a strong case for its prescience of modernist thought.^90 In these letters,
Schiller advocates the aesthetic as an education in unity, which enables
humankind to experience the harmony that modern political, intellectual
and social divisions have denied him, and his broad programme is visible
not only inBiographia Literaria,but Eliot’s diagnosis of the ‘dissociation
of sensibility’ in modern thinking, or Pound’s assertion above that in the
Image, emotion and ideas are a single ‘organism’.On the Naı ̈ve and
Sentimental, however, is a serious questioning of the conditions of possi-
bility of such aesthetic unity, but its revisionary import for English poetics
has been rather disguised by Coleridge’s adaptation of it. Although careful
recent detective work has revealed that he knew the essay by 1802 and
possibly earlier, when he drew on its terms in 1819 he combined it with the
Schlegel brothers’ historicising emphasis to make ‘naı ̈ve’ and ‘sentimental’
terms of chronological succession: pre-Christian poets are naı ̈ve and post-
Christian ones sentimental.^91 Schiller’s original distinction, however, is
between two distinct modes of sensibility, and importantly for Hulme,
turns on a definition in which the supposedly indivisible and unique naı ̈ve
poet turns out to be thoroughly dependent on the disunified sentimental
one. Where Hulme sees Classical and Romantic as polar opposites and
votes firmly for the Classical, Schiller’s essay is less certain that the
distinction can be made absolute at all.
Like Hulme, Schiller describes the naı ̈ve almost interchangeably as a
mode of sensibility and a type of poetry, but both perpetually manifest
‘the law of harmony’.^92 The naı ̈ve is fundamentally characterised by its
direct relation to the world and the unity within itself, in contrast to the
modern world split by market-based specialisation and the divisions of
thought and feeling. Schiller’s prime example of the naı ̈ve is how children
think and feel. Butnaı ̈vete ́also provides us with the best guide to the
sensibility of the perfect artist, the genius, for ‘every true genius must be
naı ̈ve or he is no genius’ ( 189 ). And hence the genius is able to create art
which will transcend the divisions of modern society, for by being
‘unacquainted with the rules, those crutches of feebleness and disciplinar-
ians of perversion’, he is ‘guided solely by nature, or instinct’. Exterior
rules would compromise the inner harmony of the naı ̈ve, just as formal
rules of pattern or diction are anathema to the Imagists because they
impede the truth-to-itself of the image.
Consequently, Schiller’s naı ̈ve stands behind a number of famous
modernist statements about the autonomy of art and artist. The naı ̈ve
poet will write work that avoids the mediating, compromising function of
words themselves: ‘While the sign always remains different from and alien
42 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism