newly awakened interest in the individual mind should be accompanied
by a new idealism to falsify it from the outset. However this may
be, there can be small doubt that the result of this revolution was
a new crop of conventionalities considerably less truthful and, as
it seems to us to-day, more harmful than the old. Sentimentality had
come to birth in a night. The newly discovered world was apparently
too painful a spectacle to be faced, and to cover its nakedness new
doctrines like “the perfectibility of man,” new angles of vision like
those of Romanticism, had somehow to be invented. Fifty years were to
pass before another honest work of the imagination, with one exception,
could come to light in France; and the author of that exception,
Laclos, is as interesting a commentary on the generation succeeding
Rousseau as one can find. _Les Liaisons dangereuses_ is for its
own or any other time an extraordinarily truthful book; the characters,
as they express themselves in their letters, are not inhuman, but human
monsters; not spotless, but only foolish innocents. The tragedy is
moving in the modern way; you identify your feelings with those of the
characters themselves. But Laclos was not satisfied with the book as
it stands. He was a fervent disciple of Rousseau’s, and there appears
to be little doubt that the book which exists was only intended to be
a picture of the “false” society in which they, and we, live, and was
to be followed by another showing what men and women would immediately
be like if only they could live and act “naturally.” “_Le grand
défaut de tous ces livres à paradoxes_,” said Voltaire of Rousseau,
“_n’est-il pas de supposer toujours la nature autrement qu’elle
n’est?_”
_La nature telle qu’elle est_—such is to be the aim of the French
nineteenth-century novelists if only they can see their opportunity.
It must be confessed that several of them failed. An interest in
psychology had been awakened, yet one compares _Les Misérables_
with _La Princesse de Clèves_ and may be excused for forgetting
it. Throughout the first part of the century, at any rate, it seems
as if the last thing a novelist ever asked himself was, “Would I or
any reasonable creature act or feel like that?” Common-sense had gone
by the board again, and “the fine,” “the noble,” “the proud,” “the
pathetic,” and “the touching” held the stage.
Yet great advances were made. Balzac, for all his lack of balance and
for all his hasty carelessness, was giant enough to make a hundred on
his own account. The “naturalists,” without making any great advances
in psychology, at least were in earnest in clearing out the old stage
properties, in insisting that a love scene could take place as well in
a railway carriage or a hansom cab at eleven o’clock in the morning
as on a lake by moonlight or on a balcony at dawn. And Stendhal—but
Stendhal was the first of the moderns, the master of the whole
generation which is passing, and he had to wait till the ’eighties
before his influence became important. Whatever is valuable in the
advances that the novel has made during its latest period is valuable
just in so far as it is the result of an insistence, with Rousseau,
on being interested in the intricacies of human feeling, and an equal
insistence, with Voltaire, in refusing to sentimentalise them. That
these are the only lines on which the novelist can advance no one would
dream of asserting. But it is more particularly because Marcel Proust
seems here to stand head and shoulders above his generation, and not
on account of his many other merits as an artist, that he has such a
passionate, if still comparatively small, following to-day.
He is, perhaps, if we return to that definition of the difference
between a novel and a play, more of the essential novelist than any man
has ever been. His aim is by a hundred different methods to make you
know his chief characters, not as if you were meeting them every day,
but as if you yourself had for the moment actually been living in their
skins and inhabiting their minds. Everything possible must be done to
help you to this end. You must feel the repulsions and attractions
they feel; you must even share their ancestors, their upbringing,
and the class in which they live, and share them so intimately that
with you, as with them, they have become second nature. Nor is even
this enough. The man who knows himself is not common, and to know
Proust’s characters as you know yourself may only be a small advance in
knowledge. So every motive of importance, every reaction to whatever
stimulus they receive, is analysed and explained until your feeling
will probably be, not only how well you know this being, who is in
so many respects unlike you, but how far more clearly you have seen
into the obscure motives of your own most distressing and ridiculous
actions, how far more understandable is an attitude to life or to your
neighbours that you yourself have almost unconsciously, and perhaps in
mere self-protection, adopted.
But a short example of this is needed, and a short example of anything
in Proust is not easy to find. A character just sketched in one
volume will be developed in another, and to grasp the significance of
the first sketch one has to wait for the fuller illumination of the
development. And even then the short sketch is as often as not several
pages of the most closely written analysis, quite impossible to quote
from, or in full. There is, however, a very small character in the
first book, _Du Côté de chez Swann_, who may serve. M. Vinteuil is
an obscure musician of genius, living in the country. He holds his head
high among his neighbours, and, on account of his daughter, refuses to
meet the only other really cultured man in the district, Swann, who has
made what M. Vinteuil considers a disreputable marriage. Suddenly M.
Vinteuil’s daughter forms a disgraceful friendship. There is scandal in
the eyes of every man or woman he meets, scandal which he, poor man,
knows quite well to be founded on the most deplorable facts.
And yet, however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his
daughter’s conduct, it did not follow that his adoration
of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate
to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it
was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are
powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual
blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening
them; an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one
after another, without interruption, into the bosom of a
family will not make it lose faith either in the clemency
of its God or in the capacity of its physician. But when
M. Vinteuil regarded his daughter and himself from the
point of view of the world, and of their reputation, when
he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank
which they occupied in the general estimation of their
neighbours, then he was bound to give judgment, to utter
his own and her social condemnation in precisely the terms
which the inhabitants of Combray most hostile to him and
his daughter would have employed; he saw himself and her
in “low,” the very “lowest water,” inextricably stranded;
and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility,
that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom
he must now look up (however far beneath him they might
hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some
means of rising again to their level, which is an almost
mechanical result of any human misfortune.
The quotation is chosen on account of its shortness, and there are
perhaps many hundred other examples which, could they be quoted in
full, would show more fully this essential difference between the
novel as Proust understands it and the older novel or the play.
Here, at least, we have his method compressed. We have M. Vinteuil’s
unshakable faith in his daughter, as a jumping-off ground, founded
on the past and unaltered by the facts of the present. We have also
the pitying attitude of the world to himself and its hostile attitude
to his daughter. And from this comes M. Vinteuil’s other feeling, no
less strong than his faith in his daughter, that they two have somehow
sunk, become degraded, not only in the eyes of the world, but also,
and because of it, in their own eyes as well. Lastly, as a reaction
from this, we have the effect of these feelings on M. Vinteuil’s
manner—his attitude of humility before the world for sins that he has
not committed, for the conduct of a person in whom he still completely
believes, which, however ridiculous to the logician, can only be
recognised by the rest of us as most disquietingly true to our own
experience. It is this complexity in our emotions, this capability of
feeling many different things at the same time about any one particular
incident or person, that the novel alone can give; and it is on these
lines that Marcel Proust has adventured farther than any other man.
And here, of course, he has great advantages. Proust, unlike so many
of the great creative artists, started late in life the work by which
he will be judged. He is mature as few great men have been mature,
cultured as still fewer have been cultured. Wide reading is far
from common among great artists. The driving force necessary to the
accomplishment of any work of art is seldom found in alliance with wide
culture; that, more often than not, is to be found among the world’s
half-failures. Neither Shakespeare, nor Molière, nor Fielding, nor
Richardson, nor Balzac, nor Dickens, nor Dostoevsky, nor Ibsen was a
widely cultured man. In Shakespeare, the loss is more than compensated
by surety of intuition. In Balzac, there is a lack of the critical
faculty that makes it possible for him, even towards the end of his
life, to give in the same year one thing as beautiful as _Eugénie
Grandet_ and another as puerile as _Ferragus_, that allows
him to compare the novels of “Monk” Lewis with _La Chartreuse
de Parme_ and to call Maturin “_un des plus grands génies de
l’Europe_.”
But Proust, like Montaigne and like Racine, besides having an extreme
sensitiveness to all forms of beauty and ugliness, happiness and
misery, that he has met in his social existence, has also read widely
in the works of other sensitive men, has compared their impressions
with each other and with his own, has learnt from their successes
and failures; he is armed with more than his natural equipment, has
more eyes to see through than his own. Actually his books are filled
from end to end with criticisms of music, of painting, of literature,
not in the way that is unfortunately familiar in this country, as
unassimilated chunks in the main stream of the narrative, but as
expressions of the opinions of different characters.
This is not the only, nor indeed the chief, advantage that a wide
experience in other arts, and other men’s art, has given him. What
is of more importance is the attitude that springs from it of seeing
historically the age and society in which he lives. Nothing for him
stands still, not even to-day; and, because he realises that to-day
itself will to-morrow be only part of the stream of the past, he can
view it with the same calmly passionate interest as that which we bring
to the discoveries at Luxor. As few men are to-day, he appears to be
“_au-dessus de la mêlée_,” not, like the ancient gods, “careless
of mankind,” but curious, acutely sympathetic, and able at any moment
to bring his own experience and the experience of a thousand other men
in tens of other centuries to the understanding of one small case at
the tiny point of time which is momentarily under his observation.
To give any idea of the plot of _A la Recherche du Temps
Perdu_—and it has a plot, and a very closely knit one, too (how
closely one only begins to realise after several re-readings)—is,
of course, out of the question. Its form is that of an imaginary
autobiography, and it is obvious that much genuine autobiography is
inextricably woven with work of imagination. The first book (_Du
Côté de chez Swann_) is occupied in part by memories of childhood,
and in part, as it seems at first, by another story altogether, the
account of a love affair of M. Swann’s. Of course this story is not a
mere excrescence, but it is only slowly, as the later books are read,
that we begin to see Proust’s immense cunning in introducing us early
in the novel to Swann’s affairs. For they have a purpose beyond the
fact that Swann becomes in time a friend of the young man, who is then
in his childhood, and beyond the fact that he is very intimately mixed
up with many others of the most important characters in the book. And
this purpose is that of a prelude to the later and fuller story. It is,
as it were, a standing example at the outset of the truism that no one
ever learns by the mistakes of others—that what has been will be again
in the next generation, with only the mere outward changes which time
and place impose. In the second book (_A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles
en Fleurs_) we accompany the hero (it is one of the significant
curiosities of Proust, akin to his refusal to divide his book into
chapters, that never once is this hero named in the whole course of
the work) to the seaside, and feel with him the emotions of an acutely
sensitive boy just growing into manhood. And the remaining books are
all occupied more or less with his efforts to assimilate the new social
worlds in Paris and at Balbec Plage which are opening out before his
curious and very sharply observant eyes.
There are those who, after enjoying the first two books, have
complained rather bitterly of the succeeding ones. One charge against
Proust seems to be that he deals more than is necessary with what
are called “unpleasant” subjects and people; another is clearly,
though not usually put into so few words, that he is a snob. As
regards the first charge, it is true that Proust, like most French
writers, is apt to claim with Terence, _Humani nihil a me alienum
puto_; to urge that he is ever coarse, that he is ever anything,
in fact, but extremely discriminating in his touch, is, as a matter
of fact, absurd. But the other charge is more valuable because, while
mistaken, it does emphasise a side of Proust’s interests in life
which is of some considerable significance. It is true that Proust is
extremely interested not only in individuals but in those extensions
of personality which are classes, cliques, bodies of men and women,
which, however formed, by coming together succeed in developing a sort
of communal outlook upon life. It is true also that a good deal of the
book is occupied with two of these classes in particular, both of them
rich, the aristocracy and the pushing _bourgeoisie_ that likes to
employ the artist and the intellectual as “stepping-stones from their
dead selves to higher things.” But to call this interest snobbery is,
surely, a sign of rather careless reading. It is to assume that the
_naïveté_ of the young man’s first adoration of the old families
of France, long before he had learnt to know them, is, in fact, the
attitude of Proust himself. Even in the case of the young man snobbery
seems a hard term for his actual state of mind.
Nor could we ever reach that goal to which I longed so
much to attain, Guermantes itself. I knew that it was
the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse
de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who
did actually exist, but whenever I thought about them
I pictured them to myself either in tapestry, as was
the “Coronation of Esther” which hung in our church, or
else in changing rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad
in his window, where he passed from cabbage green when
I was dipping my fingers in the holy-water stoup, to
plum-blue when I had reached our row of chairs; or again
altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève de
Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the
magic lantern sent wandering over the curtains of my room
or flung aloft upon the ceiling—in short, always wrapped
in the mystery of the Merovingian age, and bathed, as
in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the
resounding syllable _antes_. And if in spite of
that they were for me, in their capacity as a duke and
duchess, real people, though of an unfamiliar kind, this
ducal personality was in its turn enormously distended,
immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that
Guermantes of which they were duke and duchess, all that
sunlit “Guermantes way” of our walks, the course of the
Vivonne, its water-lilies and its overshadowing trees, and
an endless series of hot summer afternoons.
Is there any wonder that this young poet—and he was very young—when
first he meets the Duchess in real life, and is welcomed into the
select circle of her friends, should feel tremendously excited? But
snob is not the right word.
As a fact, of course, what these complainants have missed is the use
to which this aristocratic circle has been put in the life-history of
the hero. For Proust, like any writer that can be read over and over
again, has stamped his work through and through with his own peculiarly
coloured personal psychology. And if there is one theme that is
being insistently played throughout the whole work (like Swann’s and
Odette’s phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata), in incident after incident,
in the adventures of one character after another, it is that theme of
sadness that no ideal state is attainable in this world, not so much
because we cannot climb, nor even because the ideal becomes illusion on
attainment, but because the object to which we attach our ideal is, of
necessity, not seen as it really is, but always as we long for it to
be. This, with its complement that the mere fact of not being able to
possess may lead to desire even when the object in itself does not seem
very desirable, is at the very heart of Proust’s philosophy.
This worship of his hero’s for aristocracy is only an incident in this
continual theme. It is in essence exactly the same as all his other
deceptions. When Gilberte was the beautifully dressed child of his
idol, Swann, surrounded by a halo of romance owing to her friendship
with the writer Bergotte, and when she appeared to look down on his
advances, there was nothing on earth he would not give, nothing he
would not do, to obtain her friendship. Yet when once that friendship
is attained the interest in her fades away imperceptibly till she plays
no more part in his life than a memory of what was once so bitterly
wanted. So it is with the _petite bande_ of young girls at Balbec
while it presented a united and exclusive front to the world. So it is
with the chief of that band, Albertine herself. Desirable while she has
held aloof, she becomes through knowledge, through the loss of that
mystery which had existed, as it always does, not in her, but only in
him who longed for her, almost boring. He is on the point of leaving
her, of finishing with the _liaison_ once and for all. Suddenly
all is changed. He has reason to doubt her complete faithfulness to
him. With the pain of this doubt love is once more awakened, and at
the end of the last published volume we leave him on the point of
rushing off to Paris to marry her. This, again, is the whole meaning of
Swann’s marriage with the vulgar and impossible Odette de Crécy. It is
the continual theme of all the pitiable deceptions of M. de Charlus.
“Besides,” he says in one place,
the mistresses with whom I have been most in love have
never coincided with my love for them. True love it must
have been, since I subordinated everything else in the
world to the chance of seeing them, of keeping them to
myself, and would burst into tears if, one evening, I had
heard them speak. But they themselves must be regarded
rather as endowed with the property of arousing that
love, of raising it to its paroxysm, than as being its
embodiments.... You would have said that a virtue which had
nothing to do with them had been arbitrarily attached to
them by Nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-galvanic
power, had the effect on me of exciting my love—that is
to say, of controlling all my actions and causing all my
sorrows. But from this the looks or the brains or the
favours shown me by these women were entirely distinct.
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.