InThe Craft of FictionPercy Lubbock describes the plight from which no reader of novels can quite escape. “As quickly as we read, [the novel] melts and shifts in the memory; even at the moment when the last page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful.” When the reader of novels turns critic, as in some degree every good reader does, what is the object he criticizes? It is not the novel he has laid aside but rather the fragments of it that have lodged in his memory. Some of...

For “the vagueness that afflicts all criticism of novels” one reason, I have said, is our inability to possess a novel as picture or a lyric can be possessed. Another is the inadequate vocabulary for describing the aspects of a novel—“most words provisional,” as Virginia Woolf complained, “many metaphorical, and some on trial for the first time.” “We have not,” she says, “named and therefore presumably not recognized the simplest of devices by which every novel has to come into being.”

The names given to the few aspects or devices that have been recognized come mainly from other kinds...

FOR ONE of the devices called rhythmical by E. M. Forster I preferred a specific term—theexpanding symbol.Forster extends the meaning of rhythm to include another device, quite unlike the expanding symbol, although it too depends on repetition with variation and it too serves the novelist who would sing in the halls of fiction and invite the reader to attend to the knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend. The specific term I shall use for this kind of rhythm is aninterweaving theme.What Forster says about his second kind of rhythm, the “difficult rhythm,”...

A NOVELIST may use many kinds of rhythm in one work. In this last discourse I propose to consider one work, to touch on the varied forms of the device, and to inquire briefly into the effect that comes from the combination of phrases, characters, and incidents, rhythmically arranged, with a profusion of expanding symbols, and with a complex evolution of themes.

The one work is E. M. Forster’sA Passage to India,and I may as well say now that I believe it to be a great novel. It is so unlike most great novels that for a long...