“with only a slight revision here and there.” We may allow ourselves,
I think, the presumption that it is substantially a true record.[2]
Certainly it furnishes us with the key to the whole work. Passages
from Proust more exquisite, even more characteristic, might easily be
found; none so significant. Those ever-veering steeples, sometimes
before, sometimes behind, lightening, darkening, changing, looking
now like three golden pivots, now like three birds perched on the
plain—they reveal, more fully and subtly than could any philosophic
exposition, both the method and the philosophic preoccupation of the
author. They declare that for him there was never an actual but always
a psychological perspective, and that _peculiar to himself_. This
is why there is no intellectual or logical means of checking Proust’s
observations. Either we accept them as he gives them, emotionally,
or we reject them as meaningless. He has, he repeatedly tells us,
no faith in intellectual observation, neither will he presume upon
logical deduction in questions of human feeling. He quietly discards
that assumption of god-like knowledge for which we have come to look
so confidently in our writers of fiction. He will have none of the
sympathetic imagination that “puts itself in another’s place.” He
refuses as an act of disingenuousness either to project himself into
or to interpret the character of another. “We alone,” he says, “by our
belief that they have an existence of their own, can give to certain of
the things that we see a soul which they afterwards keep, which they
develop in our minds.” Essentially, that is to say, he believes he can
know nothing outside of his own sensations, and for him every sensation
is inextricably interwoven with memory. Whether he writes of a woman
or a musical theme, of a love affair or of trees in the park, he never
forgets that in the very act of observing there are several elements to
be reckoned with. The thing observed may seem to casual eyes fixed like
the three steeples. But Proust knows better. He knows that he himself
is moving, that within him his past is in a different kind of motion,
dictating, suggesting, comparing, reminding, side-tracking, and that
therefore the steeples themselves are never in reality still. Nothing
in life is stable. Within the flux of our past and our present, figures
outside ourselves seem to rise, to move, to act. But such movements
have reality only in so far as they are reflected in the unique mirror
of a soul. And for Proust this mirror is combined of the individual and
his memory.
[Footnote 2: See, however, my foot-note on page 106 and _Pastiches et
Mélanges_, pp. 91-99.—C.K.S.M.]
No wonder if such a novelist is sometimes called difficult. He is too
like life to be easy. Other novels, beside his, seem accommodatingly
static, other characters finished, understood in each spring of each
action—precisely as those we know in life are never finished or
understood.
But to come to the women.
A man of particular sincerity once said to me that after twenty years
of married life he understood his wife no better than on the day he
married her. He had of course become familiar with her modes of thought
and action which served as knowledge for practical daily purposes. But
familiarity had never bred understanding. Her underlying motives, the
ultimate significance of her looks and words, remained hidden.
This, I think, is Proust’s position, more especially when the woman
happens to affect him powerfully. In every case we can _see_ his
women, and thus far they are the reverse of shadowy. Grandmother,
mother, aunts, and servant—the women that surround his childhood;
Mlle. Vinteuil and the Duchesse de Guermantes—female figures that
shock or thrill his boyish imagination; Odette—the mature cocotte
that stands throughout his youth for feminine mystery and glamour;
Odette’s daughter Gilberte, and later Albertine—the young girls, minxes
both, with whom he falls in love; Madame Verdurin and her circle—the
social climbers who call forth his most delicate adult irony as well
as his most rancid contempt;—these, simply as pictures, leap out at
us complete. Nothing could be more objective than their presentation
to the eye and ear of the reader. We feel with each one as if we
had met her in the flesh—as one has met a casual acquaintance. The
mother’s submissive wifeliness; the almost masculine incorruptibility
of the grandmother; the raciness of the servant; the neurosis of Aunt
Léonie; the half-hearted viciousness of the music-master’s daughter;
the slightly comic social splendour of the Duchesse; the unmeaning
melancholy of Odette’s eyes; the unredeemed vulgarity of Madame
Verdurin; the domineering girlishness of Gilberte, by turns frank and
secretive, appealing and repellent; the smile with which Albertine,
at once innocent and wanton, receives the youth in her bedroom—in
depicting these Proust never trespasses beyond natural as compared with
literary experience. We all know with what liveliness in conversation
any man with the gifts of observation and wit can create an image for
us of some female “character” met with in his childhood or his travels.
But let that same man come to speak out of his emotions of some woman
who has moved him deeply, then his heart will cloud his brain, his
tongue will falter or run away with him, and he will no longer be
capable of outlining a portrait. As listeners our impressions of his
subject will be gained, not from what he says, but independently from
what we perceive that he feels, which may well be in direct conflict
with his words. In life, that is to say, the more important a character
is to us the more we are thrown back for our ultimate knowledge on
the emotions aroused by that character in ourselves. In fiction it
is usually the other way about. It is his central figures whom the
novelist pretends to know best. Proust, however, has recognised this
discrepancy with scientific clearness. He devotes himself, therefore,
where his important women are concerned—aside from the very minimum of
detached, objective observations—to a presentment of the effect they
have upon the men that love them.
So his women set us wondering and supposing and coming to our own
conclusions exactly as we do in life, either when an individual of our
own sex is described for us by one of the other sex, or when we are
emotionally affected by some one of the other sex.
For this is important. When it comes to his male characters, Proust
takes a different tone. Here he finds himself able, quite consistently
with his philosophy, for far more positive assertion. In various ways
he can allow them to reveal and expound themselves, and even each
other, as when Bergotte speaks of the married Swann as a man who
“has to swallow a hundred serpents every day.” The point of view,
the intellectual outfit which all males have in common—these give
the male novelist a certain tract of solid ground when dealing with
characters of his own sex. A man’s fellow-feeling for other men is very
strong. It has but a faint and imperfect parallel as between woman and
woman. Proust, accordingly, without any sacrifice of conscience, can,
“by his belief,” endow Swann with a soul. But—marvellous and highly
characteristic creation as he is—Swann may be put in the same category
with other male characters by other male novelists. Odette, Gilberte,
Albertine, are in a category by themselves. Outside of Proust’s book
they are only to be met with in life.
It is in this differential treatment of his women that we perceive
how rigorously Proust applies his artistic method. He never seeks to
transcend his own personality. In him, the observer, the whole of
creation lives and moves and has its being. Men are creatures made in
his own image. He can faithfully follow his own emotions, and “by his
belief” can conscientiously endow his men with souls. But women are
in a different case. He has no inner guide to assure him that they
are anything more than the phantoms they seem. Strictly speaking, this
should imply no more than a negative attitude. In fact, however, Proust
goes further. Because he has no grounds for belief he passes into
unbelief. In his philosophy _esse est percipi_, therefore, the
souls of women for him have no existence. Herein it is likely that he
has borne out the unavowed experience of most men. Whether or no, he
certainly has expressed the truth of his own experience with a purity
that few, even among great writers, can rival.
One thing more. There is Proust’s mother.
No doubt the avenging eagerness with which I reintroduce her here
for my conclusion is due in part to my being myself of the soulless
sex. But quite apart from any such feelings, to speak of this
novelist’s women without reckoning especially with his mother would
be inexcusable. That he adored her in childhood he makes manifest.
Further, that throughout his life this adoration effectively debarred
him from profound emotion where other women were concerned becomes
clear enough to the reader. It hardly appears, however, that Proust
was himself wholly conscious of this. True, there is a passage in the
_Combray_ section in which he speaks of “that untroubled peace
which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me,
since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes in them,
and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her kiss,
the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation,
unburdened by any liability save to myself.” But this is the only
place where he seems to allow that the love he bore his mother was
even comparable in kind with the love aroused by other women later
in his life. Indeed, though he repeatedly speaks of the anguish with
which in his childhood he longed for his mother’s good-night kiss, the
ecstasy with which he received it, as if it were the Host in an act of
communion, conveying to him “her real presence and with it the power
to sleep”; though he tells how, for that “frail and precious kiss,” he
prepared himself in advance so as to “consecrate” the whole minute of
contact; though he dreaded to prolong or repeat the kiss lest a look
of displeasure should cross those beautiful features with the slight,
beloved blemish under one of the eyes; yet he describes himself at
this time as one “into whose life Love had not yet entered,” as one
whose emotion, failing love and as yet awaiting it, happened to be at
the disposal of “filial piety.” No wonder if, when temporary “loves”
came, he compared with them as unconsciously as unfavourably this good
and gracious mother—so admiringly timid as a wife, so gentle towards
strangers, so perfect socially, so full of stern solicitude as a parent
(“she never allowed herself to go to any length of tenderness with
me”)—and found them merely exciting to the senses. He had already, so
far as woman was concerned, given his heart away.
Yet, after all, perhaps he knew it well enough and merely takes his
own way of saying it. He tells us little enough of his mother, though
probably he tells as much as he knows. What her own real thoughts and
feelings were we are left to guess. But “never again,” he says, after
describing one very special visit of hers to the boy’s bedroom—“never
again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been
increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the
sobs ... which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma.
Actually their echo has never ceased.”
CATHERINE CARSWELL.
IX
_THE BEST RECORD_
One of my feelings whenever I read Marcel Proust is regret that Henry
James is not alive to enjoy him, as he would have done immensely and
amazedly, though, judging from the letters of that great master of
the art of writing fiction, no doubt he would not have given him his
unqualified approval. But he would have recognised him as working at
his own level, while not in his own groove. Yet, for all that Proust
is the author of practically only one book, big though that book is,
in that one book he has spread his nets wider, and sunk them deeper,
than did Henry James in the sum of all his novels. One wonders if
such mastery has ever been obtained so suddenly and so completely;
indeed, the sureness of touch seems a little less certain in the last
published volumes than in the earlier ones. We had revealed to us from
the beginning a new way of writing fiction, or rather of describing
life. It had never so been done before. Let us pray that he will have
no disciples—one can foresee the horror of them; but influence he must
have.
My own interest begins with the second volume of _Swann_,
though my admiration begins with the first sentence of the first;
and my advice to new readers would be to take up any volume after
_Swann_—to start in the middle—when I am sure they will insist on
knowing everything the author has to say about his characters from the
beginning. You become soaked in the lives of these people as a sponge
becomes soaked with water. In the process you live your own life over
again, and, if you have lived in Paris and in Normandy, you tread the
same ground.
Proust has no “story” to tell. He sets down life as it was lived by
certain people at a certain period: Parisian society from the middle of
the Dreyfus case to the present day. From the amazing brilliance of the
whole opening two details presently detach themselves—the love of Swann
for Odette, and the boy and girl idyll in the Champs-Élysées: they are
beyond words to praise, for they are not Art, but life recorded with
matchless insight or remembrance. We need not compare, but how pale is
_Jean Christophe_ beside these pages! So when we get to Normandy,
the _Plage_, the hotel, and the countryside with its little
railway, and childhood has melted into adolescence, we live again those
days, and tread those paths, which we thought beyond recapture, save by
indistinct memory. It is an exquisite pleasure which I, at any rate,
never expected to experience.
Emerging from the shadows of the joyous band of _jeunes filles en
fleurs_, with its hint of perversity—we shall have to rewrite our
hymns: “There’s a _Freud_ for little children!”—we come to the
marvellous Guermantes, with whom Proust has pictured that high-born
snobbery—and life without snobbery is like meat without salt—which
observers, as they get on in years, come to know is inherent in the
upper classes no less, perhaps more, than in the middle classes: a
right snobbery, bereft of any meanness or noxious prejudices. These
people see France through their family history, and their family
history was France. They are Ladies and Gentlemen, with all that that
connotes: and in considering them we are conscious of all the rest
who are not. Proust, in exploring one path, illuminates the others.
We spend a few hours in their company, in the course of a dinner and
an evening reception (taking up a couple of hundred or so of pages),
and at the end we know all about them; we understand the world which
made them, and what they are going to make of the world. As contrasts
to these great ones we have those other snobs, the Verdurins, of the
“cultured” middle class. Surely never before, in memoir, essay, or
fiction, has it all been set down so brilliantly.
One wonders what sort of man Proust really was. We know he was a great
friend of Léon Daudet—two men, one would have thought, as the poles
asunder. We know that he slept by day, and lived and worked by night:
we know that he was ill and neurasthenic. We know also that nothing was
hidden from him, and that he had an infinite power of expression. He
was a very human being with the brain and the pen of a recording angel.
Occasionally, lest his cleverness should seem to be superhuman, one
comes on a jest or an anecdote which is a “chestnut”; or he becomes a
little too intricate, or his neurasthenia shows its cloven hoof: once
or twice I am inclined to throw the book down as too tiresome, but
I cling to him and grapple with him, and soon feel again that I am
enjoying one of the greatest pleasures of my life.
One meets with all kinds of people in his work, some of them very odd
people; though how very odd is the ordinary normal person! Proust’s
odd people may be thought to be modern: yet both in art and in life
they are indeed very ancient. They are those for whom—to modernise an
old phrase—Life is a _mauvais quart d’heure_ made up of exquisite
complexes. Side by side with these “moderns” are the old-fashioned
people, notably the Grandmother and Françoise—not Micawber is more
definite than this last.
The more we study the great writers of all ages, and the more we
observe for ourselves, the more we realise that the world never
alters; we can only ring the changes on the same material. Harmony and
discord, beauty and ugliness! It is like a gramophone disc. The records
vary, the melodies, the arrangements, make their individual effect,
but the substance is the same. The Masters make their records on an
unchanging surface. Marcel Proust’s is a magnificent record; perhaps
the most brilliant ever achieved. It requires only that we bring to it
a sympathetic and sharp-pointed needle.
Did his death leave his record incomplete?
One would like to know what more he had in his mind to record of these
people. Especially is one curious as to the future of M. de Charlus.
What did he do in the Great War? Did he open one of his houses as
a hospital for not too badly wounded soldiers? Or was he content
with lending his name to charity bazaars? Or was he—likeliest of
all—galvanised by his high breeding and undoubted courage into a vigour
beyond his years, to make a hero’s end? Perhaps we shall never know.
Does it much matter? We can finish off these people to our own liking,
or—if indeed his book was unfinished—leave them as he left them. There
they are for us, all alive—and likely to remain so.
REGINALD TURNER.
X
_A FOOT-NOTE_
Though in England almost every one, who has read and understood,
admires the works of Marcel Proust, it is not so in France. There,
not to go beyond my own experience, I have met plenty of writers,
and good ones too, who cannot away with them. Even that essay on the
style of Flaubert, which I had supposed would be universally reckoned
a masterpiece, I have heard described by a friend of mine, a charming
poet and admired dramatist, as childish. Now, when I hear such a one,
and others whom I respect, disparaging Proust, I do not fly into a
passion; I seek the cause, instead. And I find it—though the discovery,
should they ever come to hear of it, would a good deal shock some of my
French friends and surprise perhaps a few of my English—in Politics.
The French themselves seem hardly to realise how sharp and deep their
political divisions are become. Yet when we remember that during the
last forty years politics have been able to make of that gentle latin
scepticism, which gave us Montaigne, Bayle, and Voltaire, and still
gives us M. Anatole France, something as narrow and bitter almost
as Calvinism; when we hear of such pretty place-names as (say) St.
Symphorien being changed into (say) Émile Combesville; we ought not
to be surprised if literature even gets splashed a little in the dirty
dog-fight. Because Marcel Proust is supposed to have chosen as the
subject of his epic the _faubourg St. Germain_, it is assumed
that he admired and believed in it. Was not _L’Action française_
amongst the first to hail his rising genius? Is he not half a Jew and
therefore wholly a renegade? He is a black reactionary and an enemy of
light. He is not a good man, so how can he be a good writer? We are
back again in a very familiar world of criticism; only the English
critics can prove that he was good, after all.
As a matter of fact, which I know counts for little in politics or
criticism, Proust seems to me often unduly hard on the _faubourg_.
I shall not easily forget, nor perhaps will it, the devastating
effect of that small phrase, when, after treating us to a ravishing
description of a theatre full to the brim of _beau monde_, after
explaining how these are the people fitted by training, tradition,
and circumstance to taste the things of the mind, he adds, by way of
afterthought as it were, “si seulement ils avaient eu de l’esprit.”
For my part, sitting next her at that gorgeous dinner-party, I was
completely bowled over by the matchless Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes
(late Princesse des Laumes), bowled over not only by her beauty and
seduction, and a little perhaps by her great name, but by her _bel
esprit_ and intelligence. To me her observations on Victor Hugo in
particular and the art of writing in general seemed to possess that
airy profundity which above all things one relishes in a literary
conversation, until M. Proust, after pooh-poohing her circle, undid
the duchess herself with this painfully just appreciation: “Pour
toutes ces raisons les causeries avec la duchesse ressemblaient à
ces connaissances qu’on puise dans une bibliothèque de château,
surannée, incomplète, incapable de former une intelligence, dépourvue
de presque tout ce que nous aimons, mais nous offrant parfois quelque
renseignement curieux, voire la citation d’une belle page que nous ne
connaissions pas, et dont nous sommes heureux dans la suite de nous
rappeler que nous en devons la connaissance à une magnifique demeure
seigneuriale. Nous sommes alors, pour avoir trouvé la préface de Balzac
à _la Chartreuse_ ou des lettres inédites de Joubert, tentés de
nous exagérer le prix de la vie que nous y avons menée et dont nous
oublions, pour cette aubaine d’un soir, la frivolité stérile.”
By naming Madame de Guermantes I have given myself occasion to remark
one of M. Proust’s most extraordinary gifts—his power of realising a
character. Without being presented one would know the incomparable
duchess should one ever have the happiness of meeting her at a party;
and I should recognise one of her good things (“Oriane’s latest”) were
it repeated in the train. When some one quotes a saying by Dr. Johnson
or the Duke of Wellington we need not verify by the book; their
characters are so vivid to us, and they speak so much in character,
that their phrases have the ring of familiar voices. It is the same
with Madame de Guermantes. How many authors have achieved this miracle?
Shakespeare, of course, who achieved all miracles, can distinguish even
his minor characters. In a tipsy dialogue between Mrs. Quickly and Doll
Tearsheet you can tell by the mere phrasing, by the particular way in
which a bawdy joke is turned, which of the ladies is speaking. And who
else can do it? Not Balzac, I am sure. Dickens, some one will say. Yes,
but only by giving us for characters blatant caricatures. We all know
the devil by his tail.
So far I have not contested the common opinion that Proust is the poet
of the _beau monde_; I have sought only to show that, if he were,
it would not follow that he was either a snob or a reactionary: it
would not follow that he was taken in. In fact, the subject of Proust’s
epic is the whole of French life as it was from forty to twenty years
ago—a subject of which the _faubourg_ is but a part. He gives
us a full-length picture of family life in the provinces and of a
quasi-intellectual circle in Paris, of the “seaside girls” who run
about with Albertine, and a _croquis_ of “county society”; best
of all, perhaps, he gives us exquisite landscapes and still-lifes.
And surely at this time of day it ought not to be necessary to remind
people, especially French people, that any subject, provided the
artist is thoroughly possessed by it, is as good as any other; that the
forms and colours, and their relations, of a pot of flowers or fruit on
a table, passionately apprehended, are capable of inspiring as sublime
a work of art as the Madonna or the Crucifixion. If the _faubourg_
above all things fascinated Proust, that I suspect was because in it
Proust saw a subject proper only to the touch of a master psychologist.
“Society,” he saw, is a hierarchy without official grades or badges:
unlike the army, with its colonels, majors, and captains; unlike the
navy, with its admirals, captains, and commanders; it resembles rather
a public school or small college. It is a microcosm in which people are
moved up and down, in and out, by mysterious and insensible powers; in
which they are promoted and degraded by a breath of fashion blowing
they know not whence; in which they obey slavishly unwritten laws, as
absolute as those of the Medes and Persians: powers these, none of
which they themselves can apprehend, but of which some can be surprised
by sensibilities in their way as delicate and subtle as those which
know when a lady changes her _sachets_ and can distinguish the
_bouquet_ of Léoville from Larose. Herein perhaps, rather than in
its social prestige, lay the charm of the _faubourg_ for Marcel
Proust.