The New Age, January 27, 1916

Two big things to discuss in this issue: more fiction from Hastings, and T. E. Hulme, elaborating his philosophy.

First, Hastings:

The story from the last post continues in this issue of TNA: Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning has dropped the "Feminine Fables" header from the tale, which appears here as "In Between Whiles." Many Hastings themes in the next installment, as the Peri wanders the sea until forced to land at a nearly deserted island, where one fisherman lives. The encounter devolves into an armed standoff fairly quickly as they have a battle of the sexes for dominance.

In other Hastings news, "Men and Manners" is an anonymous column that is probably hers. This week's argues that men are mostly just ignorant of how to treat women. Distastefully, it seems to say that men are inherently better than women, but that's not a good reason to strut about acting superior.

Last thought, mostly for myself: there's a letter praising "Men and Manners" in this issue. If the author of "Men and Manners" is Hastings, as I suspect, then this would somewhat undercut the narrative that she's alienating the readers from The Old New Age.

Second, Hulme:

He's been contributing philosophical articles, but this is the first I'm going to write about. It's part of a series titled "A Note-Book," and I'm sure it's been covered by Hulme scholarship before I got to it, but here's my take, anyway. Hulme says that there are grand, large-scale beliefs that are so prevalent and powerful in both individual minds and collective cultures that they become invisible, despite the fact that they are assumptions. The focus of the essay is on two of these beliefs, religion and humanism. In a moment of modernist gnosticism, Hulme explains that the religious attitude believes in a version of original sin, that man is bad, and can partake in perfection without ever being perfect. Understanding this leads one to discipline and order.

Humanism doesn't believe in the inherent badness of people. The goal of humanism, then, is to help people unleash their inherent goodness. Hulme hates this, because "It distorts the real nature of ethical values by deriving them out of essentially subjective things, like human desires and feelings." According to Hulme, this is now breaking up, and society will return to something more philosophically aligned with medieval Europe than renascence Europe. The solution? Here:

"A complete reaction from the subjectivism and relativism of humanist ethics should contain two elements : (1) the establishment of the objective character of ethical values, (2) a satisfactory ethic not only looks on values as objective, but establishes an order or hierarchy among such values, which it also regards as absolute and objective."

Prefiguring Eliot? We'll see. Hulme's complaint about subjectivism and relativism that permeate his society is very familiar to me, as I see such complaints around all the time. The strange thing is that the complaints often point to a different moment or era as the source of subjectivism or relativism, the 1960s, for example. Hulme sees it everywhere, all the way back to the renaissance.