Romanticism
and Classicism—T. E. Hulme
Explanatory notes—S. Sreekumar
T. E. Hulme [Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917)] was a poet and critic
who had a notable influence on modernism. He was an aesthetic philosopher and
is called the 'father of imagism'. Hulme
was greatly influenced by Henri Bergson1, the French Philosopher.
The imagists and other avant-garde poets
of the period strongly reacted against the vacuity ( blankness) of
late- Victorian poetry2. Hulme was in the forefront of the reaction against
the Victorians. As the secretary of the Poets' Club he got the chance to meet
poets like Ezra Pound. Hulme published only 25 poems totaling some 260 lines,
but his poems like ‘Autumn’ and ‘City Sunset’ have the distinction of being the
first Imagist poems.
Hulme was only 34 when he was killed in the
First World War. From his unpublished papers Herbert Reed edited a volume of
critical essays entitled Speculations. This extract is taken from Speculations.
This piece can be read as the manifesto of imagism
which created a revolution in poetic technique. Pound and Eliot made extensive
use of the ideas expounded by Hulme, especially his recommendation of a dry
hard style of poetry. Hulme is the thinker behind the Pound-Eliot revolution in
English poetry. The essay advocates a preference for Classicism
over Romanticism and establishes a modernist poetics based on that.
[It must be remembered that terms ‘Romanticism’
and ‘Classicism’ are pliable terms.]
·
Hulme speaks about the root of Romanticism
thus: - “…man the individual is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if
you can rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these
possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress”.
·
Hulme defines classicism thus: - “Man
is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely
constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be
got out of him”.
I. Romanticism and
classicism are two different views.
Romanticism says
that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstances. Classicism says that
he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to
something fairly decent.
For Romanticism man’s nature is like a well. For Classicism it is like a bucket.
The Romantic view regards man as a well, a reservoir full of
possibilities.
The Classical view regards him as a very finite and fixed creature.
II. Classical and Romantic ideas and belief in God – an
analogy
Hulme compares classical
idea to normal religious attitude. Belief in God is part of the fixed nature of
man. This belief is as fixed as the belief in the objective world or the belief
in the existence of matter. It is parallel to appetite, sexual instinct and all
the other fixed qualities.
At
certain times these instincts were suppressed either by force or by
rhetoric. This happened in Florence under Savonarola3, in Geneva under Calvin4, and in England under the roundheads5. The inevitable result of suppression is that
it will burst out in some abnormal direction.
So is with religion. “By the perverted
rhetoric of rationalism if religion is suppressed, the instincts that
find their normal outlet in religion will come out in another way.” You
don’t believe in God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t
believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words
you get Romanticism”. Hulme gives an example: “It is like pouring a pot of
treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best
definition I can give of it, is spilt religion”.
III Classical
and Romantic in Verse
A particular convention of art is like organic life. It grows old and dies. There was an extraordinary
flowering of poetry during the Elizabethan period. The discovery of the blank
verse was one of the main reasons for it. It was new and the poets wanted to
play with the new tune. Hulme says,
“Each field of artistic activity is exhausted by the first great artist who
gathers a full harvest from it”. [Hulme seems to anticipate the
Anxiety of Influence theory of late 20th century propounded by
critics like Harold Bloom]
We can argue that poets are
individuals and cannot be made slaves to any particular movement. A poet can be
a classicist or romantic, as he likes it. But no one can stand outside the
age in which he lives. Every poet is governed by the literary history of
the ages that came before him. [ Hulme anticipates Structuralist theories here] Hulme gives the example of Spinoza8 to explain his point. Spinoza said that when a stone fell to the ground
it would think that it was falling because of its conscious effort. Similarly
the amount of freedom a man has is limited. Many acts, which we label as free,
are in reality automatic. [Refer Michael Foucault & Louis Althusser]
IV. The prevalent views
about poetry
·
Hulme
says that romantic poetry is associated with much whining and moaning about
something or other. (Shelley’s
self-pity is the best example. Refer ‘Ode to the West Wind’).
·
The
belief in romantic poetry is so prevalent that any poem, which is dry and hard,
is not considered poetry at all. Verse for them always means the bringing of
some emotion or other. To them, poetry is something that leads them beyond of
some kind. Romanticism has so much changed the reader that without some form of
vagueness poetry is not considered poetry at all. The general tendency is to
think that verse is the expression of unsatisfied emotion. People believe that
verse is impossible without some sentiment. A classical revival appears to them
as the death of poetry. [Eliot had to fight what he called ‘stock responses’. The definition that
‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow’… etc. has done much harm to our critical judgment]
V Classicism, Romanticism and the idea of
beauty
“Classicism
defines beauty as lying in conformity to certain standard fixed norms. The
romantic view drags in the infinite. Art must aim at precise description and
Hulme says that it is a very difficult thing to give a precise description.
Mere carefulness does not bring exactness of expression. The use of language by
its very nature is a communal thing. It never expresses the exact idea. [Hulme anticipates the Deconstructionists of
late 20th century] But what it
expresses is a compromise. Language has its own conventions and special nature.
We can express anything exactly only through concentrated effort.
VI. Hulme’s Prophecy and views on the languages of
prose and poetry
Hulme says “I prophecy that a period of dry,
hard, classical verse is coming”. Hulme’s prophecy was proved accurate by the
poetry of Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot and others. Hulme says that in prose as in
algebra concrete things are embodied in signs or counters, which are moved
about according to certain rules. Poetry can be considered an effort to avoid
this effect of prose. “It is not a counter language, but a visual concrete
one”. It always tries to capture the reader’s attention. It chooses fresh
epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new, and we are
tired of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and
become abstract counters. A poet says a ship ‘coursed the seas’, instead of the
counter word ‘sailed’.
Hulme says, “Visual meanings can be
transferred by the new bowl of metaphor; prose is an old pot that lets them
leak out. Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an
intuitive language. Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose- a
train which delivers you at a destination”.
VII. Hulme’s views on ‘fresh’ and
‘unexpected’.
·
Hulme says that when people praise a poem or a work as ‘fresh’,
they mean that it is good. Hulme says that there is nothing desirable in being
‘fresh’.
·
“Works of art aren’t eggs. Rather the
contrary. It is simply an unfortunate necessity due to the nature of language
and technique that the only way the element that constitutes goodness, the only
way in which its presence can be detected externally, is by freshness”.
Hulme further says that poets have to avoid conventional language to get the
exact meaning. The terms they use may be quite unexpected. Herrick uses the
phrase “tempestuous petticoat” to describe a woman’s dress. Hulme says that it
is an apt expression by one who had carefully observed the movement of a woman.
[Pound’s dictum ‘Make it new’ is relevant here]
VIII. Hulmes opinions on the poetry of the future.
Hulme
says that in the verse to come fancy will be the chief weapon of the classical
school. “…the verse we are going to get will be cheerful, dry and
sophisticated…”. Subjects do not matter for the verse of the future. It may be
the same as in romantic poetry.
Fancy is not mere decoration added to plain speech. Plain speech
is essentially inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors, that is, by fancy, that
it can be made precise. The
Romantic Movement is going to end in the near future. It may be deplored. But
it cannot be helped – wonder must cease to be wonder. It is the inevitableness
of the process.
A literature of wonder must have an end as inevitably as a strange
land loses its strangeness when one lives in it. Wonder can only be the
attitude of a man passing from one state to another; it can never be a
permanently fixed thing.
Dr. S. Sreekumar
NOTES
1. Bergson had great influence on the modernists.
He attempted to redefine the relationship between science and metaphysics,
intelligence and intuition. He wanted to improve the possibilities of thought
through intuition. Intuition alone approached knowledge of the absolute and
real life. Bergson criticized intelligence and made wide use of images and
metaphors in his writing. He avoided using concepts. Bergson argued in The Creative Evolution that
thought itself would never have thought it possible for a human being to swim. For swimming to be possible, man must
throw himself in water, and only then can thought consider swimming as
possible. Bergson considered intelligence as a practical faculty rather than a
speculative faculty. Bergson developed a theory of Duration. He believed that 'human experience is relative, but religious
and ethical values are absolute' [ In
the Modernist Movement, Bergson had great influence and students who want to
study Modernism in detail, must try to get a comprehensive ideal of Bergson’s
philosophy.]
2. Eliot observes that if the music of poetry
exists apart from the meaning there would be poetry of musical beauty which
makes no sense. In the poems of Swinburne and some of the Pre-Raphaelite poets,
sometimes great metrical beauty existed without corresponding gravity of
meaning.
3. Girolamo Savonarola, Dominican friar and
puritan fanatic, became moral dictator of the city of Florence in 1494. He had
a reputation for austerity and learning, and became prior of the convent of St
Mark. A visionary, prophet and formidably effective hellfire preacher, obsessed
with human wickedness and convinced that the wrath of God was about to fall
upon the earth, he detested practically every form of pleasure and relaxation. He
put an end to the carnivals and festivals the Florentines traditionally enjoyed.
In the famous ‘bonfire of the vanities’ in 1497 he had gaming tables and packs
of cards, carnival masks, mirrors, ornaments, nude statues and supposedly
indecent books and pictures burned in the street. Savonarola made many powerful
enemies. Among them was the Borgia pope, Alexander VI. Savonarola and his two
disciples were hanged and burnt to ashes which was thrown into the River Arno
4. John Calvin was an influential French theologian instrumental for the development of the system
of Christian
theology called Calvinism.
Calvinism includes the doctrines of predestination and of the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation of the human soul from death and eternal damnation. He was a tireless polemic and apologetic writer who generated much controversy.
5. Roundhead was the name
given to the supporters of the Parliament of England during the English Civil
War. Also known as Parliamentarians, they fought against Charles I of England
and his supporters, the Cavaliers or Royalists. Roundheads were mostly Puritans.
6. A
thick, sticky dark syrup made from partly refined sugar, a sweet, dark, thick liquid that is used in cooking sweet
dishes and sweets.
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