Proust with Balzac. As an observer of society, yes; as a creator, no.
“Never,” he writes, “since Stendhal and Balzac has any novelist put
so much reality into a novel. Stendhal, Balzac: I write those great
names without hesitation beside that of Marcel Proust. It is the finest
homage I can render to the power and originality of his talent.” During
Balzac’s lifetime there was Benjamin Constant, whose _Adolphe_ has
its place after _Manon Lescaut_, a purely objective study of an
incomparable simplicity, which comes into the midst of those analysts
of difficult souls—Laclos, who wrote an unsurpassable study of naked
human flesh in _Les Liaisons dangereuses_; Voltaire, Diderot;
Rousseau, in whose _Nouvelle Héloïse_ the novel of passion comes
into existence. After these Flaubert, the Goncourts, Huysmans, Zola,
Maupassant. I should place Proust with those rare spirits whose
_métier_ is the analysis of difficult souls. Browning wrote in
regard to his _Sordello_: “My stress lay on the incidents in the
development of a soul: little else is worth study; I, at least, always
thought so.” This certainly applies to Proust; and, as he seems to me
to derive some of his talent from Stendhal and from no other novelist,
I can imagine his casuistical and cruel creation of the obscure soul of
M. de Charlus in much the same fashion as Stendhal’s when he undresses
Julien Sorel’s soul with a deliberate and fascinating effrontery.
Consider the question of Balzac’s style: you will find that it has
life, that it has idea, that it has variety; that there are moments
when it attains a rare and perfectly individual beauty. To Baudelaire
he was a passionate visionary. “In a word, every one in Balzac, down
to the very scullions, has genius.” I have often wondered whether, in
the novel, perfect form is a good or even a possible thing if the novel
is to be what Balzac made it, history added to poetry. A novelist with
style will not look at life with an entirely naked vision.
There is no naked vision in Proust; his vision is like a clouded
mirror, in whose depths strange shapes flash and vanish. The only
faultless style in French is Flaubert’s; that style, which has every
merit and hardly a fault, becomes what it is by a process very
different from that of most writers careful of form. I cannot deny that
Stendhal has a sense of rhythm: it is in his brain rather than in his
dry imagination; in a sterile kind of brain, set at a great distance
from the heart, whose rhythm is too faint to disturb it. Still, in
Proust’s style there is something paradoxical, singular, caustic; it is
coloured and perfumed and exotic, a style in which sensation becomes
complex, cultivated, the flower of an elaborate life; it can become
deadly, as passion becomes poisonous. “The world of the novelist,” I
have written, “what we call the real world, is a solid theft out of
space; colour and music may float into it and wander through it, but
it has not been made with colour and music, and it is not a part of
the consciousness of its inhabitants.” This world was never lived in
by d’Annunzio; this world was never entered by Proust. All the same,
there is in him something cruel, something abnormal, something subtle.
He is a creator of gorgeous fabrics, Babylons, Sodoms. Only, he never
startles you, as Balzac startles you.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
XXII
_THE LAST WORD_
Two of the contributors to the stout Proust memorial number of _La
Nouvelle Revue Française_ remind me that I met Marcel Proust many
years ago at a Christmas Eve party given by Madame Edwards (now Madame
José Sert) in her remarkable flat on the Quai Voltaire, Paris. (Not
that I needed reminding.) With some eagerness I turned up the year,
1910, in my journal. What I read there was this: “Doran came on Sunday
night for dinner. We went on to Misia Edwards’ ‘Réveillon,’ and got
home at 4 A.M.” Not a word more! And I cannot now remember a single
thing that Proust said.
I have, however, a fairly clear recollection of his appearance and
style: a dark, pale man, of somewhat less than forty, with black hair
and moustache; peculiar; urbane; one would have said, an aesthete; an
ideal figure, physically, for Bunthorne; he continually twisted his
body, arms, and legs into strange curves, in the style of Lord Balfour
as I have observed Lord Balfour in the restaurants of foreign hotels.
I would not describe him as self-conscious; I would say rather that
he was well aware of himself. Although he had then published only
one book, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_—and that fourteen years
before—and although the book had had no popular success, Proust was
undoubtedly in 1910 a considerable lion. He sat at the hostess’s own
table and dominated it, and everybody at the party showed interest in
him. Even I was somehow familiar with his name. As for _Les Plaisirs
et les Jours_, I have not read it to this day.
A few weeks before his death, while searching for something else in
an overcrowded bookcase, I came across my first edition of _Du Côté
de chez Swann_, and decided to read the book again. I cared for it
less, and I also cared for it more, than in 1913. The _longueurs_
of it seemed to me to be insupportable, the clumsy centipedalian
crawling of the interminable sentences inexcusable; the lack of form
or construction may disclose artlessness, but it signifies effrontery
too. Why should not Proust have given himself the trouble of learning
to “write,” in the large sense? Further, the monotony of subject and
treatment becomes wearisome. (I admit that it is never so distressing
in _Swann_ as in the later volumes of _Guermantes_ and of
_Sodome et Gomorrhe_.) On the other hand, at the second reading I
was absolutely enchanted by some of the detail.
About two-thirds of Proust’s work must be devoted to the minutiæ
of social manners, the rendering ridiculous of a million varieties
of snob. At this game Proust is a master. (Happily he does not
conceal that, with the rest of mankind, he loves ancient blood and
distinguished connections.) He will write you a hundred pages about a
fashionable dinner at which nothing is exhibited except the littleness
and the _naïveté_ of human nature. His interest in human nature,
if intense and clairvoyant, is exceedingly limited. Foreign critics
generally agree that the English novelist has an advantage over the
French in that he walks all round his characters and displays them
to you from every side. I have heard this over and over again in
conversation in Paris, and I think it is fairly true, though certainly
Balzac was the greatest exponent of complete display. Proust never
“presents” a character; he never presents a situation: he fastens on
one or two aspects of a character or a situation, and strictly ignores
all the others. And he is scarcely ever heroical, as Balzac was always;
he rarely exalts, and he nearly always depreciates—in a tolerant way.
Again, he cannot control his movements: he sees a winding path off the
main avenue, and scampers away further and further and still further,
merely because at the moment it amuses him to do so. You ask yourself:
He is lost—will he ever come back? The answer is that often he never
comes back, and when he does come back he employs a magic but illicit
carpet, to the outrage of principles of composition which cannot be
outraged in a work of the first order. This animadversion applies
not only to any particular work, but to his work as a whole. The
later books are orgies of self-indulgence; the work has ruined the
_moral_ of the author: phenomenon common enough.
Two achievements in Proust’s output I should rank as great. The first
is the section of _Swann_ entitled _Un amour de Swann_. He
had a large theme here—love and jealousy. The love is physical and the
object of it contemptible; the jealousy is fantastic. But the affair
is handled with tremendous, grave, bitter, impressive power. The one
fault of it is that he lets Swann go to a _soirée musicale_ and
cannot, despite several efforts, get him away from it in time to save
the interest of the situation entire. Yet in the _soirée musicale_
divagation there are marvellous, inimitable things.
The second achievement, at the opening of _Sodome et Gomorrhe_,
is the psychological picture of the type-pederast. An unpromising
subject, according to British notions! Proust evolves from it beauty,
and a heartrending pathos. Nobody with any perception of tragedy can
read these wonderful pages and afterwards regard the pervert as he
had regarded the pervert before reading them. I reckon them as the
high-water of Proust.
Speaking generally, Proust’s work declined steadily from _Swann_.
_A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ was a fearful fall, and as
volume followed volume the pearls were strung more and more sparsely on
the serpentine string. That Proust was a genius is not to be doubted;
and I agree that he made some original discoveries in the by-ways
of psychological fiction. But that he was a supreme genius, as many
critics both French and English would have us believe, I cannot admit.
ARNOLD BENNETT.
THE END
_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED,
_Edinburgh_.
[Transcriber’s Notes:
In two quotations from Proust’s _À la recherche du temps perdu_, words
are missing, rendering the quotations unintelligible. The missing
words, in brackets below, were supplied based on the authoritative
French edition (Gallimard, Bibliothêque de la Pléiade, 1988, vol. III).
Je n’avais [jamais] fait de différence entre les ouvriers
si loin qu’on allât dans [ses] effets d’art raffiné
Other obvious printer errors have been corrected without note.]