Hitherto I have only praised.
In writing of a great creative artist, and especially of one whose work
is over, it is always better worth while to dwell on the beauties than
to hunt down the blemishes. Where the qualities outweigh the defects
the latter lose much of their importance, even when, as sometimes
in Proust’s case, they are defects in the moral sensibility, that
tuning-fork of the novelist’s art.
It is vain to deny, or to try to explain away, this particular
blemish--deficiency, it should be rather called--in Proust’s work.
Undoubtedly there are blind spots in his books, as there are in
Balzac’s, in Stendhal’s, in Flaubert’s; but Proust’s blind spots are
peculiarly disconcerting because they are intermittent. One cannot
dismiss the matter by saying that a whole category of human emotions is
invisible to him, since at certain times his vision is acutest at the
precise angle where the blindness had previously occurred.
A well-known English critic, confusing the scenes in which Proust’s
moral sense has failed him with those (far more numerous) in which he
deliberately portrays the viler aspects of the human medley, suggests
that timorous readers might find unmingled enjoyment in the perusal of
“A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” by the simple expedient of “thinking
away” M. de Charlus--as who should propose “thinking away” Falstaff
from the plays in which he figures! It would, in fact, be almost as
difficult to dismiss M. de Charlus with an “I know thee not, old man,”
as Falstaff; and quite as unnecessary. It is not by daring to do “in
the round” a mean or corrupt character--an Iago, a Lord Steyne, a
Philippe Bridau, or a Valérie Marneffe--that a novelist diminishes
the value of his work. On the contrary, he increases it. Only when
the vileness and the cruelty escape him, when he fails to see the
blackness of the shadow they project, and thus unconsciously flattens
his modelling, does he correspondingly empoverish the picture; and
this Proust too often did--but never in drawing M. de Charlus, whose
ignominy was always as vividly present to him as Iago’s or Goneril’s to
their creator.
There is one deplorable page where the hero and narrator, with whose
hyper-sensitiveness a hundred copious and exquisite passages have
acquainted us, describes with complacency how he has deliberately
hidden himself to spy on an unedifying scene. This episode--and
several others marked by the same abrupt lapse of sensibility--might
be “thought away” with all the less detriment that, at such moments,
Proust’s characters invariably lose their _probableness_ and begin
to stumble through their parts like good actors vainly trying to
galvanize a poor play. All through his work there are pages literally
trembling with emotion; but wherever the moral sensibility fails, the
tremor, the vibration, ceases. When he is unaware of the meanness of an
act committed by one of his characters, that character loses by so much
of its life-likeness, and, reversing Pygmalion’s gesture, the author
turns living beings back to stone.
But what are these lapses in a book where countless pages throb with
passionate pity and look at one with human eyes? The same man who thus
offends at one moment, at the next has one by the heartstrings in a
scene such as that where the hero, hearing his grandmother speak for
the first time over the telephone, is startled into thoughts of death
and separation by the altered sound of a familiar voice; or that in
which Saint-Loup comes up to Paris on twenty-four hours’ leave, and
his adoring mother first exults at the thought that he is going to
spend his evening with her, then bitterly divines that he is not, and
finally trembles lest, by betraying her disappointment, she shall have
spoilt his selfish pleasure. And it is almost always at the very moment
when the reader thinks: “Oh, if only he doesn’t fail me _now_!” that he
floods his squalid scene with the magic of an inexhaustible poetry, so
that one could cry out, like Sigmund when the gale blows open the door
of the hut: “No one went--some one came! _It is the spring._”
M. Benjamin Crémieux, whose article on Proust is the most thoughtful
study of his work yet published, has come upon the obstacle of Proust’s
lapses of sensibility, and tried, not very successfully, to turn it.
According to this critic, Proust’s satire is never “based on a moral
ideal,” but is always merely “complementary to his psychological
analysis. The only occasion” (M. Crémieux continues) “where Proust
incidentally speaks of a moral ideal is in the description of the
death of Bergotte.” He then cites the beautiful passage in question:
“Everything happens in our lives as though we had entered upon them
with a burden of obligations contracted in an anterior existence; there
is nothing in our earthly condition to make us feel that we are under
an obligation to be good, to be morally sensitive [_être délicats_],
even to be polite; nor, to the artist, to begin over again twenty times
a passage which will probably be admired only when his body has been
devoured by worms.... All these obligations, which have no sanction
in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world
founded on goodness, on moral scruple, on sacrifice, a world entirely
different from this one, a world whence we come when we are born on
earth, perhaps to return there and live once more under the rule of
the unknown laws which we have obeyed here because we carried their
principles within ourselves, without knowing who decreed that they
should be; those laws to which every deep intellectual labour draws us
nearer, and which are invisible only--and not always!--to fools.”
It is difficult to see how so deliberate a profession of faith in a
moral ideal can be brushed aside as “incidental.” The passage quoted
would rather seem to be the key to Proust’s whole attitude: to its
weakness as well as to its strength. For it will be noticed that, among
the mysterious “obligations” brought with us from that other “entirely
different” world, he omits one; the old stoical quality of courage.
That quality, moral or physical, seems never to have been recognized
by him as one of the mainsprings of human action. He could conceive of
human beings as good, as pitiful, as self-sacrificing, as guided by the
most delicate moral scruples; but never, apparently, as brave, either
by instinct or through conscious effort.
Fear ruled his moral world: fear of death, fear of love, fear of
responsibility, fear of sickness, fear of draughts, fear of fear. It
formed the inexorable horizon of his universe and the hard delimitation
of his artist’s temperament.
In saying so one touches on the narrow margin between the man’s genius
and his physical disabilities, and at this point criticism must draw
back, or linger only in reverent admiration of the great work achieved,
the vast register covered, in spite of that limitation, in conflict
with those disabilities.
Nietzsche’s great saying, “Everything worth while is accomplished
notwithstanding” [_trotzdem_], might serve as the epitaph of Proust.