How did reactionaries and social conservatives find value in radical new forms of art?

Alexander Adams

Mar 7, 2024

In this article, I will look at some links between reactionary supporters of Modernism in literature and visual art, namely T.E. Hulme, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Jonathan Bowden. These were social and political conservatives who saw value in art that was formally advanced, such as free verse, collage, Cubism, primitivist-influenced carving and even abstraction. These thinkers constitute a minority among both political conservatives and artistic Modernists but they represent an influential and important strand of thinking.

Poet, philosopher, translator and journalist Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917) has been credited as the leading theorist of Modernism from 1908 until 1917. His poems have been called the first truly modern poem in the English language. This is no small achievement, considering Hulme wrote so few poems and published only six in his lifetime. Hulme’s few poems and a lecture of 1908 provided the spark for – or anticipated – the formation of the Imagist group in 1909. He noted that vers libre from France and Italy had provided an impetus for fashion-following poets writing in English. “Those arts like poetry, whose matter is immortal, must find a new technique each generation. Each age must have its own special form of expression, and any period that deliberately goes out of it is an age of insincerity.”

Hulme damned the Victorian poets. “The latter stages in the decay of an art form are very interesting and worth study because they are peculiarly applicable to the state of poetry at the present day. They resemble the latter stages in the decay of religion when the spirit has gone and there is a meaningless reverence for formalities and ritual. The carcass is dead, and all the flies are upon it. Imitative poetry springs up like weeds, and women whimper and whine of you and I alas, and roses, roses all the way. It becomes the expression of sentimentality rather than of virile thought.”

Hulme contended that as the uses of poetry changed and there was an abandonment of narrative and versified history – with a rise of fragmentation and concentration upon the momentary – so verse forms must change to reflect this. The stressed-syllable metre will drop out of favour. In its place would be free verse, full of concrete imagery, aimed at emotional effect and written in a highly subjective, personal manner. This approach came to influence two American poets living in London. Ezra Pound became a close ally of Hulme and leader of the Imagists. He collaborated on redrafting some of Hulme’s work. When T.S. Eliot moved to London in 1914, Pound performed the same act for him, helping to edit The Waste Land (1922) into a more coherent and tighter form. Although Eliot and Hulme were in London at the same time, they never met. Hulme was on active military service for much the time when Eliot was there. Eliot only emerged as a significant poet in June 1917, three months before Hulme’s death in Flanders.

Hulme recognised the importance of action as critic to expression. He translated George Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. He also championed the combative Modernism of Jacob Epstein’s sculpture, which combined primitivism, ancient statuary and direct carving in forms expressing aggressive sexuality. Although Hulme averred an attraction to revolutionary novelty – “Personally I am of course in favour of the complete destruction of all verse more than twenty years old.” – he cast these radical forms as a type of Classicism, which would overcome a century of dominance by Romanticism.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Pound’s poem of 1913 embodies Hulme’s dictum and is considered a quintessentially Imagist poem. Pound, whose credo was “Make it new”, became a fixer, editor and promoter of vanguard literature and art during the formative periods of many Modernists. This earned him the devotion and loyalty of these individuals even after Pound was shamed as a Fascist in 1945 and subsequently imprisoned in a mental asylum. Pound reached back into the pre-Renaissance era – as Hulme did, in his veneration for Gothic and Byzantine art [3] – to hold up the troubadour tradition of the Occident as a model for young poets. Pound’s combination of the vernacular, popular and classical in a collage form was revolutionary, winning him plaudits from vanguardists and alienating the conventional lover of poetry. His Cantos, a sprawling sequence of poems covering a vast range of subjects (written from 1915 to 1962), have a claim to be the outstanding achievement and bedrock of Modernist poetry in English. The density of allusions, complexity of content, multiplicity of forms and dramatic changes in register spurn the necessity of unity, as proposed by Aristotle in his description of classical drama. Pound’s hostility to conventional form (as a continued veneration of hollowed out forms) is identical to Hulme’s position, as quoted above.

“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged.” So wrote Eliot in 1919, in his seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. He argues that even a poet working in new ways is part of a tradition that infuses his work with meaning, in the same way his era does, regardless of whether or not he employs the forms and styles of his antecedents. As the great writer submits himself ever more to his material and works honestly within the idiom of his age, his work is transmuted and absorbed into the tradition. “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. There remains to define this process of depersonalisation and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalisation that art may be said to approach the condition of science.” Tradition is a sequence of adjustments and absorptions of innovations. Therefore innovation is necessary and normal.

Canadian-British artist-author Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) proposed a radically reactionary interpretation of human nature in The Art of Being Ruled (1926). His ideas were influenced by Sorel, whose ideas he knew before Hulme translated him, as well as Nietzsche. Lewis proposed that man did not yearn for liberty but for enslavement.

“For in the mass[,] people wish to be automata: they wish to be conventional: they hate you teaching them or forcing them into ‘freedom’: they wish to be obedient, hard-working machines, as near dead as possible – as near dead (feelingless and thoughtless) as they can get, without actually dying.”[4] Lewis detects people a desire to be numb, to escape oneself, coupled with a strong sense of purpose and place. The cause of this Lewis identified as a quasi-Schopenhauerian anguish.

“Generally speaking, it can be said that people wish to escape from themselves (this by no means excluding the crudest selfishness). When people are encouraged, as happens in a democratic society, to believe that they wish ‘to express their personality’, the question at once arises as to what their personality is. For the most part, if investigated, it would be rapidly found that they had none. So what would it be that they would eventually ‘express’? and why have they been asked to express it? If they were subsequently watched in the act of ‘expressing’ their personality, it would be found that it was somebody else’s personality they were expressing. If a hundred of them were observed ‘expressing their personality’ all together and at the same time, it would be found that they all ‘expressed’ this inalienable, mysterious ‘personality’ in the same way. In short, it would be patent at once that they had only one personality between them to ‘express’ – some ‘expressing’ it with a little more virtuosity, some a little less. It would be a group personality they were ‘expressing’ – a pattern imposed on them by means of education and the hypnotism of cinema, wireless and press. Each one would, however, be firmly persuaded that it was ‘his own’ personality that he was ‘expressing’: just as when he voted he would be persuaded that it was the vote of a free man that was being cast, replete with the independence and free-will which was the birthright of a member of a truly democratic community.”

Ten years after The Art of Being Ruled was published, Lewis wrote, “Ninety per cent of men long at all times for a leader. They are on the look-out, whether they know it or not, for someone who will take all responsibility off their shoulders and tell them what to do.”[6] For Lewis, the burden of choice for the average man with many concerns, was onerous and one which he would happily pass up, should the cost not be onerous. By extension, the cost demands of having to choose between political platforms of parties and then having the responsibility for being culpable through complicity with the results of endorsing a ruling party’s programme, are also unwelcome. In order to reach these conclusions, Lewis does not have to assume here that democracy actually functions as it is supposed to.

For Lewis, art must be rooted in man’s essential nature and the realities of his age. To describe a mechanised world and industrialised warfare – Lewis, like Hulme, served on the Western Front – art could not help but be modern in character and appearance. It was also inevitable that art would be unacceptable to the masses.

The last figure in this chain of reactionaries is the one least known to the general public. Jonathan Bowden (1962-2012), the New Right thinker and orator, who declared “I’m an ultra-Rightwing Modernist, let’s make that clear.” Bowden was a man separated from the mainstream not just in terms of his political sympathies but also his self-conscious choices and self-forged artistic comrades. He publicly committed himself to his heroes, including the Lewis, Hulme, Pound and Eliot. Bowden saw that academia was uncomfortable with the political views of these creators who were “not philo-Semitic, inegalitarian, hierarchical, religious, prior metaphysical, and all these things which you’re not supposed to be.” Bowden believed that even though the left-inclined establishment would like to demote these three creators, without them “you wouldn’t have much left of Western writings in the twentieth century.”

Bowden was tireless in his promotion of vanguard Modernists who opposed liberalism, democracy, materialism and progressivism in all its social and cultural forms. Bowden declared, “Democracy is always a mistake!” It is a mistake avoided by the knowledgeable reactionary and revolutionary. “That’s the logic of vanguardism: you don’t allow them to decide.” Modernism was ideal for the reactionary precisely because it kicked against the general population. It was deliberately exclusionary and intended to reach only the initiated elite.

On this topic, Bowden was fond of citing Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). He was someone who had theorised in the 1920s that Modernist art was intentionally divisive. “Modern art, on the other hand, will always have the masses against it. It is essentially unpopular; moreover, it is antipopular. […] It divides the public into two groups: one very small, formed by those who are favourably inclined towards it; another very large – the hostile majority.” The essay “The Dehumanization of Art” is an approach to explain why High Modernism was so unpopular in 1925. Gasset argued opponents of earlier vanguard art works were hostile because they understood the new art and realised how it defied conventions and promoted values inimicable to the dominant ones; it consequently went through a phase of lacking popularity before finding a general audience. High Modernism, however, provokes actual hostility. “When a man dislikes a work of art, but understands it, he feels superior to it; and there is no reason for indignation. But when his dislike is due to his failure to understand, he feels vaguely humiliated and this rankling sense of inferiority must be counterbalanced by indignant self-assertion.”

Gasset suggested that the reason Modernist art had conquered the galleries and salons of Europe was because it had been taken up by the elites as a status marker. “[T]he new art also helps the elite to recognize themselves and one another in the drab mass of society and to learn their mission which consists in being few and holding their own against the many.” Identifying and conversing about difficult high culture was a mechanism that distinguished the elite from the mass. Gasset punctured the progressivist idea of equality, using difficult Modernist art as proof. “Behind all contemporary life lurks the provoking and profound injustice of the assumption that men are actually equal. Each move among men so obviously reveals the opposite that each move results in a painful clash.” Any one of the thinkers discussed here could have written that sentence. What sets Gasset apart from the others is that his view of cultural production was more conventional and he was sceptical of all Modernism. (For further views on Gasset, here is my article.)

For Bowden, truth lay in embracing the options opened by modernity but rejecting the political associations retrospectively attached to the styles and schools of Modernism. For Bowden, in a living culture he seeks an underlying reactionary core, synonymous with vitalism. Eliot’s “retreat into Christianity” is vitalist or essentialist in nature. “The point about Eliot’s later Christian poetry is its stillness and its belief in a center and its belief in a return to essence.”

Bowden thought that true artists would be leaders – as Nietzsche suggested they might be. Their achievements would be recognised by other men of distinction and they would explain and interpret great art, forming a chain of moral leadership. “Other people can feed off that and feed the nature of their identity,” he said. Hierarchy was essential to the arts because it was inherent in mankind. Some men are born to lead but most are born to follow. People derive meaning from fulfilling their allotted roles. Bowden used Eliot as an example.

“One is often asked with figures as difficult, abstruse, and elitist as Eliot what the point of them is. The point is that they are transcendent figures. The point is that they look upwards. The point of all life is to look upwards in the prospect of something which is above you. Whether you believe God is above you […] you’ve got to look above you.”

Here striving, transcendence and recognition of one’s own subordinate status – here, under God – is a recognition of human truths. Without a sense of the metaphysical (as embodied in creative figures of greatness who connect us the higher values) a people loses its identity. “Once a people loses its ability to recognize its own side, its own semiotic of being, it’s finished as a people, unless things get so bad that there’s a return to forms of identity by looking at the very small vanguard of people who haven’t given up on them.” Bowden himself saw himself as a messenger and an advocate rather than a (primarily) as a creator.

Bowden saw conflict between cultures as an axis extending from everyday matters of resource control to the quasi-spiritual appreciation of values through high art. “I am not arguing for a surrogate religiosity of culture, but I think that something which mildly approaches it is necessary. If people give up on the highest things that their people as individuals have created, they are opening the space for themselves to be destroyed in the future by people who will not give up on their greatest gifts.”[xi] It requires a Nietzschean exercise of will by a people to survive cultural and demographic strife, as Bowden sees it, and high culture is a key battleground.

Jonathan Bowden highlighted a fissure that runs through dissident circles, that of the traditionalist and the reactionary, who are divided most upon aesthetic questions. Bowden knew that Modernism per se was not a tool for progressivism and that it be used as a means of expressing elitist will to power and overcoming comfort aesthetics, which can so easily be repurposed and hollowed out by those with influence and hostile intentions. That is one contribution of Bowden to the line of those who came before and why he needs to taken seriously by anyone who appreciates reactionary Modernism.