Is conservative modernism the way forward for the right?

Conservative Modernists: Literature and Tory Politics in Britain, 1900-1920, Christos Hadjiyiannis, Cambridge University Press, £29.99

One of the fascinating paradoxes of 20th-century literature is that the poets and critics who did the most to promote modernism rank among the greatest conservative men of letters. Even as they developed new modes and orders in art, they clung to the political and social norms of the English-speaking peoples. The most celebrated of these ‘conservative modernists’ was TS Eliot, an American transplant to London who once memorably described himself as a ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’.

But Eliot was not the only – nor even the first – member of this set of paradoxical men of letters. In addition to the author of The Waste Land, the critic Christos Hadjiyiannis has profiled other contributors to that world, from those well-known, such as Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford, to those largely forgotten, such as TE Hulme or Edward Storer. His most remarkable study of this intellectual cohort, Conservative Modernists: Literature and Tory Politics in Britain, 1900-1920, was originally published in 2018 but was reprinted this year in an affordable new paperback edition by Cambridge University Press.

Hadjiyiannis goes straight to the roots of modernist renewal: ‘As a movement that sought to overturn romanticism, classical modernism was actually full of nostalgia for a mythical past,’ he argues. ‘Writing at the beginning of a new century, Tory modernists all looked resolutely backwards.’ When the dominant forces of their time seemed to push toward chaos and disillusionment, conservative modernists attempted to rediscover principles for a humane order. His exploration of the history of their ideas shows that conservative movements can be capable of far more imagination than they manage today. In an age of demagoguery, ideology and AI slop, conservative modernism offers a serious, literate alternative to what passes for right-wing political and cultural activity on both sides of the Atlantic.

What was the political context for conservative modernism? After Victorian-era successes under Benjamin Disraeli, the Tory party fell into a period of decline. The Conservatives were simply incapable of competing with new modes of mass politics innovated by liberal and socialist opponents and lost 246 seats in the 1906 general election, in what Hadjiyiannis refers to as the ‘crisis’ of 1906. The new government embarked on an ambitious reform agenda, including David Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ and an act to restrict the authority of the House of Lords.

The intellectual reaction against this liberal revolution was broad and multi-faceted, but underpinned by common principles. ‘In urging the need for a complete Conservative philosophy,’ Hadjiyiannis writes, the emerging conservative modernists ‘were hoping to rally Tories around philosophical principles that were as strong and cohesive as the ones that they found on the “Radical” side’. They believed that the chief conflict of their time was a battle of ideas, and their primary function as partisan intellectuals was to puncture the ideologies of the left. Approaching this task from a variety of backgrounds, they were all especially critical of the individualism and hopes for inexorable social progress they believed endemic to the liberalism remaking Britain. Conservative modernists, according to Hadjiyiannis, denounced such liberal notions as fallacies ‘based on an inaccurate interpretation of human nature and an erroneous understanding of history’. Instead, they hoped to reconstruct society around the authority of tradition and the objective morality of natural law.

At the heart of this critique of liberalism was a (somewhat facile, admittedly) distinction between ‘classicism’ and ‘romanticism’. Although the dichotomy is perhaps most famously associated with TS Eliot’s literary criticism, Hadjiyiannis shows it was developed in earlier works, especially by Imagist poet and ardent Tory TE Hulme, and before him by figures resurrected from even greater obscurity such as Edward Storer and JM Kennedy. Romantics, according to Hulme, ‘had been taught by Rousseau that man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him’. They subscribed to an ideology of revolution in politics and letters. Classicism, by contrast, was an allegiance to tradition. ‘Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant,’ Hulme wrote. ‘It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.’ The chief aim of conservative modernism, then, was to breathe new life into tradition. In politics and poetry both, they sought to restore conceptions of original sin, realism and patriotism that had been eroded over the long 19th century.

Although most shared this general outlook, the conservative modernists held more diverse views about what in particular might constitute a positive Tory agenda. For example, Ford Madox Ford, a novelist and author of the Parade’s End tetralogy, called himself a ‘feudalist’ or ‘eighteenth century Tory’ and couched his own conservatism in explicitly medieval terms. Others, including Kennedy, held that only conversion to Roman Catholicism could save Britain. Most, though, followed Hulme and his friends at a magazine called the Commentator in turning to more recent movements in British politics such as Lord Randolph Churchill’s ‘Tory Democracy‘. On the whole, they did not seek to replace the Conservative party so much as stiffen its spine and consolidate its ideas around classical modernity.

Perhaps the single most important controversy the conservative modernists waded into was the debate over the House of Lords. Especially after the Lords vetoed the People’s Budget, liberals, socialists and other reformers denounced the upper house of Parliament as an undemocratic institution and sought to restrict its authority considerably (a mission, it seems, that has finally succeeded under Britain’s present Labour government). The writers Hadjiyiannis profiles reacted to these schemes with horror. For them, the Lords represented above all the principle of classicism in a single institution; they believed it could ‘uphold, preserve, sanction, and embody the nation’s interests’ by playing an unrepentantly aristocratic function in politics. Attacks on the parliamentary body, to their conservative minds, were nothing less than attacks on the entire body of tradition they felt essential to a good society.

Some conservative modernists took the logic of aristocracy further than others. Hulme, among others, made arguments in favour of the House of Lords that were principally constitutional; he compared it to the United States Senate, arguing that both upper houses provided balance that could check the excesses of democracy. Others, such as Ezra Pound, took a darker path in pursuit of an even stronger politics – including the fascist ideology that would take its ugliest form in the period just after the era of this book. Hadjiyiannis ably addresses the danger of power politics in a fascinating afterword to his study. ‘Conservatism runs the risk of becoming authoritarian not when it asserts external and irreducible standards’, he writes, ‘but when it renders things that are necessarily particular into absolutes, and, in so doing, conjures absolutes by reference only to an internal value or idea – such as the conscience of the author.’ No one can deny that the aristocratic arguments of conservative modernists, especially when mixed with the ideas of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, had unfortunate – even revolutionary – consequences.

At the same time, Hadjiyiannis can sometimes over-emphasise the conservative modernists who gave in to the temptation of power politics and under-emphasise the explicit concern for liberty expressed by so many of this cohort, especially in their critiques of socialism. ‘TS Eliot set his face against centralized power, whether under “capitalism” or some socialist regime,’ Russell Kirk wrote in his essay on the politics of TS Eliot. ‘The notion that an international “planned economy” and “planned culture” might be contrived was anathema to him.’ To be sure, the conservative-modernist defence of liberty became much more explicit in the postwar years, but, even in this early period, among the reasons the conservatives were so supportive of innovation in art and language was their conviction that boredom was a kind of tyranny itself. ‘No high culture is conceivable in a society dominated by this arid caste of officialdom,’ as Kirk put it elsewhere. Conservative modernists may have defined ‘freedom’ differently from liberals, but they were no less committed to its preservation.

To the extent Hadjiyiannis does reckon with conservative-modernist conceptions of liberty, it is principally through their support of abstract art. Although the genre has become something of a punching bag for today’s ‘very-online’ right, writers like Eliot and Hulme were essential to its early development. They believed that the freedom of the form could help reconnect human beings to the true sources of transcendence obscured by liberal romanticism, and they actively advocated for artists on the cutting edge, even when they encountered ridicule and prejudice. As Hadjiyiannis puts it: ‘Hulme could not have agreed with… conception[s] of art as the sacrifice of individual expression in the name of a greater order, because that would hinder creativity, originality, and the feat of new and personal expression… it was crucial that artists did more than reproduce primitive forms: they had to use them as a mode of personal expression.’ Hulme was a particular defender of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and denounced antisemitic criticisms of him by linking his art to the conservatism of Disraeli. The aristocracy of talents conservative modernists admired could only function in an atmosphere of freedom, liberated not from the past but from centralising ideologies that sought to cut artists and writers off from what truly inspires them.

The concern for liberty is also manifested in conservative modernists’ broad support for British entry into the First World War. Many among their number felt that Imperial Germany represented an even more radical example of centralising politics than the one they opposed in the Liberal party, and many of the figures Hadjiyiannis profiles enlisted – perhaps most notably Ford Madox Ford and TE Hulme. The latter, in particular, considered defeating the Central Powers a world-historical mission. ‘Hulme stressed that defeating Germany was important for the rest of Europe, because if a militarist German State with expansionist ambitions became the dominant power in Europe, no country would be unaffected,’ Hadjiyiannis writes. ‘A German victory’, he stressed, would signal ‘the end of Europe as we know it, as a comity of nations’ and ‘result in a tyranny’. The high culture of classicism he and his friends endorsed could not survive a geopolitical environment of revanchist aggression.

In that sense, one of the most important lessons of the conservative modernists is the importance of responsibility and sacrifice. Hulme himself died in the trenches in 1917, and others in his cohort bore scars physical and spiritual that would never heal. While some came to question the wisdom of the war itself, all essentially affirmed the importance of fighting for the ideals they inherited. ‘The writings of the conservative modernists studied in this book repeatedly return to duty and sacrifice,’ Hadjiyiannis concludes. ‘Whether demanded of the writer, the reader, the ruler, or the citizen, all of the conservative modernisms we have investigated – distinct and contradictory as they may be – elevate duty and sacrifice to higher values required for the correct function of literature and society.’ Ultimately, what these men sought to conserve was a sense of objective morality.

It is perhaps these high aims that are missed most on the right today. Instead of defending high culture and seeking new ways to articulate old truths, the dominant populism of right and left alike plays into vulgarity and power politics. Anglo-American politics today cries out for something different, something better – and perhaps a party of renewal can take some inspiration from Hadjiyiannis’s conservative modernists.