Chapter XXI: A Casuist in Souls: by ARTHUR SYMONS 138 (3)

No doubt the avenging eagerness with which I reintroduce her here for my conclusion is due in part to my being myself of the soulless sex. But quite apart from any such feelings, to speak of this novelist’s women without reckoning especially with his mother would be inexcusable. That he adored her in childhood he makes manifest. Further, that throughout his life this adoration effectively debarred him from profound emotion where other women were concerned becomes clear enough to the reader. It hardly appears, however, that Proust was himself wholly conscious of this. True, there is a passage in the _Combray_ section in which he speaks of “that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation, unburdened by any liability save to myself.” But this is the only place where he seems to allow that the love he bore his mother was even comparable in kind with the love aroused by other women later in his life. Indeed, though he repeatedly speaks of the anguish with which in his childhood he longed for his mother’s good-night kiss, the ecstasy with which he received it, as if it were the Host in an act of communion, conveying to him “her real presence and with it the power to sleep”; though he tells how, for that “frail and precious kiss,” he prepared himself in advance so as to “consecrate” the whole minute of contact; though he dreaded to prolong or repeat the kiss lest a look of displeasure should cross those beautiful features with the slight, beloved blemish under one of the eyes; yet he describes himself at this time as one “into whose life Love had not yet entered,” as one whose emotion, failing love and as yet awaiting it, happened to be at the disposal of “filial piety.” No wonder if, when temporary “loves” came, he compared with them as unconsciously as unfavourably this good and gracious mother—so admiringly timid as a wife, so gentle towards strangers, so perfect socially, so full of stern solicitude as a parent (“she never allowed herself to go to any length of tenderness with me”)—and found them merely exciting to the senses. He had already, so far as woman was concerned, given his heart away.

Yet, after all, perhaps he knew it well enough and merely takes his own way of saying it. He tells us little enough of his mother, though probably he tells as much as he knows. What her own real thoughts and feelings were we are left to guess. But “never again,” he says, after describing one very special visit of hers to the boy’s bedroom—“never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs ... which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually their echo has never ceased.”

CATHERINE CARSWELL.

IX

_THE BEST RECORD_

One of my feelings whenever I read Marcel Proust is regret that Henry James is not alive to enjoy him, as he would have done immensely and amazedly, though, judging from the letters of that great master of the art of writing fiction, no doubt he would not have given him his unqualified approval. But he would have recognised him as working at his own level, while not in his own groove. Yet, for all that Proust is the author of practically only one book, big though that book is, in that one book he has spread his nets wider, and sunk them deeper, than did Henry James in the sum of all his novels. One wonders if such mastery has ever been obtained so suddenly and so completely; indeed, the sureness of touch seems a little less certain in the last published volumes than in the earlier ones. We had revealed to us from the beginning a new way of writing fiction, or rather of describing life. It had never so been done before. Let us pray that he will have no disciples—one can foresee the horror of them; but influence he must have.

My own interest begins with the second volume of _Swann_, though my admiration begins with the first sentence of the first; and my advice to new readers would be to take up any volume after _Swann_—to start in the middle—when I am sure they will insist on knowing everything the author has to say about his characters from the beginning. You become soaked in the lives of these people as a sponge becomes soaked with water. In the process you live your own life over again, and, if you have lived in Paris and in Normandy, you tread the same ground.

Proust has no “story” to tell. He sets down life as it was lived by certain people at a certain period: Parisian society from the middle of the Dreyfus case to the present day. From the amazing brilliance of the whole opening two details presently detach themselves—the love of Swann for Odette, and the boy and girl idyll in the Champs-Élysées: they are beyond words to praise, for they are not Art, but life recorded with matchless insight or remembrance. We need not compare, but how pale is _Jean Christophe_ beside these pages! So when we get to Normandy, the _Plage_, the hotel, and the countryside with its little railway, and childhood has melted into adolescence, we live again those days, and tread those paths, which we thought beyond recapture, save by indistinct memory. It is an exquisite pleasure which I, at any rate, never expected to experience.

Emerging from the shadows of the joyous band of _jeunes filles en fleurs_, with its hint of perversity—we shall have to rewrite our hymns: “There’s a _Freud_ for little children!”—we come to the marvellous Guermantes, with whom Proust has pictured that high-born snobbery—and life without snobbery is like meat without salt—which observers, as they get on in years, come to know is inherent in the upper classes no less, perhaps more, than in the middle classes: a right snobbery, bereft of any meanness or noxious prejudices. These people see France through their family history, and their family history was France. They are Ladies and Gentlemen, with all that that connotes: and in considering them we are conscious of all the rest who are not. Proust, in exploring one path, illuminates the others. We spend a few hours in their company, in the course of a dinner and an evening reception (taking up a couple of hundred or so of pages), and at the end we know all about them; we understand the world which made them, and what they are going to make of the world. As contrasts to these great ones we have those other snobs, the Verdurins, of the “cultured” middle class. Surely never before, in memoir, essay, or fiction, has it all been set down so brilliantly.

One wonders what sort of man Proust really was. We know he was a great friend of Léon Daudet—two men, one would have thought, as the poles asunder. We know that he slept by day, and lived and worked by night: we know that he was ill and neurasthenic. We know also that nothing was hidden from him, and that he had an infinite power of expression. He was a very human being with the brain and the pen of a recording angel.

Occasionally, lest his cleverness should seem to be superhuman, one comes on a jest or an anecdote which is a “chestnut”; or he becomes a little too intricate, or his neurasthenia shows its cloven hoof: once or twice I am inclined to throw the book down as too tiresome, but I cling to him and grapple with him, and soon feel again that I am enjoying one of the greatest pleasures of my life.

One meets with all kinds of people in his work, some of them very odd people; though how very odd is the ordinary normal person! Proust’s odd people may be thought to be modern: yet both in art and in life they are indeed very ancient. They are those for whom—to modernise an old phrase—Life is a _mauvais quart d’heure_ made up of exquisite complexes. Side by side with these “moderns” are the old-fashioned people, notably the Grandmother and Françoise—not Micawber is more definite than this last.

The more we study the great writers of all ages, and the more we observe for ourselves, the more we realise that the world never alters; we can only ring the changes on the same material. Harmony and discord, beauty and ugliness! It is like a gramophone disc. The records vary, the melodies, the arrangements, make their individual effect, but the substance is the same. The Masters make their records on an unchanging surface. Marcel Proust’s is a magnificent record; perhaps the most brilliant ever achieved. It requires only that we bring to it a sympathetic and sharp-pointed needle.

Did his death leave his record incomplete?

One would like to know what more he had in his mind to record of these people. Especially is one curious as to the future of M. de Charlus. What did he do in the Great War? Did he open one of his houses as a hospital for not too badly wounded soldiers? Or was he content with lending his name to charity bazaars? Or was he—likeliest of all—galvanised by his high breeding and undoubted courage into a vigour beyond his years, to make a hero’s end? Perhaps we shall never know. Does it much matter? We can finish off these people to our own liking, or—if indeed his book was unfinished—leave them as he left them. There they are for us, all alive—and likely to remain so.

REGINALD TURNER.

X

_A FOOT-NOTE_

Though in England almost every one, who has read and understood, admires the works of Marcel Proust, it is not so in France. There, not to go beyond my own experience, I have met plenty of writers, and good ones too, who cannot away with them. Even that essay on the style of Flaubert, which I had supposed would be universally reckoned a masterpiece, I have heard described by a friend of mine, a charming poet and admired dramatist, as childish. Now, when I hear such a one, and others whom I respect, disparaging Proust, I do not fly into a passion; I seek the cause, instead. And I find it—though the discovery, should they ever come to hear of it, would a good deal shock some of my French friends and surprise perhaps a few of my English—in Politics.

The French themselves seem hardly to realise how sharp and deep their political divisions are become. Yet when we remember that during the last forty years politics have been able to make of that gentle latin scepticism, which gave us Montaigne, Bayle, and Voltaire, and still gives us M. Anatole France, something as narrow and bitter almost as Calvinism; when we hear of such pretty place-names as (say) St. Symphorien being changed into (say) Émile Combesville; we ought not to be surprised if literature even gets splashed a little in the dirty dog-fight. Because Marcel Proust is supposed to have chosen as the subject of his epic the _faubourg St. Germain_, it is assumed that he admired and believed in it. Was not _L’Action française_ amongst the first to hail his rising genius? Is he not half a Jew and therefore wholly a renegade? He is a black reactionary and an enemy of light. He is not a good man, so how can he be a good writer? We are back again in a very familiar world of criticism; only the English critics can prove that he was good, after all.

As a matter of fact, which I know counts for little in politics or criticism, Proust seems to me often unduly hard on the _faubourg_. I shall not easily forget, nor perhaps will it, the devastating effect of that small phrase, when, after treating us to a ravishing description of a theatre full to the brim of _beau monde_, after explaining how these are the people fitted by training, tradition, and circumstance to taste the things of the mind, he adds, by way of afterthought as it were, “si seulement ils avaient eu de l’esprit.” For my part, sitting next her at that gorgeous dinner-party, I was completely bowled over by the matchless Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes (late Princesse des Laumes), bowled over not only by her beauty and seduction, and a little perhaps by her great name, but by her _bel esprit_ and intelligence. To me her observations on Victor Hugo in particular and the art of writing in general seemed to possess that airy profundity which above all things one relishes in a literary conversation, until M. Proust, after pooh-poohing her circle, undid the duchess herself with this painfully just appreciation: “Pour toutes ces raisons les causeries avec la duchesse ressemblaient à ces connaissances qu’on puise dans une bibliothèque de château, surannée, incomplète, incapable de former une intelligence, dépourvue de presque tout ce que nous aimons, mais nous offrant parfois quelque renseignement curieux, voire la citation d’une belle page que nous ne connaissions pas, et dont nous sommes heureux dans la suite de nous rappeler que nous en devons la connaissance à une magnifique demeure seigneuriale. Nous sommes alors, pour avoir trouvé la préface de Balzac à _la Chartreuse_ ou des lettres inédites de Joubert, tentés de nous exagérer le prix de la vie que nous y avons menée et dont nous oublions, pour cette aubaine d’un soir, la frivolité stérile.”

By naming Madame de Guermantes I have given myself occasion to remark one of M. Proust’s most extraordinary gifts—his power of realising a character. Without being presented one would know the incomparable duchess should one ever have the happiness of meeting her at a party; and I should recognise one of her good things (“Oriane’s latest”) were it repeated in the train. When some one quotes a saying by Dr. Johnson or the Duke of Wellington we need not verify by the book; their characters are so vivid to us, and they speak so much in character, that their phrases have the ring of familiar voices. It is the same with Madame de Guermantes. How many authors have achieved this miracle? Shakespeare, of course, who achieved all miracles, can distinguish even his minor characters. In a tipsy dialogue between Mrs. Quickly and Doll Tearsheet you can tell by the mere phrasing, by the particular way in which a bawdy joke is turned, which of the ladies is speaking. And who else can do it? Not Balzac, I am sure. Dickens, some one will say. Yes, but only by giving us for characters blatant caricatures. We all know the devil by his tail.

So far I have not contested the common opinion that Proust is the poet of the _beau monde_; I have sought only to show that, if he were, it would not follow that he was either a snob or a reactionary: it would not follow that he was taken in. In fact, the subject of Proust’s epic is the whole of French life as it was from forty to twenty years ago—a subject of which the _faubourg_ is but a part. He gives us a full-length picture of family life in the provinces and of a quasi-intellectual circle in Paris, of the “seaside girls” who run about with Albertine, and a _croquis_ of “county society”; best of all, perhaps, he gives us exquisite landscapes and still-lifes. And surely at this time of day it ought not to be necessary to remind people, especially French people, that any subject, provided the artist is thoroughly possessed by it, is as good as any other; that the forms and colours, and their relations, of a pot of flowers or fruit on a table, passionately apprehended, are capable of inspiring as sublime a work of art as the Madonna or the Crucifixion. If the _faubourg_ above all things fascinated Proust, that I suspect was because in it Proust saw a subject proper only to the touch of a master psychologist. “Society,” he saw, is a hierarchy without official grades or badges: unlike the army, with its colonels, majors, and captains; unlike the navy, with its admirals, captains, and commanders; it resembles rather a public school or small college. It is a microcosm in which people are moved up and down, in and out, by mysterious and insensible powers; in which they are promoted and degraded by a breath of fashion blowing they know not whence; in which they obey slavishly unwritten laws, as absolute as those of the Medes and Persians: powers these, none of which they themselves can apprehend, but of which some can be surprised by sensibilities in their way as delicate and subtle as those which know when a lady changes her _sachets_ and can distinguish the _bouquet_ of Léoville from Larose. Herein perhaps, rather than in its social prestige, lay the charm of the _faubourg_ for Marcel Proust.

One word more: a translation may do very well, but we can have no English Proust. No Englishman, I mean, writing in English, would be allowed to publish in England so complete a picture of life. Wherefore as a novel- and play-writing nation we have lost pride of place, and cannot hope to regain it till we have set our laws in order. An artist must be possessed by his subject; but the English novelist who is inspired by his sense of contemporary life is not allowed to express that by which he is possessed. Fielding, Jane Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, James, and Hardy, English novelists who took contemporary life for their province, all had something to say which may have shocked or hurt but which the age did not prohibit. They were, therefore, as free to express the best that was in them as Balzac, Zola, or Proust. But to-day our subtlest and most active minds, affected maybe, consciously or unconsciously, by modern psychological discoveries, are concerned, so far as they are concerned with life at all, with certain aspects of it, with certain relations, of which they may not treat freely. Their situation is as painful and absurd as would have been that of men of science who, towards the close of last century, should have been allowed to make no use of Darwin’s contribution to biology. The gap between first- and third-rate minds has been growing alarmingly wide of late. Proust moves in a world unknown almost to the intellectual slums, or to those intellectual lower middle classes from which are drawn too many of our magistrates, judges, and legislators. These lag behind, and impose their veto on the sincere treatment of English manners by a first-rate English artist. And perhaps the best tribute which English admirers of Proust could pay his memory would be to agitate for the repeal of those absurd and barbarous laws which make an English _Recherche du Temps Perdu_ impossible.

CLIVE BELL.

XI

_THE SPELL OF PROUST_

The magic ring which Marcel Proust drew, almost literally, round his readers—since it is in the circle of “_le temps perdu_” which is to become “_le temps retrouvé_” that he sets us and himself—seemed early in the incantation to betray a break whereby we might escape, did we so wish, from his compulsion. For, enthralled as we had been by _Swann_, there was a sensible relaxing of the spell with the _Jeunes Filles_. Not in the opening pages, where the atmosphere that we had rapturously learned to breathe was potent still with its intoxicating magic; but when we came to Balbec, and the group of seaside girls began to show as rulers of the scene, there was scarce one of us who did not own to disappointment. _La petite bande_, more actual and, on the surface, more alluring than _la petite phrase_ in the sonata of Vinteuil, yet wholly failed to charm the sense or the imagination as the enigmatic little group of notes had charmed. We heard, and we responded to, the cry: “Those flappers are so tedious!”—and as Albertine grew more and more significant, _we_ grew more sceptical, and told ourselves that we could step outside the ring at any moment we might choose. But somehow, that emancipative moment never came. Despite the blinding print of the edition in a single volume—print that must have permanently injured our collective sight—there always was a reason why we could not break away. And finally, we realised that we were wrong, and that the spell had but become more absolute, in both the shades of meaning in that word. For now that some of the more normal baits for interest were laid aside, we could perceive that here was sorcery in its pure state—the thing itself, stripped of all seeming. Now we could not so easily, or easily at all, “say why” when the profane inquired of us what the magic was—why, reading Proust, we were so interested. We were _not_ so interested; we could scarcely say, or even think, that we were “interested” any more.

The miracle had happened. We were spellbound, for good and all, within the magic ring. We had forgotten what we used to mean when, in the world outside, we had said “dull”; for here was much that was not merely dull but positively soporific, yet our eyes were glued upon the baleful page, and any interruption seemed a challenge to the occult power that held us. Something was risked, immeasurably worth our while, did we fall short of the required submission.... This was because we now could feel more deeply the extent of what the wizard meant to do with us. We were not passively to stand within the circle. We were, with him, to pace it mystically round, while time ran back to fetch the Age of Gold. _Le temps passé_ would be transmuted, imperceptibly, into _le temps retrouvé_; and our aid was necessary to the necromancer’s full success. With this flattering divination there began a new excitement, different in action from the old; for soon, instead of rushing at the latest Marcel Proust directly we had bought it, we indeed did buy it, but re-read the earlier volumes first. Here was the very magic ring itself, drawn round our fireside chair! The latest Proust lay ready to our hand, slim or substantial token of the power still unspent; but lest we should have missed a single letter in the charm, we spelt it through devoutly once again; and, in the spelling, found how many an indication subtly skilled at once to warn and to escape us till the moment of reflection or re-reading! And as a consequence, we now perceived so intricate and exquisite a “pattern in the carpet” as could make the newest volume into something more exciting for anticipation even than we had dreamed.

This is the proof, to me, of Marcel Proust’s (as one might think, indisputable; yet by a few disputed) genius. The _Swann_ book contains the largest share of interest, no doubt—that merer, franker kind of interest which other books can give us in a hardly less degree. But in the later volumes, as they “grow on” us, there is far more (if also there is less) than this; and it is through the more that we come finally to clear perception of Proust’s purpose and his mastery. For in these less immediately attractive volumes we are conscious of an ever-growing sense of the significance so deeply interfused through the whole work. He had by then become absorbed to such degree in his interpretation of the microcosm which he saw as a sufficing symbol of the irony, absurdity, and the incessant alternation, “intermittency,” and travail of the consciousness of man, that we are sensible, as he proceeds, of powers more transcendent than the highest of the writer’s mere accomplishment—stupendous as that is in Proust, who could “write” anything he chose, and chose to write so many things, from satire that is blighting in its smiling subtlety (so muted as to mock the hasty ear!), to lyric flower-pieces like the paradisal hawthorn-hedge in _Swann_, and the unrivalled comments upon buildings, pictures, fashions in dress and manners (who will forget the monocles at the big evening-party at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s?), books, the drama, even photographs! In the great elegiac glories of the death of Bergotte (not yet published in book-form), and of that _grand’mère_ who is the _motif_, as it were, in the symphonic composition of the unnamed central figure’s personality, Proust sounded chords which lay till then beyond the compass of his readers’ hearing, but were then revealed to sense that shall not lose them while it yet survives.

But over all this virtuosity there rules a mightier gift—the master-gift of insight. Proust, one could say, “knows everything,” in the restricted meaning of the words. No bent, no twist, of modern thought escapes him; yet, as one reader writes to me, “there is no dead psychology”—no case stretched on a Procrustean bed, with all that does not fit lopped comfortably, and discomfortingly, off. He, unlike Nature, is most careful of the single life. If ever we had questioned that—and we had very little questioned it—the Charlus portrait answered us: that masterpiece of the undaunted, following eye and mind. Proust leads us with him on this journey of the visual and mental powers; we are no more involuntarily drawn on than he has been into the state of an astounded fondness and appreciation for the maudlin, overbearing, ludicrous, yet constantly pathetic or superb old “invert.” We are offended personally by the insolences of his favourites; the tears in his unholy eyes can well-nigh wet our own ... and this though, with the master’s hand upon our shoulders, we have gone through every phase of the degrading intimacies, seen and heard the tragi-comic outbursts of the princely victim, every now and then remembering his “rank” and seeking to restore the true relation between him and those whom in his view he honours by his merest word, yet who are his disdainful masters through his helpless depravation.

If there were nothing else than Charlus in the books, Proust must be given pride of place among the masters. But with the plenitude there is—what must we give? More than a master, one would say, a writer cannot be. Yet in the image here suggested of the magic circle, there is possibly the one thing more that causes Proustians to divide their reading lives into the time before and after they have read these books. No spell had yet been worked on us of potency like this; for though we are pent within the ring, we move within it too—the world revolves, for us, as in a crystal held beneath our gaze by one who, moving with us, will reveal the secret hidden not there only but in our own dim sense, when at the last _le temps perdu_ shall have become _le temps retrouvé_.

ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE.

XII

_A NEW PSYCHOMETRY_[3]

[Footnote 3: Reprinted from _The Times_ of Wednesday, November 29, 1922. _The Times_ had been almost alone among English newspapers in giving “publicity” to the death of Marcel Proust in its issue of Monday, November 20.—C.K.S.M.]

To judge from the newspapers, there have been tremendous “crises” in public affairs during the last few days: the triumph of Fascismo in Italy, the Lausanne Conference, the English elections. But to many of us the great events are merely spectacular; they pass rapidly across the screen, while the band plays irrelevant scraps of syncopated music, and seem no more real than any other of the adventures, avowedly fictitious, that are “filmed” for our idle hours. They don’t, save on reflection and much diligent pondering of leading articles, come home to our business and bosoms. But one announcement in _The Times_ of last Monday week shocked many of us with a sudden, absurdly indignant bewilderment, like a foul blow: I mean the death of Marcel Proust. It is not only absurd but impious to be indignant with the decrees of Fate. The wise throughout the ages have prescribed for us our proper behaviour in the face of such an event; and most of us find the prescription quite useless. But, on the death of an author, there is this peculiar consolation that never fails: his work lives absolutely unaffected by his death.

... We can light the lamp, make a clear fire, and sit down to the book with the old thrill. There is only the thought that we must be content with what we have, that we are to get no more from that hand. With Marcel Proust, however, it seems that we are spared even that mortification. He has left behind him the completion of _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_. This is great news. The announcements from the press of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ will be eagerly awaited. Even a new Anatole France is not so important an event.

It has been said that Proust will go down to posterity as the author of one book. This is only true in a literal sense. For the many volumes of _A la Recherche_ that already crowd the shelves are several “books” in one. It is not a “story,” but a panorama of many stories. Indeed, who reads Proust for the “story”? His book is really a picture of the modern world and the modern spirit, and that is its peculiar fascination for us. There are “morbid” elements in it, to be sure—you cannot read a page without seeing that it must have been written by some one who was anything but a normal, healthy human being, and it is not for nothing that _The Times_[4] has compared him to Petronius Arbiter. But one of the advantages of this hyperaesthesia is a heightened sensibility for _everything_, the perception and accurate notation of innumerable details in thought and feeling that escape a normal observer.

[Footnote 4: _The Times_, Monday, November 20, 1922: “Marcel Proust: An Appreciation.” (From a Correspondent.)—C.K.S.M.]

Take, for instance, the account of the famous author “Bergotte.” Proust, little more than a child, but already his ardent reader, meets him at luncheon. And, first, the boy’s imagined author, a “langoureux vieillard,” has to give place to the reality, much younger, a little man with a chin-tuft and a nose like a snail-shell. Then comes an elaborate description of his spoken diction, pronunciation, etc., and an attempt to reconcile these with the peculiarities of his written style. Special “notes”:

Doubtless, again, so as to distinguish himself from
the previous generation, too fond as it had been of
abstractions, of weighty commonplaces, when Bergotte
wished to speak favourably of a book, what he would bring
into prominence, what he would quote with approval, would
always be some scene that furnished the reader with an
image, some picture that had no rational significance.
“Ah, yes!” he would exclaim, “it is quite admirable! There
is a little girl in an orange shawl. It is excellent!” Or
again, “Oh, yes, there is a passage in which there is a
regiment marching along the street; yes, it is excellent!”
As for style, he was not altogether of his time (though
he remained quite exclusively of his race, abominating
Tolstoy, George Eliot, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky), for the
word that always came to his lips when he wished to praise
the style of any writer was “mild.” “Yes, you know, I like
Chateaubriand better in _Atala_ than in _René_;
he seems to me to be milder.” He said the word like a
doctor who, when his patient assures him that milk will
give him indigestion, answers: “But, you know, it’s very
mild.” And it is true that there was in Bergotte’s style
a kind of harmony similar to that for which the ancients
used to praise certain of their orators in terms which we
now find it hard to understand, accustomed as we are to our
own modern tongues, in which effects of that kind are not
sought.[5]

[Footnote 5: [Transcriber’s Note: See next footnote.]]

It is, further, explained how this man of genius came to pay court to his intellectual inferiors with an eye on the Academy, and how, while his own private morals were bad, the moral tone of his books was of the loftiest.

Perhaps it is only in really vicious lives that the moral
problem can arise in all its disquieting strength. And of
this problem the artist finds a solution in the terms not
of his own personal life but of what is for him the true
life, a general, a literary solution. As the great Doctors
of the Church began often, without losing their virtue, by
acquainting themselves with the sins of all mankind, out of
which they extracted their own personal sanctity, so great
artists often, while being thoroughly wicked, make use of
their vices in order to arrive at a conception of the moral
law that is binding upon us all.[6]

[Footnote 6: I am glad that the acknowledgement here of Mr. Walkley’s courtesy in allowing me to substitute my version for his of these two passages from _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ gives me an opportunity to acknowledge also my borrowing and to congratulate him upon the discovery of the word “mild”—“une véritable trouvaille,” as Norpois would undoubtedly have called it.—C.K.S.M.]

Nor is the portrait finished yet. Bergotte was at bottom a man who really loved only certain images and to compose and paint them in words. Had he had to defend himself before a tribunal, in spite of himself he would have chosen his words, not for their effect on the judge, but in view of images which the judge would certainly never have perceived.

It is this extraordinarily minute “psychometry” that is the peculiar mark of Proust’s work. The sensations Swann derives from a sonata of Vinteuil’s, the special quality of Elstir’s pictures of the sea-shore, the effect of afternoon light in the church at Combray, glimpses of military life at Doncières, with its contrast of the First Empire aristocracy and the _ancien régime_,—it is the first time that such things as these have been put into words and brought intimately home to you. Then there are the studies of _le grand monde_—the “gilded saloons,” as Disraeli would have called them, of the Guermantes and the rest. Here you have a picture of the Faubourg Saint-Germain that is as true, you are assured, as Balzac’s was false.[7]

[Footnote 7: In his article, published in _The Times_ three weeks later, on December 20, 1922, Mr. Walkley replied to a criticism of this statement:—“The old complaint of ‘misrepresenting’ modern France is now beginning to be heard about the great novelist just dead, Marcel Proust. An eminent English novelist tackles me about this. He says Proust is not entitled to the highest rank in literature because his representation of French society is partial only, and therefore unfair; that he writes only of the Faubourg Saint-Germain set, which stands for the ‘dead’ France, and not of the ‘live’ people, soldiers and statesmen and others, who have made and are making France to-day. And he contrasts him with Balzac, who aimed at giving a panorama of the whole social scheme. Well, it strikes me as an unfortunate comparison. Balzac’s _Comédie Humaine_ was like Zola’s _Rougon-Macquart Family_, a mere afterthought, a specious formula designed to suggest continuity and completeness in what was merely casual and temperamental. As a ‘representation of France’ it is not to be taken seriously; what it represents—like any other work of art—is its author’s genius. His men of action, his statesmen, his men of affairs, are, frankly, preposterous. Proust never set out to ‘represent’ France; he represented the side of its social life that happened to interest him. What he did magnificently represent was the hitherto unexplored in human nature and the human mind. As M. Jacques Rivière says of him in the current _Nouvelle Revue Française_, ‘The discoveries he has made in the human mind and heart will one day be considered as capital, and of the same rank as those of Kepler in astronomy, Claude Bernard in physiology, or Auguste Comte in the interpretation of the sciences.’ That strikes me as better work than producing a portrait-group of ‘Modern France,’ with General Lyautey arm-in-arm with Marshal Foch, and M. Clemenceau putting on his celebrated pearl-grey gloves.”—C.K.S.M.]

I confess “ma mère” and “ma grand’mère” bore me. And there is just a little too much of “le petit clan.” But in this vast banquet of modern life and thought and sensation there is plenty of room to pick and choose. Since Henry Bernstein first mentioned Proust’s name to me in the year before the war I have returned again and again for a tit-bit to that feast. Proust is dead; but we can still go on enjoying his work. In that sense the cry of the child in Maeterlinck’s _Oiseau Bleu_ is true enough: “There is no death.”

A.B. WALKLEY.

XIII

_PROUST AND THE MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS_[8]

[Footnote 8: Reprinted from _The Times Literary Supplement_ of Thursday, January 4, 1923, where this article followed an English version of a formal tribute to Marcel Proust, signed by nineteen English men and women, which appeared (in French) in the special number of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ for January 1923. Mr. Middleton Murry had already written, at greater length (too great, indeed, for reproduction in this volume), on Marcel Proust in _The Quarterly Review_ for July 1922.—C.K.S.M.]

For Englishmen Marcel Proust has already become one of the great figures of modern literature. The feeling is common to many of his readers that in some way his work marks an epoch. What kind of epoch it is harder to say. Is he an end, or a beginning? And, again, yet another question insinuates itself continually as we pass slowly through his long volumes. What precisely—if answers to such questions can be made precise—was his own intention as a writer? Not that it necessarily makes the least difference to his own importance whether he succeeded or failed, whether he was consistent or spasmodic in following out his own plan. But we, at least, should be the happier for some indication of the thread to follow. For there comes a time in the reading of a long novel—and _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ is surely one of the longest—when we feel the need to stand aside, to contemplate it as a whole, to grasp the pattern, to comprehend the general vision of life on which its essential individuality depends. Only thus, it seems, can we really make it our own.

In this respect Marcel Proust’s book may be fairly said to bristle with difficulties. Its obvious theme, its surface intention, as we perceive it in the brilliant opening pages of _Du côté de chez Swann_, is the presentation by an adult man of his memories of childhood. We feel, though with peculiar qualifications to which we must return, that we are on the threshold of a spiritual autobiography; we are to be the enchanted witnesses of the unfolding and growth of a strangely sensitive consciousness. But no sooner are we attuned to the subtleties of this investigation and have accustomed ourselves to Proust’s breathless, tiptoe following of the faint and evanescent threads of association: no sooner have we begun to take a deep and steady breath of the rich fragrance of Aunt Léonie’s house at Combray, and to imbibe the luxurious atmosphere of the old town, whose shifting colours are as opulent as the lights of the windows in the church round which it clings: no sooner have we prepared ourselves to watch with absorbed interest the process of growth of a mind nurtured in this almost intoxicating soil,—than the thread is abruptly snapped. We do not complain at the moment, for the episode _Amour de Swann_ is the highest sustained achievement of Proust as a prose-writer. Perhaps the devouring passion of love—“Venus toute entière à sa proie attachée”—the smouldering, torturing flame of unsatisfied passion which by the law of its own nature can never be satisfied, has never been so subtly and so steadily anatomised before. Perhaps it has been more wonderfully presented, but never more wonderfully analysed.

It is not surprising that in the fascination of this intolerable and unwonted history, in which every psychological subtlety of the author is properly and beautifully dominated by the tragic theme, we forget that this is not at all the thing we went out to see. The boy whose history we have been following could not have known of Swann’s discomfiture before he was a man. It has happened, indeed, before the narrative of _Du Côté de chez Swann_ opens, before the bell of the garden-gate tinkles and Swann takes his place with the family on the verandah; but it can have no place in the story of the boy’s development until he is old enough to understand it. In other words, the angle of presentation has abruptly changed. Into a narrative concerned, as we imagine, solely with what a boy knew and felt, and how he knew and felt it, is suddenly thrust an episode of which he could have known nothing at all.

These two sections of the book—composing the yellow-backed _Du Côté de chez Swann_ with which Proust’s admirers had so long to remain content—were at once baffling and fascinating. Moreover, they do actually contain Proust’s very finest work: he was never again to sustain himself on this level for so long. But, considered in themselves (and there were three or four years in which we had no choice but to consider them so), they could be made to yield a pattern. On the one side was the vague and heroic figure of Swann as he loomed on the extreme horizon of the boy’s world, the mysterious visitant whose appearances in the household made an agony of his solitary going to bed; on the other was the Swann of reality, the reserved, silent, ineffably refined darling of the _beau monde_, who held his teeth clenched, like the Spartan, while the fox gnawed at his vitals. The contrast, the building up of the character of Swann, as it were, from two sides at once, was the quite sufficient motive of the book. But, so understood, it was Swann’s book, not the boy’s.

But the next volumes brought us back to the boy’s history. As we read of his love affair with Albertine, his adoration of the Duchesse de Guermantes, his adventures in the rarefied atmosphere of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it became more and more evident that _Amour de Swann_ was, in spite of its beauty and power, only an irrelevant interlude, after all. And in the narrative of the boy’s stay in the hotel at Balbec came frequent hints that the key to the story as a whole might be found in the earlier emphasis upon the manner in which the author went in search of the past. At the beginning of _Du Côté de chez Swann_ he had been at pains to give us not merely his results but his method also. He was a grown man, suddenly waking from sleep, trying to locate himself once more in his room, and his room in the world; and something familiar in this strange sensation had reminded him of his sensations in his bedroom as a child. But “reminded” is altogether too coarse and summary a word for the delicate process on which his researches depended; rather it is that a familiarity in the strange sensation whispers to him that it holds a secret for him if he will only explore it. It conceals something that he must know. Again, it is the vague familiarity of the faint flavour of a _madeleine_ dipped in tea, which the grown man is eating in his mother’s company, which ultimately yields up the magnificently vivid picture of Combray and Aunt Léonie. These sensations, or presentiments of the past, come to the boy also. There is, for example, the beautiful account of his mysterious excitement at a sight of the spire and towers of Martinville church when he is driving home in Dr. Percepied’s carriage. Again he has the sense of memories he cannot grasp, of a secret and mystical message that he cannot make his own; it is the occasion of his first attempt at writing.[9] These premonitions become more frequent during his stay with his grandmother at the Balbec hotel. Then the sudden sight of a tiny clump of trees seen while he is driving with the Marquise de Villeparisis makes him feel that they are stretching out imploring arms towards him in a mute appeal. If he can divine what they have to tell him (they seem to say) he will touch the secret of “la vraie vie,” of life indeed. And then the writer warns us that the story of his search to make this secret his own is to come, and that this premonition of a task to be accomplished was to haunt him throughout his life.

[Footnote 9: In another and rather complicated sense this is a presentiment of the future. The spires appear to have been those of Caen, the carriage a motor car, the year evidently much later. The original article will be found in _Pastiches et Mélanges_, on pp. 91 to 99.—C.K.S.M.]

At this moment Marcel Proust came nearest, we may believe, to revealing to the reader the hidden soul of his own book. There is room for different interpretations, of course, and it is admitted that in any case he was frequently distracted from whatever plan he had by his delight in a pure description of the human comedy from the angle most familiar to him. Nevertheless, we are persuaded that Proust brought to the exact and intimate analysis of his own sensations something more than the self-consciousness of talent—some element, let us say, of an almost religious fervour. This modern of the moderns, this _raffiné_ of _raffinés_, had a mystical strain in his composition. These hidden messages of a moment, these glimpses and intuitions of “la vraie vie” behind a veil, were of the utmost importance to him; he had some kind of immediate certainty of their validity. He confessed as much, and we are entitled to take a man so reticent at his word.

We may take him at his word also when he acknowledges that the effort to penetrate behind the veil of these momentary perceptions was the chief interest of his life. The first of these illuminations—the vision of Martinville spire—had taken shape in a piece of writing which he gives us. We suspect that the last did also, and that its visible expression is the whole series of volumes which, after all, do bear a significant title—_A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_; we suspect that the last page of the last volume would have brought us to the first page of the first, and that the long and winding narrative would finally have revealed itself as the history of its own conception. Then, we may imagine, all the long accounts of the Guermantes’ parties and the extraordinary figure of M. de Charlus would have fallen into their places in the scheme, as part of the surrounding circumstances whose pressure drove the youth and the man into the necessity of discovering a reality within himself. What he was to discover, when the demand that he should surrender himself to his moments of vision became urgent and finally irresistible, was the history of what he was. Proust—and amid the most labyrinthine of his complacent divagations into the _beau monde_ a vague sense of this attends us—was much more than a sentimental autobiographer of genius; he was a man trying to maintain his soul alive. And thus, it may be, we have an explanation of the rather surprising fact that he began his work so late. The two volumes which went before _Du Côté de chez Swann_[10] were not indeed negligible, but they were the work of a dilettante. The explanation, we believe, is that in spite of his great gifts Proust was a writer _malgré lui_; he composed against the grain. We mean that had it been only for the sake of the satisfaction of literary creation, he probably would not have written at all. It was only when writing presented itself to him as the only available means for getting down to the bedrock of his own personality, as the only instrument by which his _fin-de-siècle_ soul—the epithet is, in his case, a true definition—could probe to something solid to live by, that he seriously took up the pen. It was the lance with which he rode after the Grail—“la vraie vie.”

[Footnote 10: _I.e._, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_, published in 1896, and _Pastiches et Mélanges_, which, strictly speaking, did not come as a volume until after _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_, in the spring of 1919. But of the _Pastiches_ some at least had appeared in the _Figaro_ in 1908 and 1909, while the _Mélanges_ date even further, and include the introductions to Proust’s translations of Ruskin, _La Bible d’Amiens_ (1904) and _Sésame et les Lys_ (1906).—C.K.S.M.]

Proust at the first glance looks wholly different from a man who rides off on a desperate adventure. There seems to be no room for desperate adventures in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It is hardly congruous to some senses to ride through the waste land in a sixty horse-power limousine. Nevertheless, it can be done. The outward and visible sign is, not for the first time, different from the inward and spiritual grace.

So by a devious path we return to our first question. Proust marks an epoch. What kind of epoch? Is it an end or a beginning? And the answer we have reached is the answer we might have expected in the case of a figure so obviously considerable. Proust is both an end and a beginning. More an end than a beginning, perhaps, if we have regard to the technique and texture of his work. In the art of literature itself he opens up no new way. And, in the deeper sense, he indicates a need more than he satisfies it. The modern mind, looking into the astonishing mirror which Proust holds up to it, will not see in it the gleam of something to live by; but it will see, if it knows how to look, an acknowledgement of that necessity and a burning desire to satisfy it. By so much Marcel Proust marks a beginning also. It is the flame of this desire which smoulders always through his book, and at times breaks out; it is this which makes it his own, and this which gives it, in the true sense, style.

J. MIDDLETON MURRY.

XIV

_PROUST’S WAY_

I went Proust’s way for the first time one rainy winter evening five years ago, waiting in her warm boudoir for a foolish Society woman to come in and give me tea and an introduction to the new popular novelist. But she had not come in, and on a table near me, by the powder-puff and the cigarettes, I found an author who had not yet swept the board as he has since done.

A re-bound copy of _Du Côté de chez Swann_, from that accredited emporium which Thomas Carlyle founded for the reading of the Intelligentzia, the London Library, lay, dull and forbidding, among the brocade and tinsel of the bibelots. Surprised, I opened it, intending, as one idly may during these interludes, to take good-humoured cognisance of the nature of another’s chosen study. At once I became involved in an _enchevêtrement_, a leash of moods, a congeries of complexes, of crankinesses, all that goes to make up a man—Swann. There was no breathlessness, no sense of hurry, yet it was “good going.” There were hairbreadth but quite actual escapes from bathos, ugly grazings averted, artistic difficulties compounded: this author backed his sentences in and out of garages like a first-class motorist....

And, suddenly, the rumble of an earthly car sounded and my hostess and the popular author came in and tea was a weariness, for Tante Léonie—we all have our Tantes Léonie—had entered into my knowledge, and the Lady of the Cattleyas was just beginning to cause Swann, whom I already loved, to suffer after the way of all men who want anything very badly. We never mentioned the shabby, black book I had put down, but began to discuss, in this Kensington drawing-room, Freud, much as people discussed music in the drawing-room of Mme. Verdurin in Paris, and in very much the same style as if Madame Odette de Crécy had taken a hand, and Swann, blinded by love, had listened to her.

But I—I had become acquainted with Proust and had gained a world—one of the worlds in which, through a book, we can go to live awhile whenever we choose.

Proust! What is Proust? This is the cry of the Carping Uninitiated among us. To such persons, constitutionally unwilling to be instructed, one replies that Proust is a fashion—a disease—and that a Proustian, so-called, is an Opium-Eater. But, to those who know him and love him, he is a wise and cunning Prospero whose wand is style, and Combray an enchanted island—Ferdinand, not much Miranda, but Caliban, drunken sailors and all.