BOOKS
The Speculations of
T.
E. Hulme
THE
COLLECTED WRITINGS OF
T. E.
HULME.
By
Karen Csengeri.
Clarendon Press. $164.50
In
1912 a book was published in London under the title
Ripostes
oj
Ezra
Pound Whereto are Appended the Complete Poetical Works ofT.
E.
Hulme with
Prifatory Note.
The complete poetical works amounted to five poems, the
longest of them nine lines. In the prefatory note Pound associated Hulme
with Imagism: "As for the future,
Les Imagistes,
the descendants of the for–
gotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping." He also remarked that
Hulme was thirty years old. Hulme added a footnote: "Mr Pound has
grossly exaggerated my age." He was twenty-nine.
Thomas Ernest Hulme was born on September 16, 1883, son of a gen–
tleman-farmer, who later went into the ceramic transfer business. At school
in Newcastle
T.
E. H. did well in mathematics and science. When he
enrolled at the University of London, he went wild and got sent down. In
1906 he set out for Canada, where he made a hand-to-mouth living and
survived for a year. Back in England, he started writing poems, putting his
notes into essays, and meeting with literary and theatrical types, including
F.
S. Flint,Joseph Campbell, and Florence Farr. Pound joined the group on
April 22, 1909. Hulme soon gave up writing poems and resorted to phi–
losophy, politics, and art criticism. He was much taken with Bergson,
wrote several enthusiastic essays, and in 1912 translated the
Introduction to
Metaphysics.
But by then he was losing faith in Bergsonism, mainly because
of its confusion of biology and theology. He turned to poli tics and art cri t–
icism, attending upon sterner masters, Pierre Lasserre and Charles Maurras
of
L'Action francaise,
Sorel, and Worringer. His translation of Sorel's
Rljlections on Violence
was published in 1916.
T.
S. Eliot reviewed it in
The
Monist
for July 1917:
[Sorel's] motive forces are ideas and feelings which never occur
to the mind of the proletariat, but which are highly characteris–
tic of the present-day intellectual. At the back of his mind is a
scepticism which springs from Renan, but which is much more
terrible than Renan's. For with Renan and Saint-Beuve scepti–
cism was still a satisfying point of view, almost an esthetic pose.
And for many of the artists of the eighties and nineties the pes–
simism of decadence fulfilled their craving for an attitude. But
