T. E. Hulme, Mercenary of Modernism, or, Fragments of Avantgarde Sensibility in Pre-World War I Britain

Abstract

In the lees of literary history, T. E. Hulme still remains an active, irritating element. This irritation is not entirely a product of Hulme's own doing and writing-much as he himself would have liked us think so: it has been regenerated, transformed and perpetuated, in a much less amusing fashion, by critics and promoters of Hulme who have tended inflate his significance in inverse proportion the body of texts available us. For a long time, Hulme's reputation rested primarily on his Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art which Herbert Read edited posthumously in 1924. Although Speculations-as T. S. Eliot observed in the April number of Criterion that same year-appeared to have fallen like a stone the bottom of the sea of print, this rather instantaneous regret seems have secured Hulme a somewhat illusive yet in the long run undisputed place in the world of letters. Not only was he regarded as a poetic innovator and a prototype in sensibility of Eliot's own variety of modernism but he also became established as a precursor New Criticism-most notably in Murray Krieger's New Apologists for Poetry.' Hulme's 'prophetic' role in such disciplines as Aesthetics, Literature and Metaphysics has prompted Alun Jones draw such remarkable parallels as the following: Whether by genius or happy accident, he is related the achievement of the first half of the century in much the same way as Coleridge is related the first half of the nineteenth.2 As early as 1938, however, H. A. Mason, reviewing Michael Roberts' book on Hulme, found reason for calling his piece The T. E. Hulme Myth.3 Roberts had indeed perpetrated a myth in the most abstract, Sorelian sense-that of Hulme the respectable philosopher.4 Discussing him in the context of Western philosophy from Aquinas, Nicolas of Cusa and, above all, Pascal, up contemporary thinkers such as Dilthey, Husserl, Scheler, G. E. Moorethinkers that Hulme in fact rarely credited as sources while watering them down a considerable degree 5-Roberts wishes away