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
be seen, by those who cared to see, the figure of the Muse; that Logic,
at the moment of finishing its own house, laid the foundation of a new
one. Here, here is the point where the aspect called pattern is most
closely in touch with its material; here is our starting point. It
springs mainly from the plot, accompanies it like a light in the clouds,
and remains visible after it has departed. Beauty is sometimes the shape
of the book, the book as a whole, the unity, and our examination would
be easier if it was always this. But sometimes it is not. When it is not
I shall call it rhythm. For the moment we are concerned with pattern
only.
Let us examine at some length another book of the rigid type, a book
with a unity, and in this sense an easy book, although it is by Henry
James. We shall see in it pattern triumphant, and we shall also be able
to see the sacrifices an author must make if he wants his pattern and
nothing else to triumph.
_The Ambassadors_, like _Thais_, is the shape of an hour-glass. Strether
and Chad, like Paphnuce and Thais, change places, and it is the
realization of this that makes the book so satisfying at the close. The
plot is elaborate and subtle, and proceeds by action or conversation or
meditation through every paragraph. Everything is planned, everything
fits; none of the minor characters are just decorative like the
talkative Alexandrians at Nirias' banquet; they elaborate on the main
theme, they work. The final effect is pre-arranged, dawns gradually on
the reader, and is completely successful when it comes. Details of
intrigue, of the various missions from America, may be forgotten, but
the symmetry they have created is enduring.
Let us trace the growth of this symmetry.[9]
Strether, a sensitive middle-aged American, is commissioned by his old
friend, Mrs. Newsome, whom he hopes to marry, to go to Paris and rescue
her son Chad, who has gone to the bad in that appropriate city. The
Newsomes are sound commercial people, who have made money over
manufacturing a small article of domestic utility. Henry James never
tells us what the small article is, and in a moment we shall understand
why. Wells spits it out in _Tono Bungay_, Meredith reels it out in _Evan
Harrington_, Trollope prescribes it freely for Miss Dunstable, but for
James to indicate how his characters made their pile--it would not do.
The article is somewhat ignoble and ludicrous--that is enough. If you
choose to be coarse and daring and visualize it for yourself as, say, a
button-hook, you can, but you do so at your own risk: the author remains
uninvolved.
Well, whatever it is, Chad Newsome ought to come back and help make it,
and Strether undertakes to fetch him. He has to be rescued from a life
which is both immoral and unremunerative.
Strether is a typical James character--he recurs in nearly all the books
and is an essential part of their construction. He is the observer who
tries to influence the action, and who through his failure to do so
gains extra opportunities for observation. And the other characters are
such as an observer like Strether is capable of observing--through
lenses procured from a rather too first-class oculist. Everything is
adjusted to his vision, yet he is not a quietist--no, that is the
strength of the device; he takes us along with him, we move as well as
look on.
When he lands in England (and a landing is an exalted and enduring
experience for James, it is as vital as Newgate for Defoe; poetry and
life crowd round a landing): when Strether lands, though it is only old
England, he begins to have doubts of his mission, which increase when he
gets to Paris. For Chad Newsome, far from going to the bad, has
improved; he is distinguished, he is so sure of himself that he can be
kind and cordial to the man who has orders to fetch him away; his
friends are exquisite, and as for "women in the case" whom his mother
anticipated, there is no sign of them whatever. It is Paris that has
enlarged and redeemed him--and how well Strether himself understands
this!
His greatest uneasiness seemed to peep at him out of the possible
impression that almost any acceptance of Paris might give one's
authority away. It hung before him this morning, the vast bright
Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard,
in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably
marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together; and what seemed
all surface one moment seemed all depth the next. It was a place of
which, unmistakably, Chad was fond; wherefore, if he, Strether, should
like it too much, what on earth, with such a bond, would become of
either of them?
Thus, exquisitely and firmly, James sets his atmosphere--Paris
irradiates the book from end to end, it is an actor though always
unembodied, it is a scale by which human sensibility can be measured,
and when we have finished the novel and allow its incidents to blur that
we may see the pattern plainer, it is Paris that gleams at the centre of
the hour-glass shape--Paris--nothing so crude as good or evil. Strether
sees this soon, and sees that Chad realizes it better than he himself
can; and when he has reached this stage of initiation the novel takes a
turn: there is, after all, a woman in the case; behind Paris,
interpreting it for Chad, is the adorable and exalted figure of Mme. de
Vionnet. It is now impossible for Strether to proceed. All that is noble
and refined in life concentrates in Mme. de Vionnet and is reinforced by
her pathos. She asks him not to take Chad away. He promises--without
reluctance, for his own heart has already shown him as much--and he
remains in Paris not to fight it but to fight for it.
For the second batch of ambassadors now arrives from the New World. Mrs.
Newsome, incensed and puzzled by the unseemly delay, has despatched
Chad's sister, his brother-in-law, and Mamie, the girl whom he is
supposed to marry. The novel now becomes, within its ordained limits,
most amusing. There is a superb set-to between Chad's sister and Mme. de
Vionnet, while as for Mamie--here is disastrous Mamie, seen as we see
all things, through Strether's eyes.
As a child, as a "bud," and then again as a flower of expansion, Mamie
had bloomed for him, freely, in the almost incessantly open doorways of
home; where he remembered her at first very forward, as then very
backward--for he had carried on at one period, in Mrs. Newsome's
parlours, a course of English literature reinforced by exams and
teas--and once more, finally, as very much in advance. But he had kept
no great sense of points of contact; it not being in the nature of
things at Woollett that the freshest of the buds should find herself in
the same basket with the most withered of the winter apples.... He none
the less felt now, as he sat with the charming girl, the signal growth
of a confidence. For she _was_ charming, when all was said, and none the
less so for the visible habit and practice of freedom and fluency. She
was charming, he was aware, in spite of the fact that if he hadn't found
her so he would have found her something he should have been in peril of
expressing as "funny." Yes, she was funny, wonderful Mamie, and without
dreaming it; she was bland, she was bridal--with never, that he could
make out as yet, a bridegroom to support it; she was handsome and
portly, and easy and chatty, soft and sweet and almost disconcertingly
reassuring. She was dressed, if we might so far discriminate, less as a
young lady than as an old one--had an old one been supposable to
Strether as so committed to vanity; the complexities of her hair missed
moreover also the looseness of youth; and she had a mature manner of
bending a little, as to encourage and reward, while she held neatly in
front of her a pair of strikingly polished hands: the combination of all
of which kept up about her the glamour of her "receiving," placed her
again perpetually between the windows and within sound of the ice cream
plates, suggested the enumeration of all the names, gregarious specimens
of a single type, she was happy to "meet."
Mamie! She is another Henry James type; nearly every novel contains a
Mamie--Mrs. Gereth in _The Spoils of Poynton_ for instance, or Henrietta
Stackpole in _The Portrait of a Lady_. He is so good at indicating
instantaneously and constantly that a character is second rate,
deficient in sensitiveness, abounding in the wrong sort of worldliness;
he gives such a character so much vitality that its absurdity is
delightful.
So Strether changes sides and loses all hopes of marrying Mrs. Newsome.
Paris is winning--and then he catches sight of something new. Is not
Chad, as regards any fineness in him, played out? Is not Chad's Paris
after all just a place for a spree? This fear is confirmed. He goes for
a solitary country walk, and at the end of the day he comes across Chad
and Mme. de Vionnet. They are in a boat, they pretend not to see him,
because their relation is at bottom an ordinary liaison, and they are
ashamed. They were hoping for a secret week-end at an inn while their
passion survived; for it will not survive, Chad will tire of the
exquisite Frenchwoman, she is part of his fling; he will go back to his
mother and make the little domestic article and marry Mamie. They know
all this, and it is revealed to Strether though they try to hide it;
they lie, they are vulgar--even Mme. de Vionnet, even her pathos, once
so exquisite, is stained with commonness.
It was like a chill in the air to him, it was almost appalling, that a
creature so fine could be, by mysterious forces, a creature so
exploited. For, at the end of all things, they _were_ mysterious; she
had but made Chad what he was--so why could she think she had made him
infinite? She had made him better, she had made him best, she had made
him anything one would; but it came to our friend with supreme queerness
that he was none the less only Chad. The work, however admirable, was
nevertheless of the strict human order, and in short it was
marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts,
aberrations--however one classed them--within the common experience,
should be so transcendency prized.
She was older for him tonight, visibly less exempt from the touch of
time; but she was as much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the
happiest apparition, it had been given him, in all his years, to meet;
and yet he could see her there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a
maidservant crying for a young man. The only thing was that she judged
herself as the maidservant wouldn't; the weakness of which wisdom too,
the dishonour of which judgment, seemed but to sink her lower.
So Strether loses them too. As he says: "I have lost everything--it is
my only logic." It is not that they have gone back. It is that he has
gone on. The Paris they revealed to him--he could reveal it to them now,
if they had eyes to see, for it is something finer than they could ever
notice for themselves, and his imagination has more spiritual value than
their youth. The pattern of the hour-glass is complete; he and Chad have
changed places, with more subtle steps than Thais and Paphnuce, and the
light in the clouds proceeds not from the well-lit Alexandria, but from
the jewel which "twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what
seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next."
The beauty that suffuses _The Ambassadors_ is the reward due to a fine
artist for hard work. James knew exactly what he wanted, he pursued the
narrow path of æsthetic duty, and success to the full extent of his
possibilities has crowned him. The pattern has woven itself with
modulation and reservations Anatole France will never attain. Woven
itself wonderfully. But at what sacrifice!
So enormous is the sacrifice that many readers cannot get interested in
James, although they can follow what he says (his difficulty has been
much exaggerated), and can appreciate his effects. They cannot grant his
premise, which is that most of human life has to disappear before he can
do us a novel.
He has, in the first place, a very short list of characters. I have
already mentioned two--the observer who tries to influence the action,
and the second-rate outsider (to whom, for example, all the brilliant
opening of _What Maisie Knew_ is entrusted). Then there is the
sympathetic foil--very lively and frequently female--in _The
Ambassadors_. Maria Gostrey plays this part; there is the wonderful rare
heroine, whom Mme. de Vionnet approached and who is consummated by Milly
in _The Wings of the Dove_; there is sometimes a villain, sometimes a
young artist with generous impulses; and that is about all. For so fine
a novelist it is a poor show.
In the second place, the characters, beside being few in number, are
constructed on very stingy lines. They are incapable of fun, of rapid
motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will
not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the
sources of their income, their servants are noiseless or resemble
themselves, no social explanation of the world we know is possible for
them, for there are no stupid people in their world, no barriers of
language, and no poor. Even their sensations are limited. They can land
in Europe and look at works of art and at each other, but that is all.
Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James's pages--maimed yet
specialized. They remind one of the exquisite deformities who haunted
Egyptian art in the reign of Akhenaton--huge heads and tiny legs, but
nevertheless charming. In the following reign they disappear.
Now this drastic curtailment, both of the numbers of human beings and of
their attributes, is in the interests of the pattern. The longer James
worked, the more convinced he grew that a novel should be a whole--not
necessarily geometric like _The Ambassadors_, but it should accrete
round a single topic, situation, gesture, which should occupy the
characters and provide a plot, and should also fasten up the novel on
the outside--catch its scattered statements in a net, make them cohere
like a planet, and swing through the skies of memory. A pattern must
emerge, and anything that emerged from the pattern must be pruned off as
wanton distraction. Who so wanton as human beings? Put Tom Jones or Emma
or even Mr. Casaubon into a Henry James book, and the book will burn to
ashes, whereas we could put them into one another's books and only cause
local inflammation. Only a Henry James character will suit, and though
they are not dead--certain selected recesses of experience he explores
very well--they are gutted of the common stuff that fills characters in
other books, and ourselves. And this castrating is not in the interests
of the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no philosophy in the novels, no
religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no prophecy, no
benefit for the superhuman at all. It is for the sake of a particular
æsthetic effect which is certainly gained, but at this heavy price.
H. G. Wells has been amusing on this point, and perhaps profound. In
_Boon_--one of his liveliest works--he had Henry James much upon his
mind, and wrote a superb parody of him.
James begins by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of art that
must be judged by its oneness. Some one gave him that idea in the
beginning of things and he has never found it out. He doesn't find
things out. He doesn't even seem to want to find things out. He accepts
very readily and then--elaborates.... The only living human motives left
in his novels are a certain avidity and an entirely superficial
curiosity.... His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint, link by
link. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his
novel is _about_ is always there. It is like a church lit but with no
congregation to distract you, with every light and line focussed on the
high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there,
is a dead kitten, an egg shell, a piece of string.... Like his _Altar of
the Dead_ with nothing to the dead at all.... For if there was, they
couldn't all be candles, and the effect would vanish.
Wells sent _Boon_ as a present to James, apparently thinking the master
would be as much pleased by such heartiness and honesty as was he
himself. The master was far from pleased, and a most interesting
correspondence ensued.[10] Each of the eminent men becomes more and more
himself as it proceeds. James is polite, reminiscent, bewildered, and
exceedingly formidable: he admits that the parody has not "filled him
with a fond elation," and regrets in conclusion that he can sign himself
"only yours faithfully, Henry James." Wells is bewildered too, but in a
different way; he cannot understand why the man should be upset. And,
beyond the personal comedy, there is the great literary importance of
the issue. It is this question of the rigid pattern: hour-glass or grand
chain or converging lines of the cathedral or diverging lines of the
Catherine wheel, or bed of Procrustes--whatever image you like as long
as it implies unity. Can it be combined with the immense richness of
material which life provides? Wells and James would agree it cannot,
Wells would go on to say that life should be given the preference, and
must not be whittled or distended for a pattern's sake. My own
prejudices are with Wells. The James novels are a unique possession and
the reader who cannot accept his premises misses some valuable and
exquisite sensations. But I do not want more of his novels, especially
when they are written by some one else, just as I do not want the art of
Akhenaton to extend into the reign of Tutankhamen.
That then is the disadvantage of a rigid pattern. It may externalize the
atmosphere, spring naturally from the plot, but it shuts the doors on
life and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the
drawing-room. Beauty has arrived, but in too tyrannous a guise. In
plays--the plays of Racine, for instance--she may be justified because
beauty can be a great empress on the stage, and reconcile us to the loss
of the men we knew. But in the novel, her tyranny as it grows powerful
grows petty, and generates regrets which sometimes take the form of
books like _Boon_. To put it in other words, the novel is not capable of
as much artistic development as the drama: its humanity or the grossness
of its material hinder it (use whichever phrase you like). To most
readers of fiction the sensation from a pattern is not intense enough to
justify the sacrifices that made it, and their verdict is "Beautifully
done, but not worth doing."
Still this is not the end of our quest. We will not give up the hope of
beauty yet. Cannot it be introduced into fiction by some other method
than the pattern? Let us edge rather nervously towards the idea of
"rhythm."
Rhythm is sometimes quite easy. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for
instance, starts with the rhythm "diddidy dum," which we can all hear
and tap to. But the symphony as a whole has also a rhythm--due mainly to
the relation between its movements--which some people can hear but no
one can tap to. This second sort of rhythm is difficult, and whether it
is substantially the same as the first sort only a musician could tell
us. What a literary man wants to say though is that the first kind of
rhythm, the diddidy dum, can be found in certain novels and may give
them beauty. And the other rhythm, the difficult one--the rhythm of the
Fifth Symphony as a whole--I cannot quote you any parallels for that in
fiction, yet it may be present.
Rhythm in the easy sense, is illustrated by the work of Marcel
Proust.[11]
Proust's conclusion has not been published yet, and his admirers say
that when it comes everything will fall into its place, times past will
be recaptured and fixed, we shall have a perfect whole. I do not believe
this. The work seems to me a progressive rather than an æsthetic
confession, and with the elaboration of Albertine the author was getting
tired. Bits of news may await us, but it will be surprising if we have
to revise our opinion of the whole book. The book is chaotic, ill
constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs
together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.