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, Shelley, 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 classed 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 Æsthetics. 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 passage 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 passed 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 passage 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 passage from Walter Pater and the passage 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 passage from Saint Paul: "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, 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 God, 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 pæon, 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 substitutional 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 Cézanne; rhythmic irregularity, syncopation, asymmetry.
De Quincey's Our Lady of Darkness and a sentence from Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent 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, Châteaubriand, 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 surpassed 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, Régnier, Stuart Merrill, Vielé Griffin, and Jules Laforgue, the rhythms are supple, the assonances 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 god, 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.