was already one of the most famous literary figures of his time. Although he was originally from Ireland, Yeats had been living in London for a number of years. Since well before the turn of the century Yeats also had been deeply involved with Irish nationalism, Irish theater, French Symbolism, and esoteric supernatural studies both in England and Ireland. By  in London he had established his own circle of literary, political, and occult friends who were his age and of a somewhat older tradition. His fame and accomplishments alone made him an impressive figure at the time. When Pound first arrived in London, he spent a good deal of his time working at the British Museum. Through the Museum he “found

Introduction



the Vienna Cafe where museum officials, readers and their friends dined.” These included writers such as Laurence Binyon, Selwyn Image, Ernest Rhys, and May Sinclair, all of whom were friends or acquaintances of Yeats. It was Olivia Shakespear, however, the mother of his future wife (whom Pound had met in February at a party), who made the actual introduction to Yeats. She was one of Yeats’s closest friends for his entire lifetime, and in the spring of  she took Pound to Yeats’s apartment in the Woburn Buildings. According to Yeats’s biographer, “Pound and Yeats got along well from the first, with the younger man assuming towards the older a mixed attitude of admiration and patronage.” This was the beginning of a friendship that would last many years. A similar friendship begun in  was the one between Pound and Ford Madox Ford, called Ford Madox Hueffer at the time. Ford, like Yeats, was somewhat older than Pound and Hulme. In  he was thirty-six and had been living in London for five years, having spent the previous fifteen years in the English countryside. Although not as famous as Yeats, Ford had come from a renowned English artistic family. He also was a close friend and collaborator with the celebrated author Joseph Conrad, and in  he had founded and was the editor of an important and well-received new journal, the English Review. Ford was a bit more extravagant in his personal style than Yeats, but like the older author Ford was a well-established literary figure with his own circle of literary friends and acquaintances, many of whom he had known since childhood. Pound and Ford met in the spring of  through the contacts Pound had made at the British Museum. The meeting was a success and by June, Pound was already published in Ford’s English Review. The last member of the quintet to be introduced was D.H. Lawrence. It was Ford who had “discovered” Lawrence. In , when Lawrence first moved to a suburb of London, he was twenty-four years old – the same age as Pound. He was, however, quite a different type of person from Pound. From a coalmining family in Nottinghamshire, Lawrence was clearly of the working class. Shy and provincial at first, he was a contrast to Pound, Ford, and Hulme who were confident, cosmopolitan, and vociferous. However, like Pound and Hulme, Lawrence had little contact with London or its literary world before . Previously he had worked as a clerk for a surgical goods manufacturer and attended Nottingham University College to receive a teaching certificate. In late  he accepted a teaching post in a grammar school in South London. Although he considered himself primarily a creative writer rather than a



Introduction

teacher and was in the process of writing a number of short stories, poems, and a novel, Lawrence’s move to London did not immediately bring him into contact with London’s literary world. This changed in about October , when his friend Jessie Chambers sent some of his poems to the English Review. Ford admired these poems immediately, published them, and asked to see Lawrence. Very impressed by Lawrence, Ford began to show him off to his circle of friends. He introduced Lawrence to Pound that autumn, and Pound also took up this new find. By the end of , thus, the foundations of a new literary group were set. Through the medium of the contacts established in that year the five different authors were connected, albeit indirectly; in  they all had met Pound. Beyond that, however, there was little contact and they kept to their own circles. This may have been due to the differences between them, which were a result of their distinct personalities and backgrounds. Moreover, they were separated also by age. The two older writers, Yeats and Ford, grew up in a very similar intellectual milieu of which the younger three were aware only second-hand, they had written much more than the other authors, and had more time to think critically and develop their ideas and interests before . It was only gradually between  and  that their friendships became closer and they became aware of one another and their common goals. Nineteen hundred and ten was not a particularly important year for the development of their friendships; Pound, Ford, and Yeats spent most of the year outside of England, traveling in America, Germany, and France respectively. It was only in  that the five Modernists began to coalesce into a literary group. There were many ways in which this occurred. What follows is representative of just a few. One means by which the Modernists got to know one another better was through the gatherings that four of the five held at their homes. In  any one of them could attend the Monday evenings given by Yeats or the Tuesday evenings given by Hulme. Almost anyone could drop in at Pound’s rooms in Kensington at almost any time. In addition, Ford gave frequent parties at South Lodge, the home of his companion, Violet Hunt. Furthermore, there was a growing group of mutual acquaintances who also attended these gatherings and could share ideas with, and communicate them among, the five Modernists. These included friends originally of Yeats’s such as Florence Farr, Ernest Rhys, May Sinclair, and Olivia and Dorothy Shakespear; writers and artists whom Ford had discovered through his English Review such as Wyndham Lewis; and friends and new acquaintances of Hulme’s and Pound’s such

Introduction



as F.S. Flint, Edward Storer, Richard Aldington, H.D., J.G. Fletcher, Skipwith Cannell, and John Cournos. There also were a number of others involved. Pound, as the ringleader, invited them all to his home and took many of them to Yeats’s Mondays, Hulme’s Tuesdays, and Ford’s South Lodge parties. There were also a number of new literary journals that provided a means by which all these artists could get to know one another. In  Ford resigned the editorship of the English Review, which had included the work of many of the five Modernists and their friends. But there were other important new magazines after that date. The most influential probably was the New Age, which had been taken over by A.R. Orage in . Hulme and Pound became regular contributors for it in  and  respectively. Orage also published contributions by, and reviews of the work of, all of the five Modernists and almost all of their mutual friends. He held editorial meetings, dinners, and lunches at which the contributors and occasionally guests could meet and discuss ideas. Orage himself attended some of the gatherings held by the five Modernists. Other important new magazines were the Poetry Review, which had been founded by Harold Monro in , and Monro’s subsequent journal, Poetry and Drama, begun in . Pound was a contributor to these magazines as were Flint, Storer, and Aldington. Although Hulme did not contribute, he was close enough to Monro to be asked to be a judge for a poetry competition given by the Poetry Review in . Monro included reviews of the work of all five of the Modernists. Monro also had a poetry bookshop that Hulme and many of the others frequented and above which Hulme lived briefly. At this bookshop Monro also gave poetry readings and parties at which, at various times, all five of the Modernists and many of their friends were represented or present. Monro knew all five Modernists socially and attended Hulme’s Tuesdays and Yeats’s Mondays as well. Finally, Pound was a great help with the journal, The New Freewoman, which was started in  and was renamed The Egoist in . Pound and, subsequently Aldington, were the literary editors of these magazines and consequently managed to get the work of almost all the five Modernists and their friends published there. Pound also was the foreign correspondent for the new American magazine, Poetry, that was begun in  and published in Chicago. Once again he was able to have the work of Ford, Yeats, Lawrence, and many other friends published in this journal.



Introduction

Between  and , therefore, there were plenty of meeting places, mutual friends, and publications that brought together a London literary scene of which the five Modernists were a part, and which enabled them to feel that they were sharing in a new literary movement. The similarity of their ideas, therefore, was undoubtedly not accidental; they certainly had many opportunities to share their opinions. In the end they all came to the common idea that cyclic structures for history and for art appeared far more realistic than any idea of progress. While coming to this conclusion they all began to effect the fundamental changes in their aesthetic theories and practices that eventually became known as Modernism. We must now see how all of this happened in the “curious drama” of those far from idyllic Edwardian years.

 

“Immaterial pleasure houses”: the initial aesthetic dilemma

When we look back upon the lives of our fathers the first thing that seems to strike us is their intolerable slowness, and then the gloom in which they lived – or perhaps the gloom would strike us first. . . . I do not believe they had sunlight. . . . I do not believe they had any fresh breezes. . . . They could not have had. It was always brown, motionless fog in those days. . . . But in gloom and amidst horror they sang on bravely . . . in amidst the glooms they built immaterial pleasure houses. Ford Madox Ford, Ancient Lights, 

According to Ford Madox Ford, one of his very first memories was of lying in his cradle surrounded by proofsheets of the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Although this undoubtedly is an example of Ford’s legendary, and often self-serving imagination, it was not beyond the realm of possibility. Much of Ford’s youth was spent at the home of his grandfather, the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter, Ford Madox Brown, in the company of his cousins who were Rossetti’s nieces and nephew. Ford’s early years, therefore, were lived in the shadow of the great figures of the Victorian art world. And despite his deep love for his grandfather, Ford’s recollection of these artists, as the quote heading this chapter indicates, was often of the depression, gloom, and inadequacy he felt in their presence. Early on he wished to escape from their influence. The same could be said of the other four Modernists. In the early days of their careers, as is hardly surprising, one of the primary concerns of all five authors was to distinguish themselves from their predecessors and establish their own place in the history of European literature. Beginning in the late s and s for the elder Modernists, Yeats and Ford, and after the turn of the century for the younger three, Hulme, Pound, and Lawrence, all five authors attempted to outline a unique style and set of ideas for their new generation. It took them quite a while to do this, and they certainly had not succeeded by the time they met in . 



Modernism

Of this fact, they all were well aware. Their aesthetic theorizing, and political and social positions were contradictory and derivative. Their creative work was vague and imprecise. Rather than successfully defining new values and initiating novel aesthetic practices, the most obvious characteristic of the early work of the Modernists was an unoriginal and romantic escapism that led to the creation of just those “immaterial pleasure houses” of the quote above, which Ford Madox Ford criticized his elders for building. The young Modernists did have a number of strong opinions about how they were different from their predecessors. As Ford put it, “the world of twenty-five years ago,” the world of their “fathers,” was “rather a dismal place.” What made it so depressing was the existence of “those terrible and forbidding things – the Victorian great figures.” Ford was particularly happy that the “Ruskins, Carlyles, George Eliots” had disappeared, while the other Modernists agreed and added to the list authors such as Arnold, Tennyson, Browning, and Dickens. The early Modernists also were pleased that a new generation of artists for which they felt much more sympathy had taken the Victorians’ place in the s and s. These less monumental figures included Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and other artists who were influenced by European Symbolism and could be included in what was known as the Aesthetic Movement. These artists were encouraging, according to the Modernists, because they heralded a return to the aesthetic values of the early nineteenth-century Romantics after the unfortunate Victorian aberration. Underlying the Modernists’ optimism about the work of the Aesthetic Movement of the late nineteenth century was a belief, expressed most clearly by Ford Madox Ford in , that an “eternal struggle” existed “between . . . Art considered as a thing remote from the external world, and Art that descends for its subjects into the market-place.” This was the key distinction, according to Ford, between “Romantic” and “Victorian” art. All the other Modernists accepted this dichotomy and frequently expressed a preference for the former for a variety of reasons. In this the young Modernists were hardly innovative. Since the late eighteenth century, aesthetic theorists from Shelley, Hallam, and Tennyson, to Arnold, Browning, Ruskin, and Morris had made a distinction between a subjective art that is the expression of the emotions and imagination of artistic geniuses with access to a spiritual realm, and an objective art that displays truths learned by reflection or reason and which concentrates on the immediate concerns of the entire community. Where

The initial aesthetic dilemma



the Modernists were unique was in the simplicity of their theorizing. Although earlier thinkers may have emphasized one form of art rather than the other, none of them proposed the entire exclusion of either side of the dichotomy. In fact, all hoped to find a type of art that could accommodate both. In their early careers the five Modernists appeared to prefer what Ford described as a “Romantic” art of emotion and imagination to the exclusion of a “Victorian” art of reason and social comment. For example, Hulme expressed great distrust of what he considered to be the rationalism and didacticism of the Victorians. He believed that mid-nineteenthcentury thinkers and artists based their work on a deterministic view of the universe which they shared with scientists like Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer, and which assumed that all natural and human phenomena could be explained by a set of simple, orderly material laws. This in turn enabled them to be optimistic about solving contemporary problems and justified a focus on social reform. Hulme not only found this regrettable, but in reading a book that assumed that “Law was universal” he even got “the same kind of sensation as one gets from turning up a stone and seeing the creeping things revealed.” According to Hulme this was because “the nightmare of determinism” denied the mystery of chance and the freedom of human action, and left little role for the concerns of the spirit, such as religion and art. This determinism also may have contributed to the utilitarianism of the Victorians that was Ford’s bˆete noir. Because the Victorian “great” believed “he was going to solve the riddle of the universe,” according to Ford, his “desire [was] to write not so much a good book as a book which will do good.” This led, in the case of an author like Ruskin, to a “continual falsification of aesthetic standards to give body to his ethical doctrine.” The Victorian for Ford, thus, was a writer “of polemics, the preacher” – not a true artist. Or, as Pound put it in a poem of , they were people “who love not a song whate’er its skill be,/ But only love the cause or what cause should be.” In other words, the Victorian artist had become the useful servant of the public and his art had lost all aesthetic value. The other four Modernists agreed on these points – didacticism and social reform were inappropriate because they did not produce great art and because they diminished the importance of artists. Pound, for example, made it clear that real art was not created by any writer who “confounds poetry with rhetoric and bombast” or who is “a tedious theorist” so “affected by the thought of his time” and the life around



Modernism

him that all he can produce is an “encyclopedia of what passed for wisdom” of the day. As Yeats put it “rhetorical and didactic verse,” or in Lawrence’s words “padding and moral reflection,” did not make for great art. And none of the Modernists felt sympathy for what Lawrence called “Realism’s Reign of Terror” which resulted in works that “inevitably light on a wound or a festering sore.” Early in their careers the five Modernists were optimistic that this Victorian “gloom” was being dispersed. As Yeats put it in , “a great revolution of thought” was occurring. He was referring in particular to the work of the members of the Rhymers’ Club, which he helped organize in  and which was part of the new Aesthetic Movement. The other young Modernists also were enthusiastic about the ideals informing what they saw as a return to Romanticism. In particular, they were pleased with the rejection of rationalism, utilitarianism, materialism, and determinism, and the new acceptance of aestheticism and spiritualism. The young Modernists echoed the late nineteenth-century Aesthetic, and earlier Romantic writers, that the universe was much more complex and mysterious than was claimed by rationalists who assumed, as Yeats put it, “that the external and material are the only fixed things, the only standards of reality.” Yeats, rather, preferred a more religious or spiritual view of the universe. He believed that the supernatural or spiritual world, which lies hidden beneath the surface material world and which is much less orderly and much more mysterious, was the true reality. Quoting Shelley, Yeats claimed that “ ‘the painted veil called life’ may be ‘torn aside’ ” to reveal this truth. This could be done, however, only by those people who understand emotional and spiritual relations – in other words by great artists. In fact, for Yeats a symbolic art of intuition was truly a religion because “imagination was the first emanation of divinity . . . the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine revelations” and “ ‘the only means of conversing with eternity left to man on earth’.” The artist, therefore, was not just a more sensitive creature, but also a magician, a seer, or a priest who has privileged access to a superior truth that only he could bring into this world. According to Yeats, great artists repeat “the revelation of a spiritual world that has been the revelation of mystics in all ages.” Hulme had a similar view, but it was more psychological. He, like many others in the early years of the twentieth century, was deeply influenced by the theories of Henri Bergson. Following Bergson, Hulme claimed that the “materialistic surface of life” was not the true reality. Rather, according to Hulme, within our minds is a more complex and deeper

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“reality . . . [which is] a flux of interpenetrated elements unseizable by the intellect.” Only intuition can discover the truths of this reality, and artists are best able to do this. As Hulme put it, “[b]etween nature and ourselves, even between ourselves and our own consciousness, there is a veil, a veil that is dense with the ordinary man, transparent for the artist and poet.” Therefore, “the function of the artist is to pierce through here and there . . . the veil placed between us and reality.” In this way the artist, rather than the scientist, could discover the most important truths. Early in their careers, the Modernists also thought that the best art must be based on emotion and intuition. As Yeats and Ford put it, the best work “express[es] great passions” and, quoting Arthur Hallam, is a “poetry of sensation rather than reflection”; it is “an illustration of an emotion” rather than a presentation of “ideas.” Pound agreed that “short poems of emotions and expressions of personal feeling” were preferable to any other forms. The advantage of an emotional art, for the five Modernists, not only was that it discovered deeper truths and was aesthetically superior, but also that it was much more effective in improving the world. As Ford put it, the “great defect” of the contemporary Englishman was “his want of sympathetic imagination.” Only an exposure to great art could cure this. All the other Modernists agreed with the fundamentally Romantic notion of the ennobling power of art by means of the development of the faculty of Sympathy, which enables people to imaginatively place themselves in the situation of others and feel their emotions. Sympathy, first, was important for the artist’s ability to truly understand his subject. As Hulme put it (paraphrasing Henri Bergson) “the artist . . . in placing himself back within the object by a kind of sympathy . . . break[s] down, by an effort of intuition the barrier that space puts between him and his model.” Pound agreed, quoting De Quincey, about “ ‘the miracle which can be wrought’ ” by great artists who are capable of “ ‘feeling a thing more keenly, understanding it more deeply, than it has ever been felt before’.” Moreover, according to the five Modernists and the Romantics, Sympathy helps the audience transcend their individual subjectivity and achieve true communication with others. According to Yeats, “sympathy with all living things” and “imagination . . . binds us to each other by opening the secret doors of all hearts.” An art based on sympathy “makes us understand that we are not walled up within our immediate senses, but bound one to another, and to some greater life, by a secret communion of thought and emotion.” Because of this, as Lawrence put

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Modernism

it, “[t]he essence . . . of true human art . . . is a form of sympathy” for it can “convey the emotions of one man to his fellows.” Thus “the mission of Art . . . [is to] bring us into sympathy with as many men, as many objects, as many phenomena as possible.” This sympathetic imagination, in turn, could change the entire world. As Ford put it, there is a “need for romancers” and imaginative writers because “[o]ur laws are good, [but] our manners – our powers of understanding, sympathizing with or aiding one another – might be so very much better.” Lawrence agreed that “we must understand much if we would do much.” With their sympathetic power of understanding, Yeats argued, “the imaginative minority will spread their interests among the majority, for even the majority becomes imaginative when touched by enthusiasm.” A new romantic art, according to Ford, thus would have “ ‘a profound moral significance’.” Great art, therefore, could uncover and communicate deeper truths, aid human communication, make the public more refined, and contribute to the improvement of the world. And it could do this without resorting to rhetoric, didacticism, or logic, but through the creation of aesthetically superior works expressing the artist’s subjective emotions and visions. This in turn made art supremely important and would enable the artist to regain a position of primary importance in the world. According to Ford, if a new Romanticism was adopted, it would herald a return to an age which “held that to be an artist was to be the most august thing in life,” that “still attached something of the priestly to the functionaries of the Fine Arts or the humaner letters,” and that kept alive “the tradition that a poet was a seer and a priest by the sheer virtue of his craft and mystery.” Thus the first aesthetic theories of the five Modernists were hardly different from those of earlier Romantic writers. In addition, side by side with these lofty aesthetic claims, the Modernists also provided other, less philosophic, reasons for why they preferred a Romantic art, which often seemed to be more important to them. Ford summed it up best when he commented that the “mission” of a work of art “is to soothe, to solace, to excite, to move – to do anything that will make us forget our squalid lives, our daily toils, the miseries of our friends, or our intolerable futures. What the artist wishes to do . . . is to take you out of yourself.” Yeats and Pound agreed that poetry was valuable when it could “draw one’s imagination as far as possible from the complexities of modern life and thought,” or when it could “prevent ennui” and provide “an escape from dullness.”

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Art was important, therefore, not to make serious political or social comment by means of the perceptions, or even the fantasies, of sensitive imaginations, as many Romantics had attempted to do. Rather, for the early Modernists, it was a way to effect an escape from the contemporary world by presenting a more beautiful, mysterious, and passionate alternative to it. Lawrence, for example, admired the poet, Rachel Annand Taylor, in  not for any deep theoretical reasons, but mainly because she “lived apart from life . . . withdrawn, sublimating experience with odours.” Her poetry was that of “a choice romanticist” because she “takes the pageant of her bleeding heart, first marches ironically by the brutal daylight, then lovingly she draws it away into her magic, obscure place apart where she breathes spells upon it, filters upon it delicate lights, tricks it with dreams and fancy, and then re-issues the pageant.” Pound was more explicit about his view of the role of artists in a poem of : We, that through all the world Have wandered seeking new things And quaint tales, that your ease May gather such dreams as please You, the Home-stayers. ... New tales, new mysteries, New songs from out the breeze That maketh soft the far evenings, . . .

The five Modernists’ notion of a beautiful alternative to the contemporary world also required an artistic style that was equally remote from the everyday. Pound in particular liked the “profusion” and “bejewelled prose” of “romantic” art, rather than what he described as the “neatness” and “restraint” of “classic” art or a language that might resemble contemporary daily speech. Similarly Lawrence admired work that was “gorgeous, sumptuous” and filled with “sensuous colour.” The Romanticism that the Modernists preferred, therefore, was often an art that, as Pound put it, simply invoked “the beauty of the unusual” rather than “the beauty of the normal.” Quoting Wordsworth, Pound in particular liked poetry that satisfied a desire to hear about “things ‘which never were on sea or land’ . . . more weird and marvellous than any you have yet heard of . . . it is no accurate information about historical things that you seek, it is the thrill which mere reality would never satisfy.” Or, as Hulme put it, they wanted an art filled with analogies “which make an other-world through-the-glass effect” and which “give a sense of wonder,

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Modernism

a sense of being united in another mystic world.” Poems “must appear free movers, and not sprung from that low-thing Earth”; they “must be an imaginary world.” In fact, this withdrawal from the contemporary world could be taken to such an extreme that, according to Yeats, “visible passing life” should be rejected altogether as an appropriate subject for art. In  he even criticized the early Romantics, for being too “full of the pride of the world.” Instead, Yeats supported the creation of a literature “which never mentions an external thing except to express a state of the soul” and in which “the images of human life have faded almost perfectly.” Hulme agreed and claimed that poetry “must be absolutely removed from reality.” If left at this point, the young Modernists appear clearly to be “the last Romantics” as they have been defined by some literary critics, and even by Yeats himself. Moreover, they could be described as last, not just in the sense of coming later in time, but also in respect to the quality of their theory and practice. The dichotomy they posited between forms of art was so simplistic that none of their Romantic or Victorian predecessors would have accepted it. Their aesthetic theories were derivative, and all of their work and ideas tended to an extreme of withdrawal that verged on sentimental escapism. However, this is not the complete story of the five Modernists early in their careers. In many of their writings they clearly were not comfortable with their “Romantic” position, and especially not with an art that suggested removal from the world. Moreover, in contemplating Romantic and Aesthetic work, they drew closer than they cared to admit to the Victorians they rejected. The result was an aesthetic position that appeared contradictory, as well as superficial. Despite pronouncements to the contrary, all the young Modernists were uneasy with art that was vague, sentimental, and escapist. As early as  Yeats remarked that he hated “the soft modern manner” and he realized that his own work fell into this category because “nothing anywhere has clear outline. Everything is cloud and foam.” The other Modernists agreed with Yeats’s evaluation of himself. Although Pound never criticized Yeats directly, he realized that modern symbolism, which used symbols that are “indefinitely suggestive” became “sometimes merely atmospheric suggestion.” Lawrence and Hulme, however, did implicate Yeats. In  Lawrence objected to Yeats because “he is vapourish, too thin” and because his type of poetry “leads to so much vapour of words, till we are blind with coloured wordiness.” Lawrence wished to avoid art that was “undecided, vague, suggestive” and which used esoteric

The initial aesthetic dilemma

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symbols that “do not show what they stand for themselves.” Hulme also had no patience for modern poets, like Yeats, who relied on “big words and common phrases without meaning” and on “the vain decorative and verbal images.” The Modernists also were upset with what Lawrence called “the sticky juice of sentimentality” and melodrama that they found in their own work and in the work of others. This type of art was concerned with “beautiful dying decadent things with sad odours” rather than with real life. Or as Hulme put it, it became an art in which “women whimper and whine of you and I alas, and roses, roses all the way. It becomes the expression of sentimentality rather than of virile thought.” Pound also hated his “enemy” the “drivelling sentimentalist.” And in his poem of , “Revolt. Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry,” Pound parodied “men . . . grown but pale sick phantoms,” “sons . . . grown such thin ephemera” because they “dream pale flowers” or “live only in . . . mists and tempered lights.” Finally, Yeats also agreed with these criticisms. In , he regretted the fact that in the modern world “[t]he poet . . . must sit apart in contemplative indolence playing with fragile things” and that poetry must “separate itself from life.” And even as early as  Yeats associated his own verse with this escapism because it is almost all a flight into fairyland from the real world, and a summons to that flight . . . it is not the poetry of insight and knowledge, but of longing and complaint – the cry of the heart against necessity. I hope some day to alter that and write poetry of insight and knowledge.

In the same years as they advocated a return to Romanticism, and with increasing frequency after , all the Modernists concurred on the type of work they wished to write. It should avoid, as Yeats later described it, “that extravagant style/ He had learned from Pater.” Rather, as he put it in , it should be a poetry of “utter simplicity” in which “everything [is] very hard and clear.” Lawrence and Hulme in  also liked literature in which there is “nothing superfluous, nothing out of place,” and that contains “absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage.” For Pound two years later, “the true poet” was one who “trusts himself to the simplest expression, and . . . writes without adjectives.” Along with simplicity and precision, the Modernists also liked, as Lawrence put it in , “level-headed, fair, unrelenting realism.” Pound and Hulme admired poets who “attempt to reproduce exactly the thing which has been clearly seen,” and poems in which “each word [is] . . . an image seen.” Artists should be “stern realist[s],” according to Ford, and

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Modernism

represent “an actual moment caught and recorded”; they should “look in the face” of the contemporary world rather than “dream for ever of islands off the west coast of Ireland.” It was precisely for his objectivity and realism, in opposition to Romantic dreaming and subjectivity, that Pound liked the work of the Victorian poet, Robert Browning. The five Modernists, therefore, were conflicted. Or to put it more strongly, as has one commentator on Pound, their “response to the demands imposed upon the poet by the opposed traditions of subjective and objective poetry” was “schizophrenic.” They admired the Romantic alternative to determinism, rhetoric, and naturalism, but they disliked the resultant vagueness, sentimentality, and escapism. Moreover, the Modernists were not entirely confident that the Romantic program of Sympathy and intuition would grant the artist the position of importance for which they had hoped. It was wonderful in theory, but whether it would work in practice was questionable. In fact, it seemed to the young Modernists that the return to Romanticism of the Aesthetic artists was responsible for a decline in the public appreciation of art. According to Ford, fin-de-si`ecle “authors themselves have contributed to the want of interest in literature that the public displays” because they insisted that it “is of necessity obstruse, esoteric, far-fetched and unreadable.” This was not made better by their private lives. The alcoholism, drug abuse, and sexual scandals with which many artists were involved and which seemed to transcend a harmless bohemianism increasingly disturbed the Modernists. Later in his life, Yeats claimed that “our form of lyric, our insistence upon emotion which has no relation to any public interest, gathered together, overwrought, unstable men.” As Pound put it, art was “left to the chance misfit or the much-scorned dilletante.” The result of this, particularly after the trial of Oscar Wilde, according to Ford, was that “the public . . . inseparably connected in its mind the idea of poetry with ideas of vice.” Artists were no longer “regarded as gentlemen, and, indeed . . . they are hardly regarded as men.” Rather, an artist was considered an “effeminate, if not a decent kind of eunuch.” In other words, the average person came to think of artists as morally suspect, weak, and remote and, therefore, not meriting serious attention. In fact, according to Ford, the situation in the early years of the twentieth century was even worse than in the age of the fin-de-si`ecle decadents. At least in that period artists could shock the public. By  even this was no longer possible. “That poets should have lost even the power to irritate the lethargic beast,” Ford concluded, “is a symptom of a lamentable impotence on the part of the poets.”

The initial aesthetic dilemma

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The Modernists realized that the Victorian “Greats” did not have this problem. They may have made social reform more important than art, but as writers and thinkers they had a much more significant impact on the world than did the fin-de-si`ecle artists. The Victorians were respected, they sold books, they made money, they forced their audience to think, and they occasionally even produced results. According to Ford, “[i]n their own day each of them was a great and serious fact. For there was a time – yes, really there was a time! – when the publication of a volume of poems was still an event – an event making great names and fortunes not merely mediocre.” This was because the public still had a “keen . . . belief that the fine arts could save a man’s soul.” But, according to Ford, “[a]ll these things are most extraordinarily changed.” And he concluded that “nowadays, and in England, we have a singular and chilling indifference to all literature.” Yeats agreed as early as  that “[t]he arts have failed; fewer people are interested in them every generation.” Thus the Modernists envied the fact that the Victorians were responsible to the world and were taken seriously. In other words, the young Modernists, despite their critique of Victorian social criticism, were not entirely immune to the attraction of the “market-place.” Yeats, for example, agreed with Shelley’s complaint that “ ‘[p]oets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners and merchants’” because they were no longer considered qualified to discuss political, social, or economic issues, and therefore were excluded from concerns that were rightly theirs. In  Yeats dramatized his own frustration with the role assigned to artists in the modern world in his play, The King’s Threshold; in this work the chief poet of Ireland dies on a hunger strike that he has started in protest at the revocation of the poet’s ancient right to sit on the king’s council as an equal to bishops, soldiers, and statesmen. The five Modernists, therefore, took seriously the role artists could play in the world. Moreover, they themselves wrote about politics, economics, and society, made some open political commitments, and hoped that their opinions on these subjects would be heard. Once again, in this the Modernists were not that far removed from their Victorian predecessors. For example, all the Modernists but Pound claimed to have been socialists of the William Morris school early in their careers. Yeats, moreover, was active in Irish nationalism in the s. The Modernists also were disturbed by many of the same features of the modern world as had been the Victorians (and the Romantics for that matter). On the most basic level they lamented the ugliness of

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Modernism

contemporary urbanization and industrialism, and they suggested the need for some form of a return to a more natural lifestyle. They had no love, as Ford put it, for “a nation electing to spend its life under the foul skies of great cities.” And they agreed with Yeats that “a perfect life” is in “a place where men plough and sow and reap, not a place where there are great wheels turning and great chimneys vomiting smoke” or where “whole districts [are] blackened with smoke like what they call in England their ‘Black Country’.” Lawrence also described the greatest urban center of England, London, as the “pompous, magnificent Capital of Commercialism.” As this indicates, the Modernists occasionally went on to criticize modern British economic theory and practice. Ford, for example, claimed that underlying many of the problems of the modern world was the idea of economic laissez-faire of the “over-utilitarian, didactic, and distinctly militant” English philistines of the Manchester School that was so widely accepted by capitalists. Yeats attributed most contemporary ills to the fact that “the world surrendered to the competition of merchants and to the vulgarity that has been founded upon it.” In fact, in his  play, The Countess Cathleen, Yeats has the devil’s servants, who tempt the starving Irish people to sell their souls for money, take the form of merchants. Finally, the early Modernists were concerned with the social consequences of these trends. Ford and Yeats especially were disturbed by the creation of a new form of poverty. Yeats, quoting Shelley, complained of the fact that “ ‘[t]he rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer’.” Ford, on the other hand, was influenced by Ruskin and Morris, to go further and criticize not just poverty, but also the lack of enjoyment and fulfillment, and the intellectual and psychological consequences, of modern industrial work: In the minds of these workers, work itself becomes an endless monotony; there is no call at all made upon the special craftsman’s intellect that is in all the human race . . . It crushes out the individuality, and thus leisure time ceases to be a season of rest, of simple lying still and doing nothing.

The five Modernists, therefore, did find much to admire in social criticism, despite their belief in the importance of an art of emotion and imagination. But because of the simplistic dichotomy they proposed between Victorian and Romantic values, they found this to be a contradiction that had to be resolved. Rather than follow Ruskin’s suggestion that a thinker must make a choice between “Economic” and “Esthetic” man and concentrate on one side first, the Modernists

The initial aesthetic dilemma

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tried to develop a third position that was a combination of the two. As Yeats put it, he wished to be “a Shelley and a Dickens in the one body.” All five writers hoped to create an art that was of the highest aesthetic standards, but not so remote as to separate the artist from the general public or art from daily life. They wanted all people to be able to appreciate, understand, and be influenced by the best work of artistic genius. Yeats hoped that poets could “have all the subtlety of Shelley, and yet use no image unknown to the common people, and speak no thought that was not a deduction from the common thought.” Pound also regretted not living in a period in which writers “could allude to things that all understood” and “write what will be understood of ‘the many’ and lauded of ‘the few’.” And Ford hoped that the arts could become integrated enough in the everyday world so that the creative artist “will be honored by emperors, and ploughmen will desire to take his hand,” and so that poetry “will become once more human nature’s daily food, instead of being, as it is now, the sweet liqueur at the end of a banquet, or chocolates in the little crystal bowls that nestle neglected among green simlax upon the tablecloth.” The Modernists were far less successful than most Victorian poets in resolving this debate at this point in their careers. Their artistic work remained vague, sentimental, elaborate, and disengaged. Their political and social theorizing lacked specific content or careful analysis. This failure to effect a successful compromise ultimately led them to continue to fall back on escapism. For example, despite Yeats’s theories and his efforts to make political comment in his early work or to write with a degree of simplicity, he was only able to do so successfully in plays such as The Countess Cathleen () and The King’s Threshold (). Most of his poems at the turn of the century, on the other hand, still were written in what Richard Ellmann has described as an “ornate style” in which “no word has any explicit meaning.” As a result, vagueness and detachment remain their key features. This is clearly apparent in the first stanza of Yeats’s poem “The Poet Pleads with the Elemental Powers” from his  collection, The Wind Among the Reeds: The Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows Have pulled the Immortal Rose; And though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept, The Polar Dragon slept, His heavy rings uncoiled from glimmering deep to deep: When will he wake from sleep?

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Modernism

Pound employed a similar style. Many of his poems until at least , as T.H. Jackson remarks, were “marked by a kind of naive aestheticism: a tendency to depend on the bizarrerie of the opalescent word, precious aural patterns, quasi-Symbolist images of vague import, and the atmospheric effects, of images of flame, ‘saphirs,’ and symbolical winds.” For example, Pound’s poem “Occidit” from his  collection Personae is as follows: Autumnal breaks the flame upon the sun-set herds. The sheep on Gilead as tawn hair gleam Neath Mithra’s dower and his slow departing, While in the sky a thousand fleece of gold Bear, each his tribute, to the waning god. Hung on the rafters of the effulgent west, Their tufted splendour shields his decadence, As in our southern lands brave tapestries Are hung king-greeting from the ponticells And drag the pageant from the earth to air, Wherein the storied figures live again, Wind-molden back unto their life’s erst guise, All tremulous beneath the many-fingered breath That Aufidus doth take to house his soul.

The vagueness and ornateness of much of Pound’s work at this period may have been related to his “inability to envisage poetry as anything other than dream.” Or, as he himself put it, it might have been a reflection of his “dream-wracked heart,” which did not wish the “bloodred spears-men of the dawn’s array” to drive his “dust-clad knights of dream away.” In “defiance” of realists, Pound declared that his “moated soul shall dream in your despite.” Lawrence and Hulme were the only Modernists of the five who were able to make their work more simple, concrete and realistic, and reflective of their own experiences by . For example, the first stanza of Lawrence’s “Wakened” from his series, “Night Songs,” published in Ford’s English Review in , exhibits a degree of simplicity and realism: Is that the moon At the window, so big and red? No one in the room – no one near the bed? Listen, her shoon Palpitating down the stair! – Or a beat of wings at the window there?

The initial aesthetic dilemma

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Hulme’s poem “Autumn” () reads in its entirety as follows: A touch of cold in the Autumn night – I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer. I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children.

However, despite these breakthroughs, Lawrence’s and Hulme’s work often remained romantic and imprecise. For example, one of Lawrence’s first poems, written in , was reminiscent of Pound and Yeats. In “Guelder Rose” Lawrence’s description of a rose bush, with its “Chaplets of cream and distant green,” turns into a sort of dream as they “impress” him “like the thought-drenched eyes/ Of some Pre-Raphaelite mystic queen/ Who haunts me with her lies.” Hulme too was attracted to dream-worlds, even if he could write of them in a more simple and concrete style. In  he wrote how Over a large table, smooth, he leaned in ecstasies, In a dream. He had been to woods, and talked and walked with trees Had left the world And brought back round globes and stone images Of gems, colours, hard and definite. With these he played in a dream, On the smooth table.

The impression that results from their creative work, once again, is that the Modernists struggled unsuccessfully early in their careers to find a middle ground between aestheticism and social comment, or to engage the real world and change it through the immense power of art. What they really wanted to do was to escape – to another, different, and more interesting world. This also can be seen in their other interests, especially in their early political commitments. Although Yeats, Ford, Hulme, and Lawrence all claimed to have been socialists initially, they were not so in any orthodox sense. In fact, Lawrence and Hulme said little about the details of their beliefs, and Yeats’s and Ford’s socialism was strangely lacking in any comment about the material world. Yeats and Ford made it clear that their socialism was directly influenced by William Morris. This was undoubtedly because Morris, more than other socialists, was concerned with the role of art and morality in

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Modernism

an ideal society. According to one commentator, Morris’s rejection of industrialization and desire to recreate a medieval-style rural way of life, in which all people cooperated in creating beautiful objects for daily use, reflected a more general wish “to simplify life, to make it more rewarding, to make it more beautiful, to make it more just, to make the joy of it available to more and more people.” In his early years, he hoped to do all this, not by means of economic theories or practical politics, but through the immense power of art. This emphasis on aesthetic and moral ideals rather than on economic or political details appealed especially to the young Modernists. Ford later recalled that he “never could understand anything at all about the economic conditions of the Ideal State” and Yeats admitted that he “did not read economics.” And both questioned whether Morris “troubled to understand books of economics” either. But Yeats admired Morris in spite of, or perhaps because of, this. Yeats liked Morris because he believed that Morris “found it enough to hold up, as it were, life as it is to-day beside his visions, and to show how faded its colours were and how sapless it was.” It was this aspect of Morris’s work that encouraged Yeats to become a socialist, but this was about the extent of Yeats’s socialism. In fact, Yeats’s ideal state was best presented perhaps by John Eglinton, whom Yeats praised for so beautifully describing “the youth of States when ‘the young men exercise in the fields, the old men sit in council, and at sunset the daughters leap down the street to the dance’.” Ford’s socialism was similar. In  he recalled how “during that splendid youth of the world in the ’eighties and ’nineties the words ‘the Social Revolution’ were for ever on our lips.” However, this “ultimate revolution . . . our beloved Social one” had little to do with economics. As Ford remembered it, it was an aesthetic revolution “of large women, curtain serge, wheat-sheaves and . . . dream babies.” Ford himself even tried to live this new socialism for a number of years by adopting the “simple life” of small farmer and artist in the country. Again his recollection of this experience was mainly of its aesthetic quality, for example, the fact that he, his wife, and friends “all dressed more or less mediaevally . . . [and] were drinking, I think, mead out of cups made of bullock’s horns.” He admitted later that this was simply escapism. Even more than socialism, Ford’s politics were informed by a sentimental anarchism; Ford wanted to be free of all government, not actively change existing political structures. His political views probably were represented most accurately by his fairy story, The Queen Who Flew (). In this tale, the beautiful young queen escapes from the evil barons,

The initial aesthetic dilemma

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renounces her kingdom, and lives happily ever after with her ploughmanlove in “the land of the Happy Folk” in which everyone is content because there is no government at all. This is hardly the stuff to make the world return “the civic crown” from “reasoners and merchants” to poets. And if this is the type of social content the Modernists wished to add to their poetry as comment on the problems of the world, it could do little to make their work more concrete and less escapist. There is, however, one example of an early Modernist with a more serious commitment to, and theory about, politics. This was Yeats, who was involved with Irish nationalism. However, even in this instance Yeats was not prevented from trying to escape, or withdraw as much as possible, from the reality of the contemporary world. In the late s Yeats was active enough in Irish nationalism to help organize protests against Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and a celebration of the centenary of the Irish nationalist, Wolfe Tone, who committed suicide in prison after his arrest for his participation in the violent rebellion of . Yeats may even have joined the secret and revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the turn of the twentieth century, however, Yeats largely gave up an active participation in political movements. Nationalism for Yeats became almost exclusively aesthetic. Rather than practical politics, Yeats concentrated on the cultural elements of nationalism, which he had been exploring since the s and which were crucial in the development of what became known as the Irish Cultural Revival. He focused his efforts on the study of ancient Irish poetry and mythology, fairy- and folktales, on the work of nineteenthcentury Irish nationalist writers, and on the effort to revive a national art in the present day. To the latter end Yeats founded Irish literary societies in Dublin and London and included Irish subjects in his creative writing. Yeats soon had formulated a well-developed theory of the importance of cultural nationalism in effecting real change. This theory complemented his views on art in general. According to Yeats, a focus on Irish art and culture was crucial because it could evoke emotions, such as “love of the Unseen Life and love of country” as well as highlight differences with the English. A great culture, therefore, was much more powerful and would have more widespread results than a political movement that relied on rhetoric and reason. Yeats believed that while politics could affect only two or three thousand people, a cultural revival could move the entire population of the country and make the nation strong enough to finally gain independence. In fact, in  Yeats even claimed

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Modernism

that the new literary movement “in ten or in fifteen years or in twenty years . . . will be strong enough to shake governments.” In hindsight we know that Yeats was right. The leaders of the Easter Rising of  were influenced by the Cultural Revival enough to organize a political action that shook the British government seriously. But the effect of this Cultural Revival was different for Yeats. A focus on aesthetic or cultural concerns simply served to increase the remoteness of his work. He had hoped that the inclusion of Irish themes would make his work more concrete and understandable to the general public, and help him avoid writing of make-believe lands or subjective emotions. But in the end this was not the case. In fact, Dorothy Hoare has argued convincingly that the use of “Irish matter only served to turn Yeats’s mind more in the direction of unreality,” to the “coloured land of dreams.” According to Richard Ellmann, one of Yeats’s classic Irish poems, “The Wanderings of Oisin” (), was little different from his non-Irish work: “the poem is Irish in name and to some extent in scenery, otherwise Pre-Raphaelite in style but Symbolist in method.” Perhaps the vagueness of Yeats’s Irish work was a result of his theory of cultural nationalism. He did not have to provide any details about how Ireland would regain independence from England because the goal of a national art was to evoke nationalist emotions, not provide accurate facts. Thus the beauty, spirituality, and mystery of some undefinable remote Irish world were preferable to any reality. That this did not bother Yeats at the time is clear from his rhetorical question: “Is it not the impracticable dreamer that conquers the world? It is not the impracticable dreamers who take the world up out of its course and turn it from one way to another?” In fact, all five of the Modernists at the beginning of their careers were “impracticable” dreamers, despite their desire to be more. This is perhaps why they were unable to reach any sort of compromise between the “market-place” and aesthetic beauty in their literary work or political commitments. What they were left with, as a result, were dream-worlds and the “immaterial pleasure houses” of their own creation.

 

“A more dream-heavy hour”: medievalist and progressive beginnings

the loveliness That has long faded from the world; The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled In shadowy pools, when armies fled; The love-tales wrought with silken thread By dreaming ladies upon cloth That has made fat the murderous moth; The roses that of old time were Woven by ladies in their hair, The dew-cold lilies ladies bore Through many a sacred corridor Where such grey clouds of incense rose That only God’s eyes did not close: For that pale breast and lingering hand Come from a more dream-heavy land, A more dream-heavy hour than this. W.B. Yeats, “He Remembers Forgotten Beauty,” from The Wind Among the Reeds,

In  there was one particular dream-world that William Butler Yeats regretted he could never see. “That indolent, demonstrative Merry England” when “men still wept when they were moved, still dressed themselves in joyous colours, and spoke with many gestures” was gone for ever. Two years earlier Ford Madox Ford also expressed a desire to be “back in a century – some beatific century that one cannot name – when nothing was hurried, nothing was passion-worn, nothing strove; when everyone was at peace with his neighbors, when the greatest of crimes was that of sitting up late o’nights.” An older way of life, be it joyous and colorful, or slow and peaceful appealed to all five Modernists early in their careers. One reason the Modernists liked this past was because they understood that images from it might be useful in creating a romantic literature 

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Modernism

of great beauty, as Yeats had done in the poem above. But the past also could serve other purposes. It might help provide a solution to the problem that such an art often slips into vagueness and withdrawal. As Yeats himself suggested, “all ancient vision was definite and precise.” If poets used symbols taken from history and ancient mythologies they might be able to create a less abstract and evasive art. In addition, if its content was derived from a common national heritage of the past, art could appeal to a large audience and unify society by providing a subject matter that all people, rich and poor, would understand and enjoy. Finally, like Sympathy, history also could evoke emotions and thus could enable an author to make serious social and political comment on the contemporary world and encourage reform without resorting to reason or didacticism. By carefully depicting a preferable age in the past, poets could provoke the readers’ emotional horror about the present and indirectly spur them on to demand change. In other words, as Pound put it, they could “Make-strong old dreams, lest this our world lose heart.” Or, according to Yeats, if artists used the past and “the magical beryls” of “old legends for their subject” they could exhibit “life, not as it is, but as the heroic part of us . . . hopes it may become.” Thus, an artist who employed imagination and emotion to construct a beautiful past automatically would help improve the present. In a poem of  Ford seemed to suggest just this: (To purge our minds of haste, pass from an age outworn And travel to the depths of tranquil times long past; Sinking as sinks a stone through waters of a tarn, Be fitting things and meet: And, look you, on our walls hang treasures from such depths.)

History, thus, seemed able to provide quite a number of treasures for creative writers and the world as a whole. As Pound put it about his medieval studies, “I, who have laboured long in the tombs,/ Am come back therefore with riches.”  Yet Ford’s stanza, as well as his and Yeats’s descriptions of life in a preferable age of the past included at the start of this chapter, should make us hesitate before applauding the Modernists’ use of history at this point in their careers. Ford “cannot name” the “beatific century” to which he wants to return, and there is no specific indication in his poem

Medievalist and progressive beginnings

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of what treasures are to be gained by the poet. Moreover, the reason for gathering past treasures does not appear to be to effect change, but to provide a release from cares and an escape to the imagined tranquillity of an imprecise, remote world. In short, the early Modernists still, as Pound admitted, looked at the world with “dream-shot eyes.” These examples of the Modernists’ attitudes toward history illustrate a general trend. Their desire for romance, passion, and beauty encouraged the five Modernists, early in their careers, to construct an idealized fantasy world of the past. In consequence, they made little serious comment on the problems of contemporary life by incorporating history into their art. As Yeats later recalled: “I thought that only beautiful things should be painted, and that only ancient things and the stuff of dreams were beautiful.” It was an unreal, dream-like beauty that was most important about the past to the Modernists. Pound even went so far as to describe himself as “the prince of dreams,/ Lord of Shalott,/ And many other things long since forgot.” Thus, despite any hope for its practical effect, history first was used by the five Modernists primarily as an aesthetic tool to add atmospheric effect. The lack of specific political, social, or economic content in their early depictions or discussions of the past, moreover, simply contributed to the escapist quality of their work. In addition, what content their views of history did contain, again, was not much different from that of their predecessors. Not only might the Modernists be called the “last Romantics,” all of them, but Hulme, also were perhaps the last representatives of the nineteenth-century medievalism as practiced by Victorian “Greats” like Scott, Carlyle, Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and William Morris. As literary critic, Alice Chandler, has pointed out, medievalism in the nineteenth century usually took one of two forms. While it often “forced man to imagine a totally different society instead of merely acquiescing in his own,” frequently it was merely decorative and an “attempt to bring color back in the world,” or to relive imagined “pageantry and drama.” It should come as no surprise that early in their careers the Modernists fell into the latter camp. In fact, they were hardly more realistic or less vaguely decorative than the most sentimental of nineteenth-century medievalists. But not only was their use of the past derivative of their predecessors, so too were the Modernists’ first comments on the pattern and direction of history. Despite any critique they might have made of Victorian progressive determinism, in the beginning of their careers all the Modernists, except Pound, had implicit theories of a universal pattern of history that

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Modernism

echoed one or more of the varieties of progress common in the nineteenth century. The only significant difference between their theories of history and those of their predecessors was that the Modernists were primarily concerned with the aesthetic, spiritual, or moral developments of history in which artists and people of intuition, emotion, and genius were the prime movers. Unlike thinkers such as Carlyle or Ruskin, they had very little to say about any form of material change, be it political, economic, or social. The results were theories of history that were one-sided, as well as unoriginal and escapist. As had so many other artists and thinkers, Yeats, Ford, Pound, and Lawrence originally looked to the past to discover a “golden age” that contained a way of life that was near perfect. While all appeared to have found this age, initially they were quite vague about when it had existed. Ford, for example, admired what he described as an “undefined, semimythical period” when kings and queens, beautiful young princesses, and magical animals existed. Lawrence mentioned only Gothic architecture, Vikings, and knights as features of the period he admired. Yeats was even more imprecise. Most often he simply referred to his golden age as existing in “ancient” times, “the primeval world,” or “old” times when the “way of our fathers” was still in existence. Despite a vagueness about historical dating, it was clear that all four Modernists were referring to the Middle Ages. This became more apparent when authors such as Ford, Pound, and Yeats considered their favorite ages more carefully. In  Pound admitted that “some temperamental sympathy” made him prefer “the Twelfth Century, or, more exactly, that century whose center is the year .” In  Yeats thought that “the eleventh and . . . twelfth centuries . . . were . . . the centuries of perfect learning,” while two years earlier Ford claimed the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were the ages that were “the most sustainedly glorious in the history of the nation.” While they might have become more specific about dating, those Modernists who commented on the medieval “golden age” provided few details about the political, social, or economic structure of the time. Despite their interest in socialism, anarchism, or nationalism, they did not enter the nineteenth-century medievalist debates, in which Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris took part, about whether the Middle Ages were communal or hierarchic, aristocratic or democratic, or what were the ways in which these features might shed light on contemporary problems. The Middle Ages as depicted by Yeats, for example, alternated between “Merry England” and ancient Ireland. However, the relationship

Medievalist and progressive beginnings

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between the two countries, and the unique features of either country’s culture, society, or political structure at the time were not made clear. In fact, Yeats’s references to ancient Irish life are almost identical to England under feudalism as described by nineteenth-century medievalists such as the English Pre-Raphaelites. Ford would later criticize the PreRaphaelites for the fact that “in the gloom and amidst the horror they sang on bravely of Launcelot and Guinevere, Merlin and Vivien, ballads of staffs and scrips, of music and moonlight.” If Irish heroes such as Oisin, Niamh, Cuchulain, the Druids, and the Sidhe are put in the place of Launcelot, Guinevere, Merlin, and Vivien, there is little to distinguish Yeats’s work from that of the most decorative of English medievalists. Ford’s use of the Middle Ages was a bit more specific than that of Yeats, but was equally lacking in content. His most extensive examination of history at the time was in his book, The Cinque Ports (), which is a description of five southern English ports, particularly at their height in the Middle Ages. Ford was quite careful about the dating of the wars and decrees of medieval kings and politicians, but he did not seriously examine the political structures they created or changed. Moreover, like Yeats, Ford did not discuss the economy or society, and although he mentioned feudalism briefly he did not describe its workings or consider it seriously as an economic, political, or social system. The same was true of Pound who wrote an entire book about medieval literature, The Spirit of Romance. Aside from mentioning the names of a few historical figures and key battles, however, Pound failed to make any comments on the material background to the period. Rather than describing the political, social, or economic details of the Middle Ages, the Modernists were interested in its aesthetic, cultural, and moral qualities. One feature that Ford in particular admired was the simplicity of the period. It lacked the complexity and disharmony of modern life. Ford took pleasure, for example, in “old towns where the sunlight lies along mellowed walls” because they reminded him of “lazy ages, of leisured times before us, of things gone, things that can never be recalled.” A “new Golden Age” would come about, Ford hoped, when “the fascination of the slow, creaking waggons of the past will grow overpowering, the claims of the simple will be rediscovered.” The five Modernists also liked the beauty and drama of the Middle Ages. It was a time when ceremony, fine manners, and a joy in living were intimate parts of daily life. For Pound, the “pageantry” of “the feudal ceremony” and “perfect chivalric pose[s],” and for Yeats, the “courtly

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Modernism

and saintly ideals of ” the Middle Ages was far superior to the “practical ideals” of the modern age. While the excitement of “the May-day riot of colour and bright laughter of a medieval township” appealed to Ford, it was more peaceful, pastoral scenes, such as “dancing countrypeople . . . cow-herds, resting after the day’s work, and . . . [a] quiet mill-race” that Yeats preferred. According to Yeats, in the Middle Ages one could find “Merry England with its glad Latin heart . . . [and] a time when men in every land found poetry and imagination in one another’s company and in the day’s labour.” Echoing Ruskin and Morris, the Modernists also admired the excellence of the medieval architecture and craftsmanship that made towns, buildings, and objects of daily life beautiful, and reflected a more profound religious view of the universe. Ford believed that “the sight of the good craftsmanship” as produced “in the old days before our times” was “absolutely essential to the cure of certain mental maladies fostered by the spirit of [his own] age” and was “essential for the preservation of the old faith” that was responsible for it. For Pound the use of “line, composition and design” rather than mass in Gothic architecture was supremely important because with this technique the builders “raised . . . the temple of the spirit” rather than “the temple of the body.” This religious spirit was essential to the greatness of all medieval art, according to the early Modernists. Lawrence, for example, admired “the ideal, noble emotion which many medieval artists expressed so perfectly in their Madonnas,” and the “aspiring,” “spiritual,” “noble,” and “divine” qualities of Gothic architecture. According to Pound it was because medieval poets were in touch with “the superhuman,” “the things of the spirit” that their poetry was great; for them a poem was “a key to the deeper understanding of nature and the beauty of the world and of the spirit.” But above all the Middle Ages was attractive to the Modernists because of its “romance.” Pound found this in what he considered to be the best medieval literature, which was a type of art that was mysterious and magical and that did not portray the details of actual events that might have occurred. This was a literature in which “one expects and demands, haunted fountains, bewitched castles, ships that move unguided to their appropriate havens.” Lawrence also loved “the old world of romance” in which one could imagine oneself in a place “where you might find a Viking asleep, where there are outlaws and knights in armour and ladies who exist solely to be succoured.” It should be evident that the line between romance and escapism was fine. Pound crossed that line

Medievalist and progressive beginnings

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in  when, in searching for “link[s] with the middle ages,” he visited Spain. What he discovered to his pleasure was “an age far from the realities of ‘the real world’,” “a dream Spain, just as real as Spain’s oldglory, and no more tainted with the appearance of modernity than a time-stained parchment psalter leaf.” Thus the Middle Ages for the Modernists was a beautiful but also exciting world of deep spiritual fulfillment to which they might escape the drab ugliness of the present day. Yet, although they agreed on these general characteristics of the Middle Ages, the young Modernists did differ somewhat on how they used this historical period in their creative writing. In  Ford described two different types of Pre-Raphaelite medievalism in a way that could apply to the medievalism of the four Modernists. According to Ford, between them Madox Brown and Rossetti invented a queer and quaint sort of mediaevalism that was realistic always as long as it could be picturesque. Morris, Swinburne, and Burne-Jones however invented the gorgeous glamour of mediaevalism.

Yeats’s work was akin to the second type. While Lawrence did not write anything specifically medievalist, he clearly admired art in this ‘gorgeous glamour’ vein. Ford and Pound, however, alternated between the two types of medievalism. For example, Yeats’s poem quoted at the opening of this chapter, “He Remembers Forgotton Beauty,” cannot be described as anything but ‘gorgeous’ with its kings wearing jewelled crowns, “love-tales wrought with silken threads,” and ladies walking through incense-filled, “sacred corridors” carrying “dew-cold lilies.” Yeats’s other poems of this period also were replete with kings and queens, music and moonlight, roses and lilies, harpstrings and battle-banners. The medievalist poetry Lawrence most liked was written in a similar style. In particular, Lawrence admired Rachel Annand Taylor, who in  he praised for being “mediaeval” and for belonging “to the company of Aucassin and Nicolette and to no other.” He even called her “first among the poets of today.” Lawrence mentioned approvingly the titles of some of her poems, which almost could have been written by Yeats, such as “The Queen,” “Arthurian Songs,” “The Knights at Kingstead,” “Rosa Mundi,” “Chant d’Amour,” “Love’s Fool to His Lady,” and “Reveries.” That the quality of these poems appears to have been less important to Lawrence than their “gorgeous glamour” can be seen in Taylor’s poem “The Queen,” which opens as follows:



Modernism The Queen sinned in a dream, Never a word she spoke; But throned in reverie supreme She sat amid her folk. And yet a rumour ran Through the Castle by the sea; The knights grew pale; the maidens ’gan To brood right rosily. Was it the purple dyes Dropped from the splendid wing Of Love-o’-Dreams in her sleeping eyes, That told the grim old King?

Like Lawrence, Pound and Yeats also very much admired the use of the medievalism in contemporary poetry. For example, Pound praised the work of Frederic Manning specifically because “he has caught much of the old Saxon vigor and some of that mediaeval glamour that lies as April dew upon the works of William Morris.” Yeats admired Lionel Johnson’s work, again for what Ford would call its medieval ‘gorgeousness’ and for its ability to help him escape from the present day. As he put it, Johnson “has made for himself a twilight world where all the colours are like the colours in the rainbow, that is cast by the moon, and all the people as far from modern tumults as the people upon fading and dropping tapestries. His delight is in ‘the courtesy of saints,’ ‘the courtesy of knights,’ ‘the courtesy of love,’ in ‘saints in golden vesture,’ in the ‘murmuring’ of ‘holy Latin immemorial,’ ‘in ‘black armour, falling lace, and altar lights at dawn’.” Pound’s own work reflected his literary interests. His early poetry resembled the medievalist ‘glamour’ of Yeats and Taylor. For example, the first stanza of “Canzon: Of Incense,” a poem Ford printed in his English Review in early , introduces many of the same characters who appeared in Yeats’s work: Thy gracious ways, O Lady of my heart, have O’er all my thought their golden glamour cast; As amber torch-flames, where strange men-at-arms Tread softly ’neath the damask shield of night, Rise from the flowing steel in part reflected, So on my mailed thought that with thee goeth, Though dark the way, a golden glamour falleth.

Medievalist and progressive beginnings

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Pound wrote many early poems filled, as Stuart McDougal remarks, with these sorts of “archaisms . . . and Pre-Raphaelite medievalisms.” However, Pound also wrote some poetry in a more realistic or, to use the Fordian term, ‘picturesque’ style. In this he was influenced by a poet all the Modernists would consider a Victorian “great figure,” Robert Browning. Poems such as “Cino,” “A Villonaud. Ballad of the Gibbet,” “Sestina: Altaforte,” and “Piere Vidal Old” told the life stories of medieval poets in a simpler, less profuse manner, and in a way that often emphasized manly strength and even glorified violence. For example, Pound’s “Marvoil,” about the troubadour Arnaut Marvoil begins: A poor clerk I, ‘Arnaut the less’ they call me, And because I have small mind to sit Day long, long day cooped on a stool A jumbling o’figures for Maitre Jacques Polin, I ha’taken to rambling the South here.

That Ford’s medievalism resembled Pound’s can be seen in two poems. The last stanza of his poem “The Cuckoo and the Gipsy” () is more realistic than “glamorous”: Would your May Days seem more fair Were we chals deep-read in books, Were the cuckoos cawing rooks, All the brakes cathedral closes Where the very sunlight dozes, Were the sounds all organ tone and book and bell and prayer?

However, the first two stanzas of Ford’s “Enough” () is quite reminiscent of a world depicted by Yeats: Long we’d sought for Avalon, Avalon the rest place; Long, long we’d laboured The oars – yea for years. Late, late one eventide Saw we o’er still waters Turrets rise and roof frets Golden in a glory, Heard for a heart-beat Women choirs and harpings Waft down the wave-ways.

Although a vague and sentimental medievalism is the most obvious characteristic of Yeats’s, Ford’s, Pound’s, and Lawrence’s earliest use of

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Modernism

the past, there is another quality of all the Modernists’ views of history that is important to note. While none of the five authors had developed a consistent speculative philosophy of history at this point in their career, there is some sense that they assumed the existence of a universal pattern of history. Despite any criticism of the modern world or desire to escape to a more beautiful past, implicit in the writings of four of the five Modernists under consideration is an optimism about the larger movement of history that is similar to most nineteenth-century thinkers. In other words, those authors who wrote about the overall course of history accepted assumptions of the importance of cumulative change over time and of some form of progress. This does not mean that all five Modernists had identical theories of progress. Rather, each adopted a different variety of progress that echoed nineteenth-century views. Yeats’s implicit pattern was of a Romantic spiral. Ford alternated between aesthetic decline and Whig political progress. Lawrence implied a vaguely religious, positive teleology. And Hulme openly agreed with Bergson’s spiritual evolution. However, as in the rest of their thought and work, the Modernists were quite vague about the pattern of history and were concerned more with aesthetic, psychological, and spiritual progress than with any change in politics or the economy. It is in his comments about the spiritual world that Yeats’s first sense of the pattern of history becomes most apparent. Yeats was interested in spiritualism from an early age and throughout his life. He was not alone; the turn of the twentieth century witnessed a widespread spiritual revival. In his autobiography he claimed that this interest, like that of so many others, began because the ideas of Mill, Huxley, and Spencer had “deprived” him “of the simple-minded religion of [his] childhood.” Yeats began looking for an alternative religious belief, and he found it in the late s and s in the Theosophical Society and his own organization he called the Order of the Golden Dawn. Spiritualism was not simply a hobby for Yeats. In  he wrote that “the mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.” Moreover, it was connected intimately with his plans for Ireland. Not only did Yeats hope for a regeneration of his country with the help of his Irish literature, he also wanted to found a new Irish mystery religion, similar to the Golden Dawn and Theosophy, but with its own particularly Irish temple, rituals, and symbols to contribute to the same goal. The spiritualist groups with which Yeats was originally involved all accepted the idea of progress. They believed that by purification and cultivation of the will and aided by secret knowledge, an individual could

Medievalist and progressive beginnings

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ascend by gradual steps, or through successive incarnations, to oneness with the divine. Moreover, having gained access to this superior supernatural world, they also could control nature and other human beings, perfect themselves, and even improve the world as a whole. The Theosophists believed in a “spiritual evolutionary scale” that “held out . . . the promise of unlimited evolution to a state of absolute spiritual perfection” for the race as well as for the individual, which would complement the physical evolution proposed by Darwin. Yeats translated these spiritual beliefs to the pattern of earthly history, with one change. He modified the pattern to make it less linear. In fact, Yeats’s view of history early in his career was very much like the spiral and “fortunate fall” of so many Romantic artists and thinkers. Because he thought that the modern world was aesthetically inferior to the past, Yeats could not accept the idea of strict progress. In  he declared that “it is one of our illusions . . . that life moves slowly and evenly towards some perfection.” Nevertheless, Yeats did not reject the idea of progress altogether. Rather, he believed that “progress is miracle, and it is sudden,” coming only after a period of decline. In  and  he thought that the world had been in a state of decline since “the first days” and was currently witnessing an age of crisis. He was confident, however, that the miracle of progress was about to occur and that a new golden age was on the horizon. This new age, according to Yeats, “may prolong its first inspiration without renouncing the complexity of ideas and emotions which is the inheritance of cultivated men.” And, in agreement with Blake, Yeats believed it would contain “the simplicity of the first ages, with knowledge of good and evil added to it.” This ultimate progress, moreover, would not be only physical or material; it would also be aesthetic and spiritual. Quoting Shelley, Yeats claimed that “ ‘there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement of the human species’.” Artists, of course, would be essential to the progress because it was they, as well as religious Irish peasants, who “had been granted by divine favour a vision of the unfallen world from which others are kept apart.” Thus Irish artists, who relied on traditional Irish subjects, would contribute to future perfection Finally, like many Romantics and Victorians, Yeats believed that when progress did occur in the future it would be final; the world would reach its “last autumn” and “men’s hearts and the weather . . . [would] grow gentle as time fades into eternity.” Thus, as a number of commentators have pointed out, Yeats’s first views of history were, as were those of many progressive thinkers, apocalyptic. He assumed that in the future evil would be expunged and history

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Modernism

would end. In short, Yeats postulated a “salvation from the cycles” and a “transcendence of all history.” In  Yeats made this clear when he wrote that “the children of the Fiend” will “have power until the end of time,/ When God shall fight with them a great pitched battle/ And hack them into pieces.” Or, as he put it two years earlier, God “at the end/ Shall pull apart the pale ribs of the moon/ And quench the stars in the ancestral night.” Ford’s earliest ideas about the pattern of history were less welldeveloped and less consistent than those of Yeats. But before  it is possible to discern two patterns implicit simultaneously in his writings. While Yeats combined, in one theory, his sense of decline with a hope for progress (through the belief in a spiral of initial decline but ultimate progress), Ford alternated between the two. As a result, Ford assigned decline and progress to different areas. Within the same work, it is possible to discern both the popular fin de si`ecle belief in the progressive aesthetic decline of Western civilization, and the common Victorian Whig view of the evolution of English political liberty and freedom. Ford’s work of , The Cinque Ports, is primarily the examination of the decline of those ports from their position of preeminence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – his golden age. They were once the most important parts of England commercially and militarily, but since had become negligible agricultural backwaters. Aside from dating this degeneration, however, Ford was not particularly interested in exploring the causes for the political or economic decline or speculating about what it meant for history as a whole. In the end, Ford attributed the material decay of the Cinque Ports purely to physical events beyond human control – the silting up of their harbors. Rather than concentrating on material matters, Ford was more interested in aesthetic and spiritual concerns. It was here that he made his most extensive comments on the progressive decline of the modern world. Ford consistently complained that “in these days of hurry and forgetfulness” the artistic impulse has either been lost or has been consciously destroyed. Buildings are made “to suit the ideals of the modern housemaid” and “the years we live in, [are] years sad for the craftsman, sadder for the artist, sadder still for the upholder of any faith whatsoever.” Ford also criticized modern legislation, not for its political consequences, but for contributing to the decline in the aesthetic quality of English life. According to Ford, the contemporary reforms of local political systems and electoral districts had given the vote to ugly modern cities as opposed to old beautiful towns, and by being “aridly rational,” these reforms had

Medievalist and progressive beginnings

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done away with all the old “whimsy,” pageantry, and beauty of local political customs and institutions. Nevertheless, Ford realized that reforms were necessary to put a stop to corruption and nepotism in local government. And despite his professed socialism, when Ford discussed politics in The Cinque Ports, he consistently praised any event that heralded the development of the English system. It is here that a Whig view of history becomes apparent. Ford’s greatest praise for any “Cinque Port” town was reserved for when it “did what it could to forward the evolution of the nation’s constitution, the nation’s freedom.” And his greatest criticism of any institution (for example the Church) was when its members became “mere drags on the progress of the kingdom towards its constitutional destinies.” Implicit in his discussion was the belief that Englishmen, from the very beginning of their history with the Britons, were naturally freedom loving. Periodically, other nations had tried to impose foreign restrictions on that freedom. Ford implied that this happened first with the Romans (“that gross horde of materialists”), then with the Normans who brought French feudalism and an absolute monarchy. However, Ford believed that the British people consistently fought against these impositions on their freedom. The “Cinque Port” towns, in particular, first freed themselves from the restrictions of feudalism (although exactly which restrictions Ford did not make clear). When this freedom enabled them to grow stronger and more powerful they continued the fight against royal encroachments. Finally, they helped other, and future, “citizens . . . play their part in the making of history” by insisting on the reaffirmation of the democratic rights contained in the Magna Carta. Accordingly, Ford claimed that the “Cinque Port” towns were important because they represented a stage in the people’s fight to uphold and expand “their self-granted privileges.” In doing so, they gradually increased, institutionalized, and extended that freedom until the present exemplary constitution and democracy was established. Unfortunately the silting up of the harbors prevented them from going further, and the evolution of the constitution moved into other hands. Thus, while Ford posited aesthetic decline, he did accept the idea of political and social advance. Both views, of linear decay or linear improvement, accept the reality of historical progress. Hulme also believed in evolution, but again it was not political. Rather, his view of progress was more inclusive. It was taken almost entirely from Bergson’s theory of “creative evolution.” Hulme admitted that he

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Modernism

was attracted to Bergson because his theories provided an alternative to the determinism and mechanism of evolutionary theories in which humankind has no free will and does not play a part in its own destiny because it responds mechanically to its environment. Bergson’s theory, on the other hand, posited continuous evolutionary advances that were contingent on the active involvement of human beings. Evolution, for Bergson, was the result of the combination of an original “vital impetus” (“´elan vital”) of energy and creativity, and the free, collective will of all living beings. This type of evolution did not assume that beings only react mechanically to external circumstances. Rather, evolution was a result of humans’ constant will and energy to create. It thus allowed for continuous change, growth, and advance in many different directions for which humans were freely responsible. Because of his faith in Bergson’s form of evolution, Hulme considered retrogressive and wrong-headed any theory that advocated permanence rather than change, or that attempted to devise means to ensure stability or to deny “creative” evolution. In  Hulme believed that any thinker who admired “rest,” “order and organisation,” or “fixity” necessarily was allied on the side of scientific determinism against Bergsonism because the flux is not one of the things that are “fixed entities.” In particular, Hulme disliked Plato’s “Theory of Ideas,” “in which the ideas of love and beauty are eternal,” because this theory was an expression of Plato’s belief that “Stability is more noble than Change.” Hulme thought exactly the opposite. In his “Lecture on Modern Poetry,” probably written in , Hulme made his most impassioned statement about his belief in the reality of change: The ancients were perfectly aware of the fluidity of the world and of its impermanence; there was the Greek theory that the whole world was flux. But while they recognized it, they feared it and endeavoured to evade it, to construct things of permanence which would stand fast in this universal flux which frightened them . . . . We see it in a thousand different forms. Materially in the pyramids, spiritually in the dogmas of religion and in the hypostatized ideas of Plato. Living in a dynamic world they wished to create a static fixity where their souls might rest.

Both deterministic evolutionary laws and cyclic views of history were rejected by Hulme and Bergson. According to Hulme, under the theory of creative evolution the future was absolutely “undetermined.” Therefore, not only could there be no prediction of the future even with a knowledge of all the laws which govern things, but the future would

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never repeat the past. It was a “becoming never the same, never repeating itself, but always producing novelty, continually ripening and creating.” Going beyond Bergson, Hulme also thought that the history of philosophy supported the idea of evolution. He accepted the idea that intellect evolves and that there had been “a philosophic evolution.” This evolution has been one from the incorrect views of Plato and Socrates, whose universal “ideas” posited permanence and stability in opposition to evolution and change, through the thought of Kant and Hegel, to the almost correct views of Nietzsche, and ultimately to its near perfection in Bergson’s ideas of flux and intuition. Hulme believed that art and society evolve as well. He assumed unquestioningly that there have been stages “in the evolution of society” such as the nomadic and city stages. And he believed that verse forms develop and change as thought becomes more and more complex. A new art form is created when thought has developed to such a complexity that the old form can no longer accommodate it. Thus art evolves at the same pace as thought. Like Ford, therefore, Hulme assumed the existence of linear progress. But, despite the fact that he mentioned a few philosophers and historical periods, he added even less specific content to his discussion of the pattern of history. Hulme believed in the value of change and evolution, but it is unclear that he had a concrete sense of how this worked in the earthly past. Lawrence’s ideas of the pattern of history were even more vague than Hulme’s, but again he also believed in progress. In particular, Lawrence thought that there was an underlying purpose to history that moves it forward: “there must be some great purposeful impulses impelling through everything to move it and work it to an end.” And he was “earnestly certain of the wonder of this eternal procession.” His “poor little philosophy” held that “the great procession is marching, on the whole, in the right direction.” Lawrence thought that all people are a part of this process and help it on: “we are for ever trying to unite ourselves with the whole universe, to carry out some ultimate purpose – evolution, we call one phase of the carrying out.” In addition, Lawrence identified this “great purpose,” and the submission to it, with religion. In fact his theory was quite similar to the “immanent teleology” that, as M.H. Abrams points out, was an essential part of Romantic views of history. This sort of teleology was a form of “natural supernaturalism” that was “very like the theological concept of the universal but hidden working of divine Providence, transferred from an eternal personal God as planner and controller to the immanent

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Modernism

operation” of the laws of history. It was also a theodicy in the sense that it held “that if life is to be worth living there cannot be a blank unreason or mere contingency at the heart of things; there must be meaning (in the sense of a good and intelligible purpose) in the occurrence of both physical and moral evils.” Lawrence certainly did believe that there was a mysterious but powerful force “which keeps the menagerie moving onward to better places, while the animals snap and rattle by the way.” And he believed that the goal of this force, and the understanding of it, was part of the “religious interest,” even a proof of the viability of religion. It was with religious sympathy, according to Lawrence, that one could discover in the “history (origin) and destiny of mankind . . . [and in] the laws of nature . . . something of intelligibility and consistent purpose working through the whole natural world and human consciousness.” Early in their careers, therefore, the Modernists were searching through the “more dream-heavy hours” of the past to find “a long-faded loveliness” that was missing from the present day. History was a place to escape and a preferable alternative to the modern age. However, despite their avowed distaste for the period in which they lived, the pattern of history that most of the Modernists assumed existed indicates that they still had a fundamental optimism about the world. Even if there had been a decline, the story of history was of ultimate progress and of improvement to come in the future. But these views and uses of the past were based primarily on aesthetic thinking, rather than on a serious consideration of politics, society, or economics. When the Modernists were eventually forced to look more carefully at the “market-place” of the contemporary world, both their sense of optimism and their views of history would change significantly.

 

“Pedantry and hysteria”: contemporary political problems

In our age it is impossible to create, as I had dreamed, an heroic and passionate conception of life worthy of the study of men elsewhere and at other times . . . There was a time when I thought of a noble body for all eyes, a soul for subtle understandings, and, to unite these two, Eleusinian rites. Instead, the people cry out for stones and vapour, pedantry and hysteria, rhetoric and sentiment. W.B. Yeats, “Journal,” .

On January ,  Yeats was proud to present, in the Abbey Theatre he had worked so hard to found three years earlier, a play by an author he regarded as the greatest living Irish playwright – the Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge. It was to be the culmination of his dream that a great literature of beauty could save the Irish nation. The Irish public, however, did not unanimously share Yeats’s views of the role of this sort of art. The play was interrupted by so much booing and hissing from one section of the audience that the actors could not be heard. On the last night of the performance, five hundred police had to be called in. Street riots followed and continued for a week. Clearly something serious had gone wrong with Yeats’s aesthetic theory. As the quote above indicates, he was well aware of this fact. Problems such as he faced at the Abbey Theatre forced Yeats to consider what was happening in the modern world. This, in turn, led him to think more carefully about the distasteful “market-place” of domestic and international politics. The same was true of the other four Modernists. By  all five had begun to explore the political, social, and economic features of the world in which they lived. What they found disturbed them deeply. Different aspects of the period caused concern for different authors, and some of them, especially Ford, Yeats, and Hulme were more involved in political, social, and economic speculation than others. But regardless of the extent to which they wrote about the contemporary world, all five Modernists shared a common response to current developments. 

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Modernism

There were many possible causes for concern in turn-of-the-century Britain. It could be argued that a general feature of the period was the erosion of the mid-Victorian confidence in the strength, stability, and possible future of Britain and her empire. This began with the agricultural and business depression of the late s. While there is some controversy among historians about the extent and impact of this depression, or whether it existed at all, at the time it was perceived as problematic for a number of reasons. First, it contributed to a marked decline in income for those who made their money from agriculture. This was especially the case for the landed aristocracy. It may, in fact, have been the beginning of the end for many aristocrats, as they had to sell estates in pieces or in entirety, and were forced increasingly to marry into the wealthy middle class. The number of millionaires who were landowners fell from  percent in  to  percent in . While industry recovered from this depression by the late s, businessmen and the public in general had been faced with a great shock. The hope for unending, cumulative economic growth that began with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century commercial, agricultural, and industrial revolutions, and that seemed guaranteed by the British government’s acceptance of the theory of Free Trade in the nineteenth century, was shattered. The reality of business cycles had to be accepted. Moreover, it was increasingly apparent that Britain soon no longer would be the world’s richest nation. A century of outstanding economic superiority over all other nations, which was the result of a large head start in industrialization, was over. Other major powers such as France, and especially Germany and the United States, had now gone through the process of industrialization quickly and far more efficiently than the British. British machines, technology, specializations, and business organization were outdated. The fear that British business might be drowned in a flood of goods “made in Germany” was not farfetched. German industry was modern and efficient. As a result, Germany’s share of world manufacturing surpassed that of Britain around . This is not to say that the British were on the verge of bankruptcy. Increasingly, invisible exports made up for the deficit of manufactured goods. But for the first time the signs were ominous for the future of the British economy. Not only were fears of a flood of German goods far from a wild fantasy, neither was the premise of the spate of books predicting a German invasion. With unification and industrialization Germany was proving to be a new and frightening world power. The Prussian defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war of  was just the beginning. Germans

Contemporary political problems

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were predatory. Just as they imitated British industrialization, they also imitated British imperialism, and were determined to have their “place in the sun” and acquire an overseas empire. Other European countries could not be left out and the “New Imperialism” of the s and s followed. Whatever was left of the world that could be taken was now divided among the Western powers. Once again, Britain had lost her position as unquestioned world leader with the only significant empire to speak of. Moreover, some people feared, not only the results of competition from other empires, but whether the British empire might continue to exist at all in the near future. In the s there was a real possibility that the Liberal government under Gladstone might give the Irish Home Rule, and begin the slippery slope to the dissolution of the entire empire. It also was unclear whether Britain could defend her overseas possessions if challenged by the natives. That this might not be a possibility was apparent when a handful of backward farmers, in a part of South Africa that the British wished to acquire, almost defeated the forces of the British empire in the Boer War that began in . Again, Britain was not in hopeless shape. She still had the largest empire in the world and a highly effective military. Or so she thought, until reports began to appear about the quality of British recruits; almost  percent of British men were deemed physically unfit for army service. More reports appeared. In fact, this was an age unleashing “a torrent” of reports, statistics, and analyses – most of them containing bad news. The number of insane people had risen by over  percent in the last decade of the nineteenth century; almost one third of the population of the largest cities in the world’s supposedly most wealthy and powerful country existed in a state of abject poverty; every “normal” worker with a family of three children “passed through a period of probably ten years when he and his family would be underfed.” Moreover, the unfortunates of the reports, and the working classes in general, no longer seemed quite as passive as they had in the past. They began to participate increasingly in trade unions. Trade union membership not only grew almost four times from  to , but it became much more active in demanding concessions. More frightening even were the efforts of socialists to influence these hordes of hungry workers. Numbers of different groups of socialists, from revolutionary Marxists to evolutionary Fabians, planned to overturn the economic and social system completely. They wished to take wealth from those who had it and give it to those who did not, while organizing everyone into an efficient, identical collectivity. Things did not grow more promising when

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Modernism

trade unionists and socialists combined to attempt to infiltrate the political system with the creation, between  and , of an entirely new political party just for the working classes, the Labour Party. Moreover, there was a real possibility that the workers could vote this party into power, as they were the vast majority of the country amounting to almost  percent of the population, and all but the most unfortunate of them had been granted the right to vote by the  Reform Act – the so-called “Mud Cabin” act. The ability of the aristocracy to halt these movements seemed unlikely because of their diminishing wealth and status. Some socialists, especially the Fabians, took a different tack from the Labour Party. They tried to “permeate” middle-class political parties. They seemed to have succeeded when the Liberal Party won the  election and began to implement a program of social welfare that appeared to many people to resemble socialism. Why did the Liberal Party try to make such radical changes to the existing order? It could be for the same reason that the Conservative Party insisted on imperial expansion and military preparedness – not necessarily to help the country, but to appeal to the newly enfranchised working class. The middle classes increasingly seemed desperate to gain the support of the vast majority of the population, before it took matters into its own hands. Concessions from the Liberals to make the workers’ lives better, or an appeal to patriotism by the Conservatives might work equally well to gain working-class votes. Moreover, it did look like the workers might be on the move. After the turn of the century the number of strikes increased dramatically, as did their violence. And other groups were also causing or threatening violence in the years before the First World War. Women even were demanding to join the working class and be allowed to vote. Moreover, these Suffragettes were not adverse to breaking windows, assaulting members of parliament and committing arson to attain their goal. The Irish, as well, looked as if they might explode. With Home Rule a real possibility under the new Liberal government after , Irish Protestants who did not wish to live in a country ruled by the majority who were Catholics began to arm themselves to resist. Catholic nationalists armed themselves to support the British legislation. Civil war seemed imminent. There was, therefore, quite a bit about which an observer could be concerned in pre-war Britain. Of course, the history of the period could be written quite differently, as there also was much that some people found positive, exciting, and a cause of great optimism. The five Modernists, when they began to consider some of these developments, however, were not optimistic. They viewed the period in which they lived as one of crisis.

Contemporary political problems

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Perhaps more important, they eventually agreed on one underlying cause of all contemporary problems – the consequences of nearly complete democracy. Like J.S. Mill fifty years previously, they were deeply afraid of the “tyranny of the majority.” Democracy seemed to have led to the triumph of incompetent, stupid, cruel, uncaring people both among the public and professional politicians. Simultaneously the great minds and characters of artists, intellectuals, and aristocrats were ignored. The resulting decline in spiritual and aesthetic values made matters worse. In responding to these problems all five Modernists arrived at similar solutions – they adopted radical conservative political positions. As a consequence of their experiences of politics and society in this period, therefore, they set out on a road that would lead some to become interested in fascism in the s and s. With new political views, as well as a more serious consideration of the world around them, it is not surprising that their aesthetic ideas, creative writing, and views of history also began to change. Ford Madox Ford was the first of the five Modernists to experience serious disillusionment about contemporary political trends. What disturbed him initially were developments within the British Empire. Ford became interested in issues of imperialism in the late s. This is not surprising as this was the height of the “New Imperialism.” It was also a period when imperial expansion was actively supported by many people for a number of different reasons. On the most superficial level exciting tales of British adventures in exotic locations were entertaining enough to sell books and magazines. Stories of colonial activities among distant natives also appealed to a sense of British superiority, as they often emphasized the contribution of missionaries and humanitarians to the “White Man’s Burden” of spreading the benefits of British civilization to primitive peoples. The empire appeared to make financial sense as well. In a period of economic competition in Europe a large empire supposedly could ensure new sources of cheap raw materials, expand markets for industrial goods, and provide opportunities for the emigration of superfluous British workers. Finally, imperial success appealed to the patriotism of workers and gentlemen alike. This in turn, could gain a majority of votes at elections for whichever political party supported expansion, and could guarantee that such a party remained in a position of power in government. For these and a few other reasons, imperialism was attractive to a wide variety of politicians. By  the Conservative Party, which was then in office, actively supported expansion of the empire by placing an aggressive imperialist in a position of power for the first time with the



Modernism

appointment of Joseph Chamberlain to the Colonial Office. Liberals also believed in the value of imperialism. The party split in  and a Liberal Unionist Party was created to oppose Gladstone’s plan for Home Rule for Ireland because it appeared to be the first step in the dismemberment of the empire. Of those who remained in the Liberal Party, a growing number of important younger members supported what became known as “Liberal Imperialism.” Even a majority of the socialist Fabian Society eventually came out in favor of imperialism. The fact that imperialist sentiment crossed all political boundaries was especially highlighted in  when the Fabians organized the “Coefficient” club including members from all political parties. Ford Madox Ford’s first comments on the British Empire in  shared this imperial enthusiasm. In his book The Cinque Ports, Ford charted how throughout her history England not only witnessed the progressive growth of freedom, but also was faced by repeated economic and military threats that she overcame despite all odds. This was largely because of her empire and naval capacity. Ford was proud of the fact that “England . . . invariably did rule the waves . . . when she had the intention of ruling them” and that Englishmen from the earliest times had “worked unrealising at building up an empire, mother of empires.” He assumed that this would and should continue. Within a couple of years, however, Ford had become very disturbed by trends in British imperialism. This began a process of deepening his interest in politics. Ford attributed his change of opinion largely to the Boer war of –, which he later described as “the end of everything” and “a chasm separating the new world from the old.” Ford recalled that “since that period the whole tone of England appears to me to have entirely changed, principles have died out of politics, even as the spirit of artistry has died out amongst the practitioners of the arts.” Ford’s extreme reaction to the Boer War was not developed in isolation. He was probably influenced by a new friendship with Joseph Conrad whom he met in . Conrad helped expand Ford’s knowledge and understanding of the deeper workings of imperialism. In the years  through , Ford and Conrad spent a great deal of time together helping each other on their work and collaborating on a number of books. During that time Conrad frequently related to Ford experiences of his past life, including the stories of his trip to the Belgian Congo which formed the basis of the novel he was in the process of writing in  published as Heart of Darkness. From Conrad, Ford learned of the reality of imperialist treatment of African natives by Europeans. According to Ford, Conrad explained

Contemporary political problems

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his entire story to him before it was published and “from time to time, particularly whilst writing ‘Heart of Darkness,’ Conrad would declaim passionately about the gloomy imbecility and cruelty of the Belgians in the Congo Free State.” With this knowledge, the events of the Boer War could be interpreted in a light that was hardly favorable to the British imperial endeavor. On the surface the British involvement in the independent South African state of Transvaal in the s could be seen as part of the larger project of the “White Man’s Burden” to spread the benefits of British democracy and liberty throughout the world. Although the Transvaal was governed by Boers, the descendants of the original Dutch settlers of the seventeenth century, in the late nineteenth century immigration had led non-Boer Europeans, known as Uitlanders, to grow two or three times as numerous as the Boers. These Uitlanders paid nine-tenths of the taxes, but were not allowed to participate in the government. Because many Uitlanders were British, they frequently asked the British government to use its influence to remedy this political injustice and bring them the benefits of democracy. This was the ostensible reason for the British involvement. However, beneath this proclaimed crusade the issues were much more complex and less altruistic. In  gold was discovered in the Rand, and the Transvaal republic seemed about to become one of the richest parts of the world. Many Uitlanders profited, even becoming the infamous Rand millionaires. With two British colonies right next door, Cape Colony and Natal, it was in the British interests, both metropolitan and peripheral, to gain control over the Boer Transvaal and unify it with the other colonies to create one large British-dominated state. It was also a strategic interest to prevent other Europeans, such as the Germans, from trying the same. With this in mind the British government went to war against the Boers. Ford viewed the British involvement in the Transvaal with abhorrence. As he recalled in : “I suppose I was as hot a pro-Boer as any one well could be.” This was for a number of reasons. On the one hand, he was very much upset by the stupidity of the public who supported imperialism. Ford was horrified by the hysteria and “mob violence” of the jingoistic imperialist patriots, and by “the ferocities and barbarities of the English crowds during the Boer War” who cheered British victories, but showed little understanding of the realities of the situation which involved a large country attempting to deprive a small independent nation of its liberty. Moreover, no one showed any concern for the vast majority of the population of South Africa. What were disregarded by British, Boers,

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Modernism

and Uitlanders alike were the African natives who were exploited for their labor by all sides. Ford, having learnt the reality of imperialism from Conrad, was upset by the treatment of Africans. As he later recalled, he “made one or two speeches in the interests neither of the Boers nor of Englishmen, but of the African natives. To them it seemed to me – and it still seems so – the African continent belongs.” But above all, Ford feared the politicians who knew the distasteful truth of imperialism, but lied about it and presented all imperial endeavors in a favorable light in order to cater to the gullible public and to serve their own selfish and power-hungry needs. This simply exacerbated the cruelty and injustice of empire. Ford’s reactions to imperialism were expressed most immediately in his novel of , The Inheritors, which was written with the help of Conrad and finished in mid-March . The Inheritors, according to Ford, is “a political work, rather allegorically backing Mr. Balfour in the then Government; the villain was to be Joseph Chamberlain who had made the war. The sub-villain was to be Leopold II, King of the Belgians.” Thus in one novel, speculation on the Boer War, contemporary British politics, and Conrad’s experiences in the Belgian Congo were united. Ford argued that all of these things were indications of a disturbing new trend characteristic of the new century. The novel is the story of how a “new order” had begun to replace the “old order.” The “old order” includes people like Arthur Balfour, the leader of the Conservative Party. The “new order” is the work of new imperialist politicians like Joseph Chamberlain (with the aid of a set of science-fiction type villains from the “Fourth Dimension”) who are practical, cynical, and immoral. They are “cold, with no scruples, clear-sighted and admirably courageous” and care more for efficiency than for suffering, emotion, or beauty. They wish, above all, to destroy the “old order’s” decency, honesty, heroism, self-sacrifice, and altruism, in order to run the world like a mechanical, soulless machine. The members of the “new order” come up with a plan for how to do this. All they must do is to reveal to the world that the humanitarian motives of the “old order” when dealing with the empire, masked true evil and “that all the traditional ideals of honour, glory, conscience, had been committed to the upholding of a gigantic and atrocious fraud.” For example, the villains will show that the “System for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions” which the Balfour character unwittingly had supported and which proclaims to be bringing the benefits of civilization to Greenland (“the model state, in which washed and broadclothed Esquimaux would live, side by side, regenerated lives, enfranchised equals

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of choicely selected younger sons of whatever occidental race”) had really only brought “flogged, butchered, miserable natives . . . famines . . . vices, diseases, and . . . crimes.” Having proved this, English people would no longer believe in the old politicians and their morality, and would willingly accept a new efficient, cold, heartless, and artless world. The years immediately after the publication of The Inheritors simply served to support the ideas Ford had expressed in the novel. The neardefeat of the forces of the British empire against a handful of Boer farmers, and news of the inefficiency and complacency with which the war had been carried out, in addition to reports of atrocities against the Boer people and the deaths of women and children in British concentration camps, only could have confirmed Ford’s belief that the principles of the old order had died. This seemed supported in the next few years when “efficiency” in government began to be demanded by former imperialists on both the right and the left as well as by the general public. These were the sorts of people calling for and writing the reports, and gathering the statistics, that so alarmed many contemporaries. Even the Fabian socialists were deeply involved in this new “social efficiency” movement. What all hoped for was that, with more information and better organization (especially by the government), innumerable problems could be solved and Britain again could be a healthy, effective, and militarily well-prepared nation. Ford increasingly began to associate the desire for efficiency with the collectivism of socialism and especially of the Fabians. For the next seven years Ford continued to protest against the war, the jingoism of the philistine British public, the growing sterility of efficient collectivism, and the lack of old and noble principles in modern life. In  Ford presented his most disturbing picture of a possible future Fabian state in which people have numbers rather than names, wear masks so that there will be no discrimination because of looks, and have portable homes for sanitation and efficiency. From his consideration of the British Empire Ford, therefore, was moved to examine domestic politics. Both imperial and domestic concerns helped make his thinking become more concrete. He was now able to pinpoint a specific cause for all of British problems. A government by and for a people who are stupid and selfish eliminated higher ideals, supported cold, cruel behavior, and encouraged the destruction of beauty, individualism, and diversity. Yeats’s reaction to developments in Irish politics was similar to Ford’s in many ways. This is not surprising because, as part of the British empire, Ireland faced problems in the late nineteenth century that were related

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Modernism

to those of imperialism in general. As has been mentioned, Yeats was intimately involved with Irish nationalist hopes for greater independence from Britain since the beginning of his career. Originally nationalism filled him with much satisfaction and optimism. As with Ford’s initial acceptance of imperialism, this may have been due to the nature of the Irish political situation at the time. In the late s, when Yeats began writing, there was a real possibility that Ireland would be granted a form of independence when Charles Stewart Parnell on the Irish side, and W.E. Gladstone on the English side, worked together to try to gain support for a Home Rule Bill in . This likelihood of achieving independence encouraged Yeats and many others to complement the political movement with a cultural one, in which a great Irish art and the remembrance of the Irish past would help a newly independent nation succeed. The situation changed significantly in the s. The split in the Liberal Party over the issue of devolution, the scandal about Parnell’s personal life followed by his death in , the retirement of Gladstone in , and the victory of the Conservative Unionist Party in , on top of the upsurge in imperial enthusiasm, all meant that any hope for a peaceful political solution to the Irish problem was very remote in the s. These developments did not discourage Yeats. According to the historian, Robert Kee, “the period that followed the death of Parnell . . . is often described as a political vacuum.” This may have been disturbing to Irish politicians who had hoped for a parliamentary solution to Irish problems, but it did not stop other nationalists. In fact, this was still a time of great excitement for Irish artists and intellectuals and was the height of the Celtic Revival. Yeats accepted this situation with enthusiasm. As he would later write, “Ireland was to be like soft wax for years to come.” The new-found freedom to mold a novel type of nationalism was very exciting to Yeats as an artist. It was in this period that Yeats developed his theory of cultural nationalism. He believed that the time had finally arrived in Ireland when the previous divisiveness and ineffectiveness of purely political parties could be overcome by an intellectual and artistic movement. This movement would simultaneously sponsor and promote the creation of an Irish art of the highest caliber and would unify the country by giving the Irish a pride in themselves and in the heroic past they all shared. Moreover, this superior culture would enable the Irish to compete with England on its own terms and would ultimately return the golden age to Ireland by making her a nation not only politically independent but

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also respected by all European countries for her spiritual, ethical, and intellectual superiority. With this in mind, in  and  Yeats founded Irish Literary Societies in London and Dublin. And in , with the help of Lady Gregory, whom he had met a few years earlier, he founded the Irish National Theatre Society, which was permanently housed in the Abbey Theatre in . Yeats’s optimism that artists who produced and promoted an art of the highest quality by international standards could contribute to Irish independence and respect was soon to be shattered. It was destroyed primarily because of the controversies that surrounded the Irish National Theatre, which was Yeats’s main hope for a free and proud Ireland. At first, it seemed that the theater might be a popular success. Many plays were well attended by enthusiastic audiences. However, from the start public controversies arose over the theater and its plays. The first production in , of Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, elicited a pamphlet denouncing the play on religious grounds and in subsequent productions the play was hissed by the audience. This was only the beginning. Increasingly in newspapers and journals Irish nationalists savagely criticized the Abbey plays for political as well as religious reasons. In accordance with Yeats’s aesthetic theories and goal of promoting art of the highest quality, the plays that were produced did not always have overt political messages, and occasionally they had what the nationalists believed were the wrong messages. Originally Yeats took this criticism calmly. He was encouraged by the vitality of the controversy and believed that the Irish poor were still enthusiastic. But as the attacks from the press continued, Yeats grew more and more bitter. This was especially true when in , after renewed controversies, it became clear to Yeats that only simplistic, propagandistic plays sentimentally idealizing the Irish people would be greeted with general enthusiasm. When Yeats produced plays other than these he was accused of not being a true nationalist. One result of this controversy was that two of Yeats’s friends who had initially inspired his nationalism, Maude Gonne and Douglas Hyde, withdrew from the Society. All of this simply supported Yeats’s increasing disillusionment with the quarrels he witnessed among various Irish political groups since before the turn of the century. The problems came to a head in  with the controversy over Synge’s Playboy of the Western World described at the opening of this chapter. As was mentioned, Yeats regarded Synge as one of the greatest living playwrights, but his plays were very controversial. This was especially

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true of Playboy. Many of the nationalists and the general public, as well, were deeply offended by what they thought was a disparagement of the Irish character. By  they were willing to cause a great deal of trouble to protest against the play and Yeats’s theater in general. This situation was very disturbing to Yeats. As he admitted at the time the societies he founded had disappointed him and “became quickly or slowly everything I despised.” In actuality, Yeats had misjudged the nature of the new non-parliamentary nationalism. Despite the popularity of the Cultural Revival, nationalists were not unified in their goals and plans, and they were far less interested in an ideal of Irish culture than they were in immediate practical independence. Moreover, the most vocal nationalists, and the ones who were to gain the most support, thought that Yeats’s program of a superior culture was a compromise with England and English values. It did not help that Yeats wrote in English, spent much time living in London, and looked to the English art world for approval. More important to nationalists than aesthetically sound art in English terms was an art that glorified all things Irish in order to inspire a confidence that would make the people act against England. They were not interested in a vague future unity produced by a superior European art, but in immediate victory. Art, therefore, in their eyes had to be subordinated to didacticism and propaganda for the cause. It soon became clear that the majority of the Irish people preferred this simple message to the distant goals of Yeats. With the victory of the Liberal Party in  there was once again a strong possibility of achieving Home Rule. The passage of the Third Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons in  made it almost certain that some form of independence for Ireland would become law by . This, however, did not make the situation better. In fact, it made it worse. Faced with the hostility of the majority of Irish Protestants who opposed Home Rule, Catholic nationalists grew more extreme and violent. Suspicion of Yeats also increased because, in addition to being a problematic nationalist, he was a Protestant by birth. By this point Yeats’s ideal of cultural nationalism not only was irrelevant, it also was suspect. When the threat of civil war followed the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, the creation of a unified Irish culture for which Yeats hoped seemed very remote. Because of these problems and the reaction to his theory of art, Yeats grew to believe that not only the nationalists, but also the Irish people as a whole, had betrayed his dreams for Ireland. They were more concerned with their different, selfish, divisive immediate desires for political change

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than with Yeats’s higher and broader goals for the future of all of Ireland in the long term. As Yeats commented in , the Irish had “become so absorbed in the politics of the hour . . . that we have forgotten the more eternal and ideal elements of nationality.” At this point Yeats finally admitted that “Ireland’s great moment had passed.” And, in , he poignantly expressed his disillusionment in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that the “stones and vapour, pedantry and hysteria, rhetoric and sentiment” of the majority of the Irish people had destroyed his noble vision of heroism and spiritual fulfillment in an independent and unified Ireland. This feeling was expressed quite clearly the next year in his play The Green Helmet, the setting of which was “intentionally violent and startling.” The play’s action centers on the growing jealousy and arguments among three great Irish heroes and old companions when a supernatural “spirit” offers a prize of a Green Helmet to the bravest of the three. The dissention soon spreads to their families and followers and threatens to destroy them all. In the end it is Cuchulain who wins the helmet when, despite being betrayed by all the others, he transcends his bitterness and even offers his life to save theirs – perhaps as Yeats himself wished to do for the Irish nationalists of his own day. Once again, as with Ford, it was the majority of the people, who had taken charge of governments and public opinion, that was the greatest disappointment for Yeats. Their selfish, shortsighted attitudes were preventing the world from improving. Politicians and the political parties that might have provided more guidance did little to help. In fact, they made matters worse by catering to the public in order to gain power, which was the only way they could advance themselves within a mass democracy. In  T.E. Hulme also began to express serious dissatisfaction with democracy, because of the nature of the public to which it catered. His initial political comments were made in response, not to imperial problems as with Ford and Yeats, but to a domestic constitutional crisis that further extended the democratic nature of British politics. These developments were also of concern to Ford and led to an expansion of his political thinking as well. Again, the fact that Ford and Hulme were interested in domestic politics between  and  is not surprising considering the events of the time. It was precisely in those years that a decisive questioning, and ultimate modification, of the English constitution occurred, centered around the “House of Lords crisis.” This constitutional crisis originated with the success of the Liberal Party in the  election that ended nearly ten years of Conservative

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rule. Change was inevitable when a landslide victory put into power a number of younger members with innovative ideas. Their new political theory, called the “New Liberalism,” promised justice and government help for those who could not help themselves. Although these ideas may have been inspired by socialism, they also were intended to deflect the working class from other, more extreme forms of the same political doctrine. In  one of these young Liberals, David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced into parliament what was commonly referred to as the “People’s Budget.” The taxes in this Budget seemed to many people to be a socialist attempt to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. This opinion certainly was held by the great majority of the members of the House of Lords who rejected the Budget after it had been passed by the House of Commons. Although technically the House of Lords had the right to veto any legislation, it had not stopped a financial bill for almost fifty years, and there was a tacit assumption that it would not do so. The Lords’ veto of the Budget in , therefore, seemed an act of great audacity. After somewhat disappointing Liberal victories in the elections of January and December , which were fought on the issues of whether the House of Lords should have the right to reject budgets and whether it should be reformed so that it could not do so, the Budget finally was passed and the Liberal Party sponsored a plan to alter the powers of the House of Lords. In February  they introduced the Parliament Bill, which would modify the veto of the House of Lords so that it could not apply to money bills at all, and only delay other legislation for two years – in effect removing the veto altogether. The Bill passed the House of Commons on May ,  and then went to the House of Lords. The Conservative Party in the Commons and the majority of the Lords were firmly opposed to the Bill. But in July  the Liberal Party revealed that they had received the King’s consent to create hundreds of Liberal peers, if necessary, to flood the House of Lords and force acceptance of the Bill if the existing Lords refused to pass it. On learning this, the Conservative leadership abandoned its opposition to the Bill. There was, however, still a great deal of uncertainty about what the Lords would do. Some peers claimed they would accept defeat and a reduction of their powers, while others declared they would abstain from voting on the issue. But there was a vocal movement of “diehards” lead by Lord Willoughby de Broke who were determined to fight the Parliament Bill to the bitter end, despite the threat of the creation of new peers. Up to the last minute it was uncertain what would be the outcome. Finally, on August ,  the Bill was passed by a very

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small majority, with well over half the Lords abstaining. The power of the House of Lords, the last bastion of aristocracy, thus was effectively abolished. Although these events may be interpreted in many different ways, one thing is clear – they effected a fundamental change in British politics. With the removal of the absolute veto power of the House of Lords all remaining obstacles to full democracy were gone in Britain. Nothing could stop “the people,” the majority of whom were in the working and lower middle classes, from using their right to vote to change Britain in their own interests. And nothing could prevent politicians of all parties from putting their efforts into opportunistically catering to this majority. In short, Mill’s “tyranny of the majority” was now a reality. Considering the Modernists’ opinions of the intelligence of the British public in general, it is hardly surprising that this development provoked quite a reaction among some of them. T.E. Hulme certainly had a strong opinion about these events. He had shown little concern with politics early in his career and was much more interested in philosophy and aesthetic theory. Moreover, in , the year before the Parliament Bill, Hulme seemed to have run out of things to say even about philosophy and art, and published nothing of substance. But after that year of near silence, suddenly and with no warning, Hulme started writing numerous articles about political theory. Politics now consumed him so much that he gave up writing poetry altogether. Hulme was very much concerned with the contemporary constitutional crisis. He made it clear that he believed any change in the House of Lords would be disastrous; it would signal the final introduction of “pure,” “unrestrained” democracy in Britain and the destruction of whatever was still valuable in British society. Hulme was opposed to pure democracy because he was convinced that it could not possibly work. As he commented in , “historically, it has always been a failure, for it has never succeeded in maintaining for any length of time a healthy social order.” The reason for this had to do with human nature itself. Hulme accepted a Hobbesean view that humans were fundamentally flawed: Man is by his very nature essentially limited and incapable of anything extraordinary. He is incapable of attaining any kind of perfection, because . . . he encloses within him certain antinomies. There is a war of instincts inside him, and it is part of his permanent characteristics that this must always be so.

Because of this nature, to let the majority of people free to do as they wished and make the decisions they desired without any restraint or

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control would be disastrous. This had been avoided in the past specifically because the aristocracy in the House of Lords had acted as a force independent of, and superior to, the masses of voters. Its veto power made the House of Lords a check on the elected governments that otherwise would cater to the majority’s desires. It was, therefore, the last of “the traditional restraints, the hierarchy, that makes social life possible and healthy.” Because of this, Hulme argued that it should be preserved in all its power. Of course, the House of Lords was not preserved in its powers and almost complete democracy was soon a fact in Britain. This simply encouraged Hulme to continue his political speculations and studies. The House of Lords crisis also provoked a reaction in Ford Madox Ford. Ford like Hulme agreed with the idea that “any tampering with the present Second Chamber would be exceedingly dangerous. Its abolition I should regard as absolutely calamitous.” But Ford’s main response was not only to express his fear of democracy, but also to criticize more severely all political parties. Ford began to discuss domestic, rather than imperial, politics about the time of the House of Lords veto of the “People’s Budget.” Before this time Ford viewed the moderates in the Conservative Party under Balfour as representatives of the political ideas of altruism and idealism that he admired, and the extremists on the right and the left – the imperialist wing of the conservatives under Chamberlain and the Fabian socialists – as representatives of the new trend he detested. His dislike of extremism may have led Ford to support another middle-of-the-road position and to join the Liberal Club in . But he was not satisfied with that party either and he resigned in . Between April  and February , as editor of the English Review, Ford wrote a monthly editorial titled “The Critical Attitude.” The majority of these articles concerned contemporary politics and in them, rather than implicating one political group, Ford began to criticize all members of all the parties. He thought that the weakness, stupidity, opportunism, and greed of their members prevented all parties from dealing effectively and responsibly with the major problems of the day. The Conservative Party was so feeble that it was unable to rally reaction against the House of Lords crisis and break the small Liberal majority at the polls. The Liberals were no better; their actions towards the Suffragettes exhibited “the sheer stupidity of weight . . . discourtesy . . . indifference,” while Lloyd George’s Budget revealed “a timid brain” and a lack of courage and imagination. Moreover, neither party had any real

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principles: “The Conservatives of to-day are no more Tories than the Liberals are Whigs. They are the Opportunists ‘out’ just as the Liberals are the Opportunists ‘in’.” This was bound to have devastating results. One example of opportunism that particularly appalled Ford in April  was the current “panic-stricken fear of the German Empire” which he believed had been “carefully engineered by the two Front Benches in the House of Commons” in order “to force on, at as early a moment as possible, a war with Germany” and appeal to the sensation-loving lower-classes. Not only might this lead to the devastation of war, it also could result in lower-class revolution. More so than ever, Ford feared the consequences of the power and problems of the lower classes. He began to call them the “blackly hating proletariat” and “mob rulers,” and he warned that their emotionalism might lead to hysteria, chaos, or “class war.” Therefore, rather than effectively dealing with problems, according to Ford both parties had abandoned their principles and were acting irresponsibly for their own interests and without regard for the well-being of the country as a whole. As a result, on the one hand, they had become stupid and timid amateurs, taking part in “the English doctrine of muddling through in matters of State.” While on the other hand, they were greedy opportunists: “there is no talk at all of the old traditions or of the finer things . . . from both sides come perpetual cries of ‘Grab’.” Ford concluded that “with the two dominant parties sinking always to lower levels of appeal, there seems to remain no scintilla of hope for anything not purely materialistic in the concerns of the State.” Contemporary domestic politics, thus, added to Ford’s dissatisfaction with the developing British system. It increasingly appeared that a government without higher ideals was catering to an ignorant and violent population. As a result, politicians made serious mistakes on all issues. There seemed little possibility of improvement. The other two Modernists, Pound and Lawrence, did not express many political opinions in this period. Lawrence, however, was increasingly upset by what he thought was the majority of the British people. In , having left England for Germany with his future wife, Lawrence wrote letters to his friends at home in which he was vehement about how he “loath[ed] the idea of England” because of its “enervation,” “hopelessness,” “resignation,” “grubbiness and despair.” In July of that year, Lawrence expressed his feelings about his native country in a manner that was perhaps more brutal than any of the other authors:

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Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frog-spawn – the gibbers!

Although this tirade may have been prompted by reactions to his personal affairs rather than purely political considerations, it is an indication of an increased dissatisfaction above all with the direction in which modern England was heading. However, Lawrence said little about what caused this dissatisfaction. Pound also began to write explicitly about politics for the first time in  and he continued to do so throughout . Most of his initial thoughts about politics revolved around his hope for, and suggestions about how to effect, an American renaissance. Perhaps because he was American he did not despise the “mob” at first to the same extent as the other three. Pound disliked certain elements of the middle and lower classes (“the idle rich” and “the idle poor”), but admired “the animal vigour,” the energy and wealth of plutocrats, and he was particularly fond of the working classes whom he thought should be given more economic control. Nevertheless, Pound concurred with Ford, Hulme, and Yeats, and perhaps was influenced by them to question democracy. He did not necessarily believe that constitutional governments “founded on the theory . . . that all men are alike” and demanding “the agreement of an innumerable multitude of people” could guarantee freedom or could work. He thought that both the rich and the poor needed guidance and direction and that “weak minded mediocrity” must no longer be “thrust . . . into positions of prominence.” Thus, although Pound and Lawrence were not particularly concerned with politics at this period, they did have opinions that would make them open to the influence of the other, more politically minded, Modernists. Clearly they had a sense that some people in society were superior to others and that those people should direct or control the majority. This certainly was a good basis from which to develop radical conservative ideas. As historians has frequently pointed out, the period between the turn of the twentieth century and the First World War was one of disturbing changes and increased tension. The Modernists were aware of these features of the time in which they lived and were quick to pinpoint an underlying cause of the problems. The vast majority of the population which was now allowed to vote had fundamentally changed the political system, not only through their own stupidity, but also because politicians

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no longer restrained them and instead catered to them for their own opportunistic ends. This, of course, was related to the growing lack of interest in art. The public no more paid attention to the higher ideals of artists and intellectuals than they did to aristocrats and superior politicians. However, rather than simply be content to complain about these problems, all the Modernists who wrote about politics began to theorize about what would be a solution, and especially about what type of political and social system would be preferable to contemporary democracy. This led them back to the past once more. This time, however, they had far more content to add to their historical thinking. Moreover, they were able to use the past to support their political and social theories, rather than merely as a form of aesthetic escape. This, in turn, helped them to develop their creative writing. It also transformed their views of history.

 

“A certain discipline”: radical conservative solutions

The future condition of man, then, will always be one of struggle and limitation. The best results can only be got out of man as the result of a certain discipline which introduces order into this internal anarchy . . . Nothing is bad in itself except disorder; all that is put in order in a hierarchy is good. T.E. Hulme, “A Tory Philosophy,” April , .

In February of  Ford Madox Ford made an astonishing statement: “I find myself wondering whether if the Deity were really beneficent, He would not send us a slaughter, famine or a pestilence that would sweep away all [the] . . . purposeless populations.” He continued, “I should like to see legislation introduced which would press hard upon, which would exterminate, all the purely parasitic classes.” A similar sentiment was expressed by D.H. Lawrence in  when he concluded a tirade about the people of Britain with the comment: “God how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them slime.” It should be obvious that at least two of the five Modernists were extraordinarily disillusioned by the majority of the population among whom they lived. Although these are the two most extreme statements any made, they do illustrate a hostility common to all five authors. However, the Modernists did not just express their discontent. They also began to speculate on preferable political and social systems. This, in turn, drew them back to the past to find models with which to work. In doing so, they took a different approach than previously. Rather than simply sentimentalize over the past or use it as a place to escape, the Modernists began to look more critically at history, and attempted to discern from it precisely what had gone wrong with the modern world and what might be an alternative to it. The conclusion that all the Modernists came to by the beginning of  was that modern problems began when a way of life dominated by a superior aristocracy, who provided control and direction for the masses, and who respected great art, 

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ended. What replaced it was the chaos of a government and society that guaranteed freedom to the selfish and ignorant middle classes and “mob”. The world would be a better place, the Modernists concluded, if the values and structures of an aristocratic age of the past were returned. Of all the Modernists after  it was T.E. Hulme who wrote most consistently about politics and who outlined this belief most explicitly, although by  it was clear that all of the others were in fundamental agreement with him. Hulme did not develop his political theories on his own. He was very much influenced by a climate of radical conservatism that had emerged both in England and in France at the time. Hulme became aware of these ideas in  at the same time as the House of Lords crisis. The “radical” conservatives of this period were different from “traditional” conservatives. While the latter accepted the constitutional system and established order, which they wished to preserve by slowing down the process of change, radical conservatives disliked democracy and hoped not to stop, but to accelerate, change to institute entirely different, generally authoritarian governments and societies similar to ones that existed in the remote past. It was writers of this type, both in Britain and France, who first suggested to Hulme that an aristocratic alternative to democracy was possible and that it had existed and prospered in a pre-modern age. The English conservatives who inspired Hulme included two groups. One was a set of authors who were influenced by the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and who wrote for The New Age, a journal to which many of the Modernists also contributed. In fact, the most prominent English advocates, explicators, and translators of Nietzsche’s thought at the time were closely connected to The New Age. Another group of writers formed the basis of a journal for which Hulme and his friend and fellow-poet, Edward Storer, also wrote, The Commentator. This journal featured ideas very much like those of the conservatives forming the “radical right” and “diehards” of the House of Lords crisis. All of these writers shared similar political opinions. Although he exaggerated somewhat, Edward Storer was accurate in describing The Commentator as “the only paper in London which is avowedly antidemocratic and Conservative which expresses its opinion that in democracy we have the real evil of our time.” Storer himself, in a number of articles for the journal, argued for the need “to stem the evil-smelling tide of democracy which is destroying and vulgarising all the fine things of the world.” Similar opinions were expressed by The New Age Nietzscheans. They claimed that Nietzsche was a genius because he “saw the dragon

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of anarchy and dissolution lurking” behind democracy, and because he had no interest in equality or in allowing “the ‘greatest number’,” “the mob,” “parasites”, or “the dregs of society” to rule the country. Rather, Nietzsche was a “lover of order and tradition” and advocated the return of the manly disciple of an older aristocratic and hierarchic society. But even more than by English conservatives, Hulme was influenced by French thinkers. Hulme was introduced to French writers on politics through his early interest in the ideas of Henri Bergson. Soon Hulme was aware of the ideas of the philosopher, Jules de Gaultier, of Georges Sorel who was the leading advocate of syndicalism, and of the writers of the group known as Action Fran¸caise, such as Charles Maurras and Pierre Lasserre. These French thinkers shared many of the opinions of the English conservatives and many also were influenced by Nietzsche. All opposed democracy and wanted to return to a preferable system that existed in the past. In addition the Action Fran¸caise appeared to be effecting real change along these lines. By  it was a well-established, visible, and vocal organization with a daily paper, L’Action fran¸caise, two journals, an institute, and an action squad, the Camelots du Roi, which had been involved for three years in a highly visible campaign of demonstrations and violent intimidation against any person or movement opposed to their ideas. They also had won the open support of Georges Sorel and the syndicalist workers who accepted his call for a violent general strike to overthrow the government. Even the police at this date saw the Action Fran¸caise as a serious threat to the existing government. Influenced by all of these writers, but especially by Pierre Lasserre of the Action Fran¸caise, in March  Hulme announced his conversion to Toryism. In describing his new political views Hulme relied heavily on the Action Fran¸caise’s rejection of the “Romantic” ideas of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and adoption of the “Classic” tradition that had existed prior to it. According to Hulme, paraphrasing the Action Fran¸caise, the “Classic” tradition was better than the “Romantic” because it correctly realized the weakness of human nature and the fact that the majority need control and guidance that only an elite few are capable of providing. Hulme especially liked the Hobbesean view that “man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.” This was far wiser than the erroneous “Romantic” “conception of the infinite possibilities of man . . . imprisoned,” which leads to the very dangerous idea, particularly expressed by inferior thinkers such as Rousseau, “that anything that increases man’s

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freedom will be to his benefit.” In other words, according to Hulme the “Romantic” point of view was wrong because it did “not think that man is by nature bad, turned into something good by a certain order and discipline, but that, on the contrary, man is something rather wonderful, and that so far he has been prevented from exhibiting any wonderful qualities by these very restrictions of order and discipline that the classic praised.” Rather, as Hulme argued in the quote heading this chapter, because of the unchangeable flaws of their nature, “the best results” were the product of “a certain discipline” provided by an aristocratic elite. Hulme also agreed with the Action Fran¸caise that the political systems that best expressed these “Classic” truths were those that existed before the French Revolution, and especially in Capetian France. They were based on a hierarchy of rights and privileges, rather than equality and popular representation. These governments provided social order and peace, ensured a well-directed economy, instilled spiritual and moral values, and supported exceptional aesthetic achievement. It was when these types of political system and the principles upon which they were based were abandoned and a set of “Romantic” ideas that were “the exact opposite of this” were adopted, that the problems of the modern world began. Given their previous preferences and ideas it is not surprising that such reactionary views were attractive to the other Modernists as well. Their sense of artistic elitism and desire for spiritual fulfillment, and their disappointment with the hysterical public who could not understand their concerns, all were problems that could be solved by the system outlined by Hulme. Ford certainly agreed, and between  and  he moved toward a similar conservatism. In February  he explicitly declared himself “by temperament an obstinate, sentimental and oldfashioned Tory.” Ford expressed his distaste for “Protestantism and a democratic instrument,” and claimed that “democracy [is] the stuff to fill graveyards.” By  he announced that “parliamentary institutions are discredited . . . and democracy is on its deathbed” because of the overwhelming “discontent with existing modes of thought,” which is “almost uniformly reactionary.” By  Pound was also expressing a similar preference for an elitist and hierarchical political system. He remarked in late , that he preferred “the theory of the dominant cell, a slightly Nietzschean biology to any collectivist theories whatsoever.” He admired the theory of his new friend, Allen Upward, that “the Superior Man,” be he aristocrat, artist, or even religious figure, should control and direct all other people.

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This was in opposition to the “superstition . . . known as the Religion of Humanity” that inspired thinkers like Rousseau to support democracy and equality. Pound also shared Hulme’s negative view of human nature. He believed that because “humanity was unbearably stupid,” any theory that “tried to lead and persuade it; to save it from itself ” was wrong. More specifically, according to Pound “the great mass of mankind are mediocre, that is axiomatic, it is the definition of the word mediocre” and they have brought all of society down to their level by creating “a god in their own image and that god is Mediocrity.” Therefore, “ ‘the religion of Humanity’ ” “ ‘is not the worship of the best man nor of the best in man’ ” but “ ‘the worship of the middling man’.” It contributed to the “pestilent” ideas of Rousseau and all others who believe “that every man is created free and equal with a divine right to become an insignificant part of a social system.” As a result of all of this, Pound explicitly claimed in  that he believed that “a ‘government, of the people, by the people and for the people’ is the worst thing on the face of the earth.” The other Modernists who wrote about politics also agreed with Hulme about a political system preferable to modern egalitarian democracy. As “a sentimental Tory and a Roman Catholic,” Ford admired a much older system – “the old feudalism and the old union of Christendom beneath a spiritual headship” – and he hoped for the return of “Catholicism and the rule of the noble.” This would repair the damage done by the American Revolution, which “was a stupid digression from the broad course of history, an impasse leading to the obviousness of democracy and one that would never have come about had the Stuarts been – as they ought to have been upon the throne.” Ford concluded that “the feudal system . . . [is] the most satisfactory form whether of government or of commonwealth.” This indicates another reason radical conservatism also appealed to the Modernists. It supported their previous admiration for the Middle Ages. Pound, in fact, claimed in  that he had arrived at his political opinions by “a capricious study of mediaeval art and life.” Yeats made his political inclinations and continued interest in the Middle Ages clear in  when he wrote: If we would find a company of our own way of thinking, we must go backward to turreted walls, to Courts, to high rocky places, to little walled towns, to jesters like that jester of Charles V who made mirth out of his own death; to the Duke Guidobaldo in his sickness, or Duke Frederick in his strength, to all those who understood that life is not lived, if not lived for contemplation or excitement.

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He regretted that this older, aristocratic political and social “tradition had become degraded, or rather because a spurious copy had been accepted in its stead.” Throughout this period Yeats, Ford, and Pound continued to contemplate the Middle Ages, with two general results. They were able to provide more details to support the radical conservative political positions they were developing. And they were led to refine their historical thinking, especially of the medieval period. More specifically, they began to abandon the use of the Middle Ages for decoration, romance, and escapism. Their medievalism now much more resembled the less superficial, if still idealized, practices of nineteenth-century authors such as Cobbett, Carlyle, Southey, Digby, Ruskin, and Morris. Yeats, Ford, and Pound now looked more carefully at the political, economic, and social organizations of the Middle Ages and highlighted many of the same features as had these more serious medievalists. Occasionally these three Modernists could still be sentimental about the Middle Ages in an aesthetic and decorative way. This was particularly true of Yeats who called the period “Merry England,” and who described it as a time “when men still wept when they were moved, still dressed themselves in joyous colours, spoke with many gestures,” and had “beautiful haughty imagination and . . . manners, full of abandon and wilfulness.” Similarly, Ford agreed with the fifteenth-century Duke of Norfolk when he said that “it was merry in England” during the Middle Ages. Medieval England for Ford, thus, was a time of the “irresponsible enjoyment of life.” But for the first time Ford explicitly criticized romantic medievalism and advocated a more realistic consideration of the period. He now claimed that in writing about the past an author “must be very careful not to sentimentalise over the picturesque.” In one book review of  he even condemned an author’s representation of the Middle Ages because it “is no more mediaeval Europe than his Court of King Peter is at Yvetot or Brentford. It is a broad, sunlit, coloured, ruffled world of hills and roads tucked somewhere away in a plane, a Fourth Dimension” known only to the author. Pound concurred. The representation of the Middle Ages that he clearly favored was realistic rather than fanciful. In  Pound explicitly expressed an admiration for writers such as Dante and Browning who showed the medieval world “blind with its ignorance, its violence, and its filth.” According to one literary critic this marked an important shift in Pound’s work. Now “Provence, Tuscany, Villon’s Paris are real worlds to be presented for themselves,” used as a critical “mirror

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to hold up to Victorian England,” rather than as “dream landscapes, or soul-scapes, to evoke vague yearnings.” Thus, instead of inventing an entirely fantastical past, the three Modernists tried to pinpoint in detail why the medieval period was preferable to the present. In general, they agreed with Hulme and the other radical conservatives that medieval politics and society were better because they were not based on ideas of the goodness of humans, their equality, or the need to have freedom to flourish. Moreover, because there was no sizeable middle class, kings and aristocrats had the power to rule, control, and direct all others. The period was, as a result, a time of unity, strength, order, and beauty, in opposition to the weakness, divisions, and hostilities of the stupid and ugly modern world. The Middle Ages, thus, provided what Yeats has desired for some time: “ ‘Unity of Being’ in the face of modern chaos.” Underlying their acceptance of this view was the belief that the aristocrats who dominated medieval life were superior to other people. Ford was very much impressed by any person he met, such as Arthur Marwood and Joseph Conrad, who he thought were living examples of the aristocratic continuity with the past. In most of his novels between  and  Ford’s heroes and heroines were members of an ancient English aristocracy. It was Ford’s admiration for the aristocracy that led him to accept a hierarchical view of the universe: The world seems to me to divide itself into a very few individuals who have a certain originating power whether in the provinces of thought or of action; into a larger number but still a comparatively few who have not only a power of production but a delight in production; and into an immense proportion of entirely unnecessary people whose only function in the world would appear to be to become the stuff to fill graveyards.

Yeats also believed in the superiority and value of the aristocracy, especially for Ireland. He was led to this belief partially because of his reading of Nietzsche and partly because of his friendship with a living Irish aristocrat, Lady Gregory. She was the person who was instrumental in finding the money for the Abbey Theatre, and throughout the controversies over it she was continually supportive of Yeats – intellectually, emotionally, and monetarily. Lady Gregory, the aristocrat, showed Yeats only courtesy, manners, style, and generosity at precisely the same time as the Irish nationalists and Irish playgoers were acting particularly rude, vulgar, and disruptive in response to his ideal of cultural nationalism. It was this manner of acting, and the morality and values of aristocrats, that especially appealed both to Yeats and Ford, not just because it was

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more pleasant than the vulgar hysteria of the “mob”, but also because it provided goals and direction for the entire society. As Yeats commented in , modern problems began “because power has passed to men who lack the training which requires a certain amount of wealth to ensure continuity from generation to generation, and to free the mind in part from other tasks.” The middle class and the “mob,” in other words, “small shopkeepers . . . clerks . . . men who had risen above the traditions of the countryman, without learning those of cultivated life,” not only did not have the time and training, they did not possess the ability to provide values for society because they were petty, vulgar, and exhibited a horrifying “new ill-breeding.” The aristocracy, on the other hand, has courage, courtesy, charm, and style, either through their “high breeding” or by inheritance. These values were essential in enabling aristocrats to carry out their most important function, which was to provide superior goals for society and “to explain why the more difficult pleasure is the nobler pleasure.” As Yeats wrote in : No art can conquer the people alone – the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority. . . . We require a new statement of the moral doctrine, which shall be accepted by the average man, but which will at the same time be plainly beyond his power in practice . . . A true system of morals is obviously from the first a weapon in the hands of the most distinguished.

By  Pound also thought an aristocracy was necessary “to keep alight some spark of civilisation at the summit of things” and set “some model of life to the rabble and to ages to come.” But it was Ford who explained more clearly how an aristocracy upheld important values, and ones inherited from a feudal past. Those people who were related to the “castes . . . ranks . . . classes to whom the shedding of blood had given an almost moral significance and stability,” had “a great ideal – an ideal of solidarity, of self-sacrifice, of co-operation – an ideal of a Greatness distinct from the acquisition of riches.” In addition, aristocrats had inherited a system of belief, a code of honour and duty that enabled them to be certain about the best ways to think and act. As one of Ford’s characters explains, aristocrats “form a standard, a rule of conduct, and then . . . live up to it.” They live “a life in which every man and woman knows exactly his part and has exactly his ideas.” Moreover, they are not slaves to passion, but have great self-restraint and thus give an impression of “tranquillity, of opulence and strength.” All of this made them eminently capable of leading and directing society. As Ford wrote in , “your true aristocrat is one who analyzes things from a height. But just because he is an aristocrat he is scrupulous, and just because he is scrupulous he is just.”

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Aristocrats, thus, provided a strong and fair government. This is not to say that they were always kind. Neither Ford, nor his ideal aristocrats, accepted a contemporary political ideology that was corrupted “with humanitarian sentimentalism” and “such watchwords as Fraternity and Equality.” According to Ford, the “old Toryism” of the Middle Ages “was in any humanitarian sense utterly remorseless in its dealing with the weak.” In those better times, politicians did not share the modern problem of having “our fingers too much on our moral pulse when it comes to enacting regulations for the relief of the Unfortunate in the mass.” According to Ford, “it is only because our rulers since then have wavered between statecraft and mercy that we have with us still” this great problem of the poor. By  Ford was pinpointing humanitarianism as one of the fundamental problems of modern government. He claimed that “because humanitarianism came creeping in, our modern State is defective,” and he even went so far as to suggest that politics, “though it need not be actively inhuman, must, as far as possible, put aside sympathy with human weakness.” Other Modernists agreed with him. As early as , in his poem “Picadilly,” Pound admitted about “The gross, the coarse, the brazen,/ God knows I cannot pity them, perhaps, as I should do.” Even Lawrence, who wrote little about politics or society in this period, believed that it was necessary to instill “a bit more flame” in the “cold ash of humanity,” and reject “Humanitarianism and suchlike forms of not-being.” But Ford went well beyond the other Modernists in describing the consequences of his anti-humanitarianism, as indicated in the opening of this chapter. In fact, Ford believed that in the Middle Ages the problem of the poor was solved simply by getting rid of them and he thought that this perhaps might be a good idea to revive in the present. He even commented that he “should like to see all men, except the few that are absolutely necessary . . . all men swept away who make a profit out of other men’s labour.” Ford had a few other plans for the unnecessary part of the population: the necessity for dealing stringently with the non-productive will become imperative. It is incredible that any statesman to-day should venture to say that the unhealthy shall by law be prohibited from breeding . . . Yet some such law rigidly enforced would go very far towards solving the social problem . . . For all of these in the modern State the only logical remedies would be starvation, the axe or the lethal chamber. Civilisation has not time to deal with the criminal or the diseased in any form. . . . degenerates should be either executed or relegated to pest colonies as in the mediaeval time the lepers were.

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This anti-humanitarianism may be disturbing to a modern mentality but it was important, according to Ford, for the strength and stability of the Middle Ages. The success of medieval governments was also provided by effective, even remorseless, leadership. In  Ford claimed that “true Toryism . . . aim[s] at the establishment of a strong State made up of efficient individuals.” This was done with a parliament composed of aristocrats who ruled on the “principle of heredity,” but who also, when necessary “bow to the will of strong individual rulers” and allow the government to be run by the “actual or virtual dictatorship” of one leader. Aristocrats could do this because they rejected “the modern ideal that the State is great where individuals are happy” and correctly understood that “before individuals can be happy the State must be strong and so constituted as to suit the needs of strong individuals.” While it may appear that Ford had moved away from his former concern to protect individuals from coldly efficient collective governments, this is not really the case. Ford made it clear that the type of state he desired was neither collective nor cold. Like medieval governments it would be strong, yet decentralized and personal. Ford was still very much worried that “The Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic-industrial-commercialism that is Modernity” had such a faith in social organization that the central government would continually increase in size and power, and that reformers “would make our corporations more vast, our nations still more boundless, for the sake of fiscal efficiency.” In the Middle Ages this could not have happened because the central government was limited by the independence and strength of the aristocrats who ruled the countryside and often even “made and unmade Kings.” Pound had a similar admiration for medieval-type political systems, which were strong and ruthless, but also decentralized and personal. He admired small states run by the enlightened, educated rich, who were helped by a body or church of subsidized artists, and in which all people worked for themselves and owned their own means of production. And he hoped that “the nations of Europe” could find “some method of cleansing / the fetid extent of their evils” and return to such a system. Yeats also disliked overly powerful central governments. He thought that the development of a state, with its “parliaments and law courts,” “which desires all the abundance for itself ” was a grave modern mistake because it did away with the independence, individualism, and strength of thought of former ages. Even artists succumbed to the power of the state. Edmund Spenser, for example, allowed his art and independence

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of mind to suffer because of his involvement with a centralizing government. He had learned to look to the State not only as the rewarder of virtue but as the maker of right and wrong, and had begun to love and hate as it bid him. . . . Like an hysterical patient he drew a complicated web of inhuman logic out of the bowels of an insufficient premise – there was no right, no law, but that of Elizabeth, and all that opposed her opposed themselves to God, to civilisation, and to all inherited wisdom and courtesy, and should be put to death.”

Medieval governments and life in general, therefore, were preferable to any modern system for the Modernists. An additional reason for their superiority was the absence of the middle classes. According to Yeats, modern problems began when “the counting-house had created a class and a new art without breeding and ancestry and set this art and this class between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the cloister.” In  Yeats claimed that “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone” because of the increasing predominance of people who “fumble in a greasy till / And add the halfpence to the pence” and because of “the fumbling wits, the obscure spite / Of our old Paudeen in his shop.” The middle classes, according to the Modernists, contributed to many modern ills, but they had an especially negative impact on politics. Ford believed that with the advent of the middle classes politics became the realm of “men of the lowest birth and of the highest arrogance” – who relied on diplomacy, spies, and torture rather than the swift and honorable use of “the sword”. He suggested that this happened in England during the reign of Henry VIII. Between  and  Ford wrote a trilogy of historical novels about the period that began with The Fifth Queen. These novels depict the decline of noble values and the rise of a politics of sordid intrigues and plottings, which occurred when bourgeois politicians such as Thomas Cromwell (“who had been an attorney for ten years after he had been a wool merchant”) determined to increase the power of the king at the expense of the aristocracy. Yeats agreed that the middle classes contributed to disorder in politics. The bourgeoisie, who shared “the mob’s materialism and the mob’s hatred of any privilege which is an incommunicable gift,” engendered “the born demagogue,” who “has always a passion for some crowd, is always deliberately inciting them against somebody.” The chaos caused by these power-hungry preachers, in turn, destroyed the stability of the aristocratic political system. Not only were the middle classes responsible for corrupting politics, they also destroyed a preferable medieval economic and social system. According to Yeats, the vulgarity of “the hot-faced bargainers and the money-changers” introduced selfishness and competition, and upset the

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harmony that had existed between noble, clergy, and peasantry. They also fundamentally altered the distribution of wealth; it was only when “the world surrendered to the competition of merchants” that the extremes of great wealth and poverty were created. Ford agreed about the negative consequences of the “free competition” and selfishness of the middle classes after the medieval period, when the altruistic “ideals of the chivalric age” were replaced by “individualistopportunist” values. One crucial development was that when “men of the lowest birth” entered government for profit rather than public service the physical and spiritual well-being of the mass of the population was ignored. For example, the disasters of the Reformation sale of church property and the enclosure process forced peasants off the land they had tilled for centuries so that landowners, many of them from the newly rich middle class, could raise sheep and make great profits from the expanding wool trade. Thus, wealth that formerly had been used to give material and moral assistance to the poor was divided instead between the new central state and the middle classes who were a part of it. At the same time, according to Ford, the government abandoned those controls on the economy that prevented the “sudden fluctuations of prices that are so unsettling to the labour market” and adopted a policy of economic freedom. Once again, the profits of the middle classes were maximized at the expense of workers’ wages. Pound expressed a similar concern about these features of the modern capitalist system when he declared in : I have no objection to wealth, the trouble is the acquisition, It would be rather a horrible sell To work like a dog and not get it.

In opposition to capitalist economics, Pound, Hulme, and Ford (like Hitler and Mussolini at a later period) all grew interested in a new type of socialist solution that combined elements of right-wing and leftwing thinking. For example, Ford was quite pleased when introduced to the ideas of Georges Sorel because he found that Sorel’s “Syndicalism . . . has become reactionary . . . even aristocratic” and was “violently anti-Parliamentary.” This confirmed his opinion that “true Toryism and true Socialism are the same.” It also gave him hope for the future because “what the extreme Left of France says to-day the rest of the world finds itself repeating about thirty-nine years after.” Pound also admired Sorel’s theories especially because they reminded him of a decentralized medieval system. He liked the idea of a society organized into a hierarchy of syndicates or guilds through which “the community recognises the

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special aptitudes of groups of men and applies them.” A government, the only function of which would be to delegate “certain stupid and honest people” “to look after our traffic and sewage,” also appealed to Pound. But it was Hulme who was most interested in Sorel, so much so that he translated into English Sorel’s most famous work, Reflections on Violence. He admired Sorel for much the same reason as did Ford and Pound; Sorel was “a revolutionary in economics, but classical in ethics.” Because he adopted the “classical, pessimistic” and “religious attitude” of a pre-modern period, his theories provided direction and discipline for the economy and helped unify the elite with the working class. Thus the Middle Ages had much that was missing from the contemporary world. The governments were strong and stable, and provided firm, but fair economic and political direction without interfering unnecessarily in people’s lives. They, plus the absence of a middle class, ensured that society was unified and all members cared for. The medieval period had a few other features the Modernists liked; it was spiritually fulfilled, morally healthy, and aesthetically pleasing. Ford and Yeats particularly admired the role of religion in the Middle Ages. Both authors agreed that medieval Catholicism was far superior to the Puritan Protestantism of the modern world. One reason was because it provided a standard of conduct, similar to that of the aristocrats, which made it easier for all men to know how to act and feel correctly. According to Ford, “Catholicism . . . a religion of action and of frames of minds is a religion that men can live up to” because it provides a simple and clear standard by which people can judge their actions. For Yeats, medieval Catholicism was understandable to the poor because of its semi-pagan mystical content, but it also acted like the aristocracy: “the Catholic Church created a system only possible for saints, hence its prolonged power. Its definition of the good was narrow, but it did not set out to make shopkeepers.” As Yeats’s remark suggests, it was Protestantism and “the religious change that followed on the Renaissance” that contributed to bourgeois morality. While Catholicism encouraged the “humility” produced by “a soul shaken by the spectacle of its sins,” Protestantism was a religion in which men “are troubled by other men’s sins.” It, thus, ushered in “the period of philanthropy and reform . . . pedantic composure . . . rhetoric . . . [and] passionless sentiment.” In other words it encouraged the “vulgar pride,” “moral enthusiasm,” and desire for “selfimprovement” that were the fundamental characteristics of the middle classes. Moreover, according to Ford, as “a religion of ideals and of reason” Protestantism also created a nation of hypocrites; by allowing

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each individual to invent impractical and grandiose goals, it forced its followers to advocate a morality they could not ever follow. Finally, medieval religion was partially responsible for a deep respect for art. Yeats pointed out the importance of the Catholic church as a patron of the arts, in opposition to “Puritanism”, which because of “its zeal and its narrowness, and the angry suspicion that it had in common with all movements of the ill-educated . . . [was] a slanderer of all fine things.” Ford agreed, commenting that Puritanism did away “with the artistic spirit as a factor of life.” However, even more important for art was medieval society. Rule by an aristocracy ensured that all of life was beautiful. According to Ford, the English gentry had inherited a love for the best things in life and a desire to always surround themselves with them. In fifteenth-century Italy, according to Yeats, the aristocracy and artists worked hand in hand to “breed the best.” At that time great dukes vigorously fulfilled their duty of patronizing the arts with little concern for “minds without culture” or with what “the blind and ignorant town / Imagines best to make it thrive.” They correctly understood that they should give liberally to what is best, rather than do what is demanded by the mob. Thus, they actively supported the creation of art, libraries, and schools “where wit and beauty learned their trade.” Yeats and Pound made even stronger connections between the aristocracy and artists. Yeats suggested that three social groups of the Middle Ages were key: Three types of men have made all beautiful things, Aristocracies have made beautiful manners, because their place in the world puts them above the fear of life, and the countrymen have made beautiful stories and beliefs, because they have nothing to lose and so do not fear, and the artists have made all the rest, because Providence has filled them with recklessness. All these look backward to a long tradition, for, being without fear, they have held to whatever pleased them.

In fact, Yeats believed that artists were part of the ideal aristocracy of the past. He revised his and Ford’s previous Pre-Raphaelite belief that artists were “priestly”. Now they were also “the proudest aristocracy upon earth, the aristocracy of artists.” And in  he commented that “every day I notice some new analogy between [the] long-established life of the well-born and the artist’s life. . . . We too despise the mob and suffer at its hands.” Pound enthusiastically agreed with this image of artists. In fact, he hoped for a new aristocracy in the future composed of artists as well as, or instead of, hereditary peers. His understanding of Sorel’s theories led him to believe that it might be possible, not only to revive guilds for workers

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Modernism

such as “joiners, etc.” or “guilds of more highly skilled craftsmen,” but also to create “a syndicat of intelligence,” which would be composed of “enlightened men,” “thinkers and authors and artists.” This syndicate would direct the others and would help solve “the traditional struggle” that has existed “from the beginning of the world . . . of driving the shaft of intelligence into the dull mass of mankind.” Moreover, it would do this in an autocratic fashion; it “will be as fanatical almost as the mediaeval religious” and “will hate and contemn the world.” Thus, “the modern artist,” who “knows he is born to rule but he has no intention of trying to rule by general franchise” will be part of a new and powerful ruling elite. Yeats summed up the change from the medieval to the modern world when he criticized Oliver Cromwell. Yeats did not necessarily dislike Cromwell for the reasons that most Irish people did – for killing thousands of Irish Catholics, taking their lands, and giving them to English Protestants. Rather, for Yeats Cromwell was responsible for the destruction of the Middle Ages. According to Yeats, Cromwell and his “kings of the mob” changed England and Ireland completely by destroying the aristocratic way of life: the Great Demagogue had come and turned the old house of the noble into ‘the house of the Poor, the lonely house, the accursed house of Cromwell.’ He came . . . with that great rabble who had overthrown the pageantry of Church and Court, but who turned towards him faces full of the sadness and docility of their long servitude, and the old individual, poetical life went down, as it seems, for ever.

Fear about the direction in which the modern world was heading, therefore, led the Modernists to look for a preferable alternative in the past. At the same time as they developed radical conservative political positions, which emphasized discipline, restraint, and control, in opposition to equality, democracy, and economic liberalism, the Modernists looked again to history and found all they wanted in Europe after the Roman Empire and before the Renaissance. Although this new Modernist medievalism still was as much a fantasy as their earlier medievalism, and hardly original, it served an important purpose. The Middle Ages no longer was just a place to escape. Rather, it provided solutions to the problems the Modernists perceived around them. Not only did medieval politics and society exclude or discipline the hysterical and ignorant “mob” and provide a satisfying sense of order and direction, it gave artists a role of great importance. In this preferable system

Radical conservative solutions



of the past, artists were respected, listened to, and took their rightful place among the ruling aristocratic elite. In short, the “civic crown” was theirs. Their new medievalism also served another important role for the Modernists. It made it easier for some of them to speculate that perhaps the tradition of life they admired in the past, but that was absent in the present, might some day return – preferably in the near future. In this they took an important step towards a cyclic view of history. Hulme and Ford both suggested this. Hulme clearly hoped that the “Classic” tradition of life would replace the current “Romantic” one. He was optimistic that the ideas of the Action Fran¸caise, and the fact that they were so popular among young people in France, indicated that this was in the process of occurring. If these ideas were spread (for example by Hulme) to England and the rest of the world, the return of a better way of life would be undeniable. Ford also fantasized about the return of an older way of life in his  novel, The New Humpty-Dumpty. The hero is Count MacDonald, a Russian-Scottish aristocrat who acts “along lines of the traditions of a gentleman of good breeding.” Like Ford, MacDonald had been a socialist in the s, but since had developed the conviction that “Rome is burning” because parliament had proven to be “such a discredited institution.” MacDonald now adopted the belief that “no men are equal,” that democracy had run the world too long “for the benefit of the weak and the unfit,” and that the best political system is one of strength and complete efficiency. MacDonald is also convinced that the only solution to modern problems is a counter-revolution, and he organizes one as an example in the small Republic of “Galiza,” where he will use the threat of military violence to restore a monarchy under the Bourbon King Dom Pedro II. MacDonald’s counter-revolution is unsuccessful in the end. And Ford made it clear what was the ultimate cause of its failure; MacDonald had not abandoned his fundamentally Romantic view of human nature. MacDonald believed that at heart all people are as good and chivalrous as himself, and therefore can be trusted to do the right thing in the end. This conviction is proven wrong by two lower-middle-class characters. Their hypocrisy, selfishness, vulgarity, greed, and jealousy cause the failure of the counter-revolution and ultimately MacDonald’s death. Thus, while the novel ends in defeat, there is some hope for the future; a knowledge of the cause of the problems may provide the key for ultimate success.



Modernism

For Hulme and Ford, therefore, a cyclic return to the past might be possible with the spread of new ideas or a better organized revolution. In either case, it was this – a return to the past – rather than the hope for continued progress along any existing lines, that was what the five Modernists were coming to believe held out the only hope for the future. The development of their thinking and exploration of other areas of interest in the next few years would serve to support this assumption.

 

“A particularly lively wheel”: cyclic views emerge

Mr. Hulme launched forth on a diatribe against . . . all those who take the Spiral as the symbol of the Nature of man, and declared that if ever he were made a Peer he would take as his insignia a particularly lively Wheel, chastising a complacent Spiral.

Cambridge Magazine, March , .

One day in  a devastatingly handsome young man, who looked a great deal like Lord Byron, suddenly dropped from the sky onto a street corner in London. Police Constable L, who witnessed the miraculous event, could tell from the stranger’s impeccable evening dress and from his disturbingly eloquent speech that this was an aristocrat, despite his odd name of Fybus Poldo. Unknown to PC L, this was no ordinary gentleman. He was, in fact, the Greek god Phoebus Apollo come from heaven to twentieth-century England to determine if religion could be brought back to the modern world. He was promptly arrested. So goes the opening of Ford Madox Ford’s  novel, Mr. Apollo. Despite his arrest, by the end of the novel Apollo is quite successful in his task. He meets a number of young people who are tired of the hopeless materialism of the scientific age in which they live, and who are looking for spiritual fulfillment. A new age of religion, similar to a better period of the past was, therefore, in the process of returning – with the help of an ancient Greek god-aristocrat, of course. As this indicates, Ford, like the other Modernists had begun to hope for and speculate about a cyclic return to a preferable past tradition. In fact, at least one of them was led directly to an explicit cyclic view of history, as is suggested by Hulme’s quote above. It was no accident that Ford had Apollo dress and act like an aristocrat. In fact, this was one of the main differences between Ford’s novel and the works that might have inspired it. In the s and s Walter Pater wrote three stories on a very similar theme; a Greek god (in two stories the god was Apollo and in one Dionysus) reappeared at a later period 



Modernism

in time. The differences between Pater’s and Ford’s stories say much about the new concerns of the Modernists in the early twentieth century. Pater’s gods are more Nietzschean than anything else. They return, not to the modern world, but to the Middle Ages (or to an eighteenth-century German dukedom not yet emerged from the medieval world), and when they take human form they do so, not as aristocrats, but as peasants or servants. Their aim is not to restore religion or the medieval values of order and discipline, but to end the depressing oppression of Catholicism and to bring an Enlightenment-style revival of pagan light, and joy in free natural impulses and fine art. In the end, Pater’s gods do not succeed. Rather, they are killed by the jealous people among whom they live because they also bring misery and destruction in the wake of their liberation. Pater, thus, was still struggling with the conflicting consequences of the Enlightenment – of how a new appreciation for reason, freedom, and democracy could contribute to positive intellectual, scientific, and artistic progress simultaneously with violent and destructive revolution. Ford, however, had moved beyond doubt and uncertainty to a new optimism; a medieval form of aristocracy and religion clearly was preferable to any of the values of the Enlightenment, and radical conservative politics indeed could effect its return. It should come as no surprise that at the same time as they developed new conservative political opinions the early Modernists became more interested in circular views of the past and cyclic structures in general. Two important developments occurred in the Modernists’ views of history at this time. First, some of the five authors openly rejected the idea of progress and advocated circularity. In addition, while the others were not so explicit, they none the less established the foundation for such a view. Their growing dislike of change and admiration for permanence, and their preference for making analogies between features of cultures separated by space and time, rather than any interest in progressive chronology, indicate their increasing belief that history does not exhibit cumulative change in either a positive or negative direction. Hulme was the Modernist who first and most openly abandoned progress for circularity. He was led directly to this position by his new conservative political beliefs. Not only did the Action Fran¸caise and other writers by whom Hulme was influenced posit the existence of two opposed traditions of life in the past, the Classic and Romantic, they also questioned the idea of progress. All these conservative authors argued that theories of automatic, linear progress, whether they were “messianic,” economic or scientific, were “Romantic” and thus wrong.

Cyclic views emerge



According to the Action Fran¸caise, the “Romantic” assumption of the goodness of humans led thinkers mistakenly to believe that if people were free of all restraint then progress would automatically occur without any additional effort. The “Classic” view of the unchangeable weakness of human nature was considered far more realistic by the Action Fran¸caise. This being the case, however, granting freedom in the hope of improvement is a facile and lazy optimism that will lead to chaos as human faults would be given free reign. Progress is, in fact, a dangerous idea. Hulme agreed. He explicitly rejected “the metaphysical notion of automatic progress . . . you get in Hegel and Fourier,” which is identical to “the religious belief in absolute and inevitable progress.” Hulme blamed “the histories I had been brought up on” for leading him to this assumption; “one is handicapped, as far as clear-thinking about politics goes, by being educated in Whig histories. It takes strenuous efforts to get rid of the pernicious notion implanted in one by Macaulay.” In  Hulme had become so disillusioned with ideas of progress that he lost interest in almost all modern philosophy. When he went to a philosophical congress at Bologna that year he was so fascinated by the pageantry and activity outside – the aristocratic parading of princes and troops – that he did not want to go inside. This was because they would be certain to talk inside of progress, while the only progress I can stand is the progress of princes and troops, for they, though they move, make no pretence of moving ‘upward.’ They progress in the only way which does not violate the classical ideal of the fixed and constant nature of man.

In fact, Hulme’s rejection of progress was so fervent that it went well beyond the conservative writers who had suggested the idea to him. None of those writers abandoned progress altogether or developed theories of historical circularity as did Hulme. While they proposed that progress was not automatic, they did assume that it could occur through discipline, order, and reason. For example, the writers for the Action Fran¸caise argued that in the beginning of time men’s instincts and passions were free. The result was a situation of chaos and barbarity. However, with the imposition of order in civil society, and with the development of will and reason, man progressed out of savagery into civilization. Thus, while they did not believe in “Romantic” progress, the Action Fran¸caise did support what Lasserre called the “other” progress – that development from barbarism to civilization through discipline. English Nietzscheans agreed and went on to claim that man could progress even further. As A.M. Ludovici put it, “if it was possible for man to struggle up from



Modernism

barbarism . . . why . . . should he not surpass himself and attain to Superman by evolving in the same degree volitionally and mentally?” Because the conservative writers believed in progress, they also feared the decadence that would result if discipline and order were relaxed, as had occurred during the French Revolution. However, they did not conclude from this that history followed a circular pattern of alternating reversals and advances. Few of the Nietzscheans, or a Modernist like Yeats who had read Nietzsche, discussed extensively or made use of his idea of Eternal Recurrence. Some even explicitly rejected it. The reversals of progress, according to these writers, were mistakes; they were not in the nature of history and they did not form a pattern. Hulme, on the other hand, between the middle of  and throughout , developed a different view. He completely rejected, not only “Romantic” theories, but all ideas of progress whatsoever. In  Hulme made it clear that in his opinion the movement from “barbarism” to “civilization” proposed by the conservative writers did not involve essential change or fundamental progress. Hulme claimed that [of ] course, man is capable of a certain kind of progress. He builds up sciences and civilisation, but the progress is here rather one of accumulation than of alteration in capacity . . . If you compare the intellect to a sponge, it is easy to see that the sponge can be empty or full of water, without its “capacity” being altered. From the moment that the human species has been constituted, its intellectual possibilities were fixed at the same time.

Hulme’s conviction about the absolute constancy of the human species, and the fact that he found “a tremendous consolation in the idea of fixity and sameness,” made a belief in any type of progress impossible. In late  and , again departing from the other conservative writers, Hulme took pains to prove these points. Two arguments were especially important: the idea of original sin and an alternative view of evolution. According to Hulme in April , man “is incapable of attaining any kind of perfection, because, either by nature, as the result of original sin, or the result of evolution, he encloses within him certain antinomies.” It is possible that Hulme was introduced to the idea of original sin by Sorel or by Lasserre, or through his growing interest in Catholicism, which the French writers insisted was a necessary complement to the “Classic” tradition of control, restraint, and hierarchy. For Hulme original sin was a “sane classical dogma” and “absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude” because it made people accept the existence of a transcendent god, rather than assume, as did the “Romantics,” “that man is a god” who can create “a heaven on earth.” Humans can never

Cyclic views emerge



act as gods or improve their world because their imperfections cannot be overcome. According to Hulme, this is an absolute truth wisely acknowledged in the past but forgotten in the present because of the attraction of ideas of progress. As he argued in a  lecture at Cambridge University titled “Anti-Romanticism and Original Sin,” “repeat the word ‘Progress’ often enough and it is easy to delude oneself into denying the truths of the doctrine of Original Sin amidst the mess of hypothetical Utopias, which ignore the principle of the constancy of Man.” In November , Hulme found another support for his belief that the absolute unchangeableness of mankind precluded the possibility of progress in a new theory of evolution. His great discovery was the work of the scientist Hugo De Vries whose “mutation theory” of evolution was a “widely popular alternative” to that of Darwin. Hulme was particularly excited about De Vries’s theory because it was a scientific alternative to the idea of progress. Unlike original sin, which was a religious theory, De Vries’s theory enabled Hulme “to keep the classical view with an appearance of scientific backing.” In particular De Vries enabled Hulme to argue against people who, using Darwin’s “antiquated theory of evolution,” “triumphantly assert that man had evolved from the brute, and that there was no reason to suppose that the evolution had finished.” Because Darwin holds that “each step in evolution has come gradually, by an accumulation of favourable small variations” people conclude “that man himself might, by the accumulation of such variations, gradually change into something better.” De Vries’s “Mutation theory” proves this to be scientifically wrong: “it supposes that each new species came into existence in one big variation, as a kind of ‘sport,’ and, that once constituted, a species remains absolutely constant.” Thus, Hulme concluded, “there would then be no hope at all of progress for man.” But not only did De Vries’s theory disprove the idea of progress, it also provided scientific proof for Hulme’s political theories of radical conservatism. According to Hulme, because “each race of man once having come into existence, is created with a certain mental and moral capacity, which is fixed from the moment of its creation, and never changes or increases,” theories of democracy that assume humans can govern themselves wisely given a proper education or environment must be wrong. As Hulme concluded, “it is then no good planning out any state of society whose successful working would depend on the assumption that the percentage of intelligent and disinterested people can be indefinitely increased.” Moreover, De Vries also supported Hulme’s views “on the question of equality and hierarchy” because he argued that “Not



Modernism

only . . . is the average level of each species absolutely constant, but the percentage of slight variations in different directions also remains constant.” As a result, certain groups in society will be superior to others and the inferior groups cannot improve themselves to join the ranks of the superior. Thus inequality and a hierarchy of talents are scientific facts that must be acknowledged. Using De Vries, therefore, Hulme had supported his beliefs in the uniformity of human nature and the impossibility of improvement over time. He was well aware that most people would not like these ideas because of the “modern disease, the horror of constancy” and the sickness of having “ ‘dynamic’ on the brain,” which “makes a man contemplate the idea of a constant world with such repugnance, so that he insists, in spite of all evidence, in believing that progress is continuous, and that man may and does change.” Hulme, on the other hand, believed that “there is nothing absurd or repugnant in the notion of a constant world, in which there is no progress.” Rather, “there is great consolation in the idea that the same struggles have taken place in each generation, and that men have always thought as we think now.” Thus Hulme had provided himself with supernatural and scientific proof of the impossibility of any type of progress. At this time as well he was given a suggestion for a different pattern of history. This came from his reading of the  book, by “the celebrated Egyptologist” Sir Flinders Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilisation. Hulme thought that this work definitively answered the question of whether it is a fact that “the progress and civilisation of humanity have been slowly and steadily increasing.” According to Hulme, “Dr. Petrie gives an emphatic negative” and finds a different “regular structure behind it all.” Drawing on new archaeological evidence from Egypt and Crete, Petrie was able “to trace the rise, growth, and decay of fourteen civilisations of equal length with the classical one.” “The result of his inquiry,” Hulme claimed, was “that civilisation is a recurrent phenomena, and not an ever-sweeping onward movement.” Here was historical proof that the universal pattern of history was of cycles, not progress. Or so Hulme concluded. Petrie, however, was not so unequivocal. While he did claim that “civilisation is a recurrent phenomenon” with alternating cycles of growth and decay, Petrie also proposed that over time the best features of each cycle had increased in quantity and quality, while the collapse after each cycle had grown less destructive. Petrie believed that “there are lesser intervals of barbarism between the civilisations, and that the civilisation phase in each period is

Cyclic views emerge



longer at each recurrence. This is in accord with the common idea that the world is getting more civilised as the ages go on.” And Petrie concluded that “this is the real nature of human progress.” Petrie, thus, like the conservative writers, did not abandon the hope for progress or happily accept the idea of circularity. In fact, his pattern was like the Romantic spiral, but with many loops. Moreover, in the