Part 1

MARCEL PROUST _AN ENGLISH TRIBUTE_

_By_ JOSEPH CONRAD ARNOLD BENNETT ARTHUR SYMONS COMPTON MACKENZIE CLIVE BELL W.J. TURNER CATHERINE CARSWELL E. RICKWORD VIOLET HUNT RALPH WRIGHT ALEC WAUGH GEORGE SAINTSBURY L. PEARSALL SMITH A.B. WALKLEY J. MIDDLETON MURRY STEPHEN HUDSON G.S. STREET ETHEL C. MAYNE FRANCIS BIRRELL REGINALD TURNER DYNELEY HUSSEY

_Collected by_ C.K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF

NEW YORK THOMAS SELTZER 1923

_Printed in Great Britain All Rights Reserved_

THE CONTENTS

I. Introduction: _by_ C.K.S.M. page 1

II. A Portrait: _by_ STEPHEN HUDSON 5

III. The Prophet of Despair: _by_ FRANCIS BIRRELL 12

IV. A Sensitive Petronius: _by_ RALPH WRIGHT 31

V. The “Little Proust”: _by_ L. PEARSALL SMITH 52

VI. A Reader’s Gratitude: _by_ COMPTON MACKENZIE 59

VII. Gilberte: _by_ ALEC WAUGH 63

VIII. Proust’s Women: _by_ CATHERINE CARSWELL 66

IX. The Best Record: _by_ REGINALD TURNER 78

X. A Foot-note: _by_ CLIVE BELL 83

XI. The Spell of Proust: _by_ ETHEL C. MAYNE 90

XII. A New Psychometry: _by_ A.B. WALKLEY 96

XIII. Proust and the Modern Consciousness: _by_ J. MIDDLETON MURRY 102

XIV. Proust’s Way: _by_ VIOLET HUNT 111

XV. M. Vinteuil’s Sonata: _by_ DYNELEY HUSSEY 117

XVI. A Note on the Little Phrase: _by_ W.J. TURNER 124

XVII. Proust as Creator: _by_ JOSEPH CONRAD 126

XVIII. A Moment to Spare: _by_ G. SAINTSBURY 129

XIX. A Real World in Fiction: _by_ G.S. STREET 131

XX. The Birth of a Classic: _by_ EDGELL RICKWORD 134

XXI. A Casuist in Souls: _by_ ARTHUR SYMONS 138

XXII. The Last Word: _by_ ARNOLD BENNETT 144

MARCEL PROUST

I

_INTRODUCTION_

The death of Marcel Proust in Paris on November 18, 1922, and the manner in which the news of his death was, by no means numerously, reported in London, brought into question the extent of his rumoured rather than defined influence over readers in this country. This question it was natural that I should ask myself, for I had recently published an English version of the first part of his great novel, _Du Côté de chez Swann_, and was then about half way through the translation of its sequel, _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_. The writer of a savage, though evidently sincere attack on Proust which a London newspaper published within forty-eight hours of his death seemed to assume that he had already a considerable (if misguided) following here, and it occurred to me that I might obtain, from writers who were my friends, and from others who had expressed their admiration of Proust in English periodicals, a body of critical opinion similar to that which, I learned, was being collected in Paris by the editor of the _Nouvelle Revue Française_. To test the worth of my idea, I began with the seniors. Mr. Saintsbury—who (in this respect only) might have served as the model for the Marquis de Norpois, whose promptness in answering a letter “was so astonishing that whenever my father, just after posting one to him, saw his handwriting upon an envelope, his first thought was always one of annoyance that their letters must, unfortunately, have crossed in the post; which, one was led to suppose, bestowed upon him the special and luxurious privilege of extraordinary deliveries and collections at all hours of the day and night”—replied at once, and Mr. Conrad soon followed, with letters of which each correspondent authorised me to make whatever use I chose.

So, I must add, did Mr. George Moore, but in a letter expressive only of his own inability to stomach Proust, the inclusion here of which, even although it might make this volume a prize to collectors of first editions, would compel the excision of the word “tribute” from title-page and cover. Mr. Walkley, the doyen of English Proustians as he is of dramatic critics, and Mr. Middleton Murry put me at liberty to use articles which they were publishing in _The Times_ and its _Literary Supplement_; Mr. Stephen Hudson, the most intimate English friend of Proust’s later years, consented to write a character sketch; and on this base my cenotaph was soon erected.

That it is not loftier must be laid to my account. I have doubtless refrained from approaching many willing contributors, from a natural and, I trust, not blameworthy reluctance to interrupt busy persons with whom I am not acquainted. At the same time, I found among those whom I did approach a widespread modesty which prevented a number of them from contributing opinions which would have been of the greatest critical importance. “We do not,” was the general answer, “know enough of Proust to venture to tackle such a theme.” This and the pressure of other work have kept silent, to my great regret, Mrs. Virginia Woolf, Miss Rebecca West, Mr. J.C. Squire, Mr. Desmond MacCarthy, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, Mr. Aldous Huxley, and that most reluctant writer Mr. E.M. Forster.

Their reticence should be my model. Although I cannot pretend not to have made a certain study of the text of Proust (probably the most corrupt text of any modern author that is to be found), the close scrutiny required of a translator has inevitably obstructed my view of the work as a whole. The reader of the following pages may, however, be assured that this is my private loss and will in no way be made his.

I have to thank all the contributors for the spontaneous generosity with which they have collaborated and have placed their work at my disposal. I have also to thank the proprietors and editors of the following newspapers and reviews for permission to reprint articles which have appeared in their pages: _The Times_ for Mr. Walkley’s; _The Times Literary Supplement_ for Mr. Middleton Murry’s; _The Saturday Review_ for Mr. Hussey’s; _The New Statesman_ for Mr. Pearsall Smith’s; _The Saturday Westminster Gazette_ for that of Mr. Arthur Symons; and _The Nineteenth Century and After_ for Mr. Ralph Wright’s.

C.K.S.M.

II

_A PORTRAIT_

In trying to represent the personality of a friend to those who do not know him, one has in mind, though one may not deliberately use, a standard of reference with which he can be compared or contrasted.

In the case of Proust no such standard is available, and I find myself driven back to the frequently used but unilluminating word unique for want of a better expression. This uniqueness consisted less, I think, in his obvious possession to an outstanding degree of gifts and charms than in his use of them. Others probably have been and are as wise, witty, cultured, sympathetic, have possessed or possess his conversational powers, his charm of manner, his graciousness. But no one I have ever known combined in his own person so many attractive qualities and could bring them into play so spontaneously. Yet, while his use of these powers resulted in his eliciting the utmost fruitfulness from social intercourse, there was an impalpable objectivity about him, an aloofness felt rather than observed. It was as though the personality revealed at the particular moment was but one of many, while the dominant consciousness lay behind them, preserving its complete inviolability. It was, I believe, in the depth and capacity of this ultimate consciousness that his uniqueness lay, as it is there that the source of his creative power and sensibility is to be found.

It seems to me that the essential element of this ultimate ego in Proust was goodness. This goodness had nothing ethical in it, must not be confounded with righteousness; and yet, seeking another word to define its nature, purity is the only one that occurs to me. There was in him the fundamental simplicity which was typified by Dostoevsky in Myshkin, and out of it grew the intellectual integrity which governed and informed his philosophy.

He possessed that rarest gift of touching everyday people, things, and concerns with gold, imparting to them a vital and abiding interest. Anything and everything served as a starting-point, nothing was too minute to kindle idea and provoke suggestive utterance. He could do this because he was himself the most interesting of men, and because Life was one long exciting adventure to him wherein nothing was trivial or negligible. It was not that loving beauty he desired nothing else, and was seeking an aesthetic disguise for the ugly, the sordid, or the base. On the contrary, he recognised that these also are of the stuff of which humanity is made, and that truth and beauty are as often as not masked by their opposites. In him extremes were not only reconciled but united. Supremely conscious and utterly unegotistical, one may look in vain in his work for a trace of vanity, of self-glorification, or even self-justification. He is intensely concerned with his own consciousness, he is never concerned with himself. I can think of no conversation in any of his books in which he takes other than a minor part, and of very few in which he takes any part at all. He is wholly taken up with the thing in itself, whatever it may be, regarding his consciousness as an instrument of revelation apart from himself. And as he shows himself in his books, so he was in life.

In reply to a letter in which, expressing my disappointment at not seeing him on a certain occasion, I went on to say that, much as I loved his books, I would rather see him and hear him talk than read them, he wrote me:

Entre ce qu’une personne dit et ce qu’elle extrait par la méditation des profondeurs où l’esprit nu gît, couvert de voiles, il y a un monde. Il est vrai qu’il y a des gens supérieurs à leurs livres mais c’est que leurs livres ne sont pas des _Livres_. Il me semble que Ruskin, qui disait de temps en temps des choses sensées, a assez bien exprimé une partie au moins de cela.... Si vous ne lisez pas mon livre ce n’est pas ma faute; c’est la faute de mon livre, car s’il était vraiment un beau livre il ferait aussitôt l’unité dans les esprits épars et rendrait le calme aux cœurs troubles.

His immersion in the subject of conversation or inquiry was complete; nothing else existed until he had got to the bottom of it. But his world was echoless; the voice never repeated itself, and banality could not enter in, because neither formula nor classification existed for him. Just as in his eyes one particular water-lily in the Vivonne was different from any other water-lily, so each fresh experience was an isolated unit complete in itself and unlike all other units in the world of his consciousness. His mind, so far from being overlaid by obliterating layers of experience, was as a virgin soil which by some magic renews itself after each fresh crop has been harvested. This power of mental renewal pervades and gives a peculiar freshness to all that he has written. It is in essence a youthful quality which was very marked in his personality. He was penetrated with boyish eagerness and curiosity, asked endless questions, wanted always to know more. What had you heard, what did you think, what did they say or do, whatever _it_ was and whoever _they_ were. And there was no denying him this or anything he wanted; he must always have his way—he always did have it, till the end of his life. And the great comfort to those who loved him is that till the last he was a glorious spoilt child. As Céleste says in _Sodome_:

On devrait bien tirer son portrait en ce moment. Il a tout des enfants. Vous ne vieillirez jamais. Vous avez de la chance, vous n’aurez jamais à lever la main sur personne, car vous avez des yeux qui savent imposer leur volonté....

This was the same Céleste who devoted her life to his service for many years and was with him to the last. After his death she wrote of him: “Monsieur ne ressemblait à personne. C’était un être incomparable—composé de deux choses, intelligence et cœur—et quel cœur!”

Knowing the intensity of his interest in and sympathy with humble lives, the suggestion of snobbishness in connexion with such a man is ridiculous. Proust, like all great artists, needed access to all human types. It is one of the drawbacks of our modern civilisation that the opportunities for varied social intercourse are limited and beset with conventional prejudices. No man went further than he did to surmount these. He knew people of the “monde” as he knew others. As he writes in _Sodome_:

Je n’avais jamais fait de différence entre les ouvriers, les bourgeois et les grands seigneurs, et j’aurais pris indifféremment les uns et les autres pour amis avec une certaine préférence pour les ouvriers, et après cela pour les grands seigneurs, non par goût, mais sachant qu’on peut exiger d’eux plus de politesse envers les ouvriers qu’on ne l’obtient de la part des bourgeois, soit que les grands seigneurs ne dédaignent pas les ouvriers comme font les bourgeois, ou bien parce qu’ils sont volontiers polis envers n’importe qui, comme les jolies femmes heureuses de donner un sourire qu’elles savent accueilli avec tant de joie.

His friends were in fact of all classes, but his friendship was accorded only on his own terms, and a condition of it was the capacity to bear hearing the truth. His friends knew themselves the better for knowing him, for he was impatient of the slightest insincerity or disingenuousness and could not tolerate pretence. Lies tired him. In a letter he alluded thus to one whom we both knew well:

Ce que je lui reproche, c’est d’être un menteur. Il a fait ma connaissance à la faveur d’un mensonge et depuis n’a guère cessé. Il trouve toujours le moyen de gâter ses qualités par ces petits mensonges qu’il croit l’avantager—tout petits et quelquefois énormes.

Proust’s insistence on truthfulness and sincerity caused him more than once to renounce lifelong associations. His sensibility was so delicate that a gesture or a note in the voice revealed to him a motive, perhaps slight and passing, of evasion or pretence. He was exacting about sincerity only. In other respects his tolerance was so wide that a hard truth from his lips, so far from wounding, stimulated. To his friends he was frankness itself, and spoke his mind without reserve. I once asked him to tell me if there were not some one, some friend of his, to whom I could talk about him. There was so much I wanted to know, and on the all too rare occasions when he was well enough to see me there was never time. In answer to this he wrote me:

Si vous désirez poser quelque interrogation à une personne qui me comprenne, c’est bien simple, adressez-vous à moi. D’ami qui me connaisse entièrement je n’en ai pas.... Je sais tout sur moi et vous dirai volontiers tout; il est donc inutile de vous désigner quelque ami mal informé et qui dans la faible mesure de sa compétence cesserait de mériter le nom d’ami s’il vous répondait.

Thus in his words we reach the final conclusion that, even if Proust’s friends had the power of expressing all that they feel about him, they would still be “mal informés,” and would have to return to him for that deeper knowledge which only he could impart. As to this, there is his further assurance that his work is the best part of himself. Providentially, he was spared until that work was done and “Fin” on the last page was written by his own hand.

STEPHEN HUDSON.

III

_THE PROPHET OF DESPAIR_

It is the privilege of those known as the world’s greatest artists to create the illusion of dragging the reader through the whole mechanism of life. Such was pre-eminently the gift of Shakespeare, whose tragedies appear to be microcosms of the universe. Such a gift was that of Balzac, for all his vulgarities and absurdities, if we may treat the whole _Comédie Humaine_ as a single novel. Such, in his rare moments of prodigal creation, was the power of Tolstoy, whom Proust in some ways so much resembles. Such is the gift of Proust in his astonishing pseudo-autobiography, _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_. For it is the sense of imaginative wealth and creative facility that is the hallmark of the first-rate genius, who must never appear to be reaching the end of his tether, but must always, on the contrary, leave the impression of there being better fish in his sea than have ever come out of it.

The outpouring of the romantic school of authors, their neglect of form, their absence of critical faculty, their devastating facility, have made this truth disagreeable and even doubtful to many minds, who feel more in sympathy with the costive author of _Adolphe_ than with the continual flux of Victor Hugo. Yet if Victor Hugo be a great author at all, as he evidently is, it is because of this very fertility that we so much dislike; and if Benjamin Constant be not a great artist, as he evidently is not, the reason must be sought in the absence of fertility, though we may find its absence sympathetic; while this same fertility, which is the whole essence of Balzac, is rendering him formidable and unattractive to a generation of readers. Now, Proust was eminently fertile, and, within the limits imposed by his own delicate health, he could go on indefinitely, so profound and so all-embracing was his interest in human beings and human emotions. But he was fertile in a new way. Not for him was the uncritical spate of nineteenth-century verbiage. His intellectual integrity, of which M.C. Dubos has written so well in his _Approximations_, always compelled him to check and ponder every move upon the chessboard of life, every comment on human feelings. For Proust is the latest great prophet of sensibility, and it is bearing this in mind that we can trace the intellectual stock of which he comes.

One of the great landmarks in French literature is pegged out for us by the Abbé Prévost’s translation of _Clarissa Harlowe_, which burst on the new sentimental generation, starved on the superficial brilliance of the Regnards and their successors, with all the energy of a gospel. The adoration with which this great novel was received by the most brilliant intellects of eighteenth-century France seems to-day somewhat excessive, however deep be our sympathy with the mind and art of Richardson. Remember how Diderot speaks of him: Diderot the most complete embodiment of the eighteenth century with its sentimental idealism and fiery common sense—the man in whom reason and spirit were perfectly blended, the enthusiastic preacher of atheism and humanity:

O Richardson, Richardson! homme unique à mes yeux. Tu seras ma lecture dans tous les temps. Forcé par les besoins pressants si mon ami tombe dans l’indigence, si la médiocrité de ma fortune ne suffit pas pour donner à mes enfants les soins nécessaires à leur éducation je vendrai mes livres, mais tu me resteras; tu me resteras sur le même rayon avec Virgile, Homère, Euripide, et Sophocle. Je vous lirai tour à tour. Plus on a l’âme belle, plus on aime la vérité, plus on a le goût exquis et pur, plus on connaît la nature, plus on estime les ouvrages de Richardson.

The new sentimental movement, developed to such a pitch of perfection by the author of _Clarissa Harlowe_, was one of enormous value to life and art. But inevitably it was pushed much too far, and the novels of the _école larmoyante_ are now well-nigh intolerable, even when written by men of genius like Rousseau, whose characters seem to spend their lives in one continual jet of tears in a country where the floodgates of ill-controlled emotion are never for an instant shut.

Rousseau had one great pupil, a great name in the history of the French novel, Stendhal. But he wore his Rousseau with a difference. For Rousseau represented, in his novels, but one side of the eighteenth century, the sentimental; but there was another, the scientific—and the life work of Stendhal consisted in an untiring effort to combine the two. For what was the avowed ambition of the self-conscious sentimentalist that was Stendhal? Soaked in the writings of Lavater, de Tracy, and the Scotch metaphysicians, crossed with a romantic passion for Rousseau and the Elizabethan drama, he wished to be as _sec_ as possible, and boasted that he read a portion of the _Code Civil_ every day—a document Rémy de Gourmont may be right in calling diffuse, but which is certainly not romantic. Nourished on Shakespeare, Rousseau, and de Tracy, Stendhal became one of the first completely modern men, who study the working of their minds with the imaginative enthusiasm, but also with the cold objectivity, of a scientist dissecting a tadpole. Like the young scientist in Hans Andersen, his first instinct was to catch the toad and put it in spirits; but in this case the toad was his own soul. Stendhal was too much of a revolutionary in writing ever to have been completely successful; but the immensity of his achievement may be gauged by the fact that parts of _L’Amour_, and still more of _Le Rouge et le Noir_, are really of practical value to lovers, who might profit considerably in the conduct of their affairs by a careful study of Stendhal’s advice, if only they were ever in a position to listen to reason. Now, this is something quite new in fiction, and would have astonished his grandfather Richardson. Proust is in turn the intellectual child of Stendhal, and has bespattered _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ with expressions of admiration for his master. In truth, he has taken over not only the methods but the philosophy of his teacher. It will be remembered that Stendhal insists in his analysis of _L’Amour-Passion_ that crystallisation can only be effected after doubt has been experienced. So, for Proust, love, the _mal sacré_ as he calls it, can only be called into being by jealousy, _le plus affreux des supplices_. We can want nothing till we have been cheated out of getting it; whence it follows that we can get nothing till we have ceased to want it, and in any case, once obtained, it would _ipso facto_ cease to be desirable. Hence Man, “how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god,” is doomed by the nature of his being to unsatisfied desire and restless misery, till Proust becomes, as I have called him above, the prophet of despair. He is a master of the agonising moments spent hanging in vain round the telephone, the weeks passed waiting for letters that never come, and the terrible reactions after one’s own fatal letter has been irrevocably posted and not all the jewels of Golconda can extract it from the pillar-box. For how does the hero of his novels finally pass under the sway of Albertine? Through agony caused by the cutting of an appointment.