Fashions in the arts come and go, and it is of little interest to try
to analyze the work of any artist who does not give one the sense of
being in some sort above them. In the art of one’s contemporaries it is
not always easy to say what produces that sense; and perhaps the best
way of trying to find out is to apply a familiar touchstone.
Out of all the flux of judgments and theories which have darkened
counsel in respect of novel-writing, one stable fact seems always to
emerge; the quality the greatest novelists have always had in common
is that of making their people live. To ask why this matters more than
anything else would lead one into the obscurest mazes of æsthetic;
but the fact is generally enough admitted to serve as a ground for
discussion. Not all the other graces and virtues combined seem to have
in them that aseptic magic. Vivacity, virtuosity, an abundance of
episodes, skill in presenting them: what power of survival have these,
compared with the sight of the doddering Baron Hulot climbing his
stairs to a senile tryst, to Beatrix Esmond descending hers in silver
clocks and red-heeled shoes?
M. Jusserand, in his “Literary History of the English People,”
says of Shakespeare that he was _un grand distributeur de vie_, a
great life-giver; it is the very epithet one needs for Proust. His
gallery of living figures is immense, almost past reckoning; so far,
in that ever-growing throng, it is only the failures that one can
count. And Proust’s power of evocation extends from the background
and middle distance (where some mysterious law of optics seems to
make it relatively easy for the novelist to animate his puppets) to
that searching “centre front” where his principal characters, so
scrutinized, explained, re-explained, pulled about, taken apart and
put together again, resist in their tough vitality his perpetual
nervous manipulation, and keep carelessly on their predestined way.
Swann himself, subjected to so merciless an examination, Swann, as to
whose haberdashery, hats, boots, gloves, taste in pictures, books,
and women we are informed with an impartial abundance, is never more
alive than when, in that terrible scene of the fifth volume, he
quietly tells the Duchesse de Guermantes that he cannot promise to
go to Italy the following spring with her and the Duke because he
happens to be dying. Equally vivid are the invalid aunt in the pale
twilight of her provincial bedroom, and the servant Françoise who
waits on her, and at her death passes as a matter of course to the
rest of the family--amazing composite picture of all the faults and
virtues of the old-fashioned French maid-servant. And then there is the
hero’s grandmother, who fills the pages with a subdued yet tingling
vitality from the moment when we first see her dashing out for one of
her lonely walks in the rain to that other day, far on in the tale,
when, fiercely and doggedly nursed by Françoise, she dies in an equal
loneliness; there is the Marquis de Saint-Loup, impetuous, selfish,
and sentimental, with his artless veneration for the latest thing in
“culture,” his snobbishness in the Bohemian world, his simplicity
and good-breeding in his own; the Jewish actress, his mistress, who
despises him because he is a mere “man of the world” and not one of her
own crew of æsthetic charlatans; the great, the abject, the abominable
and magnificent Monsieur de Charlus, and the shy scornful Duchesse de
Guermantes, with her quickness of wit and obtuseness of heart, her
consuming worldliness and her sincere belief that nothing bores her as
much as the world--the poor Duchess, mistress of all the social arts,
yet utterly nonplussed, and furious, because Swann’s announcement that
he is dying is made as she is getting into her carriage to go to a big
dinner, and nothing in her code teaches her how to behave to a friend
tactless enough to blurt out such news at such a moment! Ah, how they
all live, and abound each in his or her own sense--and how, each time
they reappear (sometimes after disconcertingly long eclipses), they
take up their individual rhythm as unerringly as the performers in some
great orchestra!
The sense that, through all his desultoriness, Proust always knows
whither his people are tending, and which of their words, gestures and
thoughts are worth recording; his ease in threading his way through
their crowded ranks, fills the reader, from the first, with the feeling
of security which only the great artists inspire. Certain novels,
beginning very quietly--carelessly, almost--yet convey on the opening
page the same feeling of impending fatality as the first bars of the
Fifth Symphony. Destiny is knocking at the gate. The next knock may
not come for a long time; but the reader knows that it _will_ come,
as surely as Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyitch knew that the mysterious little
intermittent pain which used to disappear for days would come back
oftener and more insistently till it destroyed him.
There are many ways of conveying this sense of the foot-fall of
Destiny; and nothing shows the quality of the novelist’s imagination
more clearly than the incidents he singles out to illuminate the course
of events and the inner workings of his people’s souls. When Imogen,
setting forth to meet her adored Posthumus at Milford Haven, asks
his servant Pisanio (who has been ordered by the jealous Posthumus
to murder her on the way): “How many score of miles may we well ride
’twixt hour and hour?” and, getting the man’s anguished answer: “One
score ’twixt sun and sun, Madam, ’s enough for you, and too much too,”
exclaims: “_Why, one that rode to’s execution, man, could never go so
slow_--” or when Gretchen, opening her candid soul to Faust, tells him
how she mothered her little sister from the cradle--“My mother was so
ill ... I brought the poor little creature up on milk and water ... the
cradle stood by my bed, she could hardly stir without my waking. I had
to feed her, take her into the bed with me, walk the floor with her all
night, and be early the next morning at the wash-tub; but I loved her
so that I was glad to do it”--when the swift touch of genius darts such
rays on the path to come, one is almost tempted to exclaim: There is
nothing in mere “situation”--the whole of the novelist’s art lies in
the particular way in which he brings the given conjuncture home to the
imagination!
Proust had an incredible sureness of touch in shedding this prophetic
ray on his characters. Again and again he finds the poignant word,
the significant gesture, as when, in that matchless first chapter
(“Combray”) of “Du Côté de chez Swann” he depicts the suspense of
the lonely little boy (the narrator) who, having been hurried off
to bed without a goodnight kiss because M. Swann is coming to dine,
persuades the reluctant Françoise to carry to his mother a little
note in which he implores her to come up and see him “about something
very important.” So far, the episode is like many in which the modern
novelist has analyzed--especially since “Sinister Street”--the
inarticulate tragedies of childhood. But for Proust such an episode, in
addition to its own significance, has a deeper illuminative use.
“I thought to myself,” he goes on, “how Swann would have laughed at
my anguish if he had read my letter, and guessed its real object”
(which was, of course, to get his mother’s goodnight kiss); “but, on
the contrary, as I learned later, for years an anguish of the same
kind was the torture of Swann’s own life. That anguish, which consists
in knowing that the being one loves is in some gay scene [_lieu de
plaisir_] where one is not, where there is no hope of one’s being;
that anguish, it was through the passion of love that he experienced
it--that passion to which it is in some sort predestined, to which
it peculiarly and specifically pertains”--and then, when Françoise
has been persuaded to take the child’s letter, and his mother
(engaged with her guest) does not come, but says curtly: “There is
no answer”--“Alas!” the narrator continues, “Swann also had had that
experience, had learned that the good intentions of a third person
are powerless to move a woman who is irritated at feeling herself
pursued in scenes of enjoyment by some one whom she does not love--”
and suddenly, by one touch, in the first pages of that quiet opening
chapter in which a little boy’s drowsy memories reconstitute an old
friend’s visit to his parents, a light is flashed on the central theme
of the book: the hopeless incurable passion of a sensitive man for a
stupid uncomprehending woman. The foot-fall of Destiny has echoed
through that dull provincial garden, her touch has fallen on the
shoulder of the idle man of fashion, and in an instant, and by the most
natural of transitions, the quiet picture of family life falls into its
place in the great design of the book.
Proust’s pages abound in such anticipatory flashes, each one of which
would make the fortune of a lesser novelist. A peculiar duality of
vision enabled him to lose himself in each episode as it unrolled
itself before him--as in this delicious desultory picture of Swann’s
visit to his old friends--and all the while to keep his hand on the
main threads of the design, so that no slightest incident contributing
to that design ever escapes him. This degree of saturation in one’s
subject can be achieved only through something like the slow ripening
processes of nature. Tyndall said of the great speculative minds:
“There is in the human intellect a power of expansion--I might almost
call it a power of creation--which is brought into play by the simple
brooding upon facts”; and he might have added that this brooding is
one of the most distinctive attributes of genius, is perhaps as near an
approach as can be made to the definition of genius.
Nothing can be farther from the mechanical ingenuities of
“plot”-weaving than this faculty of penetrating into a chosen subject
and bringing to light its inherent properties. Neither haste to have
done, nor fear lest the reader shall miss his emphasis, ever affects
the leisurely movement of Proust’s narrative, or causes him to give
unnatural relief to the passages intended to serve as sign-posts. A
tiny “blaze,” here and there, on the bark of one of the trees in his
forest, suffices to show the way; and the explorer who has not enough
wood-craft to discover these signs had best abstain from the adventure.