What is so good in Roman Pictures is not the presence of the “grand chain” pattern—anyone can organize a grand chain—but the suitability of the pattern to the author’s mood. Lubbock works all through by administering a series of little shocks, and by extending to his characters an elaborate charity which causes them to appear in a rather worse light than if no charity was wasted on them at all. It is the comic atmosphere, but subacid, meticulously benign. And at the end we discover to our delight that the atmosphere has been externalized, and that the partners, as they elide together in the marchesa’s drawing-room, have done the exact thing which the book requires, which it required from the start, and have bound the scattered incidents together with a thread woven out of their own substance.
Thaïs and Roman Pictures provide easy examples of pattern; it is not often that one can compare a book to a pictorial object with any accuracy, though curves, etc. , are freely spoken of by critics who do not quite know what they want to say. We can only say (so far) that pattern is an aesthetic aspect of the novel, and that though it may be nourished by anything in the novel—any character, scene, word—it draws most of its nourishment from the plot. We noted, when discussing the plot, that it added to itself the quality of beauty; beauty a little surprised at her own arrival: that upon its neat carpentry there could be seen, by those who cared to see, the figure of the Muse; that Logic, at the moment of finishing its own house, laid the foundation of a new one. Here, here is the point where the aspect called pattern is most closely in touch with its material; here is our starting point. It springs mainly from the plot, accompanies it like a light in the clouds, and remains visible after it has departed. Beauty is sometimes the shape of the book, the book as a whole, the unity, and our examination would be easier if it was always this. But sometimes it is not. When it is not I shall call it rhythm. For the moment we are concerned with pattern only.
Let us examine at some length another book of the rigid type, a book with a unity, and in this sense an easy book, although it is by Henry