Côté de chez Swann_ with which Proust’s admirers had so long to
remain content—were at once baffling and fascinating. Moreover,
they do actually contain Proust’s very finest work: he was never
again to sustain himself on this level for so long. But, considered
in themselves (and there were three or four years in which we had no
choice but to consider them so), they could be made to yield a pattern.
On the one side was the vague and heroic figure of Swann as he loomed
on the extreme horizon of the boy’s world, the mysterious visitant
whose appearances in the household made an agony of his solitary going
to bed; on the other was the Swann of reality, the reserved, silent,
ineffably refined darling of the _beau monde_, who held his teeth
clenched, like the Spartan, while the fox gnawed at his vitals. The
contrast, the building up of the character of Swann, as it were, from
two sides at once, was the quite sufficient motive of the book. But, so
understood, it was Swann’s book, not the boy’s.
But the next volumes brought us back to the boy’s history. As we read
of his love affair with Albertine, his adoration of the Duchesse de
Guermantes, his adventures in the rarefied atmosphere of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, it became more and more evident that _Amour de
Swann_ was, in spite of its beauty and power, only an irrelevant
interlude, after all. And in the narrative of the boy’s stay in the
hotel at Balbec came frequent hints that the key to the story as a
whole might be found in the earlier emphasis upon the manner in which
the author went in search of the past. At the beginning of _Du
Côté de chez Swann_ he had been at pains to give us not merely
his results but his method also. He was a grown man, suddenly waking
from sleep, trying to locate himself once more in his room, and his
room in the world; and something familiar in this strange sensation
had reminded him of his sensations in his bedroom as a child. But
“reminded” is altogether too coarse and summary a word for the
delicate process on which his researches depended; rather it is that a
familiarity in the strange sensation whispers to him that it holds a
secret for him if he will only explore it. It conceals something that
he must know. Again, it is the vague familiarity of the faint flavour
of a _madeleine_ dipped in tea, which the grown man is eating in
his mother’s company, which ultimately yields up the magnificently
vivid picture of Combray and Aunt Léonie. These sensations, or
presentiments of the past, come to the boy also. There is, for example,
the beautiful account of his mysterious excitement at a sight of the
spire and towers of Martinville church when he is driving home in Dr.
Percepied’s carriage. Again he has the sense of memories he cannot
grasp, of a secret and mystical message that he cannot make his own; it
is the occasion of his first attempt at writing.[9] These premonitions
become more frequent during his stay with his grandmother at the
Balbec hotel. Then the sudden sight of a tiny clump of trees seen while
he is driving with the Marquise de Villeparisis makes him feel that
they are stretching out imploring arms towards him in a mute appeal.
If he can divine what they have to tell him (they seem to say) he will
touch the secret of “la vraie vie,” of life indeed. And then the writer
warns us that the story of his search to make this secret his own is
to come, and that this premonition of a task to be accomplished was to
haunt him throughout his life.
[Footnote 9: In another and rather complicated sense this is a
presentiment of the future. The spires appear to have been those of
Caen, the carriage a motor car, the year evidently much later. The
original article will be found in _Pastiches et Mélanges_, on pp.
91 to 99.—C.K.S.M.]
At this moment Marcel Proust came nearest, we may believe, to revealing
to the reader the hidden soul of his own book. There is room for
different interpretations, of course, and it is admitted that in any
case he was frequently distracted from whatever plan he had by his
delight in a pure description of the human comedy from the angle most
familiar to him. Nevertheless, we are persuaded that Proust brought to
the exact and intimate analysis of his own sensations something more
than the self-consciousness of talent—some element, let us say, of an
almost religious fervour. This modern of the moderns, this _raffiné_
of _raffinés_, had a mystical strain in his composition. These hidden
messages of a moment, these glimpses and intuitions of “la vraie vie”
behind a veil, were of the utmost importance to him; he had some kind
of immediate certainty of their validity. He confessed as much, and we
are entitled to take a man so reticent at his word.
We may take him at his word also when he acknowledges that the effort
to penetrate behind the veil of these momentary perceptions was the
chief interest of his life. The first of these illuminations—the vision
of Martinville spire—had taken shape in a piece of writing which he
gives us. We suspect that the last did also, and that its visible
expression is the whole series of volumes which, after all, do bear
a significant title—_A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_; we suspect
that the last page of the last volume would have brought us to the
first page of the first, and that the long and winding narrative would
finally have revealed itself as the history of its own conception.
Then, we may imagine, all the long accounts of the Guermantes’ parties
and the extraordinary figure of M. de Charlus would have fallen into
their places in the scheme, as part of the surrounding circumstances
whose pressure drove the youth and the man into the necessity of
discovering a reality within himself. What he was to discover, when
the demand that he should surrender himself to his moments of vision
became urgent and finally irresistible, was the history of what he was.
Proust—and amid the most labyrinthine of his complacent divagations
into the _beau monde_ a vague sense of this attends us—was much
more than a sentimental autobiographer of genius; he was a man trying
to maintain his soul alive. And thus, it may be, we have an explanation
of the rather surprising fact that he began his work so late. The
two volumes which went before _Du Côté de chez Swann_[10] were
not indeed negligible, but they were the work of a dilettante. The
explanation, we believe, is that in spite of his great gifts Proust
was a writer _malgré lui_; he composed against the grain. We mean
that had it been only for the sake of the satisfaction of literary
creation, he probably would not have written at all. It was only when
writing presented itself to him as the only available means for getting
down to the bedrock of his own personality, as the only instrument
by which his _fin-de-siècle_ soul—the epithet is, in his case,
a true definition—could probe to something solid to live by, that he
seriously took up the pen. It was the lance with which he rode after
the Grail—“la vraie vie.”
[Footnote 10: _I.e._, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_, published
in 1896, and _Pastiches et Mélanges_, which, strictly speaking,
did not come as a volume until after _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en
Fleurs_, in the spring of 1919. But of the _Pastiches_ some at
least had appeared in the _Figaro_ in 1908 and 1909, while the
_Mélanges_ date even further, and include the introductions to
Proust’s translations of Ruskin, _La Bible d’Amiens_ (1904) and
_Sésame et les Lys_ (1906).—C.K.S.M.]
Proust at the first glance looks wholly different from a man who rides
off on a desperate adventure. There seems to be no room for desperate
adventures in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It is hardly congruous to
some senses to ride through the waste land in a sixty horse-power
limousine. Nevertheless, it can be done. The outward and visible sign
is, not for the first time, different from the inward and spiritual
grace.
So by a devious path we return to our first question. Proust marks
an epoch. What kind of epoch? Is it an end or a beginning? And the
answer we have reached is the answer we might have expected in the
case of a figure so obviously considerable. Proust is both an end and
a beginning. More an end than a beginning, perhaps, if we have regard
to the technique and texture of his work. In the art of literature
itself he opens up no new way. And, in the deeper sense, he indicates
a need more than he satisfies it. The modern mind, looking into the
astonishing mirror which Proust holds up to it, will not see in it
the gleam of something to live by; but it will see, if it knows how
to look, an acknowledgement of that necessity and a burning desire to
satisfy it. By so much Marcel Proust marks a beginning also. It is the
flame of this desire which smoulders always through his book, and at
times breaks out; it is this which makes it his own, and this which
gives it, in the true sense, style.
J. MIDDLETON MURRY.
XIV
_PROUST’S WAY_
I went Proust’s way for the first time one rainy winter evening five
years ago, waiting in her warm boudoir for a foolish Society woman
to come in and give me tea and an introduction to the new popular
novelist. But she had not come in, and on a table near me, by the
powder-puff and the cigarettes, I found an author who had not yet swept
the board as he has since done.
A re-bound copy of _Du Côté de chez Swann_, from that accredited
emporium which Thomas Carlyle founded for the reading of the
Intelligentzia, the London Library, lay, dull and forbidding, among the
brocade and tinsel of the bibelots. Surprised, I opened it, intending,
as one idly may during these interludes, to take good-humoured
cognisance of the nature of another’s chosen study. At once I became
involved in an _enchevêtrement_, a leash of moods, a congeries of
complexes, of crankinesses, all that goes to make up a man—Swann. There
was no breathlessness, no sense of hurry, yet it was “good going.”
There were hairbreadth but quite actual escapes from bathos, ugly
grazings averted, artistic difficulties compounded: this author backed
his sentences in and out of garages like a first-class motorist....
And, suddenly, the rumble of an earthly car sounded and my hostess and
the popular author came in and tea was a weariness, for Tante Léonie—we
all have our Tantes Léonie—had entered into my knowledge, and the Lady
of the Cattleyas was just beginning to cause Swann, whom I already
loved, to suffer after the way of all men who want anything very badly.
We never mentioned the shabby, black book I had put down, but began
to discuss, in this Kensington drawing-room, Freud, much as people
discussed music in the drawing-room of Mme. Verdurin in Paris, and in
very much the same style as if Madame Odette de Crécy had taken a hand,
and Swann, blinded by love, had listened to her.
But I—I had become acquainted with Proust and had gained a world—one of
the worlds in which, through a book, we can go to live awhile whenever
we choose.
Proust! What is Proust? This is the cry of the Carping Uninitiated
among us. To such persons, constitutionally unwilling to be instructed,
one replies that Proust is a fashion—a disease—and that a Proustian,
so-called, is an Opium-Eater. But, to those who know him and love him,
he is a wise and cunning Prospero whose wand is style, and Combray an
enchanted island—Ferdinand, not much Miranda, but Caliban, drunken
sailors and all.
The Opium Trance, indeed, offers some parallel. Dr. Hochst tells us
that the wily subconsciousness, at odds with its earthly environment,
is able to invoke and maintain an attitude of benign stupor towards
the universe, holding it, as it were, at arm’s length, able to subsist
in tranquil abstraction from chill and hateful circumstance. And one
can easily imagine some triply disillusioned soul, rebuffed of love
and ambition and the fount of life itself, entering on a course of
the Master, content to live, lullabyed by the slight movement as of
flickering woodland leaves, warmed by the soft light that falls on
grey cathedral walls and white, dusty roads, quietly appreciative of
the Master’s passionless, infallible display of the complications and
unconscious betrayals of their ego by Françoise and Tante Léonie,
Odette and the Duchess; intrigued by his fine sense of social values
shown by the apt posing of the social Inferiorities of the Verdurin
_ménage_ in Paris against the ineffable Aristocracies ensconced in
their old château, Guermantes Way—and so on, through terms of months or
even years, till the stupor, benign in character, ends at last in the
ordinary manner, the patient dying, still _en plein Proust_, with,
perhaps, a volume or two unread, to the good, for there are, or are to
be, a good many.
The normal, healthy person, still active, still complying with life,
finds it more than soothing to commit himself to this peaceable,
effluent mind-flow, a current of thought that has, like life, its
eddies, its _transes_, but persists, as must we all who agree with
our destinies, in its appointed borders and so gains something of the
peace of resignation that Renan speaks of: “_Il n’y a rien de suave
comme le renoncement de la joie, rien de doux comme l’enchantement du
désenchantement._” For there is, indeed, no joy in all these myriad
pages: how could there be, since joy is clear-cut and impermanent and
all Proustian values fade and are merged in each other without such a
thing as an edge anywhere! The sharp, dramatic point popular novelists
excel in would break the spell.
We surrender ourselves to these entrancing _longueurs_; to
indescribable sensations that endure. Reading in Proust is, to me, like
the long drink of a child whom, by and by, a solicitous elder bids put
the cup down ... a gesture that this Master will never make. It is a
suave, sensuous pleasure, like stroking the long, rippling beard of
Ogier the Dane as he sits, stone-like, in his enchanted castle. It is
a patient, monkish task like that of tending with loving, religious
husbandry the Holy Rose at Hildesheim, that has gone on growing for
four hundred years. It suggests a sense of going on, a promise of a
future that may not be so very different, such as we got when our
German nurse told us that Grimm’s tale of the man who fell in and was
drowned, but, presently, found himself under the still waters of the
mere, walking, _langweilig_, in meadows prankt with daisies and
buttercups and fat flocks grazing....
Proust translated Ruskin’s _Bible of Amiens_—just the unexpected
sort of thing he would do—and one might theorise and hint that his
learned appreciation of the beauties that lie within due submission
to architectural rules, and acceptance of the limitations and
possibilities of shaped stones, have helped to form the backbone of
his style. It has the precision and poise of the arch, supported
by the virility and integrity of the pillar, with the permitted
_fioriture_ of the pinnacle sparingly used, as one sees it in
the Norman churches dotted all round about Combray and Balbec. And I
am sure his style is the magician’s wand without whose composed and
certain wielding we should never have allowed him to lead us, like
willing children, through the mazes, winding, twisting, but always
planned and in order, of his mind—or Swann’s. And if Swann—remote,
withdrawn, half-unsympathetic character that he is—had not been so
essentially lovable and had not, while telling us all, succeeded in
being at the same time suggestive, we should not have yielded ourselves
so utterly to _his_ mind-flow.
Proust made Swann a financier, a Jew, and gave him a German name,
because, I think, he wished to indicate to our subconscious judgments
a cause of Swann’s curious racial patience, his waiting on and
deference to the caprice of others. He allows life “to ride” him,
Mme. Verdurin to patronise him, Odette to make him love her: just as
the trees let the winds lash their boughs and break them, as rivers,
flattened and contradicted by raindrops, flow on all the same under a
grey sky. Swann, beautifully groomed as he is, apt for drawing-rooms,
and acquainted with dukes and ashamed to say so, is a piece of
Nature—Nature whom I always see as an old man working in a field, with
a sack over his shoulders, bowed to the elements. For Swann doesn’t
act; things happen to him. Even his deep and pertinacious affection is
discounted by the inferior object of it. He is the golden mean in man,
no more a crank than we would all be if we were rich, with weaknesses
that we could, if we would, translate into heroisms. Most cultivated
women infallibly must have loved Swann—he is probably, therefore, of
the kind that finds only the Odettes of the world to its liking.
VIOLET HUNT.
XV
_M. VINTEUIL’S SONATA_
It has never been published, never, so far as I can ascertain, been
performed in any of our concert-halls. Indeed, its largest audience
must have been the fashionable one which gathered for the _soirée
musicale_ given by the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, when Mme. de
Cambremer’s head wagged to its rhythm like a metronome, and the
Princesse des Laumes, to show that she was listening, beat time now
and again with her fan; but, so as not to forfeit her independence,
beat a different time from the musicians’. But most frequently it was
to be heard in a piano arrangement played at Mme. Verdurin’s for the
benefit of her “little clan,” which then included Odette de Crécy and,
for a time, Charles Swann, by a pianist whom Madame had taken under her
patronage, declaring that he left Planté and Rubinstein “sitting”; and,
later, when she had become Mme. Swann, by Odette herself, when it first
came to the notice of that most acute of critics, the narrator in _A
la Recherche du Temps Perdu_.
But, of course, the boy, as he was then, must have heard a good deal
more about the Sonata from Swann, who himself was no mean judge of
music, as of painting; though, in his appreciation of the latter art,
he does seem to have derived more pleasure from the discovery in
an “old master” of a likeness to one of his friends than from the
aesthetic merits it might possess. But Swann’s opinion of the Sonata
cannot perhaps, for other reasons, be trusted altogether; it was too
closely linked up in his mind with certain occurrences in his private
life. Yet we can accept the favourable impression it made upon him
at a time when he had not met Mme. de Crécy. On that occasion he had
appreciated at first “only the material quality of the sounds which
the instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure
when, below the narrow ribbon of the violin-part, delicate, unyielding,
substantial, and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived, where
it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of
the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere
in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed
into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given moment, without being
able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was
pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure
in his memory, the phrase or harmony—he knew not which—that had just
been played and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance
of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power
to dilate our nostrils.... Hardly had the delicious sensation which
Swann had experienced died away, before his memory furnished him with
an immediate transcript, summary, it is true, and provisional, but one
on which he had kept his eyes fixed while the playing continued, so
effectively that, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no
longer uncapturable. He was able to picture to himself its extent, its
symmetrical arrangement, its notation, the strength of its expression;
he had before him that definite object which was no longer pure music,
but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual
music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished, quite clearly, a
phrase which emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound. It had
at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures,
of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which
he felt that nothing but this phrase could initiate him; and he had
been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire.”
And, though he seems to have failed to make head or tail of the Sonata
at that first hearing, that little phrase stuck in his memory. It so
haunted him that, when a year later he was sitting beside Odette on
Mme. Verdurin’s Beauvais sofa (which his hostess vowed wasn’t to be
matched _anywhere_), and heard a high note held on through two
whole bars, he foresaw the approach of his beloved phrase and promptly
associated it with the woman at his side. In this way it became the
symbol of his passion, developed into a Wagnerian _leit-motif_ of
his liaison with Odette, until, when they had inevitably quarrelled,
it became for him an exquisite anguish to hear. An anguish which the
unhappy man had to dissemble from the ironical scrutiny of all those
monocles at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party, when “the violin had risen
to a series of high notes, on which it rested as though expecting
something, an expectancy which it prolonged without ceasing to hold on
to the notes, in the exaltation with which it already saw the expected
object approaching, and with a desperate effort ... to keep the way
open a moment longer, so that the stranger might enter in, as one
holds a door open that would otherwise automatically close. And before
Swann had had time to understand what was happening, to think, ‘It
is the little phrase from Vinteuil’s Sonata. I mustn’t listen!’ all
his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which
he had succeeded, up till that evening, in keeping invisible ... had
risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present
desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”
But we may find ample corroboration of Swann’s testimony to the
excellence of this work in the comments of that acute critic already
mentioned. Although he has preferred to remain anonymous himself,
it will be convenient for purposes of reference to find him a name,
and the name which for some odd reason or other flows from my pen
is “Marcel Proust.” Well, this young “Proust,” when he heard Mme.
Swann play the Sonata, was much impressed, though he also had some
difficulty in grasping the music at first. He goes into the question
much more deeply than the dilettante Swann, and begins by asking
whether it is not wrong to talk about “hearing a thing for the first
time,” when nothing has been understood. The second and third times
are from this point of view just as much “first times.” Then he makes
the vital discovery that probably what fails us the first time is not
our intelligence but our memory. “For our memory,” he says, “compared
to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we
are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who
in his sleep dreams of a thousand things and at once forgets them....
Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing
us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape,
and, with regard to works which we have heard two or three times, we
are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to
sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and can repeat it
by heart next morning.... So, where Swann and his wife could make out a
distinct phrase, that was as far beyond the range of my perception as
a name which one tries in vain to recall.... And not only does one not
seize at once and retain an impression of works that are really great,
but even in the content of any such work (as befell me in the case of
Vinteuil’s Sonata) it is the least valuable parts that one at first
perceives.”[11]
[Footnote 11: [Transcriber’s Note: See next footnote.]]
But “Proust” also carried away from his first hearing the recollection
of a phrase; and, since it seems to have been the fate of M. Vinteuil’s
work to become implicated in the love affairs of its admirers, we find
him at Balbec contemplating his new friend Albertine thus: “I seized
the opportunity, while she stood still, to look again and discover
once and for all where exactly the little mole was. Then, just as a
phrase of Vinteuil which had delighted me in the Sonata, and which
my recollection had allowed to wander from the _Andante_ to the
_Finale_, until the day when, having the score in my hands, I was
able to find it, and to fix it in my memory in its proper place, in the
_Scherzo_, so this mole, which I had visualised now on her cheek,
now on her chin, came to rest for ever on her upper lip, just below her
nose.”[12]