The New Age, February 10, 1916

Alright, I lied about doing a post on a different magazine before returning to The New Age. The weekly pace is too quick!

These notes will be too quick too:

Hastings/Morning/Anonymous's "Men and Manners" continues, commenting on the rudeness of swearing. She satirizes the crowd at the Cafe Republique, which rang a dim bell in my mind. Googling, I found that part of the recent Paris attacks took place outside the Cafe Republique. So strange.

Then, she continues her story about the rogue peri, this time titled "A Yarn for Marines." The peri ends up on a dreadnought, where she seduces an officer. Rollicking, if a bit silly. No sign yet of the alleged backlash in the correspondence pages. I just noticed that "Peri" and "Paris" are pronounced similarly.

T.E. Hulme continues his notes on abstraction, making an interesting argument about the frameworks that undergird thought. Our logic eventually must rest on self-evident truths, but the problem is that we find our self-evident truths largely through culture, which means they aren't true at all. But he doesn't stop there--things get a little weird first. He argues that there are in fact objective self-evident truths, and that they are often found at the heart of religious dogmas. His belief in original sin, that a human "is a wretched creature that can yet apprehend perfection," is valid, while the humanist optimism about humanity is not (354). It's the large, underlying category of original sin that can change the way we perceive the world. He's going to shift to discussion of literature soon, and I look forward to that. Maybe if Hulme hadn't died, he'd have been T.S. Eliot.

Off to the dissertation.

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.

The Egoist, May 1915

In May, The Egoist hosted a special issue on Imagism, now without the terminal -e of Imagisme. It is epic. It contains articles on F.S. Flint, Ezra Pound, H.D., John Gould Fletcher, D.H. Lawrence, and Amy Lowell. It has an essay on the history of Imagism by F.S. Flint, and criticism of Imagism by Harold Monro. As an act of canon formation, it is notable for how it downplays Pound's position in the movement. Critics went a long time before rediscovering that Pound was not as single-handedly responsible for the movement as he can sometimes appear.

I wanted to write a post on this issue, but it is too much. Check out the table of contents:

This is must-read material for scholars, fans, and enemies of Imagism. Apologies for not being quite up to the task of posting on eight or so essays, and a set of poems. I'll be teaching this in the fall and into the future, no doubt. 

Before realizing that there was just too much to cover in a blog post, I finished my section on F.S. Flint's first essay, "The History of Imagism." I'll post it because I managed to ferret out one of his obscure epigraphs. 

It upends completely the standard narrative of imagism, and clearly sets out this intent with an epigraph from Tacitus' Agricola, which translates to:

"And so matters, which as being still not accurately known my predecessors embellished with their eloquence, shall now be related on the evidence of facts."

The second epigraph is harder to track: "Chi compra Manfredi?" or, "Who will buy Manfred?" John Addington Symonds wrote about this in Renaissance in Italy, which I take as Flint's source. Here's an excerpt:

"Our knowledge of the earliest Italo-Provencal poetry is vague, owing to the lack of genuine Sicilian monuments. We can only trace faint indications of a progress toward greater freedom and more spontaneous inspiration, as the 'courtly makers' yielded to the singers of the people. The battle of Benevento extinguished at one blow both the hopes of the Suabian dynasty and the development of Sicilian poetry. When Manfred's body had been borne naked on a donkey form the battle-field to his nameless grave, amid the cries of "Chi compra Manfredi? a foreign troubador, Amerigo di Peguilhan, composed his lament..." (27)

The context in Symonds explains why Flint places this here: the death of Manfred ended a developing poetic that was transplanted to northern Italy, which became famous for its innovations, while the true innovators were forgotten. Clever, Flint.

Flint gives the credit to Hulme, who is currently "in the trenches of Ypres," claiming that they founded a "Poet's Club" in 1908, to impress women. Pound didn't show up until 1909 (by a printer's error, it is 7909 in the text!). Flint is clearly upset by Pound's conquest of the term. I wonder how the poetic justice of Amy Lowell's theft of the movement felt for Flint. Intriguingly, Flint implies that he did not write the contribution to the March 1913 Poetry text published under his name and which contained the three rules of Imagism. After a few more barbs at Pound, Flint stops.