Modernist Journals | The New Age, Volume 10 (November 2, 1911 to April 25, 1912): An Introduction

The New Age, Volume 10 (November 2, 1911 to April 25, 1912): An Introduction

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Introduction

In the six months covered by this volume, the government of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith passed the Insurance Act and had a Minimum Wages Act forced on it by striking coal workers. Despite–often because of–such historic social welfare legislation, the government continued to be harshly criticized by the left, especially The New Age, and lost votes in by-elections. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) increased its violence as Liberals waffled on suffrage for fear that the women to be enfranchised would vote conservative. By waffling, Liberal England helped its own death along: when the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) gave up on obtaining Liberal support, it took its organization and money to Labour. James Ramsay MacDonald, as Labour leader, struggled to exercise Labour’s limited power through coalition with the Liberals while growing numbers of trade union members, and the suffragettes with whom they were beginning to work, pushed for a more radical approach. On the opposition side, Arthur Balfour resigned as Unionist leader in the second week of November. Competing factions compromised on Andrew Bonar Law as his replacement. Law’s public approval of Ulster Protestant militancy contributed to the growth and lawlessness of Irish militia groups. Asquith’s cabinet included:

David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary.
Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty.
Reginald McKenna, Home Secretary. (Churchill and McKenna had exchanged positions in October 1911.)

Events of the Period

Foreign

Treaties ended the five-month old Second Moroccan Crisis–in which Germany threatened to fire on French-controlled Morocco unless given portions of the Congo–in the first week of November. Disagreement between the War Office and the Admiralty over how best to prepare England for the eventual war between Germany and France led to Churchill replacing McKenna as First Lord of the Admiralty.
The Italo-Turkish War began in September when Italy seized Tripoli, taking advantage of the fact that Turkey’s only remaining European ally, Germany, was busy in Morocco. Meanwhile the Balkan states were secretly allied against Turkey, awaiting their chance to take part of the Ottoman Empire. The First Balkan War began only days after this war ended in October 1912.
The Chinese Revolution began in October 1911 when railways in Hupeh province were nationalized, infuriating investors. Simultaneously, heavy taxes and natural disasters provoked unrelated popular revolts in rural areas. The western-educated Sun Yat-sen, who had been fomenting revolution for years from abroad, returned to China in December in time to be nominated president of the republic that the rebels declared when they took control of the provincial capital, Wu-ch’ing. The Manchu government called in the warlord Yüan-Shih-K’ai to put the rebellion down. Yüan played both sides until Sun resigned, Yüan became president, and the last emperor, the six-year old Henry Puyi, was deposed in February 1912. After the leader of the election-winning (Kuomintang) Nationalist Party was assassinated a year later, Yüan became hereditary president for life.
Persia had been divided into two spheres of influence by the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. In 1909 Persia established a parliamentary government for the second time. From May to December 1911, the treasurer-general Morgan Schuster, an American, encouraged the government to ignore Russia’s influence. Russia demanded his dismissal; when Persia refused, Russia invaded, nearly eliminating the buffer between Russia and India. Shuster was expelled and Parliament dissolved. The same year the deposed Shah attempted an invasion.
Raymond Poincaré replaced Joseph Caillaux when the French cabinet headed by Caillaux was dissolved in January 1912, after only 7 months, because of the concessions made to Germany in order to end the Moroccan Crisis.
The Social Democratic Party won the last Reichstag elections of the German Empire in January, capturing a third of the vote.

Turkey. Mehmed V was the sultan, but The Committee of Union and Progress (the Young Turks) was, loosely, in charge. CUP won an overwhelming majority in the April elections, but lost support throughout the year as the war with Italy went badly.

Domestic and Colonial

The Parliament Act, passed in August 1911, ended the Lords’ absolute veto, but left them able to delay action. Any bill that passed Commons three times over a period of at least two years could bypass Lords and go directly to the king. The Act also set a five year maximum between general elections; however, this government remained in power through 1918 due to the war.
In September, the Ulster Unionist Council, under its new leader, Edward Carson, drafted a constitution for the (illegal) provisional government it would form if Home Rule were declared. In January 1912 the Ulster Unionists formed and began (legally) training a volunteer force that numbered 80,000 by the time the Home Rule Bill was officially introduced in April.
The National Insurance Act was passed in December 1911 by overwhelming majority, though some socialist MPs opposed it. It was designed to provide health and unemployment insurance to a majority of the population with contributions from workers, employers, and the state in a 4:3:2 ratio. Rather than create a state insurance agency, existing friendly societies and insurance companies were used with an insurance commission to oversee them, which resulted in unequal benefits. Because the Act covered three million working women and, to a lesser extent, the wives of working men, the government could claim that it had improved the situation of women, despite its lukewarm support for suffrage. The Act was unpopular because many workers saw their contributions as “an enforced docking of wages.” Also, the private companies involved had ensured that life insurance and pensions for widows and orphans were not included. Initial opposition weakened once benefits began to be paid–several months after deductions were first taken–but was not wiped out until the inter-war period.
Early in 1911 a majority of Commons MPs supported women’s suffrage in general elections (some women already voted in local elections). In 1910-11 three Conciliation (non-partisan) Bills enfranchising propertied-women were initiated. In July 1910, Asquith ensured one Bill would never come to a third reading by sending it to a committee of the whole house. The WSPU suspended its window-breaking campaign until 18 November 1910, “Black Friday,” when large numbers of suffragettes marched on the just-reopened Parliament. Despite orders to simply keep them away from the building, the police arrested and abused hundreds of women, who were then force-fed in jail. This torture increased public support for the women. Also on Black Friday Asquith prevented consideration of another Conciliation Bill. A new truce began after the Liberals won the December 1910 elections and introduced a new Conciliation Bill. In November 1911, Asquith’s announcement of a plan to eliminate restrictions on male suffrage undermined proposals for female suffrage: universal suffrage for women was impossible, but why should only a few propertied women have the vote, if all men were to get it? The WSPU returned to violence, at the cost of both public and political support. The Bill was defeated in March 1912. The male suffrage bill was officially introduced in July. When Asquith amended women’s suffrage to it, the Speaker decided the Bill would have to be withdrawn because the amendment altered its original purpose; thus both women’s and men’s suffrage were defeated. The WSPU (and others) saw this as Asquith’s intention and escalated its violence. The NUWSS gave up on Conciliation and the Liberals and turned to Labour.
Trade Union Activism. The number of work days lost to strikes doubled from 1910 to 1911 and then tripled in 1912. The strikes were mutually reinforcing: on the one hand, work stoppage in a given industry affected related industries; on the other, a successful strike in one industry encouraged workers in another to strike for similar improvements. The main impetus behind the strikes was the fact that real wages had been falling for many years despite full employment, record industrial profits, and declarations by the major newspapers that England was in a period of unsurpassed prosperity. French syndicalism–the use of direct, often violent, action to give workers control of industries–had a growing but uneven influence in England. Strikers often used violence, but not strategically. The Railway Strike ended in August, but in mid-January 1912 the Coal miners voted to strike for a minimum wage. Government negotiations with miners and owners failed to prevent 850,000 (mostly Welsh) miners from walking out 1 March, leaving a total of over one million workers out of work. The police were not called out for the coal strike, in part because the government was not sure the railway workers would transport them to the coal mines in Wales.
In mid-march the government was forced to introduce the Miners’ Minimum Wages Bill in order to resolve the coal strike. The bill passed despite Unionist opposition.
The Futurist Exhibition opened at the Sackville Gallery 1 March 1912.
The Titanic sank during the night of 14-15 April 1912.
The Third Irish Home Rule Bill and a Welsh disestablishment bill were introduced in April. Both were defeated in the House of Lords, but, in accordance with the Parliament Act, were reintroduced and, having passed Commons three times, received royal assent in the summer of 1914. Both were also suspended by the outbreak of WWI. Disestablishment went into effect after the war.
The Indian capital was moved from Calcutta to Delhi, capital of the former Indian Empire, as part of “devolution” (decentralization).

The Journal Itself

All issues are 24 pages and cost threepence. Orage’s “Notes of the Week” opens, followed by S. Verdad’s “Foreign Affairs” column and other articles on politics. While Orage continues to champion guild socialism in “Notes of the Week,” plenty of space is given to the Fabians. In addition to the many articles on the Insurance Act and the labor movement, there are a number scattered throughout the volume on how various laws harm the poor, e.g. Beatrice Hastings‘ “The State vs. the Innocent” (10:296). Orage swings, uncharacteristically, with the majority to condemn suffragette tactics and goals early in this volume, even though he had supported suffrage as late as 1909. Consequently a still lively discussion of suffrage is relegated to the letters. Another indicator of Orage’s more conservative attitudes after 1910 is the “Tales for Men Only” series (Nos. 15-17), written under the pseudonym R. H. Congreve, about a group of artist-philosophers who find that women impede their “creation of a common mind.”

Although there are no literary supplements and only six art supplements of 1-2 pages each, the arts receive nearly as much coverage as politics. “Present Day Criticism” and Huntly Carter’s “Art and Drama” usually open the arts section about halfway through each issue. The writers of these columns are hostile to nearly everything written or painted in England. Many issues also contain other columns on art, e.g. “Criteria in Art” (10:136) by M. B. Oxon (Lewis Wallace), and all contain poetry and fiction by a variety of authors. Walter Sickert’s sketches, first seen in volume 9, appear in the middle of 13 issues. Tom Titt’s caricatures of political figures and New Age contributors continue to be featured on the back page of each number.

Reproduction of a cubist study by Picasso in the art supplement for 23 November 1911 and John Middleton Murry’s article on his art a week later (10:115) spark the heated “Picarterbin” debate in the Letters over whether works like Picasso’s can be considered art. Only a handful of Picassos had been exhibited at the much-derided winter 1910-11 Post-Impressionism Exhibit, and few people in London were ready for cubism. Fuel is added to this fire with later reproductions of works by Auguste Herbin, André Dunoyer de Ségonzac, and M. Ben Zies. Carter, a champion of cubism, and M.B. Oxon, a detractor, are the main combatants, but there are plenty of others.

Other topics in the Letters include: freemasonry vs. Jesuitry, the National Insurance Bill, race relations, proportional representation, feminism and suffrage, the coal miner’s strike, minimum wages vs. profit margins, the 8hr. day, the influence of Europe in Asia, Bergson, capital punishment, Hamlet, Whistler, and responses to “Present-Day Criticism.”

The major changes to the journal in this volume occur in the arts section:

Ezra Pound begins a series entitled “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (Nos. 5-13, 15-17).
Jacob Tonson’s (Arnold Bennett’s) “Books and Persons” column ended its run with volume 9–according to the writer of “Present-Day Criticism” because Arnold went to America to produce a play. No single person replaces Tonson in volume 10. A.E.R.’s “Views and Reviews” becomes a regular column toward the end of the volume. Full-page reviews by other writers appear in twelve issues, and new books are covered in single paragraphs in the “Reviews” section (12 of 26 issues).
Huntly Carter’s contribution is greatly increased: he writes “Art and Drama” for 25 of 26 issues and often contributes a separate article on art as well.

Politics

The writer of “Notes of the Week” (Orage) views the two main domestic issues of the period, the Insurance Bill and the trade union strikes, with a pessimistic eye. He sees three ways to organize society: capitalism, in which employers control industry privately, syndicalism, in which workers hold exclusive control of production, or socialism, in which workers and employers jointly manage state-owned industries. Beyond any real shortcomings of the Insurance Bill and the coal and railway strike resolutions, the unbridled criticisms of these events and everyone associated with them–especially Labour leader MacDonald–is explained by his belief that anything not leading to (guild) socialism is a waste of time. Throughout the volume Orage also continues to proudly hurl any and every insult at Lloyd George and the Liberal Party, which he considers only less-vile copies of American capitalists.

Until January “NOTW” and many other articles argue steadfastly against the Insurance Bill. The “Fabian Manifesto” (10:4) in the first issue details the reasons for this opposition: the strongest benefits go to those already best protected, contributions are not based on income, there is no guarantee that employers will not pass their costs onto employees or the public, there are no provisions for improving the living conditions that cause illness, and families are protected if their breadwinner falls sick but receive nothing if he dies. Although the Bill’s passage is inevitable, no opportunity is lost to exaggerate the opposition to it or, after its passage, to declare that paycheck deductions will start a popular revolt and the Act will never work. 27,000 doctors, “NOTW” says, have pledged not to comply with the Act, and there were riots over the enactment of a similar bill in Luxembourg.

In January “NOTW” turns with delight to the prospect of a coal strike. “NOTW” considers the August settlement of the railway strike a selling-out of the workers by unions and politicians: prices were raised even before salaries were increased yet the railways recorded record profits. “NOTW” attributes this failure to the railway workers’ amorphous demand for “recognition.” In contrast, the coal workers are demanding a solid 7s/day minimum wage. “NOTW” insists that raising wages in all industries is a top priority but that simultaneous nationalization is necessary to ensure that capitalists cannot make up for increased wages by exporting or mechanizing labor. “NOTW” takes other papers to task for their willful or ignorant conflation of trade unionism, socialism, syndicalism, and the “red peril” and for fearmongering with the latter terms. “The Public” is accused of being more concerned with convenience than justice. Nothing less than civil war is envisioned as a general strike begins to seem likely. When the strike ends with a Minimum Wages Bill, though not at the miners’ proposed rates, “NOTW” pronounces the strike another total failure.

The final issue of the volume appears ten days after the sinking of the Titanic. “NOTW” is less interested in the human tragedy than in reading the ship as a microcosm of society’s plutocratic organization and proof that government needs to oversee industrial safety standards (10:601).

The Arts

In his important new column, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (Nos. 5-13, 15-17), Ezra Pound provides “expositions and translations in illustration of ‘the New Method’ in scholarship.” Pound’s first contribution is a partial translation of The Seafarer (10:107) that has often been criticized for being more creation than translation. Pound responds to questions about his translations by offering prose versions and insisting The Seafarer “was as nearly literal. . . as any translation can be” (10:369). Readers do not find out what “the New Method” is until the second installment. It turns out not to be new at all, but rather the method of “all good scholars since the beginning of scholarship” (10:130). Pound wants scholars to bridge the gap between scholars and normal men by highlighting the “Luminous Detail,” not just listing facts, so that “accuracy of sentiment” will be communicated to non-specialists. In other columns Pound gives short histories of Provençal poets and explains what he did to translate their poems. Generally, he aims to translate them as exactly as possible, rather than use them as he had in the recently published Canzoni (reviewed by Jack Collings Squire in “Recent Verse” (10:183)). Nonetheless, these translations are, in the words of one biographer, “still old-fashioned and often uncertain.” In later installments, he emphasizes the need for technique and tradition (10:297), discusses the composition of souls and the attainment of virtù (10:224), and explores the relation of music to poetry (10:343).

This was a very busy period for Pound, whom T.E. Hulme had introduced to Orage. He traveled frequently between France and England. He was trying to convince Dorothy Shakespear’s father to make their engagement official, when Hilda Doolittle, who also believed herself engaged to Pound, moved in across the street. Both H.D. and Pound met Richard Aldington in the winter of 1911-12 and were fascinated by his knowledge of Greek language and culture. Pound was apparently so caught up in things aesthetic that he failed to notice that the other two Imagists, as he named them in the spring, were romantically involved. In 1912 Pound met editors Harold Monro of the Poetry Review and Harriet Monroe of Poetry. His “Credo” appeared in Poetry Review in February. That month he also met Henry James, whom he found “delightful” after his initial intimidation wore off. During this period Pound was partly kept alive by Orage, whose publication of the right-wing, if not yet very political, poet is yet another testament to his open-mindedness as an editor. In 1917 Pound would return to The New Age as music critic William Atheling and art critic B.H. Dias.

The author of “Art and Drama,” Huntly Carter is the main art critic of this volume. In covering the theater, he alternates between deriding English productions because they are didactic and/or are adaptations of novels, and imagining a new kind of theater. He declares that “we are entering upon the third great period of dramatic renascence” after the Greek and Elizabethan (10:251). This new period requires intimate theaters because large theaters detract from play and actors. Ibsen is the leading playwright of this renaissance, but even he is perverted into didacticism on the English stage.

In painting, Carter finds that the Old Masters and contemporary London realists are concerned with “unessentials” (10:84). Good painting, by contrast, is “concerned solely with the quintessence of ideality”; among the idealists we find Gauguin, Cézanne and Wyndham Lewis (10:203). He likes cubism, but not its name. He considers the Futurists intelligent and talented, but not geniuses: they too represent excrescences, instead of essences. No reference is made to Marinetti; Boccioni is declared “the biggest futurist”–perhaps because Carter did not read any futurist manifestoes, “preferring instead to see the result of their work” (10:443). Marinetti’s lecture of 19 March is anonymously satirized in the Pastiche at the end of the month (10:524).

Philosophy

T.E. Hulme had been writing on Henri Bergson since 1909 and in 1913 published a collaborative translation of Bergson’s Introduction à la métaphysique. Bergson and J.C. Squire wrote the letters that got Hulme readmitted to university in 1912 (he was soon expelled again). Hulme was drawn to Bergson’s response to “the nightmare of universal mechanism.” Bergson argued that there are “intensive manifolds,” aspects of experience that are not part of the exterior world and so are not subject to materialist analysis. Yet, early in this volume Hulme writes, in “Mr. Balfour, Bergson, and Politics” (10:38), that he agrees with Pierre Lasserre’s attack on Bergson’s Romanticism in La Morale de Nietzsche. The last 3 of Hulme’s 5 “Notes on Bergson” (the series began in volume 9) are a personal account of how he is working through this contradiction. Although critics agree that Hulme was not an original thinker, he was influential–in part through the salon of sorts he held Tuesdays at his home in the former Venetian embassy in London. Attendees included Jacob Epstein, Pound, Orage, and many other New Age writers.

Science

The author of “The Coming of Oedipus” (10:199) argues that rather than offering competing and equally irrelevant theories about living matter both Mechanists and Vitalists need to study “the organism as a whole,” whether human or single-celled, in order to understand life itself, and says the study of cancer cells hold the key to this understanding.

Other

“The Englishman Abroad” (10:206) is a lengthy commentary on the behavior of the English on the Continent by Karl Hillebrand, a German. He argues that the English are only really English when at work in England. The few of who live outside England are all guilty of remaining so aloof that they know no more about their host countries after 20 years than after 2 weeks, to their detriment and that of Europe.
“Co-education in America” (10:175) looks at the trend (?) away from co-education in American universities and argues that though women consistently outperform men at university, they are generally incapable of equaling men’s later accomplishments because women’s brains peak at 25 while men’s brains develop slowly for a long period of time.

Works Cited and Consulted

Brooks, David. The Age of Upheaval: Edwardian Politics 1899-1914. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. New Frontiers in History. Mark Greengrass and John Stevenson, eds.
Dangerfield, George. The Strange Death of Liberal England. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. Orig. pub. 1935.
Davis, John. A History of Britain, 1885-1939. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1999.
Ensor, R.C.K. England 1870-1914. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1936. The Oxford History of England. G. N. Clark, ed.
Gibbons, Tom. Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas 1880-1920. Nedlands, Western Australia: U Western Australia P, 1973.
Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Martin, Wallace. The New Age Under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP and Barnes and Noble, 1967.
Roberts, Michael. T.E. Hulme. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1982. Orig. pub. 1938.
Wilhelm, J.J. Ezra Pound in London and Paris: 1908-25. University Park and London: Pennsylvania State UP: 1990.
“Ancient Persian Timeline” excerpted from Edward S. Ellis and Charles F. Horne’s The Story of the Greatest Nations and the World’s Famous Events (1913). Public Bookshelf. 31 Oct. 2001.
http://www.publicbookshelf.org/public_html/The_Story_of_the_Greatest_Nations_and_the_Worlds_Famous_Events_Vol_1/ancientp_bah.html
“History: The First Republic” Chinatown Online. 31 Oct. 2001.
http://www.chinatown-online.co.uk/pages/culture/history/first.htm