A Novelist on Novels

by Walter Lionel George

Pictorially rhythm is best gauged by certain tapestries based on the flower backgrounds of Fergusson and Anne Estelle Rice. Assume a black square of cloth; if the flowers are grouped thus from left to right: dark red, pink, white, there is no rhythm, for the mental line is a mere downgrade; if they are grouped: dark red, light blue, dark green, there is no rhythm, for the mental line is a mere curve, a circular or perhaps parabolic basin; but if the grouping amounts to: dark red, pink, light blue, black, light green, cream, dark brown, there is a succession of ebb and flow, rise and fall, rhythm. And this applies to drawing also, if we accept that colour is indicated by line, that lines are colours and that colours are tenses. That line can indicate colour is beyond denial, for we accept that colour is not material while tone is material. Colour being the relation between an impression and the impression of colourlessness, and tone being the resultant translation of the intensity of the colour, then it is feasible to reproduce a red and blue combination by a green and yellow combination of equal contrast.[9] Therefore a combination of blacks may be made to balance a combination of even seven colours, provided the relative intensity (amount) of the blacks is in a true relation, in tone, with the relative intensity of the colours. C. R. W. Nevinson achieves this with grays and blacks, while Wyndham Lewis forgoes it.

The quality of rhythm being obvious in music needs no discussion; it is the only form of rhythm the popular can recognise, but if we accept the principles of grouping in phrase and colour, no musician will fail to recognise a sarabande in a dance of Matisse or in the posturings of Kellermann's clown.

As for intensity, with which goes reaction, for the first cannot exist without the second, it is naturally brought about by the rhythmic focusing of the subject's attention upon words, colours or notes. Intensity is marked, for instance, by the triplets of the Venusberg music, their continual slow billowing; it can be found, less easily, in phrases and colours, but it must exist if the work is art. In prose it is marked by a general nervousness of form and word:—

'Upon the crag the tower pointed to the sky like a finger of stone, and about its base were thick bushes, which had burst forth into flower patches of purple and scarlet. The air was heavy with their scent.'

Here the intensity is confined within the simile and the colour scheme; the intervening space corresponds to the background of a picture, while the final short sentence, purposely dulled, is the reaction. Evidently (and all the more so as I have chosen a pictorial effect) an analogous intensity could be obtained in a painting; the flower patches could be exaggerated in colour to the uttermost limit of the palette, while the reagent final sentence was figured by a filmy treatment of the atmosphere. The limit to intensity is the key in which the work is conceived. But the word key must not be taken in its purely musical sense; obviously, within the same piece the governing motif must not be andante at the beginning and presto at the end, but in artistic generalisations it must be taken as the spirit that informs rather than as the technical rule which controls. Thus, in literature, the key is the attitude of the writer: if in one part of the book his thought recalls Thackeray and in another Paul de Kock the key has been changed; and again if the left side of the picture is pointillist, the right side cubist, the key has been changed. I choose exaggerated, almost absurd instances to make the point clear; in practice, when the writer, the musician, or the painter appears to have seen consistently, the key he has worked in is steadfast.

It should be said that uniformity of key does not imply absence of reaction; there is room, while the key remains uniform, for the juxtaposition of burlesque and romance, just as there is room in Holbein's 'Ambassadors' for the incomprehensible object in the foreground, said to embody a pun (Hohl Bein). But the key needs to be kept in mind as its maximum expression is the culmination of the effect. The culmination of a speech is in its peroration; of a poem in its incorporated envoi. Thus in the Arab Love Song, the culmination is:—

'And thou what needest with thy tribe's black tents
Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?'

There is no difficulty there. But in painting the culmination is more subtle. It consists in the isolation of the chief object. Say that we have from left to right: Black, yellow, dark brown, light blue, dark red; then add on the extreme right, crimson, then gold. The picture culminates on the extreme right, with the result that attention is directed there and that any object in that section of the picture benefits by an influence about equivalent to that of footlights. Culmination, involves the painter in great difficulties, for there must be culmination, while an effect in the wrong place may destroy the balance of his work. This appertains to

Group D. (Static). Its chief quality, balance, is easily defined in painting. Where there is correspondence between every section of the picture, where no value is exaggerated, balance exists. Hence the failure of Futurism. While the Futurists understand very well intensity, reaction, and relief, they refuse to give balance any attention at all; leaving aside the absurdity of rendering the mental into terms of the pictorial, and taking as an instance one who was once less Futurist than the Futurists, Severini, we see in his 'Pan-pan Dance' how he detached himself from his school: he attained balance by giving every object an equal intensity. Such is also the tendency of Wadsworth. Evidently if there are no clashes of tone-values, there must be balance, and the instance serves to show that where there are clashes of tone-values balance must be ensured by the artist's hand. There is always balance in the purely decorative; in the realistic there is balance if the attention of the beholder is directed simultaneously to the several points of culmination indicated by the rhythm of the picture. Thus there is balance in Rothenstein's 'Chloe' because the rocks on the right repeat the significance of the rocks on the left.

Likewise in literature there is balance in certain groupings of phrases:—