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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f02d508 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #65930 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65930) diff --git a/old/65930-0.txt b/old/65930-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index fa0ebbc..0000000 --- a/old/65930-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3982 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of Marcel Proust, by C. K. Scott Moncrieff - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: Marcel Proust - An English Tribute - -Compiler: C. K. Scott Moncrieff - -Release Date: July 27, 2021 [eBook #65930] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -Produced by: Charlene Taylor, Linda Cantoni, and the Online Distributed - Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was - produced from images generously made available by The Internet - Archive/American Libraries.) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARCEL PROUST *** - - - - - MARCEL PROUST - _AN ENGLISH TRIBUTE_ - -[Illustration] - - _By_ JOSEPH CONRAD - ARNOLD BENNETT - ARTHUR SYMONS - COMPTON MACKENZIE - CLIVE BELL - W.J. TURNER - CATHERINE CARSWELL - E. RICKWORD - VIOLET HUNT - RALPH WRIGHT - ALEC WAUGH - GEORGE SAINTSBURY - L. PEARSALL SMITH - A.B. WALKLEY - J. MIDDLETON MURRY - STEPHEN HUDSON - G.S. STREET - ETHEL C. MAYNE - FRANCIS BIRRELL - REGINALD TURNER - DYNELEY HUSSEY - - _Collected by_ - C.K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF - -[Illustration] - - NEW YORK - THOMAS SELTZER - 1923 - - - _Printed in Great Britain - All Rights - Reserved_ - - - - -THE CONTENTS - -[Illustration] - - - I. Introduction: _by_ C.K.S.M. page 1 - - II. A Portrait: _by_ STEPHEN HUDSON 5 - - III. The Prophet of Despair: _by_ FRANCIS BIRRELL 12 - - IV. A Sensitive Petronius: _by_ RALPH WRIGHT 31 - - V. The “Little Proust”: _by_ L. PEARSALL SMITH 52 - - VI. A Reader’s Gratitude: _by_ COMPTON MACKENZIE 59 - - VII. Gilberte: _by_ ALEC WAUGH 63 - - VIII. Proust’s Women: _by_ CATHERINE CARSWELL 66 - - IX. The Best Record: _by_ REGINALD TURNER 78 - - X. A Foot-note: _by_ CLIVE BELL 83 - - XI. The Spell of Proust: _by_ ETHEL C. MAYNE 90 - - XII. A New Psychometry: _by_ A.B. WALKLEY 96 - - XIII. Proust and the Modern Consciousness: - _by_ J. MIDDLETON MURRY 102 - - XIV. Proust’s Way: _by_ VIOLET HUNT 111 - - XV. M. Vinteuil’s Sonata: _by_ DYNELEY HUSSEY 117 - - XVI. A Note on the Little Phrase: _by_ W.J. TURNER 124 - - XVII. Proust as Creator: _by_ JOSEPH CONRAD 126 - - XVIII. A Moment to Spare: _by_ G. SAINTSBURY 129 - - XIX. A Real World in Fiction: _by_ G.S. STREET 131 - - XX. The Birth of a Classic: _by_ EDGELL RICKWORD 134 - - XXI. A Casuist in Souls: _by_ ARTHUR SYMONS 138 - - XXII. The Last Word: _by_ ARNOLD BENNETT 144 - - - - -MARCEL PROUST - - - - -I - -_INTRODUCTION_ - - -The death of Marcel Proust in Paris on November 18, 1922, and the -manner in which the news of his death was, by no means numerously, -reported in London, brought into question the extent of his rumoured -rather than defined influence over readers in this country. This -question it was natural that I should ask myself, for I had recently -published an English version of the first part of his great novel, -_Du Côté de chez Swann_, and was then about half way through -the translation of its sequel, _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en -Fleurs_. The writer of a savage, though evidently sincere attack -on Proust which a London newspaper published within forty-eight hours -of his death seemed to assume that he had already a considerable (if -misguided) following here, and it occurred to me that I might obtain, -from writers who were my friends, and from others who had expressed -their admiration of Proust in English periodicals, a body of critical -opinion similar to that which, I learned, was being collected in Paris -by the editor of the _Nouvelle Revue Française_. To test the -worth of my idea, I began with the seniors. Mr. Saintsbury—who (in -this respect only) might have served as the model for the Marquis de -Norpois, whose promptness in answering a letter “was so astonishing -that whenever my father, just after posting one to him, saw his -handwriting upon an envelope, his first thought was always one of -annoyance that their letters must, unfortunately, have crossed in the -post; which, one was led to suppose, bestowed upon him the special and -luxurious privilege of extraordinary deliveries and collections at -all hours of the day and night”—replied at once, and Mr. Conrad soon -followed, with letters of which each correspondent authorised me to -make whatever use I chose. - -So, I must add, did Mr. George Moore, but in a letter expressive only -of his own inability to stomach Proust, the inclusion here of which, -even although it might make this volume a prize to collectors of -first editions, would compel the excision of the word “tribute” from -title-page and cover. Mr. Walkley, the doyen of English Proustians as -he is of dramatic critics, and Mr. Middleton Murry put me at liberty -to use articles which they were publishing in _The Times_ and -its _Literary Supplement_; Mr. Stephen Hudson, the most intimate -English friend of Proust’s later years, consented to write a character -sketch; and on this base my cenotaph was soon erected. - -That it is not loftier must be laid to my account. I have doubtless -refrained from approaching many willing contributors, from a natural -and, I trust, not blameworthy reluctance to interrupt busy persons with -whom I am not acquainted. At the same time, I found among those whom I -did approach a widespread modesty which prevented a number of them from -contributing opinions which would have been of the greatest critical -importance. “We do not,” was the general answer, “know enough of Proust -to venture to tackle such a theme.” This and the pressure of other -work have kept silent, to my great regret, Mrs. Virginia Woolf, Miss -Rebecca West, Mr. J.C. Squire, Mr. Desmond MacCarthy, Mr. Lascelles -Abercrombie, Mr. Aldous Huxley, and that most reluctant writer Mr. E.M. -Forster. - -Their reticence should be my model. Although I cannot pretend not to -have made a certain study of the text of Proust (probably the most -corrupt text of any modern author that is to be found), the close -scrutiny required of a translator has inevitably obstructed my view of -the work as a whole. The reader of the following pages may, however, be -assured that this is my private loss and will in no way be made his. - -I have to thank all the contributors for the spontaneous generosity -with which they have collaborated and have placed their work at my -disposal. I have also to thank the proprietors and editors of the -following newspapers and reviews for permission to reprint articles -which have appeared in their pages: _The Times_ for Mr. Walkley’s; -_The Times Literary Supplement_ for Mr. Middleton Murry’s; _The -Saturday Review_ for Mr. Hussey’s; _The New Statesman_ for Mr. -Pearsall Smith’s; _The Saturday Westminster Gazette_ for that of -Mr. Arthur Symons; and _The Nineteenth Century and After_ for Mr. -Ralph Wright’s. - - C.K.S.M. - - - - -II - -_A PORTRAIT_ - - -In trying to represent the personality of a friend to those who do -not know him, one has in mind, though one may not deliberately use, a -standard of reference with which he can be compared or contrasted. - -In the case of Proust no such standard is available, and I find myself -driven back to the frequently used but unilluminating word unique -for want of a better expression. This uniqueness consisted less, I -think, in his obvious possession to an outstanding degree of gifts -and charms than in his use of them. Others probably have been and -are as wise, witty, cultured, sympathetic, have possessed or possess -his conversational powers, his charm of manner, his graciousness. -But no one I have ever known combined in his own person so many -attractive qualities and could bring them into play so spontaneously. -Yet, while his use of these powers resulted in his eliciting the -utmost fruitfulness from social intercourse, there was an impalpable -objectivity about him, an aloofness felt rather than observed. It was -as though the personality revealed at the particular moment was but one -of many, while the dominant consciousness lay behind them, preserving -its complete inviolability. It was, I believe, in the depth and -capacity of this ultimate consciousness that his uniqueness lay, as it -is there that the source of his creative power and sensibility is to be -found. - -It seems to me that the essential element of this ultimate ego in -Proust was goodness. This goodness had nothing ethical in it, must not -be confounded with righteousness; and yet, seeking another word to -define its nature, purity is the only one that occurs to me. There was -in him the fundamental simplicity which was typified by Dostoevsky in -Myshkin, and out of it grew the intellectual integrity which governed -and informed his philosophy. - -He possessed that rarest gift of touching everyday people, things, and -concerns with gold, imparting to them a vital and abiding interest. -Anything and everything served as a starting-point, nothing was too -minute to kindle idea and provoke suggestive utterance. He could do -this because he was himself the most interesting of men, and because -Life was one long exciting adventure to him wherein nothing was trivial -or negligible. It was not that loving beauty he desired nothing else, -and was seeking an aesthetic disguise for the ugly, the sordid, or the -base. On the contrary, he recognised that these also are of the stuff -of which humanity is made, and that truth and beauty are as often as -not masked by their opposites. In him extremes were not only reconciled -but united. Supremely conscious and utterly unegotistical, one may look -in vain in his work for a trace of vanity, of self-glorification, -or even self-justification. He is intensely concerned with his own -consciousness, he is never concerned with himself. I can think of no -conversation in any of his books in which he takes other than a minor -part, and of very few in which he takes any part at all. He is wholly -taken up with the thing in itself, whatever it may be, regarding his -consciousness as an instrument of revelation apart from himself. And as -he shows himself in his books, so he was in life. - -In reply to a letter in which, expressing my disappointment at not -seeing him on a certain occasion, I went on to say that, much as I -loved his books, I would rather see him and hear him talk than read -them, he wrote me: - - Entre ce qu’une personne dit et ce qu’elle extrait par la - méditation des profondeurs où l’esprit nu gît, couvert de - voiles, il y a un monde. Il est vrai qu’il y a des gens - supérieurs à leurs livres mais c’est que leurs livres ne - sont pas des _Livres_. Il me semble que Ruskin, qui - disait de temps en temps des choses sensées, a assez bien - exprimé une partie au moins de cela.... Si vous ne lisez - pas mon livre ce n’est pas ma faute; c’est la faute de mon - livre, car s’il était vraiment un beau livre il ferait - aussitôt l’unité dans les esprits épars et rendrait le - calme aux cœurs troubles. - -His immersion in the subject of conversation or inquiry was complete; -nothing else existed until he had got to the bottom of it. But his -world was echoless; the voice never repeated itself, and banality could -not enter in, because neither formula nor classification existed for -him. Just as in his eyes one particular water-lily in the Vivonne was -different from any other water-lily, so each fresh experience was an -isolated unit complete in itself and unlike all other units in the -world of his consciousness. His mind, so far from being overlaid by -obliterating layers of experience, was as a virgin soil which by some -magic renews itself after each fresh crop has been harvested. This -power of mental renewal pervades and gives a peculiar freshness to all -that he has written. It is in essence a youthful quality which was very -marked in his personality. He was penetrated with boyish eagerness and -curiosity, asked endless questions, wanted always to know more. What -had you heard, what did you think, what did they say or do, whatever -_it_ was and whoever _they_ were. And there was no denying -him this or anything he wanted; he must always have his way—he always -did have it, till the end of his life. And the great comfort to those -who loved him is that till the last he was a glorious spoilt child. As -Céleste says in _Sodome_: - - On devrait bien tirer son portrait en ce moment. Il a tout - des enfants. Vous ne vieillirez jamais. Vous avez de la - chance, vous n’aurez jamais à lever la main sur personne, - car vous avez des yeux qui savent imposer leur volonté.... - -This was the same Céleste who devoted her life to his service -for many years and was with him to the last. After his death she -wrote of him: “Monsieur ne ressemblait à personne. C’était un être -incomparable—composé de deux choses, intelligence et cœur—et quel cœur!” - -Knowing the intensity of his interest in and sympathy with humble -lives, the suggestion of snobbishness in connexion with such a man is -ridiculous. Proust, like all great artists, needed access to all human -types. It is one of the drawbacks of our modern civilisation that the -opportunities for varied social intercourse are limited and beset with -conventional prejudices. No man went further than he did to surmount -these. He knew people of the “monde” as he knew others. As he writes in -_Sodome_: - - Je n’avais jamais fait de différence entre les ouvriers, - les bourgeois et les grands seigneurs, et j’aurais pris - indifféremment les uns et les autres pour amis avec une - certaine préférence pour les ouvriers, et après cela pour - les grands seigneurs, non par goût, mais sachant qu’on - peut exiger d’eux plus de politesse envers les ouvriers - qu’on ne l’obtient de la part des bourgeois, soit que les - grands seigneurs ne dédaignent pas les ouvriers comme font - les bourgeois, ou bien parce qu’ils sont volontiers polis - envers n’importe qui, comme les jolies femmes heureuses de - donner un sourire qu’elles savent accueilli avec tant de - joie. - -His friends were in fact of all classes, but his friendship was -accorded only on his own terms, and a condition of it was the capacity -to bear hearing the truth. His friends knew themselves the better for -knowing him, for he was impatient of the slightest insincerity or -disingenuousness and could not tolerate pretence. Lies tired him. In a -letter he alluded thus to one whom we both knew well: - - Ce que je lui reproche, c’est d’être un menteur. Il - a fait ma connaissance à la faveur d’un mensonge et - depuis n’a guère cessé. Il trouve toujours le moyen de - gâter ses qualités par ces petits mensonges qu’il croit - l’avantager—tout petits et quelquefois énormes. - -Proust’s insistence on truthfulness and sincerity caused him more than -once to renounce lifelong associations. His sensibility was so delicate -that a gesture or a note in the voice revealed to him a motive, perhaps -slight and passing, of evasion or pretence. He was exacting about -sincerity only. In other respects his tolerance was so wide that a hard -truth from his lips, so far from wounding, stimulated. To his friends -he was frankness itself, and spoke his mind without reserve. I once -asked him to tell me if there were not some one, some friend of his, to -whom I could talk about him. There was so much I wanted to know, and on -the all too rare occasions when he was well enough to see me there was -never time. In answer to this he wrote me: - - Si vous désirez poser quelque interrogation à une personne - qui me comprenne, c’est bien simple, adressez-vous à moi. - D’ami qui me connaisse entièrement je n’en ai pas.... Je - sais tout sur moi et vous dirai volontiers tout; il est - donc inutile de vous désigner quelque ami mal informé et - qui dans la faible mesure de sa compétence cesserait de - mériter le nom d’ami s’il vous répondait. - -Thus in his words we reach the final conclusion that, even if Proust’s -friends had the power of expressing all that they feel about him, they -would still be “mal informés,” and would have to return to him for -that deeper knowledge which only he could impart. As to this, there -is his further assurance that his work is the best part of himself. -Providentially, he was spared until that work was done and “Fin” on the -last page was written by his own hand. - - STEPHEN HUDSON. - - - - -III - -_THE PROPHET OF DESPAIR_ - - -It is the privilege of those known as the world’s greatest artists to -create the illusion of dragging the reader through the whole mechanism -of life. Such was pre-eminently the gift of Shakespeare, whose -tragedies appear to be microcosms of the universe. Such a gift was that -of Balzac, for all his vulgarities and absurdities, if we may treat -the whole _Comédie Humaine_ as a single novel. Such, in his rare -moments of prodigal creation, was the power of Tolstoy, whom Proust -in some ways so much resembles. Such is the gift of Proust in his -astonishing pseudo-autobiography, _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_. -For it is the sense of imaginative wealth and creative facility that -is the hallmark of the first-rate genius, who must never appear to be -reaching the end of his tether, but must always, on the contrary, leave -the impression of there being better fish in his sea than have ever -come out of it. - -The outpouring of the romantic school of authors, their neglect of -form, their absence of critical faculty, their devastating facility, -have made this truth disagreeable and even doubtful to many minds, -who feel more in sympathy with the costive author of _Adolphe_ -than with the continual flux of Victor Hugo. Yet if Victor Hugo be a -great author at all, as he evidently is, it is because of this very -fertility that we so much dislike; and if Benjamin Constant be not a -great artist, as he evidently is not, the reason must be sought in -the absence of fertility, though we may find its absence sympathetic; -while this same fertility, which is the whole essence of Balzac, is -rendering him formidable and unattractive to a generation of readers. -Now, Proust was eminently fertile, and, within the limits imposed by -his own delicate health, he could go on indefinitely, so profound and -so all-embracing was his interest in human beings and human emotions. -But he was fertile in a new way. Not for him was the uncritical spate -of nineteenth-century verbiage. His intellectual integrity, of which -M.C. Dubos has written so well in his _Approximations_, always -compelled him to check and ponder every move upon the chessboard of -life, every comment on human feelings. For Proust is the latest great -prophet of sensibility, and it is bearing this in mind that we can -trace the intellectual stock of which he comes. - -One of the great landmarks in French literature is pegged out for us -by the Abbé Prévost’s translation of _Clarissa Harlowe_, which -burst on the new sentimental generation, starved on the superficial -brilliance of the Regnards and their successors, with all the energy -of a gospel. The adoration with which this great novel was received -by the most brilliant intellects of eighteenth-century France seems -to-day somewhat excessive, however deep be our sympathy with the mind -and art of Richardson. Remember how Diderot speaks of him: Diderot the -most complete embodiment of the eighteenth century with its sentimental -idealism and fiery common sense—the man in whom reason and spirit were -perfectly blended, the enthusiastic preacher of atheism and humanity: - - O Richardson, Richardson! homme unique à mes yeux. Tu - seras ma lecture dans tous les temps. Forcé par les - besoins pressants si mon ami tombe dans l’indigence, si la - médiocrité de ma fortune ne suffit pas pour donner à mes - enfants les soins nécessaires à leur éducation je vendrai - mes livres, mais tu me resteras; tu me resteras sur le même - rayon avec Virgile, Homère, Euripide, et Sophocle. Je vous - lirai tour à tour. Plus on a l’âme belle, plus on aime la - vérité, plus on a le goût exquis et pur, plus on connaît la - nature, plus on estime les ouvrages de Richardson. - -The new sentimental movement, developed to such a pitch of perfection -by the author of _Clarissa Harlowe_, was one of enormous value to -life and art. But inevitably it was pushed much too far, and the novels -of the _école larmoyante_ are now well-nigh intolerable, even -when written by men of genius like Rousseau, whose characters seem to -spend their lives in one continual jet of tears in a country where the -floodgates of ill-controlled emotion are never for an instant shut. - -Rousseau had one great pupil, a great name in the history of the French -novel, Stendhal. But he wore his Rousseau with a difference. For -Rousseau represented, in his novels, but one side of the eighteenth -century, the sentimental; but there was another, the scientific—and -the life work of Stendhal consisted in an untiring effort to combine -the two. For what was the avowed ambition of the self-conscious -sentimentalist that was Stendhal? Soaked in the writings of Lavater, -de Tracy, and the Scotch metaphysicians, crossed with a romantic -passion for Rousseau and the Elizabethan drama, he wished to be as -_sec_ as possible, and boasted that he read a portion of the -_Code Civil_ every day—a document Rémy de Gourmont may be right -in calling diffuse, but which is certainly not romantic. Nourished -on Shakespeare, Rousseau, and de Tracy, Stendhal became one of the -first completely modern men, who study the working of their minds -with the imaginative enthusiasm, but also with the cold objectivity, -of a scientist dissecting a tadpole. Like the young scientist in -Hans Andersen, his first instinct was to catch the toad and put it -in spirits; but in this case the toad was his own soul. Stendhal was -too much of a revolutionary in writing ever to have been completely -successful; but the immensity of his achievement may be gauged by the -fact that parts of _L’Amour_, and still more of _Le Rouge et le -Noir_, are really of practical value to lovers, who might profit -considerably in the conduct of their affairs by a careful study of -Stendhal’s advice, if only they were ever in a position to listen -to reason. Now, this is something quite new in fiction, and would -have astonished his grandfather Richardson. Proust is in turn the -intellectual child of Stendhal, and has bespattered _A la Recherche -du Temps Perdu_ with expressions of admiration for his master. -In truth, he has taken over not only the methods but the philosophy -of his teacher. It will be remembered that Stendhal insists in his -analysis of _L’Amour-Passion_ that crystallisation can only be -effected after doubt has been experienced. So, for Proust, love, the -_mal sacré_ as he calls it, can only be called into being by -jealousy, _le plus affreux des supplices_. We can want nothing -till we have been cheated out of getting it; whence it follows that we -can get nothing till we have ceased to want it, and in any case, once -obtained, it would _ipso facto_ cease to be desirable. Hence Man, -“how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how -express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension -how like a god,” is doomed by the nature of his being to unsatisfied -desire and restless misery, till Proust becomes, as I have called him -above, the prophet of despair. He is a master of the agonising moments -spent hanging in vain round the telephone, the weeks passed waiting -for letters that never come, and the terrible reactions after one’s -own fatal letter has been irrevocably posted and not all the jewels -of Golconda can extract it from the pillar-box. For how does the hero -of his novels finally pass under the sway of Albertine? Through agony -caused by the cutting of an appointment. - - Comme chaque fois que la porte cochère s’ouvrait, la - concierge appuyait sur un bouton électrique qui éclairait - l’escalier, et comme il n’y avait pas de locataires qui - ne fussent rentrés, je quittai immédiatement la cuisine - et revins m’asseoir dans l’antichambre, épiant, là où - la tenture un peu trop étroite qui ne couvrait pas - complètement la porte vitrée de notre appartement, laissait - passer la sombre raie verticale faite par la demi-obscurité - de l’escalier. Si tout d’un coup, cette raie devenait d’un - blond doré, c’est qu’Albertine viendrait d’entrer en bas - et serait dans deux minutes près de moi; personne d’autre - ne pouvait plus venir à cette heure-là. Et je restais, ne - pouvant détacher mes yeux de la raie qui s’obstinait à - demeurer sombre; je me penchais tout entier pour être sûr - de bien voir; mais j’avais beau regarder, le noir trait - vertical, malgré mon désir passionné, ne me donnait pas - l’enivrante allégresse que j’aurais eue, si je l’avais vu, - changé par un enchantement soudain et significatif, en un - lumineux barreau d’or. _C’était bien de l’inquiétude, - pour cette Albertine à laquelle je n’avais pensé trois - minutes pendant la soirée Guermantes!_ Mais, réveillant - les sentiments d’attente jadis éprouvés à propos d’autres - jeunes filles, surtout de Gilberte, quand elle tardait - à venir, _la privation possible d’un simple plaisir - physique me causait une cruelle souffrance morale_. - -Indeed, happiness in love is by nature impossible, as it demands an -impossible spiritual relationship. - - If we thought that the eyes of a girl like that were merely - two glittering sequins of mica, we should not be athirst - to know her and to unite her life to ours. But we feel - that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due - solely to their material composition; that it is, unknown - to us, the dark shadows of the ideas that the creature is - conceiving, relative to the people and places that she - knows—the turf of racecourses, the sand of cycling tracks - over which, pedalling on past fields and woods, she would - have drawn me after her, that little peri, more seductive - to me than she of the Persian paradise—the shadows, too, - of the home to which she will presently return, of the - plans that she is forming or that others have formed for - her; and above all that it is she, with her desires, her - sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. - I knew that I should never possess this young cyclist if - I did not possess also what was in her eyes. And it was - consequently her whole life that filled me with desire; a - sorrowful desire _because I felt that it was not to be - realised_, but exhilarating, because what had hitherto - been my life, having ceased suddenly to be my whole - life, being no more now than a little part of the space - stretching out before me, which I was burning to cover and - which was composed of the lives of these girls, offered me - that prolongation, that possible multiplication of oneself, - which is happiness. And no doubt the fact that we had, - these girls and I, not one habit, as we had not one idea, - in common, was to make it more difficult for me to make - friends with them and to please them. But perhaps, also, - it was thanks to those differences, to my consciousness - that there did not enter into the composition of the nature - and actions of these girls a single element that I knew - or possessed, that there came in place of my satiety a - thirst—like that with which a dry land burns—for a life - which my soul, because it had never until now received one - drop of it, would absorb all the more greedily in long - draughts, with a more perfect imbibition.[1] - -[Footnote 1: Mr. Birrell, whose essay, though first printed in _The -Dial_, was written for inclusion in this volume, has kindly -consented to my substituting for the original text my own versions of -this and the following quotations from _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles -en Fleurs_ and _Du Côté de chez Swann_ respectively.—C.K.S.M.] - -Proust, having thus reduced all human society to misery, builds upon -the ruins his philosophy of salvation: Only by much suffering shall -we enter into the Kingdom of Heaven—that is to say, shall we be -enabled to see ourselves solely and simply as members of the human -race, to perceive what is essential and fundamental in everybody -beneath the trappings of manners, birth, or fortune, learn to be -really intelligent. Love and jealousy alone can open to us the -portals of intelligence. Thus, in the opening pages of _Du Côté de -chez Swann_, the poor little boy, who, because M. Swann is dining -with his parents, cannot receive in bed his mother’s kiss, starts on -the long spiritual journey which is to run parallel to that of the -brilliant, unhappy _mondain_ guest. Miserable at being left alone, -he desperately sends down to his mother an agonised note by his nurse, -and in his agitation he hates Swann, whom he regards as the cause of -his misery, and continues to reflect: - - As for the agony through which I had just passed, I - imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he - had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on - the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar - anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and - no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that - moment so well as himself; to him, that anguish which lies - in knowing that the creature one adores is in some place - of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow—to him - that anguish came through Love, to which it is in a sense - predestined, by which it must be equipped and adapted; - but when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses - one’s soul before Love has yet entered into one’s life, - then it must drift, awaiting Love’s coming, vague and - free without precise attachment, at the disposal of one - sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety or - affection for a comrade. And the joy with which I first - bound myself apprentice, when Françoise returned to tell me - that my letter would be delivered, Swann, too, had known - well that false joy which a friend can give us, or some - relative of the woman we love, when on his arrival at the - house or theatre where she is to be found, for some ball or - party or first night at which he is to meet her, he sees us - wandering outside, desperately awaiting some opportunity of - communicating with her. - -“We brought nothing into the world,” remarked the first Christian -Stoic, “and it is certain we shall take nothing out of it.” He might -have made an exception for our personality, that enormous anonymity, -unmalleable as granite and unchanging as the ocean, which we brought -along with us from a thousand ancestors and shall carry unaltered to -the grave. Swann and little Proust, both endowed with sensibility, -could shake hands with each other across the generations: all the -experiences of one, all the innocence of the other, were as nothing -beside that similarity of temperament which calls to us irrevocably, as -Christ called to Matthew at the receipt of custom, and bids us share -with our friend the miseries of the past and the terrors of the future. - -Proust’s youth was spent in Paris during that period when France was -spiritually and politically severed by the _Affaire Dreyfus_, and -for him the _Affaire_ becomes the touchstone of sensibility and -intelligence. To be a Dreyfusard means to pass beyond the sheltered -harbour of one’s own clique and interest into the uncharted sea -of human solidarity. Hard indeed is the way of the rich man, the -aristocrat, the snob, or the gentleman, who wishes to find salvation -during the _Affaire_. He must leave behind him taste, beauty, -comfort, and education, consort, in spirit at least, with intolerable -Jews, fifth-rate politicians, and insufferable _arrivistes_, -before worthily taking up the burden of human misery and routing the -forces of superstition and stupidity. And there is only one school for -this lesson, the school of romantic love—that is to say, of carking -jealousy, in the throes of which all men are equal. Little Proust -himself, his bold and beautiful friend the Marquis de Saint-Loup, the -eccentric and arrogant M. de Charlus, even the stupid high-minded -Prince de Guermantes, who all know the meaning of romantic love, -as opposed to the facile pleasure of successive mistresses, will -eventually, be it only for a short moment, triumphantly stand the test. -But Saint-Loup’s saintly mother, Mme. de Marsantes, the rakish Duc de -Guermantes and his brilliant, charming, but limited wife, will never -put out to sea on the ship of misery, bound for the ever-receding -shores of romantic love and universal comprehension. They will -never risk their lives for one great moment, for the satisfaction -of unbounded passion. Swann tortured and fascinated by his flashy -_cocotte_, little Proust lacerated by the suspected infidelities -of the niece of a Civil Servant, Saint-Loup in the clutches of an -obscure and ill-conditioned actress of budding genius, M. de Charlus -broken by the sheer brutality of his young musician: such are the -people who have their souls and such are the painful schools in which -Salvation is learned—the Salvation that comes from forgetting social -prejudice and from not mistaking the “plumage for the dying bird,” from -judging people by their intrinsic merit, from making no distinction -between servants and masters, between prince and peasant. For, as the -author insists with almost maddening iteration, good brains and good -breeding never go together: all ultimate talent and perception is -with the cads. The price to pay is heavy and incessant. A little easy -happiness, a little recovery from hopeless love, a passing indifference -to ill-requited affection, can undo all the good acquired by endless -misery in the long course of years. - -Such I take to be the fundamental thought underlying _A la Recherche -du Temps Perdu_ in its present unfinished state, though we cannot -tell what surprises the succeeding volumes (happily completed) may -have in store for us. I have insisted, at perhaps excessive length, on -the general mental background to this vast epic of jealousy, because -it is not very easy to determine. The enormous wealth of the author’s -gifts tends to bury the structure under the superb splendour of the -ornament. For Proust combines, to a degree never before realised in -literature, the qualities of the aesthete and the scientist. It is the -quality which first strikes the reader who does not notice, in the -aesthetic rapture communicated by perfect style, that all pleasures are -made pegs for disillusion. Human beauty, the beauty of buildings, of -the sea, of the sky, the beauty of transmitted qualities in families -and in the country-side, the beauty of history, of good breeding, of -self-assurance—few people have felt these things as Proust. For him -the soft place-names of France are implicit with memories too deep for -tears. Let us take one passage among many where the aesthete Proust is -feeling intensely a thousand faint suggestions: - - Quand je rentrai, le concierge de l’hôtel me remit une - lettre de deuil où faisaient part le marquis et la marquise - de Gonneville, le vicomte et la vicomtesse d’Amfreville, - le comte et la comtesse de Berneville, le marquis et la - marquise de Graincourt, le comte d’Amenoncourt, la comtesse - de Maineville, le comte et la comtesse de Franquetot, la - comtesse de Chaverny née d’Aigleville, et de laquelle - je compris enfin pourquoi elle m’était envoyée quand je - reconnus les noms de la marquise de Cambremer née du Mesnil - la Guichard, du marquis et de la marquise de Cambremer, - et que je vis que la morte, une cousine des Cambremer, - s’appelait Éléonore-Euphrasie-Humbertine de Cambremer, - comtesse de Criquetot. Dans toute l’étendue de cette - famille provinciale dont le dénombrement remplissait des - lignes fines et serrées, pas un bourgeois, et d’ailleurs - pas un titre connu, mais tout le ban et l’arrière-ban des - nobles de la région qui faisaient chanter leurs noms—ceux - de tous les lieux intéressants du pays—aux joyeux finales - en _ville_, en _court_, parfois plus sourdes - (en _tot_). Habillés des tuiles de leur château ou - du crépi de leur église, la tête branlante dépassant à - peine la voûte ou le corps-de-logis et seulement pour se - coiffer du lanternon normand ou des colombages du toit en - poivrière, ils avaient l’air d’avoir sonné le rassemblement - de tous les jolis villages échelonnés ou dispersés à - cinquante lieues à la ronde et de les avoir disposés en - formation serrée, sans une lacune, sans un intrus, dans le - damier compact et rectangulaire de l’aristocratique lettre - bordée de noir. - -Such a passage contains in little the whole history of a nation -reflected in the magic mirror of a nation’s country-side, equally -desirable for its human suggestiveness and for its pure aesthetic worth. - -And here we may pause for a moment to consider one of the most -important aspects of Proust’s aesthetic impulse, which is expressed -in the title _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_, the Remembrance of -Things Past. This is more than the expression of a desire to write an -autobiography, to recapitulate one’s own vanishing experience. It is an -endeavour to reconstruct the whole of the past, on which the present is -merely a not particularly valuable comment. Royalties are interesting -because they have retired from business, aristocrats because they -have nothing left but their manners; the _bourgeoisie_ still -carry with them the relics of their old servility, the people have -not yet realised their power; and a social flux results therefrom, -the study of which can never grow boring to the onlooker as long as -superficially the old order continues, though it represent nothing -but an historic emotion. The hero as he winds along the path of his -emotional experience from childhood to adolescence is pictured as -avid for all these historic sensibilities which find their expression -in his early passion for the Guermantes group, the most aristocratic -combination of families in France. From his earliest childhood he has -dreamed about them, picturing them as their ancestors, whom he has -seen in the stained-glass windows of his village church at Combray; -till he has woven round them all the warm romance of the Middle Ages, -the austere splendours of _Le Grand Siècle_, the brilliant decay -of eighteenth-century France. But when he meets them, the courage has -gone, the intelligence has gone, and only the breeding remains. It was -the greatest historical disillusion in the boy’s life. Yet there still -hangs about them the perfume of a vanished social order, and Proust -makes splendid use of his hero’s spiritual adventure. As he wanders -through the _salons_, fast degenerating into drawing-rooms, -he becomes the Saint-Simon of the _décadence_. For Proust can -describe, with a mastery only second to that of Saint-Simon himself, -the sense of social life, the reaction of an individual to a number of -persons, and the interplay of a number of members of the same group -upon each other. His capacity for describing the manifold pleasures of -a party would have stirred the envy of the great author of _Rome, -Naples et Florence_. Many people can only see snobbery in this -heroic effort to project the past upon the screen of the present. -Yet the author is too intelligent and honest not in the end to throw -away his romantic spectacles. The _Côté de Guermantes_ cannot be -permanently satisfying. Again bursts in the philosophy of disillusion. -When he has obtained with immense labour the key to the forbidden -chamber, he finds nothing but stage properties inside. - -But this poet of political, economic, and social institutions is also -the pure poet of Nature in another mood: - - Là, où je n’avais vu avec ma grand’mère au mois d’août que - les feuilles et comme l’emplacement des pommiers, à perte - de vue ils étaient en pleine floraison, d’un luxe inouï, - les pieds dans la boue et en toilette de bal, ne prenant - pas de précautions pour ne pas gâter le plus merveilleux - satin rose qu’on eût jamais vu, et que faisait briller - le soleil: l’horizon lointain de la mer fournissait aux - pommiers comme un arrière-plan d’estampe japonaise; si je - levais la tête pour regarder le ciel, entre les fleurs qui - faisaient paraître son bleu rasséréné, presque violent, - elles semblaient s’écarter pour montrer la profondeur de - ce paradis. Sous cet azur, une brise légère, mais froide, - faisait trembler légèrement les bouquets rougissants. Des - mésanges bleues venaient se poser sur les branches et - sautaient entre les fleurs indulgentes, comme si c’eût - été un amateur d’exotisme et de couleurs, qui avait - artificiellement créé cette beauté vivante. Mais elle - touchait jusqu’aux larmes, parce que, si loin qu’on allât - dans ses effets d’art raffiné, on sentait qu’elle était - naturelle, que ces pommiers étaient là en pleine campagne - comme les paysans, sur une grande route de France. Puis aux - rayons du soleil succédèrent subitement ceux de la pluie; - ils zébrèrent tout l’horizon, enserrèrent la file des - pommiers dans leur réseau gris. Mais ceux-ci continuaient à - dresser leur beauté, fleurie et rose, dans le vent devenu - glacial sous l’averse qui tombait: c’était une journée de - printemps. - -But so wide-minded is this lyric poet who can speak with the voice -of Claudel and of Fustel de Coulanges, that he is also perhaps the -coldest analyst who has ever devoted his attention to fiction. His -knife cuts down into the very souls of his patients, as he calls -into play all the resources of his wit, animosities, sympathy, and -intelligence. He is a master of all the smaller nuances of social -relations, of all the half-whispered subterranean emotions that bind -Society together while Society barely dreams of their existence. - -It is also worth remark that Proust is the first author to treat sexual -inversion as a current and ordinary phenomenon, which he describes -neither in the vein of tedious panegyric adopted by certain decadent -writers, nor yet with the air of a showman displaying to an agitated -tourist abysses of unfathomable horror. Treating this important -social phenomenon as neither more nor less important than it is, he -has derived from it new material for his study of social relations, -and has greatly enriched and complicated the texture of his plot. His -extreme honesty meets nowhere with more triumphant rewards. It is by -the splendid use of so much unusual knowledge that Proust gains his -greatest victories as a pure novelist. Royalty, actresses, bourgeois, -servants, peasants, men, women, and children—they all have the genuine -third dimension and seem to the reader more real than his own friends. -The story is told of an English naval officer that he once knocked -down a Frenchman for casting doubt on the chastity of Ophelia. It is -to the credit of Shakespeare’s supreme genius that our sympathies are -with the naval officer, for Shakespeare’s characters, too, are as real -to us as our parents and friends and more real than our relations and -our acquaintances. But to how few artists can this praise be given, -save to Shakespeare and to Tolstoy! Yet to Proust it can be given in -full measure. To read _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ is to live -in the world, at any rate in Proust’s world—a world more sensitive, -variegated, and interesting than our own. - -It is difficult to analyse the ultimate quality of an artist’s triumph; -yet such is the function of criticism, the sole justification of -writing books about books. Proust, it seems to me, had the extremely -rare faculty of seeing his characters objectively and subjectively at -the same moment. He can project himself so far into the mind of the -persons he is describing that he seems to know more about them than -they can ever know themselves, and the reader feels, in the process, -that he never even dimly knew himself before. At the same time he never -takes sides. The warm, palpitating flesh he is creating is also and -always a decorative figure on the huge design of his tapestry, just -as in _Petroushka_ the puppets are human beings and the human -beings puppets. For Proust, though the most objective, is also the -most personal of writers. As we get accustomed to the long, tortuous -sentences, the huge elaboration of conscientious metaphor, the -continual refining on what cannot be further refined, we insensibly -become listeners to a long and brilliant conversation by the wisest -and wittiest of men. For Proust, as much as any man, has grafted the -mellowness and also the exacerbation of experience on to the untiring -inquisitiveness of youth. In a page of amazing prophecy, written as -long ago as 1896, M. Anatole France summed up the achievement of Proust -at a moment when his life work had barely begun: - - Sans doute il est jeune. Il est jeune de la jeunesse de - l’auteur. Mais il est vieux de la vieillesse du monde. - C’est le printemps des feuilles sur les rameaux antiques, - dans la forêt séculaire. On dirait que les pousses - nouvelles sont attristés du passé profond des bois et - portent le deuil de tant de printemps morts.... - - Il y a en lui du Bernardin de Saint-Pierre dépravé et du - Pétrone ingénu. - -This is not the moment to pretend to estimate impartially his exact -place and achievement in letters. For the present we can only feel his -death, almost personally, so much has he woven himself into the hearts -of his readers, and apply to him in all sincerity the words Diderot -used of his predecessor in time: - - Plus on a l’âme belle, plus on a le goût exquis et pur, - plus on connaît la nature, plus on aime la vérité, plus on - estime les ouvrages de Proust. - - FRANCIS BIRRELL. - - - - -IV - -_A SENSITIVE PETRONIUS_ - - -Marcel Proust died in Paris on the 18th day of November last. To -many Englishmen his name is still unknown; to others his death came -as a shock so great that it was as if one of their most intimate -acquaintances had suddenly passed from them; and even among those -who have read his works there is, in this country at least, quite -pointed disagreement. On one side there are many who will confess -in private, though not so willingly in public, that they have never -been able to “get through” his great work; that “the man is a bore,” -is “undiscussable in mixed society,” is “a snob,” and that, if you -ask their opinion, “there is too much fuss made about the fellow -altogether.” On the other are men, not given to overpraising the age in -which they live, who unashamedly compare him with Montaigne, Stendhal, -Tolstoy, and other “masters of the human heart”; and not that only, but -will discuss by the hour together Swann, the Duchesse de Guermantes, -Madame de Villeparisis, Bloch, M. de Charlus, Albertine, Gilberte, -Odette, the impossible and indefatigable Verdurins, and a hundred of -his other characters, as if they were personal friends, and as if it -were of real importance to them to discover what exactly were the -motives of So-and-so on such and such an occasion, and how So-and-so -else would view their actions if he knew. - -The reason for these disagreements is not, perhaps, hard to find. -Proust, let us own to it at once, is not every one’s novelist. He is -difficult to read in the sense that he does demand complete attention -and considerable efforts of memory. He has an outlook on life which is -bound to be unsympathetic to a good many Englishmen—and a good many -Frenchmen too, for that matter. He is very “long”; and it is necessary -to have read _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ more than once to be -able to see the general plan for the hosts of characters and scenes -that, as one reads it book by book, so vividly hold the stage. But -before we attempt to discuss the book it is important to see what its -author had in mind when he first sat down, a good many years ago, to -start writing it. - -Some one has said that the difference between a play and a novel is -that while watching a play you have the privileges of a most intimate -friend, but while reading a novel the privileges of God. However true -this may be of the novel as it exists to-day (and, to read some modern -novels, one might hardly suspect one’s divine position), it is by -no means true of the novel throughout its history. It is clear, if -we go back far enough, for example, that with Longus, or Plutarch, -or Petronius, the reader’s position is very nearly as much that of -a spectator as when he is watching a play by Shakespeare. And the -same thing remains roughly true of all novels up to the middle of the -eighteenth century. It is not, indeed, until we come to Richardson -and Rousseau that we find anything like the modern insistence on the -personal and intimate life of a man or a woman as a thing valuable -in itself. No one except Montaigne and Burton, neither of whom was a -novelist, appears to have been introspective before that date. What -mattered before was conduct; what was to matter afterwards was feeling. - -But if the world had long to wait for this revolution, none has -certainly taken so instantaneous an effect. Every one knows how the -reading of _Clarissa Harlowe_ influenced such an independent and -sturdy mind as Diderot’s, and what Diderot felt that day the whole of -literary France was feeling on the morrow. The days of the _petits -maîtres_ and the epigrammatists were past, and all eyes were turned -towards the rising sun of sentiment; _Le Sopha_ had given place to -the _Vie de Marianne_. But this advance was attended very closely -by its compensating drawback. - -It was perhaps necessary, if anything is ever necessary, that this -newly awakened interest in the individual mind should be accompanied -by a new idealism to falsify it from the outset. However this may -be, there can be small doubt that the result of this revolution was -a new crop of conventionalities considerably less truthful and, as -it seems to us to-day, more harmful than the old. Sentimentality had -come to birth in a night. The newly discovered world was apparently -too painful a spectacle to be faced, and to cover its nakedness new -doctrines like “the perfectibility of man,” new angles of vision like -those of Romanticism, had somehow to be invented. Fifty years were to -pass before another honest work of the imagination, with one exception, -could come to light in France; and the author of that exception, -Laclos, is as interesting a commentary on the generation succeeding -Rousseau as one can find. _Les Liaisons dangereuses_ is for its -own or any other time an extraordinarily truthful book; the characters, -as they express themselves in their letters, are not inhuman, but human -monsters; not spotless, but only foolish innocents. The tragedy is -moving in the modern way; you identify your feelings with those of the -characters themselves. But Laclos was not satisfied with the book as -it stands. He was a fervent disciple of Rousseau’s, and there appears -to be little doubt that the book which exists was only intended to be -a picture of the “false” society in which they, and we, live, and was -to be followed by another showing what men and women would immediately -be like if only they could live and act “naturally.” “_Le grand -défaut de tous ces livres à paradoxes_,” said Voltaire of Rousseau, -“_n’est-il pas de supposer toujours la nature autrement qu’elle -n’est?_” - -_La nature telle qu’elle est_—such is to be the aim of the French -nineteenth-century novelists if only they can see their opportunity. -It must be confessed that several of them failed. An interest in -psychology had been awakened, yet one compares _Les Misérables_ -with _La Princesse de Clèves_ and may be excused for forgetting -it. Throughout the first part of the century, at any rate, it seems -as if the last thing a novelist ever asked himself was, “Would I or -any reasonable creature act or feel like that?” Common-sense had gone -by the board again, and “the fine,” “the noble,” “the proud,” “the -pathetic,” and “the touching” held the stage. - -Yet great advances were made. Balzac, for all his lack of balance and -for all his hasty carelessness, was giant enough to make a hundred on -his own account. The “naturalists,” without making any great advances -in psychology, at least were in earnest in clearing out the old stage -properties, in insisting that a love scene could take place as well in -a railway carriage or a hansom cab at eleven o’clock in the morning -as on a lake by moonlight or on a balcony at dawn. And Stendhal—but -Stendhal was the first of the moderns, the master of the whole -generation which is passing, and he had to wait till the ’eighties -before his influence became important. Whatever is valuable in the -advances that the novel has made during its latest period is valuable -just in so far as it is the result of an insistence, with Rousseau, -on being interested in the intricacies of human feeling, and an equal -insistence, with Voltaire, in refusing to sentimentalise them. That -these are the only lines on which the novelist can advance no one would -dream of asserting. But it is more particularly because Marcel Proust -seems here to stand head and shoulders above his generation, and not -on account of his many other merits as an artist, that he has such a -passionate, if still comparatively small, following to-day. - -He is, perhaps, if we return to that definition of the difference -between a novel and a play, more of the essential novelist than any man -has ever been. His aim is by a hundred different methods to make you -know his chief characters, not as if you were meeting them every day, -but as if you yourself had for the moment actually been living in their -skins and inhabiting their minds. Everything possible must be done to -help you to this end. You must feel the repulsions and attractions -they feel; you must even share their ancestors, their upbringing, -and the class in which they live, and share them so intimately that -with you, as with them, they have become second nature. Nor is even -this enough. The man who knows himself is not common, and to know -Proust’s characters as you know yourself may only be a small advance in -knowledge. So every motive of importance, every reaction to whatever -stimulus they receive, is analysed and explained until your feeling -will probably be, not only how well you know this being, who is in -so many respects unlike you, but how far more clearly you have seen -into the obscure motives of your own most distressing and ridiculous -actions, how far more understandable is an attitude to life or to your -neighbours that you yourself have almost unconsciously, and perhaps in -mere self-protection, adopted. - -But a short example of this is needed, and a short example of anything -in Proust is not easy to find. A character just sketched in one -volume will be developed in another, and to grasp the significance of -the first sketch one has to wait for the fuller illumination of the -development. And even then the short sketch is as often as not several -pages of the most closely written analysis, quite impossible to quote -from, or in full. There is, however, a very small character in the -first book, _Du Côté de chez Swann_, who may serve. M. Vinteuil is -an obscure musician of genius, living in the country. He holds his head -high among his neighbours, and, on account of his daughter, refuses to -meet the only other really cultured man in the district, Swann, who has -made what M. Vinteuil considers a disreputable marriage. Suddenly M. -Vinteuil’s daughter forms a disgraceful friendship. There is scandal in -the eyes of every man or woman he meets, scandal which he, poor man, -knows quite well to be founded on the most deplorable facts. - - And yet, however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his - daughter’s conduct, it did not follow that his adoration - of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate - to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it - was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are - powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual - blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening - them; an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one - after another, without interruption, into the bosom of a - family will not make it lose faith either in the clemency - of its God or in the capacity of its physician. But when - M. Vinteuil regarded his daughter and himself from the - point of view of the world, and of their reputation, when - he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank - which they occupied in the general estimation of their - neighbours, then he was bound to give judgment, to utter - his own and her social condemnation in precisely the terms - which the inhabitants of Combray most hostile to him and - his daughter would have employed; he saw himself and her - in “low,” the very “lowest water,” inextricably stranded; - and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, - that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom - he must now look up (however far beneath him they might - hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some - means of rising again to their level, which is an almost - mechanical result of any human misfortune. - -The quotation is chosen on account of its shortness, and there are -perhaps many hundred other examples which, could they be quoted in -full, would show more fully this essential difference between the -novel as Proust understands it and the older novel or the play. -Here, at least, we have his method compressed. We have M. Vinteuil’s -unshakable faith in his daughter, as a jumping-off ground, founded -on the past and unaltered by the facts of the present. We have also -the pitying attitude of the world to himself and its hostile attitude -to his daughter. And from this comes M. Vinteuil’s other feeling, no -less strong than his faith in his daughter, that they two have somehow -sunk, become degraded, not only in the eyes of the world, but also, -and because of it, in their own eyes as well. Lastly, as a reaction -from this, we have the effect of these feelings on M. Vinteuil’s -manner—his attitude of humility before the world for sins that he has -not committed, for the conduct of a person in whom he still completely -believes, which, however ridiculous to the logician, can only be -recognised by the rest of us as most disquietingly true to our own -experience. It is this complexity in our emotions, this capability of -feeling many different things at the same time about any one particular -incident or person, that the novel alone can give; and it is on these -lines that Marcel Proust has adventured farther than any other man. - -And here, of course, he has great advantages. Proust, unlike so many -of the great creative artists, started late in life the work by which -he will be judged. He is mature as few great men have been mature, -cultured as still fewer have been cultured. Wide reading is far -from common among great artists. The driving force necessary to the -accomplishment of any work of art is seldom found in alliance with wide -culture; that, more often than not, is to be found among the world’s -half-failures. Neither Shakespeare, nor Molière, nor Fielding, nor -Richardson, nor Balzac, nor Dickens, nor Dostoevsky, nor Ibsen was a -widely cultured man. In Shakespeare, the loss is more than compensated -by surety of intuition. In Balzac, there is a lack of the critical -faculty that makes it possible for him, even towards the end of his -life, to give in the same year one thing as beautiful as _Eugénie -Grandet_ and another as puerile as _Ferragus_, that allows -him to compare the novels of “Monk” Lewis with _La Chartreuse -de Parme_ and to call Maturin “_un des plus grands génies de -l’Europe_.” - -But Proust, like Montaigne and like Racine, besides having an extreme -sensitiveness to all forms of beauty and ugliness, happiness and -misery, that he has met in his social existence, has also read widely -in the works of other sensitive men, has compared their impressions -with each other and with his own, has learnt from their successes -and failures; he is armed with more than his natural equipment, has -more eyes to see through than his own. Actually his books are filled -from end to end with criticisms of music, of painting, of literature, -not in the way that is unfortunately familiar in this country, as -unassimilated chunks in the main stream of the narrative, but as -expressions of the opinions of different characters. - -This is not the only, nor indeed the chief, advantage that a wide -experience in other arts, and other men’s art, has given him. What -is of more importance is the attitude that springs from it of seeing -historically the age and society in which he lives. Nothing for him -stands still, not even to-day; and, because he realises that to-day -itself will to-morrow be only part of the stream of the past, he can -view it with the same calmly passionate interest as that which we bring -to the discoveries at Luxor. As few men are to-day, he appears to be -“_au-dessus de la mêlée_,” not, like the ancient gods, “careless -of mankind,” but curious, acutely sympathetic, and able at any moment -to bring his own experience and the experience of a thousand other men -in tens of other centuries to the understanding of one small case at -the tiny point of time which is momentarily under his observation. - -To give any idea of the plot of _A la Recherche du Temps -Perdu_—and it has a plot, and a very closely knit one, too (how -closely one only begins to realise after several re-readings)—is, -of course, out of the question. Its form is that of an imaginary -autobiography, and it is obvious that much genuine autobiography is -inextricably woven with work of imagination. The first book (_Du -Côté de chez Swann_) is occupied in part by memories of childhood, -and in part, as it seems at first, by another story altogether, the -account of a love affair of M. Swann’s. Of course this story is not a -mere excrescence, but it is only slowly, as the later books are read, -that we begin to see Proust’s immense cunning in introducing us early -in the novel to Swann’s affairs. For they have a purpose beyond the -fact that Swann becomes in time a friend of the young man, who is then -in his childhood, and beyond the fact that he is very intimately mixed -up with many others of the most important characters in the book. And -this purpose is that of a prelude to the later and fuller story. It is, -as it were, a standing example at the outset of the truism that no one -ever learns by the mistakes of others—that what has been will be again -in the next generation, with only the mere outward changes which time -and place impose. In the second book (_A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles -en Fleurs_) we accompany the hero (it is one of the significant -curiosities of Proust, akin to his refusal to divide his book into -chapters, that never once is this hero named in the whole course of -the work) to the seaside, and feel with him the emotions of an acutely -sensitive boy just growing into manhood. And the remaining books are -all occupied more or less with his efforts to assimilate the new social -worlds in Paris and at Balbec Plage which are opening out before his -curious and very sharply observant eyes. - -There are those who, after enjoying the first two books, have -complained rather bitterly of the succeeding ones. One charge against -Proust seems to be that he deals more than is necessary with what -are called “unpleasant” subjects and people; another is clearly, -though not usually put into so few words, that he is a snob. As -regards the first charge, it is true that Proust, like most French -writers, is apt to claim with Terence, _Humani nihil a me alienum -puto_; to urge that he is ever coarse, that he is ever anything, -in fact, but extremely discriminating in his touch, is, as a matter -of fact, absurd. But the other charge is more valuable because, while -mistaken, it does emphasise a side of Proust’s interests in life -which is of some considerable significance. It is true that Proust is -extremely interested not only in individuals but in those extensions -of personality which are classes, cliques, bodies of men and women, -which, however formed, by coming together succeed in developing a sort -of communal outlook upon life. It is true also that a good deal of the -book is occupied with two of these classes in particular, both of them -rich, the aristocracy and the pushing _bourgeoisie_ that likes to -employ the artist and the intellectual as “stepping-stones from their -dead selves to higher things.” But to call this interest snobbery is, -surely, a sign of rather careless reading. It is to assume that the -_naïveté_ of the young man’s first adoration of the old families -of France, long before he had learnt to know them, is, in fact, the -attitude of Proust himself. Even in the case of the young man snobbery -seems a hard term for his actual state of mind. - - Nor could we ever reach that goal to which I longed so - much to attain, Guermantes itself. I knew that it was - the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse - de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who - did actually exist, but whenever I thought about them - I pictured them to myself either in tapestry, as was - the “Coronation of Esther” which hung in our church, or - else in changing rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad - in his window, where he passed from cabbage green when - I was dipping my fingers in the holy-water stoup, to - plum-blue when I had reached our row of chairs; or again - altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève de - Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the - magic lantern sent wandering over the curtains of my room - or flung aloft upon the ceiling—in short, always wrapped - in the mystery of the Merovingian age, and bathed, as - in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the - resounding syllable _antes_. And if in spite of - that they were for me, in their capacity as a duke and - duchess, real people, though of an unfamiliar kind, this - ducal personality was in its turn enormously distended, - immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that - Guermantes of which they were duke and duchess, all that - sunlit “Guermantes way” of our walks, the course of the - Vivonne, its water-lilies and its overshadowing trees, and - an endless series of hot summer afternoons. - -Is there any wonder that this young poet—and he was very young—when -first he meets the Duchess in real life, and is welcomed into the -select circle of her friends, should feel tremendously excited? But -snob is not the right word. - -As a fact, of course, what these complainants have missed is the use -to which this aristocratic circle has been put in the life-history of -the hero. For Proust, like any writer that can be read over and over -again, has stamped his work through and through with his own peculiarly -coloured personal psychology. And if there is one theme that is -being insistently played throughout the whole work (like Swann’s and -Odette’s phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata), in incident after incident, -in the adventures of one character after another, it is that theme of -sadness that no ideal state is attainable in this world, not so much -because we cannot climb, nor even because the ideal becomes illusion on -attainment, but because the object to which we attach our ideal is, of -necessity, not seen as it really is, but always as we long for it to -be. This, with its complement that the mere fact of not being able to -possess may lead to desire even when the object in itself does not seem -very desirable, is at the very heart of Proust’s philosophy. - -This worship of his hero’s for aristocracy is only an incident in this -continual theme. It is in essence exactly the same as all his other -deceptions. When Gilberte was the beautifully dressed child of his -idol, Swann, surrounded by a halo of romance owing to her friendship -with the writer Bergotte, and when she appeared to look down on his -advances, there was nothing on earth he would not give, nothing he -would not do, to obtain her friendship. Yet when once that friendship -is attained the interest in her fades away imperceptibly till she plays -no more part in his life than a memory of what was once so bitterly -wanted. So it is with the _petite bande_ of young girls at Balbec -while it presented a united and exclusive front to the world. So it is -with the chief of that band, Albertine herself. Desirable while she has -held aloof, she becomes through knowledge, through the loss of that -mystery which had existed, as it always does, not in her, but only in -him who longed for her, almost boring. He is on the point of leaving -her, of finishing with the _liaison_ once and for all. Suddenly -all is changed. He has reason to doubt her complete faithfulness to -him. With the pain of this doubt love is once more awakened, and at -the end of the last published volume we leave him on the point of -rushing off to Paris to marry her. This, again, is the whole meaning of -Swann’s marriage with the vulgar and impossible Odette de Crécy. It is -the continual theme of all the pitiable deceptions of M. de Charlus. -“Besides,” he says in one place, - - the mistresses with whom I have been most in love have - never coincided with my love for them. True love it must - have been, since I subordinated everything else in the - world to the chance of seeing them, of keeping them to - myself, and would burst into tears if, one evening, I had - heard them speak. But they themselves must be regarded - rather as endowed with the property of arousing that - love, of raising it to its paroxysm, than as being its - embodiments.... You would have said that a virtue which had - nothing to do with them had been arbitrarily attached to - them by Nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-galvanic - power, had the effect on me of exciting my love—that is - to say, of controlling all my actions and causing all my - sorrows. But from this the looks or the brains or the - favours shown me by these women were entirely distinct. - -It is in this setting, then, that one must think of the young man’s -fascination by what was after all far the most socially charming -circle that he could have entered. The desire for a real aristocracy, -not merely of brains, but surrounded by all the wealth of history -and legend, is understandable enough. The only doubt is whether its -representatives exist. But in Proust himself the charm undoubtedly is -a subtler thing than that. It has something of the appeal of a dead -religion for him. While it was still a power in the world one would -have found him in opposition, as the Prince de Guermantes found himself -in opposition to the army authorities when at last, and at such pain -to himself, he began to suspect their conduct of the Dreyfus case. But -aristocracy as a power in France is dead; it is only the ritual, the -historic associations, the complete existence of a little world within -a world, that remain. - -Nor, as a fact, is this interest in cliques by any means confined -to the aristocracy. Of at least equal importance are the Verdurins, -who, in spite of their riches, are at the very opposite pole of -civilisation. And yet with all their vulgarity, with all their -intellectual snobbery, with all their lack of taste and breeding, with -all their affectation of being a _petit clan_, is it not clear -that, up to a certain point at any rate, intelligence is on their side -of the ledger? Again, there is that glance at life in barracks, through -the mediation of Saint-Loup, which, while small, is as good a summary -of the military world as one knows. There are some unforgettable pages -on the Jews. There is even that little world of the hotel servants -that has plainly interested Proust almost as much as any of the larger -worlds he has spent so much care in describing. And, especially in -the early books, there are those descriptions of the world of the -young man’s parents and grandparents, so typical of the _honnête -bourgeoisie_, so profoundly drawn in their uprightness and their -rather limited social ideas, so secure and anxious for security, so -loving to their boy and yet so anxious not to “spoil” him. Never, with -the exceptions of Saint-Simon and Tolstoy, has any author succeeded so -well in giving the atmosphere of a particular house or a particular -party; never has any one analysed so closely the behaviour of people -in small homogeneous masses. - -In 1896, when Proust was still a young man, he produced a book which, -while not of great interest in itself, is naturally of value to -students of his work, both for what it contains in the germ, and for -what it omits, of the Proust who was to become a master. And to this -book Anatole France wrote a charming preface, in which he said various -things which must have appeared more friendly than critical to readers -of that day. Among other things he wrote the following words: - - Il n’est pas du tout innocent. Mais il est sincère et si - vrai qu’il en devient naïf et plaît ainsi. II y a en lui du - Bernardin de Saint-Pierre dépravé et du Pétrone ingénu. - -The words are a singularly good description of the Proust that we -know to-day. He is not innocent, and he remains _naïf_. There is -a story of how in his last illness he insisted on being muffled up -in a carriage and driven out into the country to see the hawthorn, -which was then in bloom. The freshness of joy in all beautiful things -remained with him, so far as we can see, to the end of his life. It -is as obvious in the moving account of the Prince de Guermantes’ -confession to Swann at the beginning of the last book as it is in the -early Combray chapters of the first. He was supremely sensitive and -continually surprised by beauty. But, unlike most sensitive people, he -neither railed at mankind, nor shut himself up, nor built for himself a -palace of escape from reality in his own theorising about the meaning -of it all. He set himself to observe and to note his observations. - -In many ways Anatole France’s description of him as the ingenuous -Petronius of our times is extremely intelligent. And our times are in -many ways extremely like the days in which Petronius wrote. There is -an aristocracy that has lost its _raison d’être_, and a continual -flow of new plutocrats without traditions, without taste, without -any object in life beyond spending to the best of their power of -self-advertisement. The faith in the old social order has gone, and -nothing new has arisen to take its place. Where we differ entirely from -that age is in self-consciousness. And that, too, is where a modern -Petronius must differ from the old one. For better in some ways and -for worse in others, we are far more complex than we have ever been; -our motives are at once more mixed and more clearly scrutinised. And a -writer who can satisfactorily cram this age within the pages of a book -must not only be extremely intelligent and extremely observant, but -must also have forged for himself a style capable of expressing the -finest shades of feeling; he must refuse the easy simplifications both -of the moralist and the maker of plots; he must be infinitely sensitive -and infinitely truthful. That Marcel Proust personifies this ideal no -one would completely claim. But he does, at least to some people, seem -to have approached it more nearly than any other writer of our time. - - RALPH WRIGHT. - - - - -V - -_THE “LITTLE PROUST”_@ - - -To those of us who have read or who are now reading Proust’s enormous -novel, it is a curious experience to turn back to his earliest -publication, to the book written by the precocious boy whose social -successes are described at such length in _A la Recherche du Temps -Perdu_. This book, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_, appeared in -1896, seventeen years before the publication of _Du Côté de chez -Swann_. _Les Plaisirs_ is a large, shiny volume, a pretentious -“tome” for the drawing-room, printed in the most expensive manner, and -made hideously elegant by Madeleine Lemaire’s illustrations of the -_higlif_ of the ’nineties—an amazing _élite_ of melancholy -great ladies, exquisitely fashionable in costumes which time, with its -ironic touch, has made inconceivably out of fashion and dowdy. A few -copies of this large book appeared recently in the London bookshops, -when its rarity and value seem not to have been known; and one of -these copies has come, in the happiest manner, into my possession. -It contains the literary exercises and first attempts of the “little -Proust” of the great novel, some verses of no especial merit, a few -stories and set pieces of description, and a number of short poems in -prose. These pieces were all written, the author tells us, between his -twentieth and his twenty-third year; the style is somewhat sententious, -immature and precious: it is the writing of a boy—but, one sees at -once, of a boy of genius. For here, not only in their bud, but in -their first exquisite flowering, we find all the great qualities of -Proust’s later work: the beautiful sensibility, the observation, as -of an insect with an insect’s thousand eyes, the subtle and elaborate -study of passion, with its dawn, its torments of jealousy, and—what is -so original in the great novel—the analysis, not only of falling in -love, but of falling out of it—the slow, inevitable fading away of the -most fiery passion into the coldest indifference. Indeed, most of the -themes, and often the very situations, of the later work are not only -adumbrated but happily rendered in this boyish volume—the romantic lure -of the world and its heartless vulgarity, the beauty of landscapes, of -blossoming trees and hedges and the sea, the evocative power of names, -the intermittences of memory, the longing of the child for its mother’s -good-night kiss, the great dinner-party, with all the ambitions and -pretences of hosts and guests cynically analysed and laid bare. And -here, too, we find something which, to my mind, is of even greater -interest, and about which, as Proust’s other critics have hardly -mentioned it, a few words may not be out of place. - -When the little Proust plunged into the full stream of his Parisian -experiences, he was, we are told by one of his friends, already, from -his early studies, steeped in the philosophy of Plato; and although his -feverish days were filled with love affairs and worldly successes, and -he drained to its dregs, as we say, the enchanting cup of life, all -that he felt and saw seems but to have confirmed in that precocious boy -the lesson which Plato had already taught him—the lesson, namely, that -the true meaning of life is never to be found in immediate experience; -that there is another reality which can only be envisaged by the mind, -and, as it were, created by the intellect—a deeper and more ultimate -reality, in the presence of which life no longer seems contingent, -mediocre, mortal, and its vicissitudes are felt to be irrelevant, its -briefness an illusion. Certainly, in that great battle between the -Giants and the Gods, which Plato describes in the _Sophist_, the -battle in which the Giants affirm that only those things are real which -can be touched and handled, while the Gods defend themselves from -above out of an unseen world, “mightily contending” that true essence -consists in intelligible ideas—in this eternal warfare Proust is found -fighting as conspicuously as Shelley on the side of the Gods. Hope for -him, as for Shelley, - - creates - From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; - -and it is this attitude towards life, this creative contemplation -of experience, which to my mind gives its deeper significance to -Proust’s work, and lends an importance and depth of meaning to the -youthful and rather shabby love-affairs, the fashionable wickednesses -and worldlinesses, which form so large a part of his subject-matter. -What was Proust’s ultimate “intention” in writing his great novel, -the intention which, when fulfilled, will give, we must hope, a final -and satisfying form to this immense creation, must remain a matter of -conjecture until the complete work is before us. There is, however, -much to indicate that when he retired from the world to sift and -analyse his boyish experience, it was with the purpose to disengage -from that flux of life and time the meanings implicit in it—to recover, -to develop in the dark room of consciousness, and re-create the -ultimate realities and ideals which experience reveals, though it never -really attains them. The title of the whole work, _A la Recherche du -Temps Perdu_, and that of its ultimate and yet unpublished volume, -_Le Temps retrouvé_, seem indeed to suggest some such purpose. - -That there is something irremediably wrong in the present moment; -that the true reality is the creation of desire and memory, and is -most present in hope, in recollection and absence, but never in -immediate experience; that we kill our souls by living, and that it -is in solitude, in illness, or at the approach of death that we most -truly possess them—it is on these themes, which are repeated with -deeper harmonies and richer modulations throughout his later work, -that the young Proust harps in this divinely fresh overture to the -masterpiece which was to follow. Surely, one thinks, a book of such -exquisite promise and youthful achievement, heralded as it was to the -world by Anatole France’s preface, and talked of, no doubt, in all the -Paris salons, must have produced a remarkable impression on people -so cultivated as the Parisians, so alert to discover and appreciate -literary merit. However, as we know, it produced no such impression; -in spite of Anatole France’s praise, no one seems to have had any real -notion of its importance, or to have guessed that a new genius had -appeared, a new star had arisen. And when, after publishing this large, -shiny, unappreciated volume, its author disappeared from the world into -a solitary sick-room, he seems to have been thought of (as far as he -was thought of at all) as a pretentious, affected boy who had been made -a pet of for a while in worldly salons—a little dilettante with his -head turned, who had gone up like a rocket in the skies of fashion, but -would be heard of no more in the world of letters, where anyhow this -pretty coruscation had attracted almost no attention. This seems to -have been the impression of even those among Proust’s personal friends -who were themselves writers, and who, on re-reading _Les Plaisirs et -les Jours_, are now amazed, as M. Gide confesses, that they should -have been so blind to its beauty when they first read it—that in the -first eagle-flights of this young genius they had seen little more than -the insignificant flutterings of a gay butterfly of fashion. - -When we read the lives of the great artists of the past, we are apt -to be amazed at the indifference of their contemporaries to their -early achievements; and we cannot believe that we too, in the same -circumstances, would have been equally undiscerning. But here, -happening in our own days, is an obvious instance of this contemporary -blindness; and I, at least, as I read the little Proust’s first volume, -and see spread so clearly before me, as in the light of a beautiful -dawn, the world of his creation, try to make myself believe that if -the noontide of his genius had never illuminated that world and made -it familiar to me, that if Proust had never lived to write Swann and -the Guermantes, I too should be as blind as were his friends to its -beauty and merits. I tell myself this, and yet, with the book before -me, I cannot believe it. But then I remind myself of what I already -know very well, that new dawns in art are apt to appear on just the -horizons towards which we are not looking, and to illuminate landscapes -of which we have as yet not the slightest knowledge; and that it is -only afterwards, when the master’s whole _œuvre_ is familiar to -us, that we can see the real merits of his early attempts, and read -back into them the meaning and value of his complete and acknowledged -achievement. The moral of all this (and it is pleasant to end, if -possible, one’s reflections with a moral)—the moral is that we do not -know, we cannot know, what those disquieting persons, our younger -contemporaries, are really up to; that we must “look to the end,” as -the old saying has it; and that in the first attempts of other youths -who, like Proust, were endowed with genius, but whose gifts, unlike -his, came to no fruition, we possess no doubt early masterpieces of -which we can have no conception, worlds of the imagination which -actually exist and shine in the light of an exquisite dawn before our -eyes, although our eyes cannot see them. - - LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH. - - - - -VI - -_A READER’S GRATITUDE_ - - -A French uncle of mine once took me as a boy to visit a distinguished -mathematician who lived with his melons and his roses on the outskirts -of a small town in the Lyonnais. On the way thither I was admonished -not to interrupt with foolish questions what I was given to suppose -would be an important inquiry by two learned men into the origin of the -universe: Monsieur X—— would never have me inside his house again if I -could not behave myself better than most of the children of the present -day. We waited for our host in a large musty room of subdued sunlight, -where not even a fly buzzed and where the only hint of life was the -shadow of a passing bird across the yellow blind or the quivering -filigree of a reflected bough. Presently Monsieur X—— came in to greet -us; but without showing any inclination to discuss philosophy with my -uncle he led us to some chairs and a table set out upon the sparse turf -under what I think must have been a big catalpa tree. Here he heaped my -plate with cakes and fruit and sweets, insisted that I was old enough -to drink two glasses of a cordial, and, when he did begin to talk, -talked most entertainingly about his neighbours. - -Gratitude may be childhood’s greatest embarrassment; not merely the -verbal expression of thanks, but the emotion itself, which the more -deeply it is felt, the more miserably it is involved in shame. As we -grow older, we learn what is called politeness; and although we are -still capable of being confused by and of actually suffering from -excess of gratitude, we have learnt to cover that speechless confusion -and pain with a glib phrase like ‘I do not know how to thank you.’ But -the child’s silence does convey the depth of his gratitude; and even -as I hung my head in silent embarrassment when I was invited to thank -Monsieur X—— for his kindness, so now when I ought to be thanking -Marcel Proust, against interrupting whose discourse I have been as it -were warned by the respect accorded to him by our uncles the critics, -but who when I met him as a reader filled my plate with one delicious -fruit and sweet and cake after another (steeped those cakes in tisane -of limeflowers or tea), I feel incapable of expressing gratitude; and -I fear to indulge in criticism, lest I should be just one more uncle -standing between Proust and that innocent, appreciative, timorous, -awkward child, the public. - -If I say that I regard Proust as the only completely satisfying -poetical record, the most important literary phenomenon of our time, -I feel that I am involved in an argument with people who think that -the relentless effusion of modern verse has more significance than, -let us say, a bath tap which has been left running. And I simply do -not want to argue about what I enjoy. If I say that Proust represents -the apex hitherto reached by the feminine or realistic art of this -age, just as Stendhal represents the culmination of the masculine or -ideological art of the eighteenth century, or that Proust arrives -at the general through an incredibly sensitive exploration of the -particular, whereas Stendhal achieves the particular by his exquisite -consciousness of the general, I am involved in a lecture. And I simply -do not want to lecture about what I enjoy. The trouble is that, in -order to demonstrate Proust to people who have not read him, one ought -to have as subtle a power of evocation, as rich a manner of suggestion -as Proust himself, who could, I believe, make even a dream interesting, -so that we should live in that dream and extract from it the essential -flavour of its peculiarity as authentically as the dreamer. That is why -Proust writes of childhood with such magic. He manages to recognize, -in the complication of events that merely occur and are forgotten, the -ideal duration in which they were imbedded and which gave them their -material weight and spiritual portentousness. It is only in childhood, -or at any rate only in isolated fragments of time later, that we -possess at all intimately this sense of duration when objects appeal -to us as their essential selves, as pure energies. At other periods -we value them according as they forward our lives, according as they -are useful to us, and thus we lose our sense of their independent -existence. I have just read once more the Combray chapter (marvellously -enshrined in a translation that, like the translation of a saint’s -bones, destroys not a bit of their efficacy), and I have laid it aside, -thinking of Leopardi’s _Ricordanze_ and listening to where, under -the scintillations of the Great Bear, - - _sotto al patrio tetto - sonavan voci alterne, e le tranquille - opre de’ servi._ - - COMPTON MACKENZIE. - - - - -VII - -_GILBERTE_ - - -Their eyes meet across a hedge when she is still a little girl. In -his eyes the look is one of appeal unconsciously, in hers of ironic -indifference and contempt. He hears her name called: “Gilberte”; and -she obeys instantly without turning to look back in his direction, -leaving him with a disturbing enervating memory, the sense suddenly -appreciated of things distant and intangible, of a world withheld from -him. And that brief encounter sets the tone of their relations. She is -always very largely a creature of his imagination, a window through -which he can see but cannot reach immortal pastures. Never in the sense -that Odette is, does she become a personality to him. Consequently to -the reader she appears only in intermittent flashes of reality: when -she gives him the marble that has the same colour as her eyes; when -they wrestle for the letter—their feelings one shy articulation—and she -says, “You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling for a little”; -when in spite of her grandfather’s anniversary and her father’s -disapproval she insists on going to a concert: in her impatience at -being kept from a dancing lesson by her lover’s unexpected visit. - -And when we recall the endless pains expended, through Swann’s love for -her, on Odette, on the making indeed a mirror of that love for the -woman by whom it was inspired and from whom it drew its strength and -weakness, we realise that purposely the author has left of Gilberte -“a loveliness perceived in twilight, a beauty not clearly visioned”; -that he considered the emotions felt for her not to be a response -to any emanation from herself; but that she was rather a focus, a -rallying-point, for the aspirations and intimations of boyhood; -that she was in herself uninteresting, filling rather than creating -a position in the life of the “moi” of _A la Recherche du Temps -Perdu_. Throughout the episode the reader’s attention is fixed -always on the “moi,” on the detailed analysis of his love: its ebb and -flow; its dawn of timidity and reverence and hopeless longing; its -discontent; its substitution for love of friendship; its oblique and -unrepeated essay, in the wrestle, towards a physical expression; the -resignation for its sake of a diplomatic career which would carry him -from Gilberte; the disagreement over a trifle; the gradual recognition -of its failing power, and the final realisation that those emotions of -his, which he had considered in the light of a gift to Gilberte, as -her permanent possession, had returned to him, to be showered in time, -but in a different form, before another woman. This particular series -of emotions, so familiar and yet, belonging as it does to Jurgen’s -enchanted garden between dawn and sunrise, so distant; this love that -must, in John Galsworthy’s phrase, “become in time a fragrant memory—a -searing passion—a humdrum mateship—or once in many times vintage full -and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes,” Marcel Proust has in -the last pages of _Du Côté de chez Swann_ and the first part of -_A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ presented in unfaltering -analysis. - -It is a series of emotions that has been treated many times and has -inspired more than one masterpiece of the world’s literature. For, -whatever else in life comes twice, that does not come. Love may -advance down the years often enough and gaily enough, “overthrowing -all ancient memories with laughter”: the passions of maturity may be -deeper, stronger, less impermanent. But the particular charm of that -first flowering is irrecapturable. Whence its unique fascination for -the novelist. To compare Proust’s treatment of it with that of other -writers—with, for example, Turgenev’s beautiful _First Love_—would -be a forlorn and foolish business. To praise the one at the expense -of the other would be to blame a big writer for failing to achieve a -thing at which he never aimed. Those who find themselves in sympathy -with Proust’s methods, who recognise in the technique of his work a new -formula, in its style a new prose rhythm, and in the spirit of it an -alert and original intelligence, will always look on Gilberte as one of -his most fortunate successes. - - ALEC WAUGH. - - - - -VIII - -_PROUST’S WOMEN_ - - -The literature of imagination has always been rich in autobiography, -confessed and unconfessed. It is in its essence, perhaps one should -say in its impulse, largely an affair of passionate reminiscence. -Taken, therefore, as merely a recent writer of distinction who has -chosen to deal avowedly with _Things Remembered_, Proust must -challenge comparison with dozens of eminent men, his forerunners and -contemporaries. Tolstoy has given us his own life-history, not only -diffusively throughout his novels and pamphlets, but in that wonderful -piece of reconstruction, _Childhood and Youth_. Among living -men, James Joyce, with an epic gift and an heroic feat of memory, has -recorded for us an impression of his past, physical, mental, spiritual, -and has shown it interwoven with countless other lives. And these are -two taken at random. _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_—Proust was -not the first, nor will he be the last, to choose it as a theme. - -Where Proust stands as yet alone is in his manner of approaching his -theme. Or, with more exactitude it may be said, his manner, vigilantly -passive, eagerly quiescent, of letting his theme encroach upon and -claim him. All attempted recapture of the past is for him “futile,” -a “labour in vain.” Not reconstruction, but understanding of things -remembered, is his aim. And to this end with deliberation he permits -himself what the realist rejects but the plain man all unknowingly -cherishes—the glamour in which for every one of us our own past is -bathed. Divest the past, Proust seems to say, of the present’s gift -to it—the light that never was on sea or land—and you take away its -essence; treat the present as independent of the past and you destroy -its integrity. That this is true we, as human beings—acting, thinking, -receiving impressions from moment to moment—must recognise when it is -pointed out. Our actual existence is not so much a narrative as a web -in which the shuttle of events flies back and forth between the warp -and woof of past and present, from neither of which it can escape any -more than can we ourselves. The trouble is that it is pointed out so -seldom, and least of all perhaps by novelists, who in this matter still -lag far behind our common human experience. The grasp with which Proust -has laid hold upon the philosophic and aesthetic values of memory—as, -for example, in the passage where he describes the eating, after an -interval of many years, of a _petite madeleine_ soaked in tea—is -a new thing in literature. Here is pre-eminently the novelist with a -past. None before him has taken _Things Remembered_ not merely for -theme but for medium as well. - -To forget this, or even for one moment to minimise it, in speaking of -Proust, is utterly to lose one’s bearings. But, accustomed as we are -in our own hearts to his treatment of the past, we are so unaccustomed -to it in literature that it is really not easy to avoid the artificial -standpoint, the more that Proust proclaims his naturalism neither -explicitly nor by freakishness of style. So quiet, so classical is his -bearing that it hardly strikes one to investigate his premises. - -And so, concerning his long book of memory, one hears questions put -by intelligent and even admiring readers. There are his “shadowy” -women—“Did women at any time mean anything to Proust?”: there is his -disconcerting chronology—“How old is his hero supposed to be during -such or such an incident?”: there is his social pose—“Was Proust not -himself as bad a snob as any he describes?” But such questions can be -asked only in forgetfulness, answered only in constant remembrance of -the author’s unique attitude toward his main subject, the past. - -It is because of this that, though setting out to make a few -observations upon Proust’s women, I feel it no digression if I draw -attention here to a particular passage which occurs early in the novel, -towards the end of the _Combray_ section in Volume I.—a passage -in which he not merely gives the circumstances of his hero’s first -literary composition, but puts before us the composed fragment itself. -A few pages back and the boy has been bemoaning that, his choice of -a literary career notwithstanding, his mind is blank of subjects, -his intellect, at the mere idea of writing, a void. Now, suddenly, -while out driving, he is so deeply enthralled by the charm of three -steeples which withdraw and advance, disappear and reappear, always in -different relations to each other, according as the setting sun catches -their angles and the carriage winds along the country road, that words -leap to frame themselves in his head and, for all the jolting and -inconvenience of the moment, he must immediately write them down to -“appease his conscience and to satisfy his enthusiasm.” - -The actual piece of prose so written is reproduced, says the narrator, -“with only a slight revision here and there.” We may allow ourselves, -I think, the presumption that it is substantially a true record.[2] -Certainly it furnishes us with the key to the whole work. Passages -from Proust more exquisite, even more characteristic, might easily be -found; none so significant. Those ever-veering steeples, sometimes -before, sometimes behind, lightening, darkening, changing, looking -now like three golden pivots, now like three birds perched on the -plain—they reveal, more fully and subtly than could any philosophic -exposition, both the method and the philosophic preoccupation of the -author. They declare that for him there was never an actual but always -a psychological perspective, and that _peculiar to himself_. This -is why there is no intellectual or logical means of checking Proust’s -observations. Either we accept them as he gives them, emotionally, -or we reject them as meaningless. He has, he repeatedly tells us, -no faith in intellectual observation, neither will he presume upon -logical deduction in questions of human feeling. He quietly discards -that assumption of god-like knowledge for which we have come to look -so confidently in our writers of fiction. He will have none of the -sympathetic imagination that “puts itself in another’s place.” He -refuses as an act of disingenuousness either to project himself into -or to interpret the character of another. “We alone,” he says, “by our -belief that they have an existence of their own, can give to certain of -the things that we see a soul which they afterwards keep, which they -develop in our minds.” Essentially, that is to say, he believes he can -know nothing outside of his own sensations, and for him every sensation -is inextricably interwoven with memory. Whether he writes of a woman -or a musical theme, of a love affair or of trees in the park, he never -forgets that in the very act of observing there are several elements to -be reckoned with. The thing observed may seem to casual eyes fixed like -the three steeples. But Proust knows better. He knows that he himself -is moving, that within him his past is in a different kind of motion, -dictating, suggesting, comparing, reminding, side-tracking, and that -therefore the steeples themselves are never in reality still. Nothing -in life is stable. Within the flux of our past and our present, figures -outside ourselves seem to rise, to move, to act. But such movements -have reality only in so far as they are reflected in the unique mirror -of a soul. And for Proust this mirror is combined of the individual and -his memory. - -[Footnote 2: See, however, my foot-note on page 106 and _Pastiches et -Mélanges_, pp. 91-99.—C.K.S.M.] - -No wonder if such a novelist is sometimes called difficult. He is too -like life to be easy. Other novels, beside his, seem accommodatingly -static, other characters finished, understood in each spring of each -action—precisely as those we know in life are never finished or -understood. - -But to come to the women. - -A man of particular sincerity once said to me that after twenty years -of married life he understood his wife no better than on the day he -married her. He had of course become familiar with her modes of thought -and action which served as knowledge for practical daily purposes. But -familiarity had never bred understanding. Her underlying motives, the -ultimate significance of her looks and words, remained hidden. - -This, I think, is Proust’s position, more especially when the woman -happens to affect him powerfully. In every case we can _see_ his -women, and thus far they are the reverse of shadowy. Grandmother, -mother, aunts, and servant—the women that surround his childhood; -Mlle. Vinteuil and the Duchesse de Guermantes—female figures that -shock or thrill his boyish imagination; Odette—the mature cocotte -that stands throughout his youth for feminine mystery and glamour; -Odette’s daughter Gilberte, and later Albertine—the young girls, minxes -both, with whom he falls in love; Madame Verdurin and her circle—the -social climbers who call forth his most delicate adult irony as well -as his most rancid contempt;—these, simply as pictures, leap out at -us complete. Nothing could be more objective than their presentation -to the eye and ear of the reader. We feel with each one as if we -had met her in the flesh—as one has met a casual acquaintance. The -mother’s submissive wifeliness; the almost masculine incorruptibility -of the grandmother; the raciness of the servant; the neurosis of Aunt -Léonie; the half-hearted viciousness of the music-master’s daughter; -the slightly comic social splendour of the Duchesse; the unmeaning -melancholy of Odette’s eyes; the unredeemed vulgarity of Madame -Verdurin; the domineering girlishness of Gilberte, by turns frank and -secretive, appealing and repellent; the smile with which Albertine, -at once innocent and wanton, receives the youth in her bedroom—in -depicting these Proust never trespasses beyond natural as compared with -literary experience. We all know with what liveliness in conversation -any man with the gifts of observation and wit can create an image for -us of some female “character” met with in his childhood or his travels. -But let that same man come to speak out of his emotions of some woman -who has moved him deeply, then his heart will cloud his brain, his -tongue will falter or run away with him, and he will no longer be -capable of outlining a portrait. As listeners our impressions of his -subject will be gained, not from what he says, but independently from -what we perceive that he feels, which may well be in direct conflict -with his words. In life, that is to say, the more important a character -is to us the more we are thrown back for our ultimate knowledge on -the emotions aroused by that character in ourselves. In fiction it -is usually the other way about. It is his central figures whom the -novelist pretends to know best. Proust, however, has recognised this -discrepancy with scientific clearness. He devotes himself, therefore, -where his important women are concerned—aside from the very minimum of -detached, objective observations—to a presentment of the effect they -have upon the men that love them. - -So his women set us wondering and supposing and coming to our own -conclusions exactly as we do in life, either when an individual of our -own sex is described for us by one of the other sex, or when we are -emotionally affected by some one of the other sex. - -For this is important. When it comes to his male characters, Proust -takes a different tone. Here he finds himself able, quite consistently -with his philosophy, for far more positive assertion. In various ways -he can allow them to reveal and expound themselves, and even each -other, as when Bergotte speaks of the married Swann as a man who -“has to swallow a hundred serpents every day.” The point of view, -the intellectual outfit which all males have in common—these give -the male novelist a certain tract of solid ground when dealing with -characters of his own sex. A man’s fellow-feeling for other men is very -strong. It has but a faint and imperfect parallel as between woman and -woman. Proust, accordingly, without any sacrifice of conscience, can, -“by his belief,” endow Swann with a soul. But—marvellous and highly -characteristic creation as he is—Swann may be put in the same category -with other male characters by other male novelists. Odette, Gilberte, -Albertine, are in a category by themselves. Outside of Proust’s book -they are only to be met with in life. - -It is in this differential treatment of his women that we perceive -how rigorously Proust applies his artistic method. He never seeks to -transcend his own personality. In him, the observer, the whole of -creation lives and moves and has its being. Men are creatures made in -his own image. He can faithfully follow his own emotions, and “by his -belief” can conscientiously endow his men with souls. But women are -in a different case. He has no inner guide to assure him that they -are anything more than the phantoms they seem. Strictly speaking, this -should imply no more than a negative attitude. In fact, however, Proust -goes further. Because he has no grounds for belief he passes into -unbelief. In his philosophy _esse est percipi_, therefore, the -souls of women for him have no existence. Herein it is likely that he -has borne out the unavowed experience of most men. Whether or no, he -certainly has expressed the truth of his own experience with a purity -that few, even among great writers, can rival. - -One thing more. There is Proust’s mother. - -No doubt the avenging eagerness with which I reintroduce her here -for my conclusion is due in part to my being myself of the soulless -sex. But quite apart from any such feelings, to speak of this -novelist’s women without reckoning especially with his mother would -be inexcusable. That he adored her in childhood he makes manifest. -Further, that throughout his life this adoration effectively debarred -him from profound emotion where other women were concerned becomes -clear enough to the reader. It hardly appears, however, that Proust -was himself wholly conscious of this. True, there is a passage in the -_Combray_ section in which he speaks of “that untroubled peace -which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, -since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes in them, -and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her kiss, -the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation, -unburdened by any liability save to myself.” But this is the only -place where he seems to allow that the love he bore his mother was -even comparable in kind with the love aroused by other women later -in his life. Indeed, though he repeatedly speaks of the anguish with -which in his childhood he longed for his mother’s good-night kiss, the -ecstasy with which he received it, as if it were the Host in an act of -communion, conveying to him “her real presence and with it the power -to sleep”; though he tells how, for that “frail and precious kiss,” he -prepared himself in advance so as to “consecrate” the whole minute of -contact; though he dreaded to prolong or repeat the kiss lest a look -of displeasure should cross those beautiful features with the slight, -beloved blemish under one of the eyes; yet he describes himself at -this time as one “into whose life Love had not yet entered,” as one -whose emotion, failing love and as yet awaiting it, happened to be at -the disposal of “filial piety.” No wonder if, when temporary “loves” -came, he compared with them as unconsciously as unfavourably this good -and gracious mother—so admiringly timid as a wife, so gentle towards -strangers, so perfect socially, so full of stern solicitude as a parent -(“she never allowed herself to go to any length of tenderness with -me”)—and found them merely exciting to the senses. He had already, so -far as woman was concerned, given his heart away. - -Yet, after all, perhaps he knew it well enough and merely takes his -own way of saying it. He tells us little enough of his mother, though -probably he tells as much as he knows. What her own real thoughts and -feelings were we are left to guess. But “never again,” he says, after -describing one very special visit of hers to the boy’s bedroom—“never -again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been -increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the -sobs ... which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. -Actually their echo has never ceased.” - - CATHERINE CARSWELL. - - - - -IX - -_THE BEST RECORD_ - - -One of my feelings whenever I read Marcel Proust is regret that Henry -James is not alive to enjoy him, as he would have done immensely and -amazedly, though, judging from the letters of that great master of -the art of writing fiction, no doubt he would not have given him his -unqualified approval. But he would have recognised him as working at -his own level, while not in his own groove. Yet, for all that Proust -is the author of practically only one book, big though that book is, -in that one book he has spread his nets wider, and sunk them deeper, -than did Henry James in the sum of all his novels. One wonders if -such mastery has ever been obtained so suddenly and so completely; -indeed, the sureness of touch seems a little less certain in the last -published volumes than in the earlier ones. We had revealed to us from -the beginning a new way of writing fiction, or rather of describing -life. It had never so been done before. Let us pray that he will have -no disciples—one can foresee the horror of them; but influence he must -have. - -My own interest begins with the second volume of _Swann_, -though my admiration begins with the first sentence of the first; -and my advice to new readers would be to take up any volume after -_Swann_—to start in the middle—when I am sure they will insist on -knowing everything the author has to say about his characters from the -beginning. You become soaked in the lives of these people as a sponge -becomes soaked with water. In the process you live your own life over -again, and, if you have lived in Paris and in Normandy, you tread the -same ground. - -Proust has no “story” to tell. He sets down life as it was lived by -certain people at a certain period: Parisian society from the middle of -the Dreyfus case to the present day. From the amazing brilliance of the -whole opening two details presently detach themselves—the love of Swann -for Odette, and the boy and girl idyll in the Champs-Élysées: they are -beyond words to praise, for they are not Art, but life recorded with -matchless insight or remembrance. We need not compare, but how pale is -_Jean Christophe_ beside these pages! So when we get to Normandy, -the _Plage_, the hotel, and the countryside with its little -railway, and childhood has melted into adolescence, we live again those -days, and tread those paths, which we thought beyond recapture, save by -indistinct memory. It is an exquisite pleasure which I, at any rate, -never expected to experience. - -Emerging from the shadows of the joyous band of _jeunes filles en -fleurs_, with its hint of perversity—we shall have to rewrite our -hymns: “There’s a _Freud_ for little children!”—we come to the -marvellous Guermantes, with whom Proust has pictured that high-born -snobbery—and life without snobbery is like meat without salt—which -observers, as they get on in years, come to know is inherent in the -upper classes no less, perhaps more, than in the middle classes: a -right snobbery, bereft of any meanness or noxious prejudices. These -people see France through their family history, and their family -history was France. They are Ladies and Gentlemen, with all that that -connotes: and in considering them we are conscious of all the rest -who are not. Proust, in exploring one path, illuminates the others. -We spend a few hours in their company, in the course of a dinner and -an evening reception (taking up a couple of hundred or so of pages), -and at the end we know all about them; we understand the world which -made them, and what they are going to make of the world. As contrasts -to these great ones we have those other snobs, the Verdurins, of the -“cultured” middle class. Surely never before, in memoir, essay, or -fiction, has it all been set down so brilliantly. - -One wonders what sort of man Proust really was. We know he was a great -friend of Léon Daudet—two men, one would have thought, as the poles -asunder. We know that he slept by day, and lived and worked by night: -we know that he was ill and neurasthenic. We know also that nothing was -hidden from him, and that he had an infinite power of expression. He -was a very human being with the brain and the pen of a recording angel. - -Occasionally, lest his cleverness should seem to be superhuman, one -comes on a jest or an anecdote which is a “chestnut”; or he becomes a -little too intricate, or his neurasthenia shows its cloven hoof: once -or twice I am inclined to throw the book down as too tiresome, but -I cling to him and grapple with him, and soon feel again that I am -enjoying one of the greatest pleasures of my life. - -One meets with all kinds of people in his work, some of them very odd -people; though how very odd is the ordinary normal person! Proust’s -odd people may be thought to be modern: yet both in art and in life -they are indeed very ancient. They are those for whom—to modernise an -old phrase—Life is a _mauvais quart d’heure_ made up of exquisite -complexes. Side by side with these “moderns” are the old-fashioned -people, notably the Grandmother and Françoise—not Micawber is more -definite than this last. - -The more we study the great writers of all ages, and the more we -observe for ourselves, the more we realise that the world never -alters; we can only ring the changes on the same material. Harmony and -discord, beauty and ugliness! It is like a gramophone disc. The records -vary, the melodies, the arrangements, make their individual effect, -but the substance is the same. The Masters make their records on an -unchanging surface. Marcel Proust’s is a magnificent record; perhaps -the most brilliant ever achieved. It requires only that we bring to it -a sympathetic and sharp-pointed needle. - -Did his death leave his record incomplete? - -One would like to know what more he had in his mind to record of these -people. Especially is one curious as to the future of M. de Charlus. -What did he do in the Great War? Did he open one of his houses as -a hospital for not too badly wounded soldiers? Or was he content -with lending his name to charity bazaars? Or was he—likeliest of -all—galvanised by his high breeding and undoubted courage into a vigour -beyond his years, to make a hero’s end? Perhaps we shall never know. -Does it much matter? We can finish off these people to our own liking, -or—if indeed his book was unfinished—leave them as he left them. There -they are for us, all alive—and likely to remain so. - - REGINALD TURNER. - - - - -X - -_A FOOT-NOTE_ - - -Though in England almost every one, who has read and understood, -admires the works of Marcel Proust, it is not so in France. There, -not to go beyond my own experience, I have met plenty of writers, -and good ones too, who cannot away with them. Even that essay on the -style of Flaubert, which I had supposed would be universally reckoned -a masterpiece, I have heard described by a friend of mine, a charming -poet and admired dramatist, as childish. Now, when I hear such a one, -and others whom I respect, disparaging Proust, I do not fly into a -passion; I seek the cause, instead. And I find it—though the discovery, -should they ever come to hear of it, would a good deal shock some of my -French friends and surprise perhaps a few of my English—in Politics. - -The French themselves seem hardly to realise how sharp and deep their -political divisions are become. Yet when we remember that during the -last forty years politics have been able to make of that gentle latin -scepticism, which gave us Montaigne, Bayle, and Voltaire, and still -gives us M. Anatole France, something as narrow and bitter almost -as Calvinism; when we hear of such pretty place-names as (say) St. -Symphorien being changed into (say) Émile Combesville; we ought not -to be surprised if literature even gets splashed a little in the dirty -dog-fight. Because Marcel Proust is supposed to have chosen as the -subject of his epic the _faubourg St. Germain_, it is assumed -that he admired and believed in it. Was not _L’Action française_ -amongst the first to hail his rising genius? Is he not half a Jew and -therefore wholly a renegade? He is a black reactionary and an enemy of -light. He is not a good man, so how can he be a good writer? We are -back again in a very familiar world of criticism; only the English -critics can prove that he was good, after all. - -As a matter of fact, which I know counts for little in politics or -criticism, Proust seems to me often unduly hard on the _faubourg_. -I shall not easily forget, nor perhaps will it, the devastating -effect of that small phrase, when, after treating us to a ravishing -description of a theatre full to the brim of _beau monde_, after -explaining how these are the people fitted by training, tradition, -and circumstance to taste the things of the mind, he adds, by way of -afterthought as it were, “si seulement ils avaient eu de l’esprit.” -For my part, sitting next her at that gorgeous dinner-party, I was -completely bowled over by the matchless Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes -(late Princesse des Laumes), bowled over not only by her beauty and -seduction, and a little perhaps by her great name, but by her _bel -esprit_ and intelligence. To me her observations on Victor Hugo in -particular and the art of writing in general seemed to possess that -airy profundity which above all things one relishes in a literary -conversation, until M. Proust, after pooh-poohing her circle, undid -the duchess herself with this painfully just appreciation: “Pour -toutes ces raisons les causeries avec la duchesse ressemblaient à -ces connaissances qu’on puise dans une bibliothèque de château, -surannée, incomplète, incapable de former une intelligence, dépourvue -de presque tout ce que nous aimons, mais nous offrant parfois quelque -renseignement curieux, voire la citation d’une belle page que nous ne -connaissions pas, et dont nous sommes heureux dans la suite de nous -rappeler que nous en devons la connaissance à une magnifique demeure -seigneuriale. Nous sommes alors, pour avoir trouvé la préface de Balzac -à _la Chartreuse_ ou des lettres inédites de Joubert, tentés de -nous exagérer le prix de la vie que nous y avons menée et dont nous -oublions, pour cette aubaine d’un soir, la frivolité stérile.” - -By naming Madame de Guermantes I have given myself occasion to remark -one of M. Proust’s most extraordinary gifts—his power of realising a -character. Without being presented one would know the incomparable -duchess should one ever have the happiness of meeting her at a party; -and I should recognise one of her good things (“Oriane’s latest”) were -it repeated in the train. When some one quotes a saying by Dr. Johnson -or the Duke of Wellington we need not verify by the book; their -characters are so vivid to us, and they speak so much in character, -that their phrases have the ring of familiar voices. It is the same -with Madame de Guermantes. How many authors have achieved this miracle? -Shakespeare, of course, who achieved all miracles, can distinguish even -his minor characters. In a tipsy dialogue between Mrs. Quickly and Doll -Tearsheet you can tell by the mere phrasing, by the particular way in -which a bawdy joke is turned, which of the ladies is speaking. And who -else can do it? Not Balzac, I am sure. Dickens, some one will say. Yes, -but only by giving us for characters blatant caricatures. We all know -the devil by his tail. - -So far I have not contested the common opinion that Proust is the poet -of the _beau monde_; I have sought only to show that, if he were, -it would not follow that he was either a snob or a reactionary: it -would not follow that he was taken in. In fact, the subject of Proust’s -epic is the whole of French life as it was from forty to twenty years -ago—a subject of which the _faubourg_ is but a part. He gives -us a full-length picture of family life in the provinces and of a -quasi-intellectual circle in Paris, of the “seaside girls” who run -about with Albertine, and a _croquis_ of “county society”; best -of all, perhaps, he gives us exquisite landscapes and still-lifes. -And surely at this time of day it ought not to be necessary to remind -people, especially French people, that any subject, provided the -artist is thoroughly possessed by it, is as good as any other; that the -forms and colours, and their relations, of a pot of flowers or fruit on -a table, passionately apprehended, are capable of inspiring as sublime -a work of art as the Madonna or the Crucifixion. If the _faubourg_ -above all things fascinated Proust, that I suspect was because in it -Proust saw a subject proper only to the touch of a master psychologist. -“Society,” he saw, is a hierarchy without official grades or badges: -unlike the army, with its colonels, majors, and captains; unlike the -navy, with its admirals, captains, and commanders; it resembles rather -a public school or small college. It is a microcosm in which people are -moved up and down, in and out, by mysterious and insensible powers; in -which they are promoted and degraded by a breath of fashion blowing -they know not whence; in which they obey slavishly unwritten laws, as -absolute as those of the Medes and Persians: powers these, none of -which they themselves can apprehend, but of which some can be surprised -by sensibilities in their way as delicate and subtle as those which -know when a lady changes her _sachets_ and can distinguish the -_bouquet_ of Léoville from Larose. Herein perhaps, rather than in -its social prestige, lay the charm of the _faubourg_ for Marcel -Proust. - -One word more: a translation may do very well, but we can have no -English Proust. No Englishman, I mean, writing in English, would be -allowed to publish in England so complete a picture of life. Wherefore -as a novel- and play-writing nation we have lost pride of place, -and cannot hope to regain it till we have set our laws in order. An -artist must be possessed by his subject; but the English novelist -who is inspired by his sense of contemporary life is not allowed -to express that by which he is possessed. Fielding, Jane Austen, -Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, James, and Hardy, English novelists who -took contemporary life for their province, all had something to say -which may have shocked or hurt but which the age did not prohibit. -They were, therefore, as free to express the best that was in them as -Balzac, Zola, or Proust. But to-day our subtlest and most active minds, -affected maybe, consciously or unconsciously, by modern psychological -discoveries, are concerned, so far as they are concerned with life -at all, with certain aspects of it, with certain relations, of which -they may not treat freely. Their situation is as painful and absurd -as would have been that of men of science who, towards the close of -last century, should have been allowed to make no use of Darwin’s -contribution to biology. The gap between first- and third-rate minds -has been growing alarmingly wide of late. Proust moves in a world -unknown almost to the intellectual slums, or to those intellectual -lower middle classes from which are drawn too many of our magistrates, -judges, and legislators. These lag behind, and impose their veto -on the sincere treatment of English manners by a first-rate English -artist. And perhaps the best tribute which English admirers of Proust -could pay his memory would be to agitate for the repeal of those -absurd and barbarous laws which make an English _Recherche du Temps -Perdu_ impossible. - - CLIVE BELL. - - - - -XI - -_THE SPELL OF PROUST_ - - -The magic ring which Marcel Proust drew, almost literally, round his -readers—since it is in the circle of “_le temps perdu_” which is -to become “_le temps retrouvé_” that he sets us and himself—seemed -early in the incantation to betray a break whereby we might escape, -did we so wish, from his compulsion. For, enthralled as we had been -by _Swann_, there was a sensible relaxing of the spell with the -_Jeunes Filles_. Not in the opening pages, where the atmosphere -that we had rapturously learned to breathe was potent still with its -intoxicating magic; but when we came to Balbec, and the group of -seaside girls began to show as rulers of the scene, there was scarce -one of us who did not own to disappointment. _La petite bande_, -more actual and, on the surface, more alluring than _la petite -phrase_ in the sonata of Vinteuil, yet wholly failed to charm the -sense or the imagination as the enigmatic little group of notes had -charmed. We heard, and we responded to, the cry: “Those flappers -are so tedious!”—and as Albertine grew more and more significant, -_we_ grew more sceptical, and told ourselves that we could step -outside the ring at any moment we might choose. But somehow, that -emancipative moment never came. Despite the blinding print of the -edition in a single volume—print that must have permanently injured -our collective sight—there always was a reason why we could not break -away. And finally, we realised that we were wrong, and that the spell -had but become more absolute, in both the shades of meaning in that -word. For now that some of the more normal baits for interest were laid -aside, we could perceive that here was sorcery in its pure state—the -thing itself, stripped of all seeming. Now we could not so easily, or -easily at all, “say why” when the profane inquired of us what the magic -was—why, reading Proust, we were so interested. We were _not_ -so interested; we could scarcely say, or even think, that we were -“interested” any more. - -The miracle had happened. We were spellbound, for good and all, within -the magic ring. We had forgotten what we used to mean when, in the -world outside, we had said “dull”; for here was much that was not -merely dull but positively soporific, yet our eyes were glued upon -the baleful page, and any interruption seemed a challenge to the -occult power that held us. Something was risked, immeasurably worth -our while, did we fall short of the required submission.... This was -because we now could feel more deeply the extent of what the wizard -meant to do with us. We were not passively to stand within the circle. -We were, with him, to pace it mystically round, while time ran back -to fetch the Age of Gold. _Le temps passé_ would be transmuted, -imperceptibly, into _le temps retrouvé_; and our aid was necessary -to the necromancer’s full success. With this flattering divination -there began a new excitement, different in action from the old; for -soon, instead of rushing at the latest Marcel Proust directly we had -bought it, we indeed did buy it, but re-read the earlier volumes first. -Here was the very magic ring itself, drawn round our fireside chair! -The latest Proust lay ready to our hand, slim or substantial token of -the power still unspent; but lest we should have missed a single letter -in the charm, we spelt it through devoutly once again; and, in the -spelling, found how many an indication subtly skilled at once to warn -and to escape us till the moment of reflection or re-reading! And as -a consequence, we now perceived so intricate and exquisite a “pattern -in the carpet” as could make the newest volume into something more -exciting for anticipation even than we had dreamed. - -This is the proof, to me, of Marcel Proust’s (as one might think, -indisputable; yet by a few disputed) genius. The _Swann_ book -contains the largest share of interest, no doubt—that merer, franker -kind of interest which other books can give us in a hardly less degree. -But in the later volumes, as they “grow on” us, there is far more (if -also there is less) than this; and it is through the more that we come -finally to clear perception of Proust’s purpose and his mastery. For -in these less immediately attractive volumes we are conscious of an -ever-growing sense of the significance so deeply interfused through -the whole work. He had by then become absorbed to such degree in his -interpretation of the microcosm which he saw as a sufficing symbol of -the irony, absurdity, and the incessant alternation, “intermittency,” -and travail of the consciousness of man, that we are sensible, as he -proceeds, of powers more transcendent than the highest of the writer’s -mere accomplishment—stupendous as that is in Proust, who could “write” -anything he chose, and chose to write so many things, from satire that -is blighting in its smiling subtlety (so muted as to mock the hasty -ear!), to lyric flower-pieces like the paradisal hawthorn-hedge in -_Swann_, and the unrivalled comments upon buildings, pictures, -fashions in dress and manners (who will forget the monocles at the big -evening-party at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s?), books, the drama, even -photographs! In the great elegiac glories of the death of Bergotte (not -yet published in book-form), and of that _grand’mère_ who is the -_motif_, as it were, in the symphonic composition of the unnamed -central figure’s personality, Proust sounded chords which lay till then -beyond the compass of his readers’ hearing, but were then revealed to -sense that shall not lose them while it yet survives. - -But over all this virtuosity there rules a mightier gift—the -master-gift of insight. Proust, one could say, “knows everything,” in -the restricted meaning of the words. No bent, no twist, of modern -thought escapes him; yet, as one reader writes to me, “there is no -dead psychology”—no case stretched on a Procrustean bed, with all that -does not fit lopped comfortably, and discomfortingly, off. He, unlike -Nature, is most careful of the single life. If ever we had questioned -that—and we had very little questioned it—the Charlus portrait answered -us: that masterpiece of the undaunted, following eye and mind. Proust -leads us with him on this journey of the visual and mental powers; we -are no more involuntarily drawn on than he has been into the state of -an astounded fondness and appreciation for the maudlin, overbearing, -ludicrous, yet constantly pathetic or superb old “invert.” We are -offended personally by the insolences of his favourites; the tears in -his unholy eyes can well-nigh wet our own ... and this though, with -the master’s hand upon our shoulders, we have gone through every phase -of the degrading intimacies, seen and heard the tragi-comic outbursts -of the princely victim, every now and then remembering his “rank” and -seeking to restore the true relation between him and those whom in his -view he honours by his merest word, yet who are his disdainful masters -through his helpless depravation. - -If there were nothing else than Charlus in the books, Proust must be -given pride of place among the masters. But with the plenitude there -is—what must we give? More than a master, one would say, a writer -cannot be. Yet in the image here suggested of the magic circle, there -is possibly the one thing more that causes Proustians to divide their -reading lives into the time before and after they have read these -books. No spell had yet been worked on us of potency like this; for -though we are pent within the ring, we move within it too—the world -revolves, for us, as in a crystal held beneath our gaze by one who, -moving with us, will reveal the secret hidden not there only but in our -own dim sense, when at the last _le temps perdu_ shall have become -_le temps retrouvé_. - - ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE. - - - - -XII - -_A NEW PSYCHOMETRY_[3] - -[Footnote 3: Reprinted from _The Times_ of Wednesday, November 29, -1922. _The Times_ had been almost alone among English newspapers -in giving “publicity” to the death of Marcel Proust in its issue of -Monday, November 20.—C.K.S.M.] - - -To judge from the newspapers, there have been tremendous “crises” in -public affairs during the last few days: the triumph of Fascismo in -Italy, the Lausanne Conference, the English elections. But to many of -us the great events are merely spectacular; they pass rapidly across -the screen, while the band plays irrelevant scraps of syncopated music, -and seem no more real than any other of the adventures, avowedly -fictitious, that are “filmed” for our idle hours. They don’t, save on -reflection and much diligent pondering of leading articles, come home -to our business and bosoms. But one announcement in _The Times_ of -last Monday week shocked many of us with a sudden, absurdly indignant -bewilderment, like a foul blow: I mean the death of Marcel Proust. -It is not only absurd but impious to be indignant with the decrees -of Fate. The wise throughout the ages have prescribed for us our -proper behaviour in the face of such an event; and most of us find the -prescription quite useless. But, on the death of an author, there is -this peculiar consolation that never fails: his work lives absolutely -unaffected by his death. - -... We can light the lamp, make a clear fire, and sit down to the -book with the old thrill. There is only the thought that we must -be content with what we have, that we are to get no more from that -hand. With Marcel Proust, however, it seems that we are spared even -that mortification. He has left behind him the completion of _A la -Recherche du Temps Perdu_. This is great news. The announcements -from the press of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ will be eagerly -awaited. Even a new Anatole France is not so important an event. - -It has been said that Proust will go down to posterity as the author of -one book. This is only true in a literal sense. For the many volumes -of _A la Recherche_ that already crowd the shelves are several -“books” in one. It is not a “story,” but a panorama of many stories. -Indeed, who reads Proust for the “story”? His book is really a picture -of the modern world and the modern spirit, and that is its peculiar -fascination for us. There are “morbid” elements in it, to be sure—you -cannot read a page without seeing that it must have been written by -some one who was anything but a normal, healthy human being, and -it is not for nothing that _The Times_[4] has compared him to -Petronius Arbiter. But one of the advantages of this hyperaesthesia is -a heightened sensibility for _everything_, the perception and -accurate notation of innumerable details in thought and feeling that -escape a normal observer. - -[Footnote 4: _The Times_, Monday, November 20, 1922: “Marcel -Proust: An Appreciation.” (From a Correspondent.)—C.K.S.M.] - -Take, for instance, the account of the famous author “Bergotte.” -Proust, little more than a child, but already his ardent reader, meets -him at luncheon. And, first, the boy’s imagined author, a “langoureux -vieillard,” has to give place to the reality, much younger, a little -man with a chin-tuft and a nose like a snail-shell. Then comes an -elaborate description of his spoken diction, pronunciation, etc., and -an attempt to reconcile these with the peculiarities of his written -style. Special “notes”: - - Doubtless, again, so as to distinguish himself from - the previous generation, too fond as it had been of - abstractions, of weighty commonplaces, when Bergotte - wished to speak favourably of a book, what he would bring - into prominence, what he would quote with approval, would - always be some scene that furnished the reader with an - image, some picture that had no rational significance. - “Ah, yes!” he would exclaim, “it is quite admirable! There - is a little girl in an orange shawl. It is excellent!” Or - again, “Oh, yes, there is a passage in which there is a - regiment marching along the street; yes, it is excellent!” - As for style, he was not altogether of his time (though - he remained quite exclusively of his race, abominating - Tolstoy, George Eliot, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky), for the - word that always came to his lips when he wished to praise - the style of any writer was “mild.” “Yes, you know, I like - Chateaubriand better in _Atala_ than in _René_; - he seems to me to be milder.” He said the word like a - doctor who, when his patient assures him that milk will - give him indigestion, answers: “But, you know, it’s very - mild.” And it is true that there was in Bergotte’s style - a kind of harmony similar to that for which the ancients - used to praise certain of their orators in terms which we - now find it hard to understand, accustomed as we are to our - own modern tongues, in which effects of that kind are not - sought.[5] - -[Footnote 5: [Transcriber’s Note: See next footnote.]] - -It is, further, explained how this man of genius came to pay court to -his intellectual inferiors with an eye on the Academy, and how, while -his own private morals were bad, the moral tone of his books was of the -loftiest. - - Perhaps it is only in really vicious lives that the moral - problem can arise in all its disquieting strength. And of - this problem the artist finds a solution in the terms not - of his own personal life but of what is for him the true - life, a general, a literary solution. As the great Doctors - of the Church began often, without losing their virtue, by - acquainting themselves with the sins of all mankind, out of - which they extracted their own personal sanctity, so great - artists often, while being thoroughly wicked, make use of - their vices in order to arrive at a conception of the moral - law that is binding upon us all.[6] - -[Footnote 6: I am glad that the acknowledgement here of Mr. Walkley’s -courtesy in allowing me to substitute my version for his of these two -passages from _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ gives me an -opportunity to acknowledge also my borrowing and to congratulate him -upon the discovery of the word “mild”—“une véritable trouvaille,” as -Norpois would undoubtedly have called it.—C.K.S.M.] - -Nor is the portrait finished yet. Bergotte was at bottom a man who -really loved only certain images and to compose and paint them in -words. Had he had to defend himself before a tribunal, in spite of -himself he would have chosen his words, not for their effect on the -judge, but in view of images which the judge would certainly never have -perceived. - -It is this extraordinarily minute “psychometry” that is the peculiar -mark of Proust’s work. The sensations Swann derives from a sonata of -Vinteuil’s, the special quality of Elstir’s pictures of the sea-shore, -the effect of afternoon light in the church at Combray, glimpses of -military life at Doncières, with its contrast of the First Empire -aristocracy and the _ancien régime_,—it is the first time that -such things as these have been put into words and brought intimately -home to you. Then there are the studies of _le grand monde_—the -“gilded saloons,” as Disraeli would have called them, of the Guermantes -and the rest. Here you have a picture of the Faubourg Saint-Germain -that is as true, you are assured, as Balzac’s was false.[7] - -[Footnote 7: In his article, published in _The Times_ three weeks -later, on December 20, 1922, Mr. Walkley replied to a criticism of -this statement:—“The old complaint of ‘misrepresenting’ modern France -is now beginning to be heard about the great novelist just dead, -Marcel Proust. An eminent English novelist tackles me about this. He -says Proust is not entitled to the highest rank in literature because -his representation of French society is partial only, and therefore -unfair; that he writes only of the Faubourg Saint-Germain set, which -stands for the ‘dead’ France, and not of the ‘live’ people, soldiers -and statesmen and others, who have made and are making France to-day. -And he contrasts him with Balzac, who aimed at giving a panorama of the -whole social scheme. Well, it strikes me as an unfortunate comparison. -Balzac’s _Comédie Humaine_ was like Zola’s _Rougon-Macquart -Family_, a mere afterthought, a specious formula designed to -suggest continuity and completeness in what was merely casual and -temperamental. As a ‘representation of France’ it is not to be taken -seriously; what it represents—like any other work of art—is its -author’s genius. His men of action, his statesmen, his men of affairs, -are, frankly, preposterous. Proust never set out to ‘represent’ France; -he represented the side of its social life that happened to interest -him. What he did magnificently represent was the hitherto unexplored in -human nature and the human mind. As M. Jacques Rivière says of him in -the current _Nouvelle Revue Française_, ‘The discoveries he has -made in the human mind and heart will one day be considered as capital, -and of the same rank as those of Kepler in astronomy, Claude Bernard in -physiology, or Auguste Comte in the interpretation of the sciences.’ -That strikes me as better work than producing a portrait-group of -‘Modern France,’ with General Lyautey arm-in-arm with Marshal Foch, and -M. Clemenceau putting on his celebrated pearl-grey gloves.”—C.K.S.M.] - -I confess “ma mère” and “ma grand’mère” bore me. And there is just a -little too much of “le petit clan.” But in this vast banquet of modern -life and thought and sensation there is plenty of room to pick and -choose. Since Henry Bernstein first mentioned Proust’s name to me in -the year before the war I have returned again and again for a tit-bit -to that feast. Proust is dead; but we can still go on enjoying his -work. In that sense the cry of the child in Maeterlinck’s _Oiseau -Bleu_ is true enough: “There is no death.” - - A.B. WALKLEY. - - - - -XIII - -_PROUST AND THE MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS_[8] - -[Footnote 8: Reprinted from _The Times Literary Supplement_ of -Thursday, January 4, 1923, where this article followed an English -version of a formal tribute to Marcel Proust, signed by nineteen -English men and women, which appeared (in French) in the special number -of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ for January 1923. Mr. Middleton -Murry had already written, at greater length (too great, indeed, for -reproduction in this volume), on Marcel Proust in _The Quarterly -Review_ for July 1922.—C.K.S.M.] - - -For Englishmen Marcel Proust has already become one of the great -figures of modern literature. The feeling is common to many of his -readers that in some way his work marks an epoch. What kind of epoch it -is harder to say. Is he an end, or a beginning? And, again, yet another -question insinuates itself continually as we pass slowly through his -long volumes. What precisely—if answers to such questions can be made -precise—was his own intention as a writer? Not that it necessarily -makes the least difference to his own importance whether he succeeded -or failed, whether he was consistent or spasmodic in following out his -own plan. But we, at least, should be the happier for some indication -of the thread to follow. For there comes a time in the reading of a -long novel—and _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ is surely one of -the longest—when we feel the need to stand aside, to contemplate it as -a whole, to grasp the pattern, to comprehend the general vision of -life on which its essential individuality depends. Only thus, it seems, -can we really make it our own. - -In this respect Marcel Proust’s book may be fairly said to bristle -with difficulties. Its obvious theme, its surface intention, as we -perceive it in the brilliant opening pages of _Du côté de chez -Swann_, is the presentation by an adult man of his memories of -childhood. We feel, though with peculiar qualifications to which we -must return, that we are on the threshold of a spiritual autobiography; -we are to be the enchanted witnesses of the unfolding and growth of -a strangely sensitive consciousness. But no sooner are we attuned to -the subtleties of this investigation and have accustomed ourselves -to Proust’s breathless, tiptoe following of the faint and evanescent -threads of association: no sooner have we begun to take a deep and -steady breath of the rich fragrance of Aunt Léonie’s house at Combray, -and to imbibe the luxurious atmosphere of the old town, whose shifting -colours are as opulent as the lights of the windows in the church -round which it clings: no sooner have we prepared ourselves to watch -with absorbed interest the process of growth of a mind nurtured in -this almost intoxicating soil,—than the thread is abruptly snapped. We -do not complain at the moment, for the episode _Amour de Swann_ -is the highest sustained achievement of Proust as a prose-writer. -Perhaps the devouring passion of love—“Venus toute entière à sa proie -attachée”—the smouldering, torturing flame of unsatisfied passion which -by the law of its own nature can never be satisfied, has never been -so subtly and so steadily anatomised before. Perhaps it has been more -wonderfully presented, but never more wonderfully analysed. - -It is not surprising that in the fascination of this intolerable -and unwonted history, in which every psychological subtlety of the -author is properly and beautifully dominated by the tragic theme, we -forget that this is not at all the thing we went out to see. The boy -whose history we have been following could not have known of Swann’s -discomfiture before he was a man. It has happened, indeed, before -the narrative of _Du Côté de chez Swann_ opens, before the bell -of the garden-gate tinkles and Swann takes his place with the family -on the verandah; but it can have no place in the story of the boy’s -development until he is old enough to understand it. In other words, -the angle of presentation has abruptly changed. Into a narrative -concerned, as we imagine, solely with what a boy knew and felt, and how -he knew and felt it, is suddenly thrust an episode of which he could -have known nothing at all. - -These two sections of the book—composing the yellow-backed _Du -Côté de chez Swann_ with which Proust’s admirers had so long to -remain content—were at once baffling and fascinating. Moreover, -they do actually contain Proust’s very finest work: he was never -again to sustain himself on this level for so long. But, considered -in themselves (and there were three or four years in which we had no -choice but to consider them so), they could be made to yield a pattern. -On the one side was the vague and heroic figure of Swann as he loomed -on the extreme horizon of the boy’s world, the mysterious visitant -whose appearances in the household made an agony of his solitary going -to bed; on the other was the Swann of reality, the reserved, silent, -ineffably refined darling of the _beau monde_, who held his teeth -clenched, like the Spartan, while the fox gnawed at his vitals. The -contrast, the building up of the character of Swann, as it were, from -two sides at once, was the quite sufficient motive of the book. But, so -understood, it was Swann’s book, not the boy’s. - -But the next volumes brought us back to the boy’s history. As we read -of his love affair with Albertine, his adoration of the Duchesse de -Guermantes, his adventures in the rarefied atmosphere of the Faubourg -Saint-Germain, it became more and more evident that _Amour de -Swann_ was, in spite of its beauty and power, only an irrelevant -interlude, after all. And in the narrative of the boy’s stay in the -hotel at Balbec came frequent hints that the key to the story as a -whole might be found in the earlier emphasis upon the manner in which -the author went in search of the past. At the beginning of _Du -Côté de chez Swann_ he had been at pains to give us not merely -his results but his method also. He was a grown man, suddenly waking -from sleep, trying to locate himself once more in his room, and his -room in the world; and something familiar in this strange sensation -had reminded him of his sensations in his bedroom as a child. But -“reminded” is altogether too coarse and summary a word for the -delicate process on which his researches depended; rather it is that a -familiarity in the strange sensation whispers to him that it holds a -secret for him if he will only explore it. It conceals something that -he must know. Again, it is the vague familiarity of the faint flavour -of a _madeleine_ dipped in tea, which the grown man is eating in -his mother’s company, which ultimately yields up the magnificently -vivid picture of Combray and Aunt Léonie. These sensations, or -presentiments of the past, come to the boy also. There is, for example, -the beautiful account of his mysterious excitement at a sight of the -spire and towers of Martinville church when he is driving home in Dr. -Percepied’s carriage. Again he has the sense of memories he cannot -grasp, of a secret and mystical message that he cannot make his own; it -is the occasion of his first attempt at writing.[9] These premonitions -become more frequent during his stay with his grandmother at the -Balbec hotel. Then the sudden sight of a tiny clump of trees seen while -he is driving with the Marquise de Villeparisis makes him feel that -they are stretching out imploring arms towards him in a mute appeal. -If he can divine what they have to tell him (they seem to say) he will -touch the secret of “la vraie vie,” of life indeed. And then the writer -warns us that the story of his search to make this secret his own is -to come, and that this premonition of a task to be accomplished was to -haunt him throughout his life. - -[Footnote 9: In another and rather complicated sense this is a -presentiment of the future. The spires appear to have been those of -Caen, the carriage a motor car, the year evidently much later. The -original article will be found in _Pastiches et Mélanges_, on pp. -91 to 99.—C.K.S.M.] - -At this moment Marcel Proust came nearest, we may believe, to revealing -to the reader the hidden soul of his own book. There is room for -different interpretations, of course, and it is admitted that in any -case he was frequently distracted from whatever plan he had by his -delight in a pure description of the human comedy from the angle most -familiar to him. Nevertheless, we are persuaded that Proust brought to -the exact and intimate analysis of his own sensations something more -than the self-consciousness of talent—some element, let us say, of an -almost religious fervour. This modern of the moderns, this _raffiné_ -of _raffinés_, had a mystical strain in his composition. These hidden -messages of a moment, these glimpses and intuitions of “la vraie vie” -behind a veil, were of the utmost importance to him; he had some kind -of immediate certainty of their validity. He confessed as much, and we -are entitled to take a man so reticent at his word. - -We may take him at his word also when he acknowledges that the effort -to penetrate behind the veil of these momentary perceptions was the -chief interest of his life. The first of these illuminations—the vision -of Martinville spire—had taken shape in a piece of writing which he -gives us. We suspect that the last did also, and that its visible -expression is the whole series of volumes which, after all, do bear -a significant title—_A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_; we suspect -that the last page of the last volume would have brought us to the -first page of the first, and that the long and winding narrative would -finally have revealed itself as the history of its own conception. -Then, we may imagine, all the long accounts of the Guermantes’ parties -and the extraordinary figure of M. de Charlus would have fallen into -their places in the scheme, as part of the surrounding circumstances -whose pressure drove the youth and the man into the necessity of -discovering a reality within himself. What he was to discover, when -the demand that he should surrender himself to his moments of vision -became urgent and finally irresistible, was the history of what he was. -Proust—and amid the most labyrinthine of his complacent divagations -into the _beau monde_ a vague sense of this attends us—was much -more than a sentimental autobiographer of genius; he was a man trying -to maintain his soul alive. And thus, it may be, we have an explanation -of the rather surprising fact that he began his work so late. The -two volumes which went before _Du Côté de chez Swann_[10] were -not indeed negligible, but they were the work of a dilettante. The -explanation, we believe, is that in spite of his great gifts Proust -was a writer _malgré lui_; he composed against the grain. We mean -that had it been only for the sake of the satisfaction of literary -creation, he probably would not have written at all. It was only when -writing presented itself to him as the only available means for getting -down to the bedrock of his own personality, as the only instrument -by which his _fin-de-siècle_ soul—the epithet is, in his case, -a true definition—could probe to something solid to live by, that he -seriously took up the pen. It was the lance with which he rode after -the Grail—“la vraie vie.” - -[Footnote 10: _I.e._, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_, published -in 1896, and _Pastiches et Mélanges_, which, strictly speaking, -did not come as a volume until after _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en -Fleurs_, in the spring of 1919. But of the _Pastiches_ some at -least had appeared in the _Figaro_ in 1908 and 1909, while the -_Mélanges_ date even further, and include the introductions to -Proust’s translations of Ruskin, _La Bible d’Amiens_ (1904) and -_Sésame et les Lys_ (1906).—C.K.S.M.] - -Proust at the first glance looks wholly different from a man who rides -off on a desperate adventure. There seems to be no room for desperate -adventures in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It is hardly congruous to -some senses to ride through the waste land in a sixty horse-power -limousine. Nevertheless, it can be done. The outward and visible sign -is, not for the first time, different from the inward and spiritual -grace. - -So by a devious path we return to our first question. Proust marks -an epoch. What kind of epoch? Is it an end or a beginning? And the -answer we have reached is the answer we might have expected in the -case of a figure so obviously considerable. Proust is both an end and -a beginning. More an end than a beginning, perhaps, if we have regard -to the technique and texture of his work. In the art of literature -itself he opens up no new way. And, in the deeper sense, he indicates -a need more than he satisfies it. The modern mind, looking into the -astonishing mirror which Proust holds up to it, will not see in it -the gleam of something to live by; but it will see, if it knows how -to look, an acknowledgement of that necessity and a burning desire to -satisfy it. By so much Marcel Proust marks a beginning also. It is the -flame of this desire which smoulders always through his book, and at -times breaks out; it is this which makes it his own, and this which -gives it, in the true sense, style. - - J. MIDDLETON MURRY. - - - - -XIV - -_PROUST’S WAY_ - - -I went Proust’s way for the first time one rainy winter evening five -years ago, waiting in her warm boudoir for a foolish Society woman -to come in and give me tea and an introduction to the new popular -novelist. But she had not come in, and on a table near me, by the -powder-puff and the cigarettes, I found an author who had not yet swept -the board as he has since done. - -A re-bound copy of _Du Côté de chez Swann_, from that accredited -emporium which Thomas Carlyle founded for the reading of the -Intelligentzia, the London Library, lay, dull and forbidding, among the -brocade and tinsel of the bibelots. Surprised, I opened it, intending, -as one idly may during these interludes, to take good-humoured -cognisance of the nature of another’s chosen study. At once I became -involved in an _enchevêtrement_, a leash of moods, a congeries of -complexes, of crankinesses, all that goes to make up a man—Swann. There -was no breathlessness, no sense of hurry, yet it was “good going.” -There were hairbreadth but quite actual escapes from bathos, ugly -grazings averted, artistic difficulties compounded: this author backed -his sentences in and out of garages like a first-class motorist.... - -And, suddenly, the rumble of an earthly car sounded and my hostess and -the popular author came in and tea was a weariness, for Tante Léonie—we -all have our Tantes Léonie—had entered into my knowledge, and the Lady -of the Cattleyas was just beginning to cause Swann, whom I already -loved, to suffer after the way of all men who want anything very badly. -We never mentioned the shabby, black book I had put down, but began -to discuss, in this Kensington drawing-room, Freud, much as people -discussed music in the drawing-room of Mme. Verdurin in Paris, and in -very much the same style as if Madame Odette de Crécy had taken a hand, -and Swann, blinded by love, had listened to her. - -But I—I had become acquainted with Proust and had gained a world—one of -the worlds in which, through a book, we can go to live awhile whenever -we choose. - -Proust! What is Proust? This is the cry of the Carping Uninitiated -among us. To such persons, constitutionally unwilling to be instructed, -one replies that Proust is a fashion—a disease—and that a Proustian, -so-called, is an Opium-Eater. But, to those who know him and love him, -he is a wise and cunning Prospero whose wand is style, and Combray an -enchanted island—Ferdinand, not much Miranda, but Caliban, drunken -sailors and all. - -The Opium Trance, indeed, offers some parallel. Dr. Hochst tells us -that the wily subconsciousness, at odds with its earthly environment, -is able to invoke and maintain an attitude of benign stupor towards -the universe, holding it, as it were, at arm’s length, able to subsist -in tranquil abstraction from chill and hateful circumstance. And one -can easily imagine some triply disillusioned soul, rebuffed of love -and ambition and the fount of life itself, entering on a course of -the Master, content to live, lullabyed by the slight movement as of -flickering woodland leaves, warmed by the soft light that falls on -grey cathedral walls and white, dusty roads, quietly appreciative of -the Master’s passionless, infallible display of the complications and -unconscious betrayals of their ego by Françoise and Tante Léonie, -Odette and the Duchess; intrigued by his fine sense of social values -shown by the apt posing of the social Inferiorities of the Verdurin -_ménage_ in Paris against the ineffable Aristocracies ensconced in -their old château, Guermantes Way—and so on, through terms of months or -even years, till the stupor, benign in character, ends at last in the -ordinary manner, the patient dying, still _en plein Proust_, with, -perhaps, a volume or two unread, to the good, for there are, or are to -be, a good many. - -The normal, healthy person, still active, still complying with life, -finds it more than soothing to commit himself to this peaceable, -effluent mind-flow, a current of thought that has, like life, its -eddies, its _transes_, but persists, as must we all who agree with -our destinies, in its appointed borders and so gains something of the -peace of resignation that Renan speaks of: “_Il n’y a rien de suave -comme le renoncement de la joie, rien de doux comme l’enchantement du -désenchantement._” For there is, indeed, no joy in all these myriad -pages: how could there be, since joy is clear-cut and impermanent and -all Proustian values fade and are merged in each other without such a -thing as an edge anywhere! The sharp, dramatic point popular novelists -excel in would break the spell. - -We surrender ourselves to these entrancing _longueurs_; to -indescribable sensations that endure. Reading in Proust is, to me, like -the long drink of a child whom, by and by, a solicitous elder bids put -the cup down ... a gesture that this Master will never make. It is a -suave, sensuous pleasure, like stroking the long, rippling beard of -Ogier the Dane as he sits, stone-like, in his enchanted castle. It is -a patient, monkish task like that of tending with loving, religious -husbandry the Holy Rose at Hildesheim, that has gone on growing for -four hundred years. It suggests a sense of going on, a promise of a -future that may not be so very different, such as we got when our -German nurse told us that Grimm’s tale of the man who fell in and was -drowned, but, presently, found himself under the still waters of the -mere, walking, _langweilig_, in meadows prankt with daisies and -buttercups and fat flocks grazing.... - -Proust translated Ruskin’s _Bible of Amiens_—just the unexpected -sort of thing he would do—and one might theorise and hint that his -learned appreciation of the beauties that lie within due submission -to architectural rules, and acceptance of the limitations and -possibilities of shaped stones, have helped to form the backbone of -his style. It has the precision and poise of the arch, supported -by the virility and integrity of the pillar, with the permitted -_fioriture_ of the pinnacle sparingly used, as one sees it in -the Norman churches dotted all round about Combray and Balbec. And I -am sure his style is the magician’s wand without whose composed and -certain wielding we should never have allowed him to lead us, like -willing children, through the mazes, winding, twisting, but always -planned and in order, of his mind—or Swann’s. And if Swann—remote, -withdrawn, half-unsympathetic character that he is—had not been so -essentially lovable and had not, while telling us all, succeeded in -being at the same time suggestive, we should not have yielded ourselves -so utterly to _his_ mind-flow. - -Proust made Swann a financier, a Jew, and gave him a German name, -because, I think, he wished to indicate to our subconscious judgments -a cause of Swann’s curious racial patience, his waiting on and -deference to the caprice of others. He allows life “to ride” him, -Mme. Verdurin to patronise him, Odette to make him love her: just as -the trees let the winds lash their boughs and break them, as rivers, -flattened and contradicted by raindrops, flow on all the same under a -grey sky. Swann, beautifully groomed as he is, apt for drawing-rooms, -and acquainted with dukes and ashamed to say so, is a piece of -Nature—Nature whom I always see as an old man working in a field, with -a sack over his shoulders, bowed to the elements. For Swann doesn’t -act; things happen to him. Even his deep and pertinacious affection is -discounted by the inferior object of it. He is the golden mean in man, -no more a crank than we would all be if we were rich, with weaknesses -that we could, if we would, translate into heroisms. Most cultivated -women infallibly must have loved Swann—he is probably, therefore, of -the kind that finds only the Odettes of the world to its liking. - - VIOLET HUNT. - - - - -XV - -_M. VINTEUIL’S SONATA_ - - -It has never been published, never, so far as I can ascertain, been -performed in any of our concert-halls. Indeed, its largest audience -must have been the fashionable one which gathered for the _soirée -musicale_ given by the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, when Mme. de -Cambremer’s head wagged to its rhythm like a metronome, and the -Princesse des Laumes, to show that she was listening, beat time now -and again with her fan; but, so as not to forfeit her independence, -beat a different time from the musicians’. But most frequently it was -to be heard in a piano arrangement played at Mme. Verdurin’s for the -benefit of her “little clan,” which then included Odette de Crécy and, -for a time, Charles Swann, by a pianist whom Madame had taken under her -patronage, declaring that he left Planté and Rubinstein “sitting”; and, -later, when she had become Mme. Swann, by Odette herself, when it first -came to the notice of that most acute of critics, the narrator in _A -la Recherche du Temps Perdu_. - -But, of course, the boy, as he was then, must have heard a good deal -more about the Sonata from Swann, who himself was no mean judge of -music, as of painting; though, in his appreciation of the latter art, -he does seem to have derived more pleasure from the discovery in -an “old master” of a likeness to one of his friends than from the -aesthetic merits it might possess. But Swann’s opinion of the Sonata -cannot perhaps, for other reasons, be trusted altogether; it was too -closely linked up in his mind with certain occurrences in his private -life. Yet we can accept the favourable impression it made upon him -at a time when he had not met Mme. de Crécy. On that occasion he had -appreciated at first “only the material quality of the sounds which -the instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure -when, below the narrow ribbon of the violin-part, delicate, unyielding, -substantial, and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived, where -it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of -the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere -in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed -into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given moment, without being -able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was -pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure -in his memory, the phrase or harmony—he knew not which—that had just -been played and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance -of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power -to dilate our nostrils.... Hardly had the delicious sensation which -Swann had experienced died away, before his memory furnished him with -an immediate transcript, summary, it is true, and provisional, but one -on which he had kept his eyes fixed while the playing continued, so -effectively that, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no -longer uncapturable. He was able to picture to himself its extent, its -symmetrical arrangement, its notation, the strength of its expression; -he had before him that definite object which was no longer pure music, -but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual -music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished, quite clearly, a -phrase which emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound. It had -at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures, -of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which -he felt that nothing but this phrase could initiate him; and he had -been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire.” - -And, though he seems to have failed to make head or tail of the Sonata -at that first hearing, that little phrase stuck in his memory. It so -haunted him that, when a year later he was sitting beside Odette on -Mme. Verdurin’s Beauvais sofa (which his hostess vowed wasn’t to be -matched _anywhere_), and heard a high note held on through two -whole bars, he foresaw the approach of his beloved phrase and promptly -associated it with the woman at his side. In this way it became the -symbol of his passion, developed into a Wagnerian _leit-motif_ of -his liaison with Odette, until, when they had inevitably quarrelled, -it became for him an exquisite anguish to hear. An anguish which the -unhappy man had to dissemble from the ironical scrutiny of all those -monocles at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party, when “the violin had risen -to a series of high notes, on which it rested as though expecting -something, an expectancy which it prolonged without ceasing to hold on -to the notes, in the exaltation with which it already saw the expected -object approaching, and with a desperate effort ... to keep the way -open a moment longer, so that the stranger might enter in, as one -holds a door open that would otherwise automatically close. And before -Swann had had time to understand what was happening, to think, ‘It -is the little phrase from Vinteuil’s Sonata. I mustn’t listen!’ all -his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which -he had succeeded, up till that evening, in keeping invisible ... had -risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present -desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.” - -But we may find ample corroboration of Swann’s testimony to the -excellence of this work in the comments of that acute critic already -mentioned. Although he has preferred to remain anonymous himself, -it will be convenient for purposes of reference to find him a name, -and the name which for some odd reason or other flows from my pen -is “Marcel Proust.” Well, this young “Proust,” when he heard Mme. -Swann play the Sonata, was much impressed, though he also had some -difficulty in grasping the music at first. He goes into the question -much more deeply than the dilettante Swann, and begins by asking -whether it is not wrong to talk about “hearing a thing for the first -time,” when nothing has been understood. The second and third times -are from this point of view just as much “first times.” Then he makes -the vital discovery that probably what fails us the first time is not -our intelligence but our memory. “For our memory,” he says, “compared -to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we -are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who -in his sleep dreams of a thousand things and at once forgets them.... -Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing -us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, -and, with regard to works which we have heard two or three times, we -are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to -sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and can repeat it -by heart next morning.... So, where Swann and his wife could make out a -distinct phrase, that was as far beyond the range of my perception as -a name which one tries in vain to recall.... And not only does one not -seize at once and retain an impression of works that are really great, -but even in the content of any such work (as befell me in the case of -Vinteuil’s Sonata) it is the least valuable parts that one at first -perceives.”[11] - -[Footnote 11: [Transcriber’s Note: See next footnote.]] - -But “Proust” also carried away from his first hearing the recollection -of a phrase; and, since it seems to have been the fate of M. Vinteuil’s -work to become implicated in the love affairs of its admirers, we find -him at Balbec contemplating his new friend Albertine thus: “I seized -the opportunity, while she stood still, to look again and discover -once and for all where exactly the little mole was. Then, just as a -phrase of Vinteuil which had delighted me in the Sonata, and which -my recollection had allowed to wander from the _Andante_ to the -_Finale_, until the day when, having the score in my hands, I was -able to find it, and to fix it in my memory in its proper place, in the -_Scherzo_, so this mole, which I had visualised now on her cheek, -now on her chin, came to rest for ever on her upper lip, just below her -nose.”[12] - -[Footnote 12: Mr. Hussey, whose essay by his kindness and Mr. Filson -Young’s I have been enabled to repeat from the _Saturday Review_, -has, like Mr. Birrell, authorised the substitution of my version for -the original text of these two quotations from _A l’Ombre des Jeunes -Filles en Fleurs_.—C.K.S.M.] - -And if again it be thought that this association of the music with -the critic’s sentiment may have vitiated his judgment, I can only -point to the exquisite sensibility of these passages, where music -is brought to the touchstone of life, and human experience, in its -turn, is elucidated in terms of music. Indeed, this “Proust” shows -himself preternaturally sensitive both to musical sounds and to -unorganised noises, so that he instinctively registers the pitch of -a voice; so that the wall, when rapped by his grandmother, at once -assumes for him the resonance of a drum, and her triple knock takes -its place automatically in a symphonic scheme; so that the vision of -M. de Charlus making somewhat embarrassed conversation with a new -acquaintance immediately brings to his mind “those questioning phrases -of Beethoven, indefinitely repeated at equal intervals, and destined, -after a superabundant wealth of preparation, to introduce a new -_motif_, a change of key, or a recapitulation”; and so that the -old reprobate’s sudden descent from high dudgeon to docility suggests -the performance of “a symphony played through without a break, when a -graceful _Scherzo_ of idyllic loveliness follows upon the thunders -of the first movement.” - -We cannot but regret, then, that this Sonata, which, after reading what -“Proust” has to say of it, we seem to know as well as we know César -Franck’s or the “Kreutzer,” and which has made a profound impression -on persons so different in temperament as Charles Swann and Mme. -Verdurin (who could not hear it without crying till she got neuralgia -all down her face), should have suffered such neglect at the hands of -concert-artists, whose only excuse is, presumably, to throw the blame -upon the equal neglect of the publishers. - - DYNELEY HUSSEY. - - - - -XVI - -_THE LITTLE PHRASE_ - - -My only excuse for contributing anything to this collection is that -it provides an opportunity to give some information. Readers may want -to know whether the Sonata to which Proust refers in _Du Côté de -chez Swann_ as being played at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party was -wholly an invention of Proust’s, or whether his refined and tortuous -dithyrambs on the subject were inspired by an actual Sonata which the -dullest may purchase at a Paris shop. - -Well, the answer to this hypothetical question, like all real answers -to all genuine questions, is “Yes” and “No.” For the Ayes there is the -statement by Proust in a letter to a friend printed in the memorial -number of the _Nouvelle Revue Française_:[13] “La petite phrase de -cette Sonate ... est ... la phrase charmante mais enfin médiocre d’une -sonate pour piano et violon de Saint-Saëns....” - -[Footnote 13: _Nouvelle Revue Française_, No. 112 (N.S.), January -1923, pp. 201-2. The friend is M. Jacques de Lacretelle.—C.K.S.M.] - -Explosion! Thus are our idols shattered! Even Proust’s deprecating -“mais enfin médiocre” does not prepare for this shock the sturdy -English connoisseur who likes only the best. Proust tells his friend -that he can point out the precise passage, which is several times -repeated; and adds—cunningly—that its execution was a triumph for -Jacques Thibaud. - -He continues that, during the same evening, when the piano and -violin are described as murmuring like two birds in a dialogue, -he was thinking of a sonata by Franck (especially as played by -Enesco). The tremolos over the little Saint-Saëns phrase when -played at the Verdurins’ were, he says, suggested by the Prelude to -_Lohengrin_—he does not tell us, this time, in whose rendering, -but that actually they were recalled that evening by a trifle -from Schubert. The same evening, he tells us, as a final scrap of -information, there was played “un ravissant morceau” for the piano by -Fauré. - -What are we to make of all this? Well, I am struck by the composite -character of Proust’s material. It shows that his art consists in -his power of making an exquisite synthesis of his sensibility by -reprecipitating his sensations in a more generalised, more abstract -form than that in which they came to him. - - W.J. TURNER. - - - - -XVII - -_PROUST AS CREATOR_[14] - -[Footnote 14: This is, in fact, an extract from Mr. Conrad’s letter in -reply to a request that he would justify the project of this volume by -contributing to it.—C.K.S.M.] - - -. . . . . . - -As to Marcel Proust, _créateur_, I don’t think he has been -written about much in English, and what I have seen of it was rather -superficial. I have seen him praised for his “wonderful” pictures -of Paris life and provincial life. But that has been done admirably -before, for us, either in love, or in hatred, or in mere irony. One -critic goes so far as to say that Proust’s great art reaches the -universal, and that in depicting his own past he reproduces for us the -general experience of mankind. But I doubt it. I admire him rather for -disclosing a past like nobody else’s, for enlarging, as it were, the -general experience of mankind by bringing to it something that has not -been recorded before. However, all that is not of much importance. -The important thing is that whereas before we had analysis allied to -creative art, great in poetic conception, in observation, or in style, -his is a creative art absolutely based on analysis. It is really more -than that. He is a writer who has pushed analysis to the point when -it becomes creative. All that crowd of personages in their infinite -variety through all the gradations of the social scale are rendered -visible to us by the force of analysis alone. I don’t say Proust has no -gift of description or characterisation; but, to take an example from -each end of the scale: Françoise, the devoted servant, and the Baron de -Charlus, a consummate portrait—how many descriptive lines have they got -to themselves in the whole body of that immense work? Perhaps, counting -the lines, half a page each. And yet no intelligent person can doubt -for a moment their plastic and coloured existence. One would think -that this method (and Proust has no other, because his method is the -expression of his temperament) may be carried too far, but as a matter -of fact it is never wearisome. There may be here and there amongst -those thousands of pages a paragraph that one might think over-subtle, -a bit of analysis pushed so far as to vanish into nothingness. But -those are very few, and all minor instances. The intellectual pleasure -never flags, because one has the feeling that the last word is being -said upon a subject much studied, much written about, and of human -interest—the last word of its time. Those that have found beauty in -Proust’s work are perfectly right. It is there. What amazes one is -its inexplicable character. In that prose so full of life there is no -reverie, no emotion, no marked irony, no warmth of conviction, not even -a marked rhythm to charm our ear. It appeals to our sense of wonder -and gains our homage by its veiled greatness. I don’t think there -ever has been in the whole of literature such an example of the power -of analysis, and I feel pretty safe in saying that there will never be -another. - -. . . . . . - - JOSEPH CONRAD. - - - - -XVIII - -_A MOMENT TO SPARE_ - - -I have at last found time, or rather, for it expresses our relations -better, Time has been gracious enough at last to find _me_—in -regard to _Swann_. It was a new and satisfactory experience. His -reality is extraordinary—at least in the main part of the book: I hope -for the sake of French upper middle-class society of his day that it is -not ordinary in such things as the big dinner scene in vol. ii.[15] - -[Footnote 15: _I.e._, of _Du Côté de chez Swann_; the dinner -at the Verdurins’ at which Forcheville is present for the first time -with the Cottards, Brichot the painter, Swann, and Odette. It is -only fair, to both critic and reader, to explain that Mr. Saintsbury -had read nothing of Proust save _Swann_, and that only in an -inadequate translation. On the other hand, it was as impossible for -the editor to contemplate a book of this sort without a promise of -collaboration from his old friend and master as it was, at the moment, -for the doyen of English (if not of European, which is to say the -world’s) critics to qualify himself for saying more than is printed on -this leaf.—C.K.S.M.] - -Has anybody said that he partakes _both_ of De Quincey and of -Stendhal? He does to me, and I’m shot if I ever expected to see such -a blend! You see, there is in him on the one hand a double measure of -the analytical and introspective power that Beyle’s admirers make so -much of; with what they also admire, a total absence of prettification -for prettification’s sake. Yet he can be pretty in the very best sense, -while Beyle never can, in the best or any other. Then, too, I at least -find in him much less of the type-character which, though certainly -relieved by individuality in the _Chartreuse de Parme_ and other -books (especially _Lamiel_), is still always more or less there. -But the oddest and to me the most attractive thing is the way in which -he entirely relieves the sense of aridity—of museum-preparations—which -I find in Stendhal. And here it is that the De Quincey suggestion comes -so unexpectedly in. For Proust effects this miracle by a constant -relapse upon—and sometimes a long self-restriction to—a sort of dream -element. It is not, of course, the vaguer and more mystical kind that -one finds in De Quincey, not that of _Our Ladies of Sorrow_ or -_Savannah-la-Mar_, but that of the best parts of _The English -Mail Coach_. In fact, it is sometimes Landorian rather than De -Quinceyish in its dreaminess. But, however this may be, the dream -quality is there, to me, as it is in few other Frenchmen—themselves -almost always poets. Now, the worst of the usual realist is that, being -blinder than any other heathen in his blindness, he tries to exorcise -dream, though sometimes not nightmare, from life. Such a mixture as -Proust’s I remember nowhere else. - - GEORGE SAINTSBURY. - - - - -XIX - -_A REAL WORLD IN FICTION_ - - -My presence among those who are offering a tribute to Marcel Proust -would be an impertinence if the request for it had not been continued -after I had confessed the poverty of my knowledge. As it is, I may -be justified in taking the great pleasure it is to me to testify a -sincere admiration, founded on howsoever little experience. I have to -read a good deal for my bread, and the reading I can do for pleasure -is limited by debility of eyesight; M. Proust’s books are long and -in a language I read less easily than my own. So it has happened -that so far I have read only the two volumes of a beautifully lucid -translation, wonderfully lucid when the delicacy and subtlety of the -thoughts translated are considered. I will not say that you can taste -a wine without drinking a bottle—the analogy, like most analogies, -would be false; I do not doubt that wider study would produce more -valuable opinions. Yet my slight study has produced opinions which, I -am convinced, further study will only confirm, and it is a pleasure to -record them.... - -We all have our views as to what, for us, distinguishes great fiction -from that which is less than great. Mine has always been that it causes -me to live in a real world of visible, audible, and intelligible -people—a world in which, however novel it may be to start with, I am -at home and able, with sureness, to exercise my powers of understanding -to the full; this last point matters, for of course the superficial -may be superficially alive. No doubt the test is objectively unfair, -because the reaction of a writer’s imagination on a reader’s is -affected, though not conditioned, as the sympathy between the two is -greater or less; but for my own use this test is the most profitable. -Tolstoy has done this for me, so has Sterne, so has Miss Austen, so has -Thackeray, so have not very many others, and so have not some almost -universally acclaimed. Well, M. Proust has done this most considerable -service for me, in those two volumes I have read in translation, and -I am grateful. I know his hero’s grandfather and grandmother and -mother and invalid aunt, and know them well, and my understanding -has played with zest and to the limit of its power on the wealth of -character revealed to me. M. Swann is of my intimates, and I think I -have a perfect comprehension of his Odette. That is the first thing -for which I am grateful. The second is the sheer intellectual joy -with which, time and again, I came upon an achievement of divination -in the subtleties of human emotion which caught one’s breath by its -compelling truth. Jealousy of a man for a woman may have been more -grandly expressed, but have all the subtleties of its tortuous and -agonising course ever been so completely exposed as in the case of M. -Swann? Or the feelings of a sensitive and imaginative boy in his first -affections?... For these two things I have a sincere gratitude which I -propose to increase. But the wretchedness of my present qualifications -must terminate my expression of it now. - - G.S. STREET. - - - - -XX - -_THE BIRTH OF A CLASSIC_ - - -The pictures we make, for our own satisfaction, of our actions are -generally as remote as the _clichés_ of polite conversation from -the psychological processes they pretend to reflect. It is convenient -and very often necessary to limit consciousness of an action so that -it receives a distinct and recognisable contour. With a certain -resemblance to the achievement of the Impressionists, who revealed the -fabric of a world worked-over with conceptual images, Proust breaks -up the moulds into which our feelings are generally poured. He is -curious to note the sensual deceits which agitate the mind no less -profoundly than the reality would have done, and to separate the social -stratagem (whether that of the Guermantes or of the servants in his -own home) from the intention of which it was the paraphrase. He is -dissociative only to that extent—a necessary one, since dissimulation -is the mind’s first nature. But he is not at all destructive; for an -action never really is a separate entity, cut off by crystalline walls -from the mother-liquor of our lives. In the style which he created that -glittering illusion is re-dissolved into the saturated mental life of -which it is an inextricable component. - -I know nothing, he says, that can, “autant que le baiser, faire surgir -de ce que nous croyons une chose à aspect défini, les cent autres -choses qu’elle est tout aussi bien, puisque chacune est relative à -une perspective non moins légitime.... Dans ce court trajet de mes -lèvres vers sa joue, c’est dix Albertines que je vis.” Not only the -coarsening of the grain of the skin seen in this unaccustomed proximity -(that would be comparatively insignificant), but the psychological -perspective opened by this change in their relations; though Albertine -refused his kiss at Balbec, she cannot now prevent him from gathering -in one embrace the rose of the past and of the present. For Albertine -is not only Albertine “simple image dans le décor de la vie” when -later she calls on him in Paris; her image trails the multitudinous -sensations of _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_; and though -he no longer loves her, the appearances she had for him at Balbec, -silhouetted against the sea or sitting with her back to the cliff, -bring back with them the influence of that love. We are far from what -we believed a thing with a definite appearance, a girl, and perhaps the -example may indicate faintly the complexity of Proust’s art. Wishing -to convey the shifting aspect of things, or perhaps the composite -pile of aspects which represents, at any moment, our realisation -of a thing—and as objective description reintroduces the pictorial -_cliché_ so far avoided,—he utilises the vast fabric of memory, -shot, like iridescent silk, with many indefinable moods. To specify -his method more exactly would not at present be easy, nor is there -any enjoyment equal to the mere following of this marvellous web into -the still obscure future, where half is, to our chagrin partly and to -our delight, yet hidden. To the latter, because we have to be patient -against our will; to the former, because there is still so much certain -pleasure in store, and the excitement of seeing the completed design, -whose symmetry so far is only felt, like that of a statue in its shroud -before its resurrection, coincide with or contradict our anticipations. -There is a delicious state (owing not a little of its charm to our -knowledge of its transience) in which a book, having shaken off the -first fever of novelty, is in a condition to be most artfully savoured, -and at length. The classic features will never be dearer to us than -while they are still flushed with contemporaneity. The classics are -at least readable in so far as they are modern, but the modern, once -firmly on his pedestal, is not at all approachable. So it is a great -and marvellous privilege to be awake to this exquisite dawn, at the -moment this many-leaved bloom is suspended in all its freshness which -to-morrow— - - To-morrow will find fallen or not at all: - -fallen, if the worst comes to the worst (as we have heard it always -does), to a greatness in its decay and neglect more moving than the -spick-and-span of a smart little subaltern of immortality. It is -impossible to imagine how this titanic fragment can be trundled from -age to age; nor is the future likely to have much time to spare from -the production of domestic utensils which are so badly made that they -must be continually replaced. _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ -is not one of those things which are replaced, like the novel of the -moment, but exactly what part of it is most likely to be saved the -present cannot decide. There will always be some to follow the whole -sweep of the Master’s gesture, which evokes the hours of adolescence -flowering in the shade of girlhood and rebuilds the tormented cities -of the plain; now stooping to dissect a snob or soaring to stroke a -horizon, but never theatrical and never grandiose. Perhaps in the -ray of this most intimate limelight we draw the greater part of our -pleasure from the recognition of our own movements; the heirs of our -sensibility will find there the original of many impulses which they -accept as part of human nature. - - EDGELL RICKWORD. - - - - -XXI - -_A CASUIST IN SOULS_ - - -Pater, who desired to find everywhere forces producing pleasurable -sensations, “each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind,” says: -“Few artists, not Goethe nor Byron even, work quite clearly, casting -off all _débris_, and leaving us only what the heat of their -imagination has wholly fused and transformed.” Has the heat of Proust’s -imagination fused and transformed his material as Balzac and Rodin -transformed and fused theirs? Are his characters creations? Has he -the strange magical sense of that life in natural things, which is -incommunicable? I think not; there is too much _débris_ in his -prose which he has not cast off. - -Proust’s books are the autobiography of a sensitive soul, for whom -the visible world exists; only, he could never say with Gautier, -“I am a man for whom the visible world exists”; for in this famous -phrase he expresses his outlook on life, and his view of his own work: -Gautier, who literally discovered descriptive prose, a painter’s -prose by preference; who, in prose and in verse alike, is the poet -of physical beauty, of the beauty of the exterior of things. Proust, -with his adoration of beauty, gives one an equal sense of the beauty -of exterior things and of physical beauty; with infinite carefulness, -with infinite precautions, he gives one glimpses of occult secrets -unknown to us, of our inevitable instincts, and, at times, of those icy -ecstasies which Laforgue reveals in _Moralités légendaires_. Only, -not having read books of mediaeval magic, he cannot assure us that the -devil’s embraces are of a coldness so intense that it may be called, by -an allowable figure of speech, fiery. - -In his feverish attempt to explain himself to himself, his imaginary -hero reminds me of Rousseau, who, having met Grimm and vexed Voltaire, -was destined by his febrile and vehement character to learn in -suffering what he certainly did not teach in song; who, being avid of -misunderstandings, was forced by the rankling thorns of his jealousy -to write his _Confessions_, in which he unburdens himself of -the exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, driven, in spite -of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people—a coward -before his own conscience. There is no cowardice in the conscience of -Proust’s hero; his utter shameless sincerity to the naked truth of -things allows him “avec une liberté d’esprit” to compete, near the -end of the last volume, in his unveiling of M. de Charlus, with the -outspokenness of Restif de la Bretonne in _Monsieur Nicolas_. - -Some of the pages of _Sodome_ might have been inspired by -Petronius. The actual fever and languor in the blood: that counts -for so much in Petronius’s prose, and lies at the root of some of -his fascinations. He is passionately interested in people, but only -in those who are not of the same nature as he is: his avid curiosity -being impersonal. Some of Proust’s curiosity is not so much vivid as -impersonal. Petronius—like the writer I refer to—is so specifically -Latin that he has no reticence in speaking of what he feels, none of -that unconscious reticence in feeling which races drawn farther from -civilisation have invented in their relations with nature. This is one -of the things which people mean when they say that Petronius’s prose is -immoral. So is that of Proust. Yet, in the prose of these writers, both -touched with the spirit of perversity, the rarest beauty comes from a -heightening of nature into something not quite natural, a perversity of -beauty, which is poisonous as well as curious. - -Proust has some of the corrupt mysticism of Huysmans, but not so -perilous as his; nor has he that psychology which can be carried so far -into the soul’s darkness that the flaming walls of the world themselves -fade to a glimmer; he does not chronicle the adventures of this world’s -Vanity Fair: he is concerned with the revelation of the subconscious -self; his hero’s confessions are not the exaltation of the soul. He -is concerned, not so much with adventures as with an almost cloistral -subtlety in regard to the obscure passions which work themselves out, -never with any actual logic. With all his curiosity, this curiosity -never drives him in the direction of the soul’s apprehension of -spiritual things. He does, at times, like Mallarmé, deform ingeniously -the language he writes in; and, as in most of these modern decadents, -perversity of form and perversity of manner bewilder us in his most -bewildering pages. - -I find to my surprise that a French critic, Carcassonne, compares -Proust with Balzac. As an observer of society, yes; as a creator, no. -“Never,” he writes, “since Stendhal and Balzac has any novelist put -so much reality into a novel. Stendhal, Balzac: I write those great -names without hesitation beside that of Marcel Proust. It is the finest -homage I can render to the power and originality of his talent.” During -Balzac’s lifetime there was Benjamin Constant, whose _Adolphe_ has -its place after _Manon Lescaut_, a purely objective study of an -incomparable simplicity, which comes into the midst of those analysts -of difficult souls—Laclos, who wrote an unsurpassable study of naked -human flesh in _Les Liaisons dangereuses_; Voltaire, Diderot; -Rousseau, in whose _Nouvelle Héloïse_ the novel of passion comes -into existence. After these Flaubert, the Goncourts, Huysmans, Zola, -Maupassant. I should place Proust with those rare spirits whose -_métier_ is the analysis of difficult souls. Browning wrote in -regard to his _Sordello_: “My stress lay on the incidents in the -development of a soul: little else is worth study; I, at least, always -thought so.” This certainly applies to Proust; and, as he seems to me -to derive some of his talent from Stendhal and from no other novelist, -I can imagine his casuistical and cruel creation of the obscure soul of -M. de Charlus in much the same fashion as Stendhal’s when he undresses -Julien Sorel’s soul with a deliberate and fascinating effrontery. - -Consider the question of Balzac’s style: you will find that it has -life, that it has idea, that it has variety; that there are moments -when it attains a rare and perfectly individual beauty. To Baudelaire -he was a passionate visionary. “In a word, every one in Balzac, down -to the very scullions, has genius.” I have often wondered whether, in -the novel, perfect form is a good or even a possible thing if the novel -is to be what Balzac made it, history added to poetry. A novelist with -style will not look at life with an entirely naked vision. - -There is no naked vision in Proust; his vision is like a clouded -mirror, in whose depths strange shapes flash and vanish. The only -faultless style in French is Flaubert’s; that style, which has every -merit and hardly a fault, becomes what it is by a process very -different from that of most writers careful of form. I cannot deny that -Stendhal has a sense of rhythm: it is in his brain rather than in his -dry imagination; in a sterile kind of brain, set at a great distance -from the heart, whose rhythm is too faint to disturb it. Still, in -Proust’s style there is something paradoxical, singular, caustic; it is -coloured and perfumed and exotic, a style in which sensation becomes -complex, cultivated, the flower of an elaborate life; it can become -deadly, as passion becomes poisonous. “The world of the novelist,” I -have written, “what we call the real world, is a solid theft out of -space; colour and music may float into it and wander through it, but -it has not been made with colour and music, and it is not a part of -the consciousness of its inhabitants.” This world was never lived in -by d’Annunzio; this world was never entered by Proust. All the same, -there is in him something cruel, something abnormal, something subtle. -He is a creator of gorgeous fabrics, Babylons, Sodoms. Only, he never -startles you, as Balzac startles you. - - ARTHUR SYMONS. - - - - -XXII - -_THE LAST WORD_ - - -Two of the contributors to the stout Proust memorial number of _La -Nouvelle Revue Française_ remind me that I met Marcel Proust many -years ago at a Christmas Eve party given by Madame Edwards (now Madame -José Sert) in her remarkable flat on the Quai Voltaire, Paris. (Not -that I needed reminding.) With some eagerness I turned up the year, -1910, in my journal. What I read there was this: “Doran came on Sunday -night for dinner. We went on to Misia Edwards’ ‘Réveillon,’ and got -home at 4 A.M.” Not a word more! And I cannot now remember a single -thing that Proust said. - -I have, however, a fairly clear recollection of his appearance and -style: a dark, pale man, of somewhat less than forty, with black hair -and moustache; peculiar; urbane; one would have said, an aesthete; an -ideal figure, physically, for Bunthorne; he continually twisted his -body, arms, and legs into strange curves, in the style of Lord Balfour -as I have observed Lord Balfour in the restaurants of foreign hotels. -I would not describe him as self-conscious; I would say rather that -he was well aware of himself. Although he had then published only -one book, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_—and that fourteen years -before—and although the book had had no popular success, Proust was -undoubtedly in 1910 a considerable lion. He sat at the hostess’s own -table and dominated it, and everybody at the party showed interest in -him. Even I was somehow familiar with his name. As for _Les Plaisirs -et les Jours_, I have not read it to this day. - -A few weeks before his death, while searching for something else in -an overcrowded bookcase, I came across my first edition of _Du Côté -de chez Swann_, and decided to read the book again. I cared for it -less, and I also cared for it more, than in 1913. The _longueurs_ -of it seemed to me to be insupportable, the clumsy centipedalian -crawling of the interminable sentences inexcusable; the lack of form -or construction may disclose artlessness, but it signifies effrontery -too. Why should not Proust have given himself the trouble of learning -to “write,” in the large sense? Further, the monotony of subject and -treatment becomes wearisome. (I admit that it is never so distressing -in _Swann_ as in the later volumes of _Guermantes_ and of -_Sodome et Gomorrhe_.) On the other hand, at the second reading I -was absolutely enchanted by some of the detail. - -About two-thirds of Proust’s work must be devoted to the minutiæ -of social manners, the rendering ridiculous of a million varieties -of snob. At this game Proust is a master. (Happily he does not -conceal that, with the rest of mankind, he loves ancient blood and -distinguished connections.) He will write you a hundred pages about a -fashionable dinner at which nothing is exhibited except the littleness -and the _naïveté_ of human nature. His interest in human nature, -if intense and clairvoyant, is exceedingly limited. Foreign critics -generally agree that the English novelist has an advantage over the -French in that he walks all round his characters and displays them -to you from every side. I have heard this over and over again in -conversation in Paris, and I think it is fairly true, though certainly -Balzac was the greatest exponent of complete display. Proust never -“presents” a character; he never presents a situation: he fastens on -one or two aspects of a character or a situation, and strictly ignores -all the others. And he is scarcely ever heroical, as Balzac was always; -he rarely exalts, and he nearly always depreciates—in a tolerant way. - -Again, he cannot control his movements: he sees a winding path off the -main avenue, and scampers away further and further and still further, -merely because at the moment it amuses him to do so. You ask yourself: -He is lost—will he ever come back? The answer is that often he never -comes back, and when he does come back he employs a magic but illicit -carpet, to the outrage of principles of composition which cannot be -outraged in a work of the first order. This animadversion applies -not only to any particular work, but to his work as a whole. The -later books are orgies of self-indulgence; the work has ruined the -_moral_ of the author: phenomenon common enough. - -Two achievements in Proust’s output I should rank as great. The first -is the section of _Swann_ entitled _Un amour de Swann_. He -had a large theme here—love and jealousy. The love is physical and the -object of it contemptible; the jealousy is fantastic. But the affair -is handled with tremendous, grave, bitter, impressive power. The one -fault of it is that he lets Swann go to a _soirée musicale_ and -cannot, despite several efforts, get him away from it in time to save -the interest of the situation entire. Yet in the _soirée musicale_ -divagation there are marvellous, inimitable things. - -The second achievement, at the opening of _Sodome et Gomorrhe_, -is the psychological picture of the type-pederast. An unpromising -subject, according to British notions! Proust evolves from it beauty, -and a heartrending pathos. Nobody with any perception of tragedy can -read these wonderful pages and afterwards regard the pervert as he -had regarded the pervert before reading them. I reckon them as the -high-water of Proust. - -Speaking generally, Proust’s work declined steadily from _Swann_. -_A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ was a fearful fall, and as -volume followed volume the pearls were strung more and more sparsely on -the serpentine string. That Proust was a genius is not to be doubted; -and I agree that he made some original discoveries in the by-ways -of psychological fiction. But that he was a supreme genius, as many -critics both French and English would have us believe, I cannot admit. - - ARNOLD BENNETT. - - -THE END - - -_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, -_Edinburgh_. - - - - -[Transcriber’s Notes: - -In two quotations from Proust’s _À la recherche du temps perdu_, words -are missing, rendering the quotations unintelligible. The missing -words, in brackets below, were supplied based on the authoritative -French edition (Gallimard, Bibliothêque de la Pléiade, 1988, vol. III). - - Je n’avais [jamais] fait de différence entre les ouvriers - - si loin qu’on allât dans [ses] effets d’art raffiné - -Other obvious printer errors have been corrected without note.] - - - - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARCEL PROUST *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part -of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm -concept and trademark. 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K. Scott Moncrieff</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online -at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you -are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the -country where you are located before using this eBook. -</div> - -<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Marcel Proust</p> -<p style='display:block; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:0;'>An English Tribute</p> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Compiler: C. K. Scott Moncrieff</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: July 27, 2021 [eBook #65930]</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Charlene Taylor, Linda Cantoni, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)</div> - -<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARCEL PROUST ***</div> - - - - -<div class="figcenter illowp49" id="cover" style="max-width: 41.625em;"> - <img class="w100" src="images/cover.jpg" alt="cover" title="cover" /> -</div> - -<p class="center sm">The cover image was created by the transcriber -and is placed in the public domain.</p> - -<p class="center tp bp"><a href="#THE_CONTENTS"><b>CONTENTS</b></a><br /> -<br /> -<b><a href="#TNOTE">Transcriber’s Notes</a></b></p> - -<div class="bbox"> -<h1>MARCEL PROUST<br /> -<span class="msm"><i>AN ENGLISH TRIBUTE</i></span></h1> - -<div class="figcenter illowp72" style="max-width: 1.625em;"> - <img class="w100" src="images/wingding.jpg" alt="wingding" title="wingding" /> -</div> - -<p class="center tp"><i>By</i> JOSEPH CONRAD<br /> -ARNOLD BENNETT<br /> -ARTHUR SYMONS<br /> -COMPTON MACKENZIE<br /> -CLIVE BELL<br /> -W.J. TURNER<br /> -CATHERINE CARSWELL<br /> -E. RICKWORD<br /> -VIOLET HUNT<br /> -RALPH WRIGHT<br /> -ALEC WAUGH<br /> -GEORGE SAINTSBURY<br /> -L. PEARSALL SMITH<br /> -A.B. WALKLEY<br /> -J. MIDDLETON MURRY<br /> -STEPHEN HUDSON<br /> -G.S. STREET<br /> -ETHEL C. MAYNE<br /> -FRANCIS BIRRELL<br /> -REGINALD TURNER<br /> -DYNELEY HUSSEY</p> - -<p class="center"><i>Collected by</i><br /> -C.K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF</p> - -<div class="figcenter illowp100 tp bp" id="colophon" style="max-width: 7.1875em;"> - <img class="w100" src="images/colophon.jpg" alt="colophon" title="colophon" /> -</div> - -<p class="center"> -<span class="sm">NEW YORK</span><br /> -THOMAS SELTZER<br /> -<span class="msm">1923</span> -</p> - -<hr class="short" /> - -<p class="center msm bp"> -<i>Printed in Great Britain<br /> -All Rights<br /> -Reserved</i><br /> -</p> -</div> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">-v-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_CONTENTS">THE CONTENTS</h2> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter illowp72 bp" style="max-width: 1.625em;"> - <img class="w100" src="images/wingding.jpg" alt="wingding" title="wingding" /> -</div> - -<table class="autotable" summary="contents"> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">I. Introduction: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">C.K.S.M.</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">page 1</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">II. A Portrait: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">STEPHEN HUDSON</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_5">5</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">III. The Prophet of Despair: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">FRANCIS BIRRELL</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_12">12</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">IV. A Sensitive Petronius: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">RALPH WRIGHT</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">V. The “Little Proust”: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">L. PEARSALL SMITH</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_52">52</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">VI. A Reader’s Gratitude: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">COMPTON MACKENZIE</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_59">59</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">VII. Gilberte: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">ALEC WAUGH</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">VIII. Proust’s Women: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">CATHERINE CARSWELL</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">IX. The Best Record: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">REGINALD TURNER</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_78">78</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">X. A Foot-note: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">CLIVE BELL</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_83">83</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XI. The Spell of Proust: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">ETHEL C. MAYNE</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XII. A New Psychometry: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">A.B. WALKLEY</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_96">96</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XIII. Proust and the Modern Consciousness: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">J. MIDDLETON MURRY</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_102">102</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XIV. Proust’s Way: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">VIOLET HUNT</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XV. M. Vinteuil’s Sonata: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">DYNELEY HUSSEY</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XVI. A Note on the Little Phrase: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">W.J. TURNER</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_124">124</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XVII. Proust as Creator: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">JOSEPH CONRAD</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_126">126</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XVIII. A Moment to Spare: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">G. SAINTSBURY</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XIX. A Real World in Fiction: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">G.S. STREET</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_131">131</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XX. The Birth of a Classic: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">EDGELL RICKWORD</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_134">134</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XXI. A Casuist in Souls: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">ARTHUR SYMONS</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">XXII. The Last Word: <i>by</i> <span class="msm">ARNOLD BENNETT</span></td> -<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_144">144</a></td> -</tr> -</table> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">-1-</span></p> - -<h1 class="nobreak"><span class="gesperrt">MARCEL PROUST</span></h1> -</div> - - -<div class="chapter"> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="I">I<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>INTRODUCTION</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE death of Marcel Proust in Paris on November 18, 1922, and the -manner in which the news of his death was, by no means numerously, -reported in London, brought into question the extent of his rumoured -rather than defined influence over readers in this country. This -question it was natural that I should ask myself, for I had recently -published an English version of the first part of his great novel, -<i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de chez Swann</span></i>, and was then about half way through -the translation of its sequel, <i><span lang="fr">A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en -Fleurs</span></i>. The writer of a savage, though evidently sincere attack -on Proust which a London newspaper published within forty-eight hours -of his death seemed to assume that he had already a considerable (if -misguided) following here, and it occurred to me that I might obtain, -from writers who were my friends, and from others who had expressed -their admiration of Proust in English periodicals, a body of critical -opinion similar to that which, I learned, was being collected in Paris -by the editor of the <i><span lang="fr">Nouvelle Revue Française</span></i>. To test the -worth of my idea, I began with the seniors.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">-2-</span> Mr. Saintsbury—who (in -this respect only) might have served as the model for the Marquis de -Norpois, whose promptness in answering a letter “was so astonishing -that whenever my father, just after posting one to him, saw his -handwriting upon an envelope, his first thought was always one of -annoyance that their letters must, unfortunately, have crossed in the -post; which, one was led to suppose, bestowed upon him the special and -luxurious privilege of extraordinary deliveries and collections at -all hours of the day and night”—replied at once, and Mr. Conrad soon -followed, with letters of which each correspondent authorised me to -make whatever use I chose.</p> - -<p>So, I must add, did Mr. George Moore, but in a letter expressive only -of his own inability to stomach Proust, the inclusion here of which, -even although it might make this volume a prize to collectors of -first editions, would compel the excision of the word “tribute” from -title-page and cover. Mr. Walkley, the doyen of English Proustians as -he is of dramatic critics, and Mr. Middleton Murry put me at liberty -to use articles which they were publishing in <i>The Times</i> and -its <i>Literary Supplement</i>; Mr. Stephen Hudson, the most intimate -English friend of Proust’s later years, consented to write a character -sketch; and on this base my cenotaph was soon erected.</p> - -<p>That it is not loftier must be laid to my<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">-3-</span> account. I have doubtless -refrained from approaching many willing contributors, from a natural -and, I trust, not blameworthy reluctance to interrupt busy persons with -whom I am not acquainted. At the same time, I found among those whom I -did approach a widespread modesty which prevented a number of them from -contributing opinions which would have been of the greatest critical -importance. “We do not,” was the general answer, “know enough of Proust -to venture to tackle such a theme.” This and the pressure of other -work have kept silent, to my great regret, Mrs. Virginia Woolf, Miss -Rebecca West, Mr. J.C. Squire, Mr. Desmond MacCarthy, Mr. Lascelles -Abercrombie, Mr. Aldous Huxley, and that most reluctant writer Mr. E.M. -Forster.</p> - -<p>Their reticence should be my model. Although I cannot pretend not to -have made a certain study of the text of Proust (probably the most -corrupt text of any modern author that is to be found), the close -scrutiny required of a translator has inevitably obstructed my view of -the work as a whole. The reader of the following pages may, however, be -assured that this is my private loss and will in no way be made his.</p> - -<p>I have to thank all the contributors for the spontaneous generosity -with which they have collaborated and have placed their work at my -disposal. I have also to thank the proprietors and editors of the -following newspapers and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">-4-</span> reviews for permission to reprint articles -which have appeared in their pages: <i>The Times</i> for Mr. Walkley’s; -<i>The Times Literary Supplement</i> for Mr. Middleton Murry’s; <i>The -Saturday Review</i> for Mr. Hussey’s; <i>The New Statesman</i> for Mr. -Pearsall Smith’s; <i>The Saturday Westminster Gazette</i> for that of -Mr. Arthur Symons; and <i>The Nineteenth Century and After</i> for Mr. -Ralph Wright’s.</p> - -<p class="right"> -C.K.S.M.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">-5-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="II">II<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>A PORTRAIT</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">I</span>N trying to represent the personality of a friend to those who do -not know him, one has in mind, though one may not deliberately use, a -standard of reference with which he can be compared or contrasted.</p> - -<p>In the case of Proust no such standard is available, and I find myself -driven back to the frequently used but unilluminating word unique -for want of a better expression. This uniqueness consisted less, I -think, in his obvious possession to an outstanding degree of gifts -and charms than in his use of them. Others probably have been and -are as wise, witty, cultured, sympathetic, have possessed or possess -his conversational powers, his charm of manner, his graciousness. -But no one I have ever known combined in his own person so many -attractive qualities and could bring them into play so spontaneously. -Yet, while his use of these powers resulted in his eliciting the -utmost fruitfulness from social intercourse, there was an impalpable -objectivity about him, an aloofness felt rather than observed. It was -as though the personality revealed at the particular moment was but one -of many, while the dominant consciousness lay behind them, preserving -its complete inviolability. It was, I believe, in the depth and -capacity of this ultimate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">-6-</span> consciousness that his uniqueness lay, as it -is there that the source of his creative power and sensibility is to be -found.</p> - -<p>It seems to me that the essential element of this ultimate ego in -Proust was goodness. This goodness had nothing ethical in it, must not -be confounded with righteousness; and yet, seeking another word to -define its nature, purity is the only one that occurs to me. There was -in him the fundamental simplicity which was typified by Dostoevsky in -Myshkin, and out of it grew the intellectual integrity which governed -and informed his philosophy.</p> - -<p>He possessed that rarest gift of touching everyday people, things, and -concerns with gold, imparting to them a vital and abiding interest. -Anything and everything served as a starting-point, nothing was too -minute to kindle idea and provoke suggestive utterance. He could do -this because he was himself the most interesting of men, and because -Life was one long exciting adventure to him wherein nothing was trivial -or negligible. It was not that loving beauty he desired nothing else, -and was seeking an aesthetic disguise for the ugly, the sordid, or the -base. On the contrary, he recognised that these also are of the stuff -of which humanity is made, and that truth and beauty are as often as -not masked by their opposites. In him extremes were not only reconciled -but united. Supremely conscious and utterly unegotistical, one may look -in vain in his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">-7-</span> work for a trace of vanity, of self-glorification, -or even self-justification. He is intensely concerned with his own -consciousness, he is never concerned with himself. I can think of no -conversation in any of his books in which he takes other than a minor -part, and of very few in which he takes any part at all. He is wholly -taken up with the thing in itself, whatever it may be, regarding his -consciousness as an instrument of revelation apart from himself. And as -he shows himself in his books, so he was in life.</p> - -<p>In reply to a letter in which, expressing my disappointment at not -seeing him on a certain occasion, I went on to say that, much as I -loved his books, I would rather see him and hear him talk than read -them, he wrote me:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">Entre ce qu’une personne dit et ce qu’elle extrait par la -méditation des profondeurs où l’esprit nu gît, couvert de -voiles, il y a un monde. Il est vrai qu’il y a des gens -supérieurs à leurs livres mais c’est que leurs livres ne -sont pas des <i>Livres</i>. Il me semble que Ruskin, qui -disait de temps en temps des choses sensées, a assez bien -exprimé une partie au moins de cela.... Si vous ne lisez -pas mon livre ce n’est pas ma faute; c’est la faute de mon -livre, car s’il était vraiment un beau livre il ferait -aussitôt l’unité dans les esprits épars et rendrait le -calme aux cœurs troubles.</span></p> -</div> - -<p>His immersion in the subject of conversation or inquiry was complete; -nothing else existed until he had got to the bottom of it. But his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">-8-</span> -world was echoless; the voice never repeated itself, and banality could -not enter in, because neither formula nor classification existed for -him. Just as in his eyes one particular water-lily in the Vivonne was -different from any other water-lily, so each fresh experience was an -isolated unit complete in itself and unlike all other units in the -world of his consciousness. His mind, so far from being overlaid by -obliterating layers of experience, was as a virgin soil which by some -magic renews itself after each fresh crop has been harvested. This -power of mental renewal pervades and gives a peculiar freshness to all -that he has written. It is in essence a youthful quality which was very -marked in his personality. He was penetrated with boyish eagerness and -curiosity, asked endless questions, wanted always to know more. What -had you heard, what did you think, what did they say or do, whatever -<i>it</i> was and whoever <i>they</i> were. And there was no denying -him this or anything he wanted; he must always have his way—he always -did have it, till the end of his life. And the great comfort to those -who loved him is that till the last he was a glorious spoilt child. As -Céleste says in <i><span lang="fr">Sodome</span></i>:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">On devrait bien tirer son portrait en ce moment. Il a tout -des enfants. Vous ne vieillirez jamais. Vous avez de la -chance, vous n’aurez jamais à lever la main sur personne, -car vous avez des yeux qui savent imposer leur volonté....</span></p> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">-9-</span></p> - -<p>This was the same Céleste who devoted her life to his service -for many years and was with him to the last. After his death she -wrote of him: “<span lang="fr">Monsieur ne ressemblait à personne. C’était un être -incomparable—composé de deux choses, intelligence et cœur—et quel cœur!</span>”</p> - -<p>Knowing the intensity of his interest in and sympathy with humble -lives, the suggestion of snobbishness in connexion with such a man is -ridiculous. Proust, like all great artists, needed access to all human -types. It is one of the drawbacks of our modern civilisation that the -opportunities for varied social intercourse are limited and beset with -conventional prejudices. No man went further than he did to surmount -these. He knew people of the “<span lang="fr">monde</span>” as he knew others. As he writes in -<i><span lang="fr">Sodome</span></i>:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">Je n’avais jamais fait de différence entre les ouvriers, -les bourgeois et les grands seigneurs, et j’aurais pris -indifféremment les uns et les autres pour amis avec une -certaine préférence pour les ouvriers, et après cela pour -les grands seigneurs, non par goût, mais sachant qu’on -peut exiger d’eux plus de politesse envers les ouvriers -qu’on ne l’obtient de la part des bourgeois, soit que les -grands seigneurs ne dédaignent pas les ouvriers comme font -les bourgeois, ou bien parce qu’ils sont volontiers polis -envers n’importe qui, comme les jolies femmes heureuses de -donner un sourire qu’elles savent accueilli avec tant de -joie.</span></p> -</div> - -<p>His friends were in fact of all classes, but his friendship was -accorded only on his own terms,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">-10-</span> and a condition of it was the capacity -to bear hearing the truth. His friends knew themselves the better for -knowing him, for he was impatient of the slightest insincerity or -disingenuousness and could not tolerate pretence. Lies tired him. In a -letter he alluded thus to one whom we both knew well:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">Ce que je lui reproche, c’est d’être un menteur. Il -a fait ma connaissance à la faveur d’un mensonge et -depuis n’a guère cessé. Il trouve toujours le moyen de -gâter ses qualités par ces petits mensonges qu’il croit -l’avantager—tout petits et quelquefois énormes.</span></p> -</div> - -<p>Proust’s insistence on truthfulness and sincerity caused him more than -once to renounce lifelong associations. His sensibility was so delicate -that a gesture or a note in the voice revealed to him a motive, perhaps -slight and passing, of evasion or pretence. He was exacting about -sincerity only. In other respects his tolerance was so wide that a hard -truth from his lips, so far from wounding, stimulated. To his friends -he was frankness itself, and spoke his mind without reserve. I once -asked him to tell me if there were not some one, some friend of his, to -whom I could talk about him. There was so much I wanted to know, and on -the all too rare occasions when he was well enough to see me there was -never time. In answer to this he wrote me:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">Si vous désirez poser quelque interrogation à une personne -qui me comprenne, c’est bien simple,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">-11-</span> adressez-vous à moi. -D’ami qui me connaisse entièrement je n’en ai pas.... Je -sais tout sur moi et vous dirai volontiers tout; il est -donc inutile de vous désigner quelque ami mal informé et -qui dans la faible mesure de sa compétence cesserait de -mériter le nom d’ami s’il vous répondait.</span></p> -</div> - -<p>Thus in his words we reach the final conclusion that, even if Proust’s -friends had the power of expressing all that they feel about him, they -would still be “<span lang="fr">mal informés</span>,” and would have to return to him for -that deeper knowledge which only he could impart. As to this, there -is his further assurance that his work is the best part of himself. -Providentially, he was spared until that work was done and “<span lang="fr">Fin</span>” on the -last page was written by his own hand.</p> - -<p class="right"> -STEPHEN HUDSON.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">-12-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="III">III<br /> -<br /> -<i><span class="gesperrt">THE PROPHET OF DESPAIR</span></i></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">I</span>T is the privilege of those known as the world’s greatest artists to -create the illusion of dragging the reader through the whole mechanism -of life. Such was pre-eminently the gift of Shakespeare, whose -tragedies appear to be microcosms of the universe. Such a gift was that -of Balzac, for all his vulgarities and absurdities, if we may treat -the whole <i><span lang="fr">Comédie Humaine</span></i> as a single novel. Such, in his rare -moments of prodigal creation, was the power of Tolstoy, whom Proust -in some ways so much resembles. Such is the gift of Proust in his -astonishing pseudo-autobiography, <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</span></i>. -For it is the sense of imaginative wealth and creative facility that -is the hallmark of the first-rate genius, who must never appear to be -reaching the end of his tether, but must always, on the contrary, leave -the impression of there being better fish in his sea than have ever -come out of it.</p> - -<p>The outpouring of the romantic school of authors, their neglect of -form, their absence of critical faculty, their devastating facility, -have made this truth disagreeable and even doubtful to many minds, -who feel more in sympathy with the costive author of <i><span lang="fr">Adolphe</span></i> -than with the continual flux of Victor Hugo. Yet if Victor Hugo<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">-13-</span> be a -great author at all, as he evidently is, it is because of this very -fertility that we so much dislike; and if Benjamin Constant be not a -great artist, as he evidently is not, the reason must be sought in -the absence of fertility, though we may find its absence sympathetic; -while this same fertility, which is the whole essence of Balzac, is -rendering him formidable and unattractive to a generation of readers. -Now, Proust was eminently fertile, and, within the limits imposed by -his own delicate health, he could go on indefinitely, so profound and -so all-embracing was his interest in human beings and human emotions. -But he was fertile in a new way. Not for him was the uncritical spate -of nineteenth-century verbiage. His intellectual integrity, of which -M.C. Dubos has written so well in his <i>Approximations</i>, always -compelled him to check and ponder every move upon the chessboard of -life, every comment on human feelings. For Proust is the latest great -prophet of sensibility, and it is bearing this in mind that we can -trace the intellectual stock of which he comes.</p> - -<p>One of the great landmarks in French literature is pegged out for us -by the Abbé Prévost’s translation of <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i>, which -burst on the new sentimental generation, starved on the superficial -brilliance of the Regnards and their successors, with all the energy -of a gospel. The adoration with which this great novel was received -by the most brilliant intellects of eighteenth-century<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">-14-</span> France seems -to-day somewhat excessive, however deep be our sympathy with the mind -and art of Richardson. Remember how Diderot speaks of him: Diderot the -most complete embodiment of the eighteenth century with its sentimental -idealism and fiery common sense—the man in whom reason and spirit were -perfectly blended, the enthusiastic preacher of atheism and humanity:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">O Richardson, Richardson! homme unique à mes yeux. Tu -seras ma lecture dans tous les temps. Forcé par les -besoins pressants si mon ami tombe dans l’indigence, si la -médiocrité de ma fortune ne suffit pas pour donner à mes -enfants les soins nécessaires à leur éducation je vendrai -mes livres, mais tu me resteras; tu me resteras sur le même -rayon avec Virgile, Homère, Euripide, et Sophocle. Je vous -lirai tour à tour. Plus on a l’âme belle, plus on aime la -vérité, plus on a le goût exquis et pur, plus on connaît la -nature, plus on estime les ouvrages de Richardson.</span></p> -</div> - -<p>The new sentimental movement, developed to such a pitch of perfection -by the author of <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i>, was one of enormous value to -life and art. But inevitably it was pushed much too far, and the novels -of the <i><span lang="fr">école larmoyante</span></i> are now well-nigh intolerable, even -when written by men of genius like Rousseau, whose characters seem to -spend their lives in one continual jet of tears in a country where the -floodgates of ill-controlled emotion are never for an instant shut.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">-15-</span></p> - -<p>Rousseau had one great pupil, a great name in the history of the French -novel, Stendhal. But he wore his Rousseau with a difference. For -Rousseau represented, in his novels, but one side of the eighteenth -century, the sentimental; but there was another, the scientific—and -the life work of Stendhal consisted in an untiring effort to combine -the two. For what was the avowed ambition of the self-conscious -sentimentalist that was Stendhal? Soaked in the writings of Lavater, -de Tracy, and the Scotch metaphysicians, crossed with a romantic -passion for Rousseau and the Elizabethan drama, he wished to be as -<i><span lang="fr">sec</span></i> as possible, and boasted that he read a portion of the -<i><span lang="fr">Code Civil</span></i> every day—a document Rémy de Gourmont may be right -in calling diffuse, but which is certainly not romantic. Nourished -on Shakespeare, Rousseau, and de Tracy, Stendhal became one of the -first completely modern men, who study the working of their minds -with the imaginative enthusiasm, but also with the cold objectivity, -of a scientist dissecting a tadpole. Like the young scientist in -Hans Andersen, his first instinct was to catch the toad and put it -in spirits; but in this case the toad was his own soul. Stendhal was -too much of a revolutionary in writing ever to have been completely -successful; but the immensity of his achievement may be gauged by the -fact that parts of <i><span lang="fr">L’Amour</span></i>, and still more of -<i><span lang="fr">Le Rouge et le Noir</span></i>, are really of practical value to lovers, who might profit -considerably<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">-16-</span> in the conduct of their affairs by a careful study of -Stendhal’s advice, if only they were ever in a position to listen -to reason. Now, this is something quite new in fiction, and would -have astonished his grandfather Richardson. Proust is in turn the -intellectual child of Stendhal, and has bespattered <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche -du Temps Perdu</span></i> with expressions of admiration for his master. -In truth, he has taken over not only the methods but the philosophy -of his teacher. It will be remembered that Stendhal insists in his -analysis of <i><span lang="fr">L’Amour-Passion</span></i> that crystallisation can only be -effected after doubt has been experienced. So, for Proust, love, the -<i><span lang="fr">mal sacré</span></i> as he calls it, can only be called into being by -jealousy, <i><span lang="fr">le plus affreux des supplices</span></i>. We can want nothing -till we have been cheated out of getting it; whence it follows that we -can get nothing till we have ceased to want it, and in any case, once -obtained, it would <i>ipso facto</i> cease to be desirable. Hence Man, -“how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how -express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension -how like a god,” is doomed by the nature of his being to unsatisfied -desire and restless misery, till Proust becomes, as I have called him -above, the prophet of despair. He is a master of the agonising moments -spent hanging in vain round the telephone, the weeks passed waiting -for letters that never come, and the terrible reactions after one’s<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">-17-</span> -own fatal letter has been irrevocably posted and not all the jewels -of Golconda can extract it from the pillar-box. For how does the hero -of his novels finally pass under the sway of Albertine? Through agony -caused by the cutting of an appointment.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">Comme chaque fois que la porte cochère s’ouvrait, la -concierge appuyait sur un bouton électrique qui éclairait -l’escalier, et comme il n’y avait pas de locataires qui -ne fussent rentrés, je quittai immédiatement la cuisine -et revins m’asseoir dans l’antichambre, épiant, là où -la tenture un peu trop étroite qui ne couvrait pas -complètement la porte vitrée de notre appartement, laissait -passer la sombre raie verticale faite par la demi-obscurité -de l’escalier. Si tout d’un coup, cette raie devenait d’un -blond doré, c’est qu’Albertine viendrait d’entrer en bas -et serait dans deux minutes près de moi; personne d’autre -ne pouvait plus venir à cette heure-là. Et je restais, ne -pouvant détacher mes yeux de la raie qui s’obstinait à -demeurer sombre; je me penchais tout entier pour être sûr -de bien voir; mais j’avais beau regarder, le noir trait -vertical, malgré mon désir passionné, ne me donnait pas -l’enivrante allégresse que j’aurais eue, si je l’avais vu, -changé par un enchantement soudain et significatif, en un -lumineux barreau d’or. <i>C’était bien de l’inquiétude, -pour cette Albertine à laquelle je n’avais pensé trois -minutes pendant la soirée Guermantes!</i> Mais, réveillant -les sentiments d’attente jadis éprouvés à propos d’autres -jeunes filles, surtout de Gilberte, quand elle tardait -à venir, <i>la privation possible d’un simple plaisir -physique me causait une cruelle souffrance morale</i>.</span></p> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">-18-</span></p> - -<p>Indeed, happiness in love is by nature impossible, as it demands an -impossible spiritual relationship.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>If we thought that the eyes of a girl like that were merely -two glittering sequins of mica, we should not be athirst -to know her and to unite her life to ours. But we feel -that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due -solely to their material composition; that it is, unknown -to us, the dark shadows of the ideas that the creature is -conceiving, relative to the people and places that she -knows—the turf of racecourses, the sand of cycling tracks -over which, pedalling on past fields and woods, she would -have drawn me after her, that little peri, more seductive -to me than she of the Persian paradise—the shadows, too, -of the home to which she will presently return, of the -plans that she is forming or that others have formed for -her; and above all that it is she, with her desires, her -sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. -I knew that I should never possess this young cyclist if -I did not possess also what was in her eyes. And it was -consequently her whole life that filled me with desire; a -sorrowful desire <i>because I felt that it was not to be -realised</i>, but exhilarating, because what had hitherto -been my life, having ceased suddenly to be my whole -life, being no more now than a little part of the space -stretching out before me, which I was burning to cover and -which was composed of the lives of these girls, offered me -that prolongation, that possible multiplication of oneself, -which is happiness. And no doubt the fact that we had, -these girls and I, not one habit, as we had not one idea, -in common, was to make it more difficult for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">-19-</span> me to make -friends with them and to please them. But perhaps, also, -it was thanks to those differences, to my consciousness -that there did not enter into the composition of the nature -and actions of these girls a single element that I knew -or possessed, that there came in place of my satiety a -thirst—like that with which a dry land burns—for a life -which my soul, because it had never until now received one -drop of it, would absorb all the more greedily in long -draughts, with a more perfect imbibition.<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p> -</div> - -<p>Proust, having thus reduced all human society to misery, builds upon -the ruins his philosophy of salvation: Only by much suffering shall -we enter into the Kingdom of Heaven—that is to say, shall we be -enabled to see ourselves solely and simply as members of the human -race, to perceive what is essential and fundamental in everybody -beneath the trappings of manners, birth, or fortune, learn to be -really intelligent. Love and jealousy alone can open to us the -portals of intelligence. Thus, in the opening pages of <i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de -chez Swann</span></i>, the poor little boy, who, because M. Swann is dining -with his parents, cannot receive in bed his mother’s kiss, starts on -the long spiritual journey which is to run parallel to that of the -brilliant, unhappy <i><span lang="fr">mondain</span></i> guest. Miserable at being left alone, -he desperately sends down to his mother an agonised note by his nurse, -and in his agitation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">-20-</span> he hates Swann, whom he regards as the cause of -his misery, and continues to reflect:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>As for the agony through which I had just passed, I -imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he -had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on -the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar -anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and -no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that -moment so well as himself; to him, that anguish which lies -in knowing that the creature one adores is in some place -of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow—to him -that anguish came through Love, to which it is in a sense -predestined, by which it must be equipped and adapted; -but when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses -one’s soul before Love has yet entered into one’s life, -then it must drift, awaiting Love’s coming, vague and -free without precise attachment, at the disposal of one -sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety or -affection for a comrade. And the joy with which I first -bound myself apprentice, when Françoise returned to tell me -that my letter would be delivered, Swann, too, had known -well that false joy which a friend can give us, or some -relative of the woman we love, when on his arrival at the -house or theatre where she is to be found, for some ball or -party or first night at which he is to meet her, he sees us -wandering outside, desperately awaiting some opportunity of -communicating with her.</p> -</div> - -<p>“We brought nothing into the world,” remarked the first Christian -Stoic, “and it is certain we shall take nothing out of it.” He might -have made an exception for our personality, that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">-21-</span> enormous anonymity, -unmalleable as granite and unchanging as the ocean, which we brought -along with us from a thousand ancestors and shall carry unaltered to -the grave. Swann and little Proust, both endowed with sensibility, -could shake hands with each other across the generations: all the -experiences of one, all the innocence of the other, were as nothing -beside that similarity of temperament which calls to us irrevocably, as -Christ called to Matthew at the receipt of custom, and bids us share -with our friend the miseries of the past and the terrors of the future.</p> - -<p>Proust’s youth was spent in Paris during that period when France was -spiritually and politically severed by the <i><span lang="fr">Affaire Dreyfus</span></i>, and -for him the <i><span lang="fr">Affaire</span></i> becomes the touchstone of sensibility and -intelligence. To be a Dreyfusard means to pass beyond the sheltered -harbour of one’s own clique and interest into the uncharted sea -of human solidarity. Hard indeed is the way of the rich man, the -aristocrat, the snob, or the gentleman, who wishes to find salvation -during the <i><span lang="fr">Affaire</span></i>. He must leave behind him taste, beauty, -comfort, and education, consort, in spirit at least, with intolerable -Jews, fifth-rate politicians, and insufferable <i><span lang="fr">arrivistes</span></i>, -before worthily taking up the burden of human misery and routing the -forces of superstition and stupidity. And there is only one school for -this lesson, the school of romantic love—that is to say, of carking -jealousy,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">-22-</span> in the throes of which all men are equal. Little Proust -himself, his bold and beautiful friend the Marquis de Saint-Loup, the -eccentric and arrogant M. de Charlus, even the stupid high-minded -Prince de Guermantes, who all know the meaning of romantic love, -as opposed to the facile pleasure of successive mistresses, will -eventually, be it only for a short moment, triumphantly stand the test. -But Saint-Loup’s saintly mother, Mme. de Marsantes, the rakish Duc de -Guermantes and his brilliant, charming, but limited wife, will never -put out to sea on the ship of misery, bound for the ever-receding -shores of romantic love and universal comprehension. They will -never risk their lives for one great moment, for the satisfaction -of unbounded passion. Swann tortured and fascinated by his flashy -<i><span lang="fr">cocotte</span></i>, little Proust lacerated by the suspected infidelities -of the niece of a Civil Servant, Saint-Loup in the clutches of an -obscure and ill-conditioned actress of budding genius, M. de Charlus -broken by the sheer brutality of his young musician: such are the -people who have their souls and such are the painful schools in which -Salvation is learned—the Salvation that comes from forgetting social -prejudice and from not mistaking the “plumage for the dying bird,” from -judging people by their intrinsic merit, from making no distinction -between servants and masters, between prince and peasant. For, as the -author insists with almost maddening iteration, good brains and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">-23-</span> good -breeding never go together: all ultimate talent and perception is -with the cads. The price to pay is heavy and incessant. A little easy -happiness, a little recovery from hopeless love, a passing indifference -to ill-requited affection, can undo all the good acquired by endless -misery in the long course of years.</p> - -<p>Such I take to be the fundamental thought underlying <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche -du Temps Perdu</span></i> in its present unfinished state, though we cannot -tell what surprises the succeeding volumes (happily completed) may -have in store for us. I have insisted, at perhaps excessive length, on -the general mental background to this vast epic of jealousy, because -it is not very easy to determine. The enormous wealth of the author’s -gifts tends to bury the structure under the superb splendour of the -ornament. For Proust combines, to a degree never before realised in -literature, the qualities of the aesthete and the scientist. It is the -quality which first strikes the reader who does not notice, in the -aesthetic rapture communicated by perfect style, that all pleasures are -made pegs for disillusion. Human beauty, the beauty of buildings, of -the sea, of the sky, the beauty of transmitted qualities in families -and in the country-side, the beauty of history, of good breeding, of -self-assurance—few people have felt these things as Proust. For him -the soft place-names of France are implicit with memories too deep for -tears. Let us take one passage among many where the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">-24-</span> aesthete Proust is -feeling intensely a thousand faint suggestions:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">Quand je rentrai, le concierge de l’hôtel me remit une -lettre de deuil où faisaient part le marquis et la marquise -de Gonneville, le vicomte et la vicomtesse d’Amfreville, -le comte et la comtesse de Berneville, le marquis et la -marquise de Graincourt, le comte d’Amenoncourt, la comtesse -de Maineville, le comte et la comtesse de Franquetot, la -comtesse de Chaverny née d’Aigleville, et de laquelle -je compris enfin pourquoi elle m’était envoyée quand je -reconnus les noms de la marquise de Cambremer née du Mesnil -la Guichard, du marquis et de la marquise de Cambremer, -et que je vis que la morte, une cousine des Cambremer, -s’appelait Éléonore-Euphrasie-Humbertine de Cambremer, -comtesse de Criquetot. Dans toute l’étendue de cette -famille provinciale dont le dénombrement remplissait des -lignes fines et serrées, pas un bourgeois, et d’ailleurs -pas un titre connu, mais tout le ban et l’arrière-ban des -nobles de la région qui faisaient chanter leurs noms—ceux -de tous les lieux intéressants du pays—aux joyeux finales -en <i>ville</i>, en <i>court</i>, parfois plus sourdes -(en <i>tot</i>). Habillés des tuiles de leur château ou -du crépi de leur église, la tête branlante dépassant à -peine la voûte ou le corps-de-logis et seulement pour se -coiffer du lanternon normand ou des colombages du toit en -poivrière, ils avaient l’air d’avoir sonné le rassemblement -de tous les jolis villages échelonnés ou dispersés à -cinquante lieues à la ronde et de les avoir disposés en -formation serrée, sans une lacune, sans un intrus, dans le -damier compact et rectangulaire de l’aristocratique lettre -bordée de noir.</span></p> -</div> - -<p>Such a passage contains in little the whole<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">-25-</span> history of a nation -reflected in the magic mirror of a nation’s country-side, equally -desirable for its human suggestiveness and for its pure aesthetic worth.</p> - -<p>And here we may pause for a moment to consider one of the most -important aspects of Proust’s aesthetic impulse, which is expressed -in the title <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</span></i>, the Remembrance of -Things Past. This is more than the expression of a desire to write an -autobiography, to recapitulate one’s own vanishing experience. It is an -endeavour to reconstruct the whole of the past, on which the present is -merely a not particularly valuable comment. Royalties are interesting -because they have retired from business, aristocrats because they -have nothing left but their manners; the <i>bourgeoisie</i> still -carry with them the relics of their old servility, the people have -not yet realised their power; and a social flux results therefrom, -the study of which can never grow boring to the onlooker as long as -superficially the old order continues, though it represent nothing -but an historic emotion. The hero as he winds along the path of his -emotional experience from childhood to adolescence is pictured as -avid for all these historic sensibilities which find their expression -in his early passion for the Guermantes group, the most aristocratic -combination of families in France. From his earliest childhood he has -dreamed about them, picturing them as their ancestors, whom he has<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">-26-</span> -seen in the stained-glass windows of his village church at Combray; -till he has woven round them all the warm romance of the Middle Ages, -the austere splendours of <i><span lang="fr">Le Grand Siècle</span></i>, the brilliant decay -of eighteenth-century France. But when he meets them, the courage has -gone, the intelligence has gone, and only the breeding remains. It was -the greatest historical disillusion in the boy’s life. Yet there still -hangs about them the perfume of a vanished social order, and Proust -makes splendid use of his hero’s spiritual adventure. As he wanders -through the <i>salons</i>, fast degenerating into drawing-rooms, -he becomes the Saint-Simon of the <i><span lang="fr">décadence</span></i>. For Proust can -describe, with a mastery only second to that of Saint-Simon himself, -the sense of social life, the reaction of an individual to a number of -persons, and the interplay of a number of members of the same group -upon each other. His capacity for describing the manifold pleasures of -a party would have stirred the envy of the great author of <i><span lang="fr">Rome, -Naples et Florence</span></i>. Many people can only see snobbery in this -heroic effort to project the past upon the screen of the present. -Yet the author is too intelligent and honest not in the end to throw -away his romantic spectacles. The <i><span lang="fr">Côté de Guermantes</span></i> cannot be -permanently satisfying. Again bursts in the philosophy of disillusion. -When he has obtained with immense labour the key to the forbidden -chamber, he finds nothing but stage properties inside.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">-27-</span></p> - -<p>But this poet of political, economic, and social institutions is also -the pure poet of Nature in another mood:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">Là, où je n’avais vu avec ma grand’mère au mois d’août que -les feuilles et comme l’emplacement des pommiers, à perte -de vue ils étaient en pleine floraison, d’un luxe inouï, -les pieds dans la boue et en toilette de bal, ne prenant -pas de précautions pour ne pas gâter le plus merveilleux -satin rose qu’on eût jamais vu, et que faisait briller -le soleil: l’horizon lointain de la mer fournissait aux -pommiers comme un arrière-plan d’estampe japonaise; si je -levais la tête pour regarder le ciel, entre les fleurs qui -faisaient paraître son bleu rasséréné, presque violent, -elles semblaient s’écarter pour montrer la profondeur de -ce paradis. Sous cet azur, une brise légère, mais froide, -faisait trembler légèrement les bouquets rougissants. Des -mésanges bleues venaient se poser sur les branches et -sautaient entre les fleurs indulgentes, comme si c’eût -été un amateur d’exotisme et de couleurs, qui avait -artificiellement créé cette beauté vivante. Mais elle -touchait jusqu’aux larmes, parce que, si loin qu’on allât -dans ses effets d’art raffiné, on sentait qu’elle était -naturelle, que ces pommiers étaient là en pleine campagne -comme les paysans, sur une grande route de France. Puis aux -rayons du soleil succédèrent subitement ceux de la pluie; -ils zébrèrent tout l’horizon, enserrèrent la file des -pommiers dans leur réseau gris. Mais ceux-ci continuaient à -dresser leur beauté, fleurie et rose, dans le vent devenu -glacial sous l’averse qui tombait: c’était une journée de -printemps.</span></p> -</div> - -<p>But so wide-minded is this lyric poet who can speak with the voice -of Claudel and of Fustel de<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">-28-</span> Coulanges, that he is also perhaps the -coldest analyst who has ever devoted his attention to fiction. His -knife cuts down into the very souls of his patients, as he calls -into play all the resources of his wit, animosities, sympathy, and -intelligence. He is a master of all the smaller nuances of social -relations, of all the half-whispered subterranean emotions that bind -Society together while Society barely dreams of their existence.</p> - -<p>It is also worth remark that Proust is the first author to treat sexual -inversion as a current and ordinary phenomenon, which he describes -neither in the vein of tedious panegyric adopted by certain decadent -writers, nor yet with the air of a showman displaying to an agitated -tourist abysses of unfathomable horror. Treating this important -social phenomenon as neither more nor less important than it is, he -has derived from it new material for his study of social relations, -and has greatly enriched and complicated the texture of his plot. His -extreme honesty meets nowhere with more triumphant rewards. It is by -the splendid use of so much unusual knowledge that Proust gains his -greatest victories as a pure novelist. Royalty, actresses, bourgeois, -servants, peasants, men, women, and children—they all have the genuine -third dimension and seem to the reader more real than his own friends. -The story is told of an English naval officer that he once knocked -down a Frenchman for casting doubt on the chastity of Ophelia. It is -to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">-29-</span> credit of Shakespeare’s supreme genius that our sympathies are -with the naval officer, for Shakespeare’s characters, too, are as real -to us as our parents and friends and more real than our relations and -our acquaintances. But to how few artists can this praise be given, -save to Shakespeare and to Tolstoy! Yet to Proust it can be given in -full measure. To read <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</span></i> is to live -in the world, at any rate in Proust’s world—a world more sensitive, -variegated, and interesting than our own.</p> - -<p>It is difficult to analyse the ultimate quality of an artist’s triumph; -yet such is the function of criticism, the sole justification of -writing books about books. Proust, it seems to me, had the extremely -rare faculty of seeing his characters objectively and subjectively at -the same moment. He can project himself so far into the mind of the -persons he is describing that he seems to know more about them than -they can ever know themselves, and the reader feels, in the process, -that he never even dimly knew himself before. At the same time he never -takes sides. The warm, palpitating flesh he is creating is also and -always a decorative figure on the huge design of his tapestry, just -as in <i>Petroushka</i> the puppets are human beings and the human -beings puppets. For Proust, though the most objective, is also the -most personal of writers. As we get accustomed to the long, tortuous -sentences, the huge elaboration of conscientious metaphor, the -continual refining on<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">-30-</span> what cannot be further refined, we insensibly -become listeners to a long and brilliant conversation by the wisest -and wittiest of men. For Proust, as much as any man, has grafted the -mellowness and also the exacerbation of experience on to the untiring -inquisitiveness of youth. In a page of amazing prophecy, written as -long ago as 1896, M. Anatole France summed up the achievement of Proust -at a moment when his life work had barely begun:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">Sans doute il est jeune. Il est jeune de la jeunesse de -l’auteur. Mais il est vieux de la vieillesse du monde. -C’est le printemps des feuilles sur les rameaux antiques, -dans la forêt séculaire. On dirait que les pousses -nouvelles sont attristés du passé profond des bois et -portent le deuil de tant de printemps morts....</span></p> - -<p><span lang="fr">Il y a en lui du Bernardin de Saint-Pierre dépravé et du -Pétrone ingénu.</span></p> -</div> - -<p>This is not the moment to pretend to estimate impartially his exact -place and achievement in letters. For the present we can only feel his -death, almost personally, so much has he woven himself into the hearts -of his readers, and apply to him in all sincerity the words Diderot -used of his predecessor in time:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">Plus on a l’âme belle, plus on a le goût exquis et pur, -plus on connaît la nature, plus on aime la vérité, plus on -estime les ouvrages de Proust.</span></p> -</div> - -<p class="right"> -FRANCIS BIRRELL.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">-31-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="IV">IV<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>A SENSITIVE PETRONIUS</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">M</span>ARCEL PROUST died in Paris on the 18th day of November last. To -many Englishmen his name is still unknown; to others his death came -as a shock so great that it was as if one of their most intimate -acquaintances had suddenly passed from them; and even among those -who have read his works there is, in this country at least, quite -pointed disagreement. On one side there are many who will confess -in private, though not so willingly in public, that they have never -been able to “get through” his great work; that “the man is a bore,” -is “undiscussable in mixed society,” is “a snob,” and that, if you -ask their opinion, “there is too much fuss made about the fellow -altogether.” On the other are men, not given to overpraising the age in -which they live, who unashamedly compare him with Montaigne, Stendhal, -Tolstoy, and other “masters of the human heart”; and not that only, but -will discuss by the hour together Swann, the Duchesse de Guermantes, -Madame de Villeparisis, Bloch, M. de Charlus, Albertine, Gilberte, -Odette, the impossible and indefatigable Verdurins, and a hundred of -his other characters, as if they were personal friends, and as if it -were of real importance to them to discover what exactly were the -motives of So-and-so on such and such<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">-32-</span> an occasion, and how So-and-so -else would view their actions if he knew.</p> - -<p>The reason for these disagreements is not, perhaps, hard to find. -Proust, let us own to it at once, is not every one’s novelist. He is -difficult to read in the sense that he does demand complete attention -and considerable efforts of memory. He has an outlook on life which is -bound to be unsympathetic to a good many Englishmen—and a good many -Frenchmen too, for that matter. He is very “long”; and it is necessary -to have read <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</span></i> more than once to be -able to see the general plan for the hosts of characters and scenes -that, as one reads it book by book, so vividly hold the stage. But -before we attempt to discuss the book it is important to see what its -author had in mind when he first sat down, a good many years ago, to -start writing it.</p> - -<p>Some one has said that the difference between a play and a novel is -that while watching a play you have the privileges of a most intimate -friend, but while reading a novel the privileges of God. However true -this may be of the novel as it exists to-day (and, to read some modern -novels, one might hardly suspect one’s divine position), it is by -no means true of the novel throughout its history. It is clear, if -we go back far enough, for example, that with Longus, or Plutarch, -or Petronius, the reader’s position is very nearly as much that of -a spectator as when he is watching<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">-33-</span> a play by Shakespeare. And the -same thing remains roughly true of all novels up to the middle of the -eighteenth century. It is not, indeed, until we come to Richardson -and Rousseau that we find anything like the modern insistence on the -personal and intimate life of a man or a woman as a thing valuable -in itself. No one except Montaigne and Burton, neither of whom was a -novelist, appears to have been introspective before that date. What -mattered before was conduct; what was to matter afterwards was feeling.</p> - -<p>But if the world had long to wait for this revolution, none has -certainly taken so instantaneous an effect. Every one knows how the -reading of <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i> influenced such an independent and -sturdy mind as Diderot’s, and what Diderot felt that day the whole of -literary France was feeling on the morrow. The days of the <i><span lang="fr">petits -maîtres</span></i> and the epigrammatists were past, and all eyes were turned -towards the rising sun of sentiment; <i><span lang="fr">Le Sopha</span></i> had given place to -the <i><span lang="fr">Vie de Marianne</span></i>. But this advance was attended very closely -by its compensating drawback.</p> - -<p>It was perhaps necessary, if anything is ever necessary, that this -newly awakened interest in the individual mind should be accompanied -by a new idealism to falsify it from the outset. However this may -be, there can be small doubt that the result of this revolution was -a new crop of conventionalities considerably less truthful<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">-34-</span> and, as -it seems to us to-day, more harmful than the old. Sentimentality had -come to birth in a night. The newly discovered world was apparently -too painful a spectacle to be faced, and to cover its nakedness new -doctrines like “the perfectibility of man,” new angles of vision like -those of Romanticism, had somehow to be invented. Fifty years were to -pass before another honest work of the imagination, with one exception, -could come to light in France; and the author of that exception, -Laclos, is as interesting a commentary on the generation succeeding -Rousseau as one can find. <i><span lang="fr">Les Liaisons dangereuses</span></i> is for its -own or any other time an extraordinarily truthful book; the characters, -as they express themselves in their letters, are not inhuman, but human -monsters; not spotless, but only foolish innocents. The tragedy is -moving in the modern way; you identify your feelings with those of the -characters themselves. But Laclos was not satisfied with the book as -it stands. He was a fervent disciple of Rousseau’s, and there appears -to be little doubt that the book which exists was only intended to be -a picture of the “false” society in which they, and we, live, and was -to be followed by another showing what men and women would immediately -be like if only they could live and act “naturally.” “<span lang="fr"><i>Le grand -défaut de tous ces livres à paradoxes</i></span>,” said Voltaire of Rousseau, -“<span lang="fr"><i>n’est-il pas de supposer toujours la nature autrement qu’elle -n’est?</i></span>”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">-35-</span></p> - -<p><i><span lang="fr">La nature telle qu’elle est</span></i>—such is to be the aim of the French -nineteenth-century novelists if only they can see their opportunity. -It must be confessed that several of them failed. An interest in -psychology had been awakened, yet one compares <i><span lang="fr">Les Misérables</span></i> -with <i><span lang="fr">La Princesse de Clèves</span></i> and may be excused for forgetting -it. Throughout the first part of the century, at any rate, it seems -as if the last thing a novelist ever asked himself was, “Would I or -any reasonable creature act or feel like that?” Common-sense had gone -by the board again, and “the fine,” “the noble,” “the proud,” “the -pathetic,” and “the touching” held the stage.</p> - -<p>Yet great advances were made. Balzac, for all his lack of balance and -for all his hasty carelessness, was giant enough to make a hundred on -his own account. The “naturalists,” without making any great advances -in psychology, at least were in earnest in clearing out the old stage -properties, in insisting that a love scene could take place as well in -a railway carriage or a hansom cab at eleven o’clock in the morning -as on a lake by moonlight or on a balcony at dawn. And Stendhal—but -Stendhal was the first of the moderns, the master of the whole -generation which is passing, and he had to wait till the ’eighties -before his influence became important. Whatever is valuable in the -advances that the novel has made during its latest period is valuable -just in so far as it is the result of an insistence,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">-36-</span> with Rousseau, -on being interested in the intricacies of human feeling, and an equal -insistence, with Voltaire, in refusing to sentimentalise them. That -these are the only lines on which the novelist can advance no one would -dream of asserting. But it is more particularly because Marcel Proust -seems here to stand head and shoulders above his generation, and not -on account of his many other merits as an artist, that he has such a -passionate, if still comparatively small, following to-day.</p> - -<p>He is, perhaps, if we return to that definition of the difference -between a novel and a play, more of the essential novelist than any man -has ever been. His aim is by a hundred different methods to make you -know his chief characters, not as if you were meeting them every day, -but as if you yourself had for the moment actually been living in their -skins and inhabiting their minds. Everything possible must be done to -help you to this end. You must feel the repulsions and attractions -they feel; you must even share their ancestors, their upbringing, -and the class in which they live, and share them so intimately that -with you, as with them, they have become second nature. Nor is even -this enough. The man who knows himself is not common, and to know -Proust’s characters as you know yourself may only be a small advance in -knowledge. So every motive of importance, every reaction to whatever -stimulus they receive, is analysed and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">-37-</span> explained until your feeling -will probably be, not only how well you know this being, who is in -so many respects unlike you, but how far more clearly you have seen -into the obscure motives of your own most distressing and ridiculous -actions, how far more understandable is an attitude to life or to your -neighbours that you yourself have almost unconsciously, and perhaps in -mere self-protection, adopted.</p> - -<p>But a short example of this is needed, and a short example of anything -in Proust is not easy to find. A character just sketched in one -volume will be developed in another, and to grasp the significance of -the first sketch one has to wait for the fuller illumination of the -development. And even then the short sketch is as often as not several -pages of the most closely written analysis, quite impossible to quote -from, or in full. There is, however, a very small character in the -first book, <i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de chez Swann</span></i>, who may serve. M. Vinteuil is -an obscure musician of genius, living in the country. He holds his head -high among his neighbours, and, on account of his daughter, refuses to -meet the only other really cultured man in the district, Swann, who has -made what M. Vinteuil considers a disreputable marriage. Suddenly M. -Vinteuil’s daughter forms a disgraceful friendship. There is scandal in -the eyes of every man or woman he meets, scandal which he, poor man, -knows quite well to be founded on the most deplorable facts.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">-38-</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>And yet, however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his -daughter’s conduct, it did not follow that his adoration -of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate -to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it -was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are -powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual -blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening -them; an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one -after another, without interruption, into the bosom of a -family will not make it lose faith either in the clemency -of its God or in the capacity of its physician. But when -M. Vinteuil regarded his daughter and himself from the -point of view of the world, and of their reputation, when -he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank -which they occupied in the general estimation of their -neighbours, then he was bound to give judgment, to utter -his own and her social condemnation in precisely the terms -which the inhabitants of Combray most hostile to him and -his daughter would have employed; he saw himself and her -in “low,” the very “lowest water,” inextricably stranded; -and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, -that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom -he must now look up (however far beneath him they might -hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some -means of rising again to their level, which is an almost -mechanical result of any human misfortune.</p> -</div> - -<p>The quotation is chosen on account of its shortness, and there are -perhaps many hundred other examples which, could they be quoted in -full, would show more fully this essential difference<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">-39-</span> between the -novel as Proust understands it and the older novel or the play. -Here, at least, we have his method compressed. We have M. Vinteuil’s -unshakable faith in his daughter, as a jumping-off ground, founded -on the past and unaltered by the facts of the present. We have also -the pitying attitude of the world to himself and its hostile attitude -to his daughter. And from this comes M. Vinteuil’s other feeling, no -less strong than his faith in his daughter, that they two have somehow -sunk, become degraded, not only in the eyes of the world, but also, -and because of it, in their own eyes as well. Lastly, as a reaction -from this, we have the effect of these feelings on M. Vinteuil’s -manner—his attitude of humility before the world for sins that he has -not committed, for the conduct of a person in whom he still completely -believes, which, however ridiculous to the logician, can only be -recognised by the rest of us as most disquietingly true to our own -experience. It is this complexity in our emotions, this capability of -feeling many different things at the same time about any one particular -incident or person, that the novel alone can give; and it is on these -lines that Marcel Proust has adventured farther than any other man.</p> - -<p>And here, of course, he has great advantages. Proust, unlike so many -of the great creative artists, started late in life the work by which -he will be judged. He is mature as few great men have been mature, -cultured as still fewer<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">-40-</span> have been cultured. Wide reading is far -from common among great artists. The driving force necessary to the -accomplishment of any work of art is seldom found in alliance with wide -culture; that, more often than not, is to be found among the world’s -half-failures. Neither Shakespeare, nor Molière, nor Fielding, nor -Richardson, nor Balzac, nor Dickens, nor Dostoevsky, nor Ibsen was a -widely cultured man. In Shakespeare, the loss is more than compensated -by surety of intuition. In Balzac, there is a lack of the critical -faculty that makes it possible for him, even towards the end of his -life, to give in the same year one thing as beautiful as <i><span lang="fr">Eugénie -Grandet</span></i> and another as puerile as <i>Ferragus</i>, that allows -him to compare the novels of “Monk” Lewis with <i><span lang="fr">La Chartreuse -de Parme</span></i> and to call Maturin “<i><span lang="fr">un des plus grands génies de -l’Europe</span></i>.”</p> - -<p>But Proust, like Montaigne and like Racine, besides having an extreme -sensitiveness to all forms of beauty and ugliness, happiness and -misery, that he has met in his social existence, has also read widely -in the works of other sensitive men, has compared their impressions -with each other and with his own, has learnt from their successes -and failures; he is armed with more than his natural equipment, has -more eyes to see through than his own. Actually his books are filled -from end to end with criticisms of music, of painting, of literature, -not in the way that is unfortunately familiar in this country, as -unassimilated<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">-41-</span> chunks in the main stream of the narrative, but as -expressions of the opinions of different characters.</p> - -<p>This is not the only, nor indeed the chief, advantage that a wide -experience in other arts, and other men’s art, has given him. What -is of more importance is the attitude that springs from it of seeing -historically the age and society in which he lives. Nothing for him -stands still, not even to-day; and, because he realises that to-day -itself will to-morrow be only part of the stream of the past, he can -view it with the same calmly passionate interest as that which we bring -to the discoveries at Luxor. As few men are to-day, he appears to be -“<i><span lang="fr">au-dessus de la mêlée</span></i>,” not, like the ancient gods, “careless -of mankind,” but curious, acutely sympathetic, and able at any moment -to bring his own experience and the experience of a thousand other men -in tens of other centuries to the understanding of one small case at -the tiny point of time which is momentarily under his observation.</p> - -<p>To give any idea of the plot of <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du Temps -Perdu</span></i>—and it has a plot, and a very closely knit one, too (how -closely one only begins to realise after several re-readings)—is, -of course, out of the question. Its form is that of an imaginary -autobiography, and it is obvious that much genuine autobiography is -inextricably woven with work of imagination. The first book (<i><span lang="fr">Du -Côté de chez Swann</span></i>) is occupied in part by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">-42-</span> memories of childhood, -and in part, as it seems at first, by another story altogether, the -account of a love affair of M. Swann’s. Of course this story is not a -mere excrescence, but it is only slowly, as the later books are read, -that we begin to see Proust’s immense cunning in introducing us early -in the novel to Swann’s affairs. For they have a purpose beyond the -fact that Swann becomes in time a friend of the young man, who is then -in his childhood, and beyond the fact that he is very intimately mixed -up with many others of the most important characters in the book. And -this purpose is that of a prelude to the later and fuller story. It is, -as it were, a standing example at the outset of the truism that no one -ever learns by the mistakes of others—that what has been will be again -in the next generation, with only the mere outward changes which time -and place impose. In the second book (<i><span lang="fr">A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles -en Fleurs</span></i>) we accompany the hero (it is one of the significant -curiosities of Proust, akin to his refusal to divide his book into -chapters, that never once is this hero named in the whole course of -the work) to the seaside, and feel with him the emotions of an acutely -sensitive boy just growing into manhood. And the remaining books are -all occupied more or less with his efforts to assimilate the new social -worlds in Paris and at Balbec Plage which are opening out before his -curious and very sharply observant eyes.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">-43-</span></p> - -<p>There are those who, after enjoying the first two books, have -complained rather bitterly of the succeeding ones. One charge against -Proust seems to be that he deals more than is necessary with what -are called “unpleasant” subjects and people; another is clearly, -though not usually put into so few words, that he is a snob. As -regards the first charge, it is true that Proust, like most French -writers, is apt to claim with Terence, <i><span lang="la">Humani nihil a me alienum -puto</span></i>; to urge that he is ever coarse, that he is ever anything, -in fact, but extremely discriminating in his touch, is, as a matter -of fact, absurd. But the other charge is more valuable because, while -mistaken, it does emphasise a side of Proust’s interests in life -which is of some considerable significance. It is true that Proust is -extremely interested not only in individuals but in those extensions -of personality which are classes, cliques, bodies of men and women, -which, however formed, by coming together succeed in developing a sort -of communal outlook upon life. It is true also that a good deal of the -book is occupied with two of these classes in particular, both of them -rich, the aristocracy and the pushing <i>bourgeoisie</i> that likes to -employ the artist and the intellectual as “stepping-stones from their -dead selves to higher things.” But to call this interest snobbery is, -surely, a sign of rather careless reading. It is to assume that the -<i>naïveté</i> of the young man’s first adoration of the old families -of France, long<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">-44-</span> before he had learnt to know them, is, in fact, the -attitude of Proust himself. Even in the case of the young man snobbery -seems a hard term for his actual state of mind.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>Nor could we ever reach that goal to which I longed so -much to attain, Guermantes itself. I knew that it was -the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse -de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who -did actually exist, but whenever I thought about them -I pictured them to myself either in tapestry, as was -the “Coronation of Esther” which hung in our church, or -else in changing rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad -in his window, where he passed from cabbage green when -I was dipping my fingers in the holy-water stoup, to -plum-blue when I had reached our row of chairs; or again -altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève de -Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the -magic lantern sent wandering over the curtains of my room -or flung aloft upon the ceiling—in short, always wrapped -in the mystery of the Merovingian age, and bathed, as -in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the -resounding syllable <i>antes</i>. And if in spite of -that they were for me, in their capacity as a duke and -duchess, real people, though of an unfamiliar kind, this -ducal personality was in its turn enormously distended, -immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that -Guermantes of which they were duke and duchess, all that -sunlit “Guermantes way” of our walks, the course of the -Vivonne, its water-lilies and its overshadowing trees, and -an endless series of hot summer afternoons.</p> -</div> - -<p>Is there any wonder that this young poet—and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">-45-</span> he was very young—when -first he meets the Duchess in real life, and is welcomed into the -select circle of her friends, should feel tremendously excited? But -snob is not the right word.</p> - -<p>As a fact, of course, what these complainants have missed is the use -to which this aristocratic circle has been put in the life-history of -the hero. For Proust, like any writer that can be read over and over -again, has stamped his work through and through with his own peculiarly -coloured personal psychology. And if there is one theme that is -being insistently played throughout the whole work (like Swann’s and -Odette’s phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata), in incident after incident, -in the adventures of one character after another, it is that theme of -sadness that no ideal state is attainable in this world, not so much -because we cannot climb, nor even because the ideal becomes illusion on -attainment, but because the object to which we attach our ideal is, of -necessity, not seen as it really is, but always as we long for it to -be. This, with its complement that the mere fact of not being able to -possess may lead to desire even when the object in itself does not seem -very desirable, is at the very heart of Proust’s philosophy.</p> - -<p>This worship of his hero’s for aristocracy is only an incident in this -continual theme. It is in essence exactly the same as all his other -deceptions. When Gilberte was the beautifully dressed child of his -idol, Swann, surrounded by a halo<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">-46-</span> of romance owing to her friendship -with the writer Bergotte, and when she appeared to look down on his -advances, there was nothing on earth he would not give, nothing he -would not do, to obtain her friendship. Yet when once that friendship -is attained the interest in her fades away imperceptibly till she plays -no more part in his life than a memory of what was once so bitterly -wanted. So it is with the <i><span lang="fr">petite bande</span></i> of young girls at Balbec -while it presented a united and exclusive front to the world. So it is -with the chief of that band, Albertine herself. Desirable while she has -held aloof, she becomes through knowledge, through the loss of that -mystery which had existed, as it always does, not in her, but only in -him who longed for her, almost boring. He is on the point of leaving -her, of finishing with the <i>liaison</i> once and for all. Suddenly -all is changed. He has reason to doubt her complete faithfulness to -him. With the pain of this doubt love is once more awakened, and at -the end of the last published volume we leave him on the point of -rushing off to Paris to marry her. This, again, is the whole meaning of -Swann’s marriage with the vulgar and impossible Odette de Crécy. It is -the continual theme of all the pitiable deceptions of M. de Charlus. -“Besides,” he says in one place,</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>the mistresses with whom I have been most in love have -never coincided with my love for them. True love it must -have been, since I subordinated everything<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">-47-</span> else in the -world to the chance of seeing them, of keeping them to -myself, and would burst into tears if, one evening, I had -heard them speak. But they themselves must be regarded -rather as endowed with the property of arousing that -love, of raising it to its paroxysm, than as being its -embodiments.... You would have said that a virtue which had -nothing to do with them had been arbitrarily attached to -them by Nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-galvanic -power, had the effect on me of exciting my love—that is -to say, of controlling all my actions and causing all my -sorrows. But from this the looks or the brains or the -favours shown me by these women were entirely distinct.</p> -</div> - -<p>It is in this setting, then, that one must think of the young man’s -fascination by what was after all far the most socially charming -circle that he could have entered. The desire for a real aristocracy, -not merely of brains, but surrounded by all the wealth of history -and legend, is understandable enough. The only doubt is whether its -representatives exist. But in Proust himself the charm undoubtedly is -a subtler thing than that. It has something of the appeal of a dead -religion for him. While it was still a power in the world one would -have found him in opposition, as the Prince de Guermantes found himself -in opposition to the army authorities when at last, and at such pain -to himself, he began to suspect their conduct of the Dreyfus case. But -aristocracy as a power in France is dead; it is only the ritual, the -historic associations, the complete<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">-48-</span> existence of a little world within -a world, that remain.</p> - -<p>Nor, as a fact, is this interest in cliques by any means confined -to the aristocracy. Of at least equal importance are the Verdurins, -who, in spite of their riches, are at the very opposite pole of -civilisation. And yet with all their vulgarity, with all their -intellectual snobbery, with all their lack of taste and breeding, with -all their affectation of being a <i><span lang="fr">petit clan</span></i>, is it not clear -that, up to a certain point at any rate, intelligence is on their side -of the ledger? Again, there is that glance at life in barracks, through -the mediation of Saint-Loup, which, while small, is as good a summary -of the military world as one knows. There are some unforgettable pages -on the Jews. There is even that little world of the hotel servants -that has plainly interested Proust almost as much as any of the larger -worlds he has spent so much care in describing. And, especially in -the early books, there are those descriptions of the world of the -young man’s parents and grandparents, so typical of the <i><span lang="fr">honnête -bourgeoisie</span></i>, so profoundly drawn in their uprightness and their -rather limited social ideas, so secure and anxious for security, so -loving to their boy and yet so anxious not to “spoil” him. Never, with -the exceptions of Saint-Simon and Tolstoy, has any author succeeded so -well in giving the atmosphere of a particular house or a particular -party; never has any one analysed so<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">-49-</span> closely the behaviour of people -in small homogeneous masses.</p> - -<p>In 1896, when Proust was still a young man, he produced a book which, -while not of great interest in itself, is naturally of value to -students of his work, both for what it contains in the germ, and for -what it omits, of the Proust who was to become a master. And to this -book Anatole France wrote a charming preface, in which he said various -things which must have appeared more friendly than critical to readers -of that day. Among other things he wrote the following words:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span lang="fr">Il n’est pas du tout innocent. Mais il est sincère et si -vrai qu’il en devient naïf et plaît ainsi. II y a en lui du -Bernardin de Saint-Pierre dépravé et du Pétrone ingénu.</span></p> -</div> - -<p>The words are a singularly good description of the Proust that we -know to-day. He is not innocent, and he remains <i><span lang="fr">naïf</span></i>. There is -a story of how in his last illness he insisted on being muffled up -in a carriage and driven out into the country to see the hawthorn, -which was then in bloom. The freshness of joy in all beautiful things -remained with him, so far as we can see, to the end of his life. It -is as obvious in the moving account of the Prince de Guermantes’ -confession to Swann at the beginning of the last book as it is in the -early Combray chapters of the first. He was supremely sensitive and -continually<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">-50-</span> surprised by beauty. But, unlike most sensitive people, he -neither railed at mankind, nor shut himself up, nor built for himself a -palace of escape from reality in his own theorising about the meaning -of it all. He set himself to observe and to note his observations.</p> - -<p>In many ways Anatole France’s description of him as the ingenuous -Petronius of our times is extremely intelligent. And our times are in -many ways extremely like the days in which Petronius wrote. There is -an aristocracy that has lost its <i>raison d’être</i>, and a continual -flow of new plutocrats without traditions, without taste, without -any object in life beyond spending to the best of their power of -self-advertisement. The faith in the old social order has gone, and -nothing new has arisen to take its place. Where we differ entirely from -that age is in self-consciousness. And that, too, is where a modern -Petronius must differ from the old one. For better in some ways and -for worse in others, we are far more complex than we have ever been; -our motives are at once more mixed and more clearly scrutinised. And a -writer who can satisfactorily cram this age within the pages of a book -must not only be extremely intelligent and extremely observant, but -must also have forged for himself a style capable of expressing the -finest shades of feeling; he must refuse the easy simplifications both -of the moralist and the maker of plots; he must be infinitely sensitive -and infinitely<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">-51-</span> truthful. That Marcel Proust personifies this ideal no -one would completely claim. But he does, at least to some people, seem -to have approached it more nearly than any other writer of our time.</p> - -<p class="right"> -RALPH WRIGHT.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">-52-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="V">V<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>THE “LITTLE PROUST”</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">T</span>O those of us who have read or who are now reading Proust’s enormous -novel, it is a curious experience to turn back to his earliest -publication, to the book written by the precocious boy whose social -successes are described at such length in <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du Temps -Perdu</span></i>. This book, <i><span lang="fr">Les Plaisirs et les Jours</span></i>, appeared in -1896, seventeen years before the publication of <i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de chez -Swann</span></i>. <i><span lang="fr">Les Plaisirs</span></i> is a large, shiny volume, a pretentious -“tome” for the drawing-room, printed in the most expensive manner, and -made hideously elegant by Madeleine Lemaire’s illustrations of the -<i><span lang="fr">higlif</span></i> of the ’nineties—an amazing <i>élite</i> of melancholy -great ladies, exquisitely fashionable in costumes which time, with its -ironic touch, has made inconceivably out of fashion and dowdy. A few -copies of this large book appeared recently in the London bookshops, -when its rarity and value seem not to have been known; and one of -these copies has come, in the happiest manner, into my possession. -It contains the literary exercises and first attempts of the “little -Proust” of the great novel, some verses of no especial merit, a few -stories and set pieces of description, and a number of short poems in -prose. These pieces were all written, the author tells us,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">-53-</span> between his -twentieth and his twenty-third year; the style is somewhat sententious, -immature and precious: it is the writing of a boy—but, one sees at -once, of a boy of genius. For here, not only in their bud, but in -their first exquisite flowering, we find all the great qualities of -Proust’s later work: the beautiful sensibility, the observation, as -of an insect with an insect’s thousand eyes, the subtle and elaborate -study of passion, with its dawn, its torments of jealousy, and—what is -so original in the great novel—the analysis, not only of falling in -love, but of falling out of it—the slow, inevitable fading away of the -most fiery passion into the coldest indifference. Indeed, most of the -themes, and often the very situations, of the later work are not only -adumbrated but happily rendered in this boyish volume—the romantic lure -of the world and its heartless vulgarity, the beauty of landscapes, of -blossoming trees and hedges and the sea, the evocative power of names, -the intermittences of memory, the longing of the child for its mother’s -good-night kiss, the great dinner-party, with all the ambitions and -pretences of hosts and guests cynically analysed and laid bare. And -here, too, we find something which, to my mind, is of even greater -interest, and about which, as Proust’s other critics have hardly -mentioned it, a few words may not be out of place.</p> - -<p>When the little Proust plunged into the full stream of his Parisian -experiences, he was, we<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">-54-</span> are told by one of his friends, already, from -his early studies, steeped in the philosophy of Plato; and although his -feverish days were filled with love affairs and worldly successes, and -he drained to its dregs, as we say, the enchanting cup of life, all -that he felt and saw seems but to have confirmed in that precocious boy -the lesson which Plato had already taught him—the lesson, namely, that -the true meaning of life is never to be found in immediate experience; -that there is another reality which can only be envisaged by the mind, -and, as it were, created by the intellect—a deeper and more ultimate -reality, in the presence of which life no longer seems contingent, -mediocre, mortal, and its vicissitudes are felt to be irrelevant, its -briefness an illusion. Certainly, in that great battle between the -Giants and the Gods, which Plato describes in the <i>Sophist</i>, the -battle in which the Giants affirm that only those things are real which -can be touched and handled, while the Gods defend themselves from -above out of an unseen world, “mightily contending” that true essence -consists in intelligible ideas—in this eternal warfare Proust is found -fighting as conspicuously as Shelley on the side of the Gods. Hope for -him, as for Shelley,</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> - <div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent28">creates</div> - <div class="verse indent0">From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;</div> - </div> -</div> -</div> - -<p>and it is this attitude towards life, this creative contemplation -of experience, which to my mind<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">-55-</span> gives its deeper significance to -Proust’s work, and lends an importance and depth of meaning to the -youthful and rather shabby love-affairs, the fashionable wickednesses -and worldlinesses, which form so large a part of his subject-matter. -What was Proust’s ultimate “intention” in writing his great novel, -the intention which, when fulfilled, will give, we must hope, a final -and satisfying form to this immense creation, must remain a matter of -conjecture until the complete work is before us. There is, however, -much to indicate that when he retired from the world to sift and -analyse his boyish experience, it was with the purpose to disengage -from that flux of life and time the meanings implicit in it—to recover, -to develop in the dark room of consciousness, and re-create the -ultimate realities and ideals which experience reveals, though it never -really attains them. The title of the whole work, <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du -Temps Perdu</span></i>, and that of its ultimate and yet unpublished volume, -<i><span lang="fr">Le Temps retrouvé</span></i>, seem indeed to suggest some such purpose.</p> - -<p>That there is something irremediably wrong in the present moment; -that the true reality is the creation of desire and memory, and is -most present in hope, in recollection and absence, but never in -immediate experience; that we kill our souls by living, and that it -is in solitude, in illness, or at the approach of death that we most -truly possess them—it is on these themes, which<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">-56-</span> are repeated with -deeper harmonies and richer modulations throughout his later work, -that the young Proust harps in this divinely fresh overture to the -masterpiece which was to follow. Surely, one thinks, a book of such -exquisite promise and youthful achievement, heralded as it was to the -world by Anatole France’s preface, and talked of, no doubt, in all the -Paris salons, must have produced a remarkable impression on people -so cultivated as the Parisians, so alert to discover and appreciate -literary merit. However, as we know, it produced no such impression; -in spite of Anatole France’s praise, no one seems to have had any real -notion of its importance, or to have guessed that a new genius had -appeared, a new star had arisen. And when, after publishing this large, -shiny, unappreciated volume, its author disappeared from the world into -a solitary sick-room, he seems to have been thought of (as far as he -was thought of at all) as a pretentious, affected boy who had been made -a pet of for a while in worldly salons—a little dilettante with his -head turned, who had gone up like a rocket in the skies of fashion, but -would be heard of no more in the world of letters, where anyhow this -pretty coruscation had attracted almost no attention. This seems to -have been the impression of even those among Proust’s personal friends -who were themselves writers, and who, on re-reading <i><span lang="fr">Les Plaisirs et -les Jours</span></i>, are now amazed, as M. Gide confesses, that they should -have been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">-57-</span> so blind to its beauty when they first read it—that in the -first eagle-flights of this young genius they had seen little more than -the insignificant flutterings of a gay butterfly of fashion.</p> - -<p>When we read the lives of the great artists of the past, we are apt -to be amazed at the indifference of their contemporaries to their -early achievements; and we cannot believe that we too, in the same -circumstances, would have been equally undiscerning. But here, -happening in our own days, is an obvious instance of this contemporary -blindness; and I, at least, as I read the little Proust’s first volume, -and see spread so clearly before me, as in the light of a beautiful -dawn, the world of his creation, try to make myself believe that if -the noontide of his genius had never illuminated that world and made -it familiar to me, that if Proust had never lived to write Swann and -the Guermantes, I too should be as blind as were his friends to its -beauty and merits. I tell myself this, and yet, with the book before -me, I cannot believe it. But then I remind myself of what I already -know very well, that new dawns in art are apt to appear on just the -horizons towards which we are not looking, and to illuminate landscapes -of which we have as yet not the slightest knowledge; and that it is -only afterwards, when the master’s whole <i>œuvre</i> is familiar to -us, that we can see the real merits of his early attempts, and read -back into them the meaning and value of his complete and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">-58-</span> acknowledged -achievement. The moral of all this (and it is pleasant to end, if -possible, one’s reflections with a moral)—the moral is that we do not -know, we cannot know, what those disquieting persons, our younger -contemporaries, are really up to; that we must “look to the end,” as -the old saying has it; and that in the first attempts of other youths -who, like Proust, were endowed with genius, but whose gifts, unlike -his, came to no fruition, we possess no doubt early masterpieces of -which we can have no conception, worlds of the imagination which -actually exist and shine in the light of an exquisite dawn before our -eyes, although our eyes cannot see them.</p> - -<p class="right"> -LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">-59-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="VI">VI<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>A READER’S GRATITUDE</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">A</span> FRENCH uncle of mine once took me as a boy to visit a distinguished -mathematician who lived with his melons and his roses on the outskirts -of a small town in the Lyonnais. On the way thither I was admonished -not to interrupt with foolish questions what I was given to suppose -would be an important inquiry by two learned men into the origin of the -universe: Monsieur X—— would never have me inside his house again if I -could not behave myself better than most of the children of the present -day. We waited for our host in a large musty room of subdued sunlight, -where not even a fly buzzed and where the only hint of life was the -shadow of a passing bird across the yellow blind or the quivering -filigree of a reflected bough. Presently Monsieur X—— came in to greet -us; but without showing any inclination to discuss philosophy with my -uncle he led us to some chairs and a table set out upon the sparse turf -under what I think must have been a big catalpa tree. Here he heaped my -plate with cakes and fruit and sweets, insisted that I was old enough -to drink two glasses of a cordial, and, when he did begin to talk, -talked most entertainingly about his neighbours.</p> - -<p>Gratitude may be childhood’s greatest embarrassment;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">-60-</span> not merely the -verbal expression of thanks, but the emotion itself, which the more -deeply it is felt, the more miserably it is involved in shame. As we -grow older, we learn what is called politeness; and although we are -still capable of being confused by and of actually suffering from -excess of gratitude, we have learnt to cover that speechless confusion -and pain with a glib phrase like ‘I do not know how to thank you.’ But -the child’s silence does convey the depth of his gratitude; and even -as I hung my head in silent embarrassment when I was invited to thank -Monsieur X—— for his kindness, so now when I ought to be thanking -Marcel Proust, against interrupting whose discourse I have been as it -were warned by the respect accorded to him by our uncles the critics, -but who when I met him as a reader filled my plate with one delicious -fruit and sweet and cake after another (steeped those cakes in tisane -of limeflowers or tea), I feel incapable of expressing gratitude; and -I fear to indulge in criticism, lest I should be just one more uncle -standing between Proust and that innocent, appreciative, timorous, -awkward child, the public.</p> - -<p>If I say that I regard Proust as the only completely satisfying -poetical record, the most important literary phenomenon of our time, -I feel that I am involved in an argument with people who think that -the relentless effusion of modern verse has more significance than, -let us<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">-61-</span> say, a bath tap which has been left running. And I simply do -not want to argue about what I enjoy. If I say that Proust represents -the apex hitherto reached by the feminine or realistic art of this -age, just as Stendhal represents the culmination of the masculine or -ideological art of the eighteenth century, or that Proust arrives -at the general through an incredibly sensitive exploration of the -particular, whereas Stendhal achieves the particular by his exquisite -consciousness of the general, I am involved in a lecture. And I simply -do not want to lecture about what I enjoy. The trouble is that, in -order to demonstrate Proust to people who have not read him, one ought -to have as subtle a power of evocation, as rich a manner of suggestion -as Proust himself, who could, I believe, make even a dream interesting, -so that we should live in that dream and extract from it the essential -flavour of its peculiarity as authentically as the dreamer. That is why -Proust writes of childhood with such magic. He manages to recognize, -in the complication of events that merely occur and are forgotten, the -ideal duration in which they were imbedded and which gave them their -material weight and spiritual portentousness. It is only in childhood, -or at any rate only in isolated fragments of time later, that we -possess at all intimately this sense of duration when objects appeal -to us as their essential selves, as pure energies. At other periods -we value them according as they forward our lives, according as they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">-62-</span> -are useful to us, and thus we lose our sense of their independent -existence. I have just read once more the Combray chapter (marvellously -enshrined in a translation that, like the translation of a saint’s -bones, destroys not a bit of their efficacy), and I have laid it aside, -thinking of Leopardi’s <i><span lang="it">Ricordanze</span></i> and listening to where, under -the scintillations of the Great Bear,</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> - <div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent14"><i><span lang="it">sotto al patrio tetto</span></i></div> - <div class="verse indent0"><i><span lang="it">sonavan voci alterne, e le tranquille</span></i></div> - <div class="verse indent0"><i><span lang="it">opre de’ servi</span>.</i></div> - </div> -</div> -</div> - -<p class="right"> -COMPTON MACKENZIE.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">-63-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="VII">VII<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>GILBERTE</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">T</span>HEIR eyes meet across a hedge when she is still a little girl. In -his eyes the look is one of appeal unconsciously, in hers of ironic -indifference and contempt. He hears her name called: “Gilberte”; and -she obeys instantly without turning to look back in his direction, -leaving him with a disturbing enervating memory, the sense suddenly -appreciated of things distant and intangible, of a world withheld from -him. And that brief encounter sets the tone of their relations. She is -always very largely a creature of his imagination, a window through -which he can see but cannot reach immortal pastures. Never in the sense -that Odette is, does she become a personality to him. Consequently to -the reader she appears only in intermittent flashes of reality: when -she gives him the marble that has the same colour as her eyes; when -they wrestle for the letter—their feelings one shy articulation—and she -says, “You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling for a little”; -when in spite of her grandfather’s anniversary and her father’s -disapproval she insists on going to a concert: in her impatience at -being kept from a dancing lesson by her lover’s unexpected visit.</p> - -<p>And when we recall the endless pains expended, through Swann’s love for -her, on Odette,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">-64-</span> on the making indeed a mirror of that love for the -woman by whom it was inspired and from whom it drew its strength and -weakness, we realise that purposely the author has left of Gilberte -“a loveliness perceived in twilight, a beauty not clearly visioned”; -that he considered the emotions felt for her not to be a response -to any emanation from herself; but that she was rather a focus, a -rallying-point, for the aspirations and intimations of boyhood; -that she was in herself uninteresting, filling rather than creating -a position in the life of the “<span lang="fr">moi</span>” of <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du Temps -Perdu</span></i>. Throughout the episode the reader’s attention is fixed -always on the “<span lang="fr">moi</span>,” on the detailed analysis of his love: its ebb and -flow; its dawn of timidity and reverence and hopeless longing; its -discontent; its substitution for love of friendship; its oblique and -unrepeated essay, in the wrestle, towards a physical expression; the -resignation for its sake of a diplomatic career which would carry him -from Gilberte; the disagreement over a trifle; the gradual recognition -of its failing power, and the final realisation that those emotions of -his, which he had considered in the light of a gift to Gilberte, as -her permanent possession, had returned to him, to be showered in time, -but in a different form, before another woman. This particular series -of emotions, so familiar and yet, belonging as it does to Jurgen’s -enchanted garden between dawn and sunrise, so distant; this love that -must, in John Galsworthy’s phrase, “become<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">-65-</span> in time a fragrant memory—a -searing passion—a humdrum mateship—or once in many times vintage full -and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes,” Marcel Proust has in -the last pages of <i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de chez Swann</span></i> and the first part of -<i><span lang="fr">A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs</span></i> presented in unfaltering -analysis.</p> - -<p>It is a series of emotions that has been treated many times and has -inspired more than one masterpiece of the world’s literature. For, -whatever else in life comes twice, that does not come. Love may -advance down the years often enough and gaily enough, “overthrowing -all ancient memories with laughter”: the passions of maturity may be -deeper, stronger, less impermanent. But the particular charm of that -first flowering is irrecapturable. Whence its unique fascination for -the novelist. To compare Proust’s treatment of it with that of other -writers—with, for example, Turgenev’s beautiful <i>First Love</i>—would -be a forlorn and foolish business. To praise the one at the expense -of the other would be to blame a big writer for failing to achieve a -thing at which he never aimed. Those who find themselves in sympathy -with Proust’s methods, who recognise in the technique of his work a new -formula, in its style a new prose rhythm, and in the spirit of it an -alert and original intelligence, will always look on Gilberte as one of -his most fortunate successes.</p> - -<p class="right"> -ALEC WAUGH.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">-66-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="VIII">VIII<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>PROUST’S WOMEN</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE literature of imagination has always been rich in autobiography, -confessed and unconfessed. It is in its essence, perhaps one should -say in its impulse, largely an affair of passionate reminiscence. -Taken, therefore, as merely a recent writer of distinction who has -chosen to deal avowedly with <i>Things Remembered</i>, Proust must -challenge comparison with dozens of eminent men, his forerunners and -contemporaries. Tolstoy has given us his own life-history, not only -diffusively throughout his novels and pamphlets, but in that wonderful -piece of reconstruction, <i>Childhood and Youth</i>. Among living -men, James Joyce, with an epic gift and an heroic feat of memory, has -recorded for us an impression of his past, physical, mental, spiritual, -and has shown it interwoven with countless other lives. And these are -two taken at random. <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</span></i>—Proust was -not the first, nor will he be the last, to choose it as a theme.</p> - -<p>Where Proust stands as yet alone is in his manner of approaching his -theme. Or, with more exactitude it may be said, his manner, vigilantly -passive, eagerly quiescent, of letting his theme encroach upon and -claim him. All attempted recapture of the past is for him “futile,”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">-67-</span> -a “labour in vain.” Not reconstruction, but understanding of things -remembered, is his aim. And to this end with deliberation he permits -himself what the realist rejects but the plain man all unknowingly -cherishes—the glamour in which for every one of us our own past is -bathed. Divest the past, Proust seems to say, of the present’s gift -to it—the light that never was on sea or land—and you take away its -essence; treat the present as independent of the past and you destroy -its integrity. That this is true we, as human beings—acting, thinking, -receiving impressions from moment to moment—must recognise when it is -pointed out. Our actual existence is not so much a narrative as a web -in which the shuttle of events flies back and forth between the warp -and woof of past and present, from neither of which it can escape any -more than can we ourselves. The trouble is that it is pointed out so -seldom, and least of all perhaps by novelists, who in this matter still -lag far behind our common human experience. The grasp with which Proust -has laid hold upon the philosophic and aesthetic values of memory—as, -for example, in the passage where he describes the eating, after an -interval of many years, of a <i><span lang="fr">petite madeleine</span></i> soaked in tea—is -a new thing in literature. Here is pre-eminently the novelist with a -past. None before him has taken <i>Things Remembered</i> not merely for -theme but for medium as well.</p> - -<p>To forget this, or even for one moment to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">-68-</span> minimise it, in speaking of -Proust, is utterly to lose one’s bearings. But, accustomed as we are -in our own hearts to his treatment of the past, we are so unaccustomed -to it in literature that it is really not easy to avoid the artificial -standpoint, the more that Proust proclaims his naturalism neither -explicitly nor by freakishness of style. So quiet, so classical is his -bearing that it hardly strikes one to investigate his premises.</p> - -<p>And so, concerning his long book of memory, one hears questions put -by intelligent and even admiring readers. There are his “shadowy” -women—“Did women at any time mean anything to Proust?”: there is his -disconcerting chronology—“How old is his hero supposed to be during -such or such an incident?”: there is his social pose—“Was Proust not -himself as bad a snob as any he describes?” But such questions can be -asked only in forgetfulness, answered only in constant remembrance of -the author’s unique attitude toward his main subject, the past.</p> - -<p>It is because of this that, though setting out to make a few -observations upon Proust’s women, I feel it no digression if I draw -attention here to a particular passage which occurs early in the novel, -towards the end of the <i>Combray</i> section in Volume I.—a passage -in which he not merely gives the circumstances of his hero’s first -literary composition, but puts before us the composed fragment itself. -A few pages back and the boy has been bemoaning that, his choice of -a literary<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">-69-</span> career notwithstanding, his mind is blank of subjects, -his intellect, at the mere idea of writing, a void. Now, suddenly, -while out driving, he is so deeply enthralled by the charm of three -steeples which withdraw and advance, disappear and reappear, always in -different relations to each other, according as the setting sun catches -their angles and the carriage winds along the country road, that words -leap to frame themselves in his head and, for all the jolting and -inconvenience of the moment, he must immediately write them down to -“appease his conscience and to satisfy his enthusiasm.”</p> - -<p>The actual piece of prose so written is reproduced, says the narrator, -“with only a slight revision here and there.” We may allow ourselves, -I think, the presumption that it is substantially a true record.<a id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> -Certainly it furnishes us with the key to the whole work. Passages -from Proust more exquisite, even more characteristic, might easily be -found; none so significant. Those ever-veering steeples, sometimes -before, sometimes behind, lightening, darkening, changing, looking -now like three golden pivots, now like three birds perched on the -plain—they reveal, more fully and subtly than could any philosophic -exposition, both the method and the philosophic preoccupation of the -author. They declare that for him there was never an actual but always -a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">-70-</span> psychological perspective, and that <i>peculiar to himself</i>. This -is why there is no intellectual or logical means of checking Proust’s -observations. Either we accept them as he gives them, emotionally, -or we reject them as meaningless. He has, he repeatedly tells us, -no faith in intellectual observation, neither will he presume upon -logical deduction in questions of human feeling. He quietly discards -that assumption of god-like knowledge for which we have come to look -so confidently in our writers of fiction. He will have none of the -sympathetic imagination that “puts itself in another’s place.” He -refuses as an act of disingenuousness either to project himself into -or to interpret the character of another. “We alone,” he says, “by our -belief that they have an existence of their own, can give to certain of -the things that we see a soul which they afterwards keep, which they -develop in our minds.” Essentially, that is to say, he believes he can -know nothing outside of his own sensations, and for him every sensation -is inextricably interwoven with memory. Whether he writes of a woman -or a musical theme, of a love affair or of trees in the park, he never -forgets that in the very act of observing there are several elements to -be reckoned with. The thing observed may seem to casual eyes fixed like -the three steeples. But Proust knows better. He knows that he himself -is moving, that within him his past is in a different kind of motion, -dictating, suggesting, comparing,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">-71-</span> reminding, side-tracking, and that -therefore the steeples themselves are never in reality still. Nothing -in life is stable. Within the flux of our past and our present, figures -outside ourselves seem to rise, to move, to act. But such movements -have reality only in so far as they are reflected in the unique mirror -of a soul. And for Proust this mirror is combined of the individual and -his memory.</p> - -<p>No wonder if such a novelist is sometimes called difficult. He is too -like life to be easy. Other novels, beside his, seem accommodatingly -static, other characters finished, understood in each spring of each -action—precisely as those we know in life are never finished or -understood.</p> - -<p>But to come to the women.</p> - -<p>A man of particular sincerity once said to me that after twenty years -of married life he understood his wife no better than on the day he -married her. He had of course become familiar with her modes of thought -and action which served as knowledge for practical daily purposes. But -familiarity had never bred understanding. Her underlying motives, the -ultimate significance of her looks and words, remained hidden.</p> - -<p>This, I think, is Proust’s position, more especially when the woman -happens to affect him powerfully. In every case we can <i>see</i> his -women, and thus far they are the reverse of shadowy. Grandmother, -mother, aunts, and servant—the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">-72-</span> women that surround his childhood; -Mlle. Vinteuil and the Duchesse de Guermantes—female figures that -shock or thrill his boyish imagination; Odette—the mature cocotte -that stands throughout his youth for feminine mystery and glamour; -Odette’s daughter Gilberte, and later Albertine—the young girls, minxes -both, with whom he falls in love; Madame Verdurin and her circle—the -social climbers who call forth his most delicate adult irony as well -as his most rancid contempt;—these, simply as pictures, leap out at -us complete. Nothing could be more objective than their presentation -to the eye and ear of the reader. We feel with each one as if we -had met her in the flesh—as one has met a casual acquaintance. The -mother’s submissive wifeliness; the almost masculine incorruptibility -of the grandmother; the raciness of the servant; the neurosis of Aunt -Léonie; the half-hearted viciousness of the music-master’s daughter; -the slightly comic social splendour of the Duchesse; the unmeaning -melancholy of Odette’s eyes; the unredeemed vulgarity of Madame -Verdurin; the domineering girlishness of Gilberte, by turns frank and -secretive, appealing and repellent; the smile with which Albertine, -at once innocent and wanton, receives the youth in her bedroom—in -depicting these Proust never trespasses beyond natural as compared with -literary experience. We all know with what liveliness in conversation -any man with the gifts of observation and wit can<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">-73-</span> create an image for -us of some female “character” met with in his childhood or his travels. -But let that same man come to speak out of his emotions of some woman -who has moved him deeply, then his heart will cloud his brain, his -tongue will falter or run away with him, and he will no longer be -capable of outlining a portrait. As listeners our impressions of his -subject will be gained, not from what he says, but independently from -what we perceive that he feels, which may well be in direct conflict -with his words. In life, that is to say, the more important a character -is to us the more we are thrown back for our ultimate knowledge on -the emotions aroused by that character in ourselves. In fiction it -is usually the other way about. It is his central figures whom the -novelist pretends to know best. Proust, however, has recognised this -discrepancy with scientific clearness. He devotes himself, therefore, -where his important women are concerned—aside from the very minimum of -detached, objective observations—to a presentment of the effect they -have upon the men that love them.</p> - -<p>So his women set us wondering and supposing and coming to our own -conclusions exactly as we do in life, either when an individual of our -own sex is described for us by one of the other sex, or when we are -emotionally affected by some one of the other sex.</p> - -<p>For this is important. When it comes to his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">-74-</span> male characters, Proust -takes a different tone. Here he finds himself able, quite consistently -with his philosophy, for far more positive assertion. In various ways -he can allow them to reveal and expound themselves, and even each -other, as when Bergotte speaks of the married Swann as a man who -“has to swallow a hundred serpents every day.” The point of view, -the intellectual outfit which all males have in common—these give -the male novelist a certain tract of solid ground when dealing with -characters of his own sex. A man’s fellow-feeling for other men is very -strong. It has but a faint and imperfect parallel as between woman and -woman. Proust, accordingly, without any sacrifice of conscience, can, -“by his belief,” endow Swann with a soul. But—marvellous and highly -characteristic creation as he is—Swann may be put in the same category -with other male characters by other male novelists. Odette, Gilberte, -Albertine, are in a category by themselves. Outside of Proust’s book -they are only to be met with in life.</p> - -<p>It is in this differential treatment of his women that we perceive -how rigorously Proust applies his artistic method. He never seeks to -transcend his own personality. In him, the observer, the whole of -creation lives and moves and has its being. Men are creatures made in -his own image. He can faithfully follow his own emotions, and “by his -belief” can conscientiously endow his men with souls. But women are -in a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">-75-</span> different case. He has no inner guide to assure him that they -are anything more than the phantoms they seem. Strictly speaking, this -should imply no more than a negative attitude. In fact, however, Proust -goes further. Because he has no grounds for belief he passes into -unbelief. In his philosophy <i><span lang="la">esse est percipi</span></i>, therefore, the -souls of women for him have no existence. Herein it is likely that he -has borne out the unavowed experience of most men. Whether or no, he -certainly has expressed the truth of his own experience with a purity -that few, even among great writers, can rival.</p> - -<p>One thing more. There is Proust’s mother.</p> - -<p>No doubt the avenging eagerness with which I reintroduce her here -for my conclusion is due in part to my being myself of the soulless -sex. But quite apart from any such feelings, to speak of this -novelist’s women without reckoning especially with his mother would -be inexcusable. That he adored her in childhood he makes manifest. -Further, that throughout his life this adoration effectively debarred -him from profound emotion where other women were concerned becomes -clear enough to the reader. It hardly appears, however, that Proust -was himself wholly conscious of this. True, there is a passage in the -<i>Combray</i> section in which he speaks of “that untroubled peace -which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, -since one has doubts of them at the moment when one<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">-76-</span> believes in them, -and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her kiss, -the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation, -unburdened by any liability save to myself.” But this is the only -place where he seems to allow that the love he bore his mother was -even comparable in kind with the love aroused by other women later -in his life. Indeed, though he repeatedly speaks of the anguish with -which in his childhood he longed for his mother’s good-night kiss, the -ecstasy with which he received it, as if it were the Host in an act of -communion, conveying to him “her real presence and with it the power -to sleep”; though he tells how, for that “frail and precious kiss,” he -prepared himself in advance so as to “consecrate” the whole minute of -contact; though he dreaded to prolong or repeat the kiss lest a look -of displeasure should cross those beautiful features with the slight, -beloved blemish under one of the eyes; yet he describes himself at -this time as one “into whose life Love had not yet entered,” as one -whose emotion, failing love and as yet awaiting it, happened to be at -the disposal of “filial piety.” No wonder if, when temporary “loves” -came, he compared with them as unconsciously as unfavourably this good -and gracious mother—so admiringly timid as a wife, so gentle towards -strangers, so perfect socially, so full of stern solicitude as a parent -(“she never allowed herself to go to any length<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">-77-</span> of tenderness with -me”)—and found them merely exciting to the senses. He had already, so -far as woman was concerned, given his heart away.</p> - -<p>Yet, after all, perhaps he knew it well enough and merely takes his -own way of saying it. He tells us little enough of his mother, though -probably he tells as much as he knows. What her own real thoughts and -feelings were we are left to guess. But “never again,” he says, after -describing one very special visit of hers to the boy’s bedroom—“never -again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been -increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the -sobs ... which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. -Actually their echo has never ceased.”</p> - -<p class="right"> -CATHERINE CARSWELL.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">-78-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="IX">IX<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>THE BEST RECORD</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">O</span>NE of my feelings whenever I read Marcel Proust is regret that Henry -James is not alive to enjoy him, as he would have done immensely and -amazedly, though, judging from the letters of that great master of -the art of writing fiction, no doubt he would not have given him his -unqualified approval. But he would have recognised him as working at -his own level, while not in his own groove. Yet, for all that Proust -is the author of practically only one book, big though that book is, -in that one book he has spread his nets wider, and sunk them deeper, -than did Henry James in the sum of all his novels. One wonders if -such mastery has ever been obtained so suddenly and so completely; -indeed, the sureness of touch seems a little less certain in the last -published volumes than in the earlier ones. We had revealed to us from -the beginning a new way of writing fiction, or rather of describing -life. It had never so been done before. Let us pray that he will have -no disciples—one can foresee the horror of them; but influence he must -have.</p> - -<p>My own interest begins with the second volume of <i>Swann</i>, -though my admiration begins with the first sentence of the first; -and my advice to new readers would be to take up any volume<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">-79-</span> after -<i>Swann</i>—to start in the middle—when I am sure they will insist on -knowing everything the author has to say about his characters from the -beginning. You become soaked in the lives of these people as a sponge -becomes soaked with water. In the process you live your own life over -again, and, if you have lived in Paris and in Normandy, you tread the -same ground.</p> - -<p>Proust has no “story” to tell. He sets down life as it was lived by -certain people at a certain period: Parisian society from the middle of -the Dreyfus case to the present day. From the amazing brilliance of the -whole opening two details presently detach themselves—the love of Swann -for Odette, and the boy and girl idyll in the Champs-Élysées: they are -beyond words to praise, for they are not Art, but life recorded with -matchless insight or remembrance. We need not compare, but how pale is -<i><span lang="fr">Jean Christophe</span></i> beside these pages! So when we get to Normandy, -the <i><span lang="fr">Plage</span></i>, the hotel, and the countryside with its little -railway, and childhood has melted into adolescence, we live again those -days, and tread those paths, which we thought beyond recapture, save by -indistinct memory. It is an exquisite pleasure which I, at any rate, -never expected to experience.</p> - -<p>Emerging from the shadows of the joyous band of <i><span lang="fr">jeunes filles en -fleurs</span></i>, with its hint of perversity—we shall have to rewrite our -hymns: “There’s a <i>Freud</i> for little children!”—we<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">-80-</span> come to the -marvellous Guermantes, with whom Proust has pictured that high-born -snobbery—and life without snobbery is like meat without salt—which -observers, as they get on in years, come to know is inherent in the -upper classes no less, perhaps more, than in the middle classes: a -right snobbery, bereft of any meanness or noxious prejudices. These -people see France through their family history, and their family -history was France. They are Ladies and Gentlemen, with all that that -connotes: and in considering them we are conscious of all the rest -who are not. Proust, in exploring one path, illuminates the others. -We spend a few hours in their company, in the course of a dinner and -an evening reception (taking up a couple of hundred or so of pages), -and at the end we know all about them; we understand the world which -made them, and what they are going to make of the world. As contrasts -to these great ones we have those other snobs, the Verdurins, of the -“cultured” middle class. Surely never before, in memoir, essay, or -fiction, has it all been set down so brilliantly.</p> - -<p>One wonders what sort of man Proust really was. We know he was a great -friend of Léon Daudet—two men, one would have thought, as the poles -asunder. We know that he slept by day, and lived and worked by night: -we know that he was ill and neurasthenic. We know also that nothing was -hidden from him, and that he had an infinite power of expression. He -was a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">-81-</span> very human being with the brain and the pen of a recording angel.</p> - -<p>Occasionally, lest his cleverness should seem to be superhuman, one -comes on a jest or an anecdote which is a “chestnut”; or he becomes a -little too intricate, or his neurasthenia shows its cloven hoof: once -or twice I am inclined to throw the book down as too tiresome, but -I cling to him and grapple with him, and soon feel again that I am -enjoying one of the greatest pleasures of my life.</p> - -<p>One meets with all kinds of people in his work, some of them very odd -people; though how very odd is the ordinary normal person! Proust’s -odd people may be thought to be modern: yet both in art and in life -they are indeed very ancient. They are those for whom—to modernise an -old phrase—Life is a <i><span lang="fr">mauvais quart d’heure</span></i> made up of exquisite -complexes. Side by side with these “moderns” are the old-fashioned -people, notably the Grandmother and Françoise—not Micawber is more -definite than this last.</p> - -<p>The more we study the great writers of all ages, and the more we -observe for ourselves, the more we realise that the world never -alters; we can only ring the changes on the same material. Harmony and -discord, beauty and ugliness! It is like a gramophone disc. The records -vary, the melodies, the arrangements, make their individual effect, -but the substance is the same.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">-82-</span> The Masters make their records on an -unchanging surface. Marcel Proust’s is a magnificent record; perhaps -the most brilliant ever achieved. It requires only that we bring to it -a sympathetic and sharp-pointed needle.</p> - -<p>Did his death leave his record incomplete?</p> - -<p>One would like to know what more he had in his mind to record of these -people. Especially is one curious as to the future of M. de Charlus. -What did he do in the Great War? Did he open one of his houses as -a hospital for not too badly wounded soldiers? Or was he content -with lending his name to charity bazaars? Or was he—likeliest of -all—galvanised by his high breeding and undoubted courage into a vigour -beyond his years, to make a hero’s end? Perhaps we shall never know. -Does it much matter? We can finish off these people to our own liking, -or—if indeed his book was unfinished—leave them as he left them. There -they are for us, all alive—and likely to remain so.</p> - -<p class="right"> -REGINALD TURNER.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">-83-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="X">X<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>A FOOT-NOTE</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">T</span>HOUGH in England almost every one, who has read and understood, -admires the works of Marcel Proust, it is not so in France. There, -not to go beyond my own experience, I have met plenty of writers, -and good ones too, who cannot away with them. Even that essay on the -style of Flaubert, which I had supposed would be universally reckoned -a masterpiece, I have heard described by a friend of mine, a charming -poet and admired dramatist, as childish. Now, when I hear such a one, -and others whom I respect, disparaging Proust, I do not fly into a -passion; I seek the cause, instead. And I find it—though the discovery, -should they ever come to hear of it, would a good deal shock some of my -French friends and surprise perhaps a few of my English—in Politics.</p> - -<p>The French themselves seem hardly to realise how sharp and deep their -political divisions are become. Yet when we remember that during the -last forty years politics have been able to make of that gentle latin -scepticism, which gave us Montaigne, Bayle, and Voltaire, and still -gives us M. Anatole France, something as narrow and bitter almost -as Calvinism; when we hear of such pretty place-names as (say) St. -Symphorien being changed into (say) Émile Combesville; we ought<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">-84-</span> not -to be surprised if literature even gets splashed a little in the dirty -dog-fight. Because Marcel Proust is supposed to have chosen as the -subject of his epic the <i><span lang="fr">faubourg St. Germain</span></i>, it is assumed -that he admired and believed in it. Was not <i><span lang="fr">L’Action française</span></i> -amongst the first to hail his rising genius? Is he not half a Jew and -therefore wholly a renegade? He is a black reactionary and an enemy of -light. He is not a good man, so how can he be a good writer? We are -back again in a very familiar world of criticism; only the English -critics can prove that he was good, after all.</p> - -<p>As a matter of fact, which I know counts for little in politics or -criticism, Proust seems to me often unduly hard on the <i><span lang="fr">faubourg</span></i>. -I shall not easily forget, nor perhaps will it, the devastating -effect of that small phrase, when, after treating us to a ravishing -description of a theatre full to the brim of <i><span lang="fr">beau monde</span></i>, after -explaining how these are the people fitted by training, tradition, -and circumstance to taste the things of the mind, he adds, by way of -afterthought as it were, “<span lang="fr">si seulement ils avaient eu de l’esprit</span>.” -For my part, sitting next her at that gorgeous dinner-party, I was -completely bowled over by the matchless Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes -(late Princesse des Laumes), bowled over not only by her beauty and -seduction, and a little perhaps by her great name, but by her <i><span lang="fr">bel -esprit</span></i> and intelligence. To me her observations on Victor<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">-85-</span> Hugo in -particular and the art of writing in general seemed to possess that -airy profundity which above all things one relishes in a literary -conversation, until M. Proust, after pooh-poohing her circle, undid -the duchess herself with this painfully just appreciation: “<span lang="fr">Pour -toutes ces raisons les causeries avec la duchesse ressemblaient à -ces connaissances qu’on puise dans une bibliothèque de château, -surannée, incomplète, incapable de former une intelligence, dépourvue -de presque tout ce que nous aimons, mais nous offrant parfois quelque -renseignement curieux, voire la citation d’une belle page que nous ne -connaissions pas, et dont nous sommes heureux dans la suite de nous -rappeler que nous en devons la connaissance à une magnifique demeure -seigneuriale. Nous sommes alors, pour avoir trouvé la préface de Balzac -à <i>la Chartreuse</i> ou des lettres inédites de Joubert, tentés de -nous exagérer le prix de la vie que nous y avons menée et dont nous -oublions, pour cette aubaine d’un soir, la frivolité stérile.”</span></p> - -<p>By naming Madame de Guermantes I have given myself occasion to remark -one of M. Proust’s most extraordinary gifts—his power of realising a -character. Without being presented one would know the incomparable -duchess should one ever have the happiness of meeting her at a party; -and I should recognise one of her good things (“Oriane’s latest”) were -it repeated in the train. When some one quotes a saying by Dr. Johnson -or the Duke of Wellington we need not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">-86-</span> verify by the book; their -characters are so vivid to us, and they speak so much in character, -that their phrases have the ring of familiar voices. It is the same -with Madame de Guermantes. How many authors have achieved this miracle? -Shakespeare, of course, who achieved all miracles, can distinguish even -his minor characters. In a tipsy dialogue between Mrs. Quickly and Doll -Tearsheet you can tell by the mere phrasing, by the particular way in -which a bawdy joke is turned, which of the ladies is speaking. And who -else can do it? Not Balzac, I am sure. Dickens, some one will say. Yes, -but only by giving us for characters blatant caricatures. We all know -the devil by his tail.</p> - -<p>So far I have not contested the common opinion that Proust is the poet -of the <i><span lang="fr">beau monde</span></i>; I have sought only to show that, if he were, -it would not follow that he was either a snob or a reactionary: it -would not follow that he was taken in. In fact, the subject of Proust’s -epic is the whole of French life as it was from forty to twenty years -ago—a subject of which the <i><span lang="fr">faubourg</span></i> is but a part. He gives -us a full-length picture of family life in the provinces and of a -quasi-intellectual circle in Paris, of the “seaside girls” who run -about with Albertine, and a <i><span lang="fr">croquis</span></i> of “county society”; best -of all, perhaps, he gives us exquisite landscapes and still-lifes. -And surely at this time of day it ought not to be necessary to remind -people, especially French people, that any<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">-87-</span> subject, provided the -artist is thoroughly possessed by it, is as good as any other; that the -forms and colours, and their relations, of a pot of flowers or fruit on -a table, passionately apprehended, are capable of inspiring as sublime -a work of art as the Madonna or the Crucifixion. If the <i><span lang="fr">faubourg</span></i> -above all things fascinated Proust, that I suspect was because in it -Proust saw a subject proper only to the touch of a master psychologist. -“Society,” he saw, is a hierarchy without official grades or badges: -unlike the army, with its colonels, majors, and captains; unlike the -navy, with its admirals, captains, and commanders; it resembles rather -a public school or small college. It is a microcosm in which people are -moved up and down, in and out, by mysterious and insensible powers; in -which they are promoted and degraded by a breath of fashion blowing -they know not whence; in which they obey slavishly unwritten laws, as -absolute as those of the Medes and Persians: powers these, none of -which they themselves can apprehend, but of which some can be surprised -by sensibilities in their way as delicate and subtle as those which -know when a lady changes her <i><span lang="fr">sachets</span></i> and can distinguish the -<i>bouquet</i> of Léoville from Larose. Herein perhaps, rather than in -its social prestige, lay the charm of the <i><span lang="fr">faubourg</span></i> for Marcel -Proust.</p> - -<p>One word more: a translation may do very well, but we can have no -English Proust. No Englishman, I mean, writing in English, would<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">-88-</span> be -allowed to publish in England so complete a picture of life. Wherefore -as a novel- and play-writing nation we have lost pride of place, -and cannot hope to regain it till we have set our laws in order. An -artist must be possessed by his subject; but the English novelist -who is inspired by his sense of contemporary life is not allowed -to express that by which he is possessed. Fielding, Jane Austen, -Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, James, and Hardy, English novelists who -took contemporary life for their province, all had something to say -which may have shocked or hurt but which the age did not prohibit. -They were, therefore, as free to express the best that was in them as -Balzac, Zola, or Proust. But to-day our subtlest and most active minds, -affected maybe, consciously or unconsciously, by modern psychological -discoveries, are concerned, so far as they are concerned with life -at all, with certain aspects of it, with certain relations, of which -they may not treat freely. Their situation is as painful and absurd -as would have been that of men of science who, towards the close of -last century, should have been allowed to make no use of Darwin’s -contribution to biology. The gap between first- and third-rate minds -has been growing alarmingly wide of late. Proust moves in a world -unknown almost to the intellectual slums, or to those intellectual -lower middle classes from which are drawn too many of our magistrates, -judges, and legislators. These lag behind, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">-89-</span> impose their veto -on the sincere treatment of English manners by a first-rate English -artist. And perhaps the best tribute which English admirers of Proust -could pay his memory would be to agitate for the repeal of those -absurd and barbarous laws which make an English <i><span lang="fr">Recherche du Temps -Perdu</span></i> impossible.</p> - -<p class="right"> -CLIVE BELL.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">-90-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XI">XI<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>THE SPELL OF PROUST</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE magic ring which Marcel Proust drew, almost literally, round his -readers—since it is in the circle of “<i><span lang="fr">le temps perdu</span></i>” which is -to become “<i><span lang="fr">le temps retrouvé</span></i>” that he sets us and himself—seemed -early in the incantation to betray a break whereby we might escape, -did we so wish, from his compulsion. For, enthralled as we had been -by <i>Swann</i>, there was a sensible relaxing of the spell with the -<i><span lang="fr">Jeunes Filles</span></i>. Not in the opening pages, where the atmosphere -that we had rapturously learned to breathe was potent still with its -intoxicating magic; but when we came to Balbec, and the group of -seaside girls began to show as rulers of the scene, there was scarce -one of us who did not own to disappointment. <i><span lang="fr">La petite bande</span></i>, -more actual and, on the surface, more alluring than <i><span lang="fr">la petite -phrase</span></i> in the sonata of Vinteuil, yet wholly failed to charm the -sense or the imagination as the enigmatic little group of notes had -charmed. We heard, and we responded to, the cry: “Those flappers -are so tedious!”—and as Albertine grew more and more significant, -<i>we</i> grew more sceptical, and told ourselves that we could step -outside the ring at any moment we might choose. But somehow, that -emancipative moment never came. Despite the blinding print of the -edition in a single volume—print<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">-91-</span> that must have permanently injured -our collective sight—there always was a reason why we could not break -away. And finally, we realised that we were wrong, and that the spell -had but become more absolute, in both the shades of meaning in that -word. For now that some of the more normal baits for interest were laid -aside, we could perceive that here was sorcery in its pure state—the -thing itself, stripped of all seeming. Now we could not so easily, or -easily at all, “say why” when the profane inquired of us what the magic -was—why, reading Proust, we were so interested. We were <i>not</i> -so interested; we could scarcely say, or even think, that we were -“interested” any more.</p> - -<p>The miracle had happened. We were spellbound, for good and all, within -the magic ring. We had forgotten what we used to mean when, in the -world outside, we had said “dull”; for here was much that was not -merely dull but positively soporific, yet our eyes were glued upon -the baleful page, and any interruption seemed a challenge to the -occult power that held us. Something was risked, immeasurably worth -our while, did we fall short of the required submission.... This was -because we now could feel more deeply the extent of what the wizard -meant to do with us. We were not passively to stand within the circle. -We were, with him, to pace it mystically round, while time ran back -to fetch the Age of Gold. <i><span lang="fr">Le temps passé</span></i> would be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">-92-</span> transmuted, -imperceptibly, into <i><span lang="fr">le temps retrouvé</span></i>; and our aid was necessary -to the necromancer’s full success. With this flattering divination -there began a new excitement, different in action from the old; for -soon, instead of rushing at the latest Marcel Proust directly we had -bought it, we indeed did buy it, but re-read the earlier volumes first. -Here was the very magic ring itself, drawn round our fireside chair! -The latest Proust lay ready to our hand, slim or substantial token of -the power still unspent; but lest we should have missed a single letter -in the charm, we spelt it through devoutly once again; and, in the -spelling, found how many an indication subtly skilled at once to warn -and to escape us till the moment of reflection or re-reading! And as -a consequence, we now perceived so intricate and exquisite a “pattern -in the carpet” as could make the newest volume into something more -exciting for anticipation even than we had dreamed.</p> - -<p>This is the proof, to me, of Marcel Proust’s (as one might think, -indisputable; yet by a few disputed) genius. The <i>Swann</i> book -contains the largest share of interest, no doubt—that merer, franker -kind of interest which other books can give us in a hardly less degree. -But in the later volumes, as they “grow on” us, there is far more (if -also there is less) than this; and it is through the more that we come -finally to clear perception of Proust’s purpose and his mastery. For -in these less immediately attractive volumes<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">-93-</span> we are conscious of an -ever-growing sense of the significance so deeply interfused through -the whole work. He had by then become absorbed to such degree in his -interpretation of the microcosm which he saw as a sufficing symbol of -the irony, absurdity, and the incessant alternation, “intermittency,” -and travail of the consciousness of man, that we are sensible, as he -proceeds, of powers more transcendent than the highest of the writer’s -mere accomplishment—stupendous as that is in Proust, who could “write” -anything he chose, and chose to write so many things, from satire that -is blighting in its smiling subtlety (so muted as to mock the hasty -ear!), to lyric flower-pieces like the paradisal hawthorn-hedge in -<i>Swann</i>, and the unrivalled comments upon buildings, pictures, -fashions in dress and manners (who will forget the monocles at the big -evening-party at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s?), books, the drama, even -photographs! In the great elegiac glories of the death of Bergotte (not -yet published in book-form), and of that <i><span lang="fr">grand’mère</span></i> who is the -<i>motif</i>, as it were, in the symphonic composition of the unnamed -central figure’s personality, Proust sounded chords which lay till then -beyond the compass of his readers’ hearing, but were then revealed to -sense that shall not lose them while it yet survives.</p> - -<p>But over all this virtuosity there rules a mightier gift—the -master-gift of insight. Proust, one could say, “knows everything,” in -the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">-94-</span> restricted meaning of the words. No bent, no twist, of modern -thought escapes him; yet, as one reader writes to me, “there is no -dead psychology”—no case stretched on a Procrustean bed, with all that -does not fit lopped comfortably, and discomfortingly, off. He, unlike -Nature, is most careful of the single life. If ever we had questioned -that—and we had very little questioned it—the Charlus portrait answered -us: that masterpiece of the undaunted, following eye and mind. Proust -leads us with him on this journey of the visual and mental powers; we -are no more involuntarily drawn on than he has been into the state of -an astounded fondness and appreciation for the maudlin, overbearing, -ludicrous, yet constantly pathetic or superb old “invert.” We are -offended personally by the insolences of his favourites; the tears in -his unholy eyes can well-nigh wet our own ... and this though, with -the master’s hand upon our shoulders, we have gone through every phase -of the degrading intimacies, seen and heard the tragi-comic outbursts -of the princely victim, every now and then remembering his “rank” and -seeking to restore the true relation between him and those whom in his -view he honours by his merest word, yet who are his disdainful masters -through his helpless depravation.</p> - -<p>If there were nothing else than Charlus in the books, Proust must be -given pride of place among the masters. But with the plenitude<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">-95-</span> there -is—what must we give? More than a master, one would say, a writer -cannot be. Yet in the image here suggested of the magic circle, there -is possibly the one thing more that causes Proustians to divide their -reading lives into the time before and after they have read these -books. No spell had yet been worked on us of potency like this; for -though we are pent within the ring, we move within it too—the world -revolves, for us, as in a crystal held beneath our gaze by one who, -moving with us, will reveal the secret hidden not there only but in our -own dim sense, when at the last <i><span lang="fr">le temps perdu</span></i> shall have become -<i><span lang="fr">le temps retrouvé</span></i>.</p> - -<p class="right"> -ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">-96-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XII">XII<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>A NEW PSYCHOMETRY</i></span><a id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">T</span>O judge from the newspapers, there have been tremendous “crises” in -public affairs during the last few days: the triumph of Fascismo in -Italy, the Lausanne Conference, the English elections. But to many of -us the great events are merely spectacular; they pass rapidly across -the screen, while the band plays irrelevant scraps of syncopated music, -and seem no more real than any other of the adventures, avowedly -fictitious, that are “filmed” for our idle hours. They don’t, save on -reflection and much diligent pondering of leading articles, come home -to our business and bosoms. But one announcement in <i>The Times</i> of -last Monday week shocked many of us with a sudden, absurdly indignant -bewilderment, like a foul blow: I mean the death of Marcel Proust. -It is not only absurd but impious to be indignant with the decrees -of Fate. The wise throughout the ages have prescribed for us our -proper behaviour in the face of such an event; and most of us find the -prescription quite useless. But, on the death of an author, there is -this peculiar consolation that never fails: his work lives absolutely -unaffected by his death.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">-97-</span></p> - -<p>... We can light the lamp, make a clear fire, and sit down to the -book with the old thrill. There is only the thought that we must -be content with what we have, that we are to get no more from that -hand. With Marcel Proust, however, it seems that we are spared even -that mortification. He has left behind him the completion of <i><span lang="fr">A la -Recherche du Temps Perdu</span></i>. This is great news. The announcements -from the press of <i><span lang="fr">La Nouvelle Revue Française</span></i> will be eagerly -awaited. Even a new Anatole France is not so important an event.</p> - -<p>It has been said that Proust will go down to posterity as the author of -one book. This is only true in a literal sense. For the many volumes -of <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche</span></i> that already crowd the shelves are several -“books” in one. It is not a “story,” but a panorama of many stories. -Indeed, who reads Proust for the “story”? His book is really a picture -of the modern world and the modern spirit, and that is its peculiar -fascination for us. There are “morbid” elements in it, to be sure—you -cannot read a page without seeing that it must have been written by -some one who was anything but a normal, healthy human being, and -it is not for nothing that <i>The Times</i><a id="FNanchor_4" href="#Footnote_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> has compared him to -Petronius Arbiter. But one of the advantages of this hyperaesthesia is -a heightened sensibility for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">-98-</span> <i>everything</i>, the perception and -accurate notation of innumerable details in thought and feeling that -escape a normal observer.</p> - -<p>Take, for instance, the account of the famous author “Bergotte.” -Proust, little more than a child, but already his ardent reader, meets -him at luncheon. And, first, the boy’s imagined author, a “<span lang="fr">langoureux -vieillard</span>,” has to give place to the reality, much younger, a little -man with a chin-tuft and a nose like a snail-shell. Then comes an -elaborate description of his spoken diction, pronunciation, etc., and -an attempt to reconcile these with the peculiarities of his written -style. Special “notes”:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>Doubtless, again, so as to distinguish himself from -the previous generation, too fond as it had been of -abstractions, of weighty commonplaces, when Bergotte -wished to speak favourably of a book, what he would bring -into prominence, what he would quote with approval, would -always be some scene that furnished the reader with an -image, some picture that had no rational significance. -“Ah, yes!” he would exclaim, “it is quite admirable! There -is a little girl in an orange shawl. It is excellent!” Or -again, “Oh, yes, there is a passage in which there is a -regiment marching along the street; yes, it is excellent!” -As for style, he was not altogether of his time (though -he remained quite exclusively of his race, abominating -Tolstoy, George Eliot, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky), for the -word that always came to his lips when he wished to praise -the style of any writer was “mild.” “Yes, you know, I like -Chateaubriand better in <i>Atala</i> than in <i>René</i>; -he<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">-99-</span> seems to me to be milder.” He said the word like a -doctor who, when his patient assures him that milk will -give him indigestion, answers: “But, you know, it’s very -mild.” And it is true that there was in Bergotte’s style -a kind of harmony similar to that for which the ancients -used to praise certain of their orators in terms which we -now find it hard to understand, accustomed as we are to our -own modern tongues, in which effects of that kind are not -sought.<a id="FNanchor_5" href="#Footnote_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p> -</div> - -<p>It is, further, explained how this man of genius came to pay court to -his intellectual inferiors with an eye on the Academy, and how, while -his own private morals were bad, the moral tone of his books was of the -loftiest.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>Perhaps it is only in really vicious lives that the moral -problem can arise in all its disquieting strength. And of -this problem the artist finds a solution in the terms not -of his own personal life but of what is for him the true -life, a general, a literary solution. As the great Doctors -of the Church began often, without losing their virtue, by -acquainting themselves with the sins of all mankind, out of -which they extracted their own personal sanctity, so great -artists often, while being thoroughly wicked, make use of -their vices in order to arrive at a conception of the moral -law that is binding upon us all.<a id="FNanchor_6" href="#Footnote_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">-100-</span></p> - -<p>Nor is the portrait finished yet. Bergotte was at bottom a man who -really loved only certain images and to compose and paint them in -words. Had he had to defend himself before a tribunal, in spite of -himself he would have chosen his words, not for their effect on the -judge, but in view of images which the judge would certainly never have -perceived.</p> - -<p>It is this extraordinarily minute “psychometry” that is the peculiar -mark of Proust’s work. The sensations Swann derives from a sonata of -Vinteuil’s, the special quality of Elstir’s pictures of the sea-shore, -the effect of afternoon light in the church at Combray, glimpses of -military life at Doncières, with its contrast of the First Empire -aristocracy and the <i><span lang="fr">ancien régime</span></i>,—it is the first time that -such things as these have been put into words and brought intimately -home to you. Then there are the studies of <i><span lang="fr">le grand monde</span></i>—the -“gilded saloons,” as Disraeli would have called them, of the Guermantes -and the rest. Here you have a picture of the Faubourg Saint-Germain -that is as true, you are assured, as Balzac’s was false.<a id="FNanchor_7" href="#Footnote_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">-101-</span></p> - -<p>I confess “<span lang="fr">ma mère</span>” and “<span lang="fr">ma grand’mère</span>” bore me. And there is just a -little too much of “<span lang="fr">le petit clan</span>.” But in this vast banquet of modern -life and thought and sensation there is plenty of room to pick and -choose. Since Henry Bernstein first mentioned Proust’s name to me in -the year before the war I have returned again and again for a tit-bit -to that feast. Proust is dead; but we can still go on enjoying his -work. In that sense the cry of the child in Maeterlinck’s <i><span lang="fr">Oiseau -Bleu</span></i> is true enough: “There is no death.”</p> - -<p class="right"> -A.B. WALKLEY.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">-102-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIII">XIII<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>PROUST AND THE MODERN<br /> -CONSCIOUSNESS</i></span><a id="FNanchor_8" href="#Footnote_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">F</span>OR Englishmen Marcel Proust has already become one of the great -figures of modern literature. The feeling is common to many of his -readers that in some way his work marks an epoch. What kind of epoch it -is harder to say. Is he an end, or a beginning? And, again, yet another -question insinuates itself continually as we pass slowly through his -long volumes. What precisely—if answers to such questions can be made -precise—was his own intention as a writer? Not that it necessarily -makes the least difference to his own importance whether he succeeded -or failed, whether he was consistent or spasmodic in following out his -own plan. But we, at least, should be the happier for some indication -of the thread to follow. For there comes a time in the reading of a -long novel—and <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</span></i> is surely one of -the longest—when we feel the need to stand aside, to contemplate it as -a whole, to grasp the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">-103-</span> pattern, to comprehend the general vision of -life on which its essential individuality depends. Only thus, it seems, -can we really make it our own.</p> - -<p>In this respect Marcel Proust’s book may be fairly said to bristle -with difficulties. Its obvious theme, its surface intention, as we -perceive it in the brilliant opening pages of <i><span lang="fr">Du côté de chez -Swann</span></i>, is the presentation by an adult man of his memories of -childhood. We feel, though with peculiar qualifications to which we -must return, that we are on the threshold of a spiritual autobiography; -we are to be the enchanted witnesses of the unfolding and growth of -a strangely sensitive consciousness. But no sooner are we attuned to -the subtleties of this investigation and have accustomed ourselves -to Proust’s breathless, tiptoe following of the faint and evanescent -threads of association: no sooner have we begun to take a deep and -steady breath of the rich fragrance of Aunt Léonie’s house at Combray, -and to imbibe the luxurious atmosphere of the old town, whose shifting -colours are as opulent as the lights of the windows in the church -round which it clings: no sooner have we prepared ourselves to watch -with absorbed interest the process of growth of a mind nurtured in -this almost intoxicating soil,—than the thread is abruptly snapped. We -do not complain at the moment, for the episode <i><span lang="fr">Amour de Swann</span></i> -is the highest sustained achievement of Proust as a prose-writer. -Perhaps the devouring passion of love—“<span lang="fr">Venus<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">-104-</span> -toute entière à sa proie -attachée</span>”—the smouldering, torturing flame of unsatisfied passion which -by the law of its own nature can never be satisfied, has never been -so subtly and so steadily anatomised before. Perhaps it has been more -wonderfully presented, but never more wonderfully analysed.</p> - -<p>It is not surprising that in the fascination of this intolerable -and unwonted history, in which every psychological subtlety of the -author is properly and beautifully dominated by the tragic theme, we -forget that this is not at all the thing we went out to see. The boy -whose history we have been following could not have known of Swann’s -discomfiture before he was a man. It has happened, indeed, before -the narrative of <i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de chez Swann</span></i> opens, before the bell -of the garden-gate tinkles and Swann takes his place with the family -on the verandah; but it can have no place in the story of the boy’s -development until he is old enough to understand it. In other words, -the angle of presentation has abruptly changed. Into a narrative -concerned, as we imagine, solely with what a boy knew and felt, and how -he knew and felt it, is suddenly thrust an episode of which he could -have known nothing at all.</p> - -<p>These two sections of the book—composing the yellow-backed <i><span lang="fr">Du -Côté de chez Swann</span></i> with which Proust’s admirers had so long to -remain content—were at once baffling and fascinating.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">-105-</span> Moreover, -they do actually contain Proust’s very finest work: he was never -again to sustain himself on this level for so long. But, considered -in themselves (and there were three or four years in which we had no -choice but to consider them so), they could be made to yield a pattern. -On the one side was the vague and heroic figure of Swann as he loomed -on the extreme horizon of the boy’s world, the mysterious visitant -whose appearances in the household made an agony of his solitary going -to bed; on the other was the Swann of reality, the reserved, silent, -ineffably refined darling of the <i><span lang="fr">beau monde</span></i>, who held his teeth -clenched, like the Spartan, while the fox gnawed at his vitals. The -contrast, the building up of the character of Swann, as it were, from -two sides at once, was the quite sufficient motive of the book. But, so -understood, it was Swann’s book, not the boy’s.</p> - -<p>But the next volumes brought us back to the boy’s history. As we read -of his love affair with Albertine, his adoration of the Duchesse de -Guermantes, his adventures in the rarefied atmosphere of the Faubourg -Saint-Germain, it became more and more evident that <i><span lang="fr">Amour de -Swann</span></i> was, in spite of its beauty and power, only an irrelevant -interlude, after all. And in the narrative of the boy’s stay in the -hotel at Balbec came frequent hints that the key to the story as a -whole might be found in the earlier emphasis upon the manner in which -the author went in search<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">-106-</span> of the past. At the beginning of -<i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de chez Swann</span></i> he had been at pains to give us not merely -his results but his method also. He was a grown man, suddenly waking -from sleep, trying to locate himself once more in his room, and his -room in the world; and something familiar in this strange sensation -had reminded him of his sensations in his bedroom as a child. But -“reminded” is altogether too coarse and summary a word for the -delicate process on which his researches depended; rather it is that a -familiarity in the strange sensation whispers to him that it holds a -secret for him if he will only explore it. It conceals something that -he must know. Again, it is the vague familiarity of the faint flavour -of a <i><span lang="fr">madeleine</span></i> dipped in tea, which the grown man is eating in -his mother’s company, which ultimately yields up the magnificently -vivid picture of Combray and Aunt Léonie. These sensations, or -presentiments of the past, come to the boy also. There is, for example, -the beautiful account of his mysterious excitement at a sight of the -spire and towers of Martinville church when he is driving home in Dr. -Percepied’s carriage. Again he has the sense of memories he cannot -grasp, of a secret and mystical message that he cannot make his own; it -is the occasion of his first attempt at writing.<a id="FNanchor_9" href="#Footnote_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> These premonitions -become<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">-107-</span> more frequent during his stay with his grandmother at the -Balbec hotel. Then the sudden sight of a tiny clump of trees seen while -he is driving with the Marquise de Villeparisis makes him feel that -they are stretching out imploring arms towards him in a mute appeal. -If he can divine what they have to tell him (they seem to say) he will -touch the secret of “<span lang="fr">la vraie vie</span>,” of life indeed. And then the writer -warns us that the story of his search to make this secret his own is -to come, and that this premonition of a task to be accomplished was to -haunt him throughout his life.</p> - -<p>At this moment Marcel Proust came nearest, we may believe, to revealing -to the reader the hidden soul of his own book. There is room for -different interpretations, of course, and it is admitted that in any -case he was frequently distracted from whatever plan he had by his -delight in a pure description of the human comedy from the angle most -familiar to him. Nevertheless, we are persuaded that Proust brought -to the exact and intimate analysis of his own sensations something -more than the self-consciousness of talent—some element, let us -say, of an almost religious fervour. This modern of the moderns, -this <i><span lang="fr">raffiné</span></i> of <i><span lang="fr">raffinés</span></i>, had a mystical strain in -his composition. These hidden messages of a moment, these glimpses -and intuitions of “<span lang="fr">la vraie vie</span>” behind a veil, were of the utmost -importance to him; he had some kind of immediate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">-108-</span> certainty of their -validity. He confessed as much, and we are entitled to take a man so -reticent at his word.</p> - -<p>We may take him at his word also when he acknowledges that the effort -to penetrate behind the veil of these momentary perceptions was the -chief interest of his life. The first of these illuminations—the vision -of Martinville spire—had taken shape in a piece of writing which he -gives us. We suspect that the last did also, and that its visible -expression is the whole series of volumes which, after all, do bear -a significant title—<i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</span></i>; we suspect -that the last page of the last volume would have brought us to the -first page of the first, and that the long and winding narrative would -finally have revealed itself as the history of its own conception. -Then, we may imagine, all the long accounts of the Guermantes’ parties -and the extraordinary figure of M. de Charlus would have fallen into -their places in the scheme, as part of the surrounding circumstances -whose pressure drove the youth and the man into the necessity of -discovering a reality within himself. What he was to discover, when -the demand that he should surrender himself to his moments of vision -became urgent and finally irresistible, was the history of what he was. -Proust—and amid the most labyrinthine of his complacent divagations -into the <i><span lang="fr">beau monde</span></i> a vague sense of this attends us—was much -more than a sentimental<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">-109-</span> autobiographer of genius; he was a man trying -to maintain his soul alive. And thus, it may be, we have an explanation -of the rather surprising fact that he began his work so late. The -two volumes which went before <i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de chez Swann</span></i><a id="FNanchor_10" href="#Footnote_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> were -not indeed negligible, but they were the work of a dilettante. The -explanation, we believe, is that in spite of his great gifts Proust -was a writer <i><span lang="fr">malgré lui</span></i>; he composed against the grain. We mean -that had it been only for the sake of the satisfaction of literary -creation, he probably would not have written at all. It was only when -writing presented itself to him as the only available means for getting -down to the bedrock of his own personality, as the only instrument -by which his <i><span lang="fr">fin-de-siècle</span></i> soul—the epithet is, in his case, -a true definition—could probe to something solid to live by, that he -seriously took up the pen. It was the lance with which he rode after -the Grail—“<span lang="fr">la vraie vie</span>.”</p> - -<p>Proust at the first glance looks wholly different from a man who rides -off on a desperate adventure. There seems to be no room for desperate -adventures in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It is hardly congruous to -some senses to ride through the waste land in a sixty horse-power -limousine.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">-110-</span> Nevertheless, it can be done. The outward and visible sign -is, not for the first time, different from the inward and spiritual -grace.</p> - -<p>So by a devious path we return to our first question. Proust marks -an epoch. What kind of epoch? Is it an end or a beginning? And the -answer we have reached is the answer we might have expected in the -case of a figure so obviously considerable. Proust is both an end and -a beginning. More an end than a beginning, perhaps, if we have regard -to the technique and texture of his work. In the art of literature -itself he opens up no new way. And, in the deeper sense, he indicates -a need more than he satisfies it. The modern mind, looking into the -astonishing mirror which Proust holds up to it, will not see in it -the gleam of something to live by; but it will see, if it knows how -to look, an acknowledgement of that necessity and a burning desire to -satisfy it. By so much Marcel Proust marks a beginning also. It is the -flame of this desire which smoulders always through his book, and at -times breaks out; it is this which makes it his own, and this which -gives it, in the true sense, style.</p> - -<p class="right"> -J. MIDDLETON MURRY.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">-111-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIV">XIV<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>PROUST’S WAY</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">I</span> WENT Proust’s way for the first time one rainy winter evening five -years ago, waiting in her warm boudoir for a foolish Society woman -to come in and give me tea and an introduction to the new popular -novelist. But she had not come in, and on a table near me, by the -powder-puff and the cigarettes, I found an author who had not yet swept -the board as he has since done.</p> - -<p>A re-bound copy of <i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de chez Swann</span></i>, from that accredited -emporium which Thomas Carlyle founded for the reading of the -Intelligentzia, the London Library, lay, dull and forbidding, among the -brocade and tinsel of the bibelots. Surprised, I opened it, intending, -as one idly may during these interludes, to take good-humoured -cognisance of the nature of another’s chosen study. At once I became -involved in an <i><span lang="fr">enchevêtrement</span></i>, a leash of moods, a congeries of -complexes, of crankinesses, all that goes to make up a man—Swann. There -was no breathlessness, no sense of hurry, yet it was “good going.” -There were hairbreadth but quite actual escapes from bathos, ugly -grazings averted, artistic difficulties compounded: this author backed -his sentences in and out of garages like a first-class motorist....</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">-112-</span></p> - -<p>And, suddenly, the rumble of an earthly car sounded and my hostess and -the popular author came in and tea was a weariness, for Tante Léonie—we -all have our Tantes Léonie—had entered into my knowledge, and the Lady -of the Cattleyas was just beginning to cause Swann, whom I already -loved, to suffer after the way of all men who want anything very badly. -We never mentioned the shabby, black book I had put down, but began -to discuss, in this Kensington drawing-room, Freud, much as people -discussed music in the drawing-room of Mme. Verdurin in Paris, and in -very much the same style as if Madame Odette de Crécy had taken a hand, -and Swann, blinded by love, had listened to her.</p> - -<p>But I—I had become acquainted with Proust and had gained a world—one of -the worlds in which, through a book, we can go to live awhile whenever -we choose.</p> - -<p>Proust! What is Proust? This is the cry of the Carping Uninitiated -among us. To such persons, constitutionally unwilling to be instructed, -one replies that Proust is a fashion—a disease—and that a Proustian, -so-called, is an Opium-Eater. But, to those who know him and love him, -he is a wise and cunning Prospero whose wand is style, and Combray an -enchanted island—Ferdinand, not much Miranda, but Caliban, drunken -sailors and all.</p> - -<p>The Opium Trance, indeed, offers some<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">-113-</span> parallel. Dr. Hochst tells us -that the wily subconsciousness, at odds with its earthly environment, -is able to invoke and maintain an attitude of benign stupor towards -the universe, holding it, as it were, at arm’s length, able to subsist -in tranquil abstraction from chill and hateful circumstance. And one -can easily imagine some triply disillusioned soul, rebuffed of love -and ambition and the fount of life itself, entering on a course of -the Master, content to live, lullabyed by the slight movement as of -flickering woodland leaves, warmed by the soft light that falls on -grey cathedral walls and white, dusty roads, quietly appreciative of -the Master’s passionless, infallible display of the complications and -unconscious betrayals of their ego by Françoise and Tante Léonie, -Odette and the Duchess; intrigued by his fine sense of social values -shown by the apt posing of the social Inferiorities of the Verdurin -<i><span lang="fr">ménage</span></i> in Paris against the ineffable Aristocracies ensconced in -their old château, Guermantes Way—and so on, through terms of months or -even years, till the stupor, benign in character, ends at last in the -ordinary manner, the patient dying, still <i><span lang="fr">en plein Proust</span></i>, with, -perhaps, a volume or two unread, to the good, for there are, or are to -be, a good many.</p> - -<p>The normal, healthy person, still active, still complying with life, -finds it more than soothing to commit himself to this peaceable, -effluent mind-flow, a current of thought that has, like life, its<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">-114-</span> -eddies, its <i><span lang="fr">transes</span></i>, but persists, as must we all who agree with -our destinies, in its appointed borders and so gains something of the -peace of resignation that Renan speaks of: “<i><span lang="fr">Il n’y a rien de suave -comme le renoncement de la joie, rien de doux comme l’enchantement du -désenchantement.</span></i>” For there is, indeed, no joy in all these myriad -pages: how could there be, since joy is clear-cut and impermanent and -all Proustian values fade and are merged in each other without such a -thing as an edge anywhere! The sharp, dramatic point popular novelists -excel in would break the spell.</p> - -<p>We surrender ourselves to these entrancing <i><span lang="fr">longueurs</span></i>; to -indescribable sensations that endure. Reading in Proust is, to me, like -the long drink of a child whom, by and by, a solicitous elder bids put -the cup down ... a gesture that this Master will never make. It is a -suave, sensuous pleasure, like stroking the long, rippling beard of -Ogier the Dane as he sits, stone-like, in his enchanted castle. It is -a patient, monkish task like that of tending with loving, religious -husbandry the Holy Rose at Hildesheim, that has gone on growing for -four hundred years. It suggests a sense of going on, a promise of a -future that may not be so very different, such as we got when our -German nurse told us that Grimm’s tale of the man who fell in and was -drowned, but, presently, found himself under the still waters of the -mere, walking, <i><span lang="de">langweilig</span></i>, in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">-115-</span> meadows prankt with daisies and -buttercups and fat flocks grazing....</p> - -<p>Proust translated Ruskin’s <i>Bible of Amiens</i>—just the unexpected -sort of thing he would do—and one might theorise and hint that his -learned appreciation of the beauties that lie within due submission -to architectural rules, and acceptance of the limitations and -possibilities of shaped stones, have helped to form the backbone of -his style. It has the precision and poise of the arch, supported -by the virility and integrity of the pillar, with the permitted -<i><span lang="it">fioriture</span></i> of the pinnacle sparingly used, as one sees it in -the Norman churches dotted all round about Combray and Balbec. And I -am sure his style is the magician’s wand without whose composed and -certain wielding we should never have allowed him to lead us, like -willing children, through the mazes, winding, twisting, but always -planned and in order, of his mind—or Swann’s. And if Swann—remote, -withdrawn, half-unsympathetic character that he is—had not been so -essentially lovable and had not, while telling us all, succeeded in -being at the same time suggestive, we should not have yielded ourselves -so utterly to <i>his</i> mind-flow.</p> - -<p>Proust made Swann a financier, a Jew, and gave him a German name, -because, I think, he wished to indicate to our subconscious judgments -a cause of Swann’s curious racial patience, his waiting on and -deference to the caprice of others. He allows life “to ride” him, -Mme. Verdurin<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">-116-</span> to patronise him, Odette to make him love her: just as -the trees let the winds lash their boughs and break them, as rivers, -flattened and contradicted by raindrops, flow on all the same under a -grey sky. Swann, beautifully groomed as he is, apt for drawing-rooms, -and acquainted with dukes and ashamed to say so, is a piece of -Nature—Nature whom I always see as an old man working in a field, with -a sack over his shoulders, bowed to the elements. For Swann doesn’t -act; things happen to him. Even his deep and pertinacious affection is -discounted by the inferior object of it. He is the golden mean in man, -no more a crank than we would all be if we were rich, with weaknesses -that we could, if we would, translate into heroisms. Most cultivated -women infallibly must have loved Swann—he is probably, therefore, of -the kind that finds only the Odettes of the world to its liking.</p> - -<p class="right"> -VIOLET HUNT.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">-117-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XV">XV<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>M. VINTEUIL’S SONATA</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">I</span>T has never been published, never, so far as I can ascertain, been -performed in any of our concert-halls. Indeed, its largest audience -must have been the fashionable one which gathered for the <i><span lang="fr">soirée -musicale</span></i> given by the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, when Mme. de -Cambremer’s head wagged to its rhythm like a metronome, and the -Princesse des Laumes, to show that she was listening, beat time now -and again with her fan; but, so as not to forfeit her independence, -beat a different time from the musicians’. But most frequently it was -to be heard in a piano arrangement played at Mme. Verdurin’s for the -benefit of her “little clan,” which then included Odette de Crécy and, -for a time, Charles Swann, by a pianist whom Madame had taken under her -patronage, declaring that he left Planté and Rubinstein “sitting”; and, -later, when she had become Mme. Swann, by Odette herself, when it first -came to the notice of that most acute of critics, the narrator in <i><span lang="fr">A -la Recherche du Temps Perdu</span></i>.</p> - -<p>But, of course, the boy, as he was then, must have heard a good deal -more about the Sonata from Swann, who himself was no mean judge of -music, as of painting; though, in his appreciation of the latter art, -he does seem to have derived more pleasure from the discovery in -an “old<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">-118-</span> master” of a likeness to one of his friends than from the -aesthetic merits it might possess. But Swann’s opinion of the Sonata -cannot perhaps, for other reasons, be trusted altogether; it was too -closely linked up in his mind with certain occurrences in his private -life. Yet we can accept the favourable impression it made upon him -at a time when he had not met Mme. de Crécy. On that occasion he had -appreciated at first “only the material quality of the sounds which -the instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure -when, below the narrow ribbon of the violin-part, delicate, unyielding, -substantial, and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived, where -it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of -the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere -in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed -into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given moment, without being -able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was -pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure -in his memory, the phrase or harmony—he knew not which—that had just -been played and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance -of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power -to dilate our nostrils.... Hardly had the delicious sensation which -Swann had experienced died away, before his memory furnished him with -an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">-119-</span> immediate transcript, summary, it is true, and provisional, but one -on which he had kept his eyes fixed while the playing continued, so -effectively that, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no -longer uncapturable. He was able to picture to himself its extent, its -symmetrical arrangement, its notation, the strength of its expression; -he had before him that definite object which was no longer pure music, -but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual -music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished, quite clearly, a -phrase which emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound. It had -at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures, -of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which -he felt that nothing but this phrase could initiate him; and he had -been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire.”</p> - -<p>And, though he seems to have failed to make head or tail of the Sonata -at that first hearing, that little phrase stuck in his memory. It so -haunted him that, when a year later he was sitting beside Odette on -Mme. Verdurin’s Beauvais sofa (which his hostess vowed wasn’t to be -matched <i>anywhere</i>), and heard a high note held on through two -whole bars, he foresaw the approach of his beloved phrase and promptly -associated it with the woman at his side. In this way it became the -symbol of his passion, developed into a Wagnerian <i>leit-motif</i> of -his liaison with Odette, until,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">-120-</span> when they had inevitably quarrelled, -it became for him an exquisite anguish to hear. An anguish which the -unhappy man had to dissemble from the ironical scrutiny of all those -monocles at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party, when “the violin had risen -to a series of high notes, on which it rested as though expecting -something, an expectancy which it prolonged without ceasing to hold on -to the notes, in the exaltation with which it already saw the expected -object approaching, and with a desperate effort ... to keep the way -open a moment longer, so that the stranger might enter in, as one -holds a door open that would otherwise automatically close. And before -Swann had had time to understand what was happening, to think, ‘It -is the little phrase from Vinteuil’s Sonata. I mustn’t listen!’ all -his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which -he had succeeded, up till that evening, in keeping invisible ... had -risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present -desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”</p> - -<p>But we may find ample corroboration of Swann’s testimony to the -excellence of this work in the comments of that acute critic already -mentioned. Although he has preferred to remain anonymous himself, -it will be convenient for purposes of reference to find him a name, -and the name which for some odd reason or other flows from my pen -is “Marcel Proust.” Well, this young “Proust,” when he heard Mme.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">-121-</span> -Swann play the Sonata, was much impressed, though he also had some -difficulty in grasping the music at first. He goes into the question -much more deeply than the dilettante Swann, and begins by asking -whether it is not wrong to talk about “hearing a thing for the first -time,” when nothing has been understood. The second and third times -are from this point of view just as much “first times.” Then he makes -the vital discovery that probably what fails us the first time is not -our intelligence but our memory. “For our memory,” he says, “compared -to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we -are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who -in his sleep dreams of a thousand things and at once forgets them.... -Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing -us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, -and, with regard to works which we have heard two or three times, we -are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to -sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and can repeat it -by heart next morning.... So, where Swann and his wife could make out a -distinct phrase, that was as far beyond the range of my perception as -a name which one tries in vain to recall.... And not only does one not -seize at once and retain an impression of works that are really great, -but even in the content of any such work (as befell<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">-122-</span> me in the case of -Vinteuil’s Sonata) it is the least valuable parts that one at first -perceives.”<a id="FNanchor_11" href="#Footnote_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p> - -<p>But “Proust” also carried away from his first hearing the recollection -of a phrase; and, since it seems to have been the fate of M. Vinteuil’s -work to become implicated in the love affairs of its admirers, we find -him at Balbec contemplating his new friend Albertine thus: “I seized -the opportunity, while she stood still, to look again and discover -once and for all where exactly the little mole was. Then, just as a -phrase of Vinteuil which had delighted me in the Sonata, and which -my recollection had allowed to wander from the <i>Andante</i> to the -<i>Finale</i>, until the day when, having the score in my hands, I was -able to find it, and to fix it in my memory in its proper place, in the -<i>Scherzo</i>, so this mole, which I had visualised now on her cheek, -now on her chin, came to rest for ever on her upper lip, just below her -nose.”<a id="FNanchor_12" href="#Footnote_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></p> - -<p>And if again it be thought that this association of the music with -the critic’s sentiment may have vitiated his judgment, I can only -point to the exquisite sensibility of these passages, where music -is brought to the touchstone of life, and human experience, in its -turn, is elucidated in terms of music. Indeed, this “Proust” shows -himself preternaturally sensitive both to musical<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">-123-</span> sounds and to -unorganised noises, so that he instinctively registers the pitch of -a voice; so that the wall, when rapped by his grandmother, at once -assumes for him the resonance of a drum, and her triple knock takes -its place automatically in a symphonic scheme; so that the vision of -M. de Charlus making somewhat embarrassed conversation with a new -acquaintance immediately brings to his mind “those questioning phrases -of Beethoven, indefinitely repeated at equal intervals, and destined, -after a superabundant wealth of preparation, to introduce a new -<i>motif</i>, a change of key, or a recapitulation”; and so that the -old reprobate’s sudden descent from high dudgeon to docility suggests -the performance of “a symphony played through without a break, when a -graceful <i>Scherzo</i> of idyllic loveliness follows upon the thunders -of the first movement.”</p> - -<p>We cannot but regret, then, that this Sonata, which, after reading what -“Proust” has to say of it, we seem to know as well as we know César -Franck’s or the “Kreutzer,” and which has made a profound impression -on persons so different in temperament as Charles Swann and Mme. -Verdurin (who could not hear it without crying till she got neuralgia -all down her face), should have suffered such neglect at the hands of -concert-artists, whose only excuse is, presumably, to throw the blame -upon the equal neglect of the publishers.</p> - -<p class="right"> -DYNELEY HUSSEY.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">-124-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVI">XVI<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>THE LITTLE PHRASE</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">M</span>Y only excuse for contributing anything to this collection is that -it provides an opportunity to give some information. Readers may want -to know whether the Sonata to which Proust refers in <i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de -chez Swann</span></i> as being played at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party was -wholly an invention of Proust’s, or whether his refined and tortuous -dithyrambs on the subject were inspired by an actual Sonata which the -dullest may purchase at a Paris shop.</p> - -<p>Well, the answer to this hypothetical question, like all real answers -to all genuine questions, is “Yes” and “No.” For the Ayes there is the -statement by Proust in a letter to a friend printed in the memorial -number of the <i><span lang="fr">Nouvelle Revue Française</span></i>:<a id="FNanchor_13" href="#Footnote_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> -“<span lang="fr">La petite phrase de -cette Sonate ... est ... la phrase charmante mais enfin médiocre d’une -sonate pour piano et violon de Saint-Saëns....</span>”</p> - -<p>Explosion! Thus are our idols shattered! Even Proust’s deprecating -“<span lang="fr">mais enfin médiocre</span>” does not prepare for this shock the sturdy -English connoisseur who likes only the best. Proust tells his friend -that he can point out the precise passage, which is several times -repeated; and adds—cunningly—that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">-125-</span> its execution was a triumph for -Jacques Thibaud.</p> - -<p>He continues that, during the same evening, when the piano and -violin are described as murmuring like two birds in a dialogue, -he was thinking of a sonata by Franck (especially as played by -Enesco). The tremolos over the little Saint-Saëns phrase when -played at the Verdurins’ were, he says, suggested by the Prelude to -<i>Lohengrin</i>—he does not tell us, this time, in whose rendering, -but that actually they were recalled that evening by a trifle -from Schubert. The same evening, he tells us, as a final scrap of -information, there was played “<span lang="fr">un ravissant morceau</span>” for the piano by -Fauré.</p> - -<p>What are we to make of all this? Well, I am struck by the composite -character of Proust’s material. It shows that his art consists in -his power of making an exquisite synthesis of his sensibility by -reprecipitating his sensations in a more generalised, more abstract -form than that in which they came to him.</p> - -<p class="right"> -W.J. TURNER.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">-126-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVII">XVII<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>PROUST AS CREATOR</i></span><a id="FNanchor_14" href="#Footnote_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="center tp">. <span style="margin-left: 2em">.</span> <span style="margin-left: 2em">.</span> <span style="margin-left: 2em">.</span> <span style="margin-left: 2em">.</span> <span style="margin-left: 2em">.</span></p> - -<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>S to Marcel Proust, <i><span lang="fr">créateur</span></i>, I don’t think he has been -written about much in English, and what I have seen of it was rather -superficial. I have seen him praised for his “wonderful” pictures -of Paris life and provincial life. But that has been done admirably -before, for us, either in love, or in hatred, or in mere irony. One -critic goes so far as to say that Proust’s great art reaches the -universal, and that in depicting his own past he reproduces for us the -general experience of mankind. But I doubt it. I admire him rather for -disclosing a past like nobody else’s, for enlarging, as it were, the -general experience of mankind by bringing to it something that has not -been recorded before. However, all that is not of much importance. -The important thing is that whereas before we had analysis allied to -creative art, great in poetic conception, in observation, or in style, -his is a creative art absolutely based on analysis. It is really more -than that. He is a writer who has pushed analysis to the point when -it becomes creative. All that crowd of personages in their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">-127-</span> infinite -variety through all the gradations of the social scale are rendered -visible to us by the force of analysis alone. I don’t say Proust has no -gift of description or characterisation; but, to take an example from -each end of the scale: Françoise, the devoted servant, and the Baron de -Charlus, a consummate portrait—how many descriptive lines have they got -to themselves in the whole body of that immense work? Perhaps, counting -the lines, half a page each. And yet no intelligent person can doubt -for a moment their plastic and coloured existence. One would think -that this method (and Proust has no other, because his method is the -expression of his temperament) may be carried too far, but as a matter -of fact it is never wearisome. There may be here and there amongst -those thousands of pages a paragraph that one might think over-subtle, -a bit of analysis pushed so far as to vanish into nothingness. But -those are very few, and all minor instances. The intellectual pleasure -never flags, because one has the feeling that the last word is being -said upon a subject much studied, much written about, and of human -interest—the last word of its time. Those that have found beauty in -Proust’s work are perfectly right. It is there. What amazes one is -its inexplicable character. In that prose so full of life there is no -reverie, no emotion, no marked irony, no warmth of conviction, not even -a marked rhythm to charm our ear. It appeals to our sense of wonder -and gains our<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">-128-</span> homage by its veiled greatness. I don’t think there -ever has been in the whole of literature such an example of the power -of analysis, and I feel pretty safe in saying that there will never be -another.</p> - -<p class="center">. <span style="margin-left: 2em">.</span> <span style="margin-left: 2em">.</span> <span style="margin-left: 2em">.</span> <span style="margin-left: 2em">.</span> <span style="margin-left: 2em">.</span></p> - -<p class="right"> -JOSEPH CONRAD.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">-129-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVIII">XVIII<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>A MOMENT TO SPARE</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">I</span> HAVE at last found time, or rather, for it expresses our relations -better, Time has been gracious enough at last to find <i>me</i>—in -regard to <i>Swann</i>. It was a new and satisfactory experience. His -reality is extraordinary—at least in the main part of the book: I hope -for the sake of French upper middle-class society of his day that it is -not ordinary in such things as the big dinner scene in vol. ii.<a id="FNanchor_15" href="#Footnote_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p> - -<p>Has anybody said that he partakes <i>both</i> of De Quincey and of -Stendhal? He does to me, and I’m shot if I ever expected to see such -a blend! You see, there is in him on the one hand a double measure of -the analytical and introspective power that Beyle’s admirers make so -much of; with what they also admire, a total absence of prettification -for prettification’s sake. Yet he can be pretty in the very best sense, -while Beyle never can, in the best or any other. Then, too, I at least -find in him much less of the type-character<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">-130-</span> which, though certainly -relieved by individuality in the <i><span lang="fr">Chartreuse de Parme</span></i> and other -books (especially <i>Lamiel</i>), is still always more or less there. -But the oddest and to me the most attractive thing is the way in which -he entirely relieves the sense of aridity—of museum-preparations—which -I find in Stendhal. And here it is that the De Quincey suggestion comes -so unexpectedly in. For Proust effects this miracle by a constant -relapse upon—and sometimes a long self-restriction to—a sort of dream -element. It is not, of course, the vaguer and more mystical kind that -one finds in De Quincey, not that of <i>Our Ladies of Sorrow</i> or -<i>Savannah-la-Mar</i>, but that of the best parts of <i>The English -Mail Coach</i>. In fact, it is sometimes Landorian rather than De -Quinceyish in its dreaminess. But, however this may be, the dream -quality is there, to me, as it is in few other Frenchmen—themselves -almost always poets. Now, the worst of the usual realist is that, being -blinder than any other heathen in his blindness, he tries to exorcise -dream, though sometimes not nightmare, from life. Such a mixture as -Proust’s I remember nowhere else.</p> - -<p class="right"> -GEORGE SAINTSBURY.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">-131-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIX">XIX<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>A REAL WORLD IN FICTION</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">M</span>Y presence among those who are offering a tribute to Marcel Proust -would be an impertinence if the request for it had not been continued -after I had confessed the poverty of my knowledge. As it is, I may -be justified in taking the great pleasure it is to me to testify a -sincere admiration, founded on howsoever little experience. I have to -read a good deal for my bread, and the reading I can do for pleasure -is limited by debility of eyesight; M. Proust’s books are long and -in a language I read less easily than my own. So it has happened -that so far I have read only the two volumes of a beautifully lucid -translation, wonderfully lucid when the delicacy and subtlety of the -thoughts translated are considered. I will not say that you can taste -a wine without drinking a bottle—the analogy, like most analogies, -would be false; I do not doubt that wider study would produce more -valuable opinions. Yet my slight study has produced opinions which, I -am convinced, further study will only confirm, and it is a pleasure to -record them....</p> - -<p>We all have our views as to what, for us, distinguishes great fiction -from that which is less than great. Mine has always been that it causes -me to live in a real world of visible, audible, and intelligible -people—a world in which, however<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">-132-</span> novel it may be to start with, I am -at home and able, with sureness, to exercise my powers of understanding -to the full; this last point matters, for of course the superficial -may be superficially alive. No doubt the test is objectively unfair, -because the reaction of a writer’s imagination on a reader’s is -affected, though not conditioned, as the sympathy between the two is -greater or less; but for my own use this test is the most profitable. -Tolstoy has done this for me, so has Sterne, so has Miss Austen, so has -Thackeray, so have not very many others, and so have not some almost -universally acclaimed. Well, M. Proust has done this most considerable -service for me, in those two volumes I have read in translation, and -I am grateful. I know his hero’s grandfather and grandmother and -mother and invalid aunt, and know them well, and my understanding -has played with zest and to the limit of its power on the wealth of -character revealed to me. M. Swann is of my intimates, and I think I -have a perfect comprehension of his Odette. That is the first thing -for which I am grateful. The second is the sheer intellectual joy -with which, time and again, I came upon an achievement of divination -in the subtleties of human emotion which caught one’s breath by its -compelling truth. Jealousy of a man for a woman may have been more -grandly expressed, but have all the subtleties of its tortuous and -agonising course ever been so completely exposed as in the case of M. -Swann?<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">-133-</span> Or the feelings of a sensitive and imaginative boy in his first -affections?... For these two things I have a sincere gratitude which I -propose to increase. But the wretchedness of my present qualifications -must terminate my expression of it now.</p> - -<p class="right"> -G.S. STREET.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">-134-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XX">XX<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>THE BIRTH OF A CLASSIC</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE pictures we make, for our own satisfaction, of our actions are -generally as remote as the <i>clichés</i> of polite conversation from -the psychological processes they pretend to reflect. It is convenient -and very often necessary to limit consciousness of an action so that -it receives a distinct and recognisable contour. With a certain -resemblance to the achievement of the Impressionists, who revealed the -fabric of a world worked-over with conceptual images, Proust breaks -up the moulds into which our feelings are generally poured. He is -curious to note the sensual deceits which agitate the mind no less -profoundly than the reality would have done, and to separate the social -stratagem (whether that of the Guermantes or of the servants in his -own home) from the intention of which it was the paraphrase. He is -dissociative only to that extent—a necessary one, since dissimulation -is the mind’s first nature. But he is not at all destructive; for an -action never really is a separate entity, cut off by crystalline walls -from the mother-liquor of our lives. In the style which he created that -glittering illusion is re-dissolved into the saturated mental life of -which it is an inextricable component.</p> - -<p>I know nothing, he says, that can, “<span lang="fr">autant que le baiser, faire surgir -de ce que nous croyons<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">-135-</span> une chose à aspect défini, les cent autres -choses qu’elle est tout aussi bien, puisque chacune est relative à -une perspective non moins légitime.... Dans ce court trajet de mes -lèvres vers sa joue, c’est dix Albertines que je vis.</span>” Not only the -coarsening of the grain of the skin seen in this unaccustomed proximity -(that would be comparatively insignificant), but the psychological -perspective opened by this change in their relations; though Albertine -refused his kiss at Balbec, she cannot now prevent him from gathering -in one embrace the rose of the past and of the present. For Albertine -is not only Albertine “<span lang="fr">simple image dans le décor de la vie</span>” when -later she calls on him in Paris; her image trails the multitudinous -sensations of <i><span lang="fr">A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs</span></i>; and though -he no longer loves her, the appearances she had for him at Balbec, -silhouetted against the sea or sitting with her back to the cliff, -bring back with them the influence of that love. We are far from what -we believed a thing with a definite appearance, a girl, and perhaps the -example may indicate faintly the complexity of Proust’s art. Wishing -to convey the shifting aspect of things, or perhaps the composite -pile of aspects which represents, at any moment, our realisation -of a thing—and as objective description reintroduces the pictorial -<i>cliché</i> so far avoided,—he utilises the vast fabric of memory, -shot, like iridescent silk, with many indefinable moods. To specify -his method<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">-136-</span> more exactly would not at present be easy, nor is there -any enjoyment equal to the mere following of this marvellous web into -the still obscure future, where half is, to our chagrin partly and to -our delight, yet hidden. To the latter, because we have to be patient -against our will; to the former, because there is still so much certain -pleasure in store, and the excitement of seeing the completed design, -whose symmetry so far is only felt, like that of a statue in its shroud -before its resurrection, coincide with or contradict our anticipations. -There is a delicious state (owing not a little of its charm to our -knowledge of its transience) in which a book, having shaken off the -first fever of novelty, is in a condition to be most artfully savoured, -and at length. The classic features will never be dearer to us than -while they are still flushed with contemporaneity. The classics are -at least readable in so far as they are modern, but the modern, once -firmly on his pedestal, is not at all approachable. So it is a great -and marvellous privilege to be awake to this exquisite dawn, at the -moment this many-leaved bloom is suspended in all its freshness which -to-morrow—</p> - -<p class="center"> -To-morrow will find fallen or not at all:<br /> -</p> - -<p>fallen, if the worst comes to the worst (as we have heard it always -does), to a greatness in its decay and neglect more moving than the -spick-and-span of a smart little subaltern of immortality.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">-137-</span> It is -impossible to imagine how this titanic fragment can be trundled from -age to age; nor is the future likely to have much time to spare from -the production of domestic utensils which are so badly made that they -must be continually replaced. <i><span lang="fr">A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</span></i> -is not one of those things which are replaced, like the novel of the -moment, but exactly what part of it is most likely to be saved the -present cannot decide. There will always be some to follow the whole -sweep of the Master’s gesture, which evokes the hours of adolescence -flowering in the shade of girlhood and rebuilds the tormented cities -of the plain; now stooping to dissect a snob or soaring to stroke a -horizon, but never theatrical and never grandiose. Perhaps in the -ray of this most intimate limelight we draw the greater part of our -pleasure from the recognition of our own movements; the heirs of our -sensibility will find there the original of many impulses which they -accept as part of human nature.</p> - -<p class="right"> -EDGELL RICKWORD.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">-138-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXI">XXI<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>A CASUIST IN SOULS</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">P</span>ATER, who desired to find everywhere forces producing pleasurable -sensations, “each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind,” says: -“Few artists, not Goethe nor Byron even, work quite clearly, casting -off all <i>débris</i>, and leaving us only what the heat of their -imagination has wholly fused and transformed.” Has the heat of Proust’s -imagination fused and transformed his material as Balzac and Rodin -transformed and fused theirs? Are his characters creations? Has he -the strange magical sense of that life in natural things, which is -incommunicable? I think not; there is too much <i>débris</i> in his -prose which he has not cast off.</p> - -<p>Proust’s books are the autobiography of a sensitive soul, for whom -the visible world exists; only, he could never say with Gautier, -“I am a man for whom the visible world exists”; for in this famous -phrase he expresses his outlook on life, and his view of his own work: -Gautier, who literally discovered descriptive prose, a painter’s -prose by preference; who, in prose and in verse alike, is the poet -of physical beauty, of the beauty of the exterior of things. Proust, -with his adoration of beauty, gives one an equal sense of the beauty -of exterior things and of physical beauty; with infinite carefulness, -with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">-139-</span> infinite precautions, he gives one glimpses of occult secrets -unknown to us, of our inevitable instincts, and, at times, of those icy -ecstasies which Laforgue reveals in <i><span lang="fr">Moralités légendaires</span></i>. Only, -not having read books of mediaeval magic, he cannot assure us that the -devil’s embraces are of a coldness so intense that it may be called, by -an allowable figure of speech, fiery.</p> - -<p>In his feverish attempt to explain himself to himself, his imaginary -hero reminds me of Rousseau, who, having met Grimm and vexed Voltaire, -was destined by his febrile and vehement character to learn in -suffering what he certainly did not teach in song; who, being avid of -misunderstandings, was forced by the rankling thorns of his jealousy -to write his <i>Confessions</i>, in which he unburdens himself of -the exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, driven, in spite -of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people—a coward -before his own conscience. There is no cowardice in the conscience of -Proust’s hero; his utter shameless sincerity to the naked truth of -things allows him “<span lang="fr">avec une liberté d’esprit</span>” to compete, near the -end of the last volume, in his unveiling of M. de Charlus, with the -outspokenness of Restif de la Bretonne in <i><span lang="fr">Monsieur Nicolas</span></i>.</p> - -<p>Some of the pages of <i><span lang="fr">Sodome</span></i> might have been inspired by -Petronius. The actual fever and languor in the blood: that counts -for so much in Petronius’s prose, and lies at the root of some<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">-140-</span> of -his fascinations. He is passionately interested in people, but only -in those who are not of the same nature as he is: his avid curiosity -being impersonal. Some of Proust’s curiosity is not so much vivid as -impersonal. Petronius—like the writer I refer to—is so specifically -Latin that he has no reticence in speaking of what he feels, none of -that unconscious reticence in feeling which races drawn farther from -civilisation have invented in their relations with nature. This is one -of the things which people mean when they say that Petronius’s prose is -immoral. So is that of Proust. Yet, in the prose of these writers, both -touched with the spirit of perversity, the rarest beauty comes from a -heightening of nature into something not quite natural, a perversity of -beauty, which is poisonous as well as curious.</p> - -<p>Proust has some of the corrupt mysticism of Huysmans, but not so -perilous as his; nor has he that psychology which can be carried so far -into the soul’s darkness that the flaming walls of the world themselves -fade to a glimmer; he does not chronicle the adventures of this world’s -Vanity Fair: he is concerned with the revelation of the subconscious -self; his hero’s confessions are not the exaltation of the soul. He -is concerned, not so much with adventures as with an almost cloistral -subtlety in regard to the obscure passions which work themselves out, -never with any actual logic. With all his curiosity, this<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">-141-</span> curiosity -never drives him in the direction of the soul’s apprehension of -spiritual things. He does, at times, like Mallarmé, deform ingeniously -the language he writes in; and, as in most of these modern decadents, -perversity of form and perversity of manner bewilder us in his most -bewildering pages.</p> - -<p>I find to my surprise that a French critic, Carcassonne, compares -Proust with Balzac. As an observer of society, yes; as a creator, no. -“Never,” he writes, “since Stendhal and Balzac has any novelist put -so much reality into a novel. Stendhal, Balzac: I write those great -names without hesitation beside that of Marcel Proust. It is the finest -homage I can render to the power and originality of his talent.” During -Balzac’s lifetime there was Benjamin Constant, whose <i><span lang="fr">Adolphe</span></i> has -its place after <i><span lang="fr">Manon Lescaut</span></i>, a purely objective study of an -incomparable simplicity, which comes into the midst of those analysts -of difficult souls—Laclos, who wrote an unsurpassable study of naked -human flesh in <i><span lang="fr">Les Liaisons dangereuses</span></i>; Voltaire, Diderot; -Rousseau, in whose <i><span lang="fr">Nouvelle Héloïse</span></i> the novel of passion comes -into existence. After these Flaubert, the Goncourts, Huysmans, Zola, -Maupassant. I should place Proust with those rare spirits whose -<i><span lang="fr">métier</span></i> is the analysis of difficult souls. Browning wrote in -regard to his <i>Sordello</i>: “My stress lay on the incidents in the -development of a soul: little else is worth study; I, at<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">-142-</span> least, always -thought so.” This certainly applies to Proust; and, as he seems to me -to derive some of his talent from Stendhal and from no other novelist, -I can imagine his casuistical and cruel creation of the obscure soul of -M. de Charlus in much the same fashion as Stendhal’s when he undresses -Julien Sorel’s soul with a deliberate and fascinating effrontery.</p> - -<p>Consider the question of Balzac’s style: you will find that it has -life, that it has idea, that it has variety; that there are moments -when it attains a rare and perfectly individual beauty. To Baudelaire -he was a passionate visionary. “In a word, every one in Balzac, down -to the very scullions, has genius.” I have often wondered whether, in -the novel, perfect form is a good or even a possible thing if the novel -is to be what Balzac made it, history added to poetry. A novelist with -style will not look at life with an entirely naked vision.</p> - -<p>There is no naked vision in Proust; his vision is like a clouded -mirror, in whose depths strange shapes flash and vanish. The only -faultless style in French is Flaubert’s; that style, which has every -merit and hardly a fault, becomes what it is by a process very -different from that of most writers careful of form. I cannot deny that -Stendhal has a sense of rhythm: it is in his brain rather than in his -dry imagination; in a sterile kind of brain, set at a great distance -from the heart, whose rhythm is too faint to disturb<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">-143-</span> it. Still, in -Proust’s style there is something paradoxical, singular, caustic; it is -coloured and perfumed and exotic, a style in which sensation becomes -complex, cultivated, the flower of an elaborate life; it can become -deadly, as passion becomes poisonous. “The world of the novelist,” I -have written, “what we call the real world, is a solid theft out of -space; colour and music may float into it and wander through it, but -it has not been made with colour and music, and it is not a part of -the consciousness of its inhabitants.” This world was never lived in -by d’Annunzio; this world was never entered by Proust. All the same, -there is in him something cruel, something abnormal, something subtle. -He is a creator of gorgeous fabrics, Babylons, Sodoms. Only, he never -startles you, as Balzac startles you.</p> - -<p class="right"> -ARTHUR SYMONS.<br /> -</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">-144-</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXII">XXII<br /> -<br /> -<span class="gesperrt"><i>THE LAST WORD</i></span></h2> -</div> - - -<p class="tp"><span class="dropcap">T</span>WO of the contributors to the stout Proust memorial number of <i><span lang="fr">La -Nouvelle Revue Française</span></i> remind me that I met Marcel Proust many -years ago at a Christmas Eve party given by Madame Edwards (now Madame -José Sert) in her remarkable flat on the Quai Voltaire, Paris. (Not -that I needed reminding.) With some eagerness I turned up the year, -1910, in my journal. What I read there was this: “Doran came on Sunday -night for dinner. We went on to Misia Edwards’ ‘<span lang="fr">Réveillon</span>,’ and got -home at 4 <span class="sm">A.M.</span>” Not a word more! And I cannot now remember a single -thing that Proust said.</p> - -<p>I have, however, a fairly clear recollection of his appearance and -style: a dark, pale man, of somewhat less than forty, with black hair -and moustache; peculiar; urbane; one would have said, an aesthete; an -ideal figure, physically, for Bunthorne; he continually twisted his -body, arms, and legs into strange curves, in the style of Lord Balfour -as I have observed Lord Balfour in the restaurants of foreign hotels. -I would not describe him as self-conscious; I would say rather that -he was well aware of himself. Although he had then published only -one book, <i><span lang="fr">Les Plaisirs et les Jours</span></i>—and that fourteen years -before—and although the book had had no popular success,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">-145-</span> Proust was -undoubtedly in 1910 a considerable lion. He sat at the hostess’s own -table and dominated it, and everybody at the party showed interest in -him. Even I was somehow familiar with his name. As for <i><span lang="fr">Les Plaisirs -et les Jours</span></i>, I have not read it to this day.</p> - -<p>A few weeks before his death, while searching for something else in -an overcrowded bookcase, I came across my first edition of <i><span lang="fr">Du Côté -de chez Swann</span></i>, and decided to read the book again. I cared for it -less, and I also cared for it more, than in 1913. The <i><span lang="fr">longueurs</span></i> -of it seemed to me to be insupportable, the clumsy centipedalian -crawling of the interminable sentences inexcusable; the lack of form -or construction may disclose artlessness, but it signifies effrontery -too. Why should not Proust have given himself the trouble of learning -to “write,” in the large sense? Further, the monotony of subject and -treatment becomes wearisome. (I admit that it is never so distressing -in <i>Swann</i> as in the later volumes of <i><span lang="fr">Guermantes</span></i> and of -<i><span lang="fr">Sodome et Gomorrhe</span></i>.) On the other hand, at the second reading I -was absolutely enchanted by some of the detail.</p> - -<p>About two-thirds of Proust’s work must be devoted to the minutiæ -of social manners, the rendering ridiculous of a million varieties -of snob. At this game Proust is a master. (Happily he does not -conceal that, with the rest of mankind, he loves ancient blood and -distinguished connections.) He will write you a hundred pages<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">-146-</span> about a -fashionable dinner at which nothing is exhibited except the littleness -and the <i><span lang="fr">naïveté</span></i> of human nature. His interest in human nature, -if intense and clairvoyant, is exceedingly limited. Foreign critics -generally agree that the English novelist has an advantage over the -French in that he walks all round his characters and displays them -to you from every side. I have heard this over and over again in -conversation in Paris, and I think it is fairly true, though certainly -Balzac was the greatest exponent of complete display. Proust never -“presents” a character; he never presents a situation: he fastens on -one or two aspects of a character or a situation, and strictly ignores -all the others. And he is scarcely ever heroical, as Balzac was always; -he rarely exalts, and he nearly always depreciates—in a tolerant way.</p> - -<p>Again, he cannot control his movements: he sees a winding path off the -main avenue, and scampers away further and further and still further, -merely because at the moment it amuses him to do so. You ask yourself: -He is lost—will he ever come back? The answer is that often he never -comes back, and when he does come back he employs a magic but illicit -carpet, to the outrage of principles of composition which cannot be -outraged in a work of the first order. This animadversion applies -not only to any particular work, but to his work as a whole. The -later books are orgies of self-indulgence; the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">-147-</span> work has ruined the -<i>moral</i> of the author: phenomenon common enough.</p> - -<p>Two achievements in Proust’s output I should rank as great. The first -is the section of <i>Swann</i> entitled <i><span lang="fr">Un amour de Swann</span></i>. He -had a large theme here—love and jealousy. The love is physical and the -object of it contemptible; the jealousy is fantastic. But the affair -is handled with tremendous, grave, bitter, impressive power. The one -fault of it is that he lets Swann go to a <i><span lang="fr">soirée musicale</span></i> and -cannot, despite several efforts, get him away from it in time to save -the interest of the situation entire. Yet in the <i><span lang="fr">soirée musicale</span></i> -divagation there are marvellous, inimitable things.</p> - -<p>The second achievement, at the opening of <i><span lang="fr">Sodome et Gomorrhe</span></i>, -is the psychological picture of the type-pederast. An unpromising -subject, according to British notions! Proust evolves from it beauty, -and a heartrending pathos. Nobody with any perception of tragedy can -read these wonderful pages and afterwards regard the pervert as he -had regarded the pervert before reading them. I reckon them as the -high-water of Proust.</p> - -<p>Speaking generally, Proust’s work declined steadily from <i>Swann</i>. -<i><span lang="fr">A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs</span></i> was a fearful fall, and as -volume followed volume the pearls were strung more and more sparsely on -the serpentine string. That Proust was a genius is not to be doubted; -and I agree<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">-148-</span> that he made some original discoveries in the by-ways -of psychological fiction. But that he was a supreme genius, as many -critics both French and English would have us believe, I cannot admit.</p> - -<p class="right"> -ARNOLD BENNETT.<br /> -</p> - -<hr /> - -<p class="center msm bp">THE END</p> - - -<p class="center sm tp"><i>Printed in Great Britain by</i> <span class="smcap">R. & R. Clark, Limited</span>, -<i>Edinburgh</i>.</p> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="FOOTNOTES">FOOTNOTES</h2> -</div> - - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[1]</a> Mr. Birrell, whose essay, though first printed in <i>The -Dial</i>, was written for inclusion in this volume, has kindly -consented to my substituting for the original text my own versions of -this and the following quotations from <i><span lang="fr">A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles -en Fleurs</span></i> and <i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de chez Swann</span></i> respectively.—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="label">[2]</a> See, however, my foot-note on <a href="#Page_106">page 106</a> -and <i><span lang="fr">Pastiches et Mélanges</span></i>, pp. 91-99.—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="label">[3]</a> Reprinted from <i>The Times</i> of Wednesday, November 29, -1922. <i>The Times</i> had been almost alone among English newspapers -in giving “publicity” to the death of Marcel Proust in its issue of -Monday, November 20.—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_4" href="#FNanchor_4" class="label">[4]</a> <i>The Times</i>, Monday, November 20, 1922: “Marcel -Proust: An Appreciation.” (From a Correspondent.)—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_5" href="#FNanchor_5" class="label">[5]</a> <span class="transnote"><i>Transcriber’s Note:</i> See next footnote.</span></p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_6" href="#FNanchor_6" class="label">[6]</a> I am glad that the acknowledgement here of Mr. Walkley’s -courtesy in allowing me to substitute my version for his of these two -passages from <i><span lang="fr">A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs</span></i> gives me an -opportunity to acknowledge also my borrowing and to congratulate him -upon the discovery of the word “mild”—“<span lang="fr">une véritable trouvaille</span>,” as -Norpois would undoubtedly have called it.—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_7" href="#FNanchor_7" class="label">[7]</a> In his article, published in <i>The Times</i> three weeks -later, on December 20, 1922, Mr. Walkley replied to a criticism of -this statement:—“The old complaint of ‘misrepresenting’ modern France -is now beginning to be heard about the great novelist just dead, -Marcel Proust. An eminent English novelist tackles me about this. He -says Proust is not entitled to the highest rank in literature because -his representation of French society is partial only, and therefore -unfair; that he writes only of the Faubourg Saint-Germain set, which -stands for the ‘dead’ France, and not of the ‘live’ people, soldiers -and statesmen and others, who have made and are making France to-day. -And he contrasts him with Balzac, who aimed at giving a panorama of the -whole social scheme. Well, it strikes me as an unfortunate comparison. -Balzac’s <i><span lang="fr">Comédie Humaine</span></i> was like Zola’s <i>Rougon-Macquart -Family</i>, a mere afterthought, a specious formula designed to -suggest continuity and completeness in what was merely casual and -temperamental. As a ‘representation of France’ it is not to be taken -seriously; what it represents—like any other work of art—is its -author’s genius. His men of action, his statesmen, his men of affairs, -are, frankly, preposterous. Proust never set out to ‘represent’ France; -he represented the side of its social life that happened to interest -him. What he did magnificently represent was the hitherto unexplored in -human nature and the human mind. As M. Jacques Rivière says of him in -the current <i><span lang="fr">Nouvelle Revue Française</span></i>, ‘The discoveries he has -made in the human mind and heart will one day be considered as capital, -and of the same rank as those of Kepler in astronomy, Claude Bernard in -physiology, or Auguste Comte in the interpretation of the sciences.’ -That strikes me as better work than producing a portrait-group of -‘Modern France,’ with General Lyautey arm-in-arm with Marshal Foch, and -M. Clemenceau putting on his celebrated pearl-grey gloves.”—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_8" href="#FNanchor_8" class="label">[8]</a> Reprinted from <i>The Times Literary Supplement</i> of -Thursday, January 4, 1923, where this article followed an English -version of a formal tribute to Marcel Proust, signed by nineteen -English men and women, which appeared (in French) in the special number -of <i><span lang="fr">La Nouvelle Revue Française</span></i> for January 1923. Mr. Middleton -Murry had already written, at greater length (too great, indeed, for -reproduction in this volume), on Marcel Proust in <i>The Quarterly -Review</i> for July 1922.—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_9" href="#FNanchor_9" class="label">[9]</a> In another and rather complicated sense this is a -presentiment of the future. The spires appear to have been those of -Caen, the carriage a motor car, the year evidently much later. The -original article will be found in <i><span lang="fr">Pastiches et Mélanges</span></i>, on pp. -91 to 99.—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_10" href="#FNanchor_10" class="label">[10]</a> <i>I.e.</i>, <i><span lang="fr">Les Plaisirs et les Jours</span></i>, published -in 1896, and <i><span lang="fr">Pastiches et Mélanges</span></i>, which, strictly speaking, -did not come as a volume until after <i><span lang="fr">A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en -Fleurs</span></i>, in the spring of 1919. But of the <i><span lang="fr">Pastiches</span></i> some at -least had appeared in the <i>Figaro</i> in 1908 and 1909, while the -<i><span lang="fr">Mélanges</span></i> date even further, and include the introductions to -Proust’s translations of Ruskin, <i><span lang="fr">La Bible d’Amiens</span></i> (1904) and -<i><span lang="fr">Sésame et les Lys</span></i> (1906).—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_11" href="#FNanchor_11" class="label">[11]</a> <span class="transnote"><i>Transcriber’s Note:</i> See next footnote.</span></p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_12" href="#FNanchor_12" class="label">[12]</a> Mr. Hussey, whose essay by his kindness and Mr. Filson -Young’s I have been enabled to repeat from the <i>Saturday Review</i>, -has, like Mr. Birrell, authorised the substitution of my version for -the original text of these two quotations from <i><span lang="fr">A l’Ombre des Jeunes -Filles en Fleurs</span></i>.—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_13" href="#FNanchor_13" class="label">[13]</a> <i><span lang="fr">Nouvelle Revue Française</span></i>, No. 112 (N.S.), January -1923, pp. 201-2. The friend is M. Jacques de Lacretelle.—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_14" href="#FNanchor_14" class="label">[14]</a> This is, in fact, an extract from Mr. Conrad’s letter in -reply to a request that he would justify the project of this volume by -contributing to it.—C.K.S.M.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_15" href="#FNanchor_15" class="label">[15]</a> <i>I.e.</i>, of <i><span lang="fr">Du Côté de chez Swann</span></i>; the dinner -at the Verdurins’ at which Forcheville is present for the first time -with the Cottards, Brichot the painter, Swann, and Odette. It is -only fair, to both critic and reader, to explain that Mr. Saintsbury -had read nothing of Proust save <i>Swann</i>, and that only in an -inadequate translation. On the other hand, it was as impossible for -the editor to contemplate a book of this sort without a promise of -collaboration from his old friend and master as it was, at the moment, -for the doyen of English (if not of European, which is to say the -world’s) critics to qualify himself for saying more than is printed on -this leaf.—C.K.S.M.</p> -</div> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" /> - -<div class="transnote"> -<div class="chapter"> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="TNOTE">Transcriber’s Notes</h2> -</div> - -<p>In two quotations from Proust’s <i>À la recherche du temps perdu</i>, words -are missing, rendering the quotations unintelligible. The missing -words, in brackets below, were supplied based on the authoritative -French edition (Gallimard, Bibliothêque de la Pléiade, 1988, vol. III).</p> - -<p class="blockquot"> -<i><a href="#Page_9">Page 9</a>:</i> Je n’avais [jamais] fait de différence entre les ouvriers<br /> -<br /> -<i><a href="#Page_27">Page 27</a>:</i> si loin qu’on allât dans [ses] effets d’art raffiné</p> - -<p>Other obvious printer errors have been corrected without note.</p> -</div> - - - - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARCEL PROUST ***</div> -<div style='text-align:left'> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will -be renamed. -</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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