Are you one of the many, like me, who know and love the scene in
the film Amadeus which picked up on the
widely repeated story (whether true or apocryphal) reported, e.g., by Gehring
in his 1911 biography Mozart: “[Mozart’s comic opera] Entfuhrung aus dem Serail [The Abduction from
the Seraglio] was represented for the first time on the 16th of July,
1782. Its success was extraordinary, and several numbers were encored.
Nevertheless the Emperor said to Mozart, ‘Too fine for our ears, my
dear Mozart, and a great deal too many notes.’ To which Mozart
replied, ‘Exactly as many notes as are necessary, your Majesty.’ “ END QUOTE
Believe it or not, before the end of this post, I am going to
claim a connection between that famous anecdote and the conclusion of my post
yesterday about the heretofore unrecognized (as to its pervasiveness) influence
of Cowper’s poetically expressed ideas (about the horrors of colonial slavery) on
Mansfield Park. In that conclusion, I
analyzed what I described as the Cowper-infused poetic ruminations of Fanny
Price while on her dreamily romantic Sunday seaside promenade with Henry
Crawford:
‘The
day was uncommonly lovely. It was really March; but it was April in its mild
air, brisk soft wind, and bright sun, occasionally clouded for a minute; and
everything looked so beautiful under the influence of such a sky, the effects
of the shadows pursuing each other on the ships at Spithead and the island
beyond, with the ever-varying hues of the sea, now at high water, dancing in
its glee and dashing against the ramparts with so fine a sound, produced
altogether such a combination of charms for Fanny, as made her gradually almost
careless of the circumstances under which she felt them.’
Here is
my analysis one more time, before I get to the Mozartean connection I see:
“Austen
begins simply enough with a 5-word sentence, as to which we cannot know how
much is objective fact about the loveliness of the weather, and how much is the
buoyant Fanny’s subjective perception of it. That first sentence is followed by
a 4-word statement, which is purely factual: it was “really March” –[and by the
way, it’s no coincidence that we are reminded, ironically, of Mary’s much
earlier bon mot (“Oh! do not attack
me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be
dictated to by a watch.”), but this time it’s Fanny who cannot be dictated to
by a calendar!] But that factual statement pauses at a semicolon instead of
ending with a period. Why? Because the 20-word passage which follows it begins
with “but”, and thus constitutes a fanciful poetic negation of the fact of March (winter not quite over) with
Fanny’s feeling of April (as if
spring had already begun). And that of course corresponds to the “spring” which
has thawed Fanny’s heart, after the long cold “winter” of silent, frozen
jealousy of Mary’s seemingly limitless power over Edmund.
And
then, the passage pauses again, at a second semicolon, but this time the pause
is not to negate, but to amplify, what immediately preceded it. And that sets
the stage perfectly for JA, in her masterful synthesis of syntax, rhythm, description,
and symbolism, to virtuosically extend the remainder of that second sentence
for a remarkable additional seventy seven
words, filled from one end to the other with subtle poetic description of
what Fanny sees and feels! I am reminded of the mastery of the likes of Mozart
and Beethoven, who knew how to delay and extend resolution for a seeming eternity,
to make that climax all the more satisfying (and all sexual innuendoes are
intended, in Fanny’s case!)”
This morning I was happy to awaken to Diane Reynolds’s marvelous
response to my overall point about the Cowper in MP, and also to Diane’s independently
bringing forward the long sentence in Persuasion
which she had mentioned earlier in the week as having caught her sharp eye:
“For,
though shy, [Benwick] did not seem reserved; it had rather the appearance of
feelings glad to burst their usual restraints; and having talked of poetry, the
richness of the present age, and gone through a brief comparison of opinion as
to the first-rate poets, trying to ascertain whether Marmion or The Lady of the
Lake were to be preferred, and
how ranked the Giaour and The Bride of Abydos; and moreover, how the Giaour was to be pronounced, he
showed himself so intimately acquainted with all the tenderest songs of the one
poet, and all the impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony of the other; he
repeated, with such tremulous feeling, the various lines which imaged a broken
heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he
meant to be understood, that she ventured to hope he did not always read only
poetry, and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be
seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong
feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought
to taste it but sparingly.”
It took me ten seconds to realize,
with the kind of excitement that only a hardcore Austen wonk like myself could
feel, that this narrative passage in Persuasion
was composed by JA with EXACTLY the
same expanding, tripartite structure that I had just detected and parsed in
Fanny Price’s poetic seaside ruminations, written by JA only two years earlier;
and, what made it immeasurably more wonderful, was that it was ALSO a super-long sentence in which the
presence of poetry loved by Austen
was not only implied (as with The Task
in Fanny’s ruminations); the poetic presence in this later-written passage now consisted
of two poets JA and Anne Elliot read and loved (i.e., Scott and Byron), whose poems
are now explicitly named!
But it
gets even better. This latter-written passage is an even more virtuosic three-stage,
exponential expansion of the germ of a tiny idea than the above passage in MP.
I.e., in the earlier one, the first part is 5 words long, the second 4 words,
and then the third, an organic outgrowth of the first two, is twenty times longer than the first two: 77
words. Well, apparently JA was only getting warmed up in MP. In the narrator’s
account of Anne’s and Benwick’s sharing poetry faves, JA starts out about twice
as long as in the MP Cowperian passage, with the first part at 8 words; then
the second at 13 words. But then the third --- again an organic outgrowth of the
first two --- is more than twice as
long as the comparable third part of the MP passage, coming in at a
mind-blowing 172 words!
[And
Diane, just reading your latest post as I was getting ready to post this---yes,
last year I also mentioned that I loved the dry deflating irony of “moreover,
how the Giaour was to be pronounced”!]
So, is
it just a coincidence that these passages in MP and Persuasion are so remarkably similar in structure and poetic resonance,
with the latter twice as large as the former? I don’t think so!! What this
suggests to me is two things for starters, although I’d love to hear other
reactions, as surely there is much more to be gleaned from this intriguing parallel:
First,
as my Subject Line suggests, I see this as JA, an immortal composer of words,
applying a musical compositional technique of expansion that she would’ve
encountered repeatedly, and understood and loved as a player of piano music,
taken to the highest levels of perfection of sonata form by the musical
immortals of the Classical era, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. And just as the
expanded sentence is twice as long in Persuasion
as in MP, so too are the late sonatas, symphonies, and concertos noticeably
longer than those of Mozart and Haydn.
Second,
these two poetry-inspired passages make me wonder whether there might have come
a time when, reversing Scott’s career trajectory, JA might have begun to write
serious poetry, had she lived another decade or two. If so, would she have broken
away from the model of line after line of equal length, and instead taken what
she was already experimenting with in her prose fiction, and make a daring leap
into a new form of poetry, based on the expansionary model I see in those passages?
Finally, with all of the above as preface, I am now ready to
respond to what Ellen
wrote in response to Diane’s posting of that passage in Persuasion:
“How
much of this comes from the reality this is not a finished text. It's not the
first or even second draft; let's suppose a ninth. If you look at Sanditon and the canceled chapters of Persuasion, you see these long sentences,
packed with thought and feeling ....”
As must
be apparent from my “preface”, I couldn’t disagree more with Ellen’s take on JA’s
later long sentences (which, Mozart’s imperious Emperor, if he had been a
reader, might’ve asserted contained “too many words”) as representing preliminary
drafts by JA. I am highly skeptical that they represent raw ideas as they emerged, Athena-like, from her
fertile brain; ideas which, had she been healthy, she’d supposedly have
radically altered later so as to make her long sentences much more compact.
No, I
believe precisely the opposite is the case. Like Diane in her noting the highly
polished nature of those long sentences, I see JA the author, inspired by her delvings
into the great poetry coming to her hot off the presses while she was writing
her later novels, engaging in some masterful literary alchemy. She was in the
process of finding a way of combining what she absorbed from her poetic
explorations with her longstanding deep musical sensibility and knowledge, when
illness and then death cruelly cut that process short.
And one
more relevant point -- beginning with MP, we also know that JA was, for the
first time since she became an adult, writing novels from scratch, rather than revising
and rerevising what she had written before. That was perhaps a very liberating
turning point in her career, emboldening her to begin really experimenting with
developing new and varied forms of sentence structure “packed with thought and
feeling” (as Ellen does aptly put it). In this way, she was reaching toward accommodating
her own steadily continuing maturation as a writer, and, as we can see with 21st
century hindsight, pointed the way toward the unimaginably rich
expansions in psychological fiction by the likes of James, Joyce, and Nabokov,
among many others.
So, what
happy serendipity, Diane, that you brought forward that Persuasion sentence at the exact moment when I had just parsed out
that passage in MP. I say, now the fun can really begin. Can anyone else bring
forward some other comparably long sentences from any of JA’s fiction from MP
onward, so we can see how it relates to the poetic pattern I’ve outlined.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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