Bloch, in which I might have insisted upon an explanation, the doubts
he had engendered in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from
which I, if you please, expected nothing less than the revelation of
truth itself) were all the finer if they meant absolutely nothing. For,
as it happened, Bloch was not invited to the house again. At first, he
had been well received there. It is true that my grandfather made out
that, whenever I formed a strong attachment to any one of my friends and
brought him home with me, that friend was invariably a Jew; to which he
would not have objected on principle--indeed his own friend Swann was
of Jewish extraction--had he not found that the Jews whom I chose as
friends were not usually of the best type. And so I was hardly ever able
to bring a new friend home without my grandfather's humming the "O,
God of our fathers" from _La Juive_, or else "Israel, break thy chain,"
singing the tune alone, of course, to an "um-ti-tum-ti-tum, tra-la"; but
I used to be afraid of my friend's recognising the sound, and so being
able to reconstruct the words.
Before seeing them, merely on hearing their names, about which, as often
as not, there was nothing particularly Hebraic, he would divine not only
the Jewish origin of such of my friends as might indeed be of the chosen
people, but even some dark secret which was hidden in their family.
"And what do they call your friend who is coming this evening?"
"Dumont, grandpapa."
"Dumont! Oh, I'm frightened of Dumont."
And he would sing:
Archers, be on your guard!
Watch without rest, without sound,
and then, after a few adroit questions on points of detail, he would
call out "On guard! on guard," or, if it were the victim himself who
had already arrived, and had been obliged, unconsciously, by my
grandfather's subtle examination, to admit his origin, then my
grandfather, to shew us that he had no longer any doubts, would merely
look at us, humming almost inaudibly the air of
What! do you hither guide the feet
Of this timid Israelite?
or of
Sweet vale of Hebron, dear paternal fields,
or, perhaps, of
Yes, I am of the chosen race.
These little eccentricities on my grandfather's part implied no ill-will
whatsoever towards my friends. But Bloch had displeased my family for
other reasons. He had begun by annoying my father, who, seeing him come
in with wet clothes, had asked him with keen interest:
"Why, M. Bloch, is there a change in the weather; has it been raining? I
can't understand it; the barometer has been 'set fair.'"
Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than "Sir, I am
absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so
resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer
trouble to inform me of them."
"My poor boy," said my father after Bloch had gone, "your friend is out
of his mind. Why, he couldn't even tell me what the weather was like. As
if there could be anything more interesting! He is an imbecile."
Next, Bloch had displeased my grandmother because, after luncheon, when
she complained of not feeling very well, he had stifled a sob and wiped
the tears from his eyes.
"You cannot imagine that he is sincere," she observed to me. "Why he
doesn't know me. Unless he's mad, of course."
And finally he had upset the whole household when he arrived an hour
and a half late for luncheon and covered with mud from head to foot, and
made not the least apology, saying merely: "I never allow myself to be
influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or
by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time. I would willingly
reintroduce to society the opium pipe of China or the Malayan kriss, but
I am wholly and entirely without instruction in those infinitely more
pernicious (besides being quite bleakly bourgeois) implements, the
umbrella and the watch."
In spite of all this he would still have been received at Combray. He
was, of course, hardly the friend my parents would have chosen for
me; they had, in the end, decided that the tears which he had shed on
hearing of my grandmother's illness were genuine enough; but they
knew, either instinctively or from their own experience, that our early
impulsive emotions have but little influence over our later actions and
the conduct of our lives; and that regard for moral obligations, loyalty
to our friends, patience in finishing our work, obedience to a rule
of life, have a surer foundation in habits solidly formed and blindly
followed than in these momentary transports, ardent but sterile. They
would have preferred to Bloch, as companions for myself, boys who would
have given me no more than it is proper, by all the laws of middle-class
morality, for boys to give one another, who would not unexpectedly
send me a basket of fruit because they happened, that morning, to have
thought of me with affection, but who, since they were incapable of
inclining in my favour, by any single impulse of their imagination and
emotions, the exact balance of the duties and claims of friendship, were
as incapable of loading the scales to my prejudice. Even the injuries
we do them will not easily divert from the path of their duty towards us
those conventional natures of which my great-aunt furnished a type: who,
after quarrelling for years with a niece, to whom she never spoke again,
yet made no change in the will in which she had left that niece the
whole of her fortune, because she was her next-of-kin, and it was the
'proper thing' to do.
But I was fond of Bloch; my parents wished me to be happy; and the
insoluble problems which I set myself on such texts as the 'absolutely
meaningless' beauty of _La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë_ tired me more
and made me more unwell than I should have been after further talks with
him, unwholesome as those talks might seem to my mother's mind. And he
would still have been received at Combray but for one thing. That same
night, after dinner, having informed me (a piece of news which had a
great influence on my later life, making it happier at one time and then
more unhappy) that no woman ever thought of anything but love, and that
there was not one of them whose resistance a man could not overcome,
he had gone on to assure me that he had heard it said on unimpeachable
authority that my great-aunt herself had led a 'gay' life in her younger
days, and had been notoriously 'kept.' I could not refrain from passing
on so important a piece of information to my parents; the next time
Bloch called he was not admitted, and afterwards, when I met him in the
street, he greeted me with extreme coldness.
But in the matter of Bergotte he had spoken truly.
For the first few days, like a tune which will be running in one's head
and maddening one soon enough, but of which one has not for the moment
'got hold,' the things I was to love so passionately in Bergotte's style
had not yet caught my eye. I could not, it is true, lay down the novel
of his which I was reading, but I fancied that I was interested in the
story alone, as in the first dawn of love, when we go every day to meet
a woman at some party or entertainment by the charm of which we imagine
it is that we are attracted. Then I observed the rare, almost archaic
phrases which he liked to employ at certain points, where a hidden flow
of harmony, a prelude contained and concealed in the work itself would
animate and elevate his style; and it was at such points as these,
too, that he would begin to speak of the "vain dream of life," of the
"inexhaustible torrent of fair forms," of the "sterile, splendid torture
of understanding and loving," of the "moving effigies which ennoble for
all time the charming and venerable fronts of our cathedrals"; that he
would express a whole system of philosophy, new to me, by the use of
marvellous imagery, to the inspiration of which I would naturally have
ascribed that sound of harping which began to chime and echo in my ears,
an accompaniment to which that imagery added something ethereal and
sublime. One of these passages of Bergotte, the third or fourth which I
had detached from the rest, filled me with a joy to which the meagre joy
I had tasted in the first passage bore no comparison, a joy which I felt
myself to have experienced in some innermost chamber of my soul, deep,
undivided, vast, from which all obstructions and partitions seemed to
have been swept away. For what had happened was that, while I recognised
in this passage the same taste for uncommon phrases, the same bursts
of music, the same idealist philosophy which had been present in the
earlier passages without my having taken them into account as the source
of my pleasure, I now no longer had the impression of being confronted
by a particular passage in one of Bergotte's works, which traced a
purely bi-dimensional figure in outline upon the surface of my mind, but
rather of the 'ideal passage' of Bergotte, common to every one of his
books, and to which all the earlier, similar passages, now becoming
merged in it, had added a kind of density and volume, by which my own
understanding seemed to be enlarged.
I was by no means Bergotte's sole admirer; he was the favourite writer
also of a friend of my mother's, a highly literary lady; while Dr. du
Boulbon had kept all his patients waiting until he finished Bergotte's
latest volume; and it was from his consulting room, and from a house in
a park near Combray that some of the first seeds were scattered of that
taste for Bergotte, a rare-growth in those days, but now so universally
acclimatised that one finds it flowering everywhere throughout Europe
and America, and even in the tiniest villages, rare still in its
refinement, but in that alone. What my mother's friend, and, it would
seem, what Dr. du Boulbon liked above all in the writings of Bergotte
was just what I liked, the same flow of melody, the same old-fashioned
phrases, and certain others, quite simple and familiar, but so placed by
him, in such prominence, as to hint at a particular quality of taste on
his part; and also, in the sad parts of his books, a sort of roughness,
a tone that was almost harsh. And he himself, no doubt, realised that
these were his principal attractions. For in his later books, if he had
hit upon some great truth, or upon the name of an historic cathedral,
he would break off his narrative, and in an invocation, an apostrophe, a
lengthy prayer, would give a free outlet to that effluence which, in
the earlier volumes, remained buried beneath the form of his prose,
discernible only in a rippling of its surface, and perhaps even more
delightful, more harmonious when it was thus veiled from the eye, when
the reader could give no precise indication of where the murmur of the
current began, or of where it died away. These passages in which he
delighted were our favourites also. For my own part I knew all of them
by heart. I felt even disappointed when he resumed the thread of his
narrative. Whenever he spoke of something whose beauty had until
then remained hidden from me, of pine-forests or of hailstorms, of
_Notre-Dame de Paris_, of _Athalie_, or of _Phèdre_, by some piece
of imagery he would make their beauty explode and drench me with its
essence. And so, dimly realising that the universe contained innumerable
elements which my feeble senses would be powerless to discern, did he
not bring them within my reach, I wished that I might have his opinion,
some metaphor of his, upon everything in the world, and especially upon
such things as I might have an opportunity, some day, of seeing for
myself; and among such things, more particularly still upon some of the
historic buildings of France, upon certain views of the sea, because the
emphasis with which, in his books, he referred to these shewed that he
regarded them as rich in significance and beauty. But, alas, upon almost
everything in the world his opinion was unknown to me. I had no doubt
that it would differ entirely from my own, since his came down from an
unknown sphere towards which I was striving to raise myself; convinced
that my thoughts would have seemed pure foolishness to that perfected
spirit, I had so completely obliterated them all that, if I happened to
find in one of his books something which had already occurred to my own
mind, my heart would swell with gratitude and pride as though some deity
had, in his infinite bounty, restored it to me, had pronounced it to be
beautiful and right. It happened now and then that a page of Bergotte
would express precisely those ideas which I used often at night, when
I was unable to sleep, to write to my grandmother and mother, and so
concisely and well that his page had the appearance of a collection of
mottoes for me to set at the head of my letters. And so too, in later
years, when I began to compose a book of my own, and the quality of some
of my sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to
go on with the undertaking, I would find the equivalent of my sentences
in Bergotte's. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages,
that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in
my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I seemed to have
detected in my mind, and in my fear of their not turning out 'true to
life,' I had no time to ask myself whether what I was writing would be
pleasant to read! But indeed there was no kind of language, no kind of
ideas which I really liked, except these. My feverish and unsatisfactory
attempts were themselves a token of my love, a love which brought me no
pleasure, but was, for all that, intense and deep. And so, when I came
suddenly upon similar phrases in the writings of another, that is to say
stripped of their familiar accompaniment of scruples and repressions and
self-tormentings, I was free to indulge to the full my own appetite
for such things, just as a cook who, once in a while, has no dinner to
prepare for other people, can then find time to gormandise himself. And
so, when I had found, one day, in a book by Bergotte, some joke about
an old family servant, to which his solemn and magnificent style added a
great deal of irony, but which was in principle what I had often said to
my grandmother about Françoise, and when, another time, I had discovered
that he thought not unworthy of reflection in one of those mirrors of
absolute Truth which were his writings, a remark similar to one which I
had had occasion to make on our friend M. Legrandin (and, moreover, my
remarks on Françoise and M. Legrandin were among those which I would
most resolutely have sacrificed for Bergotte's sake, in the belief
that he would find them quite without interest); then it was suddenly
revealed to me that my own humble existence and the Realms of Truth were
less widely separated than I had supposed, that at certain points they
were actually in contact; and in my new-found confidence and joy I wept
upon his printed page, as in the arms of a long-lost father.
From his books I had formed an impression of Bergotte as a frail and
disappointed old man, who had lost his children, and had never found
any consolation. And so I would read, or rather sing his sentences in
my brain, with rather more _dolce_, rather more _lento_ than he himself
had, perhaps, intended, and his simplest phrase would strike my ears
with something peculiarly gentle and loving in its intonation. More than
anything else in the world I cherished his philosophy, and had pledged
myself to it in lifelong devotion. It made me impatient to reach the
age when I should be eligible to attend the class at school called
'Philosophy.' I did not wish to learn or do anything else there, but
simply to exist and be guided entirely by the mind of Bergotte, and,
if I had been told then that the metaphysicians whom I was actually to
follow there resembled him in nothing, I should have been struck down by
the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when
a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to
come.
One Sunday, while I was reading in the garden, I was interrupted by
Swann, who had come to call upon my parents.
"What are you reading? May I look? Why, it's Bergotte! Who has been
telling you about him?"
I replied that Bloch was responsible.
"Oh, yes, that boy I saw here once, who looks so like the Bellini
portrait of Mahomet II. It's an astonishing likeness; he has the same
arched eyebrows and hooked nose and prominent cheekbones. When his beard
comes he'll be Mahomet himself. Anyhow he has good taste, for Bergotte
is a charming creature." And seeing how much I seemed to admire
Bergotte, Swann, who never spoke at all about the people he knew, made
an exception in my favour and said: "I know him well; if you would like
him to write a few words on the title-page of your book I could ask him
for you."
I dared not accept such an offer, but bombarded Swann with questions
about his friend. "Can you tell me, please, who is his favourite actor?"
"Actor? No, I can't say. But I do know this: there's not a man on the
stage whom he thinks equal to Berma; he puts her above everyone. Have
you seen her?"
"No, sir, my parents do not allow me to go to the theatre."
"That is a pity. You should insist. Berma in _Phèdre_, in the _Cid_;
well, she's only an actress, if you like, but you know that I don't
believe very much in the 'hierarchy' of the arts." As he spoke I
noticed, what had often struck me before in his conversations with
my grandmother's sisters, that whenever he spoke of serious matters,
whenever he used an expression which seemed to imply a definite opinion
upon some important subject, he would take care to isolate, to sterilise
it by using a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he
had put the phrase or word between inverted commas, and was anxious
to disclaim any personal responsibility for it; as who should say "the
'hierarchy,' don't you know, as silly people call it." But then, if it
was so absurd, why did he say the 'hierarchy'? A moment later he went
on: "Her acting will give you as noble an inspiration as any masterpiece
of art in the world, as--oh, I don't know--" and he began to laugh,
"shall we say the Queens of Chartres?" Until then I had supposed that
his horror of having to give a serious opinion was something Parisian
and refined, in contrast to the provincial dogmatism of my grandmother's
sisters; and I had imagined also that it was characteristic of the
mental attitude towards life of the circle in which Swann moved,
where, by a natural reaction from the 'lyrical' enthusiasms of earlier
generations, an excessive importance was given to small and precise
facts, formerly regarded as vulgar, and anything in the nature of
'phrase-making' was banned. But now I found myself slightly shocked
by this attitude which Swann invariably adopted when face to face with
generalities. He appeared unwilling to risk even having an opinion, and
to be at his ease only when he could furnish, with meticulous accuracy,
some precise but unimportant detail. But in so doing he did not take
into account that even here he was giving an opinion, holding a brief
(as they say) for something, that the accuracy of his details had an
importance of its own. I thought again of the dinner that night, when I
had been so unhappy because Mamma would not be coming up to my room, and
when he had dismissed the balls given by the Princesse de Léon as being
of no importance. And yet it was to just that sort of amusement that he
was devoting his life. For what other kind of existence did he reserve
the duties of saying in all seriousness what he thought about things,
of formulating judgments which he would not put between inverted commas;
and when would he cease to give himself up to occupations of which at
the same time he made out that they were absurd? I noticed, too, in the
manner in which Swann spoke to me of Bergotte, something which, to do
him justice, was not peculiar to himself, but was shared by all that
writer's admirers at that time, at least by my mother's friend and
by Dr. du Boulbon. Like Swann, they would say of Bergotte: "He has a
charming mind, so individual, he has a way of his own of saying things,
which is a little far-fetched, but so pleasant. You never need to look
for his name on the title-page, you can tell his work at once." But
none of them had yet gone so far as to say "He is a great writer, he has
great talent." They did not even credit him with talent at all. They
did not speak, because they were not aware of it. We are very slow in
recognising in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the type which
is labelled 'great talent' in our museum of general ideas. Simply
because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no
resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather
originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we add up the
sum of these, and find that it amounts simply to talent.
"Are there any books in which Bergotte has written about Berma?" I asked
M. Swann.
"I think he has, in that little essay on Racine, but it must be out of
print. Still, there has perhaps been a second impression. I will find
out. Anyhow, I can ask Bergotte himself all that you want to know next
time he comes to dine with us. He never misses a week, from one year's
end to another. He is my daughter's greatest friend. They go about
together, and look at old towns and cathedrals and castles."