Chapter XXI: A Casuist in Souls: by ARTHUR SYMONS 138 (2)

And yet, however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his
daughter’s conduct, it did not follow that his adoration
of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate
to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it
was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are
powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual
blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening
them; an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one
after another, without interruption, into the bosom of a
family will not make it lose faith either in the clemency
of its God or in the capacity of its physician. But when
M. Vinteuil regarded his daughter and himself from the
point of view of the world, and of their reputation, when
he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank
which they occupied in the general estimation of their
neighbours, then he was bound to give judgment, to utter
his own and her social condemnation in precisely the terms
which the inhabitants of Combray most hostile to him and
his daughter would have employed; he saw himself and her
in “low,” the very “lowest water,” inextricably stranded;
and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility,
that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom
he must now look up (however far beneath him they might
hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some
means of rising again to their level, which is an almost
mechanical result of any human misfortune.

The quotation is chosen on account of its shortness, and there are perhaps many hundred other examples which, could they be quoted in full, would show more fully this essential difference between the novel as Proust understands it and the older novel or the play. Here, at least, we have his method compressed. We have M. Vinteuil’s unshakable faith in his daughter, as a jumping-off ground, founded on the past and unaltered by the facts of the present. We have also the pitying attitude of the world to himself and its hostile attitude to his daughter. And from this comes M. Vinteuil’s other feeling, no less strong than his faith in his daughter, that they two have somehow sunk, become degraded, not only in the eyes of the world, but also, and because of it, in their own eyes as well. Lastly, as a reaction from this, we have the effect of these feelings on M. Vinteuil’s manner—his attitude of humility before the world for sins that he has not committed, for the conduct of a person in whom he still completely believes, which, however ridiculous to the logician, can only be recognised by the rest of us as most disquietingly true to our own experience. It is this complexity in our emotions, this capability of feeling many different things at the same time about any one particular incident or person, that the novel alone can give; and it is on these lines that Marcel Proust has adventured farther than any other man.

And here, of course, he has great advantages. Proust, unlike so many of the great creative artists, started late in life the work by which he will be judged. He is mature as few great men have been mature, cultured as still fewer have been cultured. Wide reading is far from common among great artists. The driving force necessary to the accomplishment of any work of art is seldom found in alliance with wide culture; that, more often than not, is to be found among the world’s half-failures. Neither Shakespeare, nor Molière, nor Fielding, nor Richardson, nor Balzac, nor Dickens, nor Dostoevsky, nor Ibsen was a widely cultured man. In Shakespeare, the loss is more than compensated by surety of intuition. In Balzac, there is a lack of the critical faculty that makes it possible for him, even towards the end of his life, to give in the same year one thing as beautiful as _Eugénie Grandet_ and another as puerile as _Ferragus_, that allows him to compare the novels of “Monk” Lewis with _La Chartreuse de Parme_ and to call Maturin “_un des plus grands génies de l’Europe_.”

But Proust, like Montaigne and like Racine, besides having an extreme sensitiveness to all forms of beauty and ugliness, happiness and misery, that he has met in his social existence, has also read widely in the works of other sensitive men, has compared their impressions with each other and with his own, has learnt from their successes and failures; he is armed with more than his natural equipment, has more eyes to see through than his own. Actually his books are filled from end to end with criticisms of music, of painting, of literature, not in the way that is unfortunately familiar in this country, as unassimilated chunks in the main stream of the narrative, but as expressions of the opinions of different characters.

This is not the only, nor indeed the chief, advantage that a wide experience in other arts, and other men’s art, has given him. What is of more importance is the attitude that springs from it of seeing historically the age and society in which he lives. Nothing for him stands still, not even to-day; and, because he realises that to-day itself will to-morrow be only part of the stream of the past, he can view it with the same calmly passionate interest as that which we bring to the discoveries at Luxor. As few men are to-day, he appears to be “_au-dessus de la mêlée_,” not, like the ancient gods, “careless of mankind,” but curious, acutely sympathetic, and able at any moment to bring his own experience and the experience of a thousand other men in tens of other centuries to the understanding of one small case at the tiny point of time which is momentarily under his observation.

To give any idea of the plot of _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_—and it has a plot, and a very closely knit one, too (how closely one only begins to realise after several re-readings)—is, of course, out of the question. Its form is that of an imaginary autobiography, and it is obvious that much genuine autobiography is inextricably woven with work of imagination. The first book (_Du Côté de chez Swann_) is occupied in part by memories of childhood, and in part, as it seems at first, by another story altogether, the account of a love affair of M. Swann’s. Of course this story is not a mere excrescence, but it is only slowly, as the later books are read, that we begin to see Proust’s immense cunning in introducing us early in the novel to Swann’s affairs. For they have a purpose beyond the fact that Swann becomes in time a friend of the young man, who is then in his childhood, and beyond the fact that he is very intimately mixed up with many others of the most important characters in the book. And this purpose is that of a prelude to the later and fuller story. It is, as it were, a standing example at the outset of the truism that no one ever learns by the mistakes of others—that what has been will be again in the next generation, with only the mere outward changes which time and place impose. In the second book (_A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_) we accompany the hero (it is one of the significant curiosities of Proust, akin to his refusal to divide his book into chapters, that never once is this hero named in the whole course of the work) to the seaside, and feel with him the emotions of an acutely sensitive boy just growing into manhood. And the remaining books are all occupied more or less with his efforts to assimilate the new social worlds in Paris and at Balbec Plage which are opening out before his curious and very sharply observant eyes.

There are those who, after enjoying the first two books, have complained rather bitterly of the succeeding ones. One charge against Proust seems to be that he deals more than is necessary with what are called “unpleasant” subjects and people; another is clearly, though not usually put into so few words, that he is a snob. As regards the first charge, it is true that Proust, like most French writers, is apt to claim with Terence, _Humani nihil a me alienum puto_; to urge that he is ever coarse, that he is ever anything, in fact, but extremely discriminating in his touch, is, as a matter of fact, absurd. But the other charge is more valuable because, while mistaken, it does emphasise a side of Proust’s interests in life which is of some considerable significance. It is true that Proust is extremely interested not only in individuals but in those extensions of personality which are classes, cliques, bodies of men and women, which, however formed, by coming together succeed in developing a sort of communal outlook upon life. It is true also that a good deal of the book is occupied with two of these classes in particular, both of them rich, the aristocracy and the pushing _bourgeoisie_ that likes to employ the artist and the intellectual as “stepping-stones from their dead selves to higher things.” But to call this interest snobbery is, surely, a sign of rather careless reading. It is to assume that the _naïveté_ of the young man’s first adoration of the old families of France, long before he had learnt to know them, is, in fact, the attitude of Proust himself. Even in the case of the young man snobbery seems a hard term for his actual state of mind.

Nor could we ever reach that goal to which I longed so
much to attain, Guermantes itself. I knew that it was
the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse
de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who
did actually exist, but whenever I thought about them
I pictured them to myself either in tapestry, as was
the “Coronation of Esther” which hung in our church, or
else in changing rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad
in his window, where he passed from cabbage green when
I was dipping my fingers in the holy-water stoup, to
plum-blue when I had reached our row of chairs; or again
altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève de
Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the
magic lantern sent wandering over the curtains of my room
or flung aloft upon the ceiling—in short, always wrapped
in the mystery of the Merovingian age, and bathed, as
in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the
resounding syllable _antes_. And if in spite of
that they were for me, in their capacity as a duke and
duchess, real people, though of an unfamiliar kind, this
ducal personality was in its turn enormously distended,
immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that
Guermantes of which they were duke and duchess, all that
sunlit “Guermantes way” of our walks, the course of the
Vivonne, its water-lilies and its overshadowing trees, and
an endless series of hot summer afternoons.

Is there any wonder that this young poet—and he was very young—when first he meets the Duchess in real life, and is welcomed into the select circle of her friends, should feel tremendously excited? But snob is not the right word.

As a fact, of course, what these complainants have missed is the use to which this aristocratic circle has been put in the life-history of the hero. For Proust, like any writer that can be read over and over again, has stamped his work through and through with his own peculiarly coloured personal psychology. And if there is one theme that is being insistently played throughout the whole work (like Swann’s and Odette’s phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata), in incident after incident, in the adventures of one character after another, it is that theme of sadness that no ideal state is attainable in this world, not so much because we cannot climb, nor even because the ideal becomes illusion on attainment, but because the object to which we attach our ideal is, of necessity, not seen as it really is, but always as we long for it to be. This, with its complement that the mere fact of not being able to possess may lead to desire even when the object in itself does not seem very desirable, is at the very heart of Proust’s philosophy.

This worship of his hero’s for aristocracy is only an incident in this continual theme. It is in essence exactly the same as all his other deceptions. When Gilberte was the beautifully dressed child of his idol, Swann, surrounded by a halo of romance owing to her friendship with the writer Bergotte, and when she appeared to look down on his advances, there was nothing on earth he would not give, nothing he would not do, to obtain her friendship. Yet when once that friendship is attained the interest in her fades away imperceptibly till she plays no more part in his life than a memory of what was once so bitterly wanted. So it is with the _petite bande_ of young girls at Balbec while it presented a united and exclusive front to the world. So it is with the chief of that band, Albertine herself. Desirable while she has held aloof, she becomes through knowledge, through the loss of that mystery which had existed, as it always does, not in her, but only in him who longed for her, almost boring. He is on the point of leaving her, of finishing with the _liaison_ once and for all. Suddenly all is changed. He has reason to doubt her complete faithfulness to him. With the pain of this doubt love is once more awakened, and at the end of the last published volume we leave him on the point of rushing off to Paris to marry her. This, again, is the whole meaning of Swann’s marriage with the vulgar and impossible Odette de Crécy. It is the continual theme of all the pitiable deceptions of M. de Charlus. “Besides,” he says in one place,

the mistresses with whom I have been most in love have
never coincided with my love for them. True love it must
have been, since I subordinated everything else in the
world to the chance of seeing them, of keeping them to
myself, and would burst into tears if, one evening, I had
heard them speak. But they themselves must be regarded
rather as endowed with the property of arousing that
love, of raising it to its paroxysm, than as being its
embodiments.... You would have said that a virtue which had
nothing to do with them had been arbitrarily attached to
them by Nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-galvanic
power, had the effect on me of exciting my love—that is
to say, of controlling all my actions and causing all my
sorrows. But from this the looks or the brains or the
favours shown me by these women were entirely distinct.

It is in this setting, then, that one must think of the young man’s fascination by what was after all far the most socially charming circle that he could have entered. The desire for a real aristocracy, not merely of brains, but surrounded by all the wealth of history and legend, is understandable enough. The only doubt is whether its representatives exist. But in Proust himself the charm undoubtedly is a subtler thing than that. It has something of the appeal of a dead religion for him. While it was still a power in the world one would have found him in opposition, as the Prince de Guermantes found himself in opposition to the army authorities when at last, and at such pain to himself, he began to suspect their conduct of the Dreyfus case. But aristocracy as a power in France is dead; it is only the ritual, the historic associations, the complete existence of a little world within a world, that remain.

Nor, as a fact, is this interest in cliques by any means confined to the aristocracy. Of at least equal importance are the Verdurins, who, in spite of their riches, are at the very opposite pole of civilisation. And yet with all their vulgarity, with all their intellectual snobbery, with all their lack of taste and breeding, with all their affectation of being a _petit clan_, is it not clear that, up to a certain point at any rate, intelligence is on their side of the ledger? Again, there is that glance at life in barracks, through the mediation of Saint-Loup, which, while small, is as good a summary of the military world as one knows. There are some unforgettable pages on the Jews. There is even that little world of the hotel servants that has plainly interested Proust almost as much as any of the larger worlds he has spent so much care in describing. And, especially in the early books, there are those descriptions of the world of the young man’s parents and grandparents, so typical of the _honnête bourgeoisie_, so profoundly drawn in their uprightness and their rather limited social ideas, so secure and anxious for security, so loving to their boy and yet so anxious not to “spoil” him. Never, with the exceptions of Saint-Simon and Tolstoy, has any author succeeded so well in giving the atmosphere of a particular house or a particular party; never has any one analysed so closely the behaviour of people in small homogeneous masses.

In 1896, when Proust was still a young man, he produced a book which, while not of great interest in itself, is naturally of value to students of his work, both for what it contains in the germ, and for what it omits, of the Proust who was to become a master. And to this book Anatole France wrote a charming preface, in which he said various things which must have appeared more friendly than critical to readers of that day. Among other things he wrote the following words:

Il n’est pas du tout innocent. Mais il est sincère et si
vrai qu’il en devient naïf et plaît ainsi. II y a en lui du
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre dépravé et du Pétrone ingénu.

The words are a singularly good description of the Proust that we know to-day. He is not innocent, and he remains _naïf_. There is a story of how in his last illness he insisted on being muffled up in a carriage and driven out into the country to see the hawthorn, which was then in bloom. The freshness of joy in all beautiful things remained with him, so far as we can see, to the end of his life. It is as obvious in the moving account of the Prince de Guermantes’ confession to Swann at the beginning of the last book as it is in the early Combray chapters of the first. He was supremely sensitive and continually surprised by beauty. But, unlike most sensitive people, he neither railed at mankind, nor shut himself up, nor built for himself a palace of escape from reality in his own theorising about the meaning of it all. He set himself to observe and to note his observations.

In many ways Anatole France’s description of him as the ingenuous Petronius of our times is extremely intelligent. And our times are in many ways extremely like the days in which Petronius wrote. There is an aristocracy that has lost its _raison d’être_, and a continual flow of new plutocrats without traditions, without taste, without any object in life beyond spending to the best of their power of self-advertisement. The faith in the old social order has gone, and nothing new has arisen to take its place. Where we differ entirely from that age is in self-consciousness. And that, too, is where a modern Petronius must differ from the old one. For better in some ways and for worse in others, we are far more complex than we have ever been; our motives are at once more mixed and more clearly scrutinised. And a writer who can satisfactorily cram this age within the pages of a book must not only be extremely intelligent and extremely observant, but must also have forged for himself a style capable of expressing the finest shades of feeling; he must refuse the easy simplifications both of the moralist and the maker of plots; he must be infinitely sensitive and infinitely truthful. That Marcel Proust personifies this ideal no one would completely claim. But he does, at least to some people, seem to have approached it more nearly than any other writer of our time.

RALPH WRIGHT.

V

_THE “LITTLE PROUST”_@

To those of us who have read or who are now reading Proust’s enormous novel, it is a curious experience to turn back to his earliest publication, to the book written by the precocious boy whose social successes are described at such length in _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_. This book, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_, appeared in 1896, seventeen years before the publication of _Du Côté de chez Swann_. _Les Plaisirs_ is a large, shiny volume, a pretentious “tome” for the drawing-room, printed in the most expensive manner, and made hideously elegant by Madeleine Lemaire’s illustrations of the _higlif_ of the ’nineties—an amazing _élite_ of melancholy great ladies, exquisitely fashionable in costumes which time, with its ironic touch, has made inconceivably out of fashion and dowdy. A few copies of this large book appeared recently in the London bookshops, when its rarity and value seem not to have been known; and one of these copies has come, in the happiest manner, into my possession. It contains the literary exercises and first attempts of the “little Proust” of the great novel, some verses of no especial merit, a few stories and set pieces of description, and a number of short poems in prose. These pieces were all written, the author tells us, between his twentieth and his twenty-third year; the style is somewhat sententious, immature and precious: it is the writing of a boy—but, one sees at once, of a boy of genius. For here, not only in their bud, but in their first exquisite flowering, we find all the great qualities of Proust’s later work: the beautiful sensibility, the observation, as of an insect with an insect’s thousand eyes, the subtle and elaborate study of passion, with its dawn, its torments of jealousy, and—what is so original in the great novel—the analysis, not only of falling in love, but of falling out of it—the slow, inevitable fading away of the most fiery passion into the coldest indifference. Indeed, most of the themes, and often the very situations, of the later work are not only adumbrated but happily rendered in this boyish volume—the romantic lure of the world and its heartless vulgarity, the beauty of landscapes, of blossoming trees and hedges and the sea, the evocative power of names, the intermittences of memory, the longing of the child for its mother’s good-night kiss, the great dinner-party, with all the ambitions and pretences of hosts and guests cynically analysed and laid bare. And here, too, we find something which, to my mind, is of even greater interest, and about which, as Proust’s other critics have hardly mentioned it, a few words may not be out of place.

When the little Proust plunged into the full stream of his Parisian experiences, he was, we are told by one of his friends, already, from his early studies, steeped in the philosophy of Plato; and although his feverish days were filled with love affairs and worldly successes, and he drained to its dregs, as we say, the enchanting cup of life, all that he felt and saw seems but to have confirmed in that precocious boy the lesson which Plato had already taught him—the lesson, namely, that the true meaning of life is never to be found in immediate experience; that there is another reality which can only be envisaged by the mind, and, as it were, created by the intellect—a deeper and more ultimate reality, in the presence of which life no longer seems contingent, mediocre, mortal, and its vicissitudes are felt to be irrelevant, its briefness an illusion. Certainly, in that great battle between the Giants and the Gods, which Plato describes in the _Sophist_, the battle in which the Giants affirm that only those things are real which can be touched and handled, while the Gods defend themselves from above out of an unseen world, “mightily contending” that true essence consists in intelligible ideas—in this eternal warfare Proust is found fighting as conspicuously as Shelley on the side of the Gods. Hope for him, as for Shelley,

creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

and it is this attitude towards life, this creative contemplation of experience, which to my mind gives its deeper significance to Proust’s work, and lends an importance and depth of meaning to the youthful and rather shabby love-affairs, the fashionable wickednesses and worldlinesses, which form so large a part of his subject-matter. What was Proust’s ultimate “intention” in writing his great novel, the intention which, when fulfilled, will give, we must hope, a final and satisfying form to this immense creation, must remain a matter of conjecture until the complete work is before us. There is, however, much to indicate that when he retired from the world to sift and analyse his boyish experience, it was with the purpose to disengage from that flux of life and time the meanings implicit in it—to recover, to develop in the dark room of consciousness, and re-create the ultimate realities and ideals which experience reveals, though it never really attains them. The title of the whole work, _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_, and that of its ultimate and yet unpublished volume, _Le Temps retrouvé_, seem indeed to suggest some such purpose.

That there is something irremediably wrong in the present moment; that the true reality is the creation of desire and memory, and is most present in hope, in recollection and absence, but never in immediate experience; that we kill our souls by living, and that it is in solitude, in illness, or at the approach of death that we most truly possess them—it is on these themes, which are repeated with deeper harmonies and richer modulations throughout his later work, that the young Proust harps in this divinely fresh overture to the masterpiece which was to follow. Surely, one thinks, a book of such exquisite promise and youthful achievement, heralded as it was to the world by Anatole France’s preface, and talked of, no doubt, in all the Paris salons, must have produced a remarkable impression on people so cultivated as the Parisians, so alert to discover and appreciate literary merit. However, as we know, it produced no such impression; in spite of Anatole France’s praise, no one seems to have had any real notion of its importance, or to have guessed that a new genius had appeared, a new star had arisen. And when, after publishing this large, shiny, unappreciated volume, its author disappeared from the world into a solitary sick-room, he seems to have been thought of (as far as he was thought of at all) as a pretentious, affected boy who had been made a pet of for a while in worldly salons—a little dilettante with his head turned, who had gone up like a rocket in the skies of fashion, but would be heard of no more in the world of letters, where anyhow this pretty coruscation had attracted almost no attention. This seems to have been the impression of even those among Proust’s personal friends who were themselves writers, and who, on re-reading _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_, are now amazed, as M. Gide confesses, that they should have been so blind to its beauty when they first read it—that in the first eagle-flights of this young genius they had seen little more than the insignificant flutterings of a gay butterfly of fashion.

When we read the lives of the great artists of the past, we are apt to be amazed at the indifference of their contemporaries to their early achievements; and we cannot believe that we too, in the same circumstances, would have been equally undiscerning. But here, happening in our own days, is an obvious instance of this contemporary blindness; and I, at least, as I read the little Proust’s first volume, and see spread so clearly before me, as in the light of a beautiful dawn, the world of his creation, try to make myself believe that if the noontide of his genius had never illuminated that world and made it familiar to me, that if Proust had never lived to write Swann and the Guermantes, I too should be as blind as were his friends to its beauty and merits. I tell myself this, and yet, with the book before me, I cannot believe it. But then I remind myself of what I already know very well, that new dawns in art are apt to appear on just the horizons towards which we are not looking, and to illuminate landscapes of which we have as yet not the slightest knowledge; and that it is only afterwards, when the master’s whole _œuvre_ is familiar to us, that we can see the real merits of his early attempts, and read back into them the meaning and value of his complete and acknowledged achievement. The moral of all this (and it is pleasant to end, if possible, one’s reflections with a moral)—the moral is that we do not know, we cannot know, what those disquieting persons, our younger contemporaries, are really up to; that we must “look to the end,” as the old saying has it; and that in the first attempts of other youths who, like Proust, were endowed with genius, but whose gifts, unlike his, came to no fruition, we possess no doubt early masterpieces of which we can have no conception, worlds of the imagination which actually exist and shine in the light of an exquisite dawn before our eyes, although our eyes cannot see them.

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH.

VI

_A READER’S GRATITUDE_

A French uncle of mine once took me as a boy to visit a distinguished mathematician who lived with his melons and his roses on the outskirts of a small town in the Lyonnais. On the way thither I was admonished not to interrupt with foolish questions what I was given to suppose would be an important inquiry by two learned men into the origin of the universe: Monsieur X—— would never have me inside his house again if I could not behave myself better than most of the children of the present day. We waited for our host in a large musty room of subdued sunlight, where not even a fly buzzed and where the only hint of life was the shadow of a passing bird across the yellow blind or the quivering filigree of a reflected bough. Presently Monsieur X—— came in to greet us; but without showing any inclination to discuss philosophy with my uncle he led us to some chairs and a table set out upon the sparse turf under what I think must have been a big catalpa tree. Here he heaped my plate with cakes and fruit and sweets, insisted that I was old enough to drink two glasses of a cordial, and, when he did begin to talk, talked most entertainingly about his neighbours.

Gratitude may be childhood’s greatest embarrassment; not merely the verbal expression of thanks, but the emotion itself, which the more deeply it is felt, the more miserably it is involved in shame. As we grow older, we learn what is called politeness; and although we are still capable of being confused by and of actually suffering from excess of gratitude, we have learnt to cover that speechless confusion and pain with a glib phrase like ‘I do not know how to thank you.’ But the child’s silence does convey the depth of his gratitude; and even as I hung my head in silent embarrassment when I was invited to thank Monsieur X—— for his kindness, so now when I ought to be thanking Marcel Proust, against interrupting whose discourse I have been as it were warned by the respect accorded to him by our uncles the critics, but who when I met him as a reader filled my plate with one delicious fruit and sweet and cake after another (steeped those cakes in tisane of limeflowers or tea), I feel incapable of expressing gratitude; and I fear to indulge in criticism, lest I should be just one more uncle standing between Proust and that innocent, appreciative, timorous, awkward child, the public.

If I say that I regard Proust as the only completely satisfying poetical record, the most important literary phenomenon of our time, I feel that I am involved in an argument with people who think that the relentless effusion of modern verse has more significance than, let us say, a bath tap which has been left running. And I simply do not want to argue about what I enjoy. If I say that Proust represents the apex hitherto reached by the feminine or realistic art of this age, just as Stendhal represents the culmination of the masculine or ideological art of the eighteenth century, or that Proust arrives at the general through an incredibly sensitive exploration of the particular, whereas Stendhal achieves the particular by his exquisite consciousness of the general, I am involved in a lecture. And I simply do not want to lecture about what I enjoy. The trouble is that, in order to demonstrate Proust to people who have not read him, one ought to have as subtle a power of evocation, as rich a manner of suggestion as Proust himself, who could, I believe, make even a dream interesting, so that we should live in that dream and extract from it the essential flavour of its peculiarity as authentically as the dreamer. That is why Proust writes of childhood with such magic. He manages to recognize, in the complication of events that merely occur and are forgotten, the ideal duration in which they were imbedded and which gave them their material weight and spiritual portentousness. It is only in childhood, or at any rate only in isolated fragments of time later, that we possess at all intimately this sense of duration when objects appeal to us as their essential selves, as pure energies. At other periods we value them according as they forward our lives, according as they are useful to us, and thus we lose our sense of their independent existence. I have just read once more the Combray chapter (marvellously enshrined in a translation that, like the translation of a saint’s bones, destroys not a bit of their efficacy), and I have laid it aside, thinking of Leopardi’s _Ricordanze_ and listening to where, under the scintillations of the Great Bear,

_sotto al patrio tetto
sonavan voci alterne, e le tranquille
opre de’ servi._

COMPTON MACKENZIE.

VII

_GILBERTE_

Their eyes meet across a hedge when she is still a little girl. In his eyes the look is one of appeal unconsciously, in hers of ironic indifference and contempt. He hears her name called: “Gilberte”; and she obeys instantly without turning to look back in his direction, leaving him with a disturbing enervating memory, the sense suddenly appreciated of things distant and intangible, of a world withheld from him. And that brief encounter sets the tone of their relations. She is always very largely a creature of his imagination, a window through which he can see but cannot reach immortal pastures. Never in the sense that Odette is, does she become a personality to him. Consequently to the reader she appears only in intermittent flashes of reality: when she gives him the marble that has the same colour as her eyes; when they wrestle for the letter—their feelings one shy articulation—and she says, “You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling for a little”; when in spite of her grandfather’s anniversary and her father’s disapproval she insists on going to a concert: in her impatience at being kept from a dancing lesson by her lover’s unexpected visit.

And when we recall the endless pains expended, through Swann’s love for her, on Odette, on the making indeed a mirror of that love for the woman by whom it was inspired and from whom it drew its strength and weakness, we realise that purposely the author has left of Gilberte “a loveliness perceived in twilight, a beauty not clearly visioned”; that he considered the emotions felt for her not to be a response to any emanation from herself; but that she was rather a focus, a rallying-point, for the aspirations and intimations of boyhood; that she was in herself uninteresting, filling rather than creating a position in the life of the “moi” of _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_. Throughout the episode the reader’s attention is fixed always on the “moi,” on the detailed analysis of his love: its ebb and flow; its dawn of timidity and reverence and hopeless longing; its discontent; its substitution for love of friendship; its oblique and unrepeated essay, in the wrestle, towards a physical expression; the resignation for its sake of a diplomatic career which would carry him from Gilberte; the disagreement over a trifle; the gradual recognition of its failing power, and the final realisation that those emotions of his, which he had considered in the light of a gift to Gilberte, as her permanent possession, had returned to him, to be showered in time, but in a different form, before another woman. This particular series of emotions, so familiar and yet, belonging as it does to Jurgen’s enchanted garden between dawn and sunrise, so distant; this love that must, in John Galsworthy’s phrase, “become in time a fragrant memory—a searing passion—a humdrum mateship—or once in many times vintage full and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes,” Marcel Proust has in the last pages of _Du Côté de chez Swann_ and the first part of _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ presented in unfaltering analysis.

It is a series of emotions that has been treated many times and has inspired more than one masterpiece of the world’s literature. For, whatever else in life comes twice, that does not come. Love may advance down the years often enough and gaily enough, “overthrowing all ancient memories with laughter”: the passions of maturity may be deeper, stronger, less impermanent. But the particular charm of that first flowering is irrecapturable. Whence its unique fascination for the novelist. To compare Proust’s treatment of it with that of other writers—with, for example, Turgenev’s beautiful _First Love_—would be a forlorn and foolish business. To praise the one at the expense of the other would be to blame a big writer for failing to achieve a thing at which he never aimed. Those who find themselves in sympathy with Proust’s methods, who recognise in the technique of his work a new formula, in its style a new prose rhythm, and in the spirit of it an alert and original intelligence, will always look on Gilberte as one of his most fortunate successes.

ALEC WAUGH.

VIII

_PROUST’S WOMEN_

The literature of imagination has always been rich in autobiography, confessed and unconfessed. It is in its essence, perhaps one should say in its impulse, largely an affair of passionate reminiscence. Taken, therefore, as merely a recent writer of distinction who has chosen to deal avowedly with _Things Remembered_, Proust must challenge comparison with dozens of eminent men, his forerunners and contemporaries. Tolstoy has given us his own life-history, not only diffusively throughout his novels and pamphlets, but in that wonderful piece of reconstruction, _Childhood and Youth_. Among living men, James Joyce, with an epic gift and an heroic feat of memory, has recorded for us an impression of his past, physical, mental, spiritual, and has shown it interwoven with countless other lives. And these are two taken at random. _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_—Proust was not the first, nor will he be the last, to choose it as a theme.

Where Proust stands as yet alone is in his manner of approaching his theme. Or, with more exactitude it may be said, his manner, vigilantly passive, eagerly quiescent, of letting his theme encroach upon and claim him. All attempted recapture of the past is for him “futile,” a “labour in vain.” Not reconstruction, but understanding of things remembered, is his aim. And to this end with deliberation he permits himself what the realist rejects but the plain man all unknowingly cherishes—the glamour in which for every one of us our own past is bathed. Divest the past, Proust seems to say, of the present’s gift to it—the light that never was on sea or land—and you take away its essence; treat the present as independent of the past and you destroy its integrity. That this is true we, as human beings—acting, thinking, receiving impressions from moment to moment—must recognise when it is pointed out. Our actual existence is not so much a narrative as a web in which the shuttle of events flies back and forth between the warp and woof of past and present, from neither of which it can escape any more than can we ourselves. The trouble is that it is pointed out so seldom, and least of all perhaps by novelists, who in this matter still lag far behind our common human experience. The grasp with which Proust has laid hold upon the philosophic and aesthetic values of memory—as, for example, in the passage where he describes the eating, after an interval of many years, of a _petite madeleine_ soaked in tea—is a new thing in literature. Here is pre-eminently the novelist with a past. None before him has taken _Things Remembered_ not merely for theme but for medium as well.

To forget this, or even for one moment to minimise it, in speaking of Proust, is utterly to lose one’s bearings. But, accustomed as we are in our own hearts to his treatment of the past, we are so unaccustomed to it in literature that it is really not easy to avoid the artificial standpoint, the more that Proust proclaims his naturalism neither explicitly nor by freakishness of style. So quiet, so classical is his bearing that it hardly strikes one to investigate his premises.

And so, concerning his long book of memory, one hears questions put by intelligent and even admiring readers. There are his “shadowy” women—“Did women at any time mean anything to Proust?”: there is his disconcerting chronology—“How old is his hero supposed to be during such or such an incident?”: there is his social pose—“Was Proust not himself as bad a snob as any he describes?” But such questions can be asked only in forgetfulness, answered only in constant remembrance of the author’s unique attitude toward his main subject, the past.

It is because of this that, though setting out to make a few observations upon Proust’s women, I feel it no digression if I draw attention here to a particular passage which occurs early in the novel, towards the end of the _Combray_ section in Volume I.—a passage in which he not merely gives the circumstances of his hero’s first literary composition, but puts before us the composed fragment itself. A few pages back and the boy has been bemoaning that, his choice of a literary career notwithstanding, his mind is blank of subjects, his intellect, at the mere idea of writing, a void. Now, suddenly, while out driving, he is so deeply enthralled by the charm of three steeples which withdraw and advance, disappear and reappear, always in different relations to each other, according as the setting sun catches their angles and the carriage winds along the country road, that words leap to frame themselves in his head and, for all the jolting and inconvenience of the moment, he must immediately write them down to “appease his conscience and to satisfy his enthusiasm.”

The actual piece of prose so written is reproduced, says the narrator, “with only a slight revision here and there.” We may allow ourselves, I think, the presumption that it is substantially a true record.[2] Certainly it furnishes us with the key to the whole work. Passages from Proust more exquisite, even more characteristic, might easily be found; none so significant. Those ever-veering steeples, sometimes before, sometimes behind, lightening, darkening, changing, looking now like three golden pivots, now like three birds perched on the plain—they reveal, more fully and subtly than could any philosophic exposition, both the method and the philosophic preoccupation of the author. They declare that for him there was never an actual but always a psychological perspective, and that _peculiar to himself_. This is why there is no intellectual or logical means of checking Proust’s observations. Either we accept them as he gives them, emotionally, or we reject them as meaningless. He has, he repeatedly tells us, no faith in intellectual observation, neither will he presume upon logical deduction in questions of human feeling. He quietly discards that assumption of god-like knowledge for which we have come to look so confidently in our writers of fiction. He will have none of the sympathetic imagination that “puts itself in another’s place.” He refuses as an act of disingenuousness either to project himself into or to interpret the character of another. “We alone,” he says, “by our belief that they have an existence of their own, can give to certain of the things that we see a soul which they afterwards keep, which they develop in our minds.” Essentially, that is to say, he believes he can know nothing outside of his own sensations, and for him every sensation is inextricably interwoven with memory. Whether he writes of a woman or a musical theme, of a love affair or of trees in the park, he never forgets that in the very act of observing there are several elements to be reckoned with. The thing observed may seem to casual eyes fixed like the three steeples. But Proust knows better. He knows that he himself is moving, that within him his past is in a different kind of motion, dictating, suggesting, comparing, reminding, side-tracking, and that therefore the steeples themselves are never in reality still. Nothing in life is stable. Within the flux of our past and our present, figures outside ourselves seem to rise, to move, to act. But such movements have reality only in so far as they are reflected in the unique mirror of a soul. And for Proust this mirror is combined of the individual and his memory.

[Footnote 2: See, however, my foot-note on page 106 and _Pastiches et Mélanges_, pp. 91-99.—C.K.S.M.]

No wonder if such a novelist is sometimes called difficult. He is too like life to be easy. Other novels, beside his, seem accommodatingly static, other characters finished, understood in each spring of each action—precisely as those we know in life are never finished or understood.

But to come to the women.

A man of particular sincerity once said to me that after twenty years of married life he understood his wife no better than on the day he married her. He had of course become familiar with her modes of thought and action which served as knowledge for practical daily purposes. But familiarity had never bred understanding. Her underlying motives, the ultimate significance of her looks and words, remained hidden.

This, I think, is Proust’s position, more especially when the woman happens to affect him powerfully. In every case we can _see_ his women, and thus far they are the reverse of shadowy. Grandmother, mother, aunts, and servant—the women that surround his childhood; Mlle. Vinteuil and the Duchesse de Guermantes—female figures that shock or thrill his boyish imagination; Odette—the mature cocotte that stands throughout his youth for feminine mystery and glamour; Odette’s daughter Gilberte, and later Albertine—the young girls, minxes both, with whom he falls in love; Madame Verdurin and her circle—the social climbers who call forth his most delicate adult irony as well as his most rancid contempt;—these, simply as pictures, leap out at us complete. Nothing could be more objective than their presentation to the eye and ear of the reader. We feel with each one as if we had met her in the flesh—as one has met a casual acquaintance. The mother’s submissive wifeliness; the almost masculine incorruptibility of the grandmother; the raciness of the servant; the neurosis of Aunt Léonie; the half-hearted viciousness of the music-master’s daughter; the slightly comic social splendour of the Duchesse; the unmeaning melancholy of Odette’s eyes; the unredeemed vulgarity of Madame Verdurin; the domineering girlishness of Gilberte, by turns frank and secretive, appealing and repellent; the smile with which Albertine, at once innocent and wanton, receives the youth in her bedroom—in depicting these Proust never trespasses beyond natural as compared with literary experience. We all know with what liveliness in conversation any man with the gifts of observation and wit can create an image for us of some female “character” met with in his childhood or his travels. But let that same man come to speak out of his emotions of some woman who has moved him deeply, then his heart will cloud his brain, his tongue will falter or run away with him, and he will no longer be capable of outlining a portrait. As listeners our impressions of his subject will be gained, not from what he says, but independently from what we perceive that he feels, which may well be in direct conflict with his words. In life, that is to say, the more important a character is to us the more we are thrown back for our ultimate knowledge on the emotions aroused by that character in ourselves. In fiction it is usually the other way about. It is his central figures whom the novelist pretends to know best. Proust, however, has recognised this discrepancy with scientific clearness. He devotes himself, therefore, where his important women are concerned—aside from the very minimum of detached, objective observations—to a presentment of the effect they have upon the men that love them.

So his women set us wondering and supposing and coming to our own conclusions exactly as we do in life, either when an individual of our own sex is described for us by one of the other sex, or when we are emotionally affected by some one of the other sex.

For this is important. When it comes to his male characters, Proust takes a different tone. Here he finds himself able, quite consistently with his philosophy, for far more positive assertion. In various ways he can allow them to reveal and expound themselves, and even each other, as when Bergotte speaks of the married Swann as a man who “has to swallow a hundred serpents every day.” The point of view, the intellectual outfit which all males have in common—these give the male novelist a certain tract of solid ground when dealing with characters of his own sex. A man’s fellow-feeling for other men is very strong. It has but a faint and imperfect parallel as between woman and woman. Proust, accordingly, without any sacrifice of conscience, can, “by his belief,” endow Swann with a soul. But—marvellous and highly characteristic creation as he is—Swann may be put in the same category with other male characters by other male novelists. Odette, Gilberte, Albertine, are in a category by themselves. Outside of Proust’s book they are only to be met with in life.

It is in this differential treatment of his women that we perceive how rigorously Proust applies his artistic method. He never seeks to transcend his own personality. In him, the observer, the whole of creation lives and moves and has its being. Men are creatures made in his own image. He can faithfully follow his own emotions, and “by his belief” can conscientiously endow his men with souls. But women are in a different case. He has no inner guide to assure him that they are anything more than the phantoms they seem. Strictly speaking, this should imply no more than a negative attitude. In fact, however, Proust goes further. Because he has no grounds for belief he passes into unbelief. In his philosophy _esse est percipi_, therefore, the souls of women for him have no existence. Herein it is likely that he has borne out the unavowed experience of most men. Whether or no, he certainly has expressed the truth of his own experience with a purity that few, even among great writers, can rival.

One thing more. There is Proust’s mother.