T 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. And when we recall the endless pains expended, through Swann’s love for her, on Odette,-64- 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-65- 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.
GUTENBERG |
No comments:
Post a Comment