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This chapter shows that the development of T. E. Hulme's mature philosophy was highly dependent on alterations in the way he interpreted the art of various periods and cultures. His early fixation on the ideas of Henri Bergson is seen to go hand in hand with a belief that Renaissance painting, with its implied emphasis on progress, represented the highest form of visual culture. New evidence is presented showing that an encounter with Jacob Epstein's Tomb of Oscar Wilde, based on Assyrian and Egyptian aesthetics, was what suggested to him that stasis —both in art and in society —was an attractive and desirable attribute. Hulme saw Epstein's work as a positive reawakening in twentieth-century Europe of an attitude compatible with the hieratic modes of government he admired in certain Asian civilizations of the past, and proposed a new definition of the word ‘classical’ to reflect this attitude.

Chapter 3 invites a reconsideration of T.E. Hulme’s apparent anti-emotionalism by emphasising the influence of Max Scheler’s phenomenology on Hulme’s war writing, highlighting the affective response to trench warfare evident in Hulme’s personal correspondence and in the poem, “Trenches: St. Eloi.” This poem, which captures the negative affects aroused by trench warfare, also suggests the necessity of fighting, and is read in the light of Hulme’s account of the revelation of objective ethical values through affective experience in his ‘War Notes’ and ‘A Notebook’. Hulme takes his term for this affective ethics – ‘logique du coeur’ – from Pascal, but his most significant debt is to Scheler, for whom ethical values are both revealed and hierarchised through acts of feeling, a phenomenology echoed in Hulme’s attack of pacifism.

Following a definition of classicism generally, this chapter reviews the manner in which the concept was invoked by cultural critics of the pre-World War I years--notably Maurras and Lasserre in France, T. E. Hulme in England, and Samuel Lublinski in Germany--in the pursuit of order as a reaction against the perceived excesses of neo-romantic movements. Two examples are introduced to show that a trip to Greece and the use of classical themes alone do not suffice to justify the term “classical.” The chapter concludes with a look at Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain as an ironic retrospective of pre-war classicism.

This chapter reveals that Japanese visual art was far more important to the genesis of London's first Modernist poems than has ever previously been suspected. The contents of British Museum curator Laurence Binyon's lectures on East Asian art, which Ezra Pound is known to have attended in 1909, are made known for the first time, thanks to fresh archival discoveries. New evidence is also presented showing that Pound was a habitual attendee —often in Binyon's presence —at the Museum's members-only Print Room. This was home to Binyon's prize collection —a vast horde of Japanese colour prints that he wasted no time in introducing to Pound. Pound's Imagist poetry, along with the short verses of T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint, are re-examined in the light of this previously unsuspected influence.

This chapter spells out the conceptual stakes of the reformist literary mode by turning to British state theory’s ‘Hegelian moment’. Hegel’s state theory converges on an understanding of the state as an aspect of social life (Sittlichkeit), making it possible to think about the state’s institutional structures as a moment in the actualization of social life rather than as a Foucauldian assemblage of administrative means external to social life. Britain’s Hegelian moment makes visible a reformist idiom in which the state appears as an aspirational figure that makes it possible to imagine the transition from capitalist society (Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft) towards a more egalitarian socio-political order. This transformation is imagined through close engagement with existing social forms rather than through a complete revolutionary overhaul of existing social arrangements. The chapter ends by asking why Britain’s Hegelian moment ended around 1914 and what were its more immediate afterlives.