The Outsider (51 page)

When T. E. Hulme was killed in France in 1917, he left the elements of an immense task behind him. It was a task that Nietzsche had already begun for him, philosophizing
‘
with a hammer
’
. The first step in re-defining religion is to knock some of the fungus off the old values, and try to discern their shape as they existed for the men who made them.

But for a hundred years or more, Outsiders have been swinging the hammer, without consciously realizing what they were doing, and slowly creating new values by implication. Forty years after Hulme
’
s death, we can begin to see the
results of the hundred years of intellectual
questioning. Hulme
regarded his
Speculations
as a preface to Pascal
’
s
Pensees,
but it would perhaps be more accurate to regard them as the epilogue of a certain indispensible body of Outsider literature, beginning with Dostoevsky
’
s
Notes from Under the Floorboards
and including
Steppenwolf
,
The Secret Life,
Nijinsky
’
s
Diary
and
Mind at the End of Its Tether.

We might preface an analysis of the
Speculations
with a few words on the development of Existentialism. Hulme
’
s thought is not systematically set out, and the simplest way of understanding his attitude, his feeling about philosophy, is to approach him via Kierkegaard.

When Kierkegaard expressed his revolt against Hegel in the
Unscientific Postscript,
he was making a philosophical stand against philosophy; but let us not get confused about the meaning of what he was doing. Some two thousand four hundred years before, Aristophanes had thrown mud at Socrates in exactly the same spirit, with the dislike of the poet for the logician. Western civilization has been too hasty in condemning Aristophanes. The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love
words
or by men who love
living.
The Socratic conception of history (propagated in our time by Professor Whitehead) is that civilization advances in proportion as its thinkers are interested in abstractions, in knowledge for its own sake. Aristophanes deplored the heresy and exposed Socrates to ridicule at every opportunity. For him, as for Nietzsche, knowledge is merely an instrument of living; there is no such thing as abstract knowledge; there is only useful knowledge and unprofitable blatherskite. And it is likely that if Aristophanes had ever been pressed for a definition of useful knowledge, he would have answered: Whatever enables a man to live more. So much can be gathered from the spirit of the plays.

Kierkegaard felt the same. As an intensely living, intensely suffering individual, he was not concerned about whether man in the abstract fitted into a great Abstract Universal System; he only knew about the simple, finite, guilty and suffering creature called S
ø
ren Kierkegaard, who had to make a decision in the face of God, and who needed to feel that that decision mattered, ultimately, absolutely; not that the Universal Scheme could

get on very well whether he decided for God or the Devil.

In view of the gradual change in the meaning of Existentialism with Sartre and Heidegger, we should understand this: that Kierkegaard
’
s protest was a protest on behalf of the
suffering and involved,
against the abstract and impersonal. Sartre
’
s endless tergiversations about the
pour-soi
and the
en-soi
(in
UEtre et le Neant)
would have annoyed him as violently as Heidegger
’
s hair-splitting about Existence and Time. Kierkegaard would have preferred James Thompson
’
s
City of Dreadful Night
or Eliot
’
s
‘
Ash Wednesday
’
; and there can be no doubt that the Outsider shares his preference. Kierkegaard
’
s attitude is so Existential that his Christianity is a religion that regards God as the intermediary between himself and his fellow human beings, and cannot even accept their existence without first accepting the existence of God. He is an extreme case of the poet who says,
‘
I will
not
serve
’
—
Non Serviam
—like Stephen Dedalus. I will serve nothing but God and my own soul; perish all such conceptions as knowledge and civilization and social causes and being a do-gooder.
’

It is necessary to emphasize this extremist attitude so that we can be quite clear about what constitutes the essence of religion. It does not deny knowledge and civilization and doing-good; it only denies their primacy. The attitude of Leigh Hunt
’
s Abou Ben Adhem, who admits that he does not love God, but tells the Angel,
‘
Set me down as one that loves his fellow men,
’
is loathesome to it as a sentimental sophistry.

Hulme was like Kierkegaard; religion was instinctive for him. He is a poet, and his approach to religion is a poet
’
s. He does not (like Plato) compare a child to a star; he compares the stars to children:

A touch of cold in the Autumn night

I, walked abroad

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

Like a red-faced farmer.

I did not stop to speak, but nodded,

And round about were the wistful stars

With white faces, like town children.
¹⁸

His approach to religion is like G. K. Chesterton
’
s. Chesterton has a hero who loves London so much that he would not
dream of saying,
‘
A taxicab came round the corner like the wind,
⁵
but rather, The wind came around the corner
like
a taxicab.
¹⁹
That is the Existentialist approach. The way of Alienation (Hegel
’
s phrase) points outward, towards abstraction; the way of mysticism points inward, towards the concrete.

Hulme expressed his dislike of the outward way, the romantic way, in the essay on
‘
Romanticism and Classicism
⁵
:

The Romantic, because he thinks man infinite must always be talking about the infinite.
...
[He] is always flying, flying over abysses, flying up into eternal gases. The word Infinite is in every other line.
...

Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress.
...
²⁰

One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.
²¹

This distinction lies at the root of all that Hulme has to say. For instance, on modern art (modern, for Hulme, meant Picasso and Gaudier-Brzeska):

There are two kinds of art, geometrical and vital, absolutely distinct in kind from one another. These two arts are
not modifications of one and the same art but pursue different
aims and are created for the satisfaction of different necessities
…
of the mind Each of these arts springs from and
c
orresponds to a certain general attitude towards the world
…
²²

Now, it must seem to the reader that what Hulme has actually done is to create a distinction between the optimistic way of viewing the world, the humanistic, and the pessimistic, and that he has called the pessimistic view
‘
religious
⁵
. But this fails to do justice to the subtlety of Hulme
’
s thought. It can best be made clear, perhaps, by referring to Nietzsche
’
s
development of Schopenhauer
’
s view of the world
(Weltanschauung).
Schopenhauer
’
s essentially Buddhistic view recognized Will as the underlying reality of the world, but considered that Will is the servant of the world of idea, illusion, in that it can only be roused to act by some purpose outside itself and in the world of idea. Man
’
s freedom lies in refusing to act. Nietzsche
’
s deeper experience of the Will, his vastations, made him reject Schopenhauer
’
s conclusions, without rejecting his analysis of the world as Will and the world as idea. Nietzsche
’
s great concept of Yea-saying gave him a notion of purpose that is seen as positive. Nietzsche, in short, was a religious mystic.

Before quoting the key-passages in the
Speculations,
it may perhaps be as well here to aim at clarifying this disagreement between Nietzschean Vitalism and Hulme
’
s religious attitude. The rift is not as wide as it seems at first sight. Hulme was unwilling to dwell on the similarities because Nietzsche enthusiasts and Shaw enthusiasts were advocating a vitalist extremism that amounted to humanism. Now Shaw is dead, and Nietzsche hardly ever read in England, Mr. Eliot has further obscured the fundamental agreement by a campaign of literary sniping at them that has temporarily made them
‘
unfashionable
’
within the sphere of his critical dictatorship. Hulme
’
s influence on Mr. Eliot is well known, and their attacks on vitalism tend to follow the same line. Here is Mr. Eliot:

Mr. Babbitt says: To give the first place to a higher will
is only another way of declarin
g that life is an act of faith …’
This is quite true, but if life is an act of faith, in what is it an act of faith? The life forcers, with Mr. Bernard Shaw at their head, would say, I suppose,
‘
In life itself,
’
but I should not accuse Mr. Babbitt of anything so silly as that.
²³

And here is Hulme:

Biology is not theology, nor can God be defined in terms of
‘
life
’
or
‘
progress
’
...
²⁴

In the first passage, Mr. Eliot has simply misrepresented Shaw, while in the second Hulme
’
s statement is true, but again,
does not apply to Shaw or Nietzsche. Hulme
’
s desire not to be thought a Nietzschean in any sense has led him to make certain inaccurate statements about the relation of his own views to Nietzsche
’
s; for instance, in a long section dealing with a
‘
Critique of Satisfaction
’
, he uses a vivid simile to express his suspicion of philosophers and their
‘
Systems
’
:

A man might be clothed in armour so complicated and elaborate, that to the inhabitant of another planet who had never seen armour before, he might seem like some entirely impersonal and omnipotent mechanical force. But if he saw the armour running after a lady, or eating tarts in the pantry, he would realize at once that it was not a god-like or mechanical force, but an ordinary human being extraordinarily armed.
²⁵

This is the essence of Nietzsche
’
s criticism of philosophers in the first section of
Beyond Good and Evil,
‘
Prejudices of Philosophers
’
. But Hulme has no wish to be thought a Nietzschean, and states:

... I do not want to imply any scepticism as to the possibility of a really scientific philosophy. I do not mean what Nietzsche meant when he said,
‘
Do not speculate as to whether what a philosopher says is true, but ask how he came to think it true.
’
This is a form of scepticism that I hold to be just fashionable rubbish. Pure philosophy ought to be, and may be, entirely objective and scientific.
²⁶