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-13- 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-14- 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.
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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-16- 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-17- 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.
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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-19- 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.
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-20- 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-21- 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,-22- 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-23- 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-24- 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-25- 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-26- 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.
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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-28- 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-29- 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-30- 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.
AN ENGLISH TRIBUTE
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