Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

RALPH WRIGHT.

V

_THE “LITTLE PROUST”_@

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

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

creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

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

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

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

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH.

VI

_A READER’S GRATITUDE_

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

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

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

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

COMPTON MACKENZIE.

VII

_GILBERTE_

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

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

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

ALEC WAUGH.

VIII

_PROUST’S WOMEN_