Chapter XXI: A Casuist in Souls: by ARTHUR SYMONS 138 (4)

The Opium Trance, indeed, offers some parallel. Dr. Hochst tells us that the wily subconsciousness, at odds with its earthly environment, is able to invoke and maintain an attitude of benign stupor towards the universe, holding it, as it were, at arm’s length, able to subsist in tranquil abstraction from chill and hateful circumstance. And one can easily imagine some triply disillusioned soul, rebuffed of love and ambition and the fount of life itself, entering on a course of the Master, content to live, lullabyed by the slight movement as of flickering woodland leaves, warmed by the soft light that falls on grey cathedral walls and white, dusty roads, quietly appreciative of the Master’s passionless, infallible display of the complications and unconscious betrayals of their ego by Françoise and Tante Léonie, Odette and the Duchess; intrigued by his fine sense of social values shown by the apt posing of the social Inferiorities of the Verdurin _ménage_ in Paris against the ineffable Aristocracies ensconced in their old château, Guermantes Way—and so on, through terms of months or even years, till the stupor, benign in character, ends at last in the ordinary manner, the patient dying, still _en plein Proust_, with, perhaps, a volume or two unread, to the good, for there are, or are to be, a good many.

The normal, healthy person, still active, still complying with life, finds it more than soothing to commit himself to this peaceable, effluent mind-flow, a current of thought that has, like life, its eddies, its _transes_, but persists, as must we all who agree with our destinies, in its appointed borders and so gains something of the peace of resignation that Renan speaks of: “_Il n’y a rien de suave comme le renoncement de la joie, rien de doux comme l’enchantement du désenchantement._” For there is, indeed, no joy in all these myriad pages: how could there be, since joy is clear-cut and impermanent and all Proustian values fade and are merged in each other without such a thing as an edge anywhere! The sharp, dramatic point popular novelists excel in would break the spell.

We surrender ourselves to these entrancing _longueurs_; to indescribable sensations that endure. Reading in Proust is, to me, like the long drink of a child whom, by and by, a solicitous elder bids put the cup down ... a gesture that this Master will never make. It is a suave, sensuous pleasure, like stroking the long, rippling beard of Ogier the Dane as he sits, stone-like, in his enchanted castle. It is a patient, monkish task like that of tending with loving, religious husbandry the Holy Rose at Hildesheim, that has gone on growing for four hundred years. It suggests a sense of going on, a promise of a future that may not be so very different, such as we got when our German nurse told us that Grimm’s tale of the man who fell in and was drowned, but, presently, found himself under the still waters of the mere, walking, _langweilig_, in meadows prankt with daisies and buttercups and fat flocks grazing....

Proust translated Ruskin’s _Bible of Amiens_—just the unexpected sort of thing he would do—and one might theorise and hint that his learned appreciation of the beauties that lie within due submission to architectural rules, and acceptance of the limitations and possibilities of shaped stones, have helped to form the backbone of his style. It has the precision and poise of the arch, supported by the virility and integrity of the pillar, with the permitted _fioriture_ of the pinnacle sparingly used, as one sees it in the Norman churches dotted all round about Combray and Balbec. And I am sure his style is the magician’s wand without whose composed and certain wielding we should never have allowed him to lead us, like willing children, through the mazes, winding, twisting, but always planned and in order, of his mind—or Swann’s. And if Swann—remote, withdrawn, half-unsympathetic character that he is—had not been so essentially lovable and had not, while telling us all, succeeded in being at the same time suggestive, we should not have yielded ourselves so utterly to _his_ mind-flow.

Proust made Swann a financier, a Jew, and gave him a German name, because, I think, he wished to indicate to our subconscious judgments a cause of Swann’s curious racial patience, his waiting on and deference to the caprice of others. He allows life “to ride” him, Mme. Verdurin to patronise him, Odette to make him love her: just as the trees let the winds lash their boughs and break them, as rivers, flattened and contradicted by raindrops, flow on all the same under a grey sky. Swann, beautifully groomed as he is, apt for drawing-rooms, and acquainted with dukes and ashamed to say so, is a piece of Nature—Nature whom I always see as an old man working in a field, with a sack over his shoulders, bowed to the elements. For Swann doesn’t act; things happen to him. Even his deep and pertinacious affection is discounted by the inferior object of it. He is the golden mean in man, no more a crank than we would all be if we were rich, with weaknesses that we could, if we would, translate into heroisms. Most cultivated women infallibly must have loved Swann—he is probably, therefore, of the kind that finds only the Odettes of the world to its liking.

VIOLET HUNT.

XV

_M. VINTEUIL’S SONATA_

It has never been published, never, so far as I can ascertain, been performed in any of our concert-halls. Indeed, its largest audience must have been the fashionable one which gathered for the _soirée musicale_ given by the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, when Mme. de Cambremer’s head wagged to its rhythm like a metronome, and the Princesse des Laumes, to show that she was listening, beat time now and again with her fan; but, so as not to forfeit her independence, beat a different time from the musicians’. But most frequently it was to be heard in a piano arrangement played at Mme. Verdurin’s for the benefit of her “little clan,” which then included Odette de Crécy and, for a time, Charles Swann, by a pianist whom Madame had taken under her patronage, declaring that he left Planté and Rubinstein “sitting”; and, later, when she had become Mme. Swann, by Odette herself, when it first came to the notice of that most acute of critics, the narrator in _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_.

But, of course, the boy, as he was then, must have heard a good deal more about the Sonata from Swann, who himself was no mean judge of music, as of painting; though, in his appreciation of the latter art, he does seem to have derived more pleasure from the discovery in an “old master” of a likeness to one of his friends than from the aesthetic merits it might possess. But Swann’s opinion of the Sonata cannot perhaps, for other reasons, be trusted altogether; it was too closely linked up in his mind with certain occurrences in his private life. Yet we can accept the favourable impression it made upon him at a time when he had not met Mme. de Crécy. On that occasion he had appreciated at first “only the material quality of the sounds which the instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon of the violin-part, delicate, unyielding, substantial, and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure in his memory, the phrase or harmony—he knew not which—that had just been played and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power to dilate our nostrils.... Hardly had the delicious sensation which Swann had experienced died away, before his memory furnished him with an immediate transcript, summary, it is true, and provisional, but one on which he had kept his eyes fixed while the playing continued, so effectively that, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer uncapturable. He was able to picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, the strength of its expression; he had before him that definite object which was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished, quite clearly, a phrase which emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound. It had at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt that nothing but this phrase could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire.”

And, though he seems to have failed to make head or tail of the Sonata at that first hearing, that little phrase stuck in his memory. It so haunted him that, when a year later he was sitting beside Odette on Mme. Verdurin’s Beauvais sofa (which his hostess vowed wasn’t to be matched _anywhere_), and heard a high note held on through two whole bars, he foresaw the approach of his beloved phrase and promptly associated it with the woman at his side. In this way it became the symbol of his passion, developed into a Wagnerian _leit-motif_ of his liaison with Odette, until, when they had inevitably quarrelled, it became for him an exquisite anguish to hear. An anguish which the unhappy man had to dissemble from the ironical scrutiny of all those monocles at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party, when “the violin had risen to a series of high notes, on which it rested as though expecting something, an expectancy which it prolonged without ceasing to hold on to the notes, in the exaltation with which it already saw the expected object approaching, and with a desperate effort ... to keep the way open a moment longer, so that the stranger might enter in, as one holds a door open that would otherwise automatically close. And before Swann had had time to understand what was happening, to think, ‘It is the little phrase from Vinteuil’s Sonata. I mustn’t listen!’ all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded, up till that evening, in keeping invisible ... had risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”

But we may find ample corroboration of Swann’s testimony to the excellence of this work in the comments of that acute critic already mentioned. Although he has preferred to remain anonymous himself, it will be convenient for purposes of reference to find him a name, and the name which for some odd reason or other flows from my pen is “Marcel Proust.” Well, this young “Proust,” when he heard Mme. Swann play the Sonata, was much impressed, though he also had some difficulty in grasping the music at first. He goes into the question much more deeply than the dilettante Swann, and begins by asking whether it is not wrong to talk about “hearing a thing for the first time,” when nothing has been understood. The second and third times are from this point of view just as much “first times.” Then he makes the vital discovery that probably what fails us the first time is not our intelligence but our memory. “For our memory,” he says, “compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep dreams of a thousand things and at once forgets them.... Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard two or three times, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and can repeat it by heart next morning.... So, where Swann and his wife could make out a distinct phrase, that was as far beyond the range of my perception as a name which one tries in vain to recall.... And not only does one not seize at once and retain an impression of works that are really great, but even in the content of any such work (as befell me in the case of Vinteuil’s Sonata) it is the least valuable parts that one at first perceives.”[11]

[Footnote 11: [Transcriber’s Note: See next footnote.]]

But “Proust” also carried away from his first hearing the recollection of a phrase; and, since it seems to have been the fate of M. Vinteuil’s work to become implicated in the love affairs of its admirers, we find him at Balbec contemplating his new friend Albertine thus: “I seized the opportunity, while she stood still, to look again and discover once and for all where exactly the little mole was. Then, just as a phrase of Vinteuil which had delighted me in the Sonata, and which my recollection had allowed to wander from the _Andante_ to the _Finale_, until the day when, having the score in my hands, I was able to find it, and to fix it in my memory in its proper place, in the _Scherzo_, so this mole, which I had visualised now on her cheek, now on her chin, came to rest for ever on her upper lip, just below her nose.”[12]

[Footnote 12: Mr. Hussey, whose essay by his kindness and Mr. Filson Young’s I have been enabled to repeat from the _Saturday Review_, has, like Mr. Birrell, authorised the substitution of my version for the original text of these two quotations from _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_.—C.K.S.M.]

And if again it be thought that this association of the music with the critic’s sentiment may have vitiated his judgment, I can only point to the exquisite sensibility of these passages, where music is brought to the touchstone of life, and human experience, in its turn, is elucidated in terms of music. Indeed, this “Proust” shows himself preternaturally sensitive both to musical sounds and to unorganised noises, so that he instinctively registers the pitch of a voice; so that the wall, when rapped by his grandmother, at once assumes for him the resonance of a drum, and her triple knock takes its place automatically in a symphonic scheme; so that the vision of M. de Charlus making somewhat embarrassed conversation with a new acquaintance immediately brings to his mind “those questioning phrases of Beethoven, indefinitely repeated at equal intervals, and destined, after a superabundant wealth of preparation, to introduce a new _motif_, a change of key, or a recapitulation”; and so that the old reprobate’s sudden descent from high dudgeon to docility suggests the performance of “a symphony played through without a break, when a graceful _Scherzo_ of idyllic loveliness follows upon the thunders of the first movement.”

We cannot but regret, then, that this Sonata, which, after reading what “Proust” has to say of it, we seem to know as well as we know César Franck’s or the “Kreutzer,” and which has made a profound impression on persons so different in temperament as Charles Swann and Mme. Verdurin (who could not hear it without crying till she got neuralgia all down her face), should have suffered such neglect at the hands of concert-artists, whose only excuse is, presumably, to throw the blame upon the equal neglect of the publishers.

DYNELEY HUSSEY.

XVI

_THE LITTLE PHRASE_

My only excuse for contributing anything to this collection is that it provides an opportunity to give some information. Readers may want to know whether the Sonata to which Proust refers in _Du Côté de chez Swann_ as being played at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party was wholly an invention of Proust’s, or whether his refined and tortuous dithyrambs on the subject were inspired by an actual Sonata which the dullest may purchase at a Paris shop.

Well, the answer to this hypothetical question, like all real answers to all genuine questions, is “Yes” and “No.” For the Ayes there is the statement by Proust in a letter to a friend printed in the memorial number of the _Nouvelle Revue Française_:[13] “La petite phrase de cette Sonate ... est ... la phrase charmante mais enfin médiocre d’une sonate pour piano et violon de Saint-Saëns....”

[Footnote 13: _Nouvelle Revue Française_, No. 112 (N.S.), January 1923, pp. 201-2. The friend is M. Jacques de Lacretelle.—C.K.S.M.]

Explosion! Thus are our idols shattered! Even Proust’s deprecating “mais enfin médiocre” does not prepare for this shock the sturdy English connoisseur who likes only the best. Proust tells his friend that he can point out the precise passage, which is several times repeated; and adds—cunningly—that its execution was a triumph for Jacques Thibaud.

He continues that, during the same evening, when the piano and violin are described as murmuring like two birds in a dialogue, he was thinking of a sonata by Franck (especially as played by Enesco). The tremolos over the little Saint-Saëns phrase when played at the Verdurins’ were, he says, suggested by the Prelude to _Lohengrin_—he does not tell us, this time, in whose rendering, but that actually they were recalled that evening by a trifle from Schubert. The same evening, he tells us, as a final scrap of information, there was played “un ravissant morceau” for the piano by Fauré.

What are we to make of all this? Well, I am struck by the composite character of Proust’s material. It shows that his art consists in his power of making an exquisite synthesis of his sensibility by reprecipitating his sensations in a more generalised, more abstract form than that in which they came to him.

W.J. TURNER.

XVII

_PROUST AS CREATOR_[14]

[Footnote 14: This is, in fact, an extract from Mr. Conrad’s letter in reply to a request that he would justify the project of this volume by contributing to it.—C.K.S.M.]

. . . . . .

As to Marcel Proust, _créateur_, I don’t think he has been written about much in English, and what I have seen of it was rather superficial. I have seen him praised for his “wonderful” pictures of Paris life and provincial life. But that has been done admirably before, for us, either in love, or in hatred, or in mere irony. One critic goes so far as to say that Proust’s great art reaches the universal, and that in depicting his own past he reproduces for us the general experience of mankind. But I doubt it. I admire him rather for disclosing a past like nobody else’s, for enlarging, as it were, the general experience of mankind by bringing to it something that has not been recorded before. However, all that is not of much importance. The important thing is that whereas before we had analysis allied to creative art, great in poetic conception, in observation, or in style, his is a creative art absolutely based on analysis. It is really more than that. He is a writer who has pushed analysis to the point when it becomes creative. All that crowd of personages in their infinite variety through all the gradations of the social scale are rendered visible to us by the force of analysis alone. I don’t say Proust has no gift of description or characterisation; but, to take an example from each end of the scale: Françoise, the devoted servant, and the Baron de Charlus, a consummate portrait—how many descriptive lines have they got to themselves in the whole body of that immense work? Perhaps, counting the lines, half a page each. And yet no intelligent person can doubt for a moment their plastic and coloured existence. One would think that this method (and Proust has no other, because his method is the expression of his temperament) may be carried too far, but as a matter of fact it is never wearisome. There may be here and there amongst those thousands of pages a paragraph that one might think over-subtle, a bit of analysis pushed so far as to vanish into nothingness. But those are very few, and all minor instances. The intellectual pleasure never flags, because one has the feeling that the last word is being said upon a subject much studied, much written about, and of human interest—the last word of its time. Those that have found beauty in Proust’s work are perfectly right. It is there. What amazes one is its inexplicable character. In that prose so full of life there is no reverie, no emotion, no marked irony, no warmth of conviction, not even a marked rhythm to charm our ear. It appeals to our sense of wonder and gains our homage by its veiled greatness. I don’t think there ever has been in the whole of literature such an example of the power of analysis, and I feel pretty safe in saying that there will never be another.

. . . . . .

JOSEPH CONRAD.

XVIII

_A MOMENT TO SPARE_

I have at last found time, or rather, for it expresses our relations better, Time has been gracious enough at last to find _me_—in regard to _Swann_. It was a new and satisfactory experience. His reality is extraordinary—at least in the main part of the book: I hope for the sake of French upper middle-class society of his day that it is not ordinary in such things as the big dinner scene in vol. ii.[15]

[Footnote 15: _I.e._, of _Du Côté de chez Swann_; the dinner at the Verdurins’ at which Forcheville is present for the first time with the Cottards, Brichot the painter, Swann, and Odette. It is only fair, to both critic and reader, to explain that Mr. Saintsbury had read nothing of Proust save _Swann_, and that only in an inadequate translation. On the other hand, it was as impossible for the editor to contemplate a book of this sort without a promise of collaboration from his old friend and master as it was, at the moment, for the doyen of English (if not of European, which is to say the world’s) critics to qualify himself for saying more than is printed on this leaf.—C.K.S.M.]

Has anybody said that he partakes _both_ of De Quincey and of Stendhal? He does to me, and I’m shot if I ever expected to see such a blend! You see, there is in him on the one hand a double measure of the analytical and introspective power that Beyle’s admirers make so much of; with what they also admire, a total absence of prettification for prettification’s sake. Yet he can be pretty in the very best sense, while Beyle never can, in the best or any other. Then, too, I at least find in him much less of the type-character which, though certainly relieved by individuality in the _Chartreuse de Parme_ and other books (especially _Lamiel_), is still always more or less there. But the oddest and to me the most attractive thing is the way in which he entirely relieves the sense of aridity—of museum-preparations—which I find in Stendhal. And here it is that the De Quincey suggestion comes so unexpectedly in. For Proust effects this miracle by a constant relapse upon—and sometimes a long self-restriction to—a sort of dream element. It is not, of course, the vaguer and more mystical kind that one finds in De Quincey, not that of _Our Ladies of Sorrow_ or _Savannah-la-Mar_, but that of the best parts of _The English Mail Coach_. In fact, it is sometimes Landorian rather than De Quinceyish in its dreaminess. But, however this may be, the dream quality is there, to me, as it is in few other Frenchmen—themselves almost always poets. Now, the worst of the usual realist is that, being blinder than any other heathen in his blindness, he tries to exorcise dream, though sometimes not nightmare, from life. Such a mixture as Proust’s I remember nowhere else.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

XIX

_A REAL WORLD IN FICTION_

My presence among those who are offering a tribute to Marcel Proust would be an impertinence if the request for it had not been continued after I had confessed the poverty of my knowledge. As it is, I may be justified in taking the great pleasure it is to me to testify a sincere admiration, founded on howsoever little experience. I have to read a good deal for my bread, and the reading I can do for pleasure is limited by debility of eyesight; M. Proust’s books are long and in a language I read less easily than my own. So it has happened that so far I have read only the two volumes of a beautifully lucid translation, wonderfully lucid when the delicacy and subtlety of the thoughts translated are considered. I will not say that you can taste a wine without drinking a bottle—the analogy, like most analogies, would be false; I do not doubt that wider study would produce more valuable opinions. Yet my slight study has produced opinions which, I am convinced, further study will only confirm, and it is a pleasure to record them....

We all have our views as to what, for us, distinguishes great fiction from that which is less than great. Mine has always been that it causes me to live in a real world of visible, audible, and intelligible people—a world in which, however novel it may be to start with, I am at home and able, with sureness, to exercise my powers of understanding to the full; this last point matters, for of course the superficial may be superficially alive. No doubt the test is objectively unfair, because the reaction of a writer’s imagination on a reader’s is affected, though not conditioned, as the sympathy between the two is greater or less; but for my own use this test is the most profitable. Tolstoy has done this for me, so has Sterne, so has Miss Austen, so has Thackeray, so have not very many others, and so have not some almost universally acclaimed. Well, M. Proust has done this most considerable service for me, in those two volumes I have read in translation, and I am grateful. I know his hero’s grandfather and grandmother and mother and invalid aunt, and know them well, and my understanding has played with zest and to the limit of its power on the wealth of character revealed to me. M. Swann is of my intimates, and I think I have a perfect comprehension of his Odette. That is the first thing for which I am grateful. The second is the sheer intellectual joy with which, time and again, I came upon an achievement of divination in the subtleties of human emotion which caught one’s breath by its compelling truth. Jealousy of a man for a woman may have been more grandly expressed, but have all the subtleties of its tortuous and agonising course ever been so completely exposed as in the case of M. Swann? Or the feelings of a sensitive and imaginative boy in his first affections?... For these two things I have a sincere gratitude which I propose to increase. But the wretchedness of my present qualifications must terminate my expression of it now.

G.S. STREET.

XX

_THE BIRTH OF A CLASSIC_

The pictures we make, for our own satisfaction, of our actions are generally as remote as the _clichés_ of polite conversation from the psychological processes they pretend to reflect. It is convenient and very often necessary to limit consciousness of an action so that it receives a distinct and recognisable contour. With a certain resemblance to the achievement of the Impressionists, who revealed the fabric of a world worked-over with conceptual images, Proust breaks up the moulds into which our feelings are generally poured. He is curious to note the sensual deceits which agitate the mind no less profoundly than the reality would have done, and to separate the social stratagem (whether that of the Guermantes or of the servants in his own home) from the intention of which it was the paraphrase. He is dissociative only to that extent—a necessary one, since dissimulation is the mind’s first nature. But he is not at all destructive; for an action never really is a separate entity, cut off by crystalline walls from the mother-liquor of our lives. In the style which he created that glittering illusion is re-dissolved into the saturated mental life of which it is an inextricable component.

I know nothing, he says, that can, “autant que le baiser, faire surgir de ce que nous croyons une chose à aspect défini, les cent autres choses qu’elle est tout aussi bien, puisque chacune est relative à une perspective non moins légitime.... Dans ce court trajet de mes lèvres vers sa joue, c’est dix Albertines que je vis.” Not only the coarsening of the grain of the skin seen in this unaccustomed proximity (that would be comparatively insignificant), but the psychological perspective opened by this change in their relations; though Albertine refused his kiss at Balbec, she cannot now prevent him from gathering in one embrace the rose of the past and of the present. For Albertine is not only Albertine “simple image dans le décor de la vie” when later she calls on him in Paris; her image trails the multitudinous sensations of _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_; and though he no longer loves her, the appearances she had for him at Balbec, silhouetted against the sea or sitting with her back to the cliff, bring back with them the influence of that love. We are far from what we believed a thing with a definite appearance, a girl, and perhaps the example may indicate faintly the complexity of Proust’s art. Wishing to convey the shifting aspect of things, or perhaps the composite pile of aspects which represents, at any moment, our realisation of a thing—and as objective description reintroduces the pictorial _cliché_ so far avoided,—he utilises the vast fabric of memory, shot, like iridescent silk, with many indefinable moods. To specify his method more exactly would not at present be easy, nor is there any enjoyment equal to the mere following of this marvellous web into the still obscure future, where half is, to our chagrin partly and to our delight, yet hidden. To the latter, because we have to be patient against our will; to the former, because there is still so much certain pleasure in store, and the excitement of seeing the completed design, whose symmetry so far is only felt, like that of a statue in its shroud before its resurrection, coincide with or contradict our anticipations. There is a delicious state (owing not a little of its charm to our knowledge of its transience) in which a book, having shaken off the first fever of novelty, is in a condition to be most artfully savoured, and at length. The classic features will never be dearer to us than while they are still flushed with contemporaneity. The classics are at least readable in so far as they are modern, but the modern, once firmly on his pedestal, is not at all approachable. So it is a great and marvellous privilege to be awake to this exquisite dawn, at the moment this many-leaved bloom is suspended in all its freshness which to-morrow—

To-morrow will find fallen or not at all:

fallen, if the worst comes to the worst (as we have heard it always does), to a greatness in its decay and neglect more moving than the spick-and-span of a smart little subaltern of immortality. It is impossible to imagine how this titanic fragment can be trundled from age to age; nor is the future likely to have much time to spare from the production of domestic utensils which are so badly made that they must be continually replaced. _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ is not one of those things which are replaced, like the novel of the moment, but exactly what part of it is most likely to be saved the present cannot decide. There will always be some to follow the whole sweep of the Master’s gesture, which evokes the hours of adolescence flowering in the shade of girlhood and rebuilds the tormented cities of the plain; now stooping to dissect a snob or soaring to stroke a horizon, but never theatrical and never grandiose. Perhaps in the ray of this most intimate limelight we draw the greater part of our pleasure from the recognition of our own movements; the heirs of our sensibility will find there the original of many impulses which they accept as part of human nature.

EDGELL RICKWORD.

XXI

_A CASUIST IN SOULS_

Pater, who desired to find everywhere forces producing pleasurable sensations, “each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind,” says: “Few artists, not Goethe nor Byron even, work quite clearly, casting off all _débris_, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and transformed.” Has the heat of Proust’s imagination fused and transformed his material as Balzac and Rodin transformed and fused theirs? Are his characters creations? Has he the strange magical sense of that life in natural things, which is incommunicable? I think not; there is too much _débris_ in his prose which he has not cast off.

Proust’s books are the autobiography of a sensitive soul, for whom the visible world exists; only, he could never say with Gautier, “I am a man for whom the visible world exists”; for in this famous phrase he expresses his outlook on life, and his view of his own work: Gautier, who literally discovered descriptive prose, a painter’s prose by preference; who, in prose and in verse alike, is the poet of physical beauty, of the beauty of the exterior of things. Proust, with his adoration of beauty, gives one an equal sense of the beauty of exterior things and of physical beauty; with infinite carefulness, with infinite precautions, he gives one glimpses of occult secrets unknown to us, of our inevitable instincts, and, at times, of those icy ecstasies which Laforgue reveals in _Moralités légendaires_. Only, not having read books of mediaeval magic, he cannot assure us that the devil’s embraces are of a coldness so intense that it may be called, by an allowable figure of speech, fiery.

In his feverish attempt to explain himself to himself, his imaginary hero reminds me of Rousseau, who, having met Grimm and vexed Voltaire, was destined by his febrile and vehement character to learn in suffering what he certainly did not teach in song; who, being avid of misunderstandings, was forced by the rankling thorns of his jealousy to write his _Confessions_, in which he unburdens himself of the exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, driven, in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people—a coward before his own conscience. There is no cowardice in the conscience of Proust’s hero; his utter shameless sincerity to the naked truth of things allows him “avec une liberté d’esprit” to compete, near the end of the last volume, in his unveiling of M. de Charlus, with the outspokenness of Restif de la Bretonne in _Monsieur Nicolas_.

Some of the pages of _Sodome_ might have been inspired by Petronius. The actual fever and languor in the blood: that counts for so much in Petronius’s prose, and lies at the root of some of his fascinations. He is passionately interested in people, but only in those who are not of the same nature as he is: his avid curiosity being impersonal. Some of Proust’s curiosity is not so much vivid as impersonal. Petronius—like the writer I refer to—is so specifically Latin that he has no reticence in speaking of what he feels, none of that unconscious reticence in feeling which races drawn farther from civilisation have invented in their relations with nature. This is one of the things which people mean when they say that Petronius’s prose is immoral. So is that of Proust. Yet, in the prose of these writers, both touched with the spirit of perversity, the rarest beauty comes from a heightening of nature into something not quite natural, a perversity of beauty, which is poisonous as well as curious.

Proust has some of the corrupt mysticism of Huysmans, but not so perilous as his; nor has he that psychology which can be carried so far into the soul’s darkness that the flaming walls of the world themselves fade to a glimmer; he does not chronicle the adventures of this world’s Vanity Fair: he is concerned with the revelation of the subconscious self; his hero’s confessions are not the exaltation of the soul. He is concerned, not so much with adventures as with an almost cloistral subtlety in regard to the obscure passions which work themselves out, never with any actual logic. With all his curiosity, this curiosity never drives him in the direction of the soul’s apprehension of spiritual things. He does, at times, like Mallarmé, deform ingeniously the language he writes in; and, as in most of these modern decadents, perversity of form and perversity of manner bewilder us in his most bewildering pages.

I find to my surprise that a French critic, Carcassonne, compares Proust with Balzac. As an observer of society, yes; as a creator, no. “Never,” he writes, “since Stendhal and Balzac has any novelist put so much reality into a novel. Stendhal, Balzac: I write those great names without hesitation beside that of Marcel Proust. It is the finest homage I can render to the power and originality of his talent.” During Balzac’s lifetime there was Benjamin Constant, whose _Adolphe_ has its place after _Manon Lescaut_, a purely objective study of an incomparable simplicity, which comes into the midst of those analysts of difficult souls—Laclos, who wrote an unsurpassable study of naked human flesh in _Les Liaisons dangereuses_; Voltaire, Diderot; Rousseau, in whose _Nouvelle Héloïse_ the novel of passion comes into existence. After these Flaubert, the Goncourts, Huysmans, Zola, Maupassant. I should place Proust with those rare spirits whose _métier_ is the analysis of difficult souls. Browning wrote in regard to his _Sordello_: “My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study; I, at least, always thought so.” This certainly applies to Proust; and, as he seems to me to derive some of his talent from Stendhal and from no other novelist, I can imagine his casuistical and cruel creation of the obscure soul of M. de Charlus in much the same fashion as Stendhal’s when he undresses Julien Sorel’s soul with a deliberate and fascinating effrontery.

Consider the question of Balzac’s style: you will find that it has life, that it has idea, that it has variety; that there are moments when it attains a rare and perfectly individual beauty. To Baudelaire he was a passionate visionary. “In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius.” I have often wondered whether, in the novel, perfect form is a good or even a possible thing if the novel is to be what Balzac made it, history added to poetry. A novelist with style will not look at life with an entirely naked vision.

There is no naked vision in Proust; his vision is like a clouded mirror, in whose depths strange shapes flash and vanish. The only faultless style in French is Flaubert’s; that style, which has every merit and hardly a fault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that of most writers careful of form. I cannot deny that Stendhal has a sense of rhythm: it is in his brain rather than in his dry imagination; in a sterile kind of brain, set at a great distance from the heart, whose rhythm is too faint to disturb it. Still, in Proust’s style there is something paradoxical, singular, caustic; it is coloured and perfumed and exotic, a style in which sensation becomes complex, cultivated, the flower of an elaborate life; it can become deadly, as passion becomes poisonous. “The world of the novelist,” I have written, “what we call the real world, is a solid theft out of space; colour and music may float into it and wander through it, but it has not been made with colour and music, and it is not a part of the consciousness of its inhabitants.” This world was never lived in by d’Annunzio; this world was never entered by Proust. All the same, there is in him something cruel, something abnormal, something subtle. He is a creator of gorgeous fabrics, Babylons, Sodoms. Only, he never startles you, as Balzac startles you.

ARTHUR SYMONS.

XXII

_THE LAST WORD_

Two of the contributors to the stout Proust memorial number of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ remind me that I met Marcel Proust many years ago at a Christmas Eve party given by Madame Edwards (now Madame José Sert) in her remarkable flat on the Quai Voltaire, Paris. (Not that I needed reminding.) With some eagerness I turned up the year, 1910, in my journal. What I read there was this: “Doran came on Sunday night for dinner. We went on to Misia Edwards’ ‘Réveillon,’ and got home at 4 A.M.” Not a word more! And I cannot now remember a single thing that Proust said.

I have, however, a fairly clear recollection of his appearance and style: a dark, pale man, of somewhat less than forty, with black hair and moustache; peculiar; urbane; one would have said, an aesthete; an ideal figure, physically, for Bunthorne; he continually twisted his body, arms, and legs into strange curves, in the style of Lord Balfour as I have observed Lord Balfour in the restaurants of foreign hotels. I would not describe him as self-conscious; I would say rather that he was well aware of himself. Although he had then published only one book, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_—and that fourteen years before—and although the book had had no popular success, Proust was undoubtedly in 1910 a considerable lion. He sat at the hostess’s own table and dominated it, and everybody at the party showed interest in him. Even I was somehow familiar with his name. As for _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_, I have not read it to this day.

A few weeks before his death, while searching for something else in an overcrowded bookcase, I came across my first edition of _Du Côté de chez Swann_, and decided to read the book again. I cared for it less, and I also cared for it more, than in 1913. The _longueurs_ of it seemed to me to be insupportable, the clumsy centipedalian crawling of the interminable sentences inexcusable; the lack of form or construction may disclose artlessness, but it signifies effrontery too. Why should not Proust have given himself the trouble of learning to “write,” in the large sense? Further, the monotony of subject and treatment becomes wearisome. (I admit that it is never so distressing in _Swann_ as in the later volumes of _Guermantes_ and of _Sodome et Gomorrhe_.) On the other hand, at the second reading I was absolutely enchanted by some of the detail.

About two-thirds of Proust’s work must be devoted to the minutiæ of social manners, the rendering ridiculous of a million varieties of snob. At this game Proust is a master. (Happily he does not conceal that, with the rest of mankind, he loves ancient blood and distinguished connections.) He will write you a hundred pages about a fashionable dinner at which nothing is exhibited except the littleness and the _naïveté_ of human nature. His interest in human nature, if intense and clairvoyant, is exceedingly limited. Foreign critics generally agree that the English novelist has an advantage over the French in that he walks all round his characters and displays them to you from every side. I have heard this over and over again in conversation in Paris, and I think it is fairly true, though certainly Balzac was the greatest exponent of complete display. Proust never “presents” a character; he never presents a situation: he fastens on one or two aspects of a character or a situation, and strictly ignores all the others. And he is scarcely ever heroical, as Balzac was always; he rarely exalts, and he nearly always depreciates—in a tolerant way.

Again, he cannot control his movements: he sees a winding path off the main avenue, and scampers away further and further and still further, merely because at the moment it amuses him to do so. You ask yourself: He is lost—will he ever come back? The answer is that often he never comes back, and when he does come back he employs a magic but illicit carpet, to the outrage of principles of composition which cannot be outraged in a work of the first order. This animadversion applies not only to any particular work, but to his work as a whole. The later books are orgies of self-indulgence; the work has ruined the _moral_ of the author: phenomenon common enough.

Two achievements in Proust’s output I should rank as great. The first is the section of _Swann_ entitled _Un amour de Swann_. He had a large theme here—love and jealousy. The love is physical and the object of it contemptible; the jealousy is fantastic. But the affair is handled with tremendous, grave, bitter, impressive power. The one fault of it is that he lets Swann go to a _soirée musicale_ and cannot, despite several efforts, get him away from it in time to save the interest of the situation entire. Yet in the _soirée musicale_ divagation there are marvellous, inimitable things.

The second achievement, at the opening of _Sodome et Gomorrhe_, is the psychological picture of the type-pederast. An unpromising subject, according to British notions! Proust evolves from it beauty, and a heartrending pathos. Nobody with any perception of tragedy can read these wonderful pages and afterwards regard the pervert as he had regarded the pervert before reading them. I reckon them as the high-water of Proust.

Speaking generally, Proust’s work declined steadily from _Swann_. _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ was a fearful fall, and as volume followed volume the pearls were strung more and more sparsely on the serpentine string. That Proust was a genius is not to be doubted; and I agree that he made some original discoveries in the by-ways of psychological fiction. But that he was a supreme genius, as many critics both French and English would have us believe, I cannot admit.

ARNOLD BENNETT.

THE END

_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

[Transcriber’s Notes:

In two quotations from Proust’s _À la recherche du temps perdu_, words are missing, rendering the quotations unintelligible. The missing words, in brackets below, were supplied based on the authoritative French edition (Gallimard, Bibliothêque de la Pléiade, 1988, vol. III).

Je n’avais [jamais] fait de différence entre les ouvriers

si loin qu’on allât dans [ses] effets d’art raffiné

Other obvious printer errors have been corrected without note.]