of them) but the most important from the binding point of view is his
use of the "little phrase" in the music of Vinteuil. It does more than
anything else--more even than the jealousy which successively destroys
Swann, the hero, and Charlus--to make us feel that we are in a
homogeneous world. We first hear Vinteuil's name in hideous
circumstances. The musician is dead--an obscure little country organist,
unknown to fame--and his daughter is defiling his memory. The horrible
scene is to radiate in several directions, but it passes, we forget
about it.
Then we are at a Paris salon. A violin sonata is performed and a little
phrase from its andante catches the ear of Swann and steals into his
life. It is always a living being, but takes various forms. For a time
it attends his love for Odette. The love affair goes wrong, the phrase
is forgotten, we forget it. Then it breaks out again when he is ravaged
by jealousy, and now it attends his misery and past happiness at once,
without losing its own divine character. Who wrote the sonata? On
hearing it is by Vinteuil, Swann says, "I once knew a wretched little
organist of that name--it couldn't be by him." But it is, and Vinteuil's
daughter and her friend transcribed and published it.
That seems all. The little phrase crosses the book again and again, but
as an echo, a memory; we like to encounter it, but it has no binding
power. Then, hundreds and hundreds of pages on, when Vinteuil has become
a national possession, and there is talk of raising a statue to him in
the town where he has been so wretched and so obscure, another work of
his is performed--a posthumous sextet. The hero listens--he is in an
unknown rather terrible universe while a sinister dawn reddens the sea.
Suddenly for him and for the reader too, the little phrase of the sonata
recurs--half heard, changed, but giving complete orientation, so that he
is back in the country of his childhood with the knowledge that it
belongs to the unknown.
We are not obliged to agree with Proust's actual musical descriptions
(they are too pictorial for my own taste): but what we must admire is
his use of rhythm in literature, and his use of something which is akin
by nature to the effect it has to produce--namely a musical phrase.
Heard by various people--first by Swann, then by the hero--the phrase of
Vinteuil is not tethered; it is not a banner such as we find George
Meredith using--a double-blossomed cherry tree to accompany Clara
Middleton, a yacht in smooth waters for Cecilia Halkett. A banner can
only reappear, rhythm can develop, and the little phrase has a life of
its own, unconnected with the lives of its auditors, as with the life of
the man who composed it. It is almost an actor, but not quite, and that
"not quite" means that its power has gone towards stitching Proust's
book together from the inside, and towards the establishment of beauty
and the ravishing of the reader's memory. There are times when the
little phrase--from its gloomy inception, through the sonata into the
sextet--means everything to the reader. There are times when it means
nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in
fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely
waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.
Done badly, rhythm is most boring, it hardens into a symbol and instead
of carrying us on it trips us up. With exasperation we find that
Galsworthy's spaniel John, or whatever it is, lies under the feet again;
and even Meredith's cherry trees and yachts, graceful as they are, only
open the windows into poetry. I doubt that it can be achieved by the
writers who plan their books beforehand, it has to depend on a local
impulse when the right interval is reached. But the effect can be
exquisite, it can be obtained without mutilating the characters, and it
lessens our need of an external form.
That must suffice on the subject of easy rhythm in fiction: which may be
defined as repetition plus variation, and which can be illustrated by
examples. Now for the more difficult question. Is there any effect in
novels comparable to the effect of the Fifth Symphony as a whole,
where, when the orchestra stops, we hear something that has never
actually been played? The opening movement, the andante, and the
trio-scherzo-trio-finale-trio-finale that composes the third block, all
enter the mind at once, and extend one another into a common entity.
This common entity, this new thing, is the symphony as a whole, and it
has been achieved mainly (though not entirely) by the relation between
the three big blocks of sound which the orchestra has been playing. I am
calling this relation "rhythmic." If the correct musical term is
something else, that does not matter; what we have now to ask ourselves
is whether there is any analogy to it in fiction.
I cannot find any analogy. Yet there may be one; in music fiction is
likely to find its nearest parallel.
The position of the drama is different. The drama may look towards the
pictorial arts, it may allow Aristotle to discipline it, for it is not
so deeply committed to the claims of human beings. Human beings have
their great chance in the novel. They say to the novelist: "Recreate us
if you like, but we must come in," and the novelist's problem, as we
have seen all along, is to give them a good run and to achieve something
else at the same time. Whither shall he turn? not indeed for help but
for analogy. Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is
governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final
expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way.
Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion.
Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that
the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in
the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be
like that? Is not there something of it in _War and Peace_?--the book
with which we began and in which we must end. Such an untidy book. Yet,
as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we
have finished does not every item--even the catalogue of
strategies--lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?
[Footnote 9: There is a masterly analysis of _The Ambassadors_
from another standpoint in _The Craft of Fiction_.]
[Footnote 10: See the _Letters of H. James_, Vol. II.]
[Footnote 11: The first three books of _À la recherche du temps
perdu_ have been excellently translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
under the title of _Remembrance of Things Past_. (A. & C. Boni.)]
IX
CONCLUSION
IT is tempting to conclude by speculations as to the future of the
novel, will it become more or less realistic, will it be killed by the
cinema, and so on. Speculations, whether sad or lively, always have a
large air about them, they are a very convenient way of being helpful or
impressive. But we have no right to entertain them. We have refused to
be hampered by the past, so we must not profit by the future. We have
visualized the novelists of the last two hundred years all writing
together in one room, subject to the same emotions and putting the
accidents of their age into the crucible of inspiration, and whatever
our results, our method has been sound--sound for an assemblage of
pseudo-scholars like ourselves. But we must visualize the novelists of
the next two hundred years as also writing in the room. The change in
their subject matter will be enormous; they will not change. We may
harness the atom, we may land on the moon, we may abolish or intensify
warfare, the mental processes of animals may be understood; but all
these are trifles, they belong to history not to art. History develops,
art stands still. The novelist of the future will have to pass all the
new facts through the old if variable mechanism of the creative mind.
There is however one question which touches our subject, and which only
a psychologist could answer. But let us ask it. Will the creative
process itself alter? Will the mirror get a new coat of quicksilver? In
other words, can human nature change? Let us consider this possibility
for a moment--we are entitled to that much relaxation.
It is amusing to listen to elderly people on this subject. Sometimes a
man says in confident tones: "Human nature's the same in all ages. The
primitive cave man lies deep in us all. Civilization--pooh! a mere
veneer. You can't alter facts." He speaks like this when he is feeling
prosperous and fat. When he is feeling depressed and is worried by the
young, or is being sentimental about them on the ground that they will
succeed in life when he has failed, then he will take the opposite view
and say mysteriously, "Human nature is not the same. I have seen
fundamental changes in my own time. You must face facts." And he goes on
like this day after day, alternately facing facts and refusing to alter
them.
All I will do is to state a possibility. If human nature does alter it
will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way.
Here and there people--a very few people, but a few novelists are among
them--are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is
against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its
economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward
prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that
extent. Perhaps the searchers will fail, perhaps it is impossible for
the instrument of contemplation to contemplate itself, perhaps if it is
possible it means the end of imaginative literature--which if I
understand him rightly is the view of that acute enquirer, Mr. I. A.
Richards. Anyhow--that way lies movement and even combustion for the
novel, for if the novelist sees himself differently he will see his
characters differently and a new system of lighting will result.
I do not know on the verge of which philosophy or what rival
philosophies the above remarks are wavering, but as I look back at my
own scraps of knowledge and into my own heart, I see these two movements
of the human mind: the great tedious onrush known as history, and a shy
crablike sideways movement. Both movements have been neglected in these
lectures: history because it only carries people on, it is just a train
full of passengers; and the crablike movement because it is too slow and
cautious to be visible over our tiny period of two hundred years. So we
laid it down as an axiom when we started that human nature is
unchangeable, and that it produces in rapid succession prose fictions,
which fictions, when they contain 50,000 words or more, are called
novels. If we had the power or license to take a wider view, and survey
all human and pre-human activity, we might not conclude like this; the
crablike movement, the shiftings of the passengers, might be visible,
and the phrase "the development of the novel" might cease to be a
pseudo-scholarly tag or a technical triviality, and become important,
because it implied the development of humanity.
INDEX OF MAIN REFERENCES
Alain, 73-74
Aristotle, 126-129
Asquith, Mr., 161
Austen, Jane, 100-101, 112-114
Beerbohm, Max, 171-175
Bennett, Arnold, 62-63
Birth, treatment of, 76-77,
81-82
Blake, William, 211
Brontë, Charlotte, 139-140
Brontë, Emily, 209-211
C. P. S., 210
Chevalley, Abel, 17
Clark, W. G., 13-15
Death, treatment of, 76, 82-83
Defoe, Daniel, 87-95
Dickens, Charles, 32-34, 104,
108-109, 119-120
Dickinson, Lowes, 177
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 188-195
Douglas, Norman, 107-108
Eliot, George, 184-188
Eliot, T. S., 41
Fantasy defined, 158-159
Fielding, Henry, 118, 124,
175-176
"Flat" characters, 103-112
Food, treatment of, 77, 83
France, Anatole, 214-215
Freeman, John, 204
Garnett, David, 161
Gide, André, 121-122, 146-153
Goldsmith, Oliver, 143
Hardy, Thomas, 140-142, 198
Inspiration, nature of, 39
James, Henry, 30-31, 218-234
Joyce, James, 177-180, 199
Lawrence, D. H., 107, 207-209
Literary tradition, 40-41
Love, treatment of, 78-80, 86-87
Lubbock, Percy, 118-119,
216-217
Matson, Norman, 166-171
Melville, Herman, 199-206
Meredith George, 106,
134-138
Novel defined, 17
"Novelist's touch," the, 107
_One Thousand and One Nights_,
47
Pattern defined, 218
Plot defined, 130
Point of view, 118-125
Prophecy defined, 182-183
Proust, Marcel, 104, 236-239
Provincialism, 19
Pseudo-scholarship, 23-28
Raleigh, Walter, 22
Rhythm, two kinds of, 240-241
Richards, I. A., 245
Richardson, Samuel, 29-30
"Round" characters, 112-118
Scott, Walter, 51-62, 104
Sleep, treatment of, 80, 84
Stein, Gertrude, 67-68
Sterne, Laurence, 35-37,
157-158
Story, definition of, 44-45; the
repository of a voice, 64-65
_Swiss Family Robinson_, 52-53
Thackeray, W. M., 118, 124
Tolstoy, Leo, 63-64, 122-123,
242
Trollope, Anthony, 82-83
Victoria, Queen, 71-72
Wells, H. G., 31-34, 109-110,
231-233
Woolf, Virginia, 34-37