[In the following essay, Aronson explores musical analogies in various works of literature and art that can be traced to Pythagoras's concept of universal harmony, and examines how a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets and novelists have attempted to capture the experience of music in their writings.]

In Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, published in 1928, there occurs a description of a concert at the house of Lord and Lady Tantamount before an audience of invited guests. The orchestra is playing Bach's suite in B-minor, for flute and strings. It is a festive occasion. Conductor, soloists and orchestra perform with gusto and precision. Some of the listeners present respond to the musical ritual by closing their eyes and by a willing surrender to visual associations of a vaguely disturbing though not unwelcome ambiguity. Others, less given to musical rapture, are irritated by what they consider to be either hypocrisy or self-indulgence or both and pass their time observing their variously entranced neighbors. It is a heterogeneous audience portrayed with considerable ironic detachment.

The reader is disconcertingly aware of this sense of aloofness when Huxley comes to describe the music itself. Evidently realizing the inadequacies of language to say anything of any validity whatever about the emotional content of the music, he is being facetiously scientific about it. The flautist "blew across the mouth hole and a cylindrical air column vibrated." The violinists produced a similar kind of vibration in the air when they "drew their rosined horse-hair across the stretched intestines of lambs." While Bach, in Huxley's words, was meditating on the beauty, goodness, and oneness of things, Huxley meditates on music or rather on "the universal concert of things."

The meditation takes place in the mind of Lord Edward who knows a great deal about chemistry and biology and the mathematical relation between them and is not without musical erudition. As an expert in osmosis he is especially interested in, if not actually obsessed, by the problem of "natural harmony" of which musical harmony may be said to be only a small part. In the "total life of the universe", as he likes to call it, the individual life of man or beast is being compared to a melody whose modulations are open to chemical and mathematical analysis. "It's all like music," meditates Lord Edward in his laboratory while performing an experiment on a newt and listening to Bach being played downstairs, "harmonies and counterpoint and modulations."

The composer who creates these melodies is equally exposed to this disconcerting osmotic process. When he dies he is, predictably, "transformed into grass and dandelions, which in their turn had been transformed into sheep" whose intestines, in due time, will be made into strings of various lengths on which these melodies are going to be played all over again. It is an alarming and inhuman prospect. In the course of this osmotic process music is being reduced to air vibrations which in turn shake the membrana typani, the interlocked malleus, incus and stirrup bones of the ear, "raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth", and finally make the hairy endings of the auditory nerve "shudder like weeds in a rough sea." All these complex auditory phenomena, the result of Bach's variously solemn or gay meditations on life can be summed up—and Huxley has no compunctions about doing so—by referring to "Euclidian axioms" which "made holiday with the formulae of elementary statistics. Arithmetic held a wild saturnalian kermesse; algebra cut capers". When, finally, the Badinerie with which the suite in B-minor ends reaches its joyful conclusion the music terminates "in an orgy of mathematical merry-making."

Huxley, who had had a scientific education and possessed considerable musical knowledge, sets his osmotic description of biochemistry, translated into musical terms, and the music of Bach, explored in statistical terms, at the beginning of his novel. It is one of his counterpoints. There will be other forms of osmosis in his novel, based on the relationships between human beings, between the various arts, between the individual and the society he inhabits, between moral compulsions and the political life. The "universal concert of things," defined in parodied scientific terms, but understandable to the lay reader and applied to a well-known piece of music with which most educated readers may be assumed to be familiar, acquires comic dimensions. For what Huxley attempts in this episode, deliberately assuming the role of the all-knowing scientist who rejects the imaginative appeal of music for biochemical formulas, is to shock the reader out of his smug acceptance of music as a convenient release for repressed emotions and irrelevant mental or visual associations, and as a form of exuberant self-indulgence.

The reader is startled as he might well be. He does not know that Huxley's detached objectivity when portraying composer, musician and listener "osmotically" is founded upon a theory of numbers as old as humanity itself and that "the vibrating air columns" in the flute and "the stretched intestines of lambs" had been used for scientific measurements by Pythagoras two thousand five hundred years ago. The reader, ignorant of Pythagoras's discovery that the perceived harmony of musical intervals is paralleled by the simple numerical ratios of spatial distance on the string and the flute, to which may be added the present-day knowledge of the simple relations between the wave frequencies of musical sound, is thus liable to miss the ironic implications inherent in Huxley's veiled reference to ancient theories of measurable harmony in the absurd upper-class setting of twentieth-century London.

Pythagoras's theory of proportion is equally applicable to mathematical measurements, to the movement of stars and to the definition of musical harmony. It may not help the reader of Huxley's novel to achieve a deeper insight into the novelist's concern with osmosis. But it may open up revealing perspectives into the history of ideas—of special interest to the reader puzzled by the recurrent metaphor of harmonious music in the art and literature of all times. For in the language of symbols, created by Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, harmony is determined by the mathematical relation between numbers and tones, made visible by diagrams and, when recreated on strings of various lengths, translated into chords.

One further dimension is added to this definition of harmony when this system of auditory and visual proportions is found to be embodied in certain planetary constellations and the motions of the spheres with which each planet follows its predetermined course. The belief that this movement of the spheres produces harmonious sound remained intact throughout the Renaissance, accepted as an unquestioned axiom by scientist, musician, artist and poet.

Huxley who by temperament and innate gifts was better qualified for scientific than literary explorations knew all this. He must also have known that his "universal concert of things," meditated upon first by Bach and then by Lord Edward Tantamount, was a parody of the humanist revival in the belief in Pythagoras's "music of the spheres." What he so mockingly resurrected were ancient and medieval analogies according to which scientist and artist alike were assumed to share a common body of musical knowledge and experience.

Huxley thus adds an ironic dimension to the tradition of past great masters of literature among whom Shakespeare comes to mind first of all. Shakespeare's preoccupation with the "universal concert of things" is of the very stuff of which his plays are made. By a curious coincidence he was equally startled at the apparently incongruous relation between the intestines of sheep and the creation of harmony in the soul of man. "Is it not strange," exclaims Benedick, "that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?" Shakespeare, in all likelihood, knew a good deal less about Pythagoras than Aldous Huxley. But from Boethius or possibly Montaigne he had acquired a general, if vague, knowledge of the movement of the planets which, says Montaigne, "in their rolling motion, touching and rubbing against another, must of necessitie produce a wonderful harmonie." Shakespeare also knew that this music of the spheres remained inaudible to men's ears and, thus, could not directly affect their souls. Though constantly reaching out towards harmony man's soul remained insensible—except by indistinct reflection—to those heavenly chords which, according to contemporary belief, determined the "Nativitie of Mortals."

In The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo, an otherwise unprepossessing figure, is heard meditating on music and, in six lines of impassioned poetry, sums up the Pythagorean system of spherical music. Harmony, he declares—and this is quite in line with Pythagorean ways of thinking—is confined to "immortal souls" only. As long as the soul of man is closed in by "this muddy vesture of decay" (V, 1, 64-5), harmony as a universal musical chord, may be at best an aspiration, a spiritual ideal beyond the reach of man. In very exceptional circumstances an echo reaches mortal ears when it may be heard in the speaking voice of a particularly well-integrated person. When Cleopatra describes Antony's voice as being "propertied as all the tuned spheres" she communicates to those around her a sense of personal completeness derived from what, at a later stage, Huxley will rather more prosaically call "the universal concert of things."

In Shakespeare's vision of the harmonious relation between animate and inanimate elements in nature, only man constitutes a sometimes perplexing but mostly agonizing discord. It is man's propensity to think evil and to do evil which is taken as a pretext for "planetary" explanations. Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, in his speech on degree, blames the planets when they "in evil mixture to disorder wander" (I, 3, 94-5) for political and social upheavals. Jaques's melancholy in As You Like It, which threatens the prevailing harmony among the exiles in the Forest of Arden is compared to "discord in the spheres" (II, 7, 6). Iago blames "some planet" that has "unwitted men" (II, 3, 182) for the quarrel which woke Othello and tore him from Desdemona's side. Leontes, in The Winter's Tale, in search for a rational motive to justify his sudden and inexplicable fit of jealousy, ominously points at "a bawdy planet that will strike / When 'tis predominant" (I, 2, 201). The most explicit of them, Edmund, in King Lear, dismisses any sort of "spherical predominance" as a mere excuse for "knaves, thieves, and treachers" to indulge in their crimes as if, he mockingly observes, they acted "by heavenly compulsion", while "drunkards, liars, and adulterers" consider themselves at liberty to commit their sins "by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence" (I, 2, 127).

Aldous Huxley who felt at home in Shakespeare's plays no less than in biochemistry knew that the drawing of musical analogies—whether in terms of planetary motion or simple mathematical measurements—was a commonly accepted practice among writers and artists throughout the Renaissance. Both concord and discord could be conceived visually in keeping with Pythagoras's diagrams. They could also be recreated, as it were, by painters who, assuming the existence of the universal harmony of things, might and indeed did attempt a reflection of it through the application of color and design on canvas. Thus, in Ficino's theory of the image, the Pythagorean belief in the music of the spheres is being transposed from the realm of music to that of art. For according to Ficino, "the number and proportions of a thing preserved in the image something of the power of the spiritual essence which it embodies."

The artist in search of visual perfection frequently looked in music for valid analogies. Pythagorean theories provided the mathematical foundation. Spherical music stood for a symbolic representation of the essence of harmony. All that could be measured and divided into numbers and proportions, whether of visual or auditory import, became part of the universal harmony. If, as Shakespeare implied, man is the only discordant element in nature, then it is the artist's business to recreate harmony in the very teeth of man's attempts at self-destruction. Leonardo da Vinci, in one of his Notebooks, establishes this analogy between painting and music in terms of measurement and proportion. "Although objects observed by the eye touch one another as they recede, I shall nevertheless found my rule on a series of intervals measuring 20 braccia [about 28 inches] each, just as the musician who, though his voices are united and strung together, has created intervals according to the distance from voice to voice, calling them unison, second, third, forth, and fifth, and so on, until numbers have been given to the various degrees of pitch proper to the human voice … If you say that music is composed of proportion, then I have used similar meanings in paintings, as I shall show."

Such analogies abound in the history of art and art criticism. Each age developed a different musical criterion appropriate to the new cultural context. Thus, Poussin in the seventeenth century relates his paintings to Greek "modes" of musical composition and, in a well-known letter, promises his friend that "before a year is out I hope to paint a subject in [this] Phrygian mode" which, he believes, is particularly suitable for "horrible subjects." Whistler, some two centuries later, insists on designating his works as "arrangements" or "harmonies" and, finally, decides to call them "symphonies" or "nocturnos." In more recent times abstract painters found no difficulty in establishing even closer analogies between the abstract patterns of sound and design by merely calling a painting by the name of a musical composition. Familiarity with the music, represented on the canvas as an abstract configuration of lines, shapes, and colors, would enable the spectator to respond in a predictable and desirable way. When Mondrian labelled a painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie (painted in 1942/43) he aimed at an "orchestration" effect with its popular dance rhythm, pitch, and volume. However, the music remains unheard. Shapes and colors cannot be made to sing. The spectator who has never witnessed the playing of a boogie-woogie may conceivably associate this painting with the first of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. The deliberate avoidance of any actual likeness leaves all aesthetic options open. Similar doubts arise when one looks at Kandinsky's abstract paintings which were supposed to be attempts at translating Wagner's music into visual terms.

Pythagoras's system of numbers and proportions continues to haunt the artist in his search for harmonious structure. More even than the painter, the architect may discover analogies "in depth" between his planning an edifice and musical composition. Both arts assume the existence of a "third" dimension which in music is called an interval and in architecture free, unused space. This relation between mass and intervals establishes a criterion of harmony depending on spatial measure very close to the original Pythagorean assumption of a "universal concert of things." Le Corbusier who came from a family of musicians accepts the Renaissance view that architects should go to school to study science as well as music. "More than these thirty years past," he wrote, "the sap of mathematics has flown through the veins of my work, both as an architect and painter; for music is always present within me." The somewhat baffling realization that architecture exists in space while music exists in time is no obstacle to analogical thinking of this kind. In mathematical terms both interval and silence are alike measurable. Music has been called "architectural" on more than one occasion. And if the analogy is not extended into extravagant absurdity (as in Huxley's novel which started this whole train of thought), the listener to music, responsive to geometric form and algebraic progression, may indeed receive an auditory image of some harmonious essence beyond anything that ordinary everyday life can provide. Within the context of the history of ideas the Pythagorean concept of harmony—though modified by modern scientific thought—is still with us.

Color and sound as used by the artist have this in common that they tend away from reality as a mere sense impression. A painting which does not go beyond a true-to-life imitation of reality ceases to be art however exact the measurements and proportions. Sound which merely imitates nature is not music even if pitch, volume, and interval approximate as closely as humanly possible to the various noises originating in man's natural surroundings. What painter and musician, then, create is an illusion of reality as perceived through the imagination. What the eye sees and the ear hears—the painting or the piece of music—is thus retranslated by the spectator and listener through a variety of sense impressions into the language of the mind. Frequently—and by a process which Pythagoras was the first to suggest—the illusion created by a painting evokes musical analogies while a piece of music is made "visible" through visual associations originating in the listener's memory. As long as the two arts keep within the framework of illusion the likelihood of their actual fusion into a compound work of art remains a distinct, if theoretical, possibility.

Throughout the nineteenth century, writers, both in poetry and prose, explored this likelihood as a matter of increasing practical application. As their medium was language they made use of discursive speech to rationalize the need for the fusion of the arts. The logic of their argument was indeed unassailable. What other medium but the word could establish a significant link between color and sound by a detailed analysis of the "complete," if illusory, work of art? Only human speech could supply, in terms of intellectual concepts, a new meaning to harmony in the arts considered as the most accomplished of all illusions.

One of the earliest and most curious attempts at describing such a fusion of the arts of painting and music occurs in a novel by Balzac, called after its protagonist, Gambara. Gambara is a failed musician who, provoked into telling the story of his life, expounds his theories of music in a remarkable mixture of Pythagorean and Bergsonian concepts. "Nature" is, indeed, the criterion applied to both arts. The human and the nonhuman, according to him, are interchangeable because "music is both a science and an art. Its roots plunge into physics and mathematics, and this makes it a science." Like Huxley a hundred years after Balzac he is also concerned with the vibrations of air columns which "find in us corresponding elements that answer, that vibrate sympathetically, and that are capable of enhanced significance by the application of thought." This explains, continues the musician, why the physical phenomena of sound "match ideas within us according to our capacities." Proust who will elaborate upon this in a somewhat subtler way and with greater psychological insight will add little to the musical theories of Balzac's frustrated musical hero.

But this is merely the beginning of the story. Warming up to his subject he provides a popularized version of the synesthetic effect of music on the visual imagination of composer and listener. For, he asserts, "in music the instruments play the role of colors used by the painter," because mathematical laws apply to both the arts alike. The ideal composer, says Gambara, would translate "the phenomenon of light, vegetation, and life itself" into harmonious sound. He repeatedly refers to the listener's "dormant memories," a very Bergsonian concept indeed, which would be awakened to a new life by the fusion of auditory and visual elements. What this new life will be like is not spelt out in so many words. The reference here is evidently to the synesthetic effect of music, the evocation of a different kind of sense impression from that which one commonly associates with the experience of listening to a melody played on an instrument or sung by a human voice.

It is this evidence of fused sense impressions that De Quincey tried to provide in his Dream-Fugue, published as part of his English Mail Coach in 1849. Conceivably his addiction to opium had something to do with this remarkable dream-vision of man's mortality on earth. De Quincey's inspired piece of writing eliminates any distinction between what the ear hears or the eye sees, between actual and imaginative listening, between sight and insight. The dream which is the subject of this "fugue" releases the dreamer from the prison in which reason holds him captive. Thus he is enabled to experience sense impressions on a multiplicity of levels at a time. Music is at the very center of the experience. It evokes the response of all the senses simultaneously, as it were, and is equally assimilated by the sense of sight, smell, taste, and touch. Music is all-pervading because it is the stuff of which dreams are made. While reading the dream fugue, the reader becomes aware of an uncanny sensation, that of listening to a piece of music that has never been composed and of seeing visions that have never been painted except in the writer's overwrought imagination. This creation of a synesthetic universe provides the most coherent illusion of an ideal work of art. Such transcendental experiences had already, a few years earlier, been defined by another opium addict, Edgar Allan Poe, in terms of the poetry he wished to write. In a letter, probably written to his publisher in 1831, Poe defines poetry as consisting of "indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with pleasurable ideas, is poetry."

No one could have agreed more readily than Baudelaire who adapted and translated the work of De Quincey and Poe into French. In his own poetry, perfumes, colors, and sounds establish confusing correspondences, sense impressions are no longer what they seem to be, and the harmonies thus created are of an esoteric nature. In his various essays on Poe he praises the American poet for having revealed new possibilities of self-realization through his exploration of the kinship of poetry and music. The following passage chosen at random reflects the enthusiasm with which Baudelaire greeted this revelation of a "paradis artificiel" where the poet and the musician would share in equal measure an intimation of immortality. "It is at the same time through poetry and beyond poetry, through and beyond music, that the soul perceives the splendors that lie beyond the grave." When, some years later, Baudelaire discovers the music of Wagner he sees in the multiple associations of word and sound as part of a stage-representation, the fulfillment of his own dream of a synesthetic experience through art. While, on the one hand, Wagner's operas remind him of medieval Mystery-plays they also evoke the masterworks of painters, "those great visions which the Middle-Ages spread across the walls of its churches or wove into its magnificent tapestries." This was written in 1857. Some thirty years later Walter Pater in England, without referring to Wagner and his synesthetic vision of a new form of art and drama, made music the ultimate criterion by which the excellence of art—be it poetry or painting—would be judged.

According to Pater not only does "all art constantly aspire towards the condition of music," music itself is assumed to be a principle of integration compelling the poet or painter to strive for that unity of matter and form which is most completely realized in a musical work. "In its consummate moment," continues Pater, "the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other, and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed to tend and aspire. In music, then, rather than in poetry, is to be found the true type or measure of perfected art." We do not know, nor does Walter Pater tell us, what kind of music he had in mind when he wrote this. He certainly was influenced by the French Parnassiens and the esthetic theories advanced by Baudelaire a generation earlier. But taken out of its historical context Walter Pater's insistence on music as the ultimate criterion of beauty repeats in the language of late nineteenth-century estheticism what humanist writers on art had said centuries before: painting and music are a transmutation of nature in terms of proportion and measurement, while poetry is speech attuned to some transcendental universal harmony. All the arts alike express man's attempt at translating the discord prevailing in the quotidian experience of life into harmonious proportions.

Twenty years after Pater's essay on Giorgione where these lines occur, Mallarmé, in language visionary and obscure, dreams of an art "which shall complete the transposition into the book of the symphony," an art, he implies, which would encompass all that is most perfect in speech and in sound, "drawing to itself all the correspondences of the universe, the supreme Music." This dream was shared by a whole generation of writers both on the continent and in England. John Synge who, in all likelihood had met Mallarmé during his stay in Paris imagined a new type of writer who would write of human life as "a symphony and the translation of this sequence into music, and from music again, for those who are not musicians, into literature."

The temptation to find in music a universal criterion for all sense-impressions was particularly hard to resist whenever a writer's surrender to physical sensations became an end in itself. Baudelaire had pointed the way. Others followed, convinced that music had the power of transforming any sensation into sound. Thus one finds Huysmans in his notorious A Rebours (Against Nature) describing Des Esseintes' collection of liqueurs as a musical instrument "providing his palate with sensations analogous to those which music dispenses to the ear." To give but one example, "Dry curacao … was like the clarinet with its piercing, velvety note." The analogy is carried to absurd lengths. String quartets might be played by a subtle combination of various liqueurs. Major and minor keys were equally at his alcoholic disposal. And, to crown it all, "he even succeeded in transferring specific pieces of music to his palate, following the composer step by step, rendering his intentions, his effects, his shades of expression, by mixing or contrasting related liqueurs, by subtle approximations and cunning combinations."

The symbolist movement in poetry and in prose used music as a catalyst. The least tangible of all the arts, it was therefore open to a larger variety of emotive associations than painting, sculpture, or architecture. It enabled the artist to fuse sound and color, melody and design, volume and shape, evoke more complex responses than any single art could ever produce, and, finally, directly appeal to sense impressions in such a way that the whole of the human personality was involved in the esthetic experience. Symbolism, as understood around the turn of the century, on the continent and in England, implied an intricate set of musical significances which neither poet nor novelist could do without. Speech itself had to be musically oriented. The poetic line as a melody, the novel as a sonata, became commonplaces of literary criticism. Literary and musical structures were found to originate in some common primordial principle of artistic creation. The "universal concert of things" underlying all symbolist doctrines on art was being trivialized until any analogy, however absurd, between music and the other arts was found to possess an innate validity no longer subject to rational argument. Huysmans' digression into the musical equivalents of the various liqueurs is as good an evidence as any for the symbolist claim of some ultimate harmony based on sense impressions rather than on Pythagorean mathematical insight.

W. B. Yeats who started his poetic career as a disciple of Walter Pater and an admirer of Mallarmé was the first to realize the pitfalls of a symbolist vision of art founded on the predominance of music over the other arts. Repeatedly he looked upon music as a threat to the poet's spoken word. He "would have no one write with a sonata in his memory," he wrote in 1906, for "music is the most impersonal of things and words the most personal, and that is why musicians do not like words." In the same essay he asserts that there should be only so much music in poetry "as [the poet] can discover on the wings of words." Being himself tone-deaf he warns the reader against what he considers to be the illusory perfection of the musician's art. And when, still in the same essay, he compares the "spoken" music of Villon's verse when recited to the accompaniment of a guitar to a professional musician performing on a piano, "it is the piano, the mechanism, that is the important thing, and nothing of you means anything but your fingers and your intellect."

In earlier writings Yeats visualized a kind of poetry recital in which the meaning of the word would be stressed by the use of a musical instrument in the background. For though poetry and not music is the object of such experiments, as he calls them, he dreams of some primordial scene where the distinction between word and music had not yet become established in the minds of the listeners, a scene "of wild-eyed men speaking harmoniously to murmuring wires while audiences in many-colored robes listened, hushed and excited." The "wires" are those of a "psaltery"—"a beautiful stringed instrument" producing what Yeats called "natural" music to which he had been introduced by Arnold Dolmetsch who at the turn of the century was one of the first to revive interest in old musical instruments and their music.

A few years before his death, Yeats was still convinced of the superiority of poetic speech over musical intonation. In October 1936, shortly before a BBC broadcast of some of his poems, he discussed the possibility of using a drum or other musical instrument between stanzas or between poems. The idea was "to heighten the intensity of the rhythm, but never behind the voice," for, he explained, "there must never be an accompaniment, and no words must be spoken through music." The musical notes "must never be loud enough to shift the attention of the ear."

In spite of all misgivings Yeats's preoccupation with music and particularly the singing voice never ceased. Some of his most accomplished poems make use of musical metaphors in a context of significant human experience, not a mere accompaniment but the very stuff of which poetry itself is made. "Sailing to Byzantium" (1926) is, very largely, a poem about the life of the poet translated into musical terms. It begins with the "sensual music" of "generation," leading up to the poet's own attempt at "singing" and his conviction that there is no "singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence." The poet, therefore, decides to sail to Byzantium to meet there his "singing masters" who will teach him how to translate his anguish and desires into an "artifice of eternity." Such an artifice is the golden nightingale singing of the passing of time to the lords and ladies of Byzantium. This appears to be the subtlest attempt made by a poet to realise Mallarmé's vision of an art that would draw to itself "all the correspondences of the universe, the supreme Music." For though Yeats certainly knew little enough of Byzantine music, his "Sailing to Byzantium" traces the transformation of poetry into music as part of his own experience of growing old, an expression of his awareness that in order to outlast time the sensuous music of youth must be replaced by the immutable, timeless singing of the golden bird.

When, at a still later stage, Pythagoras is introduced into Yeats's poetry, it is as a mathematician and philosopher rather than as the discoverer of the "music of the spheres." He appears in three of Yeats's major poems. In the first "Among School Children," he is rejected outright, together with Plato and Aristotle. Yeats contemptuously refers to their teaching as "Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird" and chooses "passion, piety, or affection" instead. Within the context of a poem written in praise of "the great rooted blossomer," this rejection of all philosophical systems has an inner consistency of its own. There is no place for "golden thighed Pythagoras" who "fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings / What a star sang and careless Muses heard" among Yeats's images of "labour" which is both blossoming and dancing. Yet, the body of the dancer is "swayed to music." Conceivably, the reader of the poem may think there would have been no dance had there been no music. And if it is in music that all dance originates, would this not be true as well of all the other arts, of which dance is the most perfect physical embodiment?

Six years later Yeats writes one of his most humorous, but also one of his most disturbing poems, "News from the Delphic Oracle" (1934). Here Pythagoras is found in the company of Plotinus but also of Niamh and Oisin, transplanted without any more ado from Irish mythology to classical Greece. What these four have in common is that they are bored and in great need of love. "Tall Pythagoras," no better than the other "golden cadgers," "sighed amid his choir of love" (possibly an ironic reference to the music of the spheres), yawned and apparently fell asleep. It is against the background of this spectacle of sterile longing that Yeats resurrects the "dolphin-torn and gong-tormented sea" of an earlier poem ("Byzantium"), a paradise of sexual promiscuity ruled over by a different sort of music. For

Down the mountain walls
From where Pan's cavern is
Intolerable music falls.

The implication of how "intolerable" this music is, is made fairly clear in the lines that follow. It is a music of the body rather than the spirit, no more measurable in terms of numbers. Pythagoras, defeated by the intensity of lust, is contrasted to the god Pan, mathematical contemplation to the laughter of the "ecstatic waters" where nymphs and satyrs "copulate in the foam."

A year before his death, in his poem "The Statues," Yeats returns once more to ancient Greece. Tormented by his vision of "The Second Coming," by the threat of "Asiatic vague immensities" overcoming all that Western Europe has created in art and literature, he writes a poem on the origin of the European sculptural tradition which, he now believes, must be preserved. The basis of that tradition is to be found in the Pythagorean theory of numbers which provided sculptors with a mathematical basis for their work.

Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.

One remembers Yeats's dislike of "character" as part of the vocabulary of psychological realism. It is in keeping with his worship of the body "swayed in music" that "passion" is now substituted for character. Pythagoras, in this remarkable poem, achieves a kind of paradoxical resurrection. He helped sculptors to model "with a mallet or a chisel … these Calculations that look but casual flesh" and thus created "live lips upon a plummet-measured face." By making the creation of these statues possible Pythagoras also "gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass."

During the last year of his life Yeats expressed, this time in prose, his belief that only a reborn affirmation of harmony as the sole criterion of Western art can save Europe from final self-destruction. "There are moments when I am certain that art must once again accept those Greek proportions which carry into plastic art the Pythagorean number, those faces which are divine because all there is empty and measured. Europe was not born when Greek galleys defeated the Persian hordes at Salamis; but when Doric studios sent out those broad-backed marble statues against the multiform, vague, expressive Asiatic sea, they gave to the sexual instinct of Europe its goal, its fixed type." "The Statues" of which this passage is an exact comment reflects Yeats's final return to mathematical proportion as the first step to be taken by the artist on his way towards perfection. What is being reaffirmed here is an archetypal vision of the oneness of all created life whether it be in painting, sculpture, or indeed in music. There is here that affirmation of stillness which pertains to music no less than to statuary, to poetry no less than to the visual arts. If Yeats does not mention music in this remarkable poem it is because his preoccupation with the human body as a criterion of perfect living proportion precluded all that is abstract and impersonal, and devoid, as he then thought, of powerful instinctual urges. By the time he wrote this poem he must have become aware of the perils to the human soul in Pan's "intolerable music." Like the waters which echoed this music it is "ecstatic," and like the dolphins on whose back the slim adolescents had come to play in the sea it is "brute."

T. S. Eliot's poetry is less visually oriented. In his poetry musical images and metaphors abound. The musical experience furnishes him with some of his most persuasive "objective correlatives." Thus human beings and their response to the environment in which they live come to life as if they were musical themes, counterpoints of thinking and feeling, harmonious chords or shrill dissonances in an orchestral piece of always surprising and, at times, bewildering variety. Thus Eliot's use of music in his poetry leads to a widening of the reader's range of response in terms of both formal and thematic significances.

Eliot's critical pronouncements reveal an equal preoccupation with musical patterns and content. Not altogether surprisingly, a survey of musical analogies in Eliot's critical work discloses his suspicion of inadequacy on the part of the man of letters who goes to music in order to find critical support in his attempt at perfection in art for which literary criticism has not yet developed a suitable vocabulary. Thus, in the winter of 1933, Eliot in an unpublished lecture delivered in New Haven, Connecticut, is supposed to have said that he had in his own poetry, attempted "to get beyond poetry as Beethoven, in his later work, strove to get beyond music." What Eliot meant by getting "beyond poetry" is unambiguously stated in the same lecture: it is an attempt to let poetry speak for itself "with nothing poetic about it," or poetry "so transparent that we should not see the poetry." Eliot does not tell the reader what Beethoven was doing when he "strove to get beyond music." But the analogy clearly refers to a criterion of absolute esthetic purity where poetry—as Eliot would like to write it—would "stand naked in its bones," combining within itself the ideal perfection of both poetry and music.

Neither words nor ideas need be sacrificed to this perfection. Meanings may not only be preserved but may acquire additional levels of significance. In an early essay on "Ezra Pound, his Metric and Poetry" (1917) Eliot makes his position clear. Dismissing the merely emotional appeal of music in the poetry of Shelley or Swinburne as being nearer rhetoric "than to the instrument," he concludes, "For poetry to approach the condition of music (Pound quotes approvingly the dictum of Pater) it is not necessary that poetry should be destitute of meaning" as long as there is "a definite emotion behind it." Frequently, when speaking of Shakespeare's plays Eliot implies the existence of a significant relation between musical pattern and poetic response, between a formal structure, musically conceived, and the moods, emotional disposition or frame of mind it evokes in those who witness a performance of the play.

Thus, in 1951, in a lecture entitled "Poetry and Drama" Eliot visualizes "a kind of mirage of perfection of verse drama, which would be a design of human action and of words, such as to present at once the two aspects of dramatic and of musical order." Referring, in particular, to the garden scene in Romeo and Juliet he discovers there "a musical pattern … as surprising in its kind as that in the early work of Beethoven." Though Eliot is concerned here with the poetry spoken on the stage rather than with plot or character, he finds a kind of musical perfection in the scene which is the result of Shakespeare having discarded "the stiffness, the artificiality, the poetic decoration, of his early verse," thus achieving "a simplification of the language of natural speech" and a perfection of poetry brought about by the integration of the musical pattern into the poetry of this scene. Already in an earlier essay, "The Music of Poetry," Eliot had advised the poet to go to music in order to acquaint himself with musical techniques and, in particular, with the effect that such techniques may have on the reader of poetry. Eliot here stresses "possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quarter; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter."

The poet whose only tool is the word may find it impossible to compete with the multiplicity of thematic variations inherent in the use of diverse instruments to express a large variety of musical ideas or emotions. Musical analogies which refer poet or reader to musical patterns, communicating no meaning beyond what the sounds themselves express, may ultimately convey a sense of the inadequacy of all speech when measured by musical criteria. For this sense of the completeness of revelation that great music transmits finally silences even the most articulate among literary critics. Nothing of any intellectual validity whatever can be said about such music. Words themselves appear irrelevant, and the most erudite commentary merely a trivial appendage to the wordless message of perfection conveyed through the musical experience. Northrop Frye, for instance, confesses to such "a feeling of definite revelation" after listening to a Palestrina motet or a Mozart Divertimento. "Here," he says, "is a simplicity which makes us realize that the simple is the opposite of the commonplace, a feeling that the boundaries of possible expression in art have been reached for all times." And T. S. Eliot wrote, in answer to a letter by Stephen Spender who was reminded of Beethoven's posthumous music when reading "Ash Wednesday," "I have the A-minor Quarter on the gramophone and find it quite unexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and the relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die."

The novelist's concern with the musical experience is necessarily and for similar reasons of an equivocal nature. As long as he could portray the thoughts, feelings, and sense impressions of his fictitious characters without recording the inwardness of this experience, the musician or the listener to music differed from other characters only in so far as they were "musically" oriented. The way they listened and responded to music could still be described "realistically" and in the language of everyday life. In this way the musical experience, just like any other esthetic experience, could be absorbed by the reader's imagination. There was no need to render it as pertaining to different levels of consciousness which partook of this experience.

Increasingly the novelist, at the beginning of the twentieth century became aware of states of consciousness where sensory impressions and thought are inextricably intermingled, a pleasing twilight of indefinite sensations which pertains more to the realm of poetry than of prose. Language itself had to undergo a process of transformation in order to integrate this newly discovered reality. Realizing that all human speech, instead of communicating the true nature of experience, introduces an inevitable element of alienation, the novelist in the early decades of this century attempted the almost impossible: to capture the moment of emotional intensity (for example, when listening to music) at the very instant of sudden and inexplicable revelation. Time itself, the fleeting moment of experience, the instant of perception, had to be given verbal permanence.

The challenge the modern novelist had to face was to render the time-bound nature of music and thought into speech which (though itself part of the flow of time) would be "always present." Eliot's self-evident assertion, in Burnt Norton, that "Words move, music moves / Only in time" appears to establish a common denominator applicable to both writer and musician. For the patterns formed by words and the patterns formed by music originate in the same silence that existed before and will again be after the words and the music have reached the listener's consciousness. It is, says Eliot, the "stillness" out of which all art grows. He compares it to a Chinese jar which "still / Moves perpetually in its stillness." "Not," he adds, "the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts" but rather the "co-existence" of past, present and future in both music and poetry. The true predicament of the artist, then, is to render simultaneously "the moment in and out of time," that is the moment experienced first as time passing and then as a still point in time. In "The Dry Salvages," Eliot, attempting to formulate the predicament, refers to music "heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts." There is, thus, no common criterion applicable to both musical time and the time it takes to "describe" it, and the time needed to read such a description. Different levels of consciousness are involved. The poet rightly assumes that sound actually heard and sounds echoing in the memory may evoke different responses. It is the novelist's rather than the poet's business to disentangle stillness from movement, silence from sound, memory from experience. Eliot is a dependable guide in this apparently contradictory welter of incompatibilities. For when, at the end of The Four Quartets, he concludes that "Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning," he may well mean the musical phrase and the sentence spoken by the poet, both equally and in the same proportion moving perpetually in their stillness, time-bound as well as timeless, existing in a present no longer measurable by the clock.

As far as the novelist is concerned this implies a reassessment of visual reality in terms of sounds heard in time or remembered "out of time." Eyesight is replaced by daydream, the world of objects by the imaginative recreation of a universe in which material phenomena undergo a seachange and are transformed into fantasy. Human beings, landscapes and the sensations they evoke are "seen" as through a mist, floating on the surface of memory, no longer subject to the controlling authority of the conscious mind. Finally, a sequence of sounds played or sung at a certain pitch and rhythm or a change from major to minor key are found to evoke a variety of associations and memories, frequently, though not always, related to sense impressions received in the past. It is this complex interrelationship between the musical experience and the mental process it initiates that stimulates the novelist to investigate the twilight where the encounter between music and human consciousness takes place.

Novelists, repeatedly and in growing numbers ventured into that no man's land of the mind although they realized, sooner or later, that what had been initially composed as a sequence of sounds, for instance a melody which could be musically defined by such simple concepts as key, pitch, or rhythm, did not lend itself easily to transposition into even the most imaginative and expressive of prose-fictions. Though words may be used "musically," in the sense in which symbolist poets attempted to supply a musical equivalent for an experience without altogether dispensing with language, they cannot transform time-bound reality into a timeless continuum. Yet novelists in search of linguistic correspondences for human experiences inaccessible to logical analysis, were increasingly attracted to that borderland of the mind where concepts, values, and attitudes, acquired, as it were, musical features, where a sequence of thoughts was shown to be related to some imaginary modality of sounds and an emotion could be rendered through consonance or dissonance or in a minor or major key. Underlying this search was the assumption that the semantics of human speech correspond in some intangible way to the semantics of musical composition, that it might, after all, be possible to translate the meaning of a melody into linguistic terms. As far as psychic processes were concerned it seemed almost self-evident that especially through music could significances be revealed which lay below the threshold of consciousness.

Yet language is a singularly inept vehicle of expression when it is called upon to say something adequate about the content of a musical work. The modern novelist whose concern with music grew out of his preoccupation with mental processes could hardly have recourse to technical language and write a musicologist's novel. Any attempt at transposing musical content into a prose freed of semantic rigidity and thus approaching the fluidity of musical progression, turned the musical experience into an objective correlative used by the novelist to portray states of mind or a particular emotional setting which everyday language was unable to convey. The musical experience was thus used as a mirror with the help of which a character could be viewed, a relationship portrayed, an idea realized through the sounds that were found to be most expressive of what this idea stood for within the context of the novel. Musical content appeared to be the obvious equivalent for the vague and amorphous psychic states for which language had not evolved any adequate vocabulary. The novelist who aimed at unravelling the complexities of the human soul discovered in music an esthetic equivalent for the interior monologue, expressiveness uncontaminated by the ambiguity of verbal communication.

This discovery led to a dilemma that no novelist could solve in a satisfactory way: the writer of fiction had no other means of communicating the pure expressiveness of music but through linguistic equivocation. If music was indeed an objective correlative for experiences that could only be expressed in nonverbal terms, the novelist became increasingly aware of the fact that—as Susanne Langer puts it—though music is indeed the "logical expression" (though not the cause or cure) of feelings, yet "it has its special ways of functioning that make it incommensurable with language." The writer's experiments with musical content translated into the prose of his fiction were, thus, from the outset, of a most problematic nature.

No one was more troubled by the absence of an objective correlative which would denote musical meaning than Marcel Proust. Throughout his monumental novel he makes it abundantly clear that though various individuals may indeed associate a musical phrase with memories of experiences colored by sense impressions of a nonmusical nature, these memories need not in any way correspond to the musical statement made by the composer but be mere approximations to the "meaning" underlying the music. The reader may easily be misled by Proust's concern with the effect of Vinteuil's "petite phrase" on Swann and Marcel into assuming that Proust's impressionistic technique of transcribing the musical phrase into a literary image served as an end in itself. For the music that accompanies the reader from volume to volume is generally interwoven in a stream of only partially controlled memories. The melody repeatedly appears as an indistinct floating image, wrapped in a mist of associations derived from the hearer's past. In Proust's imagination this melody is "ensevelie dans la brume" (entombed in fog) or "noyée dans le brouillard" (drowned in mist). Already at the beginning of the novel after having heard Vinteuil's sonata only once "it remained almost wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which its distance or a haze in the atmosphere allows us to catch but a faint and fragmentary glimpse."

Images of indistinctness that crowd in on Swann's mind when he remembers Vinteuil's music have no material equivalents in reality. Their frame of reference is and remains throughout the book the hearer's memory. Thus, he would like to remember the music as one recalls any other sense impression "of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire." Similarly, Marcel, long after the little phrase had been absorbed in his waking consciousness, remembers it as "the expression of certain states of the soul analogous to that which I had experienced when I tasted the madeleine that had been dipped in a cup of tea." If we compare this passage with a much earlier one where the effect of the little phrase on Swann is described as being "closely akin… to the pleasure which he would have derived from experimenting with perfumes" there is little to differentiate between Proust's various uses of the musical correlative in terms of either taste or smell or sight. Memories resurrected through musical associations, may differ in intensity of sensuous perception, one sense impression being replaced by another, the indistinctness of a monument perceived from far away in a haze may be substituted by the dreamlike vision of a woman, "this invisible creature whose language I did not know and whom I understand so well—the only stranger that it has ever been my good fortune to meet"; it is with such impressions as these that the reader may place Vinteuil's little melody in a world of experiences which constitutes at best only an image, "a reflection, like water or glass" (these are Swann's words), the shadow of a shadow, and, more often than not, a memory remembered, a dream recaptured an infinite number of times.

An objective correlative, however, does not cease to carry manifold significances because of its indistinctness. In memory, as in dreams, relation between things and people assume blurred and confused shapes. The memory of a melody may indeed appear at one time as the scent of "roses in the evening," at another as "the cooing of a dove," and again as "an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures." What these memories have in common constitutes the dimly perceived reality of the melody in so far as remembered sense impressions may at all correlate music with actually experienced events in one's life. Proust is naturally inclined towards metaphorical speech—as if in memory there is no place for any sort of explicit analogy—enabling the reader to reexperience the event itself though in a somewhat modified and distorted way. Thus while Vinteuil's sonata is described with the help of such adjectives as "slender, frail, tender, rustic, pale, candid, and timid," the first bars of the septet by the same composer recall the image of "continuous, level surfaces like those of the sea, in the midst of a stormy morning beneath an already lurid sky … in eery silence, in an infinite void …" The transition from adjectival writing to the evocation of an objective correlative implies a greater maturity of expression on the part of the composer and of receptivity on the part of the hearer. The homeliness of the earlier work has grown into the complexity of Vinteuil's old-age composition. Obscurity and indistinctness have been transformed into a clarity of vision which, as in a flash of lightning, illumines a world "so harsh, so supernatural, so brief, setting athrob the still inert crimson of the morning sky above the sea."

Proust's observations on the musical experience and the way it affects the central characters in his novel create a psychological universe of considerable complexity. Listening to music, and especially to the kind of music represented by Vinteuil's little melody, produces an intensely emotional response from which the rationality of the thinking mind is excluded. The melody, from this moment onward, is a haunting presence which takes possession of the hearer's memory. All those events of his life that are overshadowed by violent emotions such as jealousy or physical desire, the fear of losing a beloved person or the anguish caused by such a loss, become entangled in the web woven by the melody. With the regularity of a conditioned reflex the emotion may be provoked by the music just as the emotion itself may arouse the memory of the corresponding musical phrase. Emotional and musical arousal are thus almost identical. In memory they become one and indivisible—so much so that when a particular piece of music ceases to exercise its fascination upon the hearer, the emotion usually associated with it is no longer found to be of any validity. The hearer, in effect, asks himself how it could have happened that at any one time this music represented the unbearable anguish of jealousy and cannot remember how the association between the musical phrase and his jealousy came into existence.

Considerations such as these are liable to interfere with the even flow of the narrative. The problem that Proust faced—and Joyce was going to solve in his own way—was how to transcribe not merely the melody but the memory of it and the meaning it acquired when being remembered in reasonably intelligible prose. If as Proust says at the beginning of the novel, all musical impressions are "sine materia" and speaks of the memory of these impressions as "the presence of one of those invisible realities," he thereby implies that the novelist has no way of translating this immaterial and invisible reality which is music into the language of fiction except in terms of subjectively experienced sense impressions.

This is what Proust repeatedly and insistently does. As the novel progresses these images, scents, and tastes become progressively more lucid. As Vinteuil's music grows more complex under the shadow of his approaching death, his melodies communicate a message which requires no material explanation as it provides what Proust calls "the profound equivalent… of how the composer heard the universe and projected it far beyond himself." The novelist's attempt to render this profound yet invisible "equivalent" in words makes Proust speculate as to the possible relationship between the composer's musical and the novelist's literary projection of reality into the work of art.

The first of what might be called the major post-Wagnerian novelists, he was also the first to formulate what happens when the novelist adapts musical content to the writing of a work of fiction. Beginning and end of the novel no longer depend on the chronological development of plot and characters but on the introduction of themes, le leitmotif as Proust so characteristically calls it, which prepare the reader for what is to come. It is through the elaboration of a given theme that duration in the novel acquires depth and substance. The transposition of musical into literary themes involves the writer in a process of "musicalization." "It is impossible," writes Proust, "to foresee the total work by the first volume alone which makes sense only in terms of those that follow … It's similar to those [musical] pieces which one does not realize to be leitmotifs when one listens to them in isolation at a concert in an overture."

Proust unquestionably assumes that musical themes originate in the unconscious and that, therefore, the writer of fiction by introducing leitmotifs into his novel has to make them intellectually accessible to the reader. This may explain the following remark made by him in an interview: "If I presume thus to reason about my book, it is because the book is in no way a work of reason: it is because its most trifling details have been supplied to me through feeling; because I first of all noticed them deep down within myself, without understanding them, having as much trouble to change them into something intelligible as if they were foreign to the work of the intellect just as is—how shall I put it?—a theme of music."

Marcel's desire to write a novel different from any work of fiction written previously is mentioned for the first time in the last volume of A La Recherche which, Proust tells a friend in a letter, "was written immediately after the first chapter of the first volume. All the 'inbetween' part was written subsequently." The inspiration to write the novel came to him while listening to Vinteuil's music which, in effect, is first mentioned in the first volume (when Swann hears "la petite phrase") and occurs again in the last volume when Marcel listens to Vinteuil's septet in which the same musical phrase has acquired greater complexity and significance. The idea which progressively takes possession of Proust's mind was thus already there, at the very beginning of A La Recherche. The growth of that idea to its final realization, the writing of a work of fiction, is what this novel is all about. It is also a deliberate attempt on the part of the novelist to prove to himself and his prospective readers that music can aspire to the "condition of language," and this not necessarily by a contrapuntal modulation of themes or a set of variations, but rather by transposing the novelist's (in this case Marcel's) experience of reality—within the limitations imposed by time, place, social context and the writer's own temperamental predilections—into music.

By the time the reader finishes reading Proust's novel, he may well ask himself whether any dividing line can be drawn between music remembered and music heard, and between sense impressions evoked by music and a musical theme emerging from any one of these impressions. Such questions are themselves valid critical comments on the relationship between the art of the story-teller and that of the musician in an age where clear distinctions between the two are no longer called for. When, for example, Proust writes that "a prolonged smile is like a sustained G sharp" he relates a psychological observation to the tonal quality of a particular sound or chord as if the two—his observation of the smile and his awareness of the singular effect produced by the playing of a chord in G sharp on an instrument—constituted one and the same kind of tonality. Such a correlation may be indefensible by either musicological or psychological criteria, yet it paves the way for further experiments with language when the G sharp will not "stand for" or be "like" a prolonged smile but be the smile itself. Proust indeed asks himself whether this is not what might have happened "if there had not come the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas, the means of communication between one spirit and another." Remembering the precision with which music could express what lies below the threshold of consciousness, Proust describes his return to language "from the unanalyzed" as "so inebriating, that on emerging from that paradise [i.e. music], contact with people who were more or less intelligent seemed to me of an extraordinary insignificance."

Once the novelist claims the validity of musical equivalents for words and thus transcribes the reality he perceives around him by way of tonality or atonality, there is nothing to stop him from rendering his observation of human nature in terms of sound symbols. Such a musical correlative will be—like sounds themselves—immaterial and invisible. No objective correspondences will help the reader in his search for a valid psychological frame of reference. The only significance that can be attributed to such sound symbols will emerge from the way "the composer [and now also the writer] heard the universe and projected it far beyond himself."

E. M. Forster, in an early novel, does precisely this. At a loss for the right word when describing the effect of a musical composition, in this case Beethoven's last piano sonata, opus 111, on performer and listener, he can only suggest with the help of nonmusical allusions what this music meant to those "whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected," the outsider, the misfit, and the rebel. He, first of all, admits his inability to "translate [the composer's] visions into human words, and his experiences into human action." He realizes that there is passion, "but it could not be easily labelled." Yet, having ventured so far, he makes Lucy, in A Room With a View (1908), play the first movement of this extraordinary sonata before a musically indifferent audience, remarking, however, that while she was playing she divested herself of her everyday identity and entered "a more solid world" where "she was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave." She became what Forster designates as "tragical," in the sense that she extracted from the music she played a conviction of ultimate victory. For, adds Forster, Beethoven's sonatas "can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph." In its final analysis it is not Lucy but Forster who decides that Beethoven's last piano sonata should embody the "victory" with which this novel ends. The reader who is assumed to be familiar with this piece of music may, after some hesitation, approve of Forster's choice and will ask no more questions. He is, however, left with a literary statement of considerable ambiguity.

A Room With a View was written long before Forster became acquainted with Proust's work. When, in 1927, his Aspects of the Novel was published Proust's concern with music is given a very prominent place. The "little phrase," according to Forster, creates "a homogeneous world" as it provides the reader with "complete orientation"—"stitching Proust's book together from the inside" as part of the protagonist's memory. When Forster writes about novels and the part music plays in them he is more concerned with "rhythm" than with the actual content of any given musical piece. It is the relation between various "blocks of sounds" that he calls rhythm. It enters the mind without being actually audible. To recreate this rhythm in the writing of a novel, "this common entity, this new thing… the symphony as a whole" is Forster's ideal of fiction-writing. "Music," he continues, "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." Forster calls this new type of literary structure "expansion," a new way of looking at people which will emphasize the inwardness of all conscious response to music. The musical experience is the essence of this "expansion" which will lead the novelist away from mere story-telling and characterization towards a deeper psychological truth which no novelist in the past ever ventured to portray.

The more the writer realized the need for increasingly subtler forms of evocation than the prose of everyday life was capable of expressing, the more was he likely to look in music for an objective equivalent for emotions that might have been more adequately expressed through poetry as they were too complex to be conveyed in conventional speech. Virginia Woolf, in an early story, probably written in 1921, before she became acquainted with Proust's work, illustrates this search for a new language when she describes the effect of a string quartet by Mozart on a listener, evidently herself, tortured, as she then was, by a sense of loss and inner division. Here, the writer intentionally dispenses with description of the music in such ambiguous terms as "victory" or "despair," but evokes the texture of the music through images relating to her own past. Thus the prose she employs shifts from interior monologue—"How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world"—to nature associations originating in the hearer's memory—"Fountain jets; drops descend … washing shadows over the silver fish … leaping, splashing, scraping sharp fins"—to encounters in the past charged with intense emotion—"I see your face, I hear your voice … What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, inextricably commingled, bound in pain and strewn in sorrow."

The experimental nature of this short, fragmentary sketch is of considerable interest to anyone concerned with the gradual dissolution of conventional thematic structure and its effect on the portrayal of human thought in contemporary fiction. The novelty of this approach to the hearer—the music being the medium through which human consciousness is portrayed—points backwards to Proust's impressionistic literary experiments with music as well as towards Joyce's more daring representation of the stream of consciousness still to come. In later novels Virginia Woolf frequently refers to the virtually unrestricted expressiveness of music as contrasted to the limiting syntactical speech patterns employed by writers attempting to render emotions which elude the dictionary meaning of words. How, indeed, she asks herself in The Waves, can "falling in love for the first time" be denoted by words? Admitting the novelist's inability to say anything worth saying about the emotions aroused by first love, she calls for music to help her in her task. "Here again there should be music … a painful, guttural, visceral, also soaring, lark-like, pealing song to replace these flagging, foolish transcripts—how much too deliberate! which attempt to describe the flying moments of first love."

More disillusioned than in 1921 Virginia Woolf now knew that this desire for a linguistic transformation of sounds into words must remain unfulfilled. Yet a few pages later she once more returns to a musical image, this time to evoke characters rather than emotions. Are not, she asks, characters as they appear to us in life open to musical definitions, each one standing for a different instrument, a melody or chord? How much simpler it would be, Virginia Woolf meditates, to render the complexity of human nature in terms of a musical composition, thereby preserving the immediacy of musical communication in the face of the corrupting effect of all human speech? Thus she desires nothing better than to "compose" her characters until the imprecision of their human qualities is transformed into the exact polyphonic pattern of a symphony. Again in The Waves Virginia Woolf lets a character (Bernard) deliberate upon this form of musical revelation claiming for music a wider imaginative scope than descriptive prose can provide. "How impossible to order them rightly, to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole—again like music. What a symphony with its concord and discord, and its tunes on top and its complicated bass beneath, then grew up! Each played his own tune, fiddle, flute, trumpet, drum or whatever the instrument might be." This passage was written, Virginia Woolf notes in her Diary, after she had listened to a Beethoven quartet one night and had felt the need to "merge all the interjected passages into Bernard's final speech." Music, actual or imaginary, rounds up a novel the rhythmic quality of which very nearly approaches the pattern of a musical composition, the ebb and tide of the sea, the coming and going of the waves.

Proust's experiments in the use of musical material in the thematic structure of his fictitious universe became known to the English reading public while E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf were writing their novels. There seems little, if any, actual influence on the part of the French writer on either of them. When they did read him they felt overawed by the gigantic dimensions of his work. They also discovered in A La Recherche a similar concern with musical form and content as had been tentatively expressed in their own novels. The one writer—hardly at all familiar with Proust at that time—who had become even more deeply aware of the need to turn the writing of fiction into something resembling musical composition—was Thomas Mann. Even before Proust had finished writing his novel Mann had already published a number of short stories dealing with the devastating effect of music on individuals of an artistic temperament.

As early as 1918, Thomas Mann who called himself a man of letters (ein Literat) characterized his work as that of a musician, comparing it to the writing of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who were "men of letters as well as musicians, but the latter more than the former." As for his own writings, "they were good scores (Partituren), everyone of them." Not without pride Mann added that "musicians also loved them; Gustav Mahler, for example, loved them." When, in 1938, Thomas Mann was asked to write an introduction to an American edition of his stories, he insisted on the need for a musical interpretation of his early work. He traced the development in his use of musical themes which, as a true Wagnerian, he calls leitmotifs, from being a mere structural device to a psychological concept underlying all his later prose fiction. In Tonio Kroger, he says, "I first learned to employ music as a shaping influence in my art. The conception of epic prose-composition as a weaving of themes, as a musical complex of associations, I later on largely employed in The Magic Mountain, only that there the verbal leitmotif is no longer as in Buddenbrooks employed in the representation of form alone, but has taken on a less mechanical, more musical character, and endeavours to mirror the emotion and the idea." Once more, in 1953, Mann, writing an introduction to the American edition of The Magic Mountain, emphasizes the specifically musical enjoyment which the awareness "of the structural coherence of the thematic fabric" gives the reader. In order to derive the greatest benefit from the novel, Thomas Mann, in effect, suggests that the book should be read twice. For only the second time is the reader able to "really penetrate and enjoy its musical associations of ideas. The first time the reader learns the thematic material; he is then in a position to read the symbolic and allusive formulas both forwards and backwards." Finally, in a letter to Theodore Adorno whose advice proved so helpful in the writing of Doctor Faustus, Mann returns to his first assertion made in 1918, that he has "always been adept at literary music-making, [has] felt myself to be half-and-half of a musician" and has "translated the technique of musical interweaving to the novel."

The concern with musical form and content on the part of such different novelists as Proust, Forster, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann, in the first half of the twentieth century is no coincidence. Nor can it be attributed to such purely musical influences as Wagner's music and the impressionism of Debussy and his school. All of them alike turned to the musical experience as embodying a primordial vision of human life expressed through rhythm or melody, pitch or volume, concord or discord. In their search for a faithful representation of the inwardness of experience, be it through individual consciousness or through the awareness of social identity, they discovered in music a metaphor of harmonious coexistence. As in the modern novel the Pythagorean planets increasingly drift "in evil mixture to disorder," the wish to make sense of that disorder impelled the novelists to apply a musical perspective to the mind of man. Thus the musical experience in the modern novel is no longer a merely literary device to create a congenial background to events and characters, but has itself become an essential ingredient of contemporary fiction writing. The vibrating air column of the flute and the vibrating strings on the violin acquired an almost metaphysical significance. What was involved was not only the application of scientific theories to the esthetic laws governing the creation and performance of music, but a new vision of the way human consciousness functions, expressed in the novel through a fusion of sense impressions and thought, the texture of sounds and the texture of words, music and speech.