Conservative Party Crisis

CHAPTER 1
Conservative Party Crisis

Tory Propaganda, Imagist Poetics
Conservative Party Crisis

The Conservative Party, for many centuries the dominant force in British
politics, fell into decline in the 1830s. The heavy defeat sustained in the
elections of 1832 reduced the Tory representation in the Commons to
fewer than 150 seats (out of a total 658). Under Robert Peel’s leader-
ship, therefore, the Tories were forced to reach out beyond traditional
Conservative boundaries. The Carlton Club, set up just before the elec-
tions of 1832, became, from 1835 onwards, the home of the party’s elec-
tion committee. Its aim was to achieve organisational coherence, and in this
it was helped by the growth of Conservative associations throughout the
country.1 At the same time, pressed into making political concessions,
the Tories embraced change – but reluctantly so, and only insofar as this
change was, as the party’s most distinguished leader, Benjamin Disraeli,
was to put it in 1867, ‘in deference to the manners, the customs, the
laws, the traditions of the people’, not ‘in deference to abstract princi-
ples and general doctrines’.2 Under Disraeli, who took over as Leader
of the Conservatives in 1868, the party sought to forge a strong alliance
between the Crown, the landed aristocracy, and the lower classes. John
Gorst, formerly Secretary of Metropolitan London and Westminster
Conservative Association, was made party principal agent and put in
charge of the organisation of the party. ‘Hints for Candidates’ were issued
and Conservative delegations toured the country making the Tory case
to new voters. Gorst’s planning worked, and in the elections of 1874 the
Tories gained a majority of 50.
Meanwhile, the Liberals were organising themselves too, setting up,
in 1877, the National Liberal Federation, which sought to copy the effi-
cient organisation of Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham Caucus.3 The
Federation provided a forum for the party base to voice their opinions
and encouraged the formation of new Liberal associations, while the
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2 Conservative Party Crisis
new phenomenon of caucuses introduced disciplined control of the mass
electorate and the manipulation of votes.4 When the Third Reform Act
of 1884 extended the franchise even further than the 1832 Reform Act
to now add nearly two million new voters to the existing register of three
million, it looked as though the Liberal party – with its Radical caucus,
urban base, and support from the increasingly influential trade unions –
would profit.
The Tories, however, were successful in organising themselves. In the
wake of the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act of 1883, which set limits
to expenditure during election campaigns, the Conservative Party was
quick to recognise that the Act did not impose any limits on party spend-
ing that was not related to particular constituencies, and to grasp the
role that fundraising and central organisation would therefore play in
the future. They were able to recruit volunteers in the Primrose League
(a quasi-romantic club set up in 1883) and the National Union, which
became the structure through which the leadership directed the party.
The Conservative landslide victories of 1895 and 1900 appeared to prove
that the party had adapted well to new political realities. It now had a
strong leader, Salisbury, who had foreseen the importance of propaganda
and organisation and who – despite his staunch conservatism and con-
tempt for mass democracy – recognised that it was crucial to appeal to
the suburban middle classes.
When Salisbury resigned in 1902, the Tories therefore seemed to be in
a strong position. Yet Britain’s massive debt, overstretched imperialism,
and changing social conditions – as well as a widening rift in the party
between Tariff Reformers and Free Traders – made them unexpectedly
vulnerable.5 It was precisely in this precarious position that Salisbury’s
successor, Balfour, found the party. Balfour had never been a favourite
among Conservative hardliners, who found him distanced and detached,
when not disdainful. He was aloof, the beneficiary of nepotism (Salisbury
was his uncle), and came across as overly intellectual in his speeches: as
Leopold Maxse of the National Review complained, ‘People ask them-
selves what is the use of all this marvellous sword-play, and the unrivalled
dialectics.’6
This reputation did not help when, soon after taking over as
Conservative leader in July 1902, Balfour was squeezed into making
unpopular decisions.7 When he repealed duties, he infuriated Tariff
Reform Conservatives, notably Chamberlain, who organised other
Protectionists into forming the powerful Tariff Reform League. But he
did not properly embrace free market economics either – or at least not
Conservative Party Crisis 3
to the laissez-faire Tories’ satisfaction. By failing to rally round Tariff
Reform, the Conservatives were left flailing and faction-ridden, and by
stopping short of embracing free trade, they made it difficult for them-
selves to win elections.8 To add to Balfour’s woes, there was the scan-
dal of ‘Chinese slavery’, when details of the use and abuse of Chinese
indentured servants in South Africa spilled into the public domain.
Working-class resentment at the Government’s restrictions on the right
of trade unions to organise strikes became a rallying point for the Labour
Representation Committee, which struck a deal with the Liberals.
Nonconformists were outraged by Balfour’s policy of putting Anglican
schools on the rates.9 And, finally, it was leaked that a plan for Irish
Home Rule was being prepared, leading to vociferous accusations that
Balfour was betraying the Union.10
The ‘Conservative Party crisis’, as the historian E. H. H. Green
memorably described this tumultuous period in the history of the party,
reached its climax in the months following its disastrous performance at
the 1906 General Election, which had paved the way for the Liberals’
ascent to power under Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The Unionists lost
245 seats; Labour won 30; and the new House of Commons ended up
with only 157 Conservative members, out of a total of 670, its lowest-
ever level.11 The Tories appeared unable to cope with the Liberals’ mobi-
lisation of the mass electorate. More ominously, the party split between
Chamberlain’s supporters and Balfourites widened even more and, inevi-
tably, this further affected its ability to communicate a coherent message
to the electorate. The leadership retained control of Central Office, but
lost all authority over the more significant National Union – and there-
fore over the party. Despite these deep divisions, however, the Tories
fared much better in the two elections of 1910. At the January election,
they won 116 seats (or two short of the Liberals); in December, the bal-
ance remained unchanged. Still, though, and perhaps more than ever
before, the party was divided.12
Tory grass-root discontent with the party leadership was aggravated
when the new Liberal Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, began pushing for
broad social, fiscal, and constitutional reforms. This assault on the status quo
was interpreted as causally connected to the weakness of the Conservative
Party’s leaders, and, specifically, to their inability to devise – and propagate –
a coherent strategy. In comparison to Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal
administration of 1906, which was largely moderate, Asquith’s 1908
cabinet pursued a radical programme.13 Alongside fellow ‘New Liberals’,
such as David Lloyd George (who replaced Asquith as Chancellor of
the Exchequer), Winston Churchill, Herbert Samuel, and Charles
Masterman, Asquith pressed for sweeping reforms. These included
proposals for old age pensions, health and unemployment insur-
ance, school meals, increases in income and excise duties, taxes on
cars, petrol and land, and a super-tax on incomes over £5,000. Tories
were particularly horrified by Lloyd George’s 1909 ‘People’s Budget’,
which proposed a hiking up of redistributive taxation in an attempt
to ease the burden of old-age pensions on public finances. The budget
proceeded on the principle of ‘unearned increment’, which, as Green
explains, ‘allowed the State, acting on behalf of society, to appropriate
wealth which had been wholly or mainly created by social factors for
redistribution for the benefit of society’. This socialist idea of ‘unearned
increment’ explains why so many Conservative candidates and com-
mentators referred to the budget as ‘socialist’ or ‘radical’, and why the
Tories who objected to it saw little difference between the Liberal and
the Labour positions.14
But of all the reforms, the most contentious was the 1910 Parliament
Bill to limit the Lords’ powers to veto legislation. The Bill (which finally
passed by Parliament as an Act in 1911) was the Liberals’ response to the
Lords’ rejection of Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’. This was the first
time the House of Lords had vetoed a budget in two centuries and the
Liberals were determined to prevent the recurrence of the budget prob-
lems. The budget was eventually passed following the January 1910 elec-
tion, which confirmed the Liberals’ mandate, but the government saw an
opportunity to press for constitutional reform; for this was their chance
to push through with the entire Liberal programme. Discussions over
constitutional reform were briefly suspended when Edward VII died in
May 1910, so as to ensure that the new king, George V, ascended to the
throne without any undue pressure on his constitutional powers. During
this truce, there were secret discussions between the British parties, but
to no avail. King George called for a second election, in December 1910,
following which the Liberals (who retained control) were able to finally
pass a Parliament Act removing the Lords’ power to veto money bills.
They now had the power to veto other public bills, but only for a maxi-
mum of two years. For many Conservatives, curbing the power of the
‘ancient Chamber’ was an attack on the founding principles of the British
political system. Balfour’s tactical incompetence in the handling of the
Lords’ veto enraged Tory hardliners and caused the party to splinter. This
was a war between entrenched Tories – diehards or ‘ditchers’ – and those
who favoured abstention – the ‘hedgers’.15
The Commentator 5
The Commentator
As the mainstream period Tory press demonstrates, dissatisfaction with
Balfour’s leadership was deep and widespread. The Quarterly Review,
though comparatively moderate in its criticism of the Tory executive,
bemoaned the lack of direction and lamented the absence of ‘definite’
Conservative policies. One commentator found that the problem was
that the Conservative leaders were not Conservative enough: ‘in order
to obtain the confidence of the country’, it was argued, ‘Conservative
leaders must have a genuine belief in Conservatism’.16 Another thought
that, having lost its Conservative convictions under Balfour, the party
had ‘gained a reputation for lack of seriousness’.17 The Spectator agreed,
asserting that Balfour’s party was missing a ‘certain hardness of tempera-
ment’, while the hard-line National Review was more outspoken, waging
a ‘Balfour must go’ campaign.18
In response to the crisis, the short-lived Tory newspaper The
Commentator was founded in May 1910 by a group of diehard
Conservatives, with the explicit purpose of propagating ‘real’ Tory prin-
ciples. Its cover promised ‘Old Principles in a New Paper’, and its open-
ing editorial proclaimed that its primary aims were ‘the advocacy and
propagation of Conservative principles’ and the ‘exhaustive enumeration
and criticism [of ] the many . . . causes operating detrimentally to the
interests of the nation’.19 The Commentator was vociferous in its critique
of the party executive. Repeatedly, it made the case that the existing lead-
ers had betrayed the Conservative base, and it consistently lamented that,
as one editorial put it, ‘we have the official party pulling in one direction
and the rank and file of the party pulling in another’.20 Right up to its
final issue in June 1913, it was reminding Conservative voters that the
party could be rescued only by ‘a bold and unswerving advocacy of true
Conservative principles’.21 In this regard, The Commentator stood on
the side of what the historian G. R. Searle has described as the ‘Radical
Right’: Conservatives who subscribed to traditional Tory causes – Tariff
Reform, Army and Navy reform, ‘constructive’ social reform, and pres-
ervation of Empire – but who saw the official Party as having betrayed
authentic Tory principles.22
The electoral losses of 1906 and 1910, the rise of the Radicals, Lloyd
George’s ‘People’s Budget’ and the constitutional crisis that this pre-
cipitated stoked a number of anxieties in the Tory ranks, many of whom
were radicalised and formed splinter groups. Chief among these were the
circle around Leopold Maxse’s National Review; the Halsbury Club; those
who, in the name of ‘National Efficiency’, pioneered a national govern-
ment of ‘first-rate men’, the primary aim of which would be to preserve
the Empire; and the ‘Reveille’ group, which included the diehard Tory
peer Willoughby de Broke and the scaremongering, xenophobic journal-
ist Arnold White.23 What all these radical Tory factions had in common
was that they objected to the perceived defeatism of the leadership and
demanded a more combative Toryism.
This was precisely the stance of The Commentator, which appears
to have been from its outset closely connected to de Broke’s ‘Reveille’
group.24 ‘Please do not imagine that this paper is published in the inter-
ests of the Conservative party’, an early editorial claimed:
We wish to draw a decided distinction between the views held by the
ordinary Conservative member of Parliament and those he is compelled
to adopt by the order of his official leaders in London. That party, in our
opinion, has entirely misunderstood the feelings of the working classes
and absolutely underrated their intelligence.
Perhaps after reading our remarks some of you may consider that we are
Tories. Well, we do not object to the name when we remember that in the
days when Tory principles prevailed, all classes in the country were happier
and far more prosperous than they are at present.25
Like the ‘Reveille’ and the rest of the party’s Right wing, The
Commentator claimed to be representing real Tory principles, and, more-
over, to be the voice of the disenfranchised real Conservatives.
According to Searle, one distinguishing feature of the Edwardian Right
was its assumption that ‘there existed vast numbers of “silent voters” and
“little people” who were exasperated with the conventional system of
politics, which ignored their interests and point of view’.26 As an organ
of the Radical Right, The Commentator had faith that working-class
Conservatives could be won over if the party empowered them, and if
it also provided them with proper leadership. ‘We are thoroughly con-
vinced’, The Commentator claimed,
that this country is equipped with a powerful and sufficient army of
Conservative supporters; but we deny that the finest army in the world
can be of any real service if its generals, instead of confronting the enemy
in accordance with the rules of ordinary warfare, persist not only in frat-
ernising with the enemy, but in losing their followers in the shoals and
quicksands into which they are perpetually leading them.27
The idea that the Conservative Party was ‘fraternising’ with the opposi-
tion was another view prevalent in Edwardian Right circles. Accordingly,
the paper berated the party’s alleged ‘old policy of surrender’, and Balfour
The Commentator 7
was accused of betrayal, opportunism, and collusion when he tried to
confer with the Liberals about the Opposition’s proposed reforms and the
vexed issue of changes in the House of Lords. ‘Does Mr. Balfour imag-
ine’, The Commentator asked, ‘that the divergent views represented by the
various sections can be made to harmonise in any conceivable way with
the doctrines of Conservatism?’28 This attack on Balfour and the party
executive extended to a critique of a widespread corruption allegedly poi-
soning British political life.29 The suggestion that the two front benches
were colluding against the electorate was the subject of Hilaire Belloc and
Cecil Chesterton’s The Party System (1910), and was a view fully endorsed
by The Commentator, which also had the suspicion – again common in
Tory Right circles – that the Tory press was somehow controlled by the
executive and biased against real Conservatism.30
One of the earliest objectives of The Commentator was to gather sup-
port against Liberal education policies, including Lloyd George’s push
to make school attendance compulsory beyond the age of twelve. This
would lead directly to ‘tyranny’, it argued: ‘the children of our working
population have been prevented from learning their future business [for]
it is perfectly obvious that the majority of the children of our working
classes are destined to rely on manual labour’.31 Lloyd George’s progres-
sive tax reforms, which would increase redistributive taxation, and his
party’s demands for reform in the House of Lords were seen by the paper
as signalling ‘the inauguration of the Socialist regime’.32 Reaching out to
disaffected Tory voters, the newspaper hailed the Upper Chamber as the
‘only barrier existing between you and tyranny’, and working conservatives
were warned against the ‘Radical-Socialist-Irish . . . conspiracy against the
Constitution’.33 True to its Tory Right leanings, the paper was also against
free trade and in favour of Tariff Reform: ‘the outward and visible signs of
the effects of Free Trade in England’, it maintained, ‘can be observed in the
closing of our iron furnaces, and the loss of an infinite number of indus-
tries which previously flourished in this country’.34 The Commentator was
also imperialistic, part of its objection to Socialism being that it ‘threat-
ened the destruction of the best interests of our country and Empire’, but
there is no sign of the xenophobia and outright bigotry that mar the writ-
ings of some of the ‘Reveilles’ (for example, Arnold White’s).35
For all its polemics, and despite its pointed stance towards the party
leadership, The Commentator backed the Conservative Party, making
it clear from the first number that, ‘In spite of all we have said against
the action of the official Conservative party, we can assure you that the
only way to rid yourselves of Radical tyranny is to support Conservative
candidates.’36 When Balfour finally resigned, on 8 November 1911, The
Commentator showed a new confidence in the party, in line with the
Reveille group, which actually disbanded to mark its support of his
successor, Andrew Bonar Law.37
As well as criticising the party leadership and demanding a ‘hardening’
of Tory principles, The Commentator stressed the importance of organisa-
tion, of devising a cohesive Conservative set of principles, and, crucially,
of communicating these to the public via an improved propaganda strat-
egy. This is how an early editorial put it:
There can be no doubt that the party machinery requires complete
overhauling . . . The leaders of the party should be in much closer touch
with the organisation, and the work of the various committees and sub-
committees should be something more than the mere formality it is at
present; some co-ordination of effort among the various societies is
absolutely essential. Above all things we want a clear and defined policy
without evasion, and stripped of these vague and intangible subtleties so
dear to the philosophic soul.38
Of course, this emphasis on organisation and propaganda was by no
means unique to The Commentator. It was, for example, also the stance
of the Quarterly Review, which called for ‘clear and definite’ party pro-
grammes, warned against ‘vagueness and vacillation’, and asserted the
usefulness of posters and catchwords as a means of political persuasion.39
In fact, in the wake of the election of December 1910, the party itself was
taking notice, appointing the former Chief Whip Aretas Akers-Douglas
to reorganise its structure and improve its communications department.40
No newspaper, however, put more emphasis on the creation and dis-
semination of ideology, and on the value of an effective communication
strategy, than The Commentator. From its first issue and throughout its
three-year existence, the paper kept calling attention to ‘the disastrous
laxity of Conservative organisation’, taking it in its own hands to rally
voters by producing and disseminating propaganda pamphlets and
‘manuals’ for Conservatives that presented ‘plain facts, expressed in sim-
ple language’.41 This emphasis on clear expression, ‘plain language’, and
‘straightforward talks’, intended to counter the obfuscating rhetoric of the
official party office, is a dominant and recurring theme in its columns.
According to Commentator Conservatives, the party ought to present
the electorate with a ‘clear and defined policy’ because, it was announced
in the first issue,
To go before them with a hundred and one suggestions . . . is simply to
court defeat. Without . . . a defined policy, it is impossible to enthuse
The Commentator 9
the electorate, and especially when it is perfectly obvious that the lead-
ers are irretrievably mixing themselves up with the politics of the other
side.42
By ‘other side’, The Commentator meant the Liberals, ‘Socialists’, or

‘Radicals’ – terms often conflated in the Edwardian years and used inter-
changeably by the paper’s contributors.43 While remaining critical of the
Conservative Party organisation, the paper recognised that the ‘Socialists’
had an advantage over the Conservatives, which was down to their ‘meth-
ods of training’ – a point also made in the Quarterly Review.44 If the
Conservative Party was to be successful at elections, it needed to match
the propaganda techniques of its opponents:
Any political speaker will tell you that the requirements of public, and
especially outdoor, speaking have undergone considerable changes . . . If we
are to be put in the abject position of being taught by Socialists, it would
seem that the first lesson we should learn is their methods of training their
adherents in the way of exposing the vulnerable points in an opponent’s
arguments.45
From then onwards, and consistently throughout its three years of cir-
culation, The Commentator sought to address what it perceived as the
Conservative Party’s major shortcomings, beginning with its lack of clear
propaganda strategy.
At the forefront of this campaign for a better propaganda strategy for
the Conservatives stood Hulme and Storer, both of whom were at this
time involved in experimenting with poetic forms. Already, in ‘A Lecture
on Modern Poetry’ in 1908, Hulme had called for a new ‘introspective’
and ‘visual’ poetry composed in vers libre, and soon he was to deliver his
famous lecture ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, which crystallised his ideas
regarding the composition of modern poetry.46 Storer, who began rally-
ing against rhythm and rhyme at the same time as Hulme, was about to
formulate his own theory for ‘classical’ modernism.47 Together, though
not wittingly, Hulme and Storer initiated Imagism, the aesthetic doctrine
formally launched by Ezra Pound and F. S. Flint in 1913, and considered
by Eliot as the ‘point de repère’ of Anglophone literary modernism.48
The Commentator hosted all five of Hulme’s political essays. Although
this has been almost completely overlooked, the context in which he
formulated and communicated his politics is significant.49 Hulme did
not turn to politics because he ‘ran out of things to say . . . about phi-
losophy and art’ (as L. B. Williams claims), nor was he in his political
essays simply ‘harking back to the “Chesterbelloc” debate that raged
through the pages of The New Age for much of the winter of 1907–8’
(as Robert Ferguson argues).50 Rather, declaring himself a ‘Tory by dispo-
sition’ (in November 1911) and a ‘certain kind of Tory’ (in April 1912),
Hulme took a genuine interest in the events that unfolded following the
1910 elections, and engaged with a very topical debate: the future of the
Conservative Party, and its loss of electoral appeal.51 The Commentator also
ran many articles by Storer, who started writing for the newspaper much
earlier than Hulme; in fact, Hulme’s essays closely follow those of Storer,
both in print and in argument, which is why they can be read in tandem.
In accordance with the other Commentator Conservatives, Hulme
and Storer stressed that existing Tory propaganda strategy was in need of
reform. Highlighting the emotional nature of political conversion, they
argued that Tory rhetoric ought to appeal to the electorate’s instincts
more directly – at a time when, in their literary writings, they and their
early modernist associates were formulating a theory for ‘direct instinc-
tive’ poetry that, as Pound put it, contained ‘facts’ that were ‘swift and
easy of transmission’.52 A detailed reading of Hulme and Storer’s political
journalism reveals many ways in which their political essays intersect with
their modernist poetics.
Crowds and the Nature of Political Conversion

Storer joined The Commentator in July 1910 as a reviewer.53 His first
explicitly political article appeared seven months later, in January 1911.
In it, he wrote:
People are not Conservatives or Socialists by the operation of rational
processes, but from conviction, which is an instinctive silent thing.
Arguments and reasons are merely means for advancing towards or pre-
serving an end. Though it may seem at first glance a point of little impor-
tance that the English intellectuals are mainly, if not entirely, on the side
opposed to Conservatism, consideration will show that though theirs is a
very small class, it exercises an influence altogether out of proportion to its
size.54
Storer’s argument was twofold. First, he argued that the formation of
political ideology was an instinctual or non-rational process and that,
consequently, the Conservatives needed to do more to appeal to the
instincts of the electorate. Second, he claimed that a major reason for
the Radicals’ successful appeal to voters was the work done by Socialist
intellectuals in disseminating and popularising Socialist beliefs. So if
the Conservatives were to be effective in winning over members of the
Crowds and the Nature of Political Conversion 11
electorate, he claimed in the same article, they needed to ‘destroy’ the
Socialists’ ‘illusion of being in the fashion’. ‘This work’, he proposed in an
article from May 1911, ‘writers can do, and it is as important in its way
as the day-to-day tactics of the practical politicians.’55
Hulme made the same two points in ‘A Note on the Art of Political
Conversion’, his first piece for The Commentator, serialised in February–
March 1911. ‘Conversion is always emotional and non-rational’, he
wrote, before asserting that intellectuals played an important part in the
formulation of political beliefs. The analysis was identical to Storer’s:
We may be under the delusion that we are deciding a question from
purely rational motives, but we never are . . .
Now this does seem to me to be a point of practical importance if it
helps us to convert this class. For though the type may not be numerous,
it does have, in the end, a big influence in politics. Not very obviously or
directly, for in no country do the intellectuals appear to lead less than in
ours; but ultimately and by devious ways their views soak down and
colour the whole mass.56
The idea that the Tory party had been too slow to appreciate the help
that intellectuals could offer it was by no means uncommon. Writing at
the same time as Hulme and Storer but in a different paper, the foreign
correspondent, art critic, and Nietzsche scholar J. M. Kennedy blamed
the decline in Tory support on the inability of the party to recognise the
important part played by ideas and intellectuals. In the series of articles
he published in The New Age between May and August 1911, which he
later collected, expanded, and published in book form under the title
Tory Democracy, Kennedy berated the Tory leaders for having been ‘too
stupid to appreciate the importance of ideas’; worse, for failing to see
that ‘ideas are the powerful influence underlying all political action’.57
For Kennedy, the party’s ‘inability . . . to grasp the importance of ideas’
was most ‘depressing’, especially as ‘the reasons for the three successive
Conservative defeats – in January 1906 and in January and December
1910 – are to be found in the Tories’ lack of ideas’. The party leaders, he
concluded, ought to have done more ‘to dissociate themselves from the
Liberal leaders’; and to do so, the party needed intellectuals – men able
‘either to create new ideas for themselves or to appreciate and develop the
new ideas created for them by others’.58
As well as recognising the importance of ideas, Kennedy stressed
the need to acknowledge the emotional nature of political influence.
Invoking the nineteenth-century historian W. E. H. Lecky, he followed
Hulme and Storer in claiming that political influence worked indirectly.59
Similar claims were also made by Ford Madox Ford in The English
Review. The vote of ordinary men at a general election, Ford maintained
in a 1909 editorial, ‘will be influenced by some mysterious catchword’.60
Or, as he put it in his pseudonymous article, ‘A Declaration of Faith’, a
few months later, ‘What sways them is an effective political cat-call, an
effective election poster or a politician of an attractive personality.’61 Ford
would continue to criticise the Conservative Party’s anti-intellectualist
stance in the years after the war, writing in the transatlantic review in
1924 (now under the pseudonym ‘Daniel Chaucer’) that the ‘Tory Party,
being the stupid party, never employs writers of any talent to support
it’.62 This sentiment would be echoed by Eliot in a 1929 commentary
in the Criterion; writing disparagingly of the Conservative Party, Eliot
claimed that ‘within the memory of no living man under sixty has it
acknowledged any contact with intelligence’.63
At the time Hulme, Storer, Kennedy, and Ford were voicing these
concerns, the view that ideological conviction was non-rational was
widespread. Having been popularised by crowd psychologists, it was
summoned by both the Left and the Right to dismiss the political beliefs
of large swathes of the population as misguided. In an April 1911 article
in the Quarterly Review, for instance, the author explained that ‘there
is great doubt if even a small percentage of the electors have the slight-
est understanding of the principles for which they blindly vote’.64 As
J. S. McLelland has shown, it was customary for those suspicious of
Liberalism to dismiss beliefs in ‘reason as a universal legislator’ by citing
‘evidence’ from crowd psychology proving the irrational nature of politi-
cal persuasion.65 In fact, this idea, as well as the related notion that indi-
viduals are made barbarians in a group, is found everywhere in Hippolyte
Taine’s The Origins of Contemporary France, which has served conserva-
tives as a cautionary tale against popular uprisings since its publication
in the late nineteenth century.66 At the same time, as Vincent Sherry has
demonstrated, Liberal politicians were applying the findings of crowd
psychologists for their own propaganda purposes.67
One of the most famous expositions of this view of the formation
of ideology as a non-rational process was Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd
(1895), which Hulme cited in ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion’
in support of his claim that ‘conversion is anything but intellectual’.68 Le
Bon’s analysis, versions of which continue to have purchase in our day,
was drawn out of a charged but facile distinction, cast between, on the
one hand, the inferior, disconnected, and associative ‘reasoning’ of the
crowd and, on the other, the application of a higher process of logical
argumentation – the privilege of the rational observer.69 According to
Le Bon, ‘crowds are not . . . influenced by reasoning, and can only com-
prehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas’, so that ‘the orators who
know how to make an impression upon them always appeal . . . to their
sentiments and never to their reason’. Le Bon attributed this phenom-
enon to the nature of ‘man’, who, he wrote, resembled a primitive being
‘by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words
and images’ and, further, whose ‘Reason and arguments are incapable
of combating certain words and formulas.’ Le Bon’s conclusion was that
words such as ‘democracy’, ‘socialism’, ‘equality’, and ‘liberty’ (which he
described as ‘vague’) often ended up as ‘natural forces’: words that ‘evoke
grandiose and vague images in men’s minds’.70
Another book mentioned by Hulme in ‘A Note on the Art of Political
Conversion’ was Graham Wallas’s Human Nature in Politics (1908).
Building on Le Bon’s work, Wallas argued that, given that political alle-
giance frequently depended on impulses and instincts, it was a mistake
to put too much emphasis on the ‘intellectuality of mankind’. In accord-
ance with Le Bon, Wallas asserted that it was an essential trait of human
nature to seek something ‘vague’ in which to believe. Ultimately, it was
our predisposition to believe the ‘vague’ that explained Socialism’s great
popular appeal: ‘The need of something which one may love and for
which one may work’, Wallas stated, ‘has created for thousands of work-
ing men a personified “Socialism,” a winged goddess with stern eyes and
drawn sword to be the hope of the world.’71
Hulme employed the theses of Le Bon and Wallas in The Commentator
in support of his claim that Tory propaganda strategy ought to change.
The idea was that the small class of intellectuals who had access to facts
ought to communicate these to the electorate by appealing to their emo-
tions. In ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion’, he followed Le Bon
in arguing that ‘catch-words’, words such as ‘natural’ and ‘free’, ended up
acquiring the status of ‘mental categories’, the result of a process in which
politicians and other rhetoricians ‘deliberately reiterate a short phrase . . .
until it gets into the mind of the victim, by a process of suggestion
definitely not intellectual’.72 The Tories, Hulme asserted, needed to take
that into account, and formulate their own catchwords. Again in agree-
ment with Le Bon, but now also Wallas, in the related essay ‘The Art
of Political Conversion’, from April 1911, he warned fellow Tories that,
in order to win back votes from the Liberals, it was important that they
appealed to the electorate’s ‘instincts’: for ‘it is absolutely no use trying
to convert them by means of hard facts’. Accordingly, William Samuel
Lilly’s conservative treatise Idola Fori: An Examination of Seven Questions
of the Day (1910) might have been ‘perfectly sound . . . it contains the
exact truth, and . . . it exactly represents my own position’, Hulme wrote,
but it failed to appeal to the people because it had ‘no propaganda quali-
ties . . . It is sense, but it is not “catching”.’73 The lesson from Le Bon and
Wallas, Hulme stressed in his two Commentator pieces on political con-
version, was that the Conservatives ought to have appealed to the elec-
torate’s instincts, not their reason. To the exact same effect, Storer had
argued in his own article in The Commentator (published weeks earlier)
that the Tories needed to shift their emphasis away from factual analysis –
for ‘arguments and reasons are merely means for advancing towards or
preserving an end’ – and approach the electorate by instinctual, non-
rational, means.74 For Kennedy, too, the Conservatives needed to recog-
nise that ‘ideas cannot be seen’; had they done so, Kennedy claimed, they
would have ‘repudiated the Liberal catchwords’.75
The idea that rational analysis alone cannot reach the depths of
human behaviour was also one of the tenets of the philosophy of Henri
Bergson – whose views had actually been a source of inspiration for
Le Bon’s crowd psychology.76 Bergson’s impact on the development
of twentieth-century art and literature is well documented, but the
influence his thought might have exerted on Edwardian Tory propa-
ganda remains uncharted. Hulme was intimately acquainted with the
philosophy of Bergson, having already published several essays on the
French thinker (mostly in The New Age), and it is very hard to imagine
Storer or Kennedy not being familiar with the French philosopher’s
metaphysics: between 1909 and 1911 alone, no fewer than two hun-
dred articles on Bergson appeared in journals and newspapers, including
The Commentator, which gave both Matter and Memory and Creative
Evolution its endorsement in reviews.77 In any case, Bergsonian ideas
inhibit the political essays of both Storer and Kennedy. Of course,
Bergson did not discuss the nature of political conversion anywhere in
his work; moreover, whereas crowd psychologists such as Le Bon made
the point that humans relied on their instincts too much, Bergson
wanted to see them rely on their instincts even more, lamenting the fact
that humans had been so conditioned as always to try to act rationally.
However, Bergson’s philosophy bore on Edwardian Tory propaganda
discussions in two ways: on the one hand, it stressed the limitations
of rational analysis, alerting propagandists to the considerable degree
to which humans relied on instinctual responses; on the other hand,
Bergson, suspicious of conventional language, highlighted the value of
non-linguistic means in engaging with readers or audiences – in this case,
the electorate.
Bergson’s great philosophical legacy is his renunciation of positivistic
dependence on rational analysis, a reliance that he found misleading
and, therefore, inadequate as a philosophical method. This is the foun-
dational premise that led him, in a move that defined his entire intel-
lectual project, to distinguish between ‘intellect’ and ‘intuition’. Put
simply (perhaps crudely), for Bergson there are two forms of knowledge:
one reached by analysis or through the ‘intellect’; and another which is
the result of ‘intuition’ and which is achieved when we ‘carefully look
into ourselves’.78 The intellect is a well-tuned instrumental mechanism
working to organise reality in a practical, convenient, and efficient man-
ner. The problem is that in doing so, it suppresses ‘our inner and indi-
vidual existence’.79 Our mental, social, and linguistic mechanisms are
all geared towards practical considerations, so preventing us from expe-
riencing reality as it truly is – in its rawest state. As Bergson explained
in his lecture ‘The Soul and the Body’ (1912), our brains process only
those experiences that are relevant to our daily lives, censoring all but
the ‘practically useful’, with language arranging rather than expressing
our thoughts and with our ‘outer . . . social life’ therefore dictating our
feelings, thoughts, and actions.80 He had made a similar point in An
Introduction to Metaphysics, the short 1903 essay that Hulme translated
into English (with considerable help from F. S. Flint) in 1912.81 Here,
Bergson argued that the intellect is not interested in finding the pre-
existing reality, which is revealed through intuition, but strives only
‘to draw profit – in short, to satisfy an interest’.82 At its core, therefore,
Bergson’s philosophy is a critique of intellectualism: what he referred to in
Creative Evolution (1907) as ‘metaphysical dogmatism’, meaning the philo-
sophical view that privileges reason at the expense of instinct or intuition.83
Hulme is usually said to have reneged on Bergsonian ideas in his
political journalism, but, on the contrary, he recognised the relevance of
Bergson’s ideas to Tory propaganda. In The Commentator, he referred to
Bergson as a philosopher who – like Le Roy, Croce, Eucken, and Simmel –
understood ‘the intellect . . . merely as a subtle and useful servant of the
will, and [appreciated] man’s generally irrational vital instincts’.84 He
was certainly not the first to apply Bergson’s ideas to a political discus-
sion. Le Bon had already used Bergsonian ideas in his crowd psychol-
ogy, while the implications of Bergson’s critique of intellectualism for
the formation of political ideologies had already been noted by Georges
Sorel, whose 1908 book Réflexions sur la violence Hulme would eventually
translate, and whose ideas exerted considerable influence on him and,
later, on Eliot.85 In Reflections on Violence, Sorel argued that our politi-
cal decisions are not fully rational, and that it was therefore useful for
politicians to create ‘a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all
the sentiments’, adding in a note to this remark that ‘this is the “global
knowledge” of Bergson’s philosophy’.86 Sorel here must have had in mind
Bergson’s suggestion in An Introduction to Metaphysics and elsewhere in
his work that supra-rational, non-conceptual, visual impressions can
carry us through to the point of intuition and, therefore, achieve the kind
of ‘direct’ communication not afforded to us by conventional language.87
As a believer in syndicalism – the transfer of the means of production
and distribution to the workers – Sorel hoped that this language consist-
ing of images would communicate to workers the ‘myth of the general
strike’, which would in turn ensure their radical and unswerving strug-
gle.88 Language consisting of just such a ‘body of images’, we will see
further below, was the aim of the Commentator propagandists, but also of
the poets who were soon to begin to call themselves ‘Imagists’.
‘The Disease of Language’

While the conviction of The Commentator that abstract language can-
not evoke sentiments followed in its principle from Bergson’s mistrust
of concepts, its history stretched back much further. It is comparable
to the evolutionary account of language that sees words as separated in
the process of abstraction from the sensation that caused them and the
image that lies behind them. This view of language dominates much of
post-Cartesian philosophy, but it received one of its most memorable
expositions in Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay of 1873, ‘On Truth and Lies in
a Nonmoral Sense’.89 While this work remained unpublished throughout
Nietzsche’s life, it nicely sums up his early view of language.90 It is worth
turning to Nietzsche’s essay also because approaching Tory propaganda
techniques through his account of language reveals a further way in
which his ideas influenced the Right in those years.91
Included in his Collected Works of 1894–1904, Nietzsche’s essay argues
that language consists of arbitrary signs designating abstract entities
that do not correspond to reality but that have an entirely tropological
structure. It tells a story according to which humans’ first contact with
the physical world initiated in them a nerve stimulus, which they then
transferred onto an image and, ultimately, imitated in sound. Gradually,
these noises were developed into a more advanced system of language, as
‘The Disease of Language’ 17
‘from boredom and necessity’ humans developed the wish to participate
in a community. They therefore assigned commonly agreed concep-
tions and meanings to words and, in this way, language was invented.92
Unfortunately, Nietzsche claimed, somewhere during this process we for-
got that language is simply a system of metaphors and as a consequence
we allowed language to become truth: from this moment on, ‘that which
shall count as “truth” . . . is established . . . a uniformly valid and binding
designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language . . .
establishes the first laws of truth’.93
Having started as an unconscious and instinctual process, language for
Nietzsche came to consist only of concepts that are by definition removed
from the ‘thing in itself ’. It remains the case that although the first meta-
phor is ‘individual and without equals’, as soon as it is translated into
communal language, it loses its uniqueness, succumbing to convention
and becoming ‘herd’ language.94 This tripartite metaphoric process – from
physical thing to nerve stimulus and sound, and so finally to conceptual
language – was taken by Nietzsche to show that language is removed both
from the real thing and from the experience of the original ‘subjective
stimulation’.95 The nature of this process of abstraction should therefore
make us suspicious of language and lead us to doubt whether it is ever
possible to retrieve the original ‘truth’ behind words. As Nietzsche wrote:
The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never
a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression. . . The ‘thing
in itself ’ (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its con-
sequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the
creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This
creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing
these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors . . . we possess nothing
but metaphors for things – metaphors which correspond in no way to the
original entities. In the same way that the sound appears as a sand figure,
so the mysterious X of the thing in itself first appears as a nerve stimulus,
then as an image, and finally as a sound. Thus the genesis of language does
not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within and with
which the man of truth, the scientist, and the philosopher later work and
build, if not derived from never-never land, is at least not derived from the
essence of things.96
Nietzsche therefore viewed language as an arbitrary, communal system of
‘legislation’, which consists of concepts abstracted through a metaphoric
exchange. These concepts, moreover, do not correspond to the ‘real
things’ that humans – forgetting that ‘the original perceptual metaphors
are metaphors’ – take them to be. And a concept, he concluded, does not
designate the ‘thing in itself ’: it is ‘bony, foursquare, and transposable as a
die . . . merely the residue of a metaphor’.97
Years before Nietzsche’s essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson had used a simi-
lar metaphor to describe the debasement of language after the sense of
the particular connection of first language to the natural world had been
lost. In the chapter on ‘Language’ in his book Nature (1836), Emerson
argued that all words, including those conveying intellectual and moral
meaning, are ‘signs of natural facts’, making language a medium for
representing reality directly. Language for Emerson originated in the
transformation of nature into words, but this process became ‘hidden
from us in the remote time when language was framed’. As humans lost
the ‘simplicity’ of their characters, their ‘love of truth’, and their ‘desire to
communicate it without loss’ and became interested in ‘riches . . . pleasure
. . . power, and . . . praise’, Emerson maintained, they lost their connection
with nature, and therefore also with language. This resulted in a simi-
lar situation to the one Nietzsche described several decades later: ‘new
imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for
things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bul-
lion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all
power to stimulate the understanding or the affections’.98
Via Hulme, Nietzsche’s quasi-Emersonian view of language found its
way into The Commentator. In ‘The Art of Political Conversion’, Hulme
explained that all words gradually lose their meaning and effect, so that
‘the catch-words of one generation have absolutely no effect on the next’.
Changing the metaphor, Hulme likened this process to a disease:
Take a phrase like ‘the rights of property’. After it has been bandied about
in political controversy for some fifty years it becomes absolutely of no
effect . . . It is something analogous to what happens in the case of disease.
Bring a microbe of measles or some other simple disease in contact with
an Australian aborigine and it kills him. But in Europe so many genera-
tions have had this disease that at last we have become hardened to it, and
it is not, as a rule, fatal . . . This is just what happens with political catch-
words. Like the microbe, after a time they work themselves out . . .99
Hulme’s evolutionary interpretation of language and his metaphor of
disease recall some of the fragments in his early, rudimentary, notebooks,
‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’, from 1906 to 1907. Like
some of his claims in the Commentator essays, these can be read through
Nietzsche’s account of language (Nietzsche is, in fact, mentioned more
often than any other philosopher in the notebooks).100 In ‘Cinders’,
Hulme had described language as a process during which all words
‘The Disease of Language’ 19
gradually lose their symbolic value. This process resulted in the ‘disease of
language’:
There is a kind of gossamer web, woven between the real things, and by
this means the animals communicate. For purposes of communication
they invent a symbolic language. Afterwards this language, used to excess,
becomes a disease, and we get the curious phenomena of men explaining
themselves by means of the gossamer web that connects them. Language
becomes a disease in the hands of the counter-word mongers. It must
constantly be remembered that it is an invention for the convenience of
men . . . Symbols are picked out and believed to be realities . . . words [such
as ‘good’ and ‘beauty’] are merely counters representing vague groups of
things, to be moved about on a board for the convenience of the players.101
The syllogism was the same as in the later text: humans understand the
world filtered through language; because language is ‘symbolic’, our
understanding of reality is always already removed from the ‘real things’
that language claims to represent, but at least ‘fresh’ words keep us closer
to reality than ‘used’ words or ‘counters’; we can therefore say that the
more we use words, the further removed from reality they become, and
this leads to the ‘disease of language’: when words, divorced from reality,
are taken to mirror reality.
We encounter a similar idea in ‘Notes on Language and Style’,
Hulme’s other set of notes, which postulated that, for purposes of com-
munication, ‘real things are replaced by symbols’, in a way similar to
substitutions of variables with their values in algebra. It was a ‘fallacy’,
Hulme wrote in ‘Notes on Language and Style’, to think that language
was logical: ‘Phrases have meaning for no reason’, and language is a
‘Large clumsy instrument’ that ‘does not naturally come with mean-
ing’.102 This was the same Nietzschean account of language that we
find in his discussion of poetry in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, in
‘Romanticism and Classicism’, in ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ – and in his
political essays for The Commentator.103
As well as Nietzsche (and Emerson), Hulme’s evolutionary account of
language in ‘The Art of Political Conversion’ can be read via Théodule-
Armand Ribot, whose significance to modernist poetics has been recog-
nised, though his possible influence on discussions of Tory propaganda
has not.104 That Ribot would give a very similar account of language to
that given by the early Nietzsche cannot come as a surprise. According
to Claudia Crawford, Nietzsche’s genealogy of language in ‘On Truth
and Lies’ is best understood as a debt to Arthur Schopenhauer: it was
Schopenhauer, Crawford argues, who taught Nietzsche that it was
impossible to know the ‘thing in itself ’ (that which exists outside the
subject), but that first perception enabled a more direct relationship with
the ‘thing in itself ’ than abstraction (or language, which is a product of
abstraction). Like Nietzsche, Ribot acknowledged Schopenhauer, and
particularly for the idea that abstract concepts obscured reality and that
only through intuitions could we have true knowledge.105
Ribot’s Evolution of General Ideas (1897) traced the progressive devel-
opment of the cognitive processes of abstraction and generalisation in a
similar way to Nietzsche’s essay. In it, Ribot drew a distinction between
‘concrete’ words and abstract ‘general’ terms. His thesis was that there
was a direct line of progression from inferior abstraction, where attention
is the primary condition of primitive people, to the formation of general
images through a process of dissociation to, finally, the substitution of
these general images for words through complete abstraction:
as we ascend in generalisation we rise . . . into the approximate. The rela-
tively empty concepts . . . are the product of a discontinuous generalisation
which prevents descent without interruption or omission into the concrete
. . . They are names representing a knowledge that is incomplete, partial,
inadequate or ill-organised . . . Having no possible contact with reality they
float in an unreal atmosphere.106
Since they gained the capacity for abstraction, humans have been able
to formulate general concepts; these concepts, in turn, enabled more
advanced communication than previously possible, but because they
are ‘empty’, they prevent us from descending into the ‘concrete’ reality
that we once experienced. In Schopenhauer’s terms, general concepts
are ‘phantasms’ or ‘representations of representations’ that ‘cling’ to the
subject: they are ‘abstract’ and ‘discursive’, ‘attainable and intelligible’ by
those who possess ‘the faculty of reason’ and whom they help reduce per-
ception to knowledge, but they do not ‘bring anything new to light’.107
To determine the function of language as an intermediary between
originary impressions and mental images with more precision, Ribot
carried out an experiment. The aim was ‘to discover the instantaneous
operations (conscious or unconscious)’ that occur when humans think,
hear, or read a word. Individuals were submitted to a hearing of a series
of words and were asked to describe without reflection what came to
their minds: ‘We said to the subject’, Ribot summarised, ‘“I am going
to pronounce certain words; will you tell me directly, without reflex-
ion, whether this word calls up anything or nothing in your mind? If
anything, what is suggested to you?”’ The experiment revealed that ‘as
a rule a mixed type prevails: a concrete image for certain words, and
Tory Propaganda, Imagist Poetics 21
typographical vision, or auditory images, for others’.108 ‘Concrete’ words,
such as, for example, ‘dog’, ‘animal’, and ‘colour’, generally evoked a
mental image of a particular thing, a phenomenon which Ribot described
in terms of a ‘logic of images’. Early on in the book, he explained that
this ‘logic of images’ is characteristic of animals and of infants, while it
may also – during the process of artistic creation – act as ‘auxiliary for
adults’.109 By contrast, abstract or general terms, such as ‘time’, ‘cause’,
or ‘infinity’, revealed in the minds of the participants a ‘typographic type
[that] consists in seeing printed words and nothing more’, or ‘auditory
images unaccompanied either by the vision of printed words or by con-
crete images’. Ribot described the kind of reasoning involved in these
cases using terms borrowed from the seventeenth-century philosopher
Leibniz: it was ‘blind’ and ‘symbolic’, with the words in such instances
evoking in individuals’ minds only ‘tokens’.110
As Nietzsche and Emerson, therefore, Ribot held to an account of lan-
guage according to which a gradual but irreparable difference sets in in
language, separating originary sensations and the concepts that ‘fix’ them
in language in higher forms of abstraction. This is what Hulme described
as the ‘disease of language’, and it is what led him to demand reform of
Tory rhetoric. Less than a month after an article on this theme by Storer,
Hulme reiterated in The Commentator that Conservatism needed to come
up with new catchwords, because the old ones had outlived their useful-
ness.111 The ‘old set’ of Tory catchwords ‘are now absolutely worked out’,
Hulme argued in ‘The Art of Political Conversion’, because ‘any meta-
phor or image in time becomes conventionalised, and so ceases to convey
any real concrete meaning’.112
Tory Propaganda, Imagist Poetics

Although not explicitly concerned with reforming language or proposing
a philosophical method that claimed to reveal reality (such as Bergson’s
technique of intuition), Ribot did hint at how it was possible to return
to the originary sensation at a pre-linguistic or instinctive level. We
have already seen that Ribot’s experiments were taken to demonstrate
that ‘concrete’ words evoke a mental image of a particular thing, unlike
abstract or general terms, which are ‘tokens’. ‘Concrete’ words enable
us to reach the originary experience, Ribot argued, by appealing to our
‘unconscious substratum, this organised and potential knowledge [which]
gives not merely value, but an actual denotation to the word, – like
harmonics superadded to the fundamental note’.113 The conclusion was
different from Le Bon’s, which was that ‘vague’ and abstract terms –
‘democracy’, ‘socialism’, ‘equality’, ‘liberty’ – evoked images in human
minds; but the essential point was the same in the two writers: certain
words and formulas appeal directly to our emotions, while others do not;
and by virtue of the fact that emotional engagement is more ‘direct’ than
abstraction, these words are the more effective means of communication.
As with Le Bon’s crowd psychology, Ribot’s evolutionary psychology
offers a way of explaining the emphasis which Hulme, Storer, and other
Commentator conservatives laid on substituting simple language and clear
expression for the abstract language of official party leaflets, which left
their readers (as one editorial in The Commentator put it) ‘completely and
hopelessly befogged’.114
By contrast, Nietzsche was far less clear about how – or whether – we
can reach this originary sensation than Ribot. On the one hand, ‘On
Truth and Lies’ seems to espouse the radically sceptical position that
there is no hope of reaching beyond language into a realm of universal
and eternal truths: that there is no deeper truth and that no ultimate
reality lurks behind the veil of appearance. As Andreas Urs Sommer has
argued, truth in this account may be understood as perspectivist and
situational.115 Yet on the other hand, Nietzsche did not exclude the pos-
sibility that an instinctual or unconscious reaction to a sensation might
approach the ‘thing in itself ’.116 This is made obvious in his remark that
the intuitive being ‘speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-
of combinations of concepts’, and that by doing so, by ‘shattering and
mocking the old conceptual barriers’, he may ‘correspond creatively
to the impression of the powerful present intuition’.117 Read this way,
Nietzsche would be channeling Emerson’s hope (though perhaps not his
belief ) that – in Emerson’s words – it is possible for ‘wise men’ to pierce
through ‘rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that
picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who
employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God’.118
In this case, the lesson would be the same from Nietzsche as from
Ribot: that it was possible to forge a language more potent than that
of ‘used’ words. While for Ribot this could be done through applying
the ‘logic of images’ of concrete words, for Nietzsche language could be
made more forceful through ‘unheard-of combinations’ – or put simply,
through new, creative, metaphors. Certainly, this was the hope of the
Commentator propagandists (led by Hulme and Storer) in demanding
a radical update of Tory rhetoric: that language could be made more
fresh, more direct, more concrete, and that so it would appeal to the
electorate’s instincts more effectively. It was also what the early modern-
ists who circled around Hulme and Storer (and who eventually devised
the Imagist aesthetic) sought to do: ‘new-mint the speech’, as Pound put
it, because ‘language, the medium of thought’s preservation, is constantly
wearing out’, and in order to ‘strengthen the perceptive faculties and free
them from encumbrance’.119 Even Ford, who was always his own man,
backed the Imagist demand for concrete words, claiming (in a statement
reprinted by Eliot in his pamphlet on Pound in 1917, and which pre-
dates Eliot’s formulation of the principle of ‘objective correlative’ by four
years) that ‘Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emo-
tions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader.’120
Having explained in ‘The Art of Political Conversion’ that ‘political
catch-words . . . work themselves out’, Hulme suggested that ‘It is only
by a certain unexpectedness of phrasing that a certain feeling of convic-
tion is carried over, and you feel that the man was actually describing
something at first hand.’121 By rejecting the clichéd language used by
Conservative Party propagandists and recommending metaphors that
produce instead vivid, concrete images (what he called ‘definite realisa-
tion of the metaphor’), Hulme was not only upholding an evolutionary
account of language close to those of Nietzsche, Emerson, and Ribot,
but also recasting in a political context the proto-Imagist demands he
had made in his lectures on poetry.122 In 1908, in ‘A Lecture on Modern
Poetry’, he had explained that he wanted poetry to achieve ‘direct’ com-
munication. In this early lecture, he had asked poets to recapture the
original ‘vision’ obstructed by conventional language – that they gener-
ate ‘new images’, so that their language ‘arrests your mind all the time
with a picture’.123 In the lectures he wrote and delivered at the time of
the Commentator pieces, he made this requirement the defining trait of
the new poetry he envisaged. In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, which
he wrote sometime between 1911 and 1912, the ‘positive fundamen-
tal quality’ of modern verse is that it is ‘not a counter language, but a
visual concrete one’. In the same way that Tory rhetoric should aim for
‘freshness’, modern poetry must choose ‘fresh epithets and fresh meta-
phors . . . because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become
abstract counters’.124 In a similar fashion, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ (also
1911–12) explained that linguistic metaphors ‘soon run their course and
die’. The poet’s job is to ‘avoid this defect of language’; further, owing to
the particular nature of language and because ‘the visual effect of a meta-
phor so soon dies’, the poet must ‘continually . . . be searching out new
metaphors’. The poet, Hulme concluded in ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’,
repeating the claim of ‘The Art of Political Conversion’, must not ‘rest
satisfied’ until he ‘got hold’ of a metaphor ‘which did pull up the reader
and make him visualise the thing’.125
Hulme mixed Tory politics and modernist poetics in an even
more striking way in ‘Theory and Practice’, his third essay for The
Commentator, in November 1911. Here, he ventured to explain how
the Tories might break from simply ‘passing on a mechanical set of
catchwords and clichés’ and instead communicate their ideas in a ‘direct
instinctive way’ by turning to Keats. Essentially restating the argument of
‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, where he outlined how images can ‘force lan-
guage to convey over this freshness of impression’, in ‘Theory and Practice’
Hulme drew attention to Leigh Hunt’s anecdotal account of the effect
that Spenser’s The Faerie Queene had on the young Keats:
When he came to the phrase about ‘sea shouldering whales’, Keats jumped
in a state of wild enthusiasm about the epithet ‘sea shouldering’. Why? . . .
Simply for this reason . . . that he had in his mind a distinct visual sensa-
tion, a real personal vision of the thing he was describing, and this resulted
in the choice of the unusual epithet in order to convey this feeling over
directly.126
Conservative propagandists, Hulme is saying, must learn from poets.
The poetic experiments of Hulme and his fellow modernists could be
just that source of inspiration, for they were all at this time immersed
in crafting a ‘direct instinctive’ poetry and forging a language compris-
ing fresh metaphors that produced in the mind of the reader a concrete
image. But the poets could learn from the propagandists, too. Although
we must be careful not to draw too direct a line of influence here, the
definiteness and precision, and the simple, plain, language advocated by
The Commentator became, from 1911 onwards, via Hulme and Storer,
the requirements of Imagist poetry. As well as directness, now the ‘great
aim’ was, as Hulme put it memorably in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’,
‘accurate, precise and definite description’.127
Like Hulme, Storer had begun searching for direct and instinctive
language in 1908. In ‘An Essay’, appended to his collection, Mirrors
of Illusion, in that year, he rallied against the ‘monstrosities’ of regular
metre and called for poetry to be made of ‘descriptions or suggestions of
something at accurate identification . . . convincing enough to some one
portion of the brain’.128 In 1912, in the Introduction to his edition of
William Cowper’s poetry, Storer shifted his emphasis on ‘poetic accuracy’
and ‘sureness of . . . observation’, presenting them as the fundamental
qualities of modern verse.129 These were the principles he upheld in
his reviews in The Commentator, as when in July 1910 he praised Luce
Morton’s collection, Threnodies, for its ‘charming simplicity’ and ‘clear-
ness of thought [which] has left the rhythm free, and gives the impres-
sion, which all poetry should give, of having sprung direct from the
poet’s imagination’.130
Pound had also begun looking for direct language, and, even though
he may well have arrived at these independently (as many others did;
for example, the Futurists), from 1911 onwards his demands upon
poetry were aligned with those of Hulme, Storer, and the Commentator
Conservatives more broadly. 131 In ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’
(1911–12), he stated that the main struggle of the poet was against ordi-
nary language consisting of ‘arbitrary and conventional symbols’.132 The
result, he wrote, should be poetry rid of conventional or indirect lan-
guage, a form of communication that ‘exalts the reader, making him feel
that he is in contact with something arranged more finely than the com-
monplace’.133 This is what was so captivating in the Chinese poems he
inherited from Ernest Fenollosa: they relied on ‘natural suggestion’, not
convention, for their sense, and so were very unlike the ‘mental counters’
of conventional speech, which Fenollosa conceived as bricks on a ‘little
checker-board’. It was these ‘mental counters’ that both Nietzsche and
Ribot considered to be the weakness of communal and abstract language,
respectively.134 Like his Chinese ancestor, and like Nietzsche’s intuitive
being, Pound’s modern poet strives for unusual language: ‘there must be
no clichés, set phrases, stereotyped journalese’; and the only escape is ‘by
precision, a result of concentrated attention’, as Pound put it, to what the
poet is writing.135
This is also what The Commentator demanded of the Tory propagan-
dist, of course, and though they are not causally connected, there is an
obvious enough overlap between Hulme and Storer’s propagandising in
The Commentator and Pound’s campaign for a new, Imagist, poetry. Of
course, the Commentator conservatives demanded that what was commu-
nicated concretely should have been facts, not the impressions the poet
had in his mind. But both the rhetorical principle and the aim were the
same: to appeal directly to the emotions of the audience. While the ‘con-
servative’ dimensions of Imagism have been touched upon by Lawrence
Rainey, who found the movement ‘the first anti-avant-garde’, insofar as it
rejected Futurism’s ethos of collective identity and insofar as it remained,
under the influence of Pound, stubbornly ‘averse to more global pro-
grams that linked poetry to contemporary social transformations or
posed questions about the status and functions of art’, the doctrine was
conservative in another, more explicit, way, too: it shared something with
Edwardian Tory efforts to reform Tory propaganda.136
When Pound launched Imagism in 1913, he made direct treatment
and poetical economy two of the three central principles of his new
aesthetic, the other one being musicality. Imagist verse rejected vague
symbolism, instead recognising that the only ‘adequate symbol’ was the
‘natural object’. The poet was instructed to use symbols so that ‘their
symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic qual-
ity of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol
as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk’. Imagist poetry thereby
avoided ‘elaboration and complication’ and, by making ‘apt use’ of the
right metaphors, it aimed to achieve ‘swiftness, almost a violence, and
certainly a vividness’; it went ‘in fear of abstractions’.137 The ultimate goal
was the image: ‘the furthest removed from rhetoric’, ‘the word beyond
formulated language’.138
We can see the principles advocated by Hulme, Storer, and Pound
at work in early Imagist experiments, many of which employ definite
description, plain expression, and unheard-of metaphors. These demands
accord with the ideas developed in Emerson, Ribot, and Nietzsche’s
discussions of language, yet according to Hulme it was Bergson, more
than anyone else, who showed the way to achieving directness. Although
Bergson never devised a theory of art or poetry (to claim so, as Hulme
recognised himself, ‘would be absurd’), An Introduction to Metaphysics
offered one way to circumvent what Hulme termed the ‘disease’ of lan-
guage.139 ‘It is true’, Bergson had written,
that no image can reproduce exactly the original feeling I have of the flow
of my own conscious life . . . [However,] the image has at least this advan-
tage, that it keeps us in the concrete. No image can replace the intuition of
duration, but many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of
things may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the
precise point where there is certain intuition to be seized.140
That is, because visual impressions are supra-rational and non-concep-
tual, they can carry us through to the point of intuition and, therefore,
lead us to duration, what Bergson called the immédiatement donnée.
As we have already seen, this characteristic of images was what inspired
Sorel to claim that the best way to communicate political ideas was
through images.141 As Sorel explained in Reflections on Violence (and as
Le Bon showed in The Crowd), this was because ‘we do nothing great
without the help of warmly-coloured and clearly-defined images, which
absorb the whole of our attention’.142 It is important to remember, how-
ever, that while Bergson’s images are the nearest thing to the original
moment of intuition and, further, are the means through which we can
reach a moment of intuition, they cannot alone reveal to us duration:
for duration to be reached, Bergson made clear, ‘consciousness must . . .
consent to make the effort’. In other words, the literary reader or politi-
cal spectator must be willing to engage with these images. As Bergson
said, ‘consciousness . . . will have been shown nothing: It will simply have
been placed in the attitude it must take up in order to make the desired
effort’.143 This collaboration between author and audience was an impor-
tant requirement of Imagist verse, but it was also in keeping with an idea
we have already encountered in The Commentator: that the Tory ‘silent’
voters were waiting for someone to wake them up and provide them
guidance.
Hulme’s own proto-Imagist poems employ plain language, avoid
abstractions, juxtapose images, and invite us to construct an image
ourselves.
Autumn
A touch of cold in the Autumn night –
I walked abroad
And saw the ruddy moon
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.
Above the Dock
Above the quiet dock in midnight,
Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.
These two poems avoid abstract or emotive words, the main exception
being ‘wistful’, which Hulme added only later to ‘Autumn’ (the surviving
draft of the poem does not contain this word). Both also employ unusual
metaphors: in ‘Autumn’, the moon is a red-faced farmer, while in ‘Above
the Dock’ it becomes a child’s balloon. Sense is evoked through sugges-
tions and associations that fuse to create a ‘body of images’. In ‘Autumn’,
Nietzsche’s ‘unheard-of combinations’ are established between the ‘ruddy
moon’ and the ‘red-faced farmer’, and ‘wistful stars’ and the ‘white faces’
of ‘town children’. As we read, our attention shifts suddenly from one
image to the next, the verse guiding us to a moment where there is (in
Bergson’s terms) an ‘intuition to be seized’. In ‘Above the Dock’, the
image of the hanging moon is swiftly followed by that of a balloon that
has drifted away. The two images carry equal weight and, in juxtaposi-
tion, invite the reader to construct a new image, much as Hulme advo-
cated in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’: two images must ‘unite to suggest
an image which is different to both’.144
A similar process is at play in some of the poetry of other members
of the ‘School of Images’. In an early poem by Joseph Campbell, for
example, images are juxtaposed as we are presented with the poet’s
swift impressions of a landscape when ‘Darkness’ descends: ‘a star
shine in a boghole / A star no longer, but a silver ribbon of lige’.145
Flint’s ‘Four Poems in Unrhymed Cadence’ are also built around
arresting images, as is John Gould Fletcher’s ‘In the City of Night’,
the dependence of the first two lines on In Memoriam VII mak-
ing the third, un-Tennysonian, line the more stark: ‘Along the dis-
mal, empty street, stretching endlessly away / The darkened houses
stand, in mournful dull array / Like wretched starving folk.’146 All
of these poems adhere to Hulme’s Bergsonian method of juxtaposi-
tion, Sorel’s notion of a ‘body of images’, Ribot’s ‘logic of images’,
but also to the plain, clear, and concise expression advocated by
The Commentator. 147 Storer’s ‘Image’ presents images in a matter-
of-fact way: ‘Forsaken lovers, / Burning to a chaste white moon, /
Upon strange pyres of loneliness and drought.’ The same with ‘Street
Magic’: ‘One night I saw a theatre, / Faint with foamy sweet, / And crin-
kled loveliness / Warm in the street’s cold side.’
The archetypal imagistic poem, Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’,
superimposes images to convey an evocation of an intense perception:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
Petals on a wet, black bough.148
Short and succinct, the poem eschews the ‘ornate and approxi-
mate’, as Pound had stipulated in ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’.149
Using parataxis, the poem is direct and precise; it evokes images in
the mind of the reader rather than simply tokens, and achieves what
Pound described as a ‘resembling unlikeness’. 150 As well as Ribot’s
‘logic of images’ and Bergson’s piling of images leading to intuition,
here we see in practice what Pound had described in ‘The Spirit of
Romance’ in 1910 as ‘primary apparition’. This is the apparition
that aims to ‘give vividness to description and stimulate conviction
in the actual vision of the poet’, and which Pound eventually pro-
nounced to be the ultimate aim of all Imagist and Vorticist art.151
He outlined a similar principle in ‘The Wisdom of Poetry’, where
‘perception by symbolic vision’ is understood to be ‘swifter and more
complex than that by ratiocination’.152 This is the poetic ideal of
‘Luminous Detail’, a method which is ‘most vigorously hostile to the . . .
method of sentiment and generalisation’ and which gives us ‘facts’ that
are ‘hard to find’, which suddenly illuminate, and which ‘are swift and
easy of transmission’.153
To forge words or images that appeal to our instincts and are also
‘easy of transmission’ was precisely what Hulme demanded of the Tory
propagandist. It was also what Le Bon, Wallas, and Sorel had identified
as the most effective way of communicating with the electorate and what
the Commentator Conservatives demanded of official Party organs. To
the many sources of influence that went into making the Imagist aes-
thetic, it would not be imprudent or fanciful to add Tory propaganda
discourse.
In ‘The Art of Political Conversion’, Hulme stated that, if the Tories
were in any doubt as to whether they needed to reform their political
rhetoric, they needed only to turn to France, where Charles Maurras
and his circle of French neo-royalists – the Action Française group – had
been successful since the 1890s in ‘restating an old dialect’, and therefore
in giving the French conservatives ‘fresh expression’. The result of this
‘restating’ of conservative ‘dialect’, Hulme had earlier maintained in ‘A
Note on the Art of Political Conversion’, was that ‘L’ Action Française has
made it rather bête démodée to be a Socialist . . . They serve their victim
with the right kind of sauce.’154 Storer thought so, too (though he mis-
spelled the names of those he admired): ‘Papers like L’ Action Française,
writers like Pierre Lassère, and Charles Mauras’, he had written weeks
earlier, ‘have succeeded in gathering around them a group of young
men who laugh at the old-fashioned dreams of Socialism with the quiet
understanding of its power that can best be found in men who were
themselves once among its supporters.’ 155 That was exactly what the
Tories in Britain had to do.
As well as devising an effective communication strategy, the reason the
members of the Action Française were so successful in propagating their
theories, in Hulme’s view, was – as he wrote in an essay contemporary
with his Commentator articles – that Lasserre and Maurras ‘show . . . vivid
interest in the theoretical basis of their position and . . . make an endeav-
our to find a thought-out consistent political philosophy’.156 Updating
Conservative language was therefore not enough; what was needed for
the Tories to be successful in attracting members of the electorate was a
coherent, fully worked-out political philosophy. It was just this philo-
sophical basis that Hulme and Storer could provide by drawing upon
the classical temperament and view of the world. Separately, Kennedy
was to turn to the same tradition, for the explicit purpose of giving the
Conservative party a credible philosophy. From these efforts, the mod-
ernist nebulous distinction between romanticism and classicism, taken
up and developed by Eliot, was to emerge.

Conservative Party Crisis

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CHAPTER 1

Conservative Party Crisis

Conservative Party Crisis

By ‘other side’, The Commentator meant the Liberals, ‘Socialists’, or

Crowds and the Nature of Political Conversion

‘The Disease of Language’

Tory Propaganda, Imagist Poetics

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