T H E A E S T H E T I C S O F C O M F O R T : H U L M E ’ S P R A G M A T I S M A N D C O N T E M P O R A R Y C R I T I C I S M PATRICIA RAE University of Victoria I n 1908, the founder and philosopher of the Imagist movement, T. E. Hulme, delivered a lecture that established a connection between a certain kind of poetry and a certain kind of painting, and that rooted both in what he held to be the prevailing philosophy of his age. Modem man, he proclaimed, had with ease renounced all claims to absolute and universal truth. He had become reconciled to the fact that the world was a flux of unique moments, forever elusive to explication in abstract terms. He rested content with the fluid reality of Heraclitus, felt no need to reach through it, as the Greeks had done, to grasp the still Forms of Plato. Longing for “a static fixity where their souls might rest,” 1 Hulme informed his audience, the ancients had embraced the timeless Ideas, had sought to fix poetic forms with elaborate rules of versifi cation, and had come to cherish in the visual arts the eternal shapes of geom etry. At ease with their uncertainty, by contrast, “frankly [acknowledging] the relative” (LM P 71), his contemporaries have rejected the pre-existent Ideas of realism for the humanly constructed concepts of nominalism. Their aspira tion for verse is no longer that it achieve perfection of form, but simply that it capture some vague mood, in the wavering feet of vers libre. In the visual arts, Hulme says, the moderns feel no need to seek satisfaction in timeless, universal shapes, but are happy with the fleeting, particular instants frozen on the canvases of Impressionism. Seven years later, in the pages of the New Age, Hulme has clearly become less comfortable with the flux. While still asserting that man can only claim relative knowledge of matters biological, psychological, and historical, he maintains that on ethical and religious issues there is absolute knowledge to be found. Contemplating the world of biology, psychology, and history, he envisions, after Henri Bergson, a field covered with a “confused muddy sub stance” :2 an expanse of “cinders” 3 that can never be ploughed into the neat rows of systematic theory. When imagining the realm of ethics and religion, by contrast, Hulme sees a zone “partaking of the perfection of geometrical figures” (HRA 6). He espouses, after G. E. Moore, an ethical realism: a con viction that the good and the just are “absolute and objective,” generated not E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x v , i , March 1989 by “human desires and feelings” (H RA 47),4 but by a God, whose existence, too, is entirely independent of them. So certain is he, indeed, of this fact, that he has become an outspoken champion of the British intention to uphold “heroic values” in the trenches of Europe, arguing that such values may justly necessitate the sacrifice of life and personality.5 Hulme’s discomfort with relativism in ethics is matched by a new unease with his old prescriptions for poetry and painting. His notebook entries reveal that he is no longer satisfied with poetry that is merely subtly emotive, but is concerned instead that it pro vide some intellectual satisfaction. For verse that merely “suggests some thing,” 6 he says, there must be substituted a poetry of clear analogies: com parisons that enable the poet to “ dwell on a point,” to prolong “ the pleasure and luxury of thought in the mind of the reader” (NLS 91). As for the visual arts, Hulme has not only become impatient with Impressionism, but has pub licly ridiculed its “last efflorescence,” Futurism, scorning the work of the Italian movement specifically because of its “ deification of the flux.” 7 He has instead taken up the cause of the new art of geometric abstraction — the art of Jacob Epstein, Wyndham...