Part 2

Comme chaque fois que la porte cochère s’ouvrait, la concierge appuyait sur un bouton électrique qui éclairait l’escalier, et comme il n’y avait pas de locataires qui ne fussent rentrés, je quittai immédiatement la cuisine et revins m’asseoir dans l’antichambre, épiant, là où la tenture un peu trop étroite qui ne couvrait pas complètement la porte vitrée de notre appartement, laissait passer la sombre raie verticale faite par la demi-obscurité de l’escalier. Si tout d’un coup, cette raie devenait d’un blond doré, c’est qu’Albertine viendrait d’entrer en bas et serait dans deux minutes près de moi; personne d’autre ne pouvait plus venir à cette heure-là. Et je restais, ne pouvant détacher mes yeux de la raie qui s’obstinait à demeurer sombre; je me penchais tout entier pour être sûr de bien voir; mais j’avais beau regarder, le noir trait vertical, malgré mon désir passionné, ne me donnait pas l’enivrante allégresse que j’aurais eue, si je l’avais vu, changé par un enchantement soudain et significatif, en un lumineux barreau d’or. _C’était bien de l’inquiétude, pour cette Albertine à laquelle je n’avais pensé trois minutes pendant la soirée Guermantes!_ Mais, réveillant les sentiments d’attente jadis éprouvés à propos d’autres jeunes filles, surtout de Gilberte, quand elle tardait à venir, _la privation possible d’un simple plaisir physique me causait une cruelle souffrance morale_.

Indeed, happiness in love is by nature impossible, as it demands an impossible spiritual relationship.

If we thought that the eyes of a girl like that were merely two glittering sequins of mica, we should not be athirst to know her and to unite her life to ours. But we feel that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due solely to their material composition; that it is, unknown to us, the dark shadows of the ideas that the creature is conceiving, relative to the people and places that she knows—the turf of racecourses, the sand of cycling tracks over which, pedalling on past fields and woods, she would have drawn me after her, that little peri, more seductive to me than she of the Persian paradise—the shadows, too, of the home to which she will presently return, of the plans that she is forming or that others have formed for her; and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. I knew that I should never possess this young cyclist if I did not possess also what was in her eyes. And it was consequently her whole life that filled me with desire; a sorrowful desire _because I felt that it was not to be realised_, but exhilarating, because what had hitherto been my life, having ceased suddenly to be my whole life, being no more now than a little part of the space stretching out before me, which I was burning to cover and which was composed of the lives of these girls, offered me that prolongation, that possible multiplication of oneself, which is happiness. And no doubt the fact that we had, these girls and I, not one habit, as we had not one idea, in common, was to make it more difficult for me to make friends with them and to please them. But perhaps, also, it was thanks to those differences, to my consciousness that there did not enter into the composition of the nature and actions of these girls a single element that I knew or possessed, that there came in place of my satiety a thirst—like that with which a dry land burns—for a life which my soul, because it had never until now received one drop of it, would absorb all the more greedily in long draughts, with a more perfect imbibition.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mr. Birrell, whose essay, though first printed in _The Dial_, was written for inclusion in this volume, has kindly consented to my substituting for the original text my own versions of this and the following quotations from _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ and _Du Côté de chez Swann_ respectively.—C.K.S.M.]

Proust, having thus reduced all human society to misery, builds upon the ruins his philosophy of salvation: Only by much suffering shall we enter into the Kingdom of Heaven—that is to say, shall we be enabled to see ourselves solely and simply as members of the human race, to perceive what is essential and fundamental in everybody beneath the trappings of manners, birth, or fortune, learn to be really intelligent. Love and jealousy alone can open to us the portals of intelligence. Thus, in the opening pages of _Du Côté de chez Swann_, the poor little boy, who, because M. Swann is dining with his parents, cannot receive in bed his mother’s kiss, starts on the long spiritual journey which is to run parallel to that of the brilliant, unhappy _mondain_ guest. Miserable at being left alone, he desperately sends down to his mother an agonised note by his nurse, and in his agitation he hates Swann, whom he regards as the cause of his misery, and continues to reflect:

As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as himself; to him, that anguish which lies in knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow—to him that anguish came through Love, to which it is in a sense predestined, by which it must be equipped and adapted; but when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses one’s soul before Love has yet entered into one’s life, then it must drift, awaiting Love’s coming, vague and free without precise attachment, at the disposal of one sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety or affection for a comrade. And the joy with which I first bound myself apprentice, when Françoise returned to tell me that my letter would be delivered, Swann, too, had known well that false joy which a friend can give us, or some relative of the woman we love, when on his arrival at the house or theatre where she is to be found, for some ball or party or first night at which he is to meet her, he sees us wandering outside, desperately awaiting some opportunity of communicating with her.

“We brought nothing into the world,” remarked the first Christian Stoic, “and it is certain we shall take nothing out of it.” He might have made an exception for our personality, that enormous anonymity, unmalleable as granite and unchanging as the ocean, which we brought along with us from a thousand ancestors and shall carry unaltered to the grave. Swann and little Proust, both endowed with sensibility, could shake hands with each other across the generations: all the experiences of one, all the innocence of the other, were as nothing beside that similarity of temperament which calls to us irrevocably, as Christ called to Matthew at the receipt of custom, and bids us share with our friend the miseries of the past and the terrors of the future.

Proust’s youth was spent in Paris during that period when France was spiritually and politically severed by the _Affaire Dreyfus_, and for him the _Affaire_ becomes the touchstone of sensibility and intelligence. To be a Dreyfusard means to pass beyond the sheltered harbour of one’s own clique and interest into the uncharted sea of human solidarity. Hard indeed is the way of the rich man, the aristocrat, the snob, or the gentleman, who wishes to find salvation during the _Affaire_. He must leave behind him taste, beauty, comfort, and education, consort, in spirit at least, with intolerable Jews, fifth-rate politicians, and insufferable _arrivistes_, before worthily taking up the burden of human misery and routing the forces of superstition and stupidity. And there is only one school for this lesson, the school of romantic love—that is to say, of carking jealousy, in the throes of which all men are equal. Little Proust himself, his bold and beautiful friend the Marquis de Saint-Loup, the eccentric and arrogant M. de Charlus, even the stupid high-minded Prince de Guermantes, who all know the meaning of romantic love, as opposed to the facile pleasure of successive mistresses, will eventually, be it only for a short moment, triumphantly stand the test. But Saint-Loup’s saintly mother, Mme. de Marsantes, the rakish Duc de Guermantes and his brilliant, charming, but limited wife, will never put out to sea on the ship of misery, bound for the ever-receding shores of romantic love and universal comprehension. They will never risk their lives for one great moment, for the satisfaction of unbounded passion. Swann tortured and fascinated by his flashy _cocotte_, little Proust lacerated by the suspected infidelities of the niece of a Civil Servant, Saint-Loup in the clutches of an obscure and ill-conditioned actress of budding genius, M. de Charlus broken by the sheer brutality of his young musician: such are the people who have their souls and such are the painful schools in which Salvation is learned—the Salvation that comes from forgetting social prejudice and from not mistaking the “plumage for the dying bird,” from judging people by their intrinsic merit, from making no distinction between servants and masters, between prince and peasant. For, as the author insists with almost maddening iteration, good brains and good breeding never go together: all ultimate talent and perception is with the cads. The price to pay is heavy and incessant. A little easy happiness, a little recovery from hopeless love, a passing indifference to ill-requited affection, can undo all the good acquired by endless misery in the long course of years.

Such I take to be the fundamental thought underlying _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ in its present unfinished state, though we cannot tell what surprises the succeeding volumes (happily completed) may have in store for us. I have insisted, at perhaps excessive length, on the general mental background to this vast epic of jealousy, because it is not very easy to determine. The enormous wealth of the author’s gifts tends to bury the structure under the superb splendour of the ornament. For Proust combines, to a degree never before realised in literature, the qualities of the aesthete and the scientist. It is the quality which first strikes the reader who does not notice, in the aesthetic rapture communicated by perfect style, that all pleasures are made pegs for disillusion. Human beauty, the beauty of buildings, of the sea, of the sky, the beauty of transmitted qualities in families and in the country-side, the beauty of history, of good breeding, of self-assurance—few people have felt these things as Proust. For him the soft place-names of France are implicit with memories too deep for tears. Let us take one passage among many where the aesthete Proust is feeling intensely a thousand faint suggestions:

Quand je rentrai, le concierge de l’hôtel me remit une lettre de deuil où faisaient part le marquis et la marquise de Gonneville, le vicomte et la vicomtesse d’Amfreville, le comte et la comtesse de Berneville, le marquis et la marquise de Graincourt, le comte d’Amenoncourt, la comtesse de Maineville, le comte et la comtesse de Franquetot, la comtesse de Chaverny née d’Aigleville, et de laquelle je compris enfin pourquoi elle m’était envoyée quand je reconnus les noms de la marquise de Cambremer née du Mesnil la Guichard, du marquis et de la marquise de Cambremer, et que je vis que la morte, une cousine des Cambremer, s’appelait Éléonore-Euphrasie-Humbertine de Cambremer, comtesse de Criquetot. Dans toute l’étendue de cette famille provinciale dont le dénombrement remplissait des lignes fines et serrées, pas un bourgeois, et d’ailleurs pas un titre connu, mais tout le ban et l’arrière-ban des nobles de la région qui faisaient chanter leurs noms—ceux de tous les lieux intéressants du pays—aux joyeux finales en _ville_, en _court_, parfois plus sourdes (en _tot_). Habillés des tuiles de leur château ou du crépi de leur église, la tête branlante dépassant à peine la voûte ou le corps-de-logis et seulement pour se coiffer du lanternon normand ou des colombages du toit en poivrière, ils avaient l’air d’avoir sonné le rassemblement de tous les jolis villages échelonnés ou dispersés à cinquante lieues à la ronde et de les avoir disposés en formation serrée, sans une lacune, sans un intrus, dans le damier compact et rectangulaire de l’aristocratique lettre bordée de noir.

Such a passage contains in little the whole history of a nation reflected in the magic mirror of a nation’s country-side, equally desirable for its human suggestiveness and for its pure aesthetic worth.

And here we may pause for a moment to consider one of the most important aspects of Proust’s aesthetic impulse, which is expressed in the title _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_, the Remembrance of Things Past. This is more than the expression of a desire to write an autobiography, to recapitulate one’s own vanishing experience. It is an endeavour to reconstruct the whole of the past, on which the present is merely a not particularly valuable comment. Royalties are interesting because they have retired from business, aristocrats because they have nothing left but their manners; the _bourgeoisie_ still carry with them the relics of their old servility, the people have not yet realised their power; and a social flux results therefrom, the study of which can never grow boring to the onlooker as long as superficially the old order continues, though it represent nothing but an historic emotion. The hero as he winds along the path of his emotional experience from childhood to adolescence is pictured as avid for all these historic sensibilities which find their expression in his early passion for the Guermantes group, the most aristocratic combination of families in France. From his earliest childhood he has dreamed about them, picturing them as their ancestors, whom he has seen in the stained-glass windows of his village church at Combray; till he has woven round them all the warm romance of the Middle Ages, the austere splendours of _Le Grand Siècle_, the brilliant decay of eighteenth-century France. But when he meets them, the courage has gone, the intelligence has gone, and only the breeding remains. It was the greatest historical disillusion in the boy’s life. Yet there still hangs about them the perfume of a vanished social order, and Proust makes splendid use of his hero’s spiritual adventure. As he wanders through the _salons_, fast degenerating into drawing-rooms, he becomes the Saint-Simon of the _décadence_. For Proust can describe, with a mastery only second to that of Saint-Simon himself, the sense of social life, the reaction of an individual to a number of persons, and the interplay of a number of members of the same group upon each other. His capacity for describing the manifold pleasures of a party would have stirred the envy of the great author of _Rome, Naples et Florence_. Many people can only see snobbery in this heroic effort to project the past upon the screen of the present. Yet the author is too intelligent and honest not in the end to throw away his romantic spectacles. The _Côté de Guermantes_ cannot be permanently satisfying. Again bursts in the philosophy of disillusion. When he has obtained with immense labour the key to the forbidden chamber, he finds nothing but stage properties inside.

But this poet of political, economic, and social institutions is also the pure poet of Nature in another mood:

Là, où je n’avais vu avec ma grand’mère au mois d’août que les feuilles et comme l’emplacement des pommiers, à perte de vue ils étaient en pleine floraison, d’un luxe inouï, les pieds dans la boue et en toilette de bal, ne prenant pas de précautions pour ne pas gâter le plus merveilleux satin rose qu’on eût jamais vu, et que faisait briller le soleil: l’horizon lointain de la mer fournissait aux pommiers comme un arrière-plan d’estampe japonaise; si je levais la tête pour regarder le ciel, entre les fleurs qui faisaient paraître son bleu rasséréné, presque violent, elles semblaient s’écarter pour montrer la profondeur de ce paradis. Sous cet azur, une brise légère, mais froide, faisait trembler légèrement les bouquets rougissants. Des mésanges bleues venaient se poser sur les branches et sautaient entre les fleurs indulgentes, comme si c’eût été un amateur d’exotisme et de couleurs, qui avait artificiellement créé cette beauté vivante. Mais elle touchait jusqu’aux larmes, parce que, si loin qu’on allât dans ses effets d’art raffiné, on sentait qu’elle était naturelle, que ces pommiers étaient là en pleine campagne comme les paysans, sur une grande route de France. Puis aux rayons du soleil succédèrent subitement ceux de la pluie; ils zébrèrent tout l’horizon, enserrèrent la file des pommiers dans leur réseau gris. Mais ceux-ci continuaient à dresser leur beauté, fleurie et rose, dans le vent devenu glacial sous l’averse qui tombait: c’était une journée de printemps.

But so wide-minded is this lyric poet who can speak with the voice of Claudel and of Fustel de Coulanges, that he is also perhaps the coldest analyst who has ever devoted his attention to fiction. His knife cuts down into the very souls of his patients, as he calls into play all the resources of his wit, animosities, sympathy, and intelligence. He is a master of all the smaller nuances of social relations, of all the half-whispered subterranean emotions that bind Society together while Society barely dreams of their existence.

It is also worth remark that Proust is the first author to treat sexual inversion as a current and ordinary phenomenon, which he describes neither in the vein of tedious panegyric adopted by certain decadent writers, nor yet with the air of a showman displaying to an agitated tourist abysses of unfathomable horror. Treating this important social phenomenon as neither more nor less important than it is, he has derived from it new material for his study of social relations, and has greatly enriched and complicated the texture of his plot. His extreme honesty meets nowhere with more triumphant rewards. It is by the splendid use of so much unusual knowledge that Proust gains his greatest victories as a pure novelist. Royalty, actresses, bourgeois, servants, peasants, men, women, and children—they all have the genuine third dimension and seem to the reader more real than his own friends. The story is told of an English naval officer that he once knocked down a Frenchman for casting doubt on the chastity of Ophelia. It is to the credit of Shakespeare’s supreme genius that our sympathies are with the naval officer, for Shakespeare’s characters, too, are as real to us as our parents and friends and more real than our relations and our acquaintances. But to how few artists can this praise be given, save to Shakespeare and to Tolstoy! Yet to Proust it can be given in full measure. To read _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ is to live in the world, at any rate in Proust’s world—a world more sensitive, variegated, and interesting than our own.

It is difficult to analyse the ultimate quality of an artist’s triumph; yet such is the function of criticism, the sole justification of writing books about books. Proust, it seems to me, had the extremely rare faculty of seeing his characters objectively and subjectively at the same moment. He can project himself so far into the mind of the persons he is describing that he seems to know more about them than they can ever know themselves, and the reader feels, in the process, that he never even dimly knew himself before. At the same time he never takes sides. The warm, palpitating flesh he is creating is also and always a decorative figure on the huge design of his tapestry, just as in _Petroushka_ the puppets are human beings and the human beings puppets. For Proust, though the most objective, is also the most personal of writers. As we get accustomed to the long, tortuous sentences, the huge elaboration of conscientious metaphor, the continual refining on what cannot be further refined, we insensibly become listeners to a long and brilliant conversation by the wisest and wittiest of men. For Proust, as much as any man, has grafted the mellowness and also the exacerbation of experience on to the untiring inquisitiveness of youth. In a page of amazing prophecy, written as long ago as 1896, M. Anatole France summed up the achievement of Proust at a moment when his life work had barely begun:

Sans doute il est jeune. Il est jeune de la jeunesse de l’auteur. Mais il est vieux de la vieillesse du monde. C’est le printemps des feuilles sur les rameaux antiques, dans la forêt séculaire. On dirait que les pousses nouvelles sont attristés du passé profond des bois et portent le deuil de tant de printemps morts....

Il y a en lui du Bernardin de Saint-Pierre dépravé et du Pétrone ingénu.

This is not the moment to pretend to estimate impartially his exact place and achievement in letters. For the present we can only feel his death, almost personally, so much has he woven himself into the hearts of his readers, and apply to him in all sincerity the words Diderot used of his predecessor in time:

Plus on a l’âme belle, plus on a le goût exquis et pur, plus on connaît la nature, plus on aime la vérité, plus on estime les ouvrages de Proust.

FRANCIS BIRRELL.

IV

_A SENSITIVE PETRONIUS_

Marcel Proust died in Paris on the 18th day of November last. To many Englishmen his name is still unknown; to others his death came as a shock so great that it was as if one of their most intimate acquaintances had suddenly passed from them; and even among those who have read his works there is, in this country at least, quite pointed disagreement. On one side there are many who will confess in private, though not so willingly in public, that they have never been able to “get through” his great work; that “the man is a bore,” is “undiscussable in mixed society,” is “a snob,” and that, if you ask their opinion, “there is too much fuss made about the fellow altogether.” On the other are men, not given to overpraising the age in which they live, who unashamedly compare him with Montaigne, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and other “masters of the human heart”; and not that only, but will discuss by the hour together Swann, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Madame de Villeparisis, Bloch, M. de Charlus, Albertine, Gilberte, Odette, the impossible and indefatigable Verdurins, and a hundred of his other characters, as if they were personal friends, and as if it were of real importance to them to discover what exactly were the motives of So-and-so on such and such an occasion, and how So-and-so else would view their actions if he knew.