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| Marcel Proust on his deathbed Paul-César Helleu, 1922 |
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-32- 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-33- 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-34- 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?”
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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,-36- 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-37- 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.
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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-39- 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-40- 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-41- 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-42- 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.
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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-44- 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-45- 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-46- 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-47- 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-48- 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-49- 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-50- 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-51- 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.
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