638
PARTISAN REVIEW
Malory in prose ha:ndled a mass of material as heterogeneous as
Spenser's, as exaltedly vague in purpose, as confusing in detail and
situation, yet the
M orte d'Arthur
has a compelling clarity and unity
when compared with the
Faerie Queene.
Malory's narrative may me–
ander, may start again and again from a different point of his com–
pass, but it always draws in toward his central meaning. His battles,
tourneys and quests may all be vaguely alike in the memory, but
while one reads one cannot but recognize the almost mathematical
pattern which the medium of prose compels him to impress on them.
Vague as the history of Arthur may be, it progresses through time,
it has a rise, a climacteric, and a fall. Though there was the intention
of a similar over-all pattern in the
Faerie Queene
it remains so diffi–
cult to deduce that it is virtually not there in the poem's total effect.
And this is chiefly because Spenser's verse-form prevented him from
coming to coherent terms with the time-dimension.
Byron's
Don Juan
is as modem in its sophistication and irony
as Spenser's poem is the reverse, and it is perhaps the last spontaneous
attempt at a novel in verse in the language. The Victorian experi–
ments in this direction have a quality of freak or of self-conscious
revival about them which puts them apart. Byron's
Don Juan
has a
certain kinship with Stendhal's novels. The hero has something of
a Julien, of a Fabrice about him, and Byron's approach to his subject
is, in its way, immensely matter-of-fact. How, for advantages and
disadvantages, does his verse-narrative compare with its kindred
novels in prose? In the first place, the
ottava rima
stanza holds a
continual temptation, for a cynic and a wit, to epigrammatic closure
with each final rhyme, a temptation to discontinuity. Moreover the
pace of the verse can be made to vary only a very little compared
with the resources of prose. Pursued at length, it is forced into a jog–
trot.
Again, the canto is a much more artificial form of division than
the chapter. It demands a high degree of unity in itself, complete with
induction, beginning, middle and conclusion. True, Byron sometimes
cocks an eyebrow at these conventions, can begin a canto with
Hail, Muse, etcetera, we left Juan sleeping-
and plunge back into the narrative exactly where he left it. But much
more often he reproduces, in his own fashion, the conventions which
a long tradition, from Chaucer and Ariosto, had forced on his chosen
form.
