conventions mediate between the artist’s vision and his expression of that
vision. Organicism means that there is no excess of analogy to meaning,
form to content, and hence no structuring principle that does not arise
from the character of the work itself. Each part alters every other part, so
that there is complete internal unity of the work, an idea to which Hulme
then surprisingly adduces Ruskin as a witness. In fact, Hulme’s metaphor
of ‘the motion of a snake’s body’, which ‘goes through all parts at once’
and whose ‘volition acts at the same instant in coils which go contrary
ways’ ( 72 ) is taken almost word for word from the second volume of
Ruskin’s Modern Painters, where it is an analogy for the seamlessly
synthesising work of the Imagination.^66 The metaphor was first suggested,
however, by Coleridge’sLecturesas an illustration of the sinuously diverse
nature of Shakespeare’s genius, ‘writhing in every direction, but still
progressive’ towards his artistic goal.^67
The approving use of Coleridge and Ruskin should make it clear that
Hulme’s essay is by no means anti-Romantic, and the lurking presence of
Romantic genius is entirely consonant with the use Hulme makes of
Bergson in the final paragraphs to amplify his point about the difference
between an organic and a mechanical unity. ‘Now all this is worked out in
Bergson’, continues Hulme cheerfully, ‘it is all based on the clear concep-
tion of these vital complexities which he calls “intensive”, as opposed to
the other kind which he calls “extensive”... to deal with the intensive you
must use intuition’ ( 72 ). Hulme is elliptically referring to Bergson’s
contrast between kinds of knowledge that the analytical, scientific or
‘extensive’ approach could give, and that afforded by what he called the
‘intuitive’. Bergson thought that analysis can only see the object in terms
of comparison with a conventional measurement, and therefore is blind to
the unique internal landscape of that object. ‘Intuition’ rejects such
exteriority for an ‘intellectual sympathyby which one places oneself within
an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it’.^68 This rejection
of convention to see the object on its own terms was a primary intellectual
source behind the Imagist desire for an undecorated poetry, whose form
would be as unique and singular as its content. Bergson called his intuitive
knowledge of the object an ‘absolute’, because it was not relative to
anything else, and the idea undergirds Pound’s belief in an ‘absolute’
rhythm, a rhythm which would be incommensurable with anything else –
thus, emphatically, not a regular rhythm – and hence as singular and
unique as the personal artist. ‘The creative-inventive faculty is the thing
that matters’, declared Pound, ‘and that the artist having this faculty is a
being infinitely separate from the other type of artist who merely goes on
Inside and outside modernism 37