SOURCE: "Expressionism and Vorticism: An Analytical Comparison," in Facets of European Modernism: Essays in Honour of James MceFarlane, edited by Janet Garton, University of East Anglia, 1985, pp. 149-74.

[In the following essay, Sheppard examines the similarities and differences between Vorticism and German Expressionism.]

Writing in mid-1914, Ezra Pound indicated that he saw an affinity between Vorticism and Expressionism when he said: "A good vorticist painting is more likely to be mistaken for a good expressionist painting than for the work of Mr Collier", and C.R.W. Nevinson, the English Futurist closely associated with the Vorticist circle, did the same when he referred, in a lecture of 12 June 1914, to "the Expressionists, such as Kandinsky, Wyndham-Lewis [sic], Wadsworth, etc., or Vorticists as I believe the latter now like to be called … ". Sixty years later, the art historian Richard Cork, in his monumental and exhaustive study, pointed out that the "urgency and harshness" of Vorticism were "akin to the excoriating art of the Expressionists", and in an essay entitled "Vorticism: Expressionism English style", the literary critic Ulrich Weisstein extended the comparison, drawing attention to typographical similarities, the importance of abstraction and primitivism for both movements, and the concern of both movements to explore "the instincts and emotions which play around the dark core of life".

Much data legitimizes such comparisons. Even though French art and literature and Italian Futurism made a more dramatic and intensive impact on the Vorticists (belying Weisstein's description of Vorticism as "that Anglo-Saxon offshoot of Expressionism") and even though the Vorticists rarely used the term "Expressionism"—a fact which is not surprising given the same reluctance on the part of the German avant garde during the pre-war years—it is clear, in retrospect, that the English movement owed a certain amount to Germany and its German counterpart.

Several of the Vorticist circle had spent time in Germany. Lewis was in Munich in early 1906 and wrote at least one letter home from the Cafe Stephanie in the Amalienstrasse, the venue of the Munich artistic boheme; Edward Wadsworth's knowledge of German dated from 1906 when he too studied in Munich; Gaudier-Brzeska had also been there in 1909; Pound visited Giessen and Freiburg in Summer 1911; and T.E. Hulme was in Berlin for nine months—probably November 1912 to July 1913—and visited Marburg at least once during that period where he heard a lecture by Hermann Cohen, the foremost Neo-Kantian philosopher ("Erkenntniskritiker") of the time.

From such contacts, their reading of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Weininger and Stirner (who is referred to in Lewis's "Enemy of the Stars" as Stirnir, the author of Einige und Sein Eigenkeit [!]) and various personal experiences, the Vorticists formed a double attitude towards Germany: on the one hand a profound antipathy to official, Wilhelmine Germany, and on the other, an ambivalent receptivity towards the German avant garde who were alienated from that system and of whom, for Pound at least, Heine was a worthy predecessor. The former attitude—a more violent version of which marks Expressionism—is evident throughout the Vorticist period and becomes more pronounced after August 1914. In "Enemy of the Stars", for example, Lewis referred to Berlin as the place of heavy, pestilential, oppressive materiality, and Tarr not only abounds in anti-German sentiment (see especially the Preface to the first edition), but has two of its main characters—Otto Kreisler and Bertha Lunken—stand respectively for German "melodramatic nihilism" and "the kind of Germanic culture encountered in Hauptmann and Sudermann". Pound openly confessed to being "not particularly fond of Germans" and often attacked German Kultur, Bildung and Wissenschaft as a more insidious example of the inhuman tyranny of German militarism. Indeed, in February 1917 he even went so far as to blame "the hell of contemporary Europe" on "the lack of representative Government in Germany, and … the non-existence of decent prose in the German language". And even Hulme, the least anti-German of the Vorticist circle, devoted a considerable amount of space in his essays in The New Age (TNA) and the Cambridge Magazine of 1915 and 1916 to attacking the German "objective-organic view of the state", according to which the state is a "metabiological, spiritual organism… in which the individual forms a part".

At the same time, Lewis, in the "Editorial" to [Blast No. 2 (B2)] also recognized an "unofficial Germany" which "has done more for the movement that this paper was founded to propagate, and for all branches of contemporary activity in Science and Art, than any other country". Had Lewis wanted to acknowledge the Vorticists' debt more precisely, he might well have singled out the painter and theoretician Wassily Kandinsky (referred to by Pound as the "mother" of Vorticism) and the theoretician of abstraction Wilhelm Worringer. The Vorticists would have known Kandinsky's visual work from several sources: he had exhibited twelve engravings and two paintings at the Allied Artists' Association (AAA) salon in 1909; three paintings (including Improvisation 6 (1909) and Komposition 1 (1910)) at the 1910 AAA salon; six woodcuts with an album and text at the 1911 AAA salon; three paintings (Improvisation 29 (1912), Landschaft mit zwei Pappeln (1912) and Improvisation 30 (Kanonen) (1913)) at the 1913 salon; three paintings (Kleines Bild mit Gelb (1914), Studiefir Improvisation 7 (1910) and Bild 1914)) at the 1914 AAA salon, and Sonntag (c. 1904-05) and Zwei Vogel (1907) at the exhibition of German woodcuts in the Twenty-One Gallery in Spring 1914. At least one of the Vorticists, Wadsworth, was intimately acquainted with Kandinsky's treatise on abstraction, Uber das Geistige in der Kunst (which had appeared at Christmas 1911), since he published seventeen translated extracts from it in B1, sixteen of which came from the first half of the chapter "Formen- und Farbensprache". As Cork maintains, Kandinsky was primarily important to several of the Vorticist circle because he helped them towards abstraction. Correspondingly, five of the fourteen passages omitted by Wadsworth from "Formen- und Farbensprache" either allow or advocate the use in painting of empirical objects and Wadsworth's development away from the "speeded-up Impressionism" of Futurism evident in his pictures Radiation, March and Scherzo (1913-14) may well have been connected with his study of Kandinsky's theory. Similarly, although Hulme did not rate Kandinsky's work very highly, he approved of his abstractionism in principle; Nevinson, in "Vital English Art", an article which implicitly used abstraction as the touchstone of modernity, called Kandinsky's three paintings at the 1914 AAA salon "three of the finest modern pictures I have ever seen"; and Lewis (who, according to Weisstein, "never sympathized with Kandinsky's art") not only praised him in an interview as "the chief apostle of absolute abstraction in painting in Europe today" but also, five years later, in The Caliph's Design, that "little vorticist bagatelle", called him "the most advanced artist in Europe … according to the above criterion of 'modernness' [i.e. abstraction]".

There were, however, two other motives behind Vorticist interest in Kandinsky. Wadsworth's choice of extracts from "Formen- und Farbensprache" indicates that he was drawn to Kandinsky's theories of the mystical origins of the innerer Klang, the inner resonance of a work of art, as do his remarks accompanying his translations concerning "cosmic organisation" and "the deeper and more spiritual standpoint of the soul." And Pound, that "ardent Kandinskyan," having read Kandinsky's "chapter on the language of form and colour," found that it confirmed his ideas on the writing of verse. For Pound, Kandinsky's notion of the "innere Notwendigkeit" which generated a work of art corresponded exactly to his own thinking about "the creative power of the artist"—that unconscious psychic drive which produced the completely appropriate image. In other words, Kandinsky's work contributed to the formulation of both sides of the Vorticist aesthetic—the advocacy of hard-edged, abstract form and the concern with primal energy.

From mid-1909 until he went to Berlin in late 1912, Hulme had been an enthusiastic Bergsonian. He translated his Introduction d la metaphysique (which appeared in 1913) and commended him for liberating men from anthropomorphism, the absolute hold of logical reason and a mechanical and deterministic view of the universe. He also expressed his gratitude to him for giving him back a concept of "soul" and a "spiritual view of the world." Hulme's experience of Berlin, the overheated world of its avant garde (described in "German Chronicle") and, most particularly, his discovery of Worringer through reading Paul Ernst's essay "Kunst und Religion" changed all that. Hulme's letter to Marsh indicates that when he first went to Berlin, he knew only of "Einfuhlungsisthetik" which, deriving from the work of Riegl, Lipps and Volkelt, assumed a harmonious relationship between man, the world and art-objects and legitimized a representational art which allowed the beholder to feel himself into the object and at home in the world. Worringer's work, however, (which Hulme, stimulated by Ernst's essay, seems to have got to know only in 1913 since it is not mentioned in the letter to Marsh as featuring in his conversations on aesthetics with Rupert Brooke in late 1912) criticized the Lippsian aesthetic for its anthropo- and ethnocentrism and proposed a different kind of aesthetic—that of "Abstraktion"—as a way of explaining non-representational, non-Western and pre-Renaissance art. According to Worringer such art derived from a drastic sense of not being at home in the world, of being exposed to chthonic, daemonic powers, and represented man's attempt to defend himself against engulfment by means of stable, abstract forms. Worringer's revolutionary notion of "Abstraktion", encountered in the over-heated atmosphere of avant-garde Berlin, had four effects on Hulme. First, it connected with and intensified his sense, already well-developed by his reading of Bergson, that the world was in flux; second, it developed his sense that this flux was chaotic and destructive rather than harmonious and spiritual; third, it made him more open to abstract art; and fourth, it gave him the sense that the era which had produced and was legitimized by "Einfuhlungsästhetik"—the liberal humanist epoch—was coming to an end. The shifts in Hulme's outlook are immediately evident in his publications after his return to England in mid- to late 1913. In "Mr Epstein and the Critics," Hulme, for the first time, announced the end of the post-Renaissance era and declared Epstein's abstract sculpture appropriate to the new age. In "Modern Art I. The Grafton Group," "Modern Art and its Philosophy" and "Modern Art II," Hulme announced the same break-up of the Renaissance humanist attitude, acknowledged his debt to Worringer and proposed an austere, constructive, geometric art. And in "A Lecture on Modern Poetry" delivered in early 1914, he summarized Worringer's views on abstraction and argued that the modern age, being one of impermanence, required a new verse which "resembles sculpture rather than music", which "appeals to the eye rather than to the ear", and which "has to mould images, a kind of spiritual clay, into definite shapes." Thereafter, all Hulme's aesthetic and philosophical writings involved a critique of humanism: Worringer's art-historical distinction had become a polemical weapon.

Although Hulme did not consider himself a Vorticist and was at loggerheads with Lewis, his ideas had an undeniable effect upon the group. First, his insistence on hard, geometric art almost certainly reinforced that tendency to abstraction which was so prevalent among the Vorticists by early 1914; second, his thinking must have strengthened that interest in "primitive" art which was also present by the same date; and third, he must have begun to transmit the conviction—which is, to the best of my knowledge, never foregrounded in the title or substance of any work by any member of the Vorticist group before 1914—that the history of the West was about to undergo a drastic change of direction. The effect of Hulme's reception of Worringer is most evident in the case of Pound. Hulme's demand for hard-edged art was, of course, nothing new to Pound (who had known Hulme since 1909 and who, in his Imagist theorizing of 1912-13, had made just such demands himself). Nevertheless, Pound's essay "The New Sculpture" clearly indicates that he, as a direct result of hearing Hulme's lecture of 22 January 1914, was becoming aware of the cultural-historical implications of those demands. Thus, when Pound wrote that "Mr Hulme was quite right in saying that the difference between the new art and the old was not a difference in degree but a difference in kind, a difference in intention," he implied that he too was beginning to sense the passing of an era, and accordingly, the same essay went on to demand a neoprimitivism in art (which, for Pound, was to be found in the work of Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska). Whereas Futurism had made the Vorticist group more aware of the technologization of the world, but presented this process—reassuringly—as part of a positive, upward movement of history, Hulme's version of Worringer implied that a much more fundamental upheaval was in store for the modern world from which men would need to seek refuge in works of austere, hardedged geometricity, not works which celebrated the flux of modern life.

Had war not broken out, the Vorticists would probably have become even more familiar with and positive about German Expressionism. The Twenty-One Gallery show of modern German art included twelve paintings by Moriz Melzer, two early woodcuts by Kandinsky (see above); one unidentifiable woodcut by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, either a woodcut from Die Kleine Passion (1913) or Grosse Kreuzigung (1912) by Wilhelm Morgner, two woodcuts, two water-colours and a drawing by Max Pechstein; and the woodcuts Ruhende Pferde (1911-12), Trinkendes Pferd (1912), Tierlegende (1912), Tiger (1912) and Schöpfungsgeschichte (1914) by Franz Marc; and Lewis, in the Foreword to its Catalogue, praised the exhibits for their disciplined, brutal austerity (i.e. their approximation to a major aspect of the Vorticist aesthetic). Furthermore, in "German Chronicle", Hulme drew his readers' attention to such Expressionist magazines as Pan, Die weissen Blätter, Der Sturm, Der lose Vogel and Die Aktion; reported on a visit to Kurt Hiller's Cabaret GNU on 24 May 1913 at which items by Ernst Blass, Paul Boldt, Arthur Drey, Alfred Wolfenstein and Hiller himself were read out; reviewed Hiller's Der Kondor (1912), the first and controversial anthology of Expressionist poetry, with particular reference to individual poems by Blass, Else Lasker-Schiller, Georg Heym, Drey and René Schickele; mentioned Werfel's anthologies Der Weltfreund (1911) and Wir sind (1913), Max Brod's anthology Tagebuch in Versen (1910), Shickele's anthology Weiss und Rot (1910), Herbert Grossberger's anthology Exhibitionen (1913) and Alfred Lichtenstein's anthology Diimmerung (1913); and indicated that he had had at least one extensive conversation with Hiller's close friend, the psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld. Overall, Hulme's article—which must have been the first ever to point English-speaking readers towards Expressionist poetry—gives the impression that things are happening in Berlin which, even if not entirely comprehensible to the Englishman, are new, intelligent, aggressive and worth watching. If the Vorticists failed to follow Hulme's pointers, it was probably more because the War cut off their access to the sources than because there was a quality in Expressionist poetry which made it inherently alien to the Vorticists. Had the Vorticists known that combination of formal discipline and apocalyptic violence which marks much of the poetry of, say, Jakob van Hoddis, Heym or Georg Trakl, they would have had no difficulty in assimilating this mode of writing to their own ambiguous aesthetic.

Although Vorticist receptivity towards the German avant garde encourages one to take the initial comparative thoughts further, such an undertaking involves two methodological hazards. First, there is the danger that it will degenerate into a nominalistic exercise in which the critic attempts to define an abstracted concept (i.e. Vorticism or Expressionism) either by drawing up a list of doctrines and surface stylistic traits or by narrowing down the concept to one "essential feature". Where the former approach bedevils much of the copious secondary literature on Expressionism, the latter makes itself felt in the much less numerous discussions of Vorticism. Inevitably, both approaches produce artificial questions (such as those which ask how far individuals are representatives of movements); readings of texts, be they literary or visual, which sacrifice complexity to conformity with abstract definition; and the neglect of historical data. It has to be remembered that "Expressionism" was a label imposed by outsiders and accepted by practitioners (if at all) only relatively late, and that the label "Vorticism" was invented by Pound for the Rebel Art Centre group only a few weeks before the appearance of Blast 1 on 15 July 1914 more as a publicistic slogan than, as was the case with the term "Futurism", the summation of a set of doctrines subscribed to by a closely-knit group. Second, there is the danger—which Weisstein did not entirely avoid—of presenting the two movements as static and self-contained. The two labels apply to phenomena which were both dynamic and diverse. Even Vorticism, which, unlike Expressionism, was small, geographically concentrated and relatively short-lived, underwent a change after the outbreak of war, and there was considerable stylistic diversity not only between but also within the work of the individuals who constituted the two movements.

If then, the two movements are to be compared, it is first necessary to get beyond the reassuring sense of static unity which comes from a reductionist use of their labels, and then to overcome the scepticism about such a comparative project which inevitably arises when the internal diversity, previously concealed by those labels, is recognized. It then becomes possible to identify and compare the problematics which informed the two movements, and, by locating them in the cultural situations from which they arose, to compare the texts which were created as the diverse and even (self-) contradictory responses to those problematics. By concentrating on the subliminal interplay between problematic and response, such an approach views the resultant texts not as autotelic aesthetic objects but as signifiers of the diverse possibilities generated by that interplay. Concomitantly therefore, the same approach, inasmuch as it concentrates on "libidinal apparatus" rather than surface style, views the two movements not as phases in a linear history of art or literature, but as aspects of that cultural brisure from which European Modernism as a whole arose.

Methodological hazards notwithstanding, the Expressionists and Vorticists shared a very similar problematic. As Lewis said, reviewing the "-isms" of the pre-war years: "In every case the structural and philosophic rudiments of life were sought out. On all hands a return to first principles was witnessed." Basic to that search was the rejection of the norms of bourgeois humanism and of classical or representational art Gottfried Benn's Morgue poems one of which begins: "Die Krone der Schbpfung, der Mensch, das Schwein / geht doch mit anderen Tieren um"; Rob Cairn's statement in Lewis's "The French Poodle" that "Man is losing his significance" Alfred Dbblin's "Ermordung einer Butterblume" which shows the impotence of human arrogance in the face of Nature; Carl Einstein's fantastic novel Bebuquin (1906-09) which is one long inversion of anthropomorphic thinking; Pound's censure of the humanist artist and polemic against the Renaissance the rejection of the anthropocentrism of the Marburg Erkenntniskritiker Hermann Cohen which is common to both Hulme and the early Expressionist Neuer Club the scepticism vis-a-vis the capacities of human reason which characterizes Hulme's writings on Bergson and the irrationalist half of the Neuer Club; Hulme's writings from the months after his return from Germany (see above); Kandinsky's mystical view of art; the Vorticists' machine forms; Marc's paintings and woodcuts which placed animals at the centre of Creation; Gaudier-Brzeska's primitivism and rejection, in his letter of 24 October 1912, of "a badly understood tradition which has always taught blind adoration of the Greeks and Romans"—all, in their various ways, aim, like much of Lewis's major prose fiction from the Vorticist decade, at the subversion of "the humanistic paradigm, the received idea of a pre-existing human nature and the illusions of an autonomous, centred 'self or formal identity."

Conversely, both Vorticists and Expressionists sought, through their artefacts, to envisage a new kind of being—and here, echoes of Zarathustra are audible—in whom the repressed powers of creativity—that "lost reality and … lost intensity" as Pound puts it—are released; who thereby stands out from the masses and who, precisely because he is not the rationally ordered, harmoniously centred self of bourgeois humanism, is capable of living adequately amid the tumultuous, many-layered violence of the modern world. And it was exactly this connection between art and life that Lewis was making when he said, in retrospect, that the "novel alphabet of shapes and colours" created by Vorticism, Cubism and Expressionism "presupposed" (i.e. was the expression of) a "new human ethos".

At the same time as they presented a "creative personality" in print or on canvas, or made statements about "creativity" in their essays and manifestos, both Expressionists and Vorticists implicitly posed four linked questions: Is the irrational power of creativity spiritual/intellectual or natural/animal? Is that power only apparently creative and in reality destructive? Is it related to cosmic forces? And are those forces, assuming that they exist, ultimately patterned or destructive?

Not surprisingly, the possible answers to such questions are bewilderingly diverse. Not only is there no consensus about the answers within either movement, but individual artists will present a "creative personality" only simultaneously to deconstruct that presentation, or, in several texts from roughly the same period, offer answers to such questions which stand in stark contradiction to one another. In Expressionist literature, Walter Hasenclever's play Der Sohn (1913), Reinhard Sorge's play Der Bettler (1911), Georg Kaiser's play Von Morgens bis Mitternachts (1912) and Hanns Johst's play Der Einsame (1917) provide good examples of the former phenomenon. In all four, a hero is presented whose creativity is, at the outset, repressed by a real father, or, in the case of Kaiser's and Johst's plays, patriarchal authority (the bank and smalltown philistinism). And in all four, the heroes seek to release that creativity by a desperate revolt. However, after what seems like initial success (episodes when all four heroes experience a moment of intense, unfettered release of their creative potential), the plays, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, deconstruct the ethos of creative vitalism. Der Sohn shows that ethos leading the son into the hands of politically suspect, right-wing anarchists; exposes it, in the scene with the prostitute, as nothing more than a dressed-up form of adolescent self-dramatization; and, in the final act, shows it bringing the son to the brink of murder (which is avoided only because the father has a convenient heart-attack when the son is about to pull the trigger). In Der Bettler, the same ethos leads the central character to a double murder, and in the other two plays, it brings about the death or ruin of several secondary characters and a state of totally disillusioned, emotional exhaustion in the two central characters (a conclusion which is avoided in the dizzily spiralling Der Bettler only because the action stops before its full implications can be realized). In all four cases, the forces of creativity are shown to be closely related with forces of destruction. One can see the same debate in the inner contradictions of the visual, literary and theoretical work of Kandinsky 1908-14, the various strands of the poetry of Jakob van Hoddis and the prose and poetry of Heym. Although critics have often imposed a unity on Heym's work, it actually points in several directions. Where his early poems and dramas (1908-10) point to the conclusion that the irrational powers driving human nature are basically bestial, destructive and linked with a hostile Fate, some of his stories and poems from 1911 involve a sense that behind the dark stratum of human experience, there lies a spiritual power which points beyond itself to a force in the cosmos that is basically good. In none of the cases cited is it a question of simple "development": various alternatives are juxtaposed—probably without the artist's awareness—and the reader is invited to consider and choose.

The abstract debate within Expressionism about the nature of creativity revolved around that untranslatable word Geist. For Kandinsky, imbued as he was with theosophical ideas, Geist was the creative, metaphysical power behind the cosmos ("das Ewig-Objektive") which also worked in the human personality ("das Zeitlich-Subjektive") to produce art. In contrast, Kurt Hiller, who disliked Kandinsky's mysticism, regarded Geist as something purely human, designating a rational/moral faculty of perception, decision and will. Consequently, in 1918, he engaged in a violent, public polemic with his former friend Fritz Koflka over precisely this issue. Whereas Kofika described Geist in a religious fashion as "die grosse Liebe, die von ausserhalb her die Welt umfangt", Hiller equated the same concept with "Ratio" and described it as that which imposes morally-directed, human control on the irrational, animal parts of the personality and the chaos of Nature. A third position—one which was particularly characteristic of early Expressionism—was most clearly taken by Ludwig Rubiner who, in the immensely influential essay "Der Dichter greift in die Politik," described Geist as the power of "Intensitit", the "Wille zur Katastrophe" which produced "Feuersbrünste, Explosionen, Absprünge von hohen Türmen, Licht, Umsichschlagen, Amokschreien." Where, for Kandinsky, Geist was spiritual and creative, for the pre-war Rubiner it was chthonic and essentially destructive (even if it did provide the experience of "eine ewige Sattigung in einem einzigen Moment"); where, for Hiller, Geist was a purely human faculty, for the Rubiner of the pre-war years it was linked with the violent forces of untamed Nature.

The same debate went on among the Vorticists and is particularly evident in Lewis's early prose and drama. Here, shifting perspectives within and on the narratives, ironically detached modes of narration and impeccably Vorticist statements in the mouths of characters whose point of view is suspect or flawed combine to show that Lewis was experimenting with psychological and metaphysical attitudes rather than maintaining one dogmatically—a statement which applies to his work both during the narrowly Vorticist period and the decade 1909-20 as a whole. For example, it is clear that Lewis meant at first to celebrate the pre-modern characters of his early short stories (1909-11) as "primitive creatures, immersed in life, as much as birds, or big, obsessed, sun-drunk insects." However, these stories became progressively darker over the two years until, in the last of them, "Brobdingnag," Lewis shows how easy it is for happy, primitive "naturalness" to tip over into murder and insanity, and the story (which, significantly perhaps, was Lewis's last piece of prose fiction to be published for three years) ends: "I felt, in quitting Kermanec, that the shadow of doom had fallen upon this roof ". Possibly as a result of this conclusion, Arghol, the central figure of "Enemy of the Stars," is the complete antithesis of the early "primitives". In Arghol, Lewis has created a being whose creative principle is not an earthy vitality, but a cold, white, brutal, intellectual will. Arghol has set himself against the threat posed by chaotic Nature and deliberately expunged the (associated) female side of his personality. At first, it seems that Lewis is unambiguously celebrating this monster (who is so akin to the typically Vorticist man-machine), but the values that he stands for are called into question when Hanp, his "half-disciple" in whom there is still a "deep female strain," murders him out of resentment at his massively male authority—whereupon the "relief of a grateful universe" becomes audible. "Enemy of the Stars" is as much a critique as a celebration of Arghol (and, by implication, the notion of creativity as hard-edged, monumental will): the play shows the self-destructiveness of Arghol's way of life even while setting it up as an ideal.

If Lewis's early stories and Vorticist play provided the two poles of the problematic, his prose fiction of the first two war years complicated it. Tarr, written during the Vorticist period and before the Great War had made its impact, is, to some extent, a restatement of what Lewis had already said. Otto Kreisler, "the place of archaic regression" is a more extreme version of Lewis's early primitives, whose self-destructiveness forms its own critique. And Tarr himself, whose very actions are heavy and machine-like, who finds the flesh and the female repugnant and who preaches a view of creativity based on the ascetic intellect and will, is similar in type to Arghol. And as with Arghol, Lewis offers an implicit critique of what Tarr stands for: despite his repugnance, he has an affair with Bertha, a heavily fleshly, Romantic German Maiden; he comes across as an "emotionally shallow" and "boorish young man"; he hardly ever seems to produce any art of note despite his claim to be an artist; his name, Sorbert [Sorbet] Tarr, with its implications of black stickiness and melting sweetness, fits ill with the icy clarity he professes and makes him more than slightly comic; and in the second half of the novel, he succumbs to the sensuality of Anastasya who completely overturns all the ideals he had earlier professed. Lewis, even while putting ideas into Tarr's mouth, deconstructs them through his presentation of the total character. Consequently, within the context of Vorticism, Tarr can be read as a critique of the two extreme notions of creativity with which that movement is associated. On the one hand, Tarr is frequently depicted, in the first part of the novel, as an amalgam of machine-parts, a hard-shelled, mechanical automaton whose actions are not governed by a personal pronoun. As such, he is reminiscent of the inhuman beings to be found in Lewis's pictures of the same period and the change he undergoes through the agency of Anastasya clearly implies the unacceptability of that ideal of personality. On the other hand, Kreisler's name derives from the German word for a spinning-top, "Kreisel", an image which relates directly to the notion of the Vortex as that is depicted in Blast—"stable and self-contained, yet suggesting whirling concentrations of energy … spinning in space on an unshakeable axis." Clearly, the fact that Kreisler destroys himself indicates that Lewis had reservations about the Vorticist ideal of energy as well. Nevertheless, having shown the limitations of both hard-edged form and unconstrained energy, Tarr explores a third possibility in Anastasya (whose name comes from the Greek word for "resurrection"). In her, the extremes of intellect and energy—Apollo and Dionysos—have been fused into a being who is whole, balanced and self-possessed without anarchy or egotism. Although Lewis offers no label for the creative drive which impels her and makes her so special, it is very different from the angular violence hymned in the pages of Blast and points beyond the "conflictual organization" of the rest of the novel and, indeed, of the Vorticist movement as a whole.

The same debate about the nature of creativity is continued and made more complex elsewhere. "The French Poodle" is not certain whether men are driven by a power which is the same as or different from that which drives animals, whether the spontaneity of animal nature is higher or lower than that of the creative force behind human nature, and whether war is a product of the vital forces of Nature, the animal powers in man or a perverse destructiveness that is peculiar to man. "A Young soldier" is uncertain whether to admire or condemn the vital urges in a young soldier glimpsed in the Tube, depicting him as a Nietzschean blond beast, "a born warrior, meant to kill other men as much as a woman is meant to bear children". Similar ambiguities are evident in the two narratives which involve Cantleman, another of Lewis's personae. In "The War-Crowds 1914" (part of an unpublished book written in July-August 1914, some of which appeared as a variant entitled "The Crowd Master"). Cantleman is presented as yet another, lesser Arghol who, despite his cerebral detachment, permits himself to experience the "female" enthusiasm which drives the crowds in Trafalgar Square at the outbreak of war. This does nothing for him, however, and confirmed in his previous beliefs, he rejects the female even more emphatically for the superior, male, intellectual detachment of "the stone Nelson" on his column. In "Cantleman's Spring-Mate", however, written three years later, this version of the creative personality is deconstructed. After a vision of lush, natural fecundity (a passage which, in its sensuality and freedom from narrative irony, is unlike anything else in Lewis's early prose and in which the procreative urges in man are derived unequivocally from the powers of Nature), the previously aloof Cantleman makes a country girl pregnant. So far, as Materer says, this is a straightforward case of "ironic defeat", but then, to complicate matters, Lewis links the sexual drive with the War, concluding: "And when [Cantleman] beat a German's brains out, it was with the same impartial malignity that he had displayed in the English night with his Springmate": clearly, in terms of this story, to succumb to Dionysos is as dangerous as to ignore him. In none of these shorter pieces, however, is there a figure like Anastasya: their multiple ambiguities are presented and the reader is left to puzzle further.

A similar process is implicit in the three visual styles of the illustrations of Blast. Moving as they do between representationalism and abstraction; balance and imbalance; violently and less obtrusively imposed form, they are at one level visual attempts to get beyond anthropomorphism and, at another, visual responses to the question of how far rigid form needs to be imposed on natural energy. The same problematic underlies Gaudier-Brzeska's diverse sculptures of 1914. On the one hand, hard-edged Vorticist works like Bird Swallowing a Fish and Toy imply the necessity of subjecting chaotically violent Nature to humanly imposed form, but on the other hand, vitalistic works like Stags and Birds Erect imply that Nature, which may seem chaotic to the conventional eye, has its own inherent principle of organic form which the artist must learn to perceive and reproduce. The same applies to Ford Madox Hueffer's "The Saddest Story" (a chapter from his novel The Good Soldier) and Rebecca West's "Indissoluble Matrimony" in Blast 1. Neither Hueffer nor West were Vorticists in the reductionist or doctrinal sense, but Lewis must have perceived that both pieces bore on the problematic which exercised his circle. The former piece is a relatively straightforward investigation of the nature and effect of the passional, sexual energies on the excessively civilized, humanized world of polite society, but the latter piece is much more complex. Here, an enfeebled, excessively cerebral petit-bourgeois is seized by the violence of Nature (personified by his "over-sexed", quarter-negro wife). As a result of swimming at night in the "Devil's Cauldron", they both turn into completely primitive beings who nearly murder each other. Clearly, "Indissoluble Matrimony" is both an implicit critique of the male who has done violence to the female in himself (and on whom, therefore, the female inevitably takes revenge), and a statement about the close relationship between the creative, sexual urge and the destructiveness of inhuman Nature. Like Lewis in his war-time stories, West shuns a simple resolution, leaving the reader to find his own way between a series of polar suggestions about the nature of creativity which are both antithetical and complementary.

The Vorticists' theoretical statements on the same subject are similarly complex. To take one detailed example only: throughout the years 1909-1918, Pound veered between an immanentist view of creativity which locates the source of that power in human nature or a human tradition, and a more mystical neo-Platonism. And in the more strictly defined Vorticist period, he veered between a view of creativity as an ordered, spiritual, pythagorean power (hence the mathematical imagery in "Vorticism [1]") and a violent, cathonic, barbarian power (cf "The New Sculpture"). Nor will one find Pound making any consistent statements about Nature during this period. Sometimes, like Lewis in "A Review of Contemporary Art," he writes as though Nature were inherently patterned, commends Chinese geomancers for their intuitive sense of that patterning and counsels the modern artist to seek it out and reproduce it abstractly in his work. Sometimes, however, he writes as though Nature were pure chaos and implies that the artist's task is to impose form upon that chaos. Pound is typical of the movement as a whole: like the Expressionists—and this is the major similarity between the two movements—the Vorticists were collectively agreed that a lost principle of creativity must be recovered, but differed widely over the nature of that power and the proper relationship between it and humankind. Accordingly, while the Vorticists' machine aesthetic of hard-edged forms is characteristic of many of their explicitly programmatic statements and foregrounded in many of their artworks, it is not the whole picture but simply one product of a more fundamental debate, the innermost terms of which have to be discovered at a much more subliminal level.

The above debate did not go on in abstraction. Rather, the terms in which it was conducted were closely bound up with the cultural-historical situations of the two movements. These differed in three important ways. To begin with, most Expressionists were born (in the 1870s and 1880s) into a society which was largely agrarian and semifeudal; grew up in a society which was changing its nature at an unprecedented rate; and achieved maturity in a society which was centered on large, industrialized cities. In contrast, the Vorticists were active in a society where the same process had been going on gradually, over the best part of a century, so that industry and machines seemed an accepted, "natural" part of the landscape rather than anything drastically new. As Lewis claimed to have told Marinetti: "We've had machines here in England for a donkey's years. They're no novelty to us." Second, by 1914, the very nature of the emergent social and economic order in Germany stood in clear contradiction to the highly authoritarian, rigidly stratified institutions by which it had been uneasily, not to say forcibly, contained. In contrast, Liberal England did not suffer from the same sense of inner contradiction even if, in reality, that contradiction was there. Having come about more slowly, industrialization had been assimilated with greater ease, and the English ruling class, more adaptable than its German counterpart, had, to a markedly greater extent than in Germany, succeeded in taking the new monied classes into itself: despite the Feinians and Suffragettes, English society seemed to be in a state of harmonious evolution, not inner contradiction. Third, partly because of the rate of social change and partly because of the brevity of its existence as a nation, Wilhelmine Germany was haunted by a sense of historical impermanence, the paradoxical symptom of which was the exaggerated monumentality of so many of its institutions. English institutions, however, had never seemed so unselfconsciously secure, supported as they were by centuries of unbroken tradition and the wealth of a still submissive Empire.

As a result, the basic experience of the Vorticists differed from that of the Expressionists in several important respects. To begin with, the early Expressionists suffered from a threefold sense of oppression. At one and the same time, they felt cut off from a living past, oppressed by the huge weight of static, authoritarian institutions above their heads, and threatened by the violence which they perceived in the mushrooming cities. This threefold sense explains why so much of their most typical poetry consists in a collage of simultaneous impressions rather than a diachronic narrative; why the father (who, in their imaginations, was a hypostatized amalgam of the old authority of semi-feudal Prussia and the new authority of the successful capitalist) was such a major problem in their writings; why so many of their paintings and poems evince such a powerful sense of apocalyptic violence and why, in order to find roots, so many of them identified so readily with mythicized worlds, which were geographically or historically as far removed from the present as possible. In contrast, the Vorticists evinced a strong sense of standing within a well-grounded social continuum which had become stodgy and sterile rather than static and oppressive and whose modern manifestation—the mechine age—was exciting rather than threatening. The whole of Pound's critical and poetic work during the Vorticist years (i.e. until he lost faith in England and moved to Paris) was rooted in a confidence that English social institutions, although in a bad way, could be revitalized by the power of art. Accordingly, for Pound, the Vorticists were the radical inheritors of a tradition which was basically good but temporarily sterile and it was in this spirit that he proclaimed: "The futurists are evidently ignorant of tradition … We [the Vorticists] do not desire to cut ourselves off from the past" and: "The vorticist has not this curious tic for destroying past glories." Similarly, as late as Blast 2 (July 1915), Lewis could not envisage England losing her Empire which, in his view, was the "one thing that would have deeply changed her" and could confidently assert that "life after the War will be the same brilliant life as it was before the War." Accordingly, it is significant that of the Vorticist circle, only Hulme, primarily as a result of his exposure to Berlin, lost this sense of social continuity to any marked degree during the Vorticist period itself. Where his articles on Bergson from late 1911 proclaim the continuity of history, its "fixity and sameness," his post-Berlin articles imply that the present has somehow become detached from the past until, in late 1915, he could write quite explicitly: "One of the main achievements of the Nineteenth Century was the elaboration and universal application of the principle of continuity. The destruction of this conception is …an urgent necessity of the present."

In contrast, the early Expressionists had an ambiguous relationship with their society: although oppressed by and alienated from it, they were also, as good Bürgersohne, dependent on and eager for recognition by it. And it was precisely this ambiguity which generated the violence of their social attitudes such as is to be found in Sorge's Der Bettler or Hasenclever's Der Sohn. This signified on the one hand a desire to smash the source of oppression, and, on the other, a resentment against a patriarchal society for failing to give them proper recognition. The Vorticist circle, however, had a much less polarized relationship with literary and artistic London and certainly did not feel so oppressed by English social institutions. Indeed, some of them even gained the entree for a while to the highest social circles. Lady Cunard wanted them to design little presents for the rich and influential guests attending a dinner in honour of George Moore, asked Lewis and Nevinson to lunch, invited Lewis to share her box at Covent Garden and expressed her admiration for one of Cuthbert Hamilton's pictures. Lady Muriel Paget wanted the group around Lewis to design avant-garde tableaux vivants for a Picture Ball at the Albert Hall and Nevinson recalled being invited to dine by Lady Lavery and Lady Constance Hatch. In late 1913, Lady Drogheda commissioned Lewis to decorate her dining-room and he later recorded that, after the publication of Blast 1, coronetted envelopes showered into his letterbox and that, at one of Lady Ottoline Morrell's gatherings, he met the then Prime Minister, Mr Asquith, whom he was able to reassure about the a-political nature of Vorticism! Even though the less socially acceptable members of the Vorticist circle—Epstein the American Jew, Pound the professional Bohemian, Bomberg the East End Jew and Gaudier-Brzeska the wild Frenchman—may well have disapproved of such contacts, none of them seems to have known that acute sense of social alienation which characterized German Expressionism. Conversely, one cannot imagine the German counterpart of English polite society extending the same kind of invitation to, say, Kurt Hiller, Emil Nolde, Herwarth Walden or Ludwig Meidner!

In consequence, where a prophetic or revolutionary stance came naturally to the Expressionists, the Vorticists, for all their apparent radicalism, rarely used the word "revolution". Affectionate if violent rebels, they existed much more within the given social institutions and did not feel the need to smash them because they did not feel trapped by them to anything like the same extent. Thus, in Blast 1, England is blasted and blessed (a series of texts for which there is no parallel in German Expressionist magazines), its institutions are attacked and enjoyed. Where the Expressionists looked for an apocalypse that would sweep everything away and initiate a society which was qualitatively different—an attitude encapsulated in Rubiner's "Der Dichter greift in die Politik"—the Vorticists, while accusing English society of being dead, had a much greater faith in its ability to resurrect itself without violent upheaval. Lewis wrote, for instance: "Optimism is very permissible. England appears to be recovering" and advocated a modification (not a revolutionizing) of the national temperament. Pound liked London, describing it on 18 March 1914 as "the only sane place for anyone to live if they've any pretence to letters" and until he went to Paris, continually expressed his faith in "the power of tradition, of centuries of race consciousness, of agreement, of association" to renew the arts and society. Right in the middle of the Vorticist period, Pound even described what was happening in present-day England as a "renaissance, or awakening" (i.e. of what was dormant in the tradition) not as a cataclysmic irruption of powers from outside into that tradition. And Blast, its radical clangour notwithstanding, presented England optimistically, as a "lump of compressed life," and the machine age as the continuation rather than the antithesis of an older social tradition, in which the vitality that had moved past epochs was still active. Although the Vorticists felt that violent movement was occurring beneath the placid surface of English society, they also felt, with the exception of Hulme after his return from Berlin, that that movement was taking English society in the same direction in which it had been moving before the sterility of the late Victorian epoch had intervened. In contrast, the Expressionists had an acute sense that violent forces were about to blow their society apart. As Heym remarked to Friedrich Schulze-Maizier in early 1910 as they walked home at night through the streets of Berlin: "Nun schauen Sie sich das einmal an. Wie gehetzt, wie hohl, wie gottverlassen! Das kann nicht bleiben, das muss zugrundegehen. Irgend etwas Ungeheures muss kommen, ein grosser Krieg, eine Revolution oder sonst etwas. Aber nur nicht so weiter!" Accordingly, when Pound came, on 15 November 1918, to describe the events of the Vorticist years, he remarked: "As for the 'revolution', we have had one here during the war, quite orderly [my italics], in the extension of the franchise. Nobody much minds there being several more." The double irony is evident: not only has a revolution not taken place, but Pound is actually more than a little pleased that this should have been so. There was a tacit collusion between English society and its aesthetic radicals: on the one hand, the Vorticists hurled ideas around that were revolutionary and subversive to a certain degree only while finding support from the stability of the very institutions they purported to be assailing, and on the other hand, established society took those ideas into itself from on high, proving, in the process, its liberalism and their harmlessness. What Lewis said of himself could apply to Vorticism as a whole: "Kill John Bull' I shouted. And John and Mrs Bull leapt for joy, in a cynical convulsion. For they felt as safe as houses. So did I"—an ambivalence which is also present in the contrast between the stable, realist setting of Tarr and the expressionistoid antics of its central figures. In Germany, however, there was not the same collusion: early Expressionism may have been as socially harmless as Vorticism, but its representatives were never so lionized by the social establishment and genuinely wanted violent social change which, as Korte has put it, was to be the "Inbegriff und Synthese aller Sehnsuichte des entfremdeten, den perhorreszierten Zwangen des Wilhelminismus ausgelieferten Subjekts nach Vitalitait, exzeptionellen Erlebnissen, Erfuillung, Verwirklichung und Identitat."

Because of their differing cultural experiences, Nietzsche was far less important for the Vorticists than for the Expressionists. Whereas, on the whole, the Expressionists received Nietzsche positively, being particularly drawn by his apocalyptic cultural criticism and its counterpart, his ecstatic vitalism, the Vorticists, rooted in an apparently reliable tradition, had less need of this. Although some of them were, for various reasons, drawn to Nietzsche before 1910, their comments became guarded or ambiguous from 1910 to 1913 and hostile from 1914 onwards. Thus, in "Redondillas, or something of that Sort" (c. 1910-11), Pound said that he believed in "some parts of Nietzsche" but suspected him "of being the one modern christian"; Hulme, writing in mid-to-late 1913, associated Nietzsche with a linguistic experimentation with which he was not altogether happy; Pound, writing in Autumn 1913, used the word "Nietzschean" pejoratively; in Blast 1, Lewis associated Nietzsche with Marinetti's "war-talk, sententious elevation and much besides"; on Lewis's own admission, Nietzsche was "another and more immediate source of infection" for the ironically distanced Tarr in general and the negatively presented Kreisler in particular; in Blast 2, Lewis connected Nietzsche with ecstatic war-fever and the absurd Beresin of "The War Baby" (c. 1916) is a caricature of the Nietzschean aristocrat. Precisely because the Vorticists were not haunted by a sense of imminent apocalypse, they could flirt selectively with aspects of Nietzsche's thought without, as so many Expressionists did, having to take his Dionysiac vision of chaos and rebirth seriously as a vitalist gospel of salvation. Thus, when they came to link that vision with Prussianism and the War, they could distance themselves from it with relative ease, as an unfortunate aberration which, as Pound said, was "all very well in conversation"—but not, by implication, in practice.

Given the above situation, Vorticist works differ from Expressionist ones in several major respects. First and foremost, the Dionysiac values—orgiastic sexuality, social apocalypse, natural violence and pan-demonism—are much more prominent in the German movement. In contrast, such elements are either totally absent from works by Vorticists, or present in a muted form, or controlled by strictly imposed form, or subject to a process of humanization. For example, most of Pound's poems from the Vorticist years do not foreground the demonic even when they deal with potentially demonic subjects, and this is true even of those he published in the two Blasts. The (deleted) sexual reference of "Fratres Minores" and the "Goddam" of "Ancient Music" are innocuous compared with the sexuality and obscenity to be found, say, in the poems of Hugo Ball, Lichtenstein and Benn; the satire of "The Social Order" is mild compared with the Germans' vitriolic attacks on the Bürger; and "Et faim sallir le loup des boys" may be contemptuous of family life, but unlike Trakl's "Im Osten" (1914), in which wild wolves burst through the city gates, it contains, despite its title, no ravenous wolves! Apart from Pound's brief flirtation with primitivism in Spring 1914, it is the same with his criticism. Joyce is praised for not "ploughing the underworld for horror" and "presenting a macabre subjectivity" and Pound's version of the god Pan evoked a "bewildering and pervasive music moving from precision to precision within itself "—not the "panic terror" which afflicted so many of the German avant garde. Analogously, although Eliot's poems depict the surreal, empty surfaces of the modern city, they do not conjure up its demonic night-side as do the poems of Heym, van Hoddis and Lichtenstein.

The Vorticists' sense of the controllability of violence is particularly evident in their paintings, woodcuts and sculptures. Where, in the visual Expressionist work, a violent and anarchic background often appears to be about to burst through the lines which roughly and barely contain it, Vorticist visual works, with their thick geometric lines, transmit a much more secure sense that such violence can be contained. The same sense informs Pound's most Vorticist poem, "Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess"; Lewis's Tarr, the potential explosiveness of whose main characters is checked by the firm realism of its city setting and the easy, detached irony of the narrator, and Hulme's vision of flux, which, after his return from Germany, was accompanied by a growing advocacy of rigid artistic, ethical and religious form. Even Hulme's translation of Sorel's Reflexions sur la violence (1916) commends not undirected, but carefully disciplined violence, used for precisely defined ends. Indeed, it was their attachment to form which led the Vorticists to bless the Hairdresser for making "systematic mercenary war" on the "wildness" of Mother Nature!

The Vorticists' tendency to humanize what is potentially demonic becomes more evident after 1914. In Blast 2, it is to be found in Hueflfer's poem "The Old Houses of Flanders" which offers a vision of genteel decay, not violent collapse; Jessie Dismorr's "London Notes" which, despite its Cubist surface, is, apart from the last line, actually a very naturalized picture of London; and Helen Sanders's "A Vision of Mud" which, beginning as a terrifying vision of engulfment, loses its threat when we hear, at the end, that its subject is a health resort. Similarly, the "religious attitude" behind Hulme's theology of 1915-16, far from being akin to Rudolf Otto's sense of the numinous or Karl Barth's sense of demonic krisis, has been reduced to a much more manageable intellectual belief in original sin; and Part I of Lewis's "A Soldier of Humour" evokes elemental and primitive powers only for these to be naturalized into a farce and rendered harmless in Part II.

By the same token, there is no equivalent in Vorticist works for the sense of imminent apocalypse to be found in Kandinsky's pre-1914 paintings and woodcuts, van Hoddis's "Weltende" (1910) or Heym's "Der Krieg" (1911)—and a comparison of Pound's "Meditatio" (c.1914) with Benn's "Der Arzt II" (1912) makes it quite clear that the Vorticists did not share the Expressionists' extreme sense of the animal in man. Consequently, when the Vorticists confronted Expressionist works, it was precisely such elements that they overlooked or played down. Kandinsky's paintings were appreciated for their abstraction rather than their sense of apocalyptic disorder; Lewis, appraising the woodcuts in the Twenty-One Gallery, saw "man and objects subject to him" and thick, blunt, brutal discipline—not the elemental suffering of Morgner's passion scenses, or the dormant animalism of Marc's Ruhendes Pferd, Trinkendes Pferd and Tierlegende, or the apocalyptic creativity of Marc's Schdpfungsgeschichte. Hulme remarked briefly on the "ferocity" of the Expressionist poetry that he heard in the Cabaret GNU, only then to concentrate his account of it on its hard, cerebral and formal qualities. Only rarely do the Vorticists allow the dark, chaotic underworld of Nature and the Unconscious into the foreground of their work—one finds it in the natural violence of "Enemy of the Stars", the description of the Restaurant Lejeune in Part II, Chapter 5 of Tarr, the presentation of primal Nature in "Indissoluble Matrimony" and "Cantleman's Spring-Mate", Pound's single glimpse of the horrors of London's lower depths and Hulme's more developed sense of the chaos in Nature after his return from Berlin. However, such texts (which approach Expressionism in their intensity) are rare, not typical, and accordingly, the extremism of Vorticism is, to a certain extent, deceptive. Pound wrote of Blast: "The large type and the flaring cover are merely bright plumage. They are the gay petals which lure"; and Lewis said in April 1919: "When you leap on to a new continent for the first time you are compelled to make a slight din to frighten away any savages that may be lurking in the neighbourhood". The apocalyptic din of a world tearing itself apart which is to be heard among the Expressionists becomes, within Vorticism, a deliberately induced noise aimed at a world experienced as basically stable: the Vorticist knows of Dionysos and even approaches him, but only appears to let him get the upper hand.

Consequently, where early Expressionist works stress the unreality of the present, being situated in the vacant instant before things blow apart, Vorticism affirms the reality and plenitude of the present; where Expressionist works are torn by extremes, Vorticist works move much more confidently between those extremes; where the "Ich" of the Expressionist artist is continually attracted by mindless ecstasy or threatened by destructive violence, the Vorticist ego is confidently affirmed as the creator of form; where the "Reihungsstil" of early Expressionist poetry is the product of a desperate attempt to hold together an assemblage of fragments which is in danger of being exploded, the Poundian haiku is as centred, and therefore as secure as the circle-creating formula of analytical geometry with which Pound compared it. Correspondingly, where Expressionist art involves a sense that objects are illusory, mere aspects of flux and hence in constant danger of breaking apart, the Vorticists have a much greater, though by no means unambiguous sense of the reality of objects. Thus, although the objects in their works are packed with or surrounded by energy, it is a propellant, not a destructive energy. The same attitude is visible in their theoretical work. Although Hulme could, in late 1911, agree with the proposition that "reality is a continuum" and "cannot be cut up into discrete objects," by 1915, his essay "Cinders" is based on the idea that the fundament of reality is not energy but hard, individualized objects. Similarly, although Pound's imagination was, thoughout the Vorticist period, engaged by Ernest Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, with its basic notion that reality is flux, his own theoretical pronouncements, especially during his Imagist period, assumed the objectivity of things. And Lewis's statements on the same subject, consonant with his ambivalent statements on abstraction, veered between a sense of the object as having an irreducibly concrete structure and a sense of the object as a temporary constellation of energy.

Correspondingly, the Vorticists' attitude to language is much more conservative than the Expressionists'. Only the early Hulme—interestingly enough under Nietzsche's influence—shows any marked sense that language is a system of arbitrary conventions which cannot do justice to reality. By 1915, however, even he is writing as though there were a necessary connection between words and things. For the rest, the Vorticists' attitude to language is summarized in the quotation from Aquinas which Pound used in "Vorticism [1]": "Nomina sunt consequentia rerum," and if they have any doubts in that proposition, they are evinced only obliquely, in the emphaticness with which Pound, for example, despite his familiarity with Fenollosa, consistently demands "the welding of word and thing." Consequently, Vorticism never produced experimental poetry of the order, say, of Kandinsky's Kldnge or Stramm's Sturm publications—indeed, Hulme was actually a little disturbed by and even disapproving of the relatively unadventurous "moderne Dichtkunst" which he heard in GNU. And despite Fenollosa's view that poetry, as an ideogram of a universe in flux, should be based on active verbs, Vorticist poetry is, on the whole, firmly noun-centred. In contrast, Expressionist poetry, deriving from a greater sense of instability, is marked by an inner conflict between superficially stable nouns and dynamic verbs. Thus, although Vorticist writing involves a robust sense of play, it does not have that irony towards language itself which one can find in the cynical rhymes, mixed registers and discordant use of classical form of early Expressionist poetry. For the Vorticists, ironic humour was a means of keeping primal violence within the control of language: for the Expressionists, irony was a more complex phenomenon—a means of dealing both with primal violence and with the fragility of that ultimate means of control. Because of their belief in the consonance of objects and language, grounded as it was in a more stable social experience, the Vorticists were that much farther away from the experience of "panic terror" which lies at the heart of continental Modernism.

The above distinctions explain the Vorticists' and Expressionists' differing attitudes to the machine and the city. The early Expressionists—like Heym, van Hoddis, Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff—saw the machine-city as a profoundly ambiguous irruption: although, on the surface, it seemed to be the quintessentially human context, in which rational control was most perfectly exercized and the range of human possibilities extended, beneath that surface they perceived a demonic, violent night-side, coextensive with chaotic Nature and populated by semi- if not inhuman beings. The machine was an aspect of this ambivalence: apparently a monument to the human ability to systematize and control, but in reality a monster which, like the Golem of Paul Wegener's two films (1914 and 1920), was out of control and destroying its creator. For a while, the late Expressionists—like the Activists and the architectural theoretician Bruno Taut—played with the utopian hope of restructuring this environment so that the machine could become the servant of man, but the German Revolution of 1918-20 demolished these exaggerated hopes with the result that after 1921, more than a few Expressionists turned their back on machine civilization or died by their own hand. Because Vorticism began from a much less drastic sense of cultural crisis, was not so intensely aware of the connection between Dionysos and the city and displayed greater confidence in man's ability to control, its representatives were able initially, to affirm machine civilisation to the extent that its artifacts could be transformed into "beautiful, painted forms." At the same time, they were also conscious of industrial civilization's "capacity for emotional brutality," and with time, this consciousness came to outweigh any impulse to celebrate the machine-city. Thus, Eliot's poems in Blast 2 present it as a "Waste Land"; Lewis's paintings Workshop and The Crowd (1914-15) depict, more clearly than ever before, the city as a dehumanizing prison; the history of Epstein's Rock Drill (1914-16) shows a clear movement away from "involvement with a mechanical culture" to "an indictment of a world that was rapidly becoming tyrannized by the machine"; and Pound, once he had awoken to the reality of machine civilization—and of the Vorticists, he, living in the rarified atmosphere of literary London was slowest to do so—rejected it decisively in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) for an idealized past. This shift did not, however, involve those inflated visions of a machine utopia which marked late Expressionism, and, because there was no revolution in England in 1918 onto which to project such fantasies, the possibilities for disillusion were not so great either.

Behind both developments lay the War, and, as with the machine-city, the Expressionists' attitude to the War underwent a dramatic change. Having, in their prewar writings, either prophesied its coming with a fascinated dread, or yearned for it in a romanticized form as a release from the tedium and repression of Wilhelmine society; more than a few, as Korte has shown, succumbed to the "Ideen von 1914" and greeted the War ecstatically, as soon as it broke out, as a means of spiritual and national renewal. Its reality was, however, shattering. Lotz, for example, who on 8 August 1914 had written an ecstatic letter to his wife, praising the sense of mystical unity he was experiencing in the army, wrote, on 21 August, after his experience of battle: "… in diesen Tagen ist mir der Krieg ein Greuel geworden". Other Expressionists—like Oskar Kokoschka, Klabund, Paul Zech, Hugo Ball, Franz Marc, Rudolf Leonhard and Ludwig Rubiner, not to mention Friedrich, the hero of Ernst Toller's play Die Wandlung (1917-18)—experienced similar reversals. The powers of ecstatic unreason to which pre-war Expressionism had been particularly drawn turned, on the battle-field, when coupled with the technology of the machine-city, into horrific violence and it is probably true to say that by about mid-1915, almost no Expressionists were pro-war. Consequently, from that date, one finds the Expressionists trying, like Franz Marc in "Das geheime Europa" and "Im Fegefeuer des Krieges", to deal with the War by seeing it as a "Leidensweg", a purgatorial experience out of which a spiritually purified society would inevitably emerge. The Vorticists, in contrast, took longer to awaken to the reality of war and longer still to oppose it—indeed, of the Vorticist circle, only Nevinson (ironically enough, the self-styled Futurist) had turned against the War by Christmas 1914. Pound rarely mentioned it in his letters, wrote only one or two war poems (one of which was a paraphrase of Hulme's war diary (Early Poems)), and when, from about Spring 1915, the War began to get into his consciousness and essays, it was supported as a crusade against German Kultur. Gaudier-Brzeska (killed on 5 June 1915) positively enjoyed battle, calling it a "GREAT REMEDY" in the belief that it would complete the work the Vorticists had begun. Lewis's initial attitude, on his own admission, was "unsatisfactory" and "complex", being a mixture of moral crusading, intellectual curiosity and sheer romanticism from which a fascination for violence cannot be excluded; and when, after Passchendaele (Summer 1917), he turned against the War, he did so from an aesthetic feeling that it was "stupid" and a "nonsense" rather than from moral or political conviction. And despite the privations of the trenches in early 1915 and his anger at the generals after the Dardanelles fiasco (Autumn/Winter 1915), Hulme too saw the War as a moral crusade against Prussianism and remained consistently prowar until his death on 28 September 1917—even if, by early 1916, he was "unable to name any great positive 'good'" for which he was fighting. As with the Dionysiac powers in general, the Vorticists managed to shield themselves from the War in a way that the Expressionists could not. If not physically, the Vorticists were, because of their protected cultural situation, less exposed psychically to its violence—which meant that they were less prone to ecstatic enthusiasm when it broke out, less overwhelmed by black disillusion and traumatic shock when its comforting justifications began to crumble, and less in need of millenarian interpretations when they had to find meaning in its continuation.

As a result of this distance and their growing antipathy to the machine civilization which seemed to have generated the War, Vorticist art and theory after about mid-1916 changed in two significant ways. On the one hand, the theory increasingly deemphasized energy and gave greater weight to form and design, and on the other hand, the art moved back from extreme abstraction and a fascination with the vitalist-primitive to more representational and recognizably human modes. Hence the humanism of Epstein's bronze The Tin Hat (1916), Pound's growing attraction to the humaneness of Chinese culture and advocacy of "clear, unexaggerated, realistic literature." Hence, too, the civilized world of Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) where love is a game, not a destructive passion, the formalism of Lewis's The Caliph's Design (1919), the relative realism of Lewis's "Guns" show (February 1919) and the move back to realism which marks the work of Bomberg, Etchells, Nevinson and Wadsworth around the end of the War. Having set out from a complex problematic and experimented with extreme notions of art and the creative personality, the Vorticists' experience of the War drove them back to a more moderate position which, despite their initially anti-humanist stance, one might describe as a "chastened, modernized humanism". In contrast, the Expressionists' experience of war and machine civilization, deriving from a more drastic sense of cultural crisis and even more extreme notions of art and the creative personality, led them, after 1915, to yet another extreme. Where the Vorticists could fall back on a sense of tradition, the Expressionists felt flung by the War into a a void where any sense of meaning or order had to be created ex nihilo. Thus, late Expressionist art and literature are marked by a strident, even hysterical resolve to resituate the "Neuer Mensch", purged of his violence and immoralism, in the centre of Creation, and, by utilizing his potential for "Menschlichkeit" and "Gemeinschaft", found a utopia in which his Geist, now understood predominantly as ethical potential, could be exercized to the full. Such inflated, utopian hopes came to nothing after the failure of the German Revolution, and the subsequent disillusion is recorded in works like Toller's Masse Mensch (1920) and Kaiser's two Gas plays (1917-18). Faced with an even more apocalyptically perceived problematic than were the Vorticists, and having committed themselves, with an intensity and single-mindedness from which the Vorticists drew back, to even more extreme resolutions, the Expressionists' situation was, when these failed, that much more desperate than that of their English counterparts. Consequently, one finds no suicides among the Vorticists and nothing so extreme as the Gnostic Catholicism to which Hugo Ball committed himself in 1920. None of the Vorticists became, as did Johannes R. Becher, a leading ideologue of an authoritarian Marxist state; Lewis, fascist though he was for a while, never matched Hanns Johst's achievement in becoming an SS Brigadier General; and Pound's espousal of Mussolini's Italy as a modern version of the corporate, mediaeval state had more to do with literary fantasies than existential desperation.

Inasmuch as both movements are aspects of European Modernism, the preceding discussion involves four assumptions about that broader phenomenon: first, Modernism was not a uniform phenomenon throughout Europe; second, Modernism was a problematic to which there were several inter-related aspects and levels; third, any given individual or group of individuals could perceive that problematic in a more or less complex way and experience it in a more or less intense way; and fourth, there were various ways in which that problematic might be resolved. While it is true that Modernism was "a break with the traditions of the past", that "break" was a much more cataclysmic experience for the German than for the English avant garde and provoked a "response" which was both more "conservative" than Eliot's and more "radical" even than D.H. Lawrence's. Accordingly, a comparison of Expressionism and Vorticism inevitably reminds one of the un-Englishness of Modernism: several of the major "English" Modernists—Conrad, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Gaudier-Brzeska and Epstein—were not English at all; Lawrence detested England and lived outside it as much as he could; and the major formative experiences behind the work of Hulme and Lewis were as continental as they were English. That massive sense of institutional stability and historical continuity generated a feeling, not unknown today, that anomie begins at Calais, and created a cultural context which tempered the radicalism and experimentation which characterized continental Modernism. Given which, it is not surprising that England should have produced a Modernist movement which combined a will to explore with a fundamental and durable sense of security, but it is surprising that England should have produced a version of Modernism at all.