The development of form in the symphony is too large a subject to be covered here, but there are certain fundamental aspects of it upon which I may dwell with safety, since they obey laws which apply everywhere. To make clear what I mean let me say that an art whose fundamental quality is movement must have for its problem the disposition within a certain length of time of a certain group of themes or melodies. The distinction between this art and that of painting is that in music the question is “When?” in painting “Where?” In this sense literature is nearer music than is painting, and I shall shortly point out some analogies between literary and musical forms. I stated in the first chapter the fundamental synthetic principle of music, which is that no one series of sounds formed into a melody can long survive the substitution of other series, unless there be given some restatement, or, at least, some reminder of the first. There is no musical form that does not pay tribute directly or indirectly to this principle. And this, much modified by the medium of language, applies also to literature. Most novels contain near the end a “looking backward over traveled roads”; a too great digression from any thesis requires a certain restatement of it. The first appearance of Sandra Belloni is heralded by her singing in the wood near the Poles’ country house. The epilogue to “Vittoria” closes with the scene in the cathedral: “Carlo Merthyr Ammiani, standing between Merthyr and her, with old blind Agostino’s hands upon his head. And then once more, and but for once, her voice was heard in Milan.” The unessential characters and motives of Sandra Belloni disappear in “Vittoria”--Mrs. Chump, an unsuccessful essay in Dickens, finds a deserved oblivion; so do the “Nice Feelings” and the “Fine Shades”; but the presence of Merthyr in the cathedral is as necessary to that situation as is the absence of Wilfred. “War and Peace” would be an inchoate mass of persons, scenes, and events, were it not for certain retrospects here and there which hold the whole mass together. “The Idiot” is a striking illustration, for the early part of Mishkin’s career only appears in the sixth chapter, as if to tide over more successfully the vastness of the scheme; and the final chapter brings back most vividly the experiences of his boyhood. The sonnet is the most concise example of this process, and I do not need to dwell on the precision with which it illustrates it.