First the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are, and apart from
the conventional ways in which you have been trained to see them... Second,
the concentrated state of mind, the grip over oneself which is necessary...to
prevent one falling into the conventional curves of ingrained technique, to hold
on through infinite detail and trouble to the exact curve you want. Wherever you
get this sincerity, you get the fundamental quality of good art without dragging
in infinite or serious.( 69 )
The fact that Hulme has called for ‘infinite detail’ to demonstrate an art
which would not drag in the infinite is more than a slip: it is indicative of
the way his criteria for accuracy are utterly consonant with the very
Romanticism he despises, with Coleridge his master ( 67 ). Classical accur-
acy is ‘sincerity’, perfect expression of the vision one sees without
the mediation of common forms of language, and requires perfect self-
determination in the artist. The criteria for true objectivity, discipline and
order in the work of art turn out to be in aninternallyautonomous state
of mind which will allow no interference from convention. Such internal
transparency is the correlative of Hulme’s perfectly Kantian definition of
seeing aesthetically: ‘The object of aesthetic contemplation is something
framed apart by itself and regarded without memory or expectation,
simply as being itself, as end not means, as individual not universal.’( 70 ).
This internalisation of poetic accuracy is confirmed by Hulme’s expansion
of the idea of ‘sincerity’ towards the end to include Coleridge’s notion of
the organic. A work whose analogies do not quite fit, and have ‘a certain
excess’ to them, is inferior. But when it is ‘sincere in the accurate sense,
when the whole of the analogy is necessary to get out the exact curve of
the feeling or thing you want to express – there you seem to me to have
the highest verse’ ( 71 ). This sincerity Hulme then defines as the ‘vital or
organic’: in a sincere, accurate work of art, the exact correlation between
the public analogy and the private thing expressed is such that there is no
difference between them ( 72 ). Hence every single part of the analogy is
needful, and if any one part were removed then the meaning of the whole
would alter. This inseparable reciprocity between the poem’s meaning
and its expression, and by extension between its form and content, shows
how over the course of a few pages, Hulme’s classical ideal of discipline
and order has morphed into one of Coleridge’s key doctrines, the orga-
nicity of the work. What provides a unifying strand throughout these
constant reformulations of ‘accuracy’, though, is the drive to eliminate
the extraneous. The classical limitation prevents humankind from blur-
ring boundaries: man is in his proper, fixed, limited place as himself.
Accuracy is truth to the emotion or thing, and this means that no external
36 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism