Abstract
This chapter, “Introduction: ‘Words Writ to the Music’”, traces Lawrence’s aesthetic development from 1908, when he began writing about “Art” in terms of “absolute music”, through to a rhythmic turn realised in the writing of The Rainbow and Women in Love (largely completed by 1918). Lawrence’s first essay “Art and the Individual” and drafts of early poems reveal his detailed engagement with discourses about the relationship between words and music, and a search for new literary forms that anticipated the blending of the arts in modernism. His breakthrough to a mature style is related here to explorations of rhythm suggested by the Chladni patterns of sound waves made visible in sand, an acoustic and musical model of importance for Lawrence and his contemporaries that resonates throughout this book.
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Notes
- 1.
See, particularly, Lawrence’s letters to Blanche Jennings on various aspects of music and the arts, between July 1908 and January 1910 (in 1L).
- 2.
See, for instance, comparable surveys of E.M. Forster and music by Michelle Fillion (2010) and of Virginia Woolf and music by Emma Sutton (2013); and more general studies of music and modernism referenced here by Daniel Albright (2000) and Brad Bucknell (2001). For a comprehensive overview of recent literature that I therefore will not replicate here, see Waddell 2017. Several of the works discussed by Waddell are referenced within my following chapters. For a summary of existing critical work on Lawrence and music see Michelucci and Poplawski (2015: 8–9).
- 3.
Modernism in music is defined as breaking “with traditional modes of writing dependent on a diatonic system (rooted in the use of major and minor keys), and challeng[ing] the narrative-like structural coherence which had reached a dramatic culmination in the large-scale post-romantic works of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler” (Jones 2003: 267). Beginning in the 1890s, its key figures are Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky, although for a much more comprehensive survey see Albright 2004.
- 4.
My study seeks to work with a fluid definition of modernisms in accordance with the suggestion that “modernism should be thought of as an overdetermined, overlapping, and multiply networked range of practices that were always caught up in a dialectical process of affirmation and negation” (Brooker et al. 2010: 10). Nonetheless, like Vincent Sherry, I use “modernism” as a singular term, “not as a gesture of constriction” but as the expression of “sensibility, temperament, disposition, attitude, outlook – a range that indexes the extensive import of the special awareness we designate as ‘modernism’” (Sherry 2017: 19–20).
- 5.
In summary, Lessing noted that the sculpture of a man being squeezed to death by a snake is not depicted as screaming, partly because of the obligation to be beautiful, but also because “the visual arts must never depict a moment of climax”. Poetry, on the other hand, can portray the full drama because it is a medium that operates in time, while “painting and sculpture must observe the decorum of space” (Albright 2000: 9).
- 6.
James T. Boulton notes that Lawrence’s “interest may have derived from Garnett’s 4000-word extract from Lessing’s Laocoön illustrated by a picture of the sculpture” (1L 5). His brother Ernest owned the 20-volume edition of Richard Garnett’s The International Library of Famous Literature (1899), which was a much-prized resource for the family and particularly for Lawrence.
- 7.
Lawrence may well have read this by January 1914, when he refers again to “the Laocoon” and to Pater in a letter which describes his struggle with a new style of writing as he completes 340 pages of what would become The Rainbow (2L 137–138).
- 8.
Lawrence seems to be quoting Henry Bryan Binns (see STH 274 n.140:25).
- 9.
The first English translation was in 1891 (Bonds 2014: 7).
- 10.
Spencer’s influence on Lawrence is disclosed in a letter of October 1907, to Reverend Robert Reid, which states that reading Spencer, among others, “has seriously modified my religious beliefs” (1L 36–37). Spencer’s views on music were disputed by Ernest Newman in Musical Studies (1905). In his letter of December 1908, Lawrence told Blanche that he “snatched at Ernest Newman” (1L 100), but we do not know exactly what he had read.
- 11.
This passage was excised from the second edition, perhaps, as Bonds suggests, because Hanslick realised that he had moved beyond music in itself as a self-contained absolute into something that relied on a relationship with the universe, although what then was lacking in subsequent editions was any “explanation at all of just how music might relate to anything beyond itself” (Bonds 2014: 190).
- 12.
For a brief account of Boethius’s threefold classification of music, see Bonds 2014: 32.
- 13.
Chopin was part of the repertoire of Lawrence’s sister Ada, who recalls that “Bert brought me Chopin waltzes, music by Tschaikowsky and Brahms” (Lawrence and Gelder 1966: 52).
- 14.
Lawrence’s letter of 15 December 1908 mentions Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, but as the editor notes “Helen Corke asserts that, in 1909, DHL’s ‘only experience of Wagner’s music had been a performance, in Nottingham theatre, of Tannhäuser, when he reacted against the stridency of the Venusberg music’” (1L 99 n.3).
- 15.
A review by F.S. Flint of the prose poems of Henry Bryan Binns in the New Age (15 August 1908) is the likely source for Lawrence’s quotation of Binns in his essay (STH 274 n.140:25). The title of his essay and its opening paragraph also reflect Lawrence’s interest in the New Age, a paper which Jessie Chambers records that “Lawrence took regularly for a time” (STH 271 n.135:2).
- 16.
As this book went to press Volume III of the Cambridge Edition of The Poems had just been published: this presents three variants of “The Piano”. The version discussed here is “The Piano [1]” (Poems 1399–1400).
- 17.
The poem-sequence was first printed in full in Appendix III of Worthen 1992: 495–499, and is now collected for the first time in Poems 1425–1429.
- 18.
For a definition see http://dictionary.onmusic.org/terms/2459-overtone
- 19.
“Pythagoras’s discovery of the relationship between number and sound ... demonstrated an even broader connection between the worlds of the visible and the invisible” (Bonds 2014: 23).
- 20.
Lawrence had recently been reading Pater (2L 138).
- 21.
E.M. Forster discussed “Pattern and rhythm” in the final chapter of Aspects of the Novel (1927), and Virginia Woolf described herself as writing “to a rhythm and not a plot” (Nicolson 1978: 204).
- 22.
- 23.
For a discussion of this letter and its sources see Kinkead-Weekes 1996: 121–126. C.P. Ravilious (1973) was the first to decipher the metaphor of the fiddler and the sandbox and Thomas Gibbons (1988) conjectured that Lawrence may have encountered the Chladni experiments by reading Thought-Forms (1901), by C.W. Leadbetter and Annie Besant. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 use the illustrations given in that book, but Chladni patterns were widely referenced in other books that Lawrence read, including Schopenhauer 1909: 347. For Lawrence’s reading of Schopenhauer see Worthen 1992: 174.
- 24.
Video demonstrations are also widely available on YouTube. See, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uEeADQN8Jo
- 25.
- 26.
Schoenberg’s settings of 21 poems from a series by Albert Giraud “rang[e] in style from ironic echoes of romantic lieder, salon and cabaret music, by way of Schoenberg’s own recently evolved expressionistic atonality, to an intricately constructivist mode of counterpoint” (Northcott 2012: 9). For brief remarks about how Lawrence’s writing compares with Schoenberg, see Krockel 2007: 107, 161.
- 27.
Music also had the advantage of freedom from the realism and naturalism that had dominated the visual and literary arts in the second half of the nineteenth century (Dahlhaus 1989: 5–7).
- 28.
A large volume of criticism addresses Lawrence’s experiments with rhythm and language—see particularly the studies by Balbert (1974) and Ingram (1990) and the section “Bibliography 93: Lawrence and Language” in Poplawski (1996: 574–578). My intention throughout this book is not to elide this valuable work but to draw attention to the relatively neglected acoustic and musical dimensions of Lawrence’s oeuvre.
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Reid, S. (2019). Introduction: “Words Writ to the Music”. In: D.H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04999-7_1
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