new light, as of joy, in his face.
Now what is the difference in these passages--a difference that throbs
in every phrase? It is that the first writer is a preacher, and the
second a prophet. George Eliot talks about God, but never alters her
focus; God and the tables and chairs are all in the same plane, and in
consequence we have not for a moment the feeling that the whole universe
needs pity and love--they are only needed in Hetty's cell. In Dostoevsky
the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves;
infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to
embrace it and summon it to embrace them; one can apply to them the
saying of St. Catherine of Siena that God is in the soul and the soul is
in God as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea. Every
sentence he writes implies this extension, and the implication is the
dominant aspect of his work. He is a great novelist in the ordinary
sense--that is to say his characters have relation to ordinary life and
also live in their own surroundings, there are incidents which keep us
excited, and so on; he has also the greatness of a prophet, to which our
ordinary standards are inapplicable.
That is the gulf between Hetty and Mitya, though they inhabit the same
moral and mythological worlds. Hetty, taken by herself, is quite
adequate. She is a poor girl, brought to confess her crime, and so to a
better frame of mind. But Mitya, taken by himself, is not adequate. He
only becomes real through what he implies, his mind is not in a frame at
all. Taken by himself he seems distorted out of drawing, intermittent;
we begin explaining him away and saying he was disproportionately
grateful for the pillow because he was overwrought--very like a Russian
in fact. We cannot understand him until we see that he extends, and that
the part of him on which Dostoevsky focused did not lie on that wooden
chest or even in dreamland but in a region where it could be joined by
the rest of humanity. Mitya is--all of us. So is Alyosha, so is
Smerdyakov. He is the prophetic vision, and the novelist's creation
also. He does not become all of us here: he is Mitya here as Hetty is
Hetty. The extension, the melting, the unity through love and pity occur
in a region which can only be implied and to which fiction is perhaps
the wrong approach. The world of the Karamazovs and Myshkin and
Raskolnikov, the world of Moby Dick which we shall enter shortly, it is
not a veil, it is not an allegory. It is the ordinary world of fiction,
but it reaches back. And that tiny humorous figure of Lady Bertram whom
we considered some time ago--Lady Bertram sitting on her sofa with
pug--may assist us in these deeper matters. Lady Bertram, we decided,
was a flat character, capable of extending into a round when the action
required it. Mitya is a round character, but he is capable of extension.
He does not conceal anything (mysticism), he does not mean anything
(symbolism), he is merely Dmitri Karamazov, but to be merely a person in
Dostoevsky is to join up with all the other people far back.
Consequently the tremendous current suddenly flows--for me in those
closing words: "I've had a good dream, gentlemen." Have I had that good
dream too? No, Dostoevsky's characters ask us to share something deeper
than their experiences. They convey to us a sensation that is partly
physical--the sensation of sinking into a translucent globe and seeing
our experience floating far above us on its surface, tiny, remote, yet
ours. We have not ceased to be people, we have given nothing up, but
"the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea."
There we touch the limit of our subject. We are not concerned with the
prophet's message, or rather (since matter and manner cannot be wholly
separated) we are concerned with it as little as possible. What matters
is the accent of his voice, his song. Hetty might have a good dream in
prison, and it would be true of her, satisfyingly true, but it would
stop short. Dinah would say she was glad, Hetty would recount her dream,
which, unlike Mitya's, would be logically connected with the crisis, and
George Eliot would say something sound and sympathetic about good dreams
generally, and their inexplicably helpful effect on the tortured breast.
Just the same and absolutely different are the two scenes, the two
books, the two writers.
Now another point appears. Regarded merely as a novelist the prophet has
certain uncanny advantages, so that it is sometimes worth letting him
into a drawing-room even on the furniture's account. Perhaps he will
smash or distort, but perhaps he will illumine. As I said of the
fantasist, he manipulates a beam of light which occasionally touches the
objects so sedulously dusted by the hand of common sense, and renders
them more vivid than they can ever be in domesticity. This intermittent
realism pervades all the greater works of Dostoevsky and Herman
Melville. Dostoevsky can be patiently accurate about a trial or the
appearance of a staircase. Melville can catalogue the products of the
whale ("I have ever found the plain things the knottiest of all," he
remarks). D. H. Lawrence can describe a field of grass and flowers or
the entrance into Fremantle. Little things in the foreground seem to be
all that the prophet cares about at moments--he sits down with them so
quiet and busy like a child between two romps. What does he feel during
these intermittencies? Is it another form of excitement, or is he
resting? We cannot know. No doubt it is what A.E. feels when he is doing
his creameries, or what Claudel feels when he is doing his diplomacy,
but what is that? Anyhow, it characterizes these novels and gives them
what is always provocative in a work of art: roughness of surface. While
they pass under our eyes they are full of dents and grooves and lumps
and spikes which draw from us little cries of approval and disapproval.
When they have past, the roughness is forgotten, they become as smooth
as the moon.
Prophetic fiction, then, seems to have definite characteristics. It
demands humility and the absence of the sense of humour. It reaches
back--though we must not conclude from the example of Dostoevsky that it
always reaches back to pity and love. It is spasmodically realistic. And
it gives us the sensation of a song or of sound. It is unlike fantasy
because its face is towards unity, whereas fantasy glances about. Its
confusion is incidental, whereas fantasy's is fundamental--_Tristram
Shandy_ ought to be a muddle, _Zuleika Dobson_ ought to keep changing
mythologies. Also the prophet--one imagines--has gone "off" more
completely than the fantasist, he is in a remoter emotional state while
he composes. Not many novelists have this aspect. Poe is too incidental.
Hawthorne potters too anxiously round the problem of individual
salvation to get free. Hardy, a philosopher and a great poet, might seem
to have claims, but Hardy's novels are surveys, they do not give out
sounds. The writer sits back, it is true, but the characters do not
reach back. He shows them to us as they let their arms rise and fall in
the air; they may parallel our sufferings but can never extend
them--never, I mean, could Jude step forward like Mitya and release
floods of our emotion by saying "Gentlemen, I've had a bad dream."
Conrad is in a rather similar position. The voice, the voice of Marlow,
is too full of experiences to sing, it is dulled by many reminiscences
of error and beauty, its owner has seen too much to see beyond cause and
effect. To have a philosophy--even a poetic and emotional philosophy
like Hardy's and Conrad's--leads to reflections on life and things. A
prophet does not reflect. And he does not hammer away. That is why we
exclude Joyce. Joyce has many qualities akin to prophecy and he has
shown (especially in the _Portrait of the Artist_) an imaginative grasp
of evil. But he undermines the universe in too workmanlike a manner,
looking round for this tool or that: in spite of all his internal
looseness he is too tight, he is never vague except after due
deliberation; it is talk, talk, never song.
So, though I believe this lecture is on a genuine aspect of the novel,
not a fake aspect, I can only think of four writers to illustrate
it--Dostoevsky, Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Emily Brontë. Emily
Brontë shall be left to the last, Dostoevsky I have alluded to,
Melville is the centre of our picture, and the centre of Melville is
_Moby Dick_.
_Moby Dick_ is an easy book, as long as we read it as a yarn or an
account of whaling interspersed with snatches of poetry. But as soon as
we catch the song in it, it grows difficult and immensely important.
Narrowed and hardened into words the spiritual theme of _Moby Dick_ is
as follows: a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong
way. The White Whale is evil, and Captain Ahab is warped by constant
pursuit until his knight-errantry turns into revenge. These are words--a
symbol for the book if we want one--but they do not carry us much
further than the acceptance of the book as a yarn--perhaps they carry us
backwards, for they may mislead us into harmonizing the incidents, and
so losing their roughness and richness. The idea of a contest we may
retain: all action is a battle, the only happiness is peace. But contest
between what? We get false if we say that it is between good and evil or
between two unreconciled evils. The essential in _Moby Dick_, its
prophetic song, flows athwart the action and the surface morality like
an undercurrent. It lies outside words. Even at the end, when the ship
has gone down with the bird of heaven pinned to its mast, and the empty
coffin, bouncing up from the vortex, has carried Ishmael back to the
world--even then we cannot catch the words of the song. There has been
stress, with intervals: but no explicable solution, certainly no
reaching back into universal pity and love; no "Gentlemen, I've had a
good dream."
The extraordinary nature of the book appears in two of its early
incidents--the sermon about Jonah and the friendship with Queequeg.
The sermon has nothing to do with Christianity. It asks for endurance or
loyalty without hope of reward. The preacher "kneeling in the pulpit's
bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed
eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and
praying at the bottom of the sea." Then he works up and up and concludes
on a note of joy that is far more terrifying than a menace.
Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him when the ship of
this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him
who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns and destroys all sin
though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges.
Delight--top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord,
but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to
him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob
can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and
deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his
final breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me by thy rod--mortal or
immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this
world's or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee: for
what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?
I believe it is not a coincidence that the last ship we encounter at the
end of the book before the final catastrophe should be called the
Delight; a vessel of ill omen who has herself encountered Moby Dick and
been shattered by him. But what the connection was in the prophet's mind
I cannot say, nor could he tell us.
Immediately after the sermon, Ishmael makes a passionate alliance with
the cannibal Queequeg, and it looks for a moment that the book is to be
a saga of blood-brotherhood. But human relationships mean little to
Melville, and after a grotesque and violent entry, Queequeg is almost
forgotten. Almost--not quite. Towards the end he falls ill and a coffin
is made for him which he does not occupy, as he recovers. It is this
coffin, serving as a life-buoy, that saves Ishmael from the final
whirlpool, and this again is no coincidence, but an unformulated
connection that sprang up in Melville's mind. _Moby Dick_ is full of
meanings: its meaning is a different problem. It is wrong to turn the
Delight or the coffin into symbols, because even if the symbolism is
correct, it silences the book. Nothing can be stated about _Moby Dick_
except that it is a contest. The rest is song.
It is to his conception of evil that Melville's work owes much of its
strength. As a rule evil has been feebly envisaged in fiction, which
seldom soars above misconduct or avoids the clouds of mysteriousness.
Evil to most novelists is either sexual and social or is something very
vague for which a special style with implications of poetry is thought
suitable. They want it to exist, in order that it may kindly help them
on with the plot, and evil, not being kind, generally hampers them with
a villain--a Lovelace or Uriah Heep, who does more harm to the author
than to the fellow characters. For a real villain we must turn to a
story of Melville's called _Billy Budd_.[7]
It is a short story, but must be mentioned because of the light it
throws on his other work. The scene is on a British man-of-war soon
after the Mutiny at the Nore--a stagey yet intensely real vessel. The
hero, a young sailor, has goodness--which is faint beside the goodness
of Alyosha; still he has goodness of the glowing aggressive sort which
cannot exist unless it has evil to consume. He is not aggressive
himself. It is the light within him that irritates and explodes. On the
surface he is a pleasant, merry, rather insensitive lad, whose perfect
physique is marred by one slight defect, a stammer, which finally
destroys him. He is "dropped into a world not without some mantraps, and
against whose subtleties simple courage without any touch of defensive
ugliness is of little avail; and where such innocence as man is capable
of does yet, in a moral emergency, not always sharpen the faculties or
enlighten the will." Claggart, one of the petty officers, at once sees
in him the enemy--his own enemy, for Claggart is evil. It is again the
contest between Ahab and Moby Dick, though the parts are more clearly
assigned, and we are further from prophecy and nearer to morality and
common sense. But not much nearer. Claggart is not like any other
villain.
Natural depravity has certain negative virtues, serving it as silent
auxiliaries. It is not going too far to say that it is without vices or
small sins. There is a phenomenal pride in it that excludes them from
anything--never mercenary or avaricious. In short, the character here
meant partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual. It is serious, but free
from acerbity.
He accuses Billy of trying to foment a mutiny. The charge is ridiculous,
no one believes it, and yet it proves fatal. For when the boy is
summoned to declare his innocence, he is so horrified that he cannot
speak, his ludicrous stammer seizes him, the power within him explodes,
and he knocks down his traducer, kills him, and has to be hanged.
_Billy Budd_ is a remote unearthly episode, but it is a song not without
words, and should be read both for its own beauty and as an introduction
to more difficult works. Evil is labelled and personified instead of
slipping over the ocean and round the world, and Melville's mind can be
observed more easily. What one notices in him is that his apprehensions
are free from personal worry, so that we become bigger not smaller after
sharing them. He has not got that tiresome little receptacle, a
conscience, which is often such a nuisance in serious writers and so
contracts their effects--the conscience of Hawthorne or of Mark
Rutherford. Melville--after the initial roughness of his
realism--reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and
sadness so transcending our own that they are undistinguishable from
glory. He says, "in certain moods no man can weigh this world without
throwing in a something somehow like Original Sin to strike the uneven
balance." He threw it in, that undefinable something, the balance
righted itself, and he gave us harmony and temporary salvation.
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.