weaving arabesques out of other men’s “units of form” ’.^69 Bergson
compared his absolute perspective to reading a novel:
The author may multiply the traits of his hero’s character, may make him speak
and act as much as he pleases, but all this can never be equivalent to the simple
and indivisible feeling which I should experience if I were able for an instant to
identify myself with the person of the hero himself. Out of that indivisible
feeling, as from a spring, all the words, gestures and actions of the man would
appear to me to flow naturally.^70
‘Indivisible’ is the vital word, or in Pound’s terms for Bergson’s intuition,
‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of
time’.^71 The Bergsonian poem would beindivisible from itself: the emotion
inseparable from the reflection, the description from its object, the formal
‘how’ of the presentation inseparable from the ‘what’ of the content.
Removing the inessential and imprecise would leave an indivisible, singular
core, an absolute.
Bergson’s philosophy of the irreducible and incommensurable object
underwrote a good deal of Imagist theorising on poetry.^72 But there was
also a Bergsonian review of the visual arts,Rhythm, run by Middleton
Murry and Katherine Mansfield, which printed work by Picasso, Derain,
Kandinsky and Gaudier-Brzeska alongside its regular selection of work by
the lesser-known British and American Fauvists Fergusson, Peploe, Rice
and Dismorr. The magazine’s enthusiastic opening editorial put forward
its belief that Bergson’s philosophy was an ‘open avowal of the supremacy
of the intuition, of the spiritual vision of the artist’:
The artist attains to the pure form, refining and intensifying his vision till all that
is unessential dissolves away...hemust return to the moment of pure
perception to see the essential forms... modernism... penetrates beneath the
outward surface of the world, and disengages the rhythms which lie at the heart
of things.^73
To demonstrate such stripped-down purity of perception, it printed
stories by Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence. But when the magazine became
more serious about its poetry section in 1912 , it was the Georgians they
printed. Murry praised Gibson’s work for its ‘direct presentment of the
author’s sense of reality, so direct, so sympathetic’, without ‘prettiness’.^74
TheGeorgian Poetryeditor Eddie Marsh had recently stepped in with a
loan to saveRhythmfrom bankruptcy, so Middleton Murry’s praise may
have been tactical: nonetheless, the fact that Marsh stepped in at all is a
sign of his interest in some kinds of modernist art (he owned four
Gaudier-Brzeskas), and Murry’s choice of adjectives indicates no change
38 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism