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PARTISAN REVIEW
his writing, his fragmentary notes and his outlines, is the writing
of an individual who wished to satisfY himself before he cared to
enchant a cultivated public.
When he gave the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in
1926, Eliot referred to Hulme as "the most
fertile
mind of my genera–
tion, and one of the glories of this University." In "Second Thoughts
about Humanism" (1929), he quoted Hulme agains t the humanism of
Irving Babbitt and Norman Foerster. "It is to the immense credit of
Hulme," he claimed, "that he found out for himself that there is an
absolute
to which Man can
never
attain." Hulme "put the matter into one
paragraph":
I hold the religious conception of ultimate values to be right, the
humanist wrong. From the nature of things, these categories are
not inevitable, like the categories of time and space, but are
equal–
ly
objective.
In speaking of religion, it is to this level of abstraction
that I wish to refer. I have none of the feelings of
nostalgia,
the rev–
erence for tradition, the desire to recapture the sentiment of Fra
Angelico, which seems to animate most modern defenders of reli–
gion. All that seems to me to be bosh. What is important, is what
nobody seems to realize-the dogmas like that of Original Sin,
which are the closest expression of the categories of the religious
attitude. That man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature,
who can yet apprehend perfection. It is not, then, that I put up
with the dogma for the sake of the sentiment, but that I may pos–
sibly swallow the sentiment for the sake of the dogma.
In the essay on Baudelaire (1930), Eliot quoted-or rather, slightly mis–
quoted-Hulme to much the same effect; insistence on original sin, the
categorical defect of man, the necessity of order, discipline, and institutions.
Baudelaire, according to Eliot, would have approved of Hulme's values.
Eliot admired Hulme because he spoke with bleak authority about orig–
inal sin. A distinction between religion and humanism followed as night the
day; and another one that seemed crucial to Eliot, between classicism and
romanticism. I can't believe that Hulme's theory oflanguage meant much to
Eliot: it is daft. "Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultane–
ous presentation to the mind of two images: language is only a more or less
feeble way of doing this." In literary work, "each
word
must be an image
seen,
not a counter," Hulme emphasized. "A man cannot write without seeing at
