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_
The literature of imagination has always been rich in autobiography,
confessed and unconfessed. It is in its essence, perhaps one should
say in its impulse, largely an affair of passionate reminiscence.
Taken, therefore, as merely a recent writer of distinction who has
chosen to deal avowedly with _Things Remembered_, Proust must
challenge comparison with dozens of eminent men, his forerunners and
contemporaries. Tolstoy has given us his own life-history, not only
diffusively throughout his novels and pamphlets, but in that wonderful
piece of reconstruction, _Childhood and Youth_. Among living
men, James Joyce, with an epic gift and an heroic feat of memory, has
recorded for us an impression of his past, physical, mental, spiritual,
and has shown it interwoven with countless other lives. And these are
two taken at random. _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_—Proust was
not the first, nor will he be the last, to choose it as a theme.
Where Proust stands as yet alone is in his manner of approaching his
theme. Or, with more exactitude it may be said, his manner, vigilantly
passive, eagerly quiescent, of letting his theme encroach upon and
claim him. All attempted recapture of the past is for him “futile,”
a “labour in vain.” Not reconstruction, but understanding of things
remembered, is his aim. And to this end with deliberation he permits
himself what the realist rejects but the plain man all unknowingly
cherishes—the glamour in which for every one of us our own past is
bathed. Divest the past, Proust seems to say, of the present’s gift
to it—the light that never was on sea or land—and you take away its
essence; treat the present as independent of the past and you destroy
its integrity. That this is true we, as human beings—acting, thinking,
receiving impressions from moment to moment—must recognise when it is
pointed out. Our actual existence is not so much a narrative as a web
in which the shuttle of events flies back and forth between the warp
and woof of past and present, from neither of which it can escape any
more than can we ourselves. The trouble is that it is pointed out so
seldom, and least of all perhaps by novelists, who in this matter still
lag far behind our common human experience. The grasp with which Proust
has laid hold upon the philosophic and aesthetic values of memory—as,
for example, in the passage where he describes the eating, after an
interval of many years, of a _petite madeleine_ soaked in tea—is
a new thing in literature. Here is pre-eminently the novelist with a
past. None before him has taken _Things Remembered_ not merely for
theme but for medium as well.
To forget this, or even for one moment to minimise it, in speaking of
Proust, is utterly to lose one’s bearings. But, accustomed as we are
in our own hearts to his treatment of the past, we are so unaccustomed
to it in literature that it is really not easy to avoid the artificial
standpoint, the more that Proust proclaims his naturalism neither
explicitly nor by freakishness of style. So quiet, so classical is his
bearing that it hardly strikes one to investigate his premises.
And so, concerning his long book of memory, one hears questions put
by intelligent and even admiring readers. There are his “shadowy”
women—“Did women at any time mean anything to Proust?”: there is his
disconcerting chronology—“How old is his hero supposed to be during
such or such an incident?”: there is his social pose—“Was Proust not
himself as bad a snob as any he describes?” But such questions can be
asked only in forgetfulness, answered only in constant remembrance of
the author’s unique attitude toward his main subject, the past.
It is because of this that, though setting out to make a few
observations upon Proust’s women, I feel it no digression if I draw
attention here to a particular passage which occurs early in the novel,
towards the end of the _Combray_ section in Volume I.—a passage
in which he not merely gives the circumstances of his hero’s first
literary composition, but puts before us the composed fragment itself.
A few pages back and the boy has been bemoaning that, his choice of
a literary career notwithstanding, his mind is blank of subjects,
his intellect, at the mere idea of writing, a void. Now, suddenly,
while out driving, he is so deeply enthralled by the charm of three
steeples which withdraw and advance, disappear and reappear, always in
different relations to each other, according as the setting sun catches
their angles and the carriage winds along the country road, that words
leap to frame themselves in his head and, for all the jolting and
inconvenience of the moment, he must immediately write them down to
“appease his conscience and to satisfy his enthusiasm.”