Chapter XXI: A Casuist in Souls: by ARTHUR SYMONS 138 (1)

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.