652
PARTISAN REVIEW
the same time a visual significance before his eyes: it is this image which
precedes the writing and makes it firm." These declarations stiffened the
resolve of imagist poets, and carried over some residual force into objectivism,
but they were useless for other purposes. William Empson, who always got
cross when imagism was around, scolded Hulme for spreading nonsense:
A dog couldn't find its way home across a field if it had nothing in
its head, at a moment of choice, except 'a simultaneous presenta–
tion of two images.' This condition often actually does come to
men lost in the desert, and they know themselves that they must
either break out of it or perish.
Michael Roberts, too, showed that Hulme confused nearly every issue he
touched in science and philosophy. Eliot published Roberts's damaging
essay, "The Categories of
T.
E. Hulme", in
The Criterion,
so he may have
wanted to distance himself from the sage in the end. But he never wavered
on original sin.
The chief merit of Karen Csengeri's edition is that it puts Hulme's
essays in the right chronological order. Read got the order mostly wrong.
Csengeri has also brought out new stuff, thirteen uncollected pieces. There
may still be things missing. "The present edition is the first more or less
complete collection of Hulme's work," Csengeri claims. Her introduction
is helpful, but
I
wish she had recognized the case to be made against
Hulme. Roberts and Empson didn't say the last sharp word.
DENIS DONOGHUE
The Human Condition and the Comic
REDEEMING LAUGHTER:
THE
COMIC DIMENSION OF HUMAN
EXPERIENCE.
By Peter
L.
Berger. Walter De Gruyter. $23.95.
It was W H. Auden who once pointed out that the two most important
things to learn are how to laugh and how to pray. Peter
L.
Berger's reflec–
tions on the nature of the comic effectively bind Auden's categories
together, arguing that laughter is an intimation of redemption and thus an
activity that, at bottom, is profoundly religious. At first glance Berger's the–
sis seems to contradict the received wisdom-from Aristotle
