Blasting and Bomardiering Page 10

  The 'Bull-gun', an article which I wrote at the time, speaks of 'the romance of the big guns, which has boomed loud for over a century'. Napoleon was a gunner. From the day when he first drove the mixed force of British and dagos out of the naval base of Toulon with his guns, he won his battles as a gunner. He always thought in terms of guns. But the romance of those great guns to-day is rather that of the monsters of the Big Bertha type, than of the small howitzer, with which I mainly had to do.

  The '6-inch How' is not one of the big imposing machines, nor yet one of the graceful swan-necked ordance, which you see on battleships and in coastal forts. 'The recoil of that gun—its sweep backwards, and its return to the "firing position"—is probably the most graceful thing about the gunner's life,' I wrote while I was serving my apprenticeship to the 'bull-gun'. It was a 'bull-gun' of sorts I tended, yes, but a very diminutive bull. It was the smallest 'siege' ordance, in short. And its habits, in a 'war of position', were very similar to the 'Field', except that one, thank god, was not bothered with horses.

  It was rough and heavy work, however, and it required rough and heavy men. On the whole we recruited the biggest men of any branch of the service. Mostly they were coal-miners, Rugby footballers, heavyweight boxers and outsize navvies.

  There was nothing graceful about our performance as you may imagine. Often it partook of the grotesqueness of a knockabout turn. During my first firing course at Lydd, for instance, when I was an acting-sergeant, it required two of us to fire it. And my mate and myself, gripping our lanyard and pulling on it violently together, we rolled over and over upon the ground, as if engaged in an all-in wrestling match. It was more like pulling out an elephant's tooth than firing a gun, to look at, I expect.

  So much for 'the graces', where the 'bull-gun' is concerned. But I soon learnt this strange trade, and should in the normal course of things have gone out to France to shoot at Fritz, but I had set my heart on the commissioned rank. I felt it was due to the editor of Blast to be his own master to some extent. Once I had a 'pip' I could go on being a 'crowd-master', without interfering with anybody, or anybody interfering too much with me.

  At last I got a 'pip'. I went first to the Field Artillery cadet-school at Exeter, where I nearly lost my life in the riding school. Several people were killed while I was there, trying to ride. It was a weekly—perhaps a daily—occurrence.

  Dean Swift never betrayed the essential shallowness of his understanding more grievously than when he selected the Horse as the animal most suited to show up man. I met dozens of his Houhynhnyms at Exeter cadet-school. And a lousier set of four-footed Yahoos I hope I may never encounter. There was one whose tail I had to clean with a sponge (for I had to clean these disgusting beasts as well as ride them) whose behaviour left me speechless and almost lost me a leg. The same outrageous devil nearly broke my neck in the riding school.

  However, I escaped from this inferno of horseflesh. It was in the comparative repose of Trowbridge Cadet-school that I got my 'pip'. This I acquired with some degree of brilliance. The examination involved considerable mathematical ability, and I revealed myself as a natural master of the Calculus. A sort of mute, inglorious Pascal. Indeed a senior wrangler who was sitting next to me at the exam—a man of, I suppose, comparable attainment to Earl Russell—cribbed my results over my shoulder, and saved himself the public disgrace that awaits all these star-performers, when they descend into the market-place and attempt to compete with the plain man, once the latter's blood is really up, as mine was. I was fifth from top.

  But I have lingered enough in these ante-chambers of war. I have no illusion that I was a valuable officer. I rapidly lost interest in the 'bull-gun', once I had learnt how to fire it. And it never fell to my lot to apply my mathematical ability at the Front, so as to hit a distant cross-roads on a map, or lay down a barrage on a trench. The O.G. Battery, or the second-in-command did that. I got my 'pip', and in doing so I became a figurehead. I rolled no more upon the earth with a perspiring companion, as I fired the gun. I never fired a gun again, in fact. Successive gun-crews did that for me. I bought two well-cut suits of old-gold khaki, in Savile Row, a cane, a revolver, and a sumptuous British Warm. I was now 'an officer', whom hundreds of thousands of men still living have saluted—have trembled at the sight of, if they were half-seas over. I passed into a more abstract class.

  CHAPTER VIII

  'Hulme of Original Sin'

  Before turning my back upon England, I will first refer to a few of the figures prominent in the literary world and in art, in 1914, who became soldiers. Principally two: namely T. E. Hulme and Gaudier Brzeska. They were both killed, the former within a quarter of a mile of where I was standing. We were in neighbouring batteries.

  I did not see him hit, but everything short of that, for we could see their earthworks, and there was nothing between to intercept the view. I watched, from ours, his battery being punched full of deep craters, with large naval shells: and from the black fountains of earth that spouted up, in breathless succession, occasional debris hurtled around us as we looked on. I remember a splintered baulk of wood sailing over and striking the dugout at my back.

  Hulme is pronounced Hume. Don't ask me how Brzeska is pronounced—I prefer to call him Gaudier, the name he adopted very sensibly to overcome precisely this difficulty.

  T. E. Hulme was a remarkable man and posthumously has been much appreciated. He was an art-critic, of a philosophic turn. Although he has been called 'a philospher', he was not that, but a man specializing in aesthetic problems. Theory of knowledge, theology, or anything else he dabbled in, was as the groundwork merely for the philosophic understanding of art.

  Neither Bergson (Hulme's master) nor anybody else at the time regarded him as more than that, though sometimes, very naturally, in a Bohemian backwater, he would affect the laurels of the Stagirite, he was not above doing that. I have seen him in the clutches of a little university professional, with Kant at his finger-tips, whom he had provoked by his dialectical trucu-lence. The spectacle was unedifying. Hulme floundered like an ungainly fish, caught in a net of superior academic information.

  His mind was sensitive and original, which is a better thing obviously than the routine equipment of the teaching profession : but he was a journalist with a flair for philosophy and art, not a philosopher. Of both these subjects he was profoundly ignorant, according to technician-standards.

  'Mr. Hulme should do useful work in the field of art-criticism,' or words to that effect, was in Bergson's testimonial, when writing to someone a letter introducing him. It was mainly as a theorist in the criticism of the fine arts that Hulme would have distinguished himself, had he lived. And I should undoubtedly have played Turner to his Ruskin.

  All the best things Hulme said about the theory of art were said about my art. This remark is altogether without conceit. The things to which his pronouncements would not apply— or to which my own pronouncements, which influenced him, would not apply—may quite well be more important. We happened, that is all, to be made for each other, as critic and 'creator'. What he said should be done, I did. Or it would be more exact to say that I did it, and he said it.

  In England there was no one else working in consonance with an 'abstract' theory of art to the same extent as myself. Neither Gaudier nor Epstein would in the end have been 'abstract' enough to satisfy the requirements of this obstinate abstractionist. He would have had to fall back on me.

  Epstein, is, I need not tell you, a very fine artist. His superb busts are among the real achievements in art of our time. But I (as an abstractionist) prefer his lifelike busts to his other less lifelike work. And a life-like bust is 'naturalism', as seen by the puritan-eye of the abstractionist.

  Epstein was, if I may say so, more 'literary' than myself. He was unquestionably Hulme's man (or perhaps I should say Hulme was Epstein's man) upon the social plane. They were great friends, where I never stood in that relation to Hulme at all.

  Hulme wrote at great length about E
pstein, he had a great personal admiration for him, almost, I daresay, a big doglike devotion. Me, he did not like so well. But—and this is no criticism of the distinguished sculptor of the 'Christ'—I believe that the pronounced romantic strain in the great Jewish craftsman would in the long run have made things difficult for such an uncompromising theorist of 'abstract art' as Hulme.

  He had not had time to write much. Even the short time there had been was mostly spent in nervous talk. His literary remains, edited by Mr. Herbert Read, are incredibly badly written. They are reminiscent of his delivery as a lecturer, which was crabbed and harsh to the last degree, and rendered grotesque by the presence of the sort of accent that has made the fortune of Gracie Fields. When he had occasion to say 'abstract art', for instance, the word art, as it was wrung out of his mouth, had a nonsensical quality to the English ear. He read from notes, and never looked up at his audience, and seemed contemptuous of the whole boring performance. These few rough essays and notes all the same show that he was an able and enlightened man, and he was therefore a great loss to England—more perhaps than Gaudier, since he was thoroughly English.

  Hulme is mainly distinguished as a 'thinker', for having heard of the theological doctrine of Original Sin. No one else in England at the time had ever heard of it, or would, I am persuaded, have done so since, had it not been for him. So all those who, successively, have persued his literary remains, when they have come across it have been overcome with astonishment. They have been so permanently impressed, that even afterwards they have felt that Hulme must have been a very extraordinary man to have heard of it. Original Sin is such an original thing to have taken any notice of.

  If men of letters had sobriquets or nicknames, in the way that some painters have (like 'Robert les Ruines' for instance, a painter who was always painting ruins), then Hulme would probably be called 'Hulme of Original Sin'. As it is, no one ever thinks of Hulme without thinking of Original Sin.

  For my own part, I have always considered that the discovery of Original Sin was the least of his achievements. After all, he might have heard of it anywhere. Probably he came across it

  while reading some primer of Scholasticism. The importance of Original Sin, as a doctrine, apart from its theological bearing, is that it puts Man in his place. This can be explained in a few words, and I will do so.

  There are two ways of regarding mankind. One is Mr. H. G. Wells's way, which is summed up in the title of one of his books, Men like Gods. The other way is that of the theologian, who, believing in a High God, has no very high opinion of Man. For the latter, Man is a pretty poor specimen, who requires a great deal of brushing up before you can make him at all presentable.

  A famous French writer, called Jean-Jacques Rousseau—the 'father of European Socialism'—taught that Man was essentially good. Mr. Wells, Mr. Shaw, and most people in fact in England, believe that.

  Christian theology teaches the opposite. For it, Man is essentially bad. But, in theology, there is a reason for Man being bad. He is bad because he 'fell'. The doctrine of Original Sin is the doctrine, of course, of 'the Fall'.

  You may believe that Man is bad without being a theologian. And then of course you mean something different by the term 'bad'. How much Hulme's terminology was theological I do not know. I should not have supposed it was very theological.

  Now why everyone was so impressed with Hulme's discovery of the doctrine of Original Sin was because that doctrine contradicted the unpleasant idolatry of Man (which you do not have to be a theologian to get a bit sick of). It refuted the modernist uplift. It denied that Man was remarkable in any way, much less 'like a god', or capable of unlimited 'advance'.

  For people who had definitely become queasy, after listening for a good many years to adulation of the mortal state—of man-in-the-raw—this theology acted as a tonic. The atmosphere had become fuggy with all the greasy incense to Mr. Everyman. And here was somebody who had the bright idea of throwing the window open. There were the stars again! And even if the Star of Bethlehem was amongst them, well what matter!

  Some of those who were delighted, however, were theologians, more or less, themselves: though there is every reason to suppose they had never heard of Original Sin, else they wouldn't have made so much fuss about it when it was brought to their notice.

  The notion of 'progress' is also involved, in this advertisement of Original Sin. And our world, of 1937, is greatly agitated by the warfare of those who believe in 'progress', and those who do not. It is the principle of 'humanism' versus that of discipline and 'authority'. The doctrine of Original Sin has its uses quite outside of Christian dogma.

  When Mr. Baldwin, now Earl Baldwin, talks about the blessings of 'democracy', for instailce, he is declaring himself a believer in progress and evolution. When Mussolini talks about the iron disciplines of the Roman soul—or Maurras says {Je suis Romain, je suis humain'—he is declaring himself a believer in 'authority'. He is/basing himself upon the past, instead of upon the future (which is where Mr. H. G. Wells's eye is ecstatically fixed). He is denying that the average man, left to himself, has a divine spark, which will eventually enable him to become a god (as thinks Mr. Wells, and as, in the main, the Anglo-Saxon is disposed to think).

  I must apologize for this disquisition. But without a little lecture of this kind I could not possibly have explained to you why it was that this fellow Hulme did everybody such a good turn by discovering the doctrine of Original Sin, or why everybody was so grateful to him and said what a fine fellow he was in consequence.

  It would be quite out of the question for me to show you in such a context as this how all this sort of thinking resulted in Hulme and myself preferring something anti-naturalist and 'abstract' to Nineteenth Century naturalism, in pictures and in statues. It must suffice for me to say that Man was not the hero of our universe. We thought he required a great deal of tidying-up before he became presentable; both he and I preferred to the fluxions in stone of an Auguste Rodin (following photographically the lines of nature) the more concentrated abstractions-from-nature of the Egyptians.

  We were a couple of fanatics and of course I am still. We preferred something more metallic and resistant than the pneumatic surface of the cuticle. We preferred a helmet to a head of hair. A scarab to a jelly-fish.

  But I can see all this will seem so much gibberish to you, unless by good luck it has been your hobby to instruct yourself in all these highbrow goings-on. All I can really tell you is that it was extremely original of this Mr. Hulme—especially living as he did in Mr. Polly's England—to pick out this stuffy old doctrine of Original Sin and rub everybody's nose in it. He was a very rude and truculent man. He needed to be. And he greatly relished rubbing his countrymen's noses in the highly disobliging doctrine in question.

  CHAPTER IX

  The "Savage Messiah" is Killed

  Physically—and to get back to the personal once more, after the foregoing excursion into highbrow regions—T. E. Hulme was a very large and imposing man, well over six foot, broad-shouldered, and with legs like a racing cyclist. He had an extremely fine head, which it was his habit to hold on one side, as if listening (a bird-like attitude) really rather reminiscent of an antique bust. Mr. Epstein's bust of him is an admirable one, but scarcely severe enough.

  In private life there was no 'severity' about Hulme. He was a very talkative jojly giant, arrogantly argumentative, but a great laughter. Heiaughed painfully, coldly, but heartily, always wringlingiiis nose as if about to sneeze, and as if he had a bitter tastcin his mouth. And among other things he was very fond of the girls. His conversation mostly bore upon that subject, indeed, and he was a most didactic amorist. He had very hard and fast notions as to how the sexual life should be conducted, and much philosophy was brought in to assist at his abstruse devotions to Venus.

  I think that in his management of the sexual impulse he was a pure Bergsoniajjt (as indeed he remained in other fields; too much, to my taste). So we may say that St. Thomas Aquinas pres
ided, when it was a statue, and Bergson when it was the living flesh. Not a bad arrangement.

  He had designs, I remember, upon a young lady who worked in a small bookshop. The proprietor of the bookshop worked upstairs. But unfortunately he had had a hole cut in the ceiling, and whenever this discoverer of Original Sin was getting on rather nicely with the beautiful assistant, there would be a frantic stamping, as of an enraged horse, upon the ceiling overhead, and a Mormon-like eye would appear in the aperture.

  This was for Hulme a maddening experience. It dominated his life for some time. He sneered, with a painful twisting of the nose, whenever he spoke of it. He was held as if in a vice by a concatenation of circumstances. To start with, he could obtain tick at this bookshop. Nowhere else. So he was compelled to go there. He was exposed incessantly to this dilemma—his purse, his sex, his intellect all contributing. The lot of Tantalus was his, a cunningly-contrived frustration: and he could see no way out of it at all.

  Had the bookseller been less trustful as a bookseller, and refused him credit, obviously the ordeal would have terminated at once. Or had he became more trustful as a man, abolished his spyhole, equally there would have been an immediate solution. Hulme would have found release had the bookseller's policy as a bookseller been suddenly modified, under the stress of competition, or as a result of the deterioration of the public taste. Had his stock taken on a more frivolous character, had he ceased to cater for the philosopher, Hulme's trials would have been at an end. Similarly, had the beautiful assistant taken on a more frivolous character, that would have been that. But no, he was condemned to suffer perpetually, to all appearance. This awful stability of things appalled him. No Heracletian flux. An implacable status quo reigned in the bookshop—dominated the world. And he would discuss this problem—sandwiched in between the doctrine of Original Sin and the Fascism of the Frenchman, Sorel, whose Reflexions sur la Violence he was translating—in his nagging, nasal, North-country voice, until he induced in his listener a sensation of the cussedness of things that really was in its way a novel cocktail. He was an excellent gossip.