BOOKS
the scepticism of the present, the scepticism of Sorel, is a tor–
turing vacuity which has developed the craving for belief.
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When war broke out in August 1914, Hulme joined the British Army
as a private. In April 1915 he was wounded and sent home. On March 20,
1916 he received a commission in the Royal Marines Artillery. He was
killed in Flanders on September 28, 1917. In 1924 Herbert Read put
together a selection of Hulme's work as
Speculations.
In 1955 Samuel
Hynes brought out
Further Speculations.
Hulme's presence in literary history is small and I think getting small–
er. Most scholars have given up the claims that were once regularly made
for him; that he was a sage, virtually invented imagism, single-handedly
turned English and American poetry from Swinburnian softness, and
directed Pound and Eliot toward the "hard" Gautier. Hulme was regarded
for many years as the most enabling force in Pound's gang. Now and with
more reason he is seen as a footnote to Eliot.
But it is hard to understand why Eliot touted him so assertively. He
began by liking Hulme's poems, especially "The Embankment"-"the
fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night"-which he regarded
as one of the most beautiful poems in the language:
Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth's the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.
In "Six Lectures on Modern French Literature"-a course of Oxford
extension lectures in the winter of 1916-Eliot associated himself with
Hulme and Sorel. In April 1924 he noted that
Speculations
"appears to have
fallen like a stone to the bottom of the sea of print."
In this volume [Hulme] appears as the forerunner of a new atti–
tude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind,
if
the
twentieth century is to have a mind of its own. Hulme is classical,
reactionary, and revolutionary; he is the antipodes of the eclectic,
tolerant, and democratic mind of the end of the last century. And
