Unicorns Part 6

through a paragraph, and in it he sets forth in his chastened and cla.s.sic style the ineluctable (Henry James revived this pretty word) perils of prose. Also its fascinations. "The prose writer," he says, "must keep his phrases large, rhythmical, comely, without letting them fall into the strictly metrical; harmonious in diversity, musical in the mouth, in texture woven into committed phrases and rounded periods." The stylist may vault airily into the saddle of logic, or in the delicate reticulation of his silver-fire paragraphs he may take, as an exemplar, John Henry Newman.

Stevenson is a perfectionist, and that way lies madness for all save a few valiant spirits. Sir Walter Raleigh, formerly Professor Raleigh, has written a crystal-clear study on Style, an essay of moment because in the writing thereof he preaches what he practises.

He confesses that "inanity dogs the footsteps of the cla.s.sic tradition," and that "words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless.... This is the error of the cla.s.sical creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality."

The Flaubertian crux. Nevertheless, Flaubert could write of style in a fluid, impressionistic way: "A style ... which will be as rhythmic as verse, as precise as the language of science, which will have undulations, modulations, like those of a violoncello, flashes of fire. A style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto, ... all the combinations of prosody have been made, those of prose are still to make." Flaubert was not obsessed by the "unique word," but by a style which is merged in the idea; as the melodic and harmonic phrases of Richard Wagner were born simultaneously and clothed in the appropriate orchestral colours.

Perhaps the cadenced prose of Pater, with its multiple resonance and languorous rhythms, may be a sort of sublimated chess-game, as Saintsbury more than hints; yet, what a fair field for his carved ivory pieces. His undulating and iridescent periods are like the solemn sound of organ music accompanied from afar by a symphony of flutes, peac.o.c.ks, and pomegranates.

No wonder Stevenson p.r.o.nounces French prose a finer art than English, though admitting that in the richer, denser harmonies of English its native writers find at first hand the very quality so eagerly sought for by Flaubert. French is a logical language, one of distinction and clarity, and one in which metre never intrudes, but it lacks the overtones of our mother speech. The English shares in common with the Russian the art of awakening feelings and thoughts by the resonance of words, which seem to be written not in length but in depth, and then are lost in faint reverberations.

But artistic prose, chiselled prose, is a negligible quant.i.ty nowadays. It was all very well in the more s.p.a.cious times of linkboys, sedan-chairs, and bag-wigs, but with the typist cutting one's phrases into angular fragments, with the soil at our heels saturated in slang, what hope is there for a.s.sonance, variety in rhythm, and the sonorous cadences of prose? Write "naturally," we are told. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural style." Even Newman, master of the pellucid, effortless phrase, confesses to laborious days of correction, and he wrote with the idea uppermost and with no thought of style, so-called. Abraham Lincoln nourished his lonely soul on the Bible and Bunyan. He is a writer of simple yet elevated prose, without parallel in our native literature other than Emerson. Hawthorne and Poe wrote in the key of cla.s.sic prose; while Walt Whitman's jigsaw jingle is the ultimate deliquescence of prose form. For practical every-day needs the eighteenth-century prose men are the best to follow. But the Bible is the Golden Book of English prose.

Quintilian wrote: "We cannot even speak except in longs and shorts, and longs and shorts are the material of feet." All personal prose should go to a tune of its own. The curious are recommended to the monumental work of George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm. Prose may be anything else, but it must not be bad blank verse. "Numerous" as to rhythms, but with no hint of balance, in the metrical sense; without rhythm it is not prose at all. Professor Oliver Elton has set this forth with admirable lucidity in his English Prose Numbers. He also a.n.a.lyses a page from The Golden Bowl of Henry James, discovering new beauties of phrasing and subtle cadences in the prose of this writer. Professor Saintsbury's study is the authoritative one among its fellows. Walter Pater's essay on Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity. When On the Art of Writing, by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared we followed Hazlitt's advice and reread an old book, English Composition, by Professor Barrett Wendell, and with more pleasure and profit than followed the later perusal of the Cornish novelist's lectures.

He warns against jargon. But the seven arts, science, society, medicine, politics, religion, have each their jargon. Not music-criticism, not baseball, are so painfully "jargonised" as metaphysics. Jargon is the fly in the ointment of every critic. Even the worthy fellow of Jesus College, Sir Arthur himself, does not altogether escape it. On page 23 of his Inaugural Address he speaks of "loose, discinct talk." "Discinct" is good, but "ungirded" is better because it is not obsolete, and it is more sonorous and Saxon. On page 42 we stumble against "suppeditate" and gnash our teeth. After finishing the book the timid neophyte will be apt to lay the flattering unction to his soul that he is a born stylist, like the surprised Mr. Jourdain, who spoke prose so many years without knowing it.

II

Fancy a tall, imposing man, in the middle years, standing before a music-desk, humming and beating time. His grey, lion-like mane is in disorder; his large eyes, pools of blue light, gleam with excitement. The colour of his face is reddish, the blood mounts easily to his head, a prophetic sign of his death by apoplexy. It is Gustave Flaubert in his study at Croisset, a few miles down the Seine below Rouen. He is chanting a newly composed piece of prose, marking time as if he were conducting a music-drama. "What are you doing there?" asked his friend. "Scanning these words, because they don't sound well," he replied. Flaubert would spend a day over a sentence and practically tested it by declaiming--spouting, he called it--for as he wisely remarked: "A well-constructed phrase adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration." His delight in prose a.s.sonance and cadence manifested itself in his predilection for such a phrase as Chateaubriand's in Atala: "Elle repand dans le bois ce grand secret de melancholie qu'elle aime a raconter aux vieux chenes et aux rivages antiques des mers." There's a "mouther" for you! as George Saintsbury would say. But in this age of uninflected speech the louder the click of the type-machine the better the style.

If modern prose were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted and scanned, it might prove more sonorous and rhythmic than it does, and more artistic. Curiously enough, Professor Saintsbury in his magisterial work writes: "I rather doubt myself whether the very finest and most elaborate prose is not better read than heard." That is, it must be overheard by the inner ear, which statement rather puts a damper on Flaubert's contention. What saith the worthy Aristotle? "All things are determined by number." Prose should have rhythm but should not be metrical ("Rhetoric"); which Robert Louis Stevenson thus paraphrased in his Technical Elements of Style in Literature: "The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose to suggest no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse."

(Probably if he had read the amorphous stuff by courtesy named "vers libre" Stevenson would have written a stronger word than "anything.") Or, again, Saintsbury: "The Rhythm of Prose, like the Metre of Verse, can, in English as well as the cla.s.sical languages, be best expressed by the foot system, or system of mathematical combinations of 'long' and 'short' syllables." A fig for your "ancient trumpery of skeleton scanning," cries Professor William Morrison Patterson in his The Rhythm of Prose: "Amphibrachs, bacchics, antibacchics, antipasts, molossi, dochmiacs, and proceleusmatics, which heretofore have been brandished before our eyes, as if they were anything more than, as stress-patterns, merely half the story."

The Columbia University professor would be far more likely to indorse the axiom of Remy de Gourmont that style is physiological, which Flaubert well knew. And now, having deployed my heaviest artillery of quotation, let me begin by saying that Professor Patterson's study is a remarkable contribution to the critical literature of a much-debated theme, Prose Rhythms, and this without minifying the admirable labours of Saintsbury, Sh.e.l.ley, Oliver Elton, Ker, or Professor Bouton of the New York University. One of the reasons that interest the present writer in the monograph is its strong musical bias. Professor Patterson is evidently the possessor of a highly organised musical ear, even if he be not a practical musician. He no doubt agrees with Disraeli's dictum that the key to literature is music; _i. e._, number, cadence, rhythm. I recall Miss Dabney's study, The Musical Basis of Verse, dealing as it does with a certain side of the subject. But the Patterson procedure is different. It is less "literary" than psychological, less psychological than physiological. He experiments with the Remy de Gourmont idea, though he probably never saw it in print. "Rhythm,"

he writes in his preface, "is thus regarded as first of all an experience, established, as a rule, by motor performance of however rudimentary a nature." Here is the man of science at work.

He speaks of the "lost art of rhythm," adduces syncopation so easily mastered by those born "timers," the Indians and Negroes, pertinently remarks that "no two individuals ever react exactly alike. The term 'type' is in many ways a highly misleading fiction."

Prose Rhythm, he continues, "must be cla.s.sed as subjective organisation of irregular, virtually haphazard arrangement of sounds.... The ultimate basis of all rhythmic experience, however, is the same. To be clear-cut it must rest upon a series of definite temporal units."

Professor Patterson experimented in two rooms: "one the regular sound-room belonging to the department of psychology at Columbia; the other an expressly constructed, fairly sound-proof cabinet built into one end of an underground room belonging to the department of physics."

It has a slightly sinister ring, all this, has it not? Padded cells and aural finger-prints!--to make an Irish bull. Max Nordau called John Ruskin a Torquemada of aesthetics. Professor Patterson might be styled a Tonal Torturer. But the experimentings were painless. "The first object," he informs us, "was to find out, as far as possible, how a group of twelve people, ten men and two women, differed with respect to the complex of mental processes usually designated roughly as the 'sense of rhythm.' After they had been ranked according to the nature of their reactions and achievements in various tests, one of the group, who had evinced a measure of ease in rapid tapping, was chosen to make drum-beat records on a phonograph. A sentence from Walter Pater, a sentence from Henry James, a pa.s.sage of music from Chopin, a haphazard arrangement of words and a haphazard arrangement of musical notes, were tapped upon a small metal drum and the beats recorded by the phonograph. The words were tapped according to the syllables as felt, a tap for each syllable. 'Hours,' for instance, was given two beats. The notes were tapped according to their designated time-values. Observer No.

1, having had long training as a musician, found no technical difficulty in the task. The remaining eleven observers, without being told the source of the records, heard the five series of drumbeats and pa.s.sed judgment upon them. The most significant judgment made was that of Observer No. 7, who declared that all five records gave him the impression of regular musical themes. A large number of the observers, especially on the first hearing, found all of the records, including even the pa.s.sage from Chopin, elusive and more or less irregular. An attempt was then made, by means of accompanying schedules, to find out how much or how little organisation each observer could be brought to feel in the beats corresponding to the pa.s.sage from Walter Pater and the pa.s.sage of haphazard musical notes." All the data are carefully set down in the Appendices.

The sentence by Walter Pater was chosen from his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, in The Renaissance. "It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse"; subtly rhythmic, too much so for any but trained ears. Some simpler excerpt from Sir Thomas Browne or John Ruskin might have been selected, such as, in the former case, the coda from the Urn Burial, or even that chest-expanding phrase, "To subsist in bones, and to be pyramidally extant is a fallacy in duration." Or, best of all, because of its tremendous intensity, the pa.s.sage from Saint Paul: "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor princ.i.p.alities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of G.o.d, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." The drum-beat is felt throughout, but the pulsation is not marked as in the pages of Macaulay; nor has it the monotony found in Lohengrin on account of the prevalence of common or four-four time, and also the coincidence of the metrical and rhythmic beat, a coincidence that Chopin usually avoids, and all latter-day composers flee as dulness-breeding. The base-rhythm of English prose is, so Professor Saintsbury writes, "the paeon, or four-syllabled foot,"

and, he could have added, provocative of ennui for delicate ears.

Variety in rhythms is the ideal. Our author appositely quotes from Puffer's Studies in Symmetry: "A picture composed in subst.i.tutional symmetry is more rich in its suggestions of motor impulse, and thus more beautiful, than an example of geometrical symmetry." And this applies to prose and music as well as to pictures. It is the very kernel of the art of Paul Cezanne; rhythmic irregularity, syncopation, asymmetry.

De Quincey's Our Lady of Darkness and a sentence from Cardinal Newman's Grammar of a.s.sent were included among the tests. Also one from Henry James; in the preface to The Golden Bowl: "For I have nowhere found vindicated the queer thesis that the right values of interesting prose depend all on withheld tests." If, according to lovers of the old rhetoric, of the resounding "purple panels" of Bossuet, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Raleigh, Browne, and Ruskin, the cooler prose of Mr. James cannot be "spouted"; nevertheless, the interior rhythmic life is finer and more complex. The Chopin nocturne played was the familiar one in G minor, Opus 37, No. 1, simple in rhythmic structure though less interesting than its sister nocturne in G, Opus 37, No. 2 (the first is in common, the second in six-eighths time). Professor Patterson knows Riemann and his "agogic accent," which, according to that editor of the Chopin Etudes, is a slight expansion in the value of the note; not a dynamic accent.

In his treatment of vers libre our author is not too sympathetic. He thinks that "in their productions"--free-verse poets--"the disquieting experience of attempting to dance up the side of a mountain" is suggested. "For those who find this task exhilarating vers libre, as a form, is without rival. With regard to subtle cadence, however, which has been claimed as the chief distinction of the new poets, it is still a question as to how far they have surpa.s.sed the refinement of balance that quickens the prose of Walter Pater." They have not, despite the verbal ingenuity, banished the impression of dislocation, of the epileptic. In French, in the hands of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Verhaeren, Gustave Kahn, Regnier, Stuart Merrill, Viele Griffin, and Jules Laforgue, the rhythms are supple, the a.s.sonances grateful to the ear, the irregular patterns not offensive to the eye; in a word, a form, or a deviation from form, more happily adapted to the genius of the French or Italian language than to the English. Most of our native vers libre sounds like a ton of coal falling through too small an aperture in the sidewalk. However, "it's not the gilt that makes a G.o.d, but the worshipper."

For musicians and writers the interesting if abstruse study of Professor Patterson will prove valuable. After reading of the results in his laboratory at Columbia we feel that we have been, all of us, talking rhythmic prose our life long.

CHAPTER XII

THE QUEEREST YARN IN THE WORLD

The way the story leaked out was this: A young Irishman from Sligo, as he blushingly admitted, whose face was a pa.s.sport of honesty stamped by nature herself, had served two customers over the bar of the old chop-house across the street from the opera-house. To him they were just two throats athirst; nothing more. They ordered drinks, and this first attracted his attention, for they agreed on cognac. Now, brandy after dinner is not an unusual drink, but this pair had asked for a large gla.s.s. Old brandy was given them, and such huge swallows followed that the bartender was compelled by his conscience to ring up one dollar for the two drinks. It was paid, and another round commanded, as if the two men were hurried, as indeed they were, for it was during an entr'acte at the opera that they had slipped out for liquid refreshments. Against the bar of the establishment a dozen or more humans were ranged, and the noise was deafening, but not so great as to prevent the Irishman from catching sc.r.a.ps of the conversation dropped by the brandy-drinkers. Their talk went something like this, and, although Michael had little schooling, his memory was excellent, and, being a decent chap, there is no need to impeach the veracity of his report.

The taller man, neither young, neither old, and, like his friend, without a grey hair, burst out laughing after the disappearance of the second cognac. "I say, old pal, who was it wrote that brandy was for heroes? Kipling? What?" The other man, stockily built, foreign-looking, answered in a contemptuous tone ("sneering-like,"

as my informant put it):

"Where's your memory? Gone to rack and ruin like your ideals, I suppose! Kipling! What do such youngsters know? Doctor Johnson or Walter Savage Landor was the originator of the lying epigram; after them Byron gobbled it up, as he gobbled up most of the good things of his generation, and after him, the deluge of this mediocre century. When I told Byron this, at Milan, I think it was, he vowed me an a.s.s. Now, it was Doctor Johnson."

"Cheer up, it's not so bad. I remember once at Paris, or was it Vienna, you said the same thing about----" and here followed a strange name.

"And, anyhow, you are mixing dates; Landor followed Byron, please, but I suppose he said it first. I told Metternich of your bon-mot, and, egad! he laughed, did that old parchment face. As for Bonaparte, upstart and charlatan, he was too selfish to smile at anybody's wit but his own, and little he had. Do you remember the Congress of Vienna?"

"Do I--1815?"

"Some such year. Or was it in 1750 when we saw Casanova at Venice?

Well--" At this point the alarm-signal went off, and the mob went over to the opera. The young bartender's heart was beating so fast that it "leapt up in his bosom," as he described it. Two middle-aged men talking of a century ago as calmly as if they had spoken of yesterday fl.u.s.tered him a bit. He heard the dates. He noticed the perfectly natural manner in which events were mentioned. There was no mystification. For the first time in his life Michael was sorry the between-act pause was so short, and he longed for the next one, though fatigued from the labours of the last. Would these gentlemen return for more cognac? In an hour they came back with the crowd, again drank old five-star brandy, and gossiped about a lot of incomprehensible things that had evidently taken place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century; at least, Michael overheard them disputing dates, and one of them bet the other that the big fire in London occurred in 1666, and referred the question to Mr. Peppers, or Peps--some such name.

"Ah, poor old Pepys," sighed the dark man; "if he had only taken better care of himself he might have been with us to-day instead of mouldering in his grave."

"Oh, well! you can't expect every one to believe in your Struldbrug cure," replied his friend dreamily. "Even Her Majesty, Queen Anne, would not take your advice, though Mrs. Masham and Mr. Harley begged her to."

"Yes, about the only thing they ever agreed upon in their life.

Where is Harley to-day?"

"Oh, I suppose in London," carelessly replied the other. "For a young bird of several centuries he's looking as fit as a fiddle; but see here, Swift, old boy, your bogy-tales are worrying our young friend," and with that Michael says they pointed to him, heartily laughed, and went away.

He crossed himself, and for a moment the electric lights burned dim, so it seemed to the superst.i.tious laddie-buck. But he had had a good chance to study the odd pair. They were not, as he repeated, old men, neither were they youthful. Say thirty-five or forty years, and he noticed this time the freshness of their complexions, the brilliancy of their eyes. They were just gentlemen in evening clothes and had run across Broadway without overcoats, a reprehensible act even for a young man. But they were healthy, self-contained, and hard-headed--they took, according to the statistician behind the bar, about a quart of brandy between them, and were as fresh as daisies after the fiery stuff. Who were they?

"Blagueurs," said I, after I had carefully deciphered the runic inscriptions in Michael's mind. (This was a week later.) Two fellows out on a lark, bent on scaring a poor Irish boy. But what was Swift, or Queen Anne, or Metternich, or Mr. Harley to him? Just words. Bonaparte he might be expected to remember. It was curious all the same that he could reel off the unusual names of Mrs. Masham and Casanova. The deuce! was there something in the horrid tale? Two immortals stalking the globe when their very bones should have been dissolved into everlasting dust! Two wraiths revisiting the glimpses of the moon--hold on! Struldbrug! Who was Struldbrug? What his cure?

I tried to summon from the vasty deep all the worthies of the eighteenth century. Struldbrug. Swift. Struldbrug. Sir William Temple. Struldbrug--ah! by the great horn spoon! The Struldbrugs of the Island of Laputa! Gulliver's hideous immortals--and then the horror of the story enveloped me, but, despite my aversion to meeting the dead, I determined to live in the chop-house till I saw face to face these ghosts from a vanished past. My curiosity was soon gratified, as the sequel will show.

Just one week after the appearance of this pair I stood talking to the Irish barman, when I saw him start and pale. Ha! I thought, here are my men. I was not mistaken. Two well-built and well-groomed gentlemen asked for brandy, and swallowed it in silence. They were polite enough to avoid my rather rude stare. No wonder I stared.

They recalled familiar faces, yet I couldn't at once place the owners. Presently they went over to a table and seated themselves.

Loudly calling for a mug of musty ale, I boldly put myself at an adjacent spot, and continued my spying tactics. The friends were soon in hot dispute. It concerned the literary reputation of Balzac.

I sat with my mouth wide open.

The elder of the pair, the one called Swift, snapped at his friend: "Zounds, sir! you and your Balzac. Hogwash and roosters in rut--that's about his capacity. Of course, when your own dull stuff appeared he praised you for the sake of the paradox. You moderns!

Balzac the father of French fiction! You the father, or is it grandfather, of psychology--a nice crew! That boy Maupa.s.sant had more stuff in him than a wilderness of Zolas, Goncourts, and the rest. He is almost as amusing as Paul de k.o.c.k--" The other, the little man, bristled with rage.

"Because you wrote a popular boy's book, full of filth and pessimism, you think you know all literature. And didn't you copy Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyagers, and Defoe? You satirise every one except G.o.d, whom you spare because you don't know him. I don't care much for Balzac, though I'm free to confess he did treat me handsomely in praising my Chartreuse----"

"Good G.o.d!" I groaned, "it's Stendhal, otherwise Henry Beyle, laying down the law to the tremendous author of Gulliver's Travels." And yet neither man looked the accepted portrait of himself. Above all, no Struldbrug moles were in view. I forgot my former fear, being interested in the dispute of these two giant writers who are more akin artistically than ever taken cognisance of by criticism. Dead?

What did I care! They were surely alive now, and I was not dreaming.

I didn't need to pinch myself, for my eyes and ears reported the occurrence. A miracle? Why not. Miracles are daily, if we but knew it. Living is the most wonderful of all miracles. The discussion proceeded. Swift spoke tersely, just as he wrote:

"Enough, friend Beyle. You are a charlatan. Your knowledge of the human heart is on a par with your taste in literature. You abominate Flaubert because his prose is more rhythmic than yours."

"I vow I protest," interrupted Stendhal.

"No matter. I'm right. Merimee, your pupil, is your master at every point."