Young’s I have been enabled to repeat from the _Saturday Review_,
has, like Mr. Birrell, authorised the substitution of my version for
the original text of these two quotations from _A l’Ombre des Jeunes
Filles en Fleurs_.—C.K.S.M.]
And if again it be thought that this association of the music with
the critic’s sentiment may have vitiated his judgment, I can only
point to the exquisite sensibility of these passages, where music
is brought to the touchstone of life, and human experience, in its
turn, is elucidated in terms of music. Indeed, this “Proust” shows
himself preternaturally sensitive both to musical sounds and to
unorganised noises, so that he instinctively registers the pitch of
a voice; so that the wall, when rapped by his grandmother, at once
assumes for him the resonance of a drum, and her triple knock takes
its place automatically in a symphonic scheme; so that the vision of
M. de Charlus making somewhat embarrassed conversation with a new
acquaintance immediately brings to his mind “those questioning phrases
of Beethoven, indefinitely repeated at equal intervals, and destined,
after a superabundant wealth of preparation, to introduce a new
_motif_, a change of key, or a recapitulation”; and so that the
old reprobate’s sudden descent from high dudgeon to docility suggests
the performance of “a symphony played through without a break, when a
graceful _Scherzo_ of idyllic loveliness follows upon the thunders
of the first movement.”
We cannot but regret, then, that this Sonata, which, after reading what
“Proust” has to say of it, we seem to know as well as we know César
Franck’s or the “Kreutzer,” and which has made a profound impression
on persons so different in temperament as Charles Swann and Mme.
Verdurin (who could not hear it without crying till she got neuralgia
all down her face), should have suffered such neglect at the hands of
concert-artists, whose only excuse is, presumably, to throw the blame
upon the equal neglect of the publishers.
DYNELEY HUSSEY.
XVI
_THE LITTLE PHRASE_
My only excuse for contributing anything to this collection is that
it provides an opportunity to give some information. Readers may want
to know whether the Sonata to which Proust refers in _Du Côté de
chez Swann_ as being played at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party was
wholly an invention of Proust’s, or whether his refined and tortuous
dithyrambs on the subject were inspired by an actual Sonata which the
dullest may purchase at a Paris shop.
Well, the answer to this hypothetical question, like all real answers
to all genuine questions, is “Yes” and “No.” For the Ayes there is the
statement by Proust in a letter to a friend printed in the memorial
number of the _Nouvelle Revue Française_:[13] “La petite phrase de
cette Sonate ... est ... la phrase charmante mais enfin médiocre d’une
sonate pour piano et violon de Saint-Saëns....”
[Footnote 13: _Nouvelle Revue Française_, No. 112 (N.S.), January
1923, pp. 201-2. The friend is M. Jacques de Lacretelle.—C.K.S.M.]
Explosion! Thus are our idols shattered! Even Proust’s deprecating
“mais enfin médiocre” does not prepare for this shock the sturdy
English connoisseur who likes only the best. Proust tells his friend
that he can point out the precise passage, which is several times
repeated; and adds—cunningly—that its execution was a triumph for
Jacques Thibaud.
He continues that, during the same evening, when the piano and
violin are described as murmuring like two birds in a dialogue,
he was thinking of a sonata by Franck (especially as played by
Enesco). The tremolos over the little Saint-Saëns phrase when
played at the Verdurins’ were, he says, suggested by the Prelude to
_Lohengrin_—he does not tell us, this time, in whose rendering,
but that actually they were recalled that evening by a trifle
from Schubert. The same evening, he tells us, as a final scrap of
information, there was played “un ravissant morceau” for the piano by
Fauré.
What are we to make of all this? Well, I am struck by the composite
character of Proust’s material. It shows that his art consists in
his power of making an exquisite synthesis of his sensibility by
reprecipitating his sensations in a more generalised, more abstract
form than that in which they came to him.
W.J. TURNER.
XVII
_PROUST AS CREATOR_[14]
[Footnote 14: This is, in fact, an extract from Mr. Conrad’s letter in
reply to a request that he would justify the project of this volume by
contributing to it.—C.K.S.M.]
. . . . . .
As to Marcel Proust, _créateur_, I don’t think he has been
written about much in English, and what I have seen of it was rather
superficial. I have seen him praised for his “wonderful” pictures
of Paris life and provincial life. But that has been done admirably
before, for us, either in love, or in hatred, or in mere irony. One
critic goes so far as to say that Proust’s great art reaches the
universal, and that in depicting his own past he reproduces for us the
general experience of mankind. But I doubt it. I admire him rather for
disclosing a past like nobody else’s, for enlarging, as it were, the
general experience of mankind by bringing to it something that has not
been recorded before. However, all that is not of much importance.
The important thing is that whereas before we had analysis allied to
creative art, great in poetic conception, in observation, or in style,
his is a creative art absolutely based on analysis. It is really more
than that. He is a writer who has pushed analysis to the point when
it becomes creative. All that crowd of personages in their infinite
variety through all the gradations of the social scale are rendered
visible to us by the force of analysis alone. I don’t say Proust has no
gift of description or characterisation; but, to take an example from
each end of the scale: Françoise, the devoted servant, and the Baron de
Charlus, a consummate portrait—how many descriptive lines have they got
to themselves in the whole body of that immense work? Perhaps, counting
the lines, half a page each. And yet no intelligent person can doubt
for a moment their plastic and coloured existence. One would think
that this method (and Proust has no other, because his method is the
expression of his temperament) may be carried too far, but as a matter
of fact it is never wearisome. There may be here and there amongst
those thousands of pages a paragraph that one might think over-subtle,
a bit of analysis pushed so far as to vanish into nothingness. But
those are very few, and all minor instances. The intellectual pleasure
never flags, because one has the feeling that the last word is being
said upon a subject much studied, much written about, and of human
interest—the last word of its time. Those that have found beauty in
Proust’s work are perfectly right. It is there. What amazes one is
its inexplicable character. In that prose so full of life there is no
reverie, no emotion, no marked irony, no warmth of conviction, not even
a marked rhythm to charm our ear. It appeals to our sense of wonder
and gains our homage by its veiled greatness. I don’t think there
ever has been in the whole of literature such an example of the power
of analysis, and I feel pretty safe in saying that there will never be
another.
. . . . . .
JOSEPH CONRAD.
XVIII
_A MOMENT TO SPARE_
I have at last found time, or rather, for it expresses our relations
better, Time has been gracious enough at last to find _me_—in
regard to _Swann_. It was a new and satisfactory experience. His
reality is extraordinary—at least in the main part of the book: I hope
for the sake of French upper middle-class society of his day that it is
not ordinary in such things as the big dinner scene in vol. ii.[15]
[Footnote 15: _I.e._, of _Du Côté de chez Swann_; the dinner
at the Verdurins’ at which Forcheville is present for the first time
with the Cottards, Brichot the painter, Swann, and Odette. It is
only fair, to both critic and reader, to explain that Mr. Saintsbury
had read nothing of Proust save _Swann_, and that only in an
inadequate translation. On the other hand, it was as impossible for
the editor to contemplate a book of this sort without a promise of
collaboration from his old friend and master as it was, at the moment,
for the doyen of English (if not of European, which is to say the
world’s) critics to qualify himself for saying more than is printed on
this leaf.—C.K.S.M.]
Has anybody said that he partakes _both_ of De Quincey and of
Stendhal? He does to me, and I’m shot if I ever expected to see such
a blend! You see, there is in him on the one hand a double measure of
the analytical and introspective power that Beyle’s admirers make so
much of; with what they also admire, a total absence of prettification
for prettification’s sake. Yet he can be pretty in the very best sense,
while Beyle never can, in the best or any other. Then, too, I at least
find in him much less of the type-character which, though certainly
relieved by individuality in the _Chartreuse de Parme_ and other
books (especially _Lamiel_), is still always more or less there.
But the oddest and to me the most attractive thing is the way in which
he entirely relieves the sense of aridity—of museum-preparations—which
I find in Stendhal. And here it is that the De Quincey suggestion comes
so unexpectedly in. For Proust effects this miracle by a constant
relapse upon—and sometimes a long self-restriction to—a sort of dream
element. It is not, of course, the vaguer and more mystical kind that
one finds in De Quincey, not that of _Our Ladies of Sorrow_ or
_Savannah-la-Mar_, but that of the best parts of _The English
Mail Coach_. In fact, it is sometimes Landorian rather than De
Quinceyish in its dreaminess. But, however this may be, the dream
quality is there, to me, as it is in few other Frenchmen—themselves
almost always poets. Now, the worst of the usual realist is that, being
blinder than any other heathen in his blindness, he tries to exorcise
dream, though sometimes not nightmare, from life. Such a mixture as
Proust’s I remember nowhere else.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
XIX
_A REAL WORLD IN FICTION_
My presence among those who are offering a tribute to Marcel Proust
would be an impertinence if the request for it had not been continued
after I had confessed the poverty of my knowledge. As it is, I may
be justified in taking the great pleasure it is to me to testify a
sincere admiration, founded on howsoever little experience. I have to
read a good deal for my bread, and the reading I can do for pleasure
is limited by debility of eyesight; M. Proust’s books are long and
in a language I read less easily than my own. So it has happened
that so far I have read only the two volumes of a beautifully lucid
translation, wonderfully lucid when the delicacy and subtlety of the
thoughts translated are considered. I will not say that you can taste
a wine without drinking a bottle—the analogy, like most analogies,
would be false; I do not doubt that wider study would produce more
valuable opinions. Yet my slight study has produced opinions which, I
am convinced, further study will only confirm, and it is a pleasure to
record them....
We all have our views as to what, for us, distinguishes great fiction
from that which is less than great. Mine has always been that it causes
me to live in a real world of visible, audible, and intelligible
people—a world in which, however novel it may be to start with, I am
at home and able, with sureness, to exercise my powers of understanding
to the full; this last point matters, for of course the superficial
may be superficially alive. No doubt the test is objectively unfair,
because the reaction of a writer’s imagination on a reader’s is
affected, though not conditioned, as the sympathy between the two is
greater or less; but for my own use this test is the most profitable.
Tolstoy has done this for me, so has Sterne, so has Miss Austen, so has
Thackeray, so have not very many others, and so have not some almost
universally acclaimed. Well, M. Proust has done this most considerable
service for me, in those two volumes I have read in translation, and
I am grateful. I know his hero’s grandfather and grandmother and
mother and invalid aunt, and know them well, and my understanding
has played with zest and to the limit of its power on the wealth of
character revealed to me. M. Swann is of my intimates, and I think I
have a perfect comprehension of his Odette. That is the first thing
for which I am grateful. The second is the sheer intellectual joy
with which, time and again, I came upon an achievement of divination
in the subtleties of human emotion which caught one’s breath by its
compelling truth. Jealousy of a man for a woman may have been more
grandly expressed, but have all the subtleties of its tortuous and
agonising course ever been so completely exposed as in the case of M.
Swann? Or the feelings of a sensitive and imaginative boy in his first
affections?... For these two things I have a sincere gratitude which I
propose to increase. But the wretchedness of my present qualifications
must terminate my expression of it now.
G.S. STREET.
XX
_THE BIRTH OF A CLASSIC_
The pictures we make, for our own satisfaction, of our actions are
generally as remote as the _clichés_ of polite conversation from
the psychological processes they pretend to reflect. It is convenient
and very often necessary to limit consciousness of an action so that
it receives a distinct and recognisable contour. With a certain
resemblance to the achievement of the Impressionists, who revealed the
fabric of a world worked-over with conceptual images, Proust breaks
up the moulds into which our feelings are generally poured. He is
curious to note the sensual deceits which agitate the mind no less
profoundly than the reality would have done, and to separate the social
stratagem (whether that of the Guermantes or of the servants in his
own home) from the intention of which it was the paraphrase. He is
dissociative only to that extent—a necessary one, since dissimulation
is the mind’s first nature. But he is not at all destructive; for an
action never really is a separate entity, cut off by crystalline walls
from the mother-liquor of our lives. In the style which he created that
glittering illusion is re-dissolved into the saturated mental life of
which it is an inextricable component.
I know nothing, he says, that can, “autant que le baiser, faire surgir
de ce que nous croyons une chose à aspect défini, les cent autres
choses qu’elle est tout aussi bien, puisque chacune est relative à
une perspective non moins légitime.... Dans ce court trajet de mes
lèvres vers sa joue, c’est dix Albertines que je vis.” Not only the
coarsening of the grain of the skin seen in this unaccustomed proximity
(that would be comparatively insignificant), but the psychological
perspective opened by this change in their relations; though Albertine
refused his kiss at Balbec, she cannot now prevent him from gathering
in one embrace the rose of the past and of the present. For Albertine
is not only Albertine “simple image dans le décor de la vie” when
later she calls on him in Paris; her image trails the multitudinous
sensations of _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_; and though
he no longer loves her, the appearances she had for him at Balbec,
silhouetted against the sea or sitting with her back to the cliff,
bring back with them the influence of that love. We are far from what
we believed a thing with a definite appearance, a girl, and perhaps the
example may indicate faintly the complexity of Proust’s art. Wishing
to convey the shifting aspect of things, or perhaps the composite
pile of aspects which represents, at any moment, our realisation
of a thing—and as objective description reintroduces the pictorial
_cliché_ so far avoided,—he utilises the vast fabric of memory,
shot, like iridescent silk, with many indefinable moods. To specify
his method more exactly would not at present be easy, nor is there
any enjoyment equal to the mere following of this marvellous web into
the still obscure future, where half is, to our chagrin partly and to
our delight, yet hidden. To the latter, because we have to be patient
against our will; to the former, because there is still so much certain
pleasure in store, and the excitement of seeing the completed design,
whose symmetry so far is only felt, like that of a statue in its shroud
before its resurrection, coincide with or contradict our anticipations.
There is a delicious state (owing not a little of its charm to our
knowledge of its transience) in which a book, having shaken off the
first fever of novelty, is in a condition to be most artfully savoured,
and at length. The classic features will never be dearer to us than
while they are still flushed with contemporaneity. The classics are
at least readable in so far as they are modern, but the modern, once
firmly on his pedestal, is not at all approachable. So it is a great
and marvellous privilege to be awake to this exquisite dawn, at the
moment this many-leaved bloom is suspended in all its freshness which
to-morrow—
To-morrow will find fallen or not at all:
fallen, if the worst comes to the worst (as we have heard it always
does), to a greatness in its decay and neglect more moving than the
spick-and-span of a smart little subaltern of immortality. It is
impossible to imagine how this titanic fragment can be trundled from
age to age; nor is the future likely to have much time to spare from
the production of domestic utensils which are so badly made that they
must be continually replaced. _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_
is not one of those things which are replaced, like the novel of the
moment, but exactly what part of it is most likely to be saved the
present cannot decide. There will always be some to follow the whole
sweep of the Master’s gesture, which evokes the hours of adolescence
flowering in the shade of girlhood and rebuilds the tormented cities
of the plain; now stooping to dissect a snob or soaring to stroke a
horizon, but never theatrical and never grandiose. Perhaps in the
ray of this most intimate limelight we draw the greater part of our
pleasure from the recognition of our own movements; the heirs of our
sensibility will find there the original of many impulses which they
accept as part of human nature.
EDGELL RICKWORD.
XXI
_A CASUIST IN SOULS_
Pater, who desired to find everywhere forces producing pleasurable
sensations, “each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind,” says:
“Few artists, not Goethe nor Byron even, work quite clearly, casting
off all _débris_, and leaving us only what the heat of their
imagination has wholly fused and transformed.” Has the heat of Proust’s
imagination fused and transformed his material as Balzac and Rodin
transformed and fused theirs? Are his characters creations? Has he
the strange magical sense of that life in natural things, which is
incommunicable? I think not; there is too much _débris_ in his
prose which he has not cast off.
Proust’s books are the autobiography of a sensitive soul, for whom
the visible world exists; only, he could never say with Gautier,
“I am a man for whom the visible world exists”; for in this famous
phrase he expresses his outlook on life, and his view of his own work:
Gautier, who literally discovered descriptive prose, a painter’s
prose by preference; who, in prose and in verse alike, is the poet
of physical beauty, of the beauty of the exterior of things. Proust,
with his adoration of beauty, gives one an equal sense of the beauty
of exterior things and of physical beauty; with infinite carefulness,
with infinite precautions, he gives one glimpses of occult secrets
unknown to us, of our inevitable instincts, and, at times, of those icy
ecstasies which Laforgue reveals in _Moralités légendaires_. Only,
not having read books of mediaeval magic, he cannot assure us that the
devil’s embraces are of a coldness so intense that it may be called, by
an allowable figure of speech, fiery.
In his feverish attempt to explain himself to himself, his imaginary
hero reminds me of Rousseau, who, having met Grimm and vexed Voltaire,
was destined by his febrile and vehement character to learn in
suffering what he certainly did not teach in song; who, being avid of
misunderstandings, was forced by the rankling thorns of his jealousy
to write his _Confessions_, in which he unburdens himself of
the exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, driven, in spite
of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people—a coward
before his own conscience. There is no cowardice in the conscience of
Proust’s hero; his utter shameless sincerity to the naked truth of
things allows him “avec une liberté d’esprit” to compete, near the
end of the last volume, in his unveiling of M. de Charlus, with the
outspokenness of Restif de la Bretonne in _Monsieur Nicolas_.
Some of the pages of _Sodome_ might have been inspired by
Petronius. The actual fever and languor in the blood: that counts
for so much in Petronius’s prose, and lies at the root of some of
his fascinations. He is passionately interested in people, but only
in those who are not of the same nature as he is: his avid curiosity
being impersonal. Some of Proust’s curiosity is not so much vivid as
impersonal. Petronius—like the writer I refer to—is so specifically
Latin that he has no reticence in speaking of what he feels, none of
that unconscious reticence in feeling which races drawn farther from
civilisation have invented in their relations with nature. This is one
of the things which people mean when they say that Petronius’s prose is
immoral. So is that of Proust. Yet, in the prose of these writers, both
touched with the spirit of perversity, the rarest beauty comes from a
heightening of nature into something not quite natural, a perversity of
beauty, which is poisonous as well as curious.
Proust has some of the corrupt mysticism of Huysmans, but not so
perilous as his; nor has he that psychology which can be carried so far
into the soul’s darkness that the flaming walls of the world themselves
fade to a glimmer; he does not chronicle the adventures of this world’s
Vanity Fair: he is concerned with the revelation of the subconscious
self; his hero’s confessions are not the exaltation of the soul. He
is concerned, not so much with adventures as with an almost cloistral
subtlety in regard to the obscure passions which work themselves out,
never with any actual logic. With all his curiosity, this curiosity
never drives him in the direction of the soul’s apprehension of
spiritual things. He does, at times, like Mallarmé, deform ingeniously
the language he writes in; and, as in most of these modern decadents,
perversity of form and perversity of manner bewilder us in his most
bewildering pages.