MARCEL PROUST: MASTER PSYCHOLOGIST AND PILOT OF THE “VRAIE VIE”
Marcel Proust may justly be hailed as the greatest psychological
novelist of his time. He was to normal psychology what Dostoievsky
was to abnormal psychology: an unsurpassed observer, interpreter, and
recorder of men's thoughts and conduct.
It would be hazardous to attempt to estimate the place he will
eventually have in literature until the remaining volumes of “A la
Recherche du Temps Perdu,” and “Le Temps Retrouvé” are published. But
the volumes of the former that have appeared: “Du Côté de Chez Swann,”
“Á l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs,” “Le Côté de Guermantes,” and
“Sodome et Gomorrhe” justify the statement that with the death of
their author in November, 1922, France lost a writer whose fame will
rank with that of Balzac. It is not likely that he will ever have
a popularity comparable to Balzac or even to Bourget, Barbusse, or
several other contemporaries, for M. Proust is an author for writers.
He will never be read by the large class of novel readers who create
the market demand for novels of action and plot; nor will he appeal
to that hardly less numerous class--chiefly women--who find the
emotional novel palatable food. However, those who, like the writer,
cannot punish themselves by struggling through a detective story and
by whom the most skillfully contrived plot can be endured only if the
harassment which it causes is counterbalanced by the charm of its
literary style or its interpretation of the personality of the author
reacting to conditions more or less common to all mankind, may find
in M. Proust a novelist whom they can ill afford to ignore. And no
writer of fact or fiction today would be just to himself were he to
proceed with his art without making the acquaintance of this master
artificer and psychologist. Proust will be remembered as a pioneer
who explored the jungle of the unconscious memory, and a marvellous
interpreter of the laws governing associated memories. I doubt not his
name will be as inseparably connected with the novel of the future as
that of de Maupassant or Poe has been with the short story of the last
few decades, even while his wares will still find scant sale, save to
writers, dilettantes, professional students of letters, of form, and of
psychology.
The measure of success that was vouchsafed him came late in life. He
was fifty when the Goncourt Prize was awarded “A l'Ombre des Jeunes
Filles en Fleurs” in 1919. Until that time his writings were known to
readers of “La Nouvelle Revue Française,” to friends, and to a limited
circle whose members have an urge for the unusual, and a flair for
the picturesque in literature. Then readers began to nibble at “Du
Côté de Chez Swann,” and the more they nibbled, that is the oftener
they read it, or attempted to read it--for it is difficult even for a
cultured Frenchman--the more keenly aware did they become that they
had encountered a new force, a new sensibility in literature, and,
like appetite that comes with eating, the greater was their desire
to develop an intimacy with him. “Le Côté de Guermantes” showed that
he walked and talked, dined and wined, registered the thoughts and
interpreted the dreams of the aristocracy with the same security,
understanding, perspicacity, and clairvoyancy that he had brought to
bear on the bourgeoisie in “Du Côté de Chez Swann.” In “Sodome et
Gomorrhe” he did the impossible. He talked with frankness and with a
tone of authority of an enigmatic, inexplicable aberration of nature,
inversion of the genesic instinct, which antedates possibly by millions
of years the differentiation of man from anthropoid stock; which
has always been with us, now the patent of good form, the badge of
intellectual superiority, the hallmark of æsthetic refinement, as in
the days of Hellenic supremacy; now the stigma of sin, the scarlet
letter of infamy, the key of the bottomless pit, as today; and which
unquestionably will always continue to be with us. He divested it
of pruriency; he rescued it from pornography; he delivered it from
pathology; and at the same time he made the penologist pause and
“normal” man thoughtful.
Whether this freakishness of nature is as common as M. Proust
says, whether it bulks so large in the conduct of daily life as he
intimates, is a matter for the individual to estimate. No statistics
are available, but experienced psychiatrists and discerning pedagogues
know that a considerable proportion of mankind is so constituted. To
deny it is equivalent to acknowledging that one is immune to evidence;
to consider it a vice is to flaunt an allegation of falsehood in
the face of biology. One can imagine the shock the world would have
today if everyone told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth about his genesic instinct. If, then, it was decided to
segregate and deprive of liberty the inverted, what a strange medley
it would be of general and soldier, of prince and pauper, of priest
and parishioner, of genius and moron, of ambassador and attaché, of
poet, artist, and savant. It will mark an epoch in modern civilisation
when this strange variation from the normal shall be subject to study
by such investigators as Mendel, de Vries, Tschermak, and the host of
biologists who are slowly solving the mysteries of heredity. Meanwhile
the preparation for such work is the formation of public opinion, and
probably there is no better way to accomplish it than that adopted by
M. Proust.
So far the only one of M. Proust's books that has appeared in English
is “Du Côté de Chez Swann,” (Swann's Way), by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
The translation itself is a work of art, and the reading public is
under profound obligation to this master stylist.
[Illustration: MARCEL PROUST IN 1890]
The narrator is M. Proust himself, but the reader who would understand
Proust must keep in mind that he has distributed his own personality
between two characters, the narrator of the story, and Swann. Those who
see Proust only in the first, or only in Swann, see but half of him.
In the overture he recalls the memories of a precocious, sentimental,
sickly childhood spent in his aunt's house in Combray, with an
indulgent mother, a sensible matter-of-fact father, an archaic
paternal grandmother, and two silly sentimental grandaunts. He
succeeds in introducing in the most incidental way M. Swann, the son
of a stockbroker, “a converted Jew and his parents and grandparents
before him,” who has successfully unlocked the door of smart and
savant society; his former mistress Odette de Crecy whom he has now
married, to the disgust of his neighbours; his daughter with whom the
narrator is to fall in love; M. Vinteuil whose sonata contains the
solvent of Swann's amatory resistance, and his daughter, a Gomorrite;
M. de Villeparisis; and M. de Charlus, who we shall see in “Sodome et
Gomorrhe” is not like other men.
The setting is in Brittany.
“Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used
to see it from the railway when we arrived there every year
in Holy Week, was no more than a church epitomising the town,
representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon, and
as one drew near, gathering close about its long, dark cloak,
sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherd
gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking houses,
which a fragment of its mediæval ramparts enclosed, here and
there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a
little town in a primitive painting.”
He who invokes his memories is a boy of ten or thereabouts, lying in
bed and awaiting dinner to end and M. Swann to depart that his mother
may kiss him goodnight. Memory of it was like a luminous panel, sharply
defined against a vague and shading background.
“The little parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows
of the path along which would come M. Swann, the unconscious
author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would journey
to the first step of that staircase, so hard to climb, which
constituted, all by itself, the tapering 'elevation' of an
irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the
little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter; in
a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all
its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its
shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like
the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its
performance in the provinces); to the drama of my undressing,
as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by
a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there
but seven o'clock at night.”
The power not only of reproducing scenes and events, but also of
revivifying states of consciousness long past through invoking
associated memories, is utilised with an effect rarely parallelled
in literature. It is invoked through any of the special senses, but
chiefly through taste and hearing. The little cake soaked in tea which,
taken many years after the trivial events of his childhood at Combray
had been all but forgotten, unlocks, as if by magic, the chamber stored
with memories.
“No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it,
touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body,
and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were
taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but
individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at
once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its
disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation
having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a
precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was
myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.”
He then tries to analyse the state, and
“that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every
obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit
all attention to the sounds which come from the next room....
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being
must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to
that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind....
Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness,
this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an
identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb,
to raise up out of the very depths of my being?”
It does reach the surface of consciousness, for
“once I had recognised the taste of the crumb of madeleine
soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to
give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the
discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the
old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up
like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little
pavilion, opening on to the garden.... And just as the Japanese
amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and
steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are
without character or form, but, the moment they become wet,
stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive
shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and
recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden
and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and
the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the
parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings,
taking their proper shape and growing solid, sprang into being,
town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”
M. Proust's description of the first effect upon him of the little
“madeleine” dipped in tea, when, “weary after a dull day, with the
prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the
tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake” is almost a paraphrase
of the words of Locke in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.”
Music, more than anything else, has the power of invoking Swann's
associated memories. A little phrase of old Vinteuil's Sonata runs like
a fine thread all through the tangle of Swann's love for Odette de
Crecy, although the memory of the phrase goes back prior to his meeting
Odette--to the night of the party at which he had heard it, after going
home from which
“he was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has seen for
a moment passing by, has brought a new form of beauty, which
strengthens and enlarges his own power of perception, without
his knowing even whether he is ever to see her again whom he
loves already, although he knows nothing of her, not even her
name.”
Swann had tried in vain to identify the fugitive phrase which had
awakened in him a passion for music that seemed to be bringing into his
life the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation.
“Like a confirmed invalid whom all of a sudden, a change of
air and surroundings, or a new course of treatment, or, as
sometimes happens, an organic change in himself, spontaneous
and unaccountable, seems to have so far removed from his malady
that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all
hope, of starting to lead--and better late than never--a wholly
different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the
phrase that he had heard, in certain other sonatas which he
had made people play over to him, to see whether he might not,
perhaps, discover his phrase among them, the presence of one of
those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe, but
to which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness
from which he was suffering a sort of recreative influence, he
was conscious once again of a desire, almost, indeed, of the
power to consecrate his life.”
“It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture our own past;
all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past
is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of
intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that
material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as
for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or
not before we ourselves must die.”
Associative memory depends upon the fact that though the grouping
of the stimuli is novel, the elementary components are individually
similar to previous stimuli, and Proust avails himself of this
established fact. These elementary stimuli leave retention traces
in the central nervous system. When the same stimuli recur in a new
grouping the pathways and centres that bear such traces are brought
into connection and are combined in new ways. This modifies the form of
the response. As the separate retention traces were due to conditions
resembling the present, the new response will tend to be adaptive. This
associative memory is known in psychology as mnemonic combination.
Although no attempt is made to describe the development of the
personality of the sensitive, sentimental, impressionable, precocious
child who narrates the story, one gets an extraordinarily vivid picture
of him. He has the hallmarks and habituations of neuropathy, and
amongst them phantasying and substitution.
“In those days, when I read to myself, I used often, while I
turned the pages, to dream of something quite different. And to
the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge of the story more
were added by the fact that when it was Mamma who was reading to
me aloud she left all the love-scenes out. And so all the odd
changes which take place in the relations between the miller's
wife and the boy, changes which only the birth and growth of
love can explain, seemed to me plunged and steeped in a mystery,
the key to which (as I could readily believe) lay in that
strange and pleasant-sounding name of _Champi_, which draped
the boy who bore it, I knew not why, in its own bright colour,
purpurate and charming.”
That his neuropathic constitution was a direct inheritance is obvious.
He got it through his Aunt Leonie
“who since her husband's death, had gradually declined to leave,
first Combray, then her house in Combray, then her bedroom,
and finally her bed; and who now never 'came down,' but lay
perpetually in an indefinite condition of grief, physical
exhaustion, illness, obsessions, and religious observances....
My aunt's life now was practically confined to two adjoining
rooms, in one of which she would rest in the afternoon while
they aired the other.”
Despite these apparent restrictions of life's activities she knows more
of the happenings of the village than the town crier, and in a way she
conditions the conduct of her neighbours whose first question is “What
effect will it have on Aunt Leonie?” Her contact with people is limited
to Françoise, a perfect servant, to Eulalie, a limping, energetic, deaf
spinster, and to the reverend Curé.
“My aunt had by degrees erased every other visitor's name from
her list, because they all committed the fatal error, in her
eyes, of falling into one or other of the two categories of
people she most detested. One group, the worse of the two, and
the one of which she rid herself first, consisted of those who
advised her not to take so much care of herself, and preached
(even if only negatively and with no outward signs beyond
an occasional disapproving silence or doubting smile) the
subversive doctrine that a sharp walk in the sun and a good
red beefsteak would do her more good (her, who had had two
dreadful sips of Vichy water on her stomach for fourteen hours)
than all her medicine bottles and her bed. The other category
was composed of people who appeared to believe that she was
more seriously ill than she thought, in fact that she was as
seriously ill as she said. And so none of those whom she had
allowed upstairs to her room, after considerable hesitation and
at Françoise's urgent request, and who in the course of their
visit had shown how unworthy they were of the honour which had
been done them by venturing a timid: 'Don't you think that if
you were just to stir out a little on really fine days...?'
or who, on the other hand, when she said to them: 'I am very
low, very low; nearing the end, dear friends!' had replied: 'Ah,
yes, when one has no strength left! Still, you may last a while
yet'; each party alike might be certain that her doors would
never open to them again.”
[Illustration: A PAGE OF CORRECTED PROOF SHOWING MARCEL PROUST'S METHOD
OF REVISION]
With all his literary art, and mastery of the mysterious powers that
suggestion has to heighten awareness and deepen information, M. Proust
does not succeed in enlightening us as to how the boy at Combray
comes to possess so much information of people and such knowledge of
the world. Part of it is intuitive, but understanding of Vinteuil's
daughter, who “after a certain year we never saw alone, but always
accompanied by a friend, a girl older than herself, with an evil
reputation in the neighbourhood, who in the end installed herself
permanently at Montjouvain,” thus leading M. Vinteuil broken-hearted
to the grave because of the shame and scandal of her sadism, is beyond
possibility even for a boy of his precocity and prehensibility.
“For a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must have been
far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to
have to resign himself to one of those situations which are
wrongly supposed to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they
are produced whenever there needs to establish itself in the
security necessary to its development a vice which Nature
herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by no more
than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she
might blend the colours of their eyes. And yet however much M.
Vinteuil may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not
follow that his adoration of her grew any less. The facts of
life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are
cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs,
so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them
continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening
them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one
after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family,
will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or
the capacity of its physician.”
Thus does he introduce most casually a subject which bulks large in
“Sodome et Gomorrhe,” and which M. Proust understands like a composite
priest, physician, and biologist.
Most of the grist of the boy's mill comes over the road that skirts
Swann's park, but some comes the Guermantes Way. In “Le Côté de
Guermantes,” which followed “A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs,”
he makes us as intimately acquainted with the Duchesse de Guermantes,
Mme. de Villeparisis, and other notables of the _société élegante_, as
he does in “Swann's Way” with the Verdurins and their “little nucleus”
which furnishes a background to Odette, and furnishes M. Proust with
canvas upon which to paint the portrait of an Æsculapian bounder, Dr.
Cottard, who, it has been said, is still of the quick. M. Proust was
the son and the brother of a physician and had abundant opportunity
not only to get first-hand information but to have his natural insight
quickened. In the same way one discovers his Jewish strain (his mother
was a Jewess) in his mystic trends and in his characters such as Bloch
and Swann. “Whenever I formed a strong attachment to any one of my
friends and brought him home with me that friend was invariably a Jew.”
Moreover his lack of a sense of humour is an Hebraic trait. With the
exception of the reaction provoked in his grandfather by the advent
of one of these friends, “Swann's Way,” and indeed all M. Proust's
writings, are humourless.
The genesis of Swann's love and the dissolution of Odette's take up one
volume. If it is not a perfect description of the divine passion in a
mature man surfeited by conquest and satiated by indulgence, it is an
approximation to it.
He was introduced one day at the theatre to Odette de Crocy by an old
friend of his, who had spoken of her to him as a ravishing creature
with whom he might very possibly come to an understanding. She made no
appeal to Swann; indeed she not only left him indifferent, aroused in
him no desire, but gave him a sort of physical repulsion. But Odette
knew the _ars amandi_ as did Circe or Sappho, and ere long she had
entangled him in the meshes of Eros' net. When the net was drawn to
her craft and the haul examined, it didn't interest her, though she
kept it, for it contributed to her material welfare. Then M. Proust
did a psychological stunt which reveals an important aspect of his
mastery of the science. Swann identified Odette with Zipporah, Jethro's
daughter, whose picture is to be seen in one of the Sixtine frescoes by
Botticelli. Her similarity to it enhanced her beauty and rendered her
more precious in his sight. Moreover it enabled him to introduce the
image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies where she assumed a
new and nobler form. And whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh,
by perpetually reviving his misgivings as to the quality of her face,
her figure, the whole of her beauty, used to cool the ardour of his
love, those misgivings were swept away and that love confirmed now that
he could re-erect his estimate of her on the sure foundations of his
æsthetic principles. Instead of placing a photograph of Odette on his
study table, he placed one of Jethro's daughter, and on it he lavished
his admiration and concentrated his intensity in all the abandon of
substitution.
The author utilises the potency of suspense to bring Swann's ardour to
the boiling point. One evening when Odette had avoided him he searched
the restaurants of the Boulevards in a state of increasing panic.
“Among all the methods by which love is brought into being,
among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there
are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now
and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in
whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot
is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom
we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she should
have pleased us up till then, any more, or even as much as
others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her should
become exclusive.”
He proceeded to cultivate his love in an emotional medium and to
inoculate himself with the culture which rendered him immune to
love of another. The culture medium was furnished by Vinteuil, the
old composer, who had died of a broken heart. “He would make Odette
play him the phrase from the sonata again ten, twenty times on end,
insisting that, while she played, she must never cease to kiss him.”
“Watching Swann's face while he listened to the phrase, one
would have said that he was inhaling an anæsthetic which allowed
him to breathe more deeply.”
The effect that it had was deep repose, mysterious refreshment.
He felt himself transformed into a “creature foreign to humanity,
blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn,
a chimera-like creature conscious of the world through his two ears
alone.”
Swann's discovery of the spiritual and bodily inconstancies of his
mistress, the perfidies and betrayals of the Verdurins, his jealousy,
planned resentments, and resurrection are related in a way that
convinces us that Proust saw life steadily and saw it whole.
To appease his anguish, to thwart his obsession, to supplant his
preoccupation he decided to frequent again the aristocratic circles
he had forsaken. The description of the reception at Mme. de Saint
Euverte's, showing the details of fashionable life, is of itself a
noteworthy piece of writing. Not only is it replete with accurate
knowledge of such society, but it gives M. Proust the opportunity
to display understanding of motives and frailties and to record
impressions of contact with the world abroad. Speaking of one of the
guests he says:
“She belonged to that one of the two divisions of the human
race in which the untiring curiosity which the other half feels
about people whom it does not know is replaced by an unfailing
interest in the people whom it does.”
The peculiar tendency which Swann always had to look for analogies
between living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted itself
here in a more positive and more general form. One of the footmen
was not unlike the headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which
represent executions, tortures, and the like. Another reminded him of
the decorative warriors one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's
paintings. “He seemed as determined to remain as unconcerned as if he
had been present at the massacre of the innocents or the martyrdom
of St. James.” As he entered the salon one reminded him of Giotto's
models, another of Albert Dürer's, another of that Greek sculpture
which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, while a servant with a
pallid countenance and a small pig-tail clubbed at the back of his head
seemed like one of Goya's sacristans.
It was this soirée that conditioned irrevocably Swann's future life,
and the little phrase from Vinteuil's Sonata did it for him. To have
heard it “in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no
one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely
absent” made him suffer insupportably. While listening to it
“suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition
tore him with such anguish that his hand rose impulsively to his
heart.... 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 in the depths of his being, deceived by this
sudden reflection of a season of love, whose sun, they supposed,
had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken
wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for
his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”
It raised the flood-gate of the dam in which he had stored the
memories of Odette when she loved him and before he loved her. Not
only did it liberate the memories of her, but the memories that were
associated with them: all the net-work of mental habits, of seasonable
impressions, of sensory reactions, through which it extended over a
series of groups its uniform meshes, by which his body now found itself
inextricably held.
“When, after that first evening at the Verdurins', he had had
the little phrase played over to him again, and had sought to
disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that, like
a perfume or a caress, it swept over and enveloped him, he had
observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals between
the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition
of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid, a
contracted sweetness; but in reality he knew that he was basing
this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon
certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind's convenience)
for the mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before
ever he knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party, when for the
first time he had heard the sonata played....
“In his little phrase, albeit it presented to the mind's eye
a clouded surface, there was contained, one felt, a matter so
consistent, so explicit, to which the phrase gave so new, so
original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved the
memory of it in the treasure-chamber of their minds. Swann would
repair to it as to a conception of love and happiness....
“Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it
existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other
conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions
of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the
rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified
and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be
obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as
we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which
we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any
material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity
of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed
aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even
the memory of the darkness....
“So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the
sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of
view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural
creatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that,
we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the
unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that
divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment
in the firmament of ours.”
From that evening Swann understood that the feeling which Odette
had once had for him would never revive. He had made his bed, and
he resolved to share it in holy matrimony with Odette, though this
discomforted his friends and made him a species of Pariah.
Mme. Swann in Combray was a solitary, but not in Paris. There she
queened it, as many lovely ladies had done before her. The account of
that, and of the narrator's love for Gilberte, Swann's daughter, who,
when he had encountered her casually at Combray, had made a stirring
and deep impression on him; and the advent of Albertine, a potential
Gomorrite, make up the contents of the succeeding instalment, entitled
“A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs.” Gilberte, Swann's daughter,
and the narrator now approaching puberty, came to play together in the
Champs Elysées, frolicking like children, innocently, though another
feeling began soon to bud in him, a feeling which he did not yet
understand. In this volume the narrator relates the experiences he had
when a youth, and therefore there is more precision in the description
of the persons with whom he came in contact. The volume also throws
much light indirectly on Proust's personality. From a certain incident
which he tells regarding the way he was brought up, one sees that
his father was a rigourous aristocrat, stiff in his demeanour, and
very particular in the choice of his connections. He, the narrator,
was brought up in a way the Germans would call “schablonenmässig”:
everything was discussed at a family council, as though he were an
inanimate plaything. His naïvete, the result of such training, is very
characteristic.
For some time he had been longing to see “Phèdre” played by the famous
Mme. La Berma (evidently Sarah Bernhardt, for at that time she was the
only one who played “Phèdre”). After long deliberation because of his
illness, it was decided he should go chaperoned by his grandmother,
to see his ideal actress. The scene opened with two men who rushed
on in the throes of heated argument. He did not know that this was
part of the play and that the men were actors; he thought they were
some ruffians who had forced their way into the theatre and who would
surely be ejected by the officials. He wondered, though, that the
spectators not only did not protest, but listened to them with the
greatest attention. Only when the theatre re-echoed with applause did
he understand that the two men were actors. Afterwards, when two ladies
came upon the stage, both of portly bearing, he could not decide which
one was La Berma; a little later he learned that neither of them was
the great actress. To reconcile such unsophistication with the account
of the peeping Tom episode when he laid bare Mlle. Vinteuil's deforming
habituation is very difficult.
Swann, now ill, and repentant, was consumed with ambition to introduce
his wife, Odette, into high society, in which he succeeded to a great
extent. Though he did not like M. Buntemps because of his reactionary
opinions, he, “the director of the minister's office,” was an important
personage and his wife, Mme. Buntemps, was a steady visitor in Odette's
salon. But once in a while he was malicious enough to exasperate
Mme. Buntemps. He told her once he would invite the Cottards and the
Duchesse de Vendome to dinner. Mme. Buntemps protested, saying it was
not seemly that the Cottards should be at the same table with the
Duchesse. In reality she was jealous of the Cottards who were going to
share the honour with her. The Prince d'Agrigente was invited, because
it was altogether “private”! Odette is described as a woman of low
intelligence, without education, speaking faulty French, but shrewd,
dominating her husband. One of her guests was Mme. Cottard, the wife
of Dr. Cottard, the medical bounder who had now become Professor, a
woman who did not belong to her present circle. But she had to invite a
person who could tell her former friends of her high connections, so as
to raise their envy.
The Marquis de Norpais, a former ambassador, is admirably drawn. He was
naturally considered by the narrator's father as the cream of society.
Just think of it! a man with two titles: Monsieur l'Ambassadeur,
and Son Excellence Monsieur le Marquis! It is true that he was an
ambassador under a republican government. But because of this he was
interesting, for despite his antecedents he was entrusted with several
extraordinary missions by very radical ministers. When a monarchist
would not accept that honour, the republican government having had no
fear that he might betray it, M. de Norpais himself willingly accepted
the charge. Being in his blood a diplomat, he could not help exercising
the functions of a diplomat, though in his heart he detested the
republican spirit of government.
The narrator's mother did not admire his intelligence, but for the
father every word of M. l'Ambassadeur de Norpais was an oracle. He had
always wished that his son should become a diplomat, while the son
wished to take up literature so as not to be separated from Gilberte.
M. de Norpais, who did not much like the new style diplomats, told the
narrator's father that a writer could gain as much consideration and
more independence than a diplomat. His father changed his mind.
It is quite impossible, within the space of an essay, to give even an
outline of the remaining volumes that have already appeared of this
amazing and epochal novel.
Without doubt M. Proust had a definite idea in mind, a determination to
make a contribution: to prove that the dominant force in mental life
is association, the chief resource of mentality reminiscence. Thus the
primitive instincts of mankind and their efforts to obtain convention's
approbation furnish the material with which he has built. It is
extraordinary how large association bulks: individuals remind him of
famous paintings, not merely the general characters of the people whom
he encounters in his daily life, but rather what seem least susceptible
of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he
knows. For instance, a bust of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo,
is suggested by the prominent cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in
short a speaking likeness to his own coachman Rami; the colouring of a
Ghirlandajo, by the nose of M. de Palancy; a portrait by Tintoretto, by
the invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker,
the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of Dr. du
Bolbon.
If, on descending the stairs after one of the Doncières evenings,
suddenly on arriving in the street, the misty night and the lights
shining through suggest a time when he arrived at Combray, at once
there is thrown on the screen of his consciousness a picture of
incidents there and experiences elsewhere that are as vivid and as
distinct as if he were looking at them on a moving-picture screen. Then
suddenly there appears a legend “the useless years which slipped by
before my invisible vocation declared itself, that invisible vocation
of which this work is the history.” Like the monk who seeks God in
solitude, like Nietzsche who sought Him in reason, M. Proust has sought
to reveal his soul, his personality, the sum total of all his various
forms of consciousness by getting memory to disgorge her contents, the
key to the chamber being association.
“We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account,
the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them;
we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves
barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds,
to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all
our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence
and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well know, are
situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them.”
There are so many features of M. Proust's work that excite admiration
that it is possible to enumerate only a few. Despite a studied style
of confusion and interminable sentences, suspended, hyphenated,
alembicated, and syncopated, that must forever make him the despair
of anyone whose knowledge of French is not both fundamental and
colloquial, he makes telling, life-like pen pictures of things and
persons. Such is one of Françoise, the maid at Combray,
“who looked as smart at five o'clock in the morning in her
kitchen, under a cap whose stiff and dazzling frills seemed
to be made of porcelain, as when dressed for church-going;
who did everything in the right way, who toiled like a horse,
whether she was well or ill, but without noise, without the
appearance of doing anything; the only one of my aunt's maids
who when Mamma asked for hot water or black coffee would bring
them actually boiling; she was one of those servants who in a
household seem least satisfactory, at first, to a stranger,
doubtless because they take no pains to make a conquest of him
and show him no special attention, knowing very well that they
have no real need of him, that he will cease to be invited to
the house sooner than they will be dismissed from it; who, on
the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters and
mistresses who have tested and proved their real capacity, and
do not look for that superficial responsiveness, that slavish
affability, which may impress a stranger favourably, but often
conceals an utter barrenness of spirit in which no amount of
training can produce the least trace of individuality.
“The daughter of Françoise, on the contrary, spoke, thinking
herself a woman of today and freed from all customs, the
Parisian argot and did not miss one of the jokes belonging to
it. Françoise having told her that I had come from a Princess:
'Ah, doubtless a Princess of the cocoanut.' Seeing that I
was expecting a visitor, she pretended to think that I was
called Charles. I answered 'No,' naïvely, which permitted
her to exclaim 'Ah, I thought so! And I was saying to myself
Charles waits (charlatan).' It wasn't very good taste, but I
was less indifferent when as a consolation for the tardiness
of Albertine, she said, 'I think you can wait for her in
perpetuity. She will not come any more.' Ah, our gigolettes of
today!
“Thus her conversation differed from that of her mother but what
is more curious the manner of speaking of her mother was not the
same as that of her grandmother, a native of Bailleau-le-Pin
which was near the country of Françoise. However the patois were
slightly different, like the two country places. The country
of the mother of Françoise was made up of hills descending
into a ravine full of willows. And, very far from there, on
the contrary, there was in France a little region where one
spoke almost exactly the same patois as at Meseglise. I made
the discovery at the same time that I was bored by it. In fact,
I once found Françoise talking fluently with a chambermaid of
the house who came from the country and spoke its patois. They
understood each other mostly. I did not understand them at
all. They knew this but did not stop on this account, excused,
so they thought, by the joy of being compatriots, although
born so far apart, for continuing to speak before me this
foreign language as if they did not wish to be understood. This
picturesque study of linguistic geography and comradeship was
followed each week in the kitchen without my taking any pleasure
in it.”
Time, M. Proust was convinced, was made for slaves. It takes longer
to read his account of a soirée at the Prince de Guermantes' than
it would to attend it. It requires half a volume to narrate it. The
account is masterly, and the reader is filled with the feelings that
actual experience might produce. Those who have had contact with
aristocracy, and whose lucidity of mind has not been impaired by it,
also find such an account interesting. Here one meets aristocrats of
every complexion, heirs of the oldest and proudest names in Gotha's
Almanach, and those whose pedigree is not so ancient, upon whom the
former look condescendingly. As in a Zoo, one sees a great variety
of the aristocrat genus, and if one has believed that the nobility
is formed of people different and better than the common herd the
delusion is dissipated. Here is a light that fairly dazzles those who
are susceptible to the appeal of clothes, wealth, and jewels. If one's
yearnings are for things more substantial in human nature he will not
be satisfied as a guest of the Prince de Guermantes. Diogenes there
would have used his lantern in vain.
One becomes intimately acquainted with the _haut monde_, their colossal
pride, and overweening conceit, concealed from the eyes of those
below them in the hierarchy by thin veils of conventional and shallow
amiability which they make more and more transparent as the people
they deal with are further removed from the blue zone of the _nobilior
spectrum_. One discovers also another characteristic: the capacity for
putting up with such pride and conceit from above, and for making the
best of it for the sake of securing the lustre which comes with the
good will of those higher up, and contact with them.
In the society of the Guermantes one becomes acquainted with such
specimens of human meanness and hatefulness, such hypocrisy, such
paucity of the sentiments that ennoble life, that he finds himself
wondering why better flowers do not grow in the enchanted gardens.
Those which seemed so beautiful at a distance turn out to be not only
without fragrance, but with a bad odour. The _grand monde_, in truth,
seems to be nothing but a small world of gossiping and shallow talk,
a world aware of no other nobility than that of inherited titles, and
scorning the idea that real nobility is a refinement of the soul,
produced by education, to which rich and poor, high and low, may all
aspire. The feeling of a man not recognised as an aristocrat who,
for some special reason, gains admission to this circle, is made
vivid in the experience of a talented physician who has saved the
life of the Prince de Guermantes and who owes his invitation to the
reception to the Prince's gratitude. The experience of a Bavarian
musician is also interesting. It shows how great can be the insolence
of aristocracy swollen with vanity. At the soirée we meet nobles who
never possessed ideals which acted as armour against pollution, nobles
with imaginations easily inflamed by the attractions of women servants,
whose lust for a chambermaid is sufficient to dim all consciousness
of their pedigrees. And we meet others who are even lower, noblemen
and ladies who keep up the traditions of Sodom and Gomorrah in modern
society.
It may be beside the question to inquire the intention of the author
in painting this picture of high society and then dwelling on aspects
of it that can only cause disgust. His words at times seem to reveal
a sarcastic intention. His descriptions are so full of minute details
and so rich in incidents of extreme naturalness that it is impossible
to believe that even a lively imagination could fabricate them. One
easily sees that they are fragments of real life. This keeps the
interest alive, despite the involved style. His periods are so twisted
and turgid with associated thoughts, so bristling with parenthetical
clauses that often profound effort is required to interpret them.
There is none of the plain, clear, sane, sunny style of a Daudet,
or of Paul Bourget. This causes a sensation of discomfort at times,
especially when the author indulges in introspection that reveals a
morbid imagination and pathological sensitiveness; as, for instance, in
the distinction between abiding sorrows and fugitive sorrows; on how
our beloved departed ones live in us, act on us, transform us even more
than the living ones; and how those who are dead grow to be more real
to us who love them than when they were alive.
We feel an unhealthiness under it all. We have to stop and analyse, to
unravel the main idea from the tangled skein in which it is hidden.
But it is a work that brings its own reward. It brings real jewels of
_finesse de pensée et d'observation_, such as those on the reminiscence
of departed sensations and feelings; on the different selves which we
have been in the past and which coexist in our present individuality;
on the eclipses to which the latter is subject when one of its
components suddenly steps from the dark recesses into the vivid light
of consciousness; on the elements of beauty apparent in different
individuals who are partial incarnations of one great beauty without;
on reminiscence of Plato; on the anxiety of expectation while awaiting
a person; on the effect which consciousness of his own sinfulness has
on the sinner; on the interchange of moral qualities and idiosyncrasies
of persons bound by mutual sympathy; on the permanence of our
passions--in mathematical jargon, a function of the time during which
they have acted on our spirit. It also discloses treasures of delicate
feeling, such as are awakened in a person by the image of a beloved one
that flashes vivid in his memory.
But to discover such treasures one has often to wade through a series
of long and indigestible sentences of thirty or forty lines.
I recall reading in an English magazine, a number of years ago,
an article entitled “A Law in Literary Expression.” Stated in its
plainest terms, the law is this: that the length of the phrase--not the
sentence, but its shortest fraction, the phrase--must be measured by
the breath pause. M. Proust breaks this law oftener than any citizen of
this country breaks the prohibition law, no matter how imperious may be
his thirst.
Finally the frank and scientific way in which he has discussed a
subject that has always been tabooed in secular literature calls for
remark. Of the posterity of Sodom he says it forms a colony spread all
over the world, and that one can count it as one can count the dust of
the earth. He studies all the types and varieties of sodomists. Their
manners and ways, their sentiments, their aberrations of the senses,
their shame are passed in review. It is a sort of scientific, poetical
treatise. The actions in which the sodomistic instinct finds its outlet
are often compared to the seemingly conscious actions by which flowers
attract the insects that are the instruments of their fecundation.
Botany and sexuality are mixed together. Sometimes the scientific
spirit, gaining the upper hand, leads him to look upon these phenomena
of genesic inversion as manifestations of a natural law, and therefore
marvellous, like all the workings of nature. He is nearly carried away,
and finds excuses for what is considered a vice, and seems to be on the
verge almost of expressing his admiration.
Some of his observations on sodomistic psychology are highly
interesting, although expressed in long periods.
I append a few pages of literal translation from the opening chapter
of “Sodome et Gomorrhe”; first, that the reader may have a sample
of M. Proust's style; second, that he may gain an insight of the
grasp the writer has of one of nature's most unsolvable riddles; and
finally, that he may have the description of an individual who plays an
important part in the novel.
“At the beginning of this scene, before my unsealed eyes, a
revolution had taken place in M. de Charlus, as complete, as
immediate as if he had been touched by a magic wand. Until
then, not understanding, I had not seen. The vice (so-called
for convenience), the vice of each individual, accompanies him
after the manner of those genii who are invisible to those who
ignore their presence. Goodness, deceit, a good name, social
relations do not allow themselves to be discovered, they exist
hidden. Ulysses himself did not at first recognise Athene. But
gods are immediately perceptible to gods, the like to the like,
so M. de Charlus was to Julien. Until now, in the presence of
M. de Charlus, I was like an absent-minded man in company with
a pregnant woman, whose heavy figure he had not remarked and
of whom, in spite of her smiling reiteration 'Yes, I am a bit
tired just now,' he persists in asking indiscreetly, 'What is
the matter with you then?' But, let some one say to him, 'She
is pregnant,' he immediately is conscious of her abdomen and
hereafter sees nothing but that. Enlightenment opens the eyes;
an error dissipated gives an added sense.
“Those persons who do not like to believe themselves examples of
this law in others--towards the Messieurs de Charlus of their
acquaintance whom they did not suspect even until there appears
on the smooth surface of a character, apparently in every
respect like others, traced in an ink until then invisible,
a word dear to the ancient Greeks, have only to recall, in
order to satisfy themselves, how at first the surrounding world
appeared naked, devoid of those ornamentations which it offers
to the more sophisticated, and also, of the many times in their
lives that they had been on the point of making a break. For
instance, nothing upon the characterless face of some man could
make them suppose that he was the brother, the fiancé or the
lover of some woman of whom they are on the point of making an
uncomplimentary remark, as, for example, to compare her to a
camel. At that moment, fortunately, however, some word whispered
to him by a neighbour freezes the fatal term on his lips. Then
immediately appears, like a _Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin_, these
words, 'This is the fiancé, or the brother, or the lover of the
woman, therefore it would be impossible to call her a camel
before him,' and, this new notion alone causes the retreat or
advance of the fraction of those notions, heretofore completed,
that he had had concerning the rest of the family.
“The real reason that M. de Charlus was different from other men
was because another being had been engrafted upon him, like the
horse upon the centaur, that his being was incorporated with
that of the Baron. I had not hitherto perceived. The abstract
had not become materialised, the being, finally understood had
lost its power of remaining invisible, and the transmutation of
M. de Charlus into a new person was so complete that not only
the contrasts of his face, of his voice, but retrospectively
the heights and depths of his relations with me, everything,
in fact, which had until then appeared incoherent, became
intelligible, disclosed itself, like a phrase which, without
meaning so long as the letters composing it are scattered
becomes, if the characters be placed in their proper order, a
thought impossible to forget.
“Moreover I now understood why, a short time ago, when I saw
M. de Charlus coming out from Mme. de Villeparisis' I thought
he looked like a woman. It was because he was one! He belonged
to that race of beings whose ideal is virile because their
temperament is feminine, and who are, in appearance only, like
other men. The silhouette cast in the facet of their eyes,
through which they see everything in the universe, is not that
of a nymph but of a beautiful young man. One of a race upon
whom rests a curse, who is forced to live in an atmosphere of
falsehood and perjury because he knows that his desire, that
which gives to all creatures the greatest satisfaction in life,
must be unavowed, being considered punishable and shameful, who
must even deny God himself, since when even as a Christian he
appears as an accused at the bar of the tribunal he must before
Christ and in his name defend himself as if from a calumny from
that which is his very life; son without a mother, forced to lie
to her all her life, even to the moment when he is closing her
eyes, friend without friendships, in spite of all those who are
attracted by his charm, fully recognised, and whose hearts would
lead them to be kind--for can those relations, which bloom only
by favour of a lie, be called friendship, when the first burst
of confidence he might be tempted to express, would cause him to
be rejected with disgust? Should he, by chance, have to do with
an impartial mind, that is to say a sympathetic one, even then
diverted from him by a psychology of convention, would permit
to flow from the confessed vice even the affection which is the
most foreign to him--as certain judges extenuate and excuse more
easily assassination amongst inverts and treason amongst Jews
from reasons drawn from original sin and fatality of race.
“Finally, lovers (at least according to the first theory
advanced which one will see modified by the continuation and
which would have angered them above everything had not this
contradiction been wiped out from before their eyes by the same
illusion that made them see and live) to whom the possibility
of this love (the hope of which gives them the force to bear so
many risks, so much solitude) is nearly closed since they are
naturally attracted to a man who does not resemble in any way a
woman, a man who is not an invert and who therefore cannot love
them; consequently their desire would remain forever unappeased
if money did not deliver to them real men or if the imagination
did not cause them to take for real men the inverts to whom
they are prostituted. Whose only honour is precarious; whose
only liberty provisory, up to the discovery of the crime; whose
only situation is unstable like the poet, who, fêted at night
in all the salons, applauded in all the theatres of London
is chased from his lodgings in the morning and can find no
place to lay his head. Turning the treadmill like Sampson and
saying like him, 'The two sexes will die each on his own side.'
Excluded even (except during the days of great misfortune
when the greatest number rallies around the victim like the
Jews around Dreyfus--from the sympathy--sometimes of society)
excluded even from their kind who see with disgust, reflected
as in a mirror which no longer flatters, all those blemishes
which they have not been willing to see in themselves and which
make them understand that that which they call their love (and
to which, playing upon the word, they have annexed everything
that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism can add to
love) comes not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen,
but from an incurable malady. Like the Jews again (save a few
who only care to consort with their own race and have always
on the lips ritualistic words and consecrated pleasantries);
they fly from each other, seeking those who are most unlike
them, who will have nothing to do with them, pardoning their
rebuffs, intoxicating themselves with their condescensions; but
also reassembled with their kind by the very ostracism which
strikes them, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, and
finally taking on (as a result of a persecution similar to that
of Israel) the physical and moral characteristics of a race,
sometimes beautiful, often frightful, finding (in spite of all
the mockeries that those more homogeneous, better assimilated
to the other race, in appearance less of an invert heap upon
him who is apparently more of one) finding even a kind of
expansion in frequenting with their kind, even an aid from
their existence so that while denying that they belong to that
race (whose very name is the greatest of injuries) those who
have succeeded in hiding the truth, that they also are of that
despised race, unmask those others, less to injure them, not
detesting them, than to excuse themselves, as a physician seeks
the appendicitis inversion in history, they find pleasure in
recalling that Socrates was one of them and that the same thing
was said of Jesus by the Israelites, without remembering that
then when homo-sexuality was normal there was no abnormality,
as there were no anti-Christians before Christ, also that
opprobrium alone makes it crime, since it has been only allowed
to exist as crime because it is refractory to all predication,
all example, to all punishment by virtue of special innate
disposition which repulses men more (although it may accompany
high moral qualities) than certain vices which contradict high
moral qualities, such as theft, cruelty, bad faith, better
understood, therefore more easily excused by men in general.
“Forming a free-masonry, much more extended, more efficacious
and less suspected than that of the lodges, because it rests
upon an identity of tastes, of needs, of habits, of dangers, of
apprenticeships, of knowledge, of traffic and of language. Whose
members avoid one another and yet immediately recognise each
other by natural or conventional signs, involuntary or studied,
which disclose to the mendicant one of his kind in the lord
whose carriage door he opens, to the father in the fiancé of his
daughter, to him who had wished to be cured, to confess, in the
physician, the priest or the lawyer whom he had gone to consult;
all obliged to protect their secret, but, at the same time,
sharing the secret of the others, which was not suspected by the
others and which makes the most improbable romances of adventure
seem true to them, for, in their romantic life, anachronically,
the ambassador is the friend of the criminal, the prince who,
with a certain freedom of manner, (which an aristocratic
education gives and which would be impossible with a little
trembling bourgeois) leaves the house of the duchess to seek the
Apache. Rejected part of the human collectivity but all the same
an important part, suspected where it does not exist, vaunting
itself, insolently with impunity where it is not divined;
counting its adherents everywhere, amongst the people, in the
army, in the temple, in the prison, upon the throne; finally
living, at least a great number of them, in a caressing and
dangerous intimacy with men of the other race, provoking them,
enticing them to speak of this vice as if it were not theirs, a
game which is made easy by the blindness or the falseness of the
others, a game which may be prolonged for years--until the day
of Scandal, when these conquerors are devoured. Until this time
obliged to hide their true life, to turn away their regards from
where they would wish to fix them, to fix them upon that from
which they would naturally turn away--to change the meaning of
many adjectives in their vocabulary, a social constraint merely,
slight compared to that interior constraint which their vice, or
that which is improperly called so, imposes upon them, less with
regard to others than to themselves and in a manner which makes
it seem not to be a vice--to themselves. But certain ones, more
practical, more hurried, who have not time to bargain and to
renounce the simplification of life and the gain of time that
might result from cooperation, have made two societies, of which
the second is exclusively composed of beings like themselves.”
M. Proust's work is the first definite reply in the affirmative to the
question whether fiction can subsist without the seductive power due
to a certain illusory essence of thought. Whether in this respect he
will have many, if any, successful followers is to be seen. But his
own volumes stand as an astonishing example of an organic and living
fiction obtained solely by the effort to portray truth.
Because of the unique qualities of his novels and the fact that they
are developed on a definite psychological plan, more than the usual
interest in a favourite writer is attached to the personality of M.
Proust. During his lifetime inaccessible both because of aristocratic
taste and of partial invalidism, his figure is likely to become more
familiar to the reading world--even to those who never read his
books--than the figures of great authors who walked with the crowd and
kept the common touch.
Neither Proust the man nor Proust the author can be considered apart
from his invalidism. It shows all through his writings, although
what the malady was which rendered him, if not a _de facto_ invalid,
certainly a potential invalid, is not known. Some of his friends
accused asthma, others a disease of the heart, while still others
attributed it to “nerves.” In reality his conduct and his writings were
consistent with neuropathy and his heredity. And if the hero of “A
la Recherche du Temps Perdu” is to be identified with himself, as is
popularly supposed, he was from early childhood delicate, sensitive,
precocious, and asthmatic, that is profoundly neuropathic.
He was fastidious in his tastes; he liked the best styles, the most
elegant ladies, aristocratic salons, and fashionable gatherings. He was
noted for the generosity of his tips. His life reminds one of the hero
of Huysman's famous novel. In his early days, M. Proust was a great
swell, and there is no doubt that many of his descriptions of incidents
and persons are elaborations of notes that he made after attending a
reception given by the Duchesse de Rohan, or other notables of the
Faubourg St. Germain, in whose houses he was an habitué.
His social activity may have been deliberate preparation for his work,
as his fifteen-year apprenticeship to Ruskin was preparation. Or it may
have been a pose, much the same as his mannerisms, habits, customs,
and possibly some features of his invalidism, were a pose. Surely he
enjoyed the reputation of being “different.”
He ruminated on Rousseau and studied Saint-Simon. When he arrived at
the stage where he could scoff at one and spurn the other, he learned
Henry James by heart. Then he wrote; he had prepared himself. The
deficit which art and endeavour failed to wipe out was compensated by
his maternal inheritance.
One may infer whither he is going by reading Proust once, but to
accompany him he must be read a second time. Those who would get
instruction and enlightenment must read him as Ruskin, his master,
said all worth while books must be read: “You must get into the habit
of looking intensely at words and assuring yourself of their meaning,
syllable by syllable.”
The discerning reader must look intensely at M. Proust's words. If he
looks long enough they seem to take on the appearance of _Mene, Tekel,
Phares_.