to what is signified in the case of scholastic understanding, the language of
genius springs from thought as by an inner necessity and is so one with it
that even concealed by the body, the spirit appears as though exposed...
the sign completely disappears in what is signified’ ( 190 – 1 ). The modern
desire for precision, accuracy, and themot justeis directly related to this
desire to make the sign disappear: ‘language in a healthy state’, said Eliot
in an unwary moment, ‘presents the object, is so close to the object that
the two are identified’.^93 ‘Direct treatment of the thing’ was Pound’s way
of putting it.^94 Schiller’s naı ̈ve genius also has no trouble with the division
of spontaneous overflow of feeling and reflection in tranquillity evident in
Wordsworth’sPreface: ‘He operates as an undivided sensuous unity and
as a harmonising whole. Sense and reason, receptive and spontaneous
faculties, have not yet divided the task between them; still less do they
contradict one other’( 200 ). Derived, of course, from Kant’sCritique of
Judgement, the idea of the artist operating as a unity of reason and
intuition is the cornerstone ofBiographia Literaria’s theory of Imagin-
ation. But its idea of an immediate unity can be traced forward to Pound
(‘one, as a human being, cannot pretend fully to express oneself unless one
express instinct and intellect together’), and from Pound to Eliot’s admir-
ation of ‘the amazing unity of Greek, the unity of concrete and abstract in
philosophy, the unity of thought and feeling, action and speculation, in
life’, his disparagement of the post-civil war dissociation of sensibility and
his demand in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ that poets ought to ‘feel their
thought as immediately as the odour of a rose’.^95
Most crucially for modernist technique, such a unity of person in the
naı ̈ve poet means there is no corresponding split between an artist’s form
and content, matter and manner, for ‘naı ̈ve poetry never lacks for content,
since its content is already containedin the form itself’.^96 Or as it appears
in Walter Pater’s famous proto-modernist formulation, inspiration for
generations of abstract painters and free verse poets: ‘“All art constantly
aspires towards the condition of music”. For a while in all other kinds of art
it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understand-
ing can always make the distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to
obliterate it.’^97
Such is the inseparability between how the naı ̈ve poet sees and what
he sees that he is also, to all extents and purposes, impersonal. ‘Thenaı ̈ve
poetis the work and the work is thenaı ̈ve poet’, declares Schiller, and ‘you
have to be unworthy of the work or not up to it or have already had
your fill of it, to ask only aboutthe poet’( 197 ). By having no critical
distance between the work and the sensibility of its author, the poem is
Inside and outside modernism 43