SOURCE: Ferrall, Charles. “The New Age and the Emergence of Reactionary Modernism Before the Great War.” Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 3 (autumn 1992): 653-67.

[In the following essay, Ferrall examines the New Age and Orage's role in shaping both the modernist political fervor and the debate over the cultural role of art that existed prior to World War I.]

It is well known that the New Age played a vital role in the dissemination of literary modernism and post-Impressionist art in Britain before the First World War. Of the three main polemicists of early modernism—T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis—Hulme wrote almost exclusively for the magazine, Pound wrote a large proportion of his criticism for its pages and Lewis, who described the New Age in 1914 as “one of the only good papers in the country” (“Letter” 319), published some of his early stories in the paper and used its correspondence columns to lash out at his opponents, real or imagined.

But despite its lively interest in such pre-war movements as Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism, the New Age was a paper primarily concerned not with contemporary developments in art and literature, but with politics. Although historians of Edwardian Britain are well acquainted with the fact that the New Age played an important role in pre-war British politics, very little has actually been written about the paper. John Finlay, an historian of the Social Credit movement, maintains that historians have “neglected” the journal because its politics are “so hard to categorize” (83). Rather than attempting any categorization himself, Finlay concludes that “the paper was sui generis, a judgment which would have appealed to its editor,” Alfred Orage (83). Similarly, Wallace Martin, the main literary historian of the New Age, attributes the paper's mercurial politics to its writers' independence from existing political parties and factions. Martin argues that the readership of “the first Socialist weekly in London” (The New Age 5) was comprised mainly of an “intelligentsia” with no particular class or political affiliations (The New Age 8). According to Martin, therefore, the New Age was “independent and neutral with respect to the heterogeneous collection of organizations that then constituted the political left” (Orage as Critic 7).

Contrary to the assumptions of Martin and other historians, I will argue that the New Age was not “neutral” toward the “political left” but actively hostile. Thus if there is any connection between the anti-leftist politics of the paper and the aesthetics of its modernist writers, then we need to reassess the widely held assumption that writers and artists such as Lewis and Pound only became politicized as a result of their response to the First World War. Movements such as Vorticism and Imagism were, I will argue, both part of and influenced by a larger reactionary political culture whose relationship to early modernism remains largely unexplored by literary historians.

The New Age was founded in the year following the landslide victory of the Liberals and their new Labour allies in the 1906 general election. Initially, Orage and the other founding editor, Holbrook Jackson, supported the new government and its progressive and radical allies; after all, both men had been members of the Fabian Society, a political movement which advocated the gradual institution of socialism by means of parliamentary legislation. But by 1911, Orage was criticising the Labour Party for its “flunkey-like dependence upon the Liberal Party” (12 Oct. 1911: 554) and calling upon “Socialists” to boycott elections (8 June 1911: 342). As well as claiming that there was very little ideological difference within parliament between the Tories, Liberals, and Labour, Orage also attacked the institution of parliamentary democracy. At the same time as he was calling for a general strike, Orage was trumpeting: “Down with the Tricolour; by which you understand that I mean the three-headed dog of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” (“Down with the Tricolour” 489).

Orage's hatred of liberal democracy and its institutions derived partly from his antipathy toward a series of legislative reforms which became known as the “New Liberalism.” Essentially, this legislation—which provided for a system of health and unemployment insurance—represented a shift by the Liberal Party away from a nineteenth century ideology of laissez-faire toward a position which recognized the need for the State to take a more active role in ameliorating the conditions of the working class (Hay). For those associated with the New Age circle, the most sustained ideological critique of the New Liberalism was to be found in Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State, a text first published in serial form in the New Age. Maurice Reckitt, a High Churchman and contributor to the paper, thirty years later wrote that “I cannot overestimate the impact of this book upon my mind, and in this I was but symptomatic of thousands of others” (107-108).

According to Belloc, the New Liberalism would produce

a State in which the few are left in possession of the means of production while the many, who are left without such possession, remain much as they were save that they have their lives organized and regulated under those few capitalists who are responsible for the well-being of their subordinates.

(26 May 1912: 77)

The significance of Belloc's argument lies in its refusal to see capitalism and the New Liberalism as ideologies in radical conflict with each other. There is a natural progression, Belloc argues, from nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism to the New Liberalism of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill to the more radical “Collectivism” or “State Socialism” of the government's radical allies. Both socialism and capitalism dispossess the ordinary man of his land and property. Consequently, these political systems are to be contrasted with the European societies of the late Middle Ages when, during the establishment of the “great landed estates” (The Servile State 42) the peasant was “bound in legal theory to the soil upon which he was born (The Servile State 47).

While such attacks were being made upon the government, a wave of unprecedented industrial unrest swept Britain, confirming for those at the New Age that the workers were dissatisfied with the New Liberalism. In 1907 a little more than two million work days had been lost as a result of strikes and lockouts. By 1912 this figure had jumped to a record number of forty million days (Morgan 96 and Read 16). G. D. H. Cole, an Oxford don who began contributing to the New Age in 1914, maintained that

High hopes had been roused by the Liberal and Labour political victories of 1906; but after four years of Liberal government and Labour action in Parliament the workers found themselves economically worse off than before.

(Short History 3: 69)

When combined with an ideological opposition to “State Socialism” or “Collectivism,” this new industrial militancy provided the impetus for the creation, largely within the pages of the New Age, of a political movement called Guild Socialism. Between 1906 and 1912, according to Orage,

The tide of Collectivism … was … too powerful to admit of even the smallest counter-current. Some experience of Collectivism in action and political methods as distinct from economic methods was necessary before the mind of the Labour movement could be turned in another direction. This was brought about by the demand of Labour to control its industry. At the same time that Syndicalism came to be discussed, a revival of trade-union activity took place, and on such a scale that it seemed to the present writers that at last the trade unions were now finally determined to form a permanent element in society.

(Preface v-vi)

Like the Syndicalists, the Guild Socialists had as their goal the institution of democracy within the industrial or economic sphere. Using the Syndicalist slogan “economic power precedes political power,” the Guild Socialists argued that Collectivists were only interested in a worthless “political” or parliamentary democracy. Only when the workers had seized the means of production and taken control of their own labour would political democracy mean anything. To institute this, the Guild Socialists proposed that the existing unions should be turned into autonomous industrial units each of which would have a monopoly on whatever it produced (Glass). As Cole later attested, Guild Socialism

set out, as against both State Socialism and what was soon to be called Communism, to assert the vital importance of individual and group liberty and the need to diffuse social responsibility among the whole people by making them as far as possible the masters of their own lives and of the conditions under which their daily work was done.

(A History of Socialist Thought 246)

As an attempt to theorize the necessary conditions for a participatory democracy, it is hard to see what is politically conservative about Guild Socialism. Yet the influence of Syndicalism, which was so important for the Guild Socialists, was not always of a politically progressive kind. In the translator's introduction to Sorel's Reflections on Violence, which was originally published in the New Age, Hulme argues that Sorel “denies the essential connection” between the working class or revolutionary movement and the ideology of “democracy.” Thus according to Hulme, Sorel is calling for a “revolution” to reinstate “reactionary” values. Although this “liberal” and “democratic” ideology has dominated Western culture since the Renaissance, Hulme does not specify its contemporary English representatives (Speculations 250-251). However, since the Syndicalism of writers such as Sorel was used by the New Age front as a weapon against State Socialism and Collectivism, we can assume that Hulme has the same enemies as his New Age and Guild Socialist colleagues. By championing Sorel, therefore, Hulme is aligning himself with the more radical elements of the union movement and attempting to theorize the ways in which the militancy of the striking workers could be harnessed for conservative purposes.

Although far less politically self-conscious before the war than Hulme, Pound duplicates many of his colleague's political ideas. Like Hulme and the Guild Socialists, Pound places his faith in the militant unions—which alone give him “faith in the future of England and a belief in her present strength”—rather than parliamentary democracy. He concludes that within the House of Commons, “the real division … is somewhere about the gangway, rather than a matter of left and right” (“Through Alien Eyes [III]” 300-301). And speaking through a pseudonym, Pound describes democracy as “the worst thing on the face of the earth” and calls for the abolition of the House of Commons (“On Certain Reforms” 130-131).

Among those at the New Age, this apparently contradictory combination of radical and conservative political ideas was in fact rather typical. Not only was the medievalism of the Guild Socialists and fellow travellers of an often extremely conservative kind (Penty), but the Guild Socialists were aligned, within the pages of the paper, with a reactionary group of writers who believed that Nietzsche would be the cure for the diseases of liberalism and democracy.¹ While advocating a return to an aristocratic society and classical culture, these writers were, nevertheless, as hostile to contemporary conservative institutions and ideology as their Guild Socialist allies. Anthony Ludovici, for example, argued that the English aristocratic “stock” was “degenerate” because it had been “breeding” with “commercial magnates” and “plutocrats” since 1688 (403-407). As a consequence, the House of Lords responded to the 1911 Parliament Act, a bill designed to curb the Lords' power, with “remarkable meekness,” even assisting “its opponents in fleecing it of its legitimate rights” (31). But the even more profound cause of contemporary degeneracy was not capitalism but Christianity. The latter, they argued, lay at the root of all “slave” revolts. As Oscar Levy expresses it,

Christianity has preached for two millennium that all men are equal, Protestantism has taught for four centuries that everyone is his own priest, democracy has given for a hundred years votes and privileges to this priestly congregation.

(“A Book” 89)

Opposing all forms of emancipatory politics, the Nietzscheans believed that a healthy society should be rigidly hierarchical, predominantly agricultural, and either pagan or Catholic. J. M. Kennedy, one of the mainstays of the New Age, even advocated an actual slave society in which the slaves would be “trained to submit themselves as ‘property’ although allowed the compensatory privilege of ‘Socialistic Sunday-schools’” (Quintessence 101).

Most of the writing of the Nietzscheans was, to say the least, extremely crude philosophically. For this reason more than any other Hulme, Lewis, and Pound were nearly always scathing in their references to them. Hulme defended the new post-Impressionist art against the attacks of Ludovici (Further Speculations 108); Pound refers to the “Neo-Nietzschean chatter” of pre-war London in Mauberly; and Lewis, in his 1915 Preface to Tarr, writes that

Nietzsche's books … have made “aristocrats” of people who would otherwise have been only mild snobs or meddlesome prigs … they have made an Overman of every vulgarly energetic grocer in Europe. … The modern Prussian advocate of the Aristocratic and Tyrannic took everybody into his confidence. Then he would coquet: he gave special prizes. Everybody couldn't be a follower of his! No: only the minority: that is the minority who read his books, which has steadily grown till it comprises certainly … the ungainliest and strangest aristocratic caste any world could hope to see.

(15)

Yet with his reference to the democracy of “energetic grocer[s],” Lewis duplicates the kind of snobbery of which he accuses Nietzsche's “vulgarisers.” Furthermore, the character Tarr describes himself as “the new animal; we haven't found a name for it yet. It will succeed the Superman.” Although Tarr is immediately deflated by the reply of his companion, Anastasy—“Jean-Jacques Rousseau. = Kiss me” (307)—his earlier reference to “the Artist himself, a new sort of person; the creative man” (29) is met with no such irony. Lewis was a little more honest thirty-five years later when he confessed that “Nietzsche was … the paramount influence, as was the case with so many people prior to world war i” (Rude Assignment 128). Similarly, Pound's assertion in 1914 that “The aristocracy of entail and of title has decayed, the aristocracy of commerce is decaying, the aristocracy of the arts is ready again for its service” (“The New Sculpture” 68), if not directly inspired by Nietzsche, was certainly typical of the kinds of artist-as-aristocrat cant which writers such as Orage, Ludovici, Levy, and Kennedy believed Nietzsche's philosophy justified.

Such Nietzscheanism had more in common with the Guild Socialists than merely an opposition to capitalism and parliamentary democracy. For example, A. E. Randell, one of the full-time staff at the paper, argued that the guild system was essentially “aristocratic” because it conceived of society as an organism. There could be no place for “liberty” and “equality” within such an aristocratic society because the individual's exercise of such rights would only lead toward “democratic despotism” and “anarchy” (512). Of course such conceptions of the organic society were not the invention of the New Age. Raymond Williams has shown how the organic model of society has been used, since the late eighteenth century, by socialists and conservatives as “the basis of an attack on the conditions of men in ‘industrial production’ … and on the claims of middle-class political democracy” (140). But by the time such a tradition culminates in the politics of the New Age, it has become antithetical to any kind of liberalism. Writers such as Ramiro de Maeztu, for example, advocated replacing the “abstract” rights of the French Revolution with “objective rights” which would be entirely conditional upon the individual's function within a hierarchically structured social organism. Not only can there be no formal equality among the members of such a society (such equality would cut across and transcend the fine gradations of the social hierarchy), but there can be little tolerance of any kind of social heterogeneity or difference. Thus the New Age writers were extremely nationalistic and, after August 1914, their support for the war against Germany bordered on the jingoistic.

Many of the Guild Socialists and Nietzscheans seem to have taken the organic society metaphor almost literally. Because they habitually reduced the social sphere to the realm of biology, the New Age writers were usually favorably disposed toward most varieties of eugenics. Orage did attack the eugenicists for concerning themselves with biological “Supermen” rather than with spiritual elites and aristocracies (“The Superman” 107), but most of his colleagues were less discriminating. Levy, for one, claimed that Nietzsche was a greater advocate of eugenics than Francis Galton and explained that

A believer in race is no longer a Christian in the old sense of the word. On the contrary, he that interferes with the humble, the miserable, the bungled, the botched, the feeble-minded, and their offspring is the most deadly sinner against the spirit of a religion that was invented, that stood, and still stands, for the survival of all the lower types of humanity.

(“The Nietzsche Movement” 205)

Another ugly feature of the New Age's politics was its anti-Semitism. Just about every issue of the paper featured anti-Semitic articles, stories, and poems of some kind. Most of this material characterizes the Jews as rootless, cosmopolitan and over-represented in finance and international capitalism. Some did argue that the economic power of the Jews was not disproportionate to their numbers (Orage, “The Folly of Anti-Semitism” 449), but most agreed that the Jews were an alien presence within the body politic. Orage, for example, recounts the following anecdote:

A Jew of ancient lineage recently said to us: “I trace my descent from Benjamin; who am I that I should marry into an upstart race? If his arrogance amused us, we also admired it. We thought that we too belonged to “No mean city”; that our own race might, after all, deteriorate by intermixture; that racial destiny, whether for Jew or Gentile, was a sacred thing and best developed to final purpose in purity of blood and spirit.

(“The Folly of Anti-Semitism” 449)

Statements by Pound before the war to the effect that artists should “be done with Jews and Jobbery” and “SPIT upon those who fawn on the JEWS for their money” (Lewis, Blast 1 45) were not out of place within such a cultural milieu.

For those such as Orage the social organism must not only protect itself against alien cultures but also strictly regulate its internal hierarchies. For this reason, the demands for political equality then being made by the Suffragists were strongly resisted by all the major contributors to the paper. In a symposium on Women's Suffrage conducted by the New Age in early 1911, Ludovici captured the spirit of this reactionary counter-attack: he is, he informs the reader, “entirely in favour of women's suffrage. Truth to tell only women ought to vote; only women do vote” (Carter 6). Pound, who expressed considerable ambivalence toward the Suffragist movement (Bush 353-371), repeats this “joke” two years later when he reports that he once told an American woman who was asking for the vote that “if you really want a vote, for heaven's sake use mine. I, perhaps, will have cast the ballot for you, but that's only the mechanical process” (“Alien Eyes IV” 324). For both Ludovici and Pound, in other words, the democratization of society is synonymous with its feminization.

The threat to social identity which such a feminization of society represents is well illustrated by Orage's series of short stories titled “Tales for Men Only.” Most of the stories are about a small group of men who form a “circle of equals” for the discussion of metaphysics, art, and other highbrow subjects. Stricken by the “sentimentality” of a woman, one of the group's members will attempt to introduce her into the male cabal. Of course, the group cannot operate properly with an “inferior” and “alien” woman present. The situation is usually resolved by the narrator's initiation of the fallen member into some branch of mystic knowledge. The initiate is either saved, in which case he gives up all serious ties with women, or he is lost to be “submerged by the flood of sex” (“Another Tale” 517). Like the Nietzscheans, Orage identifies the threatening otherness of women with the forces of democracy. Although the men have formed “a circle … closed against the mob” (“Another Tale” 518), it appears to Orage's narrator that they have “only just survived the flood of sex-infatuation that has submerged Europe since the French Revolution” (“A Tale” 445). As his metaphors and imagery of flooding suggest, Orage believes that liberal democracies level social hierarchies and dissolve the necessary boundaries between self and other, artist and mob, male and female.

As Orage's presentation of such anti-democratic sentiments in a fictional form would suggest, the political sympathies of the New Age writers were often aligned with strong aesthetic preferences. Alan Robinson has demonstrated how the promotion of “classical” aesthetics by critics such as Hulme, Ludovici, and Kennedy originated in the “political polemics of 1911” (117) and was synonymous with support for the defeated Lords or for Tory and radical right politics in general. Because these critics habitually equated “artistic styles” with desirable or undesirable social structures, “romantic” art was simplistically equated with liberal politics (90).

What has not yet been fully investigated, however, is the connection, not between classical aesthetics and conservative politics, but between the rejection of realism and the kinds of politics we find in the New Age. The three most prominent writers in Britain before the war—H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Arnold Bennett—were all closely aligned with the broad leftist coalition that the New Age dedicated itself to attacking. Since these writers were all “realists,” the aesthetic stance of the New Age was therefore strongly anti-realist.

Interestingly, Wells, Shaw, and Bennett had initially supported the paper. Shaw, with another backer, provided £500 to launch the paper and, like Wells, contributed articles on Socialism. An ideological rift between the Socialists and the New Age became apparent very early when Orage orchestrated a debate at the end of 1907 between, on the one hand, Shaw and Wells and, on the other, Belloc and Chesterton on the respective merits of a centralized Socialist state versus a society of small landowners. After the exchange with Belloc and Chesterton, Wells and Shaw never again wrote for the paper. Bennett continued to write his literary column until 1911, when he completely broke with the New Age after being violently abused by J. M. Kennedy.

That an attack upon the politics of those on the left such as Shaw, Wells, and Bennett should imply opposition to certain kinds of writing was obvious to all, including Pound. Pound argued that parliamentary democracy was represented in the world of letters by “your Bennett and Wells, your shopkeepers in ‘The realm of books’” (“Alien Eyes III” 300). The link between realism, Socialism, and parliamentary democracy is in fact as explicit in Pound's writing of this period as it is for any of the New Age writers. Referring to John Galsworthy, another politically progressive writer sympathetic to Socialism, Pound writes in 1914 that

It suits the convenience of our rulers that we should believe in voting, in suffrage as a universal panacea for our own stupidities. As a syndicalist, somewhat atrabilious, I disbelieve vigorously in any recognition of political institutions, of the Fabian Society, John Galsworthy, and so on.

(“Suffragettes” 254)

Orage's main criticism of the socialist realist writers was that they “reproduced” rather than “represented” the degraded conditions of modern society:

Contemporary life is almost always vulgarising. At least it does not offer a sufficient range of stimulus to the noble life. … My complaint is that our modern novelists, far from contributing to the nurture of imaginative minds, poison us all with the commonplace, reflecting and dull reproductions of just such persons, conditions and circumstances as imagination seeks to avoid.

(“Modern Novels” 204)

The main function of the writer, Orage argued, was to mount some kind of “resistance” to contemporary vulgarity and resurrect the “heroic” values of the past (“Modern Novels” 204). Instead, he lamented, contemporary artists “positively brag about their income” or, like Shaw, their “popularity” (“Money-Changers” 35). But except for the “classics,” according to Orage, “popular literature is a contradiction in terms. … The value of art is inversely as the sum paid for it” (“Money-Changers” 35). As a consequence, art is engaged in a perpetual battle with “journalism,” “advertising,” and “commercialism” of any kind. But it is precisely to these forces that Wells and Bennett have succumbed. He is “rendered speechless with disgust,” Orage informs us (in his “Readers & Writers” column), to find Bennett “appearing simultaneously in half the rags of London” and “even more offended physiologically” by the kind of “clap-trap” and “stunts” performed by Wells for “advertisement” (12 June 1913: 178). Alternatively, the ulterior motive for such “stunts” could be a political one: in 1911, Orage writes, Shaw is “down among the propagandists” because his drama substitutes for its proper object, the “soul,” the “idea” of voting “Progressive” (“On Drama” 58).

Although Orage and his colleagues attacked the realist aesthetics of progressive and radical writers, their response to the new art of those such as Lewis and Pound was largely ambivalent. Nevertheless, while the New Age writers and the modernists may have differed as to what the new art should be, their criticisms of the realist aesthetic have much in common. Hulme's Worringerian defence of the new “geometrical,” “mechanical,” and abstract art is in many ways Orage's critique of realist writing applied to painting and sculpture. According to Hulme,

You have these two different kinds of art. You have first the art which is natural to you, Greek art and modern art since the Renaissance. You have other arts like the Egyptian, Indian and Byzantine, where everything tends to be angular, where curves tend to be hard and geometrical, where the representation of the human body, for example, is often entirely non-vital, and distorted to fit into stiff lines and cubical shapes of various kinds.

(Speculations 82)

Thus the post-Impressionist and “primitive” artist is driven by the desire “to create a certain abstract geometrical shape, which, being durable and permanent shall be a refuge from the flux and impermanence of outside nature” (Speculations 86). Like Orage, Hulme assumes that the mimetic impulse in art derives from a desire to celebrate the object of representation. Hulme calls this object “nature” whereas critics such as Orage argue that the realist novel “reproduces” a world which, with its “commercialism,” “yellow journalism,” and “advertising,” is socially constructed. However, both Hulme and Orage assume that realist art does not establish a sufficient difference between itself and that which it represents. Such a difference is a mark of the artwork's resistance and opposition to nature or capitalist society. For Orage, true art is “heroic,” or different in stature from the degraded social world, whereas for Hulme the artwork's resistance to nature is measured by its abstraction. In both cases that which is outside of art is chaotic and threatening. Consequently, the art work's difference from this external world is also a form of defence. As Hulme says, art is a “refuge” from “nature.”

We find, therefore, that one of the distinguishing characteristics of classical or post-Impressionist art is its asceticism. In fact, one of the most reliable indicators of a writer's political affiliations during this period is his attitude toward “sex.” Writers such as Wells, according to Orage (“Readers & Writers”), are obsessed with “sex-love” (28 Aug. 1913: 513), whereas classicists treat the lower and degraded pleasures of the body with a suitable disdain. The eponymous hero of Tarr, for example, argues that

There was only one God, and he was a man. = A woman was a lower form of life. Everything was female to begin with. A jellyish diffuseness spread itself and gaped on the beds and in the bas fonds of everything. Above a certain level of life sex disappeared, just as in highly organized sensualism sex vanishes. And, on the other hand, everything beneath that line was female.

(313-314)

The asceticism which derives from such grotesque misogyny, as for all the New Age critics, tends to be more an anxious defence against the world of the flesh than a transcendence of it:

Deadness is the first condition of art. A hippopotamus' armoured hide, a turtle's shell, feathers or machinery on the one hand; that opposed to naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life, along with infinite elasticity and consciousness of movement, on the other. The second [condition] is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside.

(299-300)

These are the same oppositions—flat/three-dimensional, abstract/realist, dead/vital—which Hulme uses to defend the new art. They are in turn regulated by the oppositions of art/life and male/female. Although these terms have almost mythical characteristics, Lewis and Hulme nevertheless invest “life” and “nature” with precisely the qualities which the New Age writers find so characteristic of liberal democracies: both are chaotic, feminine, amorphous, and fluid. Of course, we cannot simply substitute the words “liberal democracy” every time we find the terms “life” or “nature” in the work of these writers. But what I would argue is that the adversarial and elitist culture of early modernism is partly constructed in opposition to the kinds of popular or “middle-brow” culture which the New Age critics found so characteristic of liberal democracies.

Writing about modernist culture in general, Andreas Huyssen argues that the ways in which modernist art rejects realism in favor of abstraction, self-referentiality, experimentalism, and autonomy are not, from about the mid-nineteenth century onwards, without political implications. “Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion,” according to Huyssen, “an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture” (52). Such resistance to mass culture is also a mediated form of resistance to those who consume it—the masses. If modernist art typically figures mass culture as feminine, passive, and emotional, so turn-of-the-century works such as Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd—sections of which Kennedy translated for the New Age—describe crowds as having “feminine characteristics.” The modernist artist's “resistance” to the “seductive lure of mass culture” often betrays a fear of the masses which, during “this age of declining liberalism is always also a fear of woman, a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the mass” (Huyssen 52).

The realist novels of those writers such as Wells were not “mass culture” in quite the sense that Huyssen understands that term. Nevertheless, the implicit literary agenda of the New Age was to draw a political division between what Kennedy describes as “the two publics—one the small artistic public, and the other the great uncultured middle-class public” (English Literature 202). Certainly, Kennedy's “small artistic public” was quite different from that of the Vorticists. The latter, for example, were willing to embrace experimentalism and mechanical rather than organic forms. But the Vorticist artist and Kennedy's classicist oppose very much the same thing. In “Crowd-Master” Lewis identifies himself with the police who “with distant icy contempt herd London” (94). The London crowds, which Lewis describes as a “tide” and as a band of “Suffragette Furies” (94), are being incited to war by the newspapers and advertising posters. Lewis represents the latter as a “crude distillation of 1905 to 1915: Suffragism. H. G. Wells” (95). The newly democratized masses are not only an amorphous and feminine body but also directly associated with the popular and “journalistic” writing of Wells. Lewis is clearly fascinated by this crowd just as his magazine, Blast, enthusiastically experiments with and assimilates the typography of contemporary newspapers and advertising. Yet the sharp lines and jagged edges which he uses in Blast and the paintings of this period can be seen as boundaries of a kind between the frigid world of the aesthetic and the democratic body of the public.

Unlike Lewis, Pound has a far more ambivalent attitude toward the organic world. Nevertheless, his Vorticist aesthetics have much in common with Lewis' anti-realism. Pound maintains that Vorticist art is “interested in the creative faculty as opposed to the mimetic (“Affirmations: Vorticism” 277). Using suitably phallic metaphors, Pound describes such art as “directing a certain fluid force against circumstance, as conceiving instead of merely reflecting and observing” (“Vorticism” 467). The “mimetic” art about which Pound writes is primarily “impressionism,” whose “logical end … is the cinematograph” (“Vorticism” 467), and Futurism. He describes the latter as a kind of “accelerated impressionism” (“Vorticism” 461). Pound's critique of the Vorticists' adversaries, then, is essentially the same as Orage's complaints about both the contemporary novel and post-Impressionist art in general: both passively receive and democratically reproduce all aspects of contemporary reality.

Of course the antirealism of Pound's Vorticist criticism came after his Imagist prescription for the “direct treatment of the thing” (“A Few Don'ts” 202). Pound's insistence on the referential qualities of poetic language during his Imagist period does, obviously, conflict with his later Vorticist polemic for an antirealist, pure, autonomous art. It is not my purpose here to resolve this apparent contradiction—if in fact it can be resolved—but instead to observe that even the Imagist poetics often display the kinds of anti-democratic bias which so characterize Pound's Vorticist writing. When Pound fought with Amy Lowell over control of the Imagist movement, he wrote to her on 1 August 1914, that

I should like the name “Imagisme” to retain some sort of a meaning. It stands, or I should like it to stand for hard, light, clear edges. I can not trust any democratized committee to maintain that standard. Some will be splay-footed and some sentimental.

(Letters 78)

Critics usually assume that adjectives such as “hard,” “light,” “clear,” “precise,” and “accurate”—adjectives which recur obsessively in the criticism of Pound, Lewis, and Hulme—refer to only the formal aspects of the work of art. Yet such descriptive terms always imply, and are often directly contrasted to, a set of opposing adjectives: feminine, sentimental, soft, democratic, and amorphous. If the Vorticist aesthetics of Pound and Lewis are an attempt aggressively to protect art from the levelling effects of liberal democracies, then Pound intends his Imagist poetics to cut through the vulgar, commercialized culture of such a society to what he perceives as a more lasting, and usually “pagan,” tradition (“Affirmations: Analysis”). The insistence by those such as Pound, Lewis, and Hulme on the “hardness” and “clear edges” of the art work can be read as a displaced expression of anxieties about the instability of social identity in a democratizing and modernizing society, a society which was perceived by those at the New Age as blurring “natural” social boundaries and hierarchies.

Such attempts by the reactionary modernists to preserve the purity of art have extremely ambivalent characteristics: the aesthetic sphere is at the same time both antidemocratic and oppositional. This contradictory combination of the elitist and the adversarial is the most significant characteristic which the aesthetics of early modernism have in common with the politics of the New Age front. In 1911 Kennedy, for example, argues that the most prominent thinkers and artists of the past ten years have been “all Liberals, radicals or Socialists: there is not a Conservative among them” (“Tory Democracy” 54). Hulme takes an even more extreme position by maintaining that European culture since the Renaissance has been totally dominated by a radical, progressive, and liberal Weltanschauung. For both Kennedy and Hulme, therefore, a true conservative or reactionary must always belong to the opposition party since the dominant institutions and traditions of contemporary society are progressive and radical. The true conservative, in other words, must be a radical. Not only has democratic ideology achieved a total ascendancy but also modernity has become the dominant European tradition. The attempts by the New Age writers and the reactionary modernists to return to the conditions which prevailed before the French Revolution, the Renaissance, or some other cataclysmic event, mime the revolutionary characteristics of radical advocates of modernity such as the socialists. When modernity becomes a tradition, the conservative nostalgia to return to pre-modernity is revolutionary. That contradictory combination of the traditional and radical, of right-wing politics and experimental aesthetics which characterizes the culture of reactionary modernism is partly the product of a larger culture milieu exemplified by journals such as the New Age.

Note

1. David S. Thatcher, who has written the fullest account of the reception of Nietzsche in Britain, either ignores or condones the extremely reactionary aspects of English Nietzscheanism.

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