Part 9

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.]