In May 1911 the art and theatre critic Huntly Carter reported in The New Age that the ‘intuitional philosophy of Bergson – a system of philosophy for elevating and making vision more penetratingly human – has so taken possession of Paris that the spirit of it seems to fill every place’. Carter summarised Henri Bergson's philosophy as the ‘modern principles of continuity and rhythm’ and praised the second wave of Fauvist artists then exhibiting at the Societe des Artists Independants, and headed by the expatriates J. D. Fergusson, Anne Estelle Rice and Jessica Dismorr, for their ‘lyrics in colour, lyrics in line, lyrics in light to the new deity, rhythm’ (my emphasis). Carter's articles elicited a response in the correspondence pages of The New Age from John Middleton Murry, who reaffirmed the celebration of Paris as ‘the great cosmopolis’ and ‘the very cross-roads of Continental ideas’ and ‘advanced art’. Praising the new post-impressionist artists named by Carter for having applied Bergson's philosophy with ‘the most comprehensive and vital results’, Murry delighted in the fact that the new movement had ‘sufficed at once to enrage and confound its critics’ in England. This letter to The New Age announced Murry's arrival on the London literary scene, and in the same month of June 1911 he published the first issue of a magazine devoted to Bergson's philosophy and Fauvist art that derived its title from the ‘new deity’: Rhythm.

Murry had met the artists Fergusson and Rice by chance on his first visit to Paris in the winter of 1910 in the Cafe d’Harcourt. In his autobiography, he recalled the importance of the word ‘rhythm’ in his early conversations with Fergusson: