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.75).Such a self can admit imperfection without self-humiliation.When Lewis turns to address Hulme directly in the essay ‘The Terms“Classical” and “Romantic”’, we find him skeptical of Original Sin.Whatever thedominant ethic may be at any time, whether puritan or more relaxed, human beingsare largely orderly and accept instruction in not lying, stealing or killing, cities are peaceable, and people scarcely need ‘inner-check’ controls.Lewis appearsdistinctly uneasy with Hulme’s doctrine, yet reasserts it (1987, p.170).Then, in a final turn he seems to make up his mind.From the French literary critic andCatholic convert Ferdinand Brunetière (1849-1906) he cites a particularly brutalversion of the argument that man is intrinsically evil, which urges ‘Let us.88T.E.Hulme and the Question of Modernismdestroy in ourselves, if we can – or at least to mortify – this “will to live” whose egoistic manifestations.make life so burdensome’.23 This self-humiliation or‘ascetic self-mortification’ as Lewis justly describes it, is readily assimilated to Christian mysticism, so that Hulme’s classicism and its associated theologicalorthodoxy would lead to ‘as it were an arrogant asceticism, and an overmasteringcontempt for human life’ (1987, p.171).Grounding himself firmly in this world,Lewis chooses the libertarian path, and Hulme is rejected, firmly and at last, in terms of the future envisaged by his words.Abjection is repudiated.SpeculationsWhat might have been Hulme’s future? He wanted to do philosophy, from abouthis fortieth year, in order to challenge his own prejudices (Ferguson, 2002, p.274).This sounds like Proudhon (who worked upon his own thought in this way) andwould have led, surely, to a softening of his dualism and his dogmatism.Theprojected ‘Critique of Satisfaction’ ( CW, pp.427ff.) would have engaged with what satisfied other thinkers, but not Hulme, and is consistent with the theory of ideology towards which he was moving by the end of his life.What politicaldirection might Hulme have taken? Bertrand Russell, moralizing against a formeropponent, thought him an ‘evil man who could have created nothing but evil’, andhave ‘wound up an Oswald Mosley type’; this was something that Epstein (surelyrightly) rejected, defining him as ‘a conservative, but not a Fascist’ who ‘couldn’t have endured a fool like Mosley’ (Ferguson, 2002, p.242).Hulme’s opponent inthe Epstein controversy was Anthony M.Ludovici, who became a non-Mosleyitefascist, and was arrested and interrogated – though not interned – during theSecond World War (Stone, 2003, pp.341-2).A clue to Hulme’s future may lie in his close but barely-documented friendshipwith the Spanish journalist Ramiro de Maeztu, who worked in London from 1905to 1919 and attended the Tuesday meetings at Frith Street.When Hulme died, KateLechmere received from him a note assuring her that he was very nearly aCatholic, a tendency nobody else had observed.Maeztu wrote: ‘He was on the way(to) reconstructing his religious philosophy.His difficulties were many, and great his anguish but I believe that in essentials he was already a Catholic, although not in a ritualistic sense, but in the spiritual’ (Jones, 1960, p.142).This does not sound secure.Ramiro de Maeztu y Whitney remains a puzzling figure.A Basque with anEnglish mother, he was a member of the ‘Generation of 1898’ who fell out with its most prominent members, Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno.In London hewas first attracted by Fabianism and then by the Guild Socialism of A.R.Orage,editor of the New Age, for which he wrote frequently.In his political writings, collected as Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of War in 1916, he acknowledges a debt to Hulme for ‘the political and social transcendency of thedoctrine of original sin’ (de Maeztu, 1916, p.5).24 He even wrote on art at this period, and his ‘Expressionism’ of 27 November 1913 contains a disparagingAbstraction, Archaism and the Future 89evocation of Lewis’s important lost painting Kermesse as resembling lobsters.Maeztu constructs a perverse argument around this work.Lewis and the Cubistsare on the right track in refusing to paint things as they are, but ‘things in nature’should be painted as ‘spiritual symbols’ – and Lewis does indeed want to paint the spirit of a fair, or Kermesse, and is in that respect the idealist required by the argument.But since Lewis’s painting does not resemble a real Kermesse, it cannot therefore represent the spirit of a Kermesse! (Maeztu, 1913, p.122).If Maeztu got the politics of original sin from Hulme, he did not learn very much about art.After his return to Spain he was one of the few intellectuals to support Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship of 1923-30, and became an advocate of hispanidad.In 1930he founded the review Acción Española, which propagated right-wing ideas on the model of Charles Maurras’s Action Française (Hennessey, 2000).As late as 1933he declared himself as politically of the centre, but Hugh Thomas, thoughdescribing him as ‘almost a fascist’, locates him as an authoritarian monarchistwho had a considerable influence on Franco (Thomas, 1977, pp.59 and 947).Maeztu was shot by republicans in the Modelo prison in Madrid in October orNovember 1936, perhaps in revenge for the assassination of García Lorca.Maeztu believed himself to be influenced by Guild Socialism when it wasapparent to everybody else that he was firmly on the right.During a 1927 interview with Giménez Caballero, who thought him a Blackshirt (‘un camisa negra’),Maeztu showed off a 1922 study of Guild Socialism that emphasized his influenceon the concept and linked his thought to that of G.D.H.Cole, J.A.Hobson and R.H.Tawney, a group of British liberals and socialists.25 He seems to have been unaware of his true political position, even as he travelled far to the right.This is not uncommon.A sympathiser’s account of Maeztu in June 1936, shortly beforehis arrest, finds him in the grounds of the Real Sitio palace at La Granja nearSegovia, among the magnificent fountains and statues, saying: ‘We don’t have theEscorial here! This is the French eighteenth century.Versailles.Nymphs.Shepherds.Brotherhood.Naturalism.But there is no God here
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