Aspects of the novel
It is no wonder that D. H. Lawrence should have written two penetrating
studies of Melville, for Lawrence himself is, as far as I know, the only
prophetic novelist writing today--all the rest are fantasists or
preachers: the only living novelist in whom the song predominates, who
has the rapt bardic quality, and whom it is idle to criticize. He
invites criticism because he is a preacher also--it is this minor aspect
of him which makes him so difficult and misleading--an excessively
clever preacher who knows how to play on the nerves of his congregation.
Nothing is more disconcerting than to sit down, so to speak, before your
prophet, and then suddenly to receive his boot in the pit of your
stomach. "I'm damned if I'll be humble after that," you cry, and so lay
yourself open to further nagging. Also the subject matter of the sermon
is agitating--hot denunciations or advice--so that in the end you cannot
remember whether you ought or ought not to have a body, and are only
sure that you are futile. This bullying, and the honeyed sweetness which
is a bully's reaction, occupy between them the foreground of Lawrence's
work; his greatness lies far, far back, and rests, not like Dostoevsky's
upon Christianity, nor like Melville's upon a contest, but upon
something æsthetic. The voice is Balder's voice, though the hands are
the hands of Esau. The prophet is irradiating nature from within, so
that every colour has a glow and every form a distinctness which could
not otherwise be obtained. Take a scene that always stays in the memory:
that scene in _Women in Love_ where one of the characters throws stones
into the water at night to shatter the image of the moon. Why he throws,
what the scene symbolizes, is unimportant. But the writer could not get
such a moon and water otherwise; he reaches them by his special path
which stamps them as more wonderful than any we can imagine. It is the
prophet back where he started from, back where the rest of us are
waiting by the edge of the pool, but with a power of re-creation and
evocation we shall never possess.
Humility is not easy with this irritable and irritating author, for the
humbler we get, the crosser he gets. Yet I do not see how else to read
him. If we start resenting or mocking, his treasure disappears as surely
as if we started obeying him. What is valuable about him cannot be put
into words; it is colour, gesture and outline in people and things, the
usual stock-in-trade of the novelist, but evolved by such a different
process that they belong to a new world.
But what about Emily Brontë? Why should _Wuthering Heights_ come into
this enquiry? It is a story about human beings, it contains no view of
the universe.
My answer is that the emotions of Heathcliffe and Catherine Earnshaw
function differently to other emotions in fiction. Instead of inhabiting
the characters, they surround them like thunder clouds, and generate the
explosions that fill the novel from the moment when Lockwood dreams of
the hand at the window down to the moment when Heathcliffe, with the
same window open, is discovered dead. _Wuthering Heights_ is filled with
sound--storm and rushing wind--a sound more important than words and
thoughts. Great as the novel is, one cannot afterwards remember anything
in it but Heathcliffe and the elder Catherine. They cause the action by
their separation: they close it by their union after death. No wonder
they "walk"; what else could such beings do? even when they were alive
their love and hate transcended them.
Emily Brontë had in some ways a literal and careful mind. She
constructed her novel on a time chart even more elaborate than Miss
Austen's, and she arranged the Linton and Earnshaw families
symmetrically, and she had a clear idea of the various legal steps by
which Heathcliffe gained possession of their two properties.[8] Then why
did she deliberately introduce muddle, chaos, tempest? Because in our
sense of the word she was a prophetess: because what is implied is more
important to her than what is said; and only in confusion could the
figures of Heathcliffe and Catherine externalize their passion till it
streamed through the house and over the moors. _Wuthering Heights_ has
no mythology beyond what these two characters provide: no great book is
more cut off from the universals of Heaven and Hell. It is local, like
the spirits it engenders, and whereas we may meet Moby Dick in any pond,
we shall only encounter them among the harebells and limestone of their
own county.
A concluding remark. Always, at the back of my mind, there lurks a
reservation about this prophetic stuff, a reservation which some will
make more strongly while others will not make it at all. Fantasy has
asked us to pay something extra; and now prophecy asks for humility and
even for a suspension of the sense of humour, so that we are not allowed
to snigger when a tragedy is called _Billy Budd_. We have indeed to lay
aside the single vision which we bring to most of literature and life
and have been trying to use through most of our enquiry, and take up a
different set of tools. Is this right? Another prophet, Blake, had no
doubt that it was right.
May God us keep
From single vision and Newton's sleep,
he cried and he has painted that same Newton with a pair of compasses in
his hand, describing a miserable mathematical triangle, and turning his
back upon the gorgeous and immeasurable water growths of _Moby Dick_.
Few will agree with Blake. Fewer will agree with Blake's Newton. Most of
us will be eclectics to this side or that according to our temperament.
The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can
exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I
would offer my fellow eclectics is: "Do not be proud of your
inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped
like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive
and truthful." For the first five lectures of this course we have used
more or less the same set of tools. This time and last we have had to
lay them down. Next time we shall take them up again, but with no
certainty that they are the best equipment for a critic or that there is
such a thing as a critical equipment.
[Footnote 7: Only to be found in a collected edition. For knowledge
of it, and for much else, I am indebted to Mr. John Freeman's
admirable monograph on Melville.]
[Footnote 8: See that sound and brilliant essay, _The Structure
of Wuthering Heights_, by C.P.S. (Hogarth Press.)]
VIII
PATTERN AND RHYTHM
OUR interludes, gay and grave, are over, and we return to the general
scheme of the course. We began with the story, and having considered
human beings, we proceeded to the plot which springs out of the story.
Now we must consider something which springs mainly out of the plot, and
to which the characters and any other element present also contribute.
For this new aspect there appears to be no literary word--indeed the
more the arts develop the more they depend on each other for definition.
We will borrow from painting first and call it the pattern. Later we
will borrow from music and call it rhythm. Unfortunately both these
words are vague--when people apply rhythm or pattern to literature they
are apt not to say what they mean and not to finish their sentences: it
is, "Oh, but surely the rhythm ..." or "Oh, but if you call that
pattern ..."
Before I discuss what pattern entails, and what qualities a reader must
bring to its appreciation, I will give two examples of books with
patterns so definite that a pictorial image sums them up: a book the
shape of an hour-glass and a book the shape of a grand chain in that
old-time dance, the Lancers.
_Thais_, by Anatole France, is the shape of an hour-glass.
There are two chief characters, Paphnuce the ascetic, Thais the
courtesan. Paphnuce lives in the desert, he is saved and happy when the
book starts. Thais leads a life of sin in Alexandria, and it is his duty
to save her. In the central scene of the book they approach, he
succeeds; she goes into a monastery and gains salvation, because she has
met him, but he, because he has met her, is damned. The two characters
converge, cross, and recede with mathematical precision, and part of the
pleasure we get from the book is due to this. Such is the pattern of
Thais--so simple that it makes a good starting-point for a difficult
survey. It is the same as the story of _Thais_, when events unroll in
their time-sequence, and the same as the plot of _Thais_, when we see
the two characters bound by their previous actions and taking fatal
steps whose consequence they do not see. But whereas the story appeals
to our curiosity and the plot to our intelligence, the pattern appeals
to our æsthetic sense, it causes us to see the book as a whole. We do
not see it as an hour-glass--that is the hard jargon of the lecture room
which must never be taken literally at this advanced stage of our
enquiry. We just have a pleasure without knowing why, and when the
pleasure is past, as it is now, and our minds are left free to explain
it, a geometrical simile such as an hour-glass will be found helpful. If
it was not for this hour-glass the story, the plot, and the characters
of Thais and Paphnuce would none of them exert their full force, they
would none of them breathe as they do. "Pattern," which seems so rigid,
is connected with atmosphere, which seems so fluid.
Now for the book that is shaped like the grand chain: _Roman Pictures_
by Percy Lubbock.
_Roman Pictures_ is a social comedy. The narrator is a tourist in Rome;
he there meets a kindly and shoddy friend of his, Deering, who rebukes
him superciliously for staring at churches and sets him out to explore
society. This he does, demurely obedient; one person hands him on to
another; café, studio, Vatican and Quirinal purlieus are all reached,
until finally, at the extreme end of his career he thinks, in a most
aristocratic and dilapidated palazzo, whom should he meet but the
second-rate Deering; Deering is his hostess's nephew, but had concealed
it owing to some backfire of snobbery. The circle is complete, the
original partners have rejoined, and greet one another with mutual
confusion which turns to mild laughter.
What is so good in _Roman Pictures_ is not the presence of the "grand
chain" pattern--any one can organize a grand chain--but the suitability
of the pattern to the author's mood. Lubbock works all through by
administering a series of little shocks, and by extending to his
characters an elaborate charity which causes them to appear in a rather
worse light than if no charity was wasted on them at all. It is the
comic atmosphere, but sub-acid, meticulously benign. And at the end we
discover to our delight that the atmosphere has been externalized, and
that the partners, as they elide together in the marchesa's
drawing-room, have done the exact thing which the book requires, which
it required from the start, and have bound the scattered incidents
together with a thread woven out of their own substance.
_Thais_ and _Roman Pictures_ provide easy examples of pattern; it is not
often that one can compare a book to a pictorial object with any
accuracy, though curves, etc., are freely spoken of by critics who do
not quite know what they want to say. We can only say (so far) that
pattern is an æsthetic aspect of the novel, and that though it may be
nourished by anything in the novel--any character, scene, word--it draws
most of its nourishment from the plot. We noted, when discussing the
plot, that it added to itself the quality of beauty; beauty a little
surprised at her own arrival: that upon its neat carpentry there could