It was one of the distinctive characters of Proust’s genius that he
combined with his great sweep of vision an exquisite delicacy of touch,
a solicitous passion for detail. Many of his pages recall those
mediæval manuscripts where the roving fancy of the scribe has framed
some solemn gospel or epistle in episodes drawn from the life of towns
and fields, or the pagan extravagances of the Bestiary. Jane Austen
never surpassed in conciseness of irony some of the conversations
between Marcel’s maiden aunts, or the description of Madame de
Cambremer and Madame de Franquetot listening to music; and one must
turn to “Cranford” for such microscopic studies of provincial life as
that of the bed-ridden aunt, Madame Octave, who is always going to get
up the next day, and meanwhile lies beside her bottle of Vichy and her
purple velvet prayer-book “bursting with pious images,” and listens to
Françoise’s report of what is going on in the street, down which Madame
Goupil, just before a thunder-storm, is seen walking _without her
umbrella_ in the new silk dress she has had made at Châteaudun!
But just as the reader is sinking delectably into the feather-bed of
the small town, Proust snatches him up in eagle’s talons and swings
him over the darkest abysses of passion and intrigue--showing him,
in the slow tortures of Swann’s love for Odette, and of Saint-Loup’s
for Rachel, the last depths and involutions of moral anguish, or
setting the frivolous careers of the two great Guermantes ladies, the
Duchess and the Princess, on a stage vaster than any since Balzac’s,
and packed with a human comedy as multifarious. This changing but
never confusing throng is composed of most of the notable types of a
society which still keeps its aristocratic framework: the old nobility
of the “Faubourg” with their satellites; rich and cultivated Jews
(such as Swann and Bloch), celebrated painters, novelists, actresses,
diplomatists, lawyers, doctors, Academicians; men of fashion and vice,
_déclassées_ Grand Duchesses, intriguing vulgarians, dowdy great
ladies, and all the other figures composing the most various, curious,
and restless of modern societies.
Without visible effort Proust’s art marshals these throngs and then
turns serenely aside to put the last tender touches to his description
of the hawthorns at Combray, or the lovely episode of Marcel’s first
visit to Rachel, where the young man walks up and down under the
blossoming pear-trees while Saint-Loup goes to fetch his mistress.
Every reader enamoured of the art must brood in amazement over the way
in which Proust maintains the balance between these two manners--the
broad and the minute. His endowment as a novelist--his range of
presentation combined with mastery of his instruments--has probably
never been surpassed.
Fascinating as it is to the professional to dwell on this amazing
virtuosity, yet the lover of Proust soon comes to feel that his rarest
quality lies beyond and above it--lies in the power to reveal, by a
single allusion, a word, an image, those depths of soul beyond the
soul’s own guessing. The man who could write of the death of Marcel’s
grandmother: “A few hours ago her beautiful hair, just beginning to
turn gray ... had seemed less old than herself. Now, on the contrary,
it placed the crown of age on a face grown young again, and from
which the wrinkles, the contractions, the heaviness, the tension, the
flaccidity caused by suffering had all disappeared. As in the far-off
time when her parents had chosen her bridegroom for her, the features
of her face were delicately traced in lines of purity and submission,
the cheeks shone with chaste hopes, with a dream of bliss, even with
an innocent gaiety that the years, one by one, had slowly destroyed.
Life, in leaving her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A
smile seemed to rest upon my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral bed,
death, like the mediæval sculptor, had laid her down in the guise of
a young girl--” the man who could find words in which to express the
inexpressible emotion with which one comes suddenly, in some apparently
unknown landscape, upon a scene long known to the soul (like that
mysterious group of trees encountered by Marcel in the course of a
drive with Madame de Villeparisis)--the man who could touch with so
sure and compassionate a hand on the central mysteries of love and
death, deserves at such moments to be ranked with Tolstoy when he
describes the death of Prince Andrew, with Shakespeare when he makes
Lear say: “Pray you, undo this button....”