English Proust. No Englishman, I mean, writing in English, would be
allowed to publish in England so complete a picture of life. Wherefore
as a novel- and play-writing nation we have lost pride of place,
and cannot hope to regain it till we have set our laws in order. An
artist must be possessed by his subject; but the English novelist
who is inspired by his sense of contemporary life is not allowed
to express that by which he is possessed. Fielding, Jane Austen,
Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, James, and Hardy, English novelists who
took contemporary life for their province, all had something to say
which may have shocked or hurt but which the age did not prohibit.
They were, therefore, as free to express the best that was in them as
Balzac, Zola, or Proust. But to-day our subtlest and most active minds,
affected maybe, consciously or unconsciously, by modern psychological
discoveries, are concerned, so far as they are concerned with life
at all, with certain aspects of it, with certain relations, of which
they may not treat freely. Their situation is as painful and absurd
as would have been that of men of science who, towards the close of
last century, should have been allowed to make no use of Darwin’s
contribution to biology. The gap between first- and third-rate minds
has been growing alarmingly wide of late. Proust moves in a world
unknown almost to the intellectual slums, or to those intellectual
lower middle classes from which are drawn too many of our magistrates,
judges, and legislators. These lag behind, and impose their veto
on the sincere treatment of English manners by a first-rate English
artist. And perhaps the best tribute which English admirers of Proust
could pay his memory would be to agitate for the repeal of those
absurd and barbarous laws which make an English _Recherche du Temps
Perdu_ impossible.
CLIVE BELL.
XI
_THE SPELL OF PROUST_
The magic ring which Marcel Proust drew, almost literally, round his
readers—since it is in the circle of “_le temps perdu_” which is
to become “_le temps retrouvé_” that he sets us and himself—seemed
early in the incantation to betray a break whereby we might escape,
did we so wish, from his compulsion. For, enthralled as we had been
by _Swann_, there was a sensible relaxing of the spell with the
_Jeunes Filles_. Not in the opening pages, where the atmosphere
that we had rapturously learned to breathe was potent still with its
intoxicating magic; but when we came to Balbec, and the group of
seaside girls began to show as rulers of the scene, there was scarce
one of us who did not own to disappointment. _La petite bande_,
more actual and, on the surface, more alluring than _la petite
phrase_ in the sonata of Vinteuil, yet wholly failed to charm the
sense or the imagination as the enigmatic little group of notes had
charmed. We heard, and we responded to, the cry: “Those flappers
are so tedious!”—and as Albertine grew more and more significant,
_we_ grew more sceptical, and told ourselves that we could step
outside the ring at any moment we might choose. But somehow, that
emancipative moment never came. Despite the blinding print of the
edition in a single volume—print that must have permanently injured
our collective sight—there always was a reason why we could not break
away. And finally, we realised that we were wrong, and that the spell
had but become more absolute, in both the shades of meaning in that
word. For now that some of the more normal baits for interest were laid
aside, we could perceive that here was sorcery in its pure state—the
thing itself, stripped of all seeming. Now we could not so easily, or
easily at all, “say why” when the profane inquired of us what the magic
was—why, reading Proust, we were so interested. We were _not_
so interested; we could scarcely say, or even think, that we were
“interested” any more.
The miracle had happened. We were spellbound, for good and all, within
the magic ring. We had forgotten what we used to mean when, in the
world outside, we had said “dull”; for here was much that was not
merely dull but positively soporific, yet our eyes were glued upon
the baleful page, and any interruption seemed a challenge to the
occult power that held us. Something was risked, immeasurably worth
our while, did we fall short of the required submission.... This was
because we now could feel more deeply the extent of what the wizard
meant to do with us. We were not passively to stand within the circle.
We were, with him, to pace it mystically round, while time ran back
to fetch the Age of Gold. _Le temps passé_ would be transmuted,
imperceptibly, into _le temps retrouvé_; and our aid was necessary
to the necromancer’s full success. With this flattering divination
there began a new excitement, different in action from the old; for
soon, instead of rushing at the latest Marcel Proust directly we had
bought it, we indeed did buy it, but re-read the earlier volumes first.
Here was the very magic ring itself, drawn round our fireside chair!
The latest Proust lay ready to our hand, slim or substantial token of
the power still unspent; but lest we should have missed a single letter
in the charm, we spelt it through devoutly once again; and, in the
spelling, found how many an indication subtly skilled at once to warn
and to escape us till the moment of reflection or re-reading! And as
a consequence, we now perceived so intricate and exquisite a “pattern
in the carpet” as could make the newest volume into something more
exciting for anticipation even than we had dreamed.
This is the proof, to me, of Marcel Proust’s (as one might think,
indisputable; yet by a few disputed) genius. The _Swann_ book
contains the largest share of interest, no doubt—that merer, franker
kind of interest which other books can give us in a hardly less degree.
But in the later volumes, as they “grow on” us, there is far more (if
also there is less) than this; and it is through the more that we come
finally to clear perception of Proust’s purpose and his mastery. For
in these less immediately attractive volumes we are conscious of an
ever-growing sense of the significance so deeply interfused through
the whole work. He had by then become absorbed to such degree in his
interpretation of the microcosm which he saw as a sufficing symbol of
the irony, absurdity, and the incessant alternation, “intermittency,”
and travail of the consciousness of man, that we are sensible, as he
proceeds, of powers more transcendent than the highest of the writer’s
mere accomplishment—stupendous as that is in Proust, who could “write”
anything he chose, and chose to write so many things, from satire that
is blighting in its smiling subtlety (so muted as to mock the hasty
ear!), to lyric flower-pieces like the paradisal hawthorn-hedge in
_Swann_, and the unrivalled comments upon buildings, pictures,
fashions in dress and manners (who will forget the monocles at the big
evening-party at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s?), books, the drama, even
photographs! In the great elegiac glories of the death of Bergotte (not
yet published in book-form), and of that _grand’mère_ who is the
_motif_, as it were, in the symphonic composition of the unnamed
central figure’s personality, Proust sounded chords which lay till then
beyond the compass of his readers’ hearing, but were then revealed to
sense that shall not lose them while it yet survives.
But over all this virtuosity there rules a mightier gift—the
master-gift of insight. Proust, one could say, “knows everything,” in
the restricted meaning of the words. No bent, no twist, of modern
thought escapes him; yet, as one reader writes to me, “there is no
dead psychology”—no case stretched on a Procrustean bed, with all that
does not fit lopped comfortably, and discomfortingly, off. He, unlike
Nature, is most careful of the single life. If ever we had questioned
that—and we had very little questioned it—the Charlus portrait answered
us: that masterpiece of the undaunted, following eye and mind. Proust
leads us with him on this journey of the visual and mental powers; we
are no more involuntarily drawn on than he has been into the state of
an astounded fondness and appreciation for the maudlin, overbearing,
ludicrous, yet constantly pathetic or superb old “invert.” We are
offended personally by the insolences of his favourites; the tears in
his unholy eyes can well-nigh wet our own ... and this though, with
the master’s hand upon our shoulders, we have gone through every phase
of the degrading intimacies, seen and heard the tragi-comic outbursts
of the princely victim, every now and then remembering his “rank” and
seeking to restore the true relation between him and those whom in his
view he honours by his merest word, yet who are his disdainful masters
through his helpless depravation.
If there were nothing else than Charlus in the books, Proust must be
given pride of place among the masters. But with the plenitude there
is—what must we give? More than a master, one would say, a writer
cannot be. Yet in the image here suggested of the magic circle, there
is possibly the one thing more that causes Proustians to divide their
reading lives into the time before and after they have read these
books. No spell had yet been worked on us of potency like this; for
though we are pent within the ring, we move within it too—the world
revolves, for us, as in a crystal held beneath our gaze by one who,
moving with us, will reveal the secret hidden not there only but in our
own dim sense, when at the last _le temps perdu_ shall have become
_le temps retrouvé_.
ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE.
XII
_A NEW PSYCHOMETRY_[3]
[Footnote 3: Reprinted from _The Times_ of Wednesday, November 29,
1922. _The Times_ had been almost alone among English newspapers
in giving “publicity” to the death of Marcel Proust in its issue of
Monday, November 20.—C.K.S.M.]
To judge from the newspapers, there have been tremendous “crises” in
public affairs during the last few days: the triumph of Fascismo in
Italy, the Lausanne Conference, the English elections. But to many of
us the great events are merely spectacular; they pass rapidly across
the screen, while the band plays irrelevant scraps of syncopated music,
and seem no more real than any other of the adventures, avowedly
fictitious, that are “filmed” for our idle hours. They don’t, save on
reflection and much diligent pondering of leading articles, come home
to our business and bosoms. But one announcement in _The Times_ of
last Monday week shocked many of us with a sudden, absurdly indignant
bewilderment, like a foul blow: I mean the death of Marcel Proust.
It is not only absurd but impious to be indignant with the decrees
of Fate. The wise throughout the ages have prescribed for us our
proper behaviour in the face of such an event; and most of us find the
prescription quite useless. But, on the death of an author, there is
this peculiar consolation that never fails: his work lives absolutely
unaffected by his death.
... We can light the lamp, make a clear fire, and sit down to the
book with the old thrill. There is only the thought that we must
be content with what we have, that we are to get no more from that
hand. With Marcel Proust, however, it seems that we are spared even
that mortification. He has left behind him the completion of _A la
Recherche du Temps Perdu_. This is great news. The announcements
from the press of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ will be eagerly
awaited. Even a new Anatole France is not so important an event.
It has been said that Proust will go down to posterity as the author of
one book. This is only true in a literal sense. For the many volumes
of _A la Recherche_ that already crowd the shelves are several
“books” in one. It is not a “story,” but a panorama of many stories.
Indeed, who reads Proust for the “story”? His book is really a picture
of the modern world and the modern spirit, and that is its peculiar
fascination for us. There are “morbid” elements in it, to be sure—you
cannot read a page without seeing that it must have been written by
some one who was anything but a normal, healthy human being, and
it is not for nothing that _The Times_[4] has compared him to
Petronius Arbiter. But one of the advantages of this hyperaesthesia is
a heightened sensibility for _everything_, the perception and
accurate notation of innumerable details in thought and feeling that
escape a normal observer.
[Footnote 4: _The Times_, Monday, November 20, 1922: “Marcel
Proust: An Appreciation.” (From a Correspondent.)—C.K.S.M.]
Take, for instance, the account of the famous author “Bergotte.”
Proust, little more than a child, but already his ardent reader, meets
him at luncheon. And, first, the boy’s imagined author, a “langoureux
vieillard,” has to give place to the reality, much younger, a little
man with a chin-tuft and a nose like a snail-shell. Then comes an
elaborate description of his spoken diction, pronunciation, etc., and
an attempt to reconcile these with the peculiarities of his written
style. Special “notes”:
Doubtless, again, so as to distinguish himself from
the previous generation, too fond as it had been of
abstractions, of weighty commonplaces, when Bergotte
wished to speak favourably of a book, what he would bring
into prominence, what he would quote with approval, would
always be some scene that furnished the reader with an
image, some picture that had no rational significance.
“Ah, yes!” he would exclaim, “it is quite admirable! There
is a little girl in an orange shawl. It is excellent!” Or
again, “Oh, yes, there is a passage in which there is a
regiment marching along the street; yes, it is excellent!”
As for style, he was not altogether of his time (though
he remained quite exclusively of his race, abominating
Tolstoy, George Eliot, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky), for the
word that always came to his lips when he wished to praise
the style of any writer was “mild.” “Yes, you know, I like
Chateaubriand better in _Atala_ than in _René_;
he seems to me to be milder.” He said the word like a
doctor who, when his patient assures him that milk will
give him indigestion, answers: “But, you know, it’s very
mild.” And it is true that there was in Bergotte’s style
a kind of harmony similar to that for which the ancients
used to praise certain of their orators in terms which we
now find it hard to understand, accustomed as we are to our
own modern tongues, in which effects of that kind are not
sought.[5]
[Footnote 5: [Transcriber’s Note: See next footnote.]]
It is, further, explained how this man of genius came to pay court to
his intellectual inferiors with an eye on the Academy, and how, while
his own private morals were bad, the moral tone of his books was of the
loftiest.
Perhaps it is only in really vicious lives that the moral
problem can arise in all its disquieting strength. And of
this problem the artist finds a solution in the terms not
of his own personal life but of what is for him the true
life, a general, a literary solution. As the great Doctors
of the Church began often, without losing their virtue, by
acquainting themselves with the sins of all mankind, out of
which they extracted their own personal sanctity, so great
artists often, while being thoroughly wicked, make use of
their vices in order to arrive at a conception of the moral
law that is binding upon us all.[6]
[Footnote 6: I am glad that the acknowledgement here of Mr. Walkley’s
courtesy in allowing me to substitute my version for his of these two
passages from _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ gives me an
opportunity to acknowledge also my borrowing and to congratulate him
upon the discovery of the word “mild”—“une véritable trouvaille,” as
Norpois would undoubtedly have called it.—C.K.S.M.]
Nor is the portrait finished yet. Bergotte was at bottom a man who
really loved only certain images and to compose and paint them in
words. Had he had to defend himself before a tribunal, in spite of
himself he would have chosen his words, not for their effect on the
judge, but in view of images which the judge would certainly never have
perceived.
It is this extraordinarily minute “psychometry” that is the peculiar
mark of Proust’s work. The sensations Swann derives from a sonata of
Vinteuil’s, the special quality of Elstir’s pictures of the sea-shore,
the effect of afternoon light in the church at Combray, glimpses of
military life at Doncières, with its contrast of the First Empire
aristocracy and the _ancien régime_,—it is the first time that
such things as these have been put into words and brought intimately
home to you. Then there are the studies of _le grand monde_—the
“gilded saloons,” as Disraeli would have called them, of the Guermantes
and the rest. Here you have a picture of the Faubourg Saint-Germain
that is as true, you are assured, as Balzac’s was false.[7]
[Footnote 7: In his article, published in _The Times_ three weeks
later, on December 20, 1922, Mr. Walkley replied to a criticism of
this statement:—“The old complaint of ‘misrepresenting’ modern France
is now beginning to be heard about the great novelist just dead,
Marcel Proust. An eminent English novelist tackles me about this. He
says Proust is not entitled to the highest rank in literature because
his representation of French society is partial only, and therefore
unfair; that he writes only of the Faubourg Saint-Germain set, which
stands for the ‘dead’ France, and not of the ‘live’ people, soldiers
and statesmen and others, who have made and are making France to-day.
And he contrasts him with Balzac, who aimed at giving a panorama of the
whole social scheme. Well, it strikes me as an unfortunate comparison.
Balzac’s _Comédie Humaine_ was like Zola’s _Rougon-Macquart
Family_, a mere afterthought, a specious formula designed to
suggest continuity and completeness in what was merely casual and
temperamental. As a ‘representation of France’ it is not to be taken
seriously; what it represents—like any other work of art—is its
author’s genius. His men of action, his statesmen, his men of affairs,
are, frankly, preposterous. Proust never set out to ‘represent’ France;
he represented the side of its social life that happened to interest
him. What he did magnificently represent was the hitherto unexplored in
human nature and the human mind. As M. Jacques Rivière says of him in
the current _Nouvelle Revue Française_, ‘The discoveries he has
made in the human mind and heart will one day be considered as capital,
and of the same rank as those of Kepler in astronomy, Claude Bernard in
physiology, or Auguste Comte in the interpretation of the sciences.’
That strikes me as better work than producing a portrait-group of
‘Modern France,’ with General Lyautey arm-in-arm with Marshal Foch, and
M. Clemenceau putting on his celebrated pearl-grey gloves.”—C.K.S.M.]
I confess “ma mère” and “ma grand’mère” bore me. And there is just a
little too much of “le petit clan.” But in this vast banquet of modern
life and thought and sensation there is plenty of room to pick and
choose. Since Henry Bernstein first mentioned Proust’s name to me in
the year before the war I have returned again and again for a tit-bit
to that feast. Proust is dead; but we can still go on enjoying his
work. In that sense the cry of the child in Maeterlinck’s _Oiseau
Bleu_ is true enough: “There is no death.”
A.B. WALKLEY.
XIII
_PROUST AND THE MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS_[8]
[Footnote 8: Reprinted from _The Times Literary Supplement_ of
Thursday, January 4, 1923, where this article followed an English
version of a formal tribute to Marcel Proust, signed by nineteen
English men and women, which appeared (in French) in the special number
of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ for January 1923. Mr. Middleton
Murry had already written, at greater length (too great, indeed, for
reproduction in this volume), on Marcel Proust in _The Quarterly
Review_ for July 1922.—C.K.S.M.]
For Englishmen Marcel Proust has already become one of the great
figures of modern literature. The feeling is common to many of his
readers that in some way his work marks an epoch. What kind of epoch it
is harder to say. Is he an end, or a beginning? And, again, yet another
question insinuates itself continually as we pass slowly through his
long volumes. What precisely—if answers to such questions can be made
precise—was his own intention as a writer? Not that it necessarily
makes the least difference to his own importance whether he succeeded
or failed, whether he was consistent or spasmodic in following out his
own plan. But we, at least, should be the happier for some indication
of the thread to follow. For there comes a time in the reading of a
long novel—and _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ is surely one of
the longest—when we feel the need to stand aside, to contemplate it as
a whole, to grasp the pattern, to comprehend the general vision of
life on which its essential individuality depends. Only thus, it seems,
can we really make it our own.
In this respect Marcel Proust’s book may be fairly said to bristle
with difficulties. Its obvious theme, its surface intention, as we
perceive it in the brilliant opening pages of _Du côté de chez
Swann_, is the presentation by an adult man of his memories of
childhood. We feel, though with peculiar qualifications to which we
must return, that we are on the threshold of a spiritual autobiography;
we are to be the enchanted witnesses of the unfolding and growth of
a strangely sensitive consciousness. But no sooner are we attuned to
the subtleties of this investigation and have accustomed ourselves
to Proust’s breathless, tiptoe following of the faint and evanescent
threads of association: no sooner have we begun to take a deep and
steady breath of the rich fragrance of Aunt Léonie’s house at Combray,
and to imbibe the luxurious atmosphere of the old town, whose shifting
colours are as opulent as the lights of the windows in the church
round which it clings: no sooner have we prepared ourselves to watch
with absorbed interest the process of growth of a mind nurtured in
this almost intoxicating soil,—than the thread is abruptly snapped. We
do not complain at the moment, for the episode _Amour de Swann_
is the highest sustained achievement of Proust as a prose-writer.
Perhaps the devouring passion of love—“Venus toute entière à sa proie
attachée”—the smouldering, torturing flame of unsatisfied passion which
by the law of its own nature can never be satisfied, has never been
so subtly and so steadily anatomised before. Perhaps it has been more
wonderfully presented, but never more wonderfully analysed.
It is not surprising that in the fascination of this intolerable
and unwonted history, in which every psychological subtlety of the
author is properly and beautifully dominated by the tragic theme, we
forget that this is not at all the thing we went out to see. The boy
whose history we have been following could not have known of Swann’s
discomfiture before he was a man. It has happened, indeed, before
the narrative of _Du Côté de chez Swann_ opens, before the bell
of the garden-gate tinkles and Swann takes his place with the family
on the verandah; but it can have no place in the story of the boy’s
development until he is old enough to understand it. In other words,
the angle of presentation has abruptly changed. Into a narrative
concerned, as we imagine, solely with what a boy knew and felt, and how
he knew and felt it, is suddenly thrust an episode of which he could
have known nothing at all.