TIME AND THE NOVELIST
637
stantaneous and which necessarily cease to be so
in
words. Words
have to dictate their own tempo.
Nowhere is this more evident than in poetic narrative, and the
fact that the tempo of the narrative must be more or less subordinated
to the tempo of the verse form (a fact more obvious in Byron than
it is
in
Chaucer) is perhaps the principal reason why the story, as
soon as it began to assume the proportions of the novel, discovered
the necessity of prose. The transition is often accepted as a regression,
a compromise, a renunciation of the demands of poetry, and a humble
self-restriction to the demands of prose. But it was not by any means
so simple as a move from a higher to a lower world. Narrative found
its way into prose because only prose will deal with the dimension
of time as we accept it and are controlled by it in daily life. The
prosaic and the poetic conceptions of time are fundamentally differ–
ent and almost mutually exclusive. It is the latter conception which,
curiously enough, can become the more obsessive. How many times
is Time mentioned in Shakespeare's sonnets? To lament time's tyr–
anny, to try to ignore it, or in some way to transcend it, are the
common approaches of poetry since poetry began. And' time remains
one of the chief preoccupations of modern verse, in the effort to un–
derstand it, not in its own terms, but in those of timelessness, to view
it through the conjectural lens of eternity.
The difficulties of a poet in coping with time
in
an ordinary,
narrative sense, are to be seen in all their bewildering variety in
The Faerie Queene.
The pattern of Spenser's words is such that time
is continually being caught up in the dragging net of his stanza.
Whatever the speed of the action enclosed by it, the variable but
ever-recurrent pattern of acceleration and slowing to a pause, to
which it must conform, divides and entrammels the action, just as
a reflection in water is broken by the ripples of the surface. That is
why his verse attains the greatest clarity in the long spells of con–
templative calm, and is most obscure where the action is rapid, or
divided by the complexity of the plot.
It
might be said that Spenser's
narrative moves slower than time, since not many of us ever contrive
to read all of his unfinished story-and even if we did, trying to
remember its beginnings and motives, its causes and effects, its shape
as a whole would stiIl be a hopeless business. A completed
Faerie
Queene
would suggest something more than time, as we have it at
our disposal, could sustain.
