XIIA NEW PSYCHOMETRY[3]

TO judge from the newspapers, there have been tremendous “crises” in public affairs during the last few days: the triumph of Fascismo in Italy, the Lausanne Conference, the English elections. But to many of us the great events are merely spectacular; they pass rapidly across the screen, while the band plays irrelevant scraps of syncopated music, and seem no more real than any other of the adventures, avowedly fictitious, that are “filmed” for our idle hours. They don’t, save on reflection and much diligent pondering of leading articles, come home to our business and bosoms. But one announcement inThe Timesof last Monday week shocked many of us with a sudden, absurdly indignant bewilderment, like a foul blow: I mean the death of Marcel Proust. It is not only absurd but impious to be indignant with the decrees of Fate. The wise throughout the ages have prescribed for us our proper behaviour in the face of such an event; and most of us find the prescription quite useless. But, on the death of an author, there is this peculiar consolation that never fails: his work lives absolutely unaffected by his death.

... We can light the lamp, make a clear fire, and sit down to the book with the old thrill. There is only the thought that we must be content with what we have, that we are to get no more from that hand. With Marcel Proust, however, it seems that we are spared even that mortification. He has left behind him the completion ofA la Recherche du Temps Perdu. This is great news. The announcements from the press ofLa Nouvelle Revue Françaisewill be eagerly awaited. Even a new Anatole France is not so important an event.

It has been said that Proust will go down to posterity as the author of one book. This is only true in a literal sense. For the many volumes ofA la Recherchethat already crowd the shelves are several “books” in one. It is not a “story,” but a panorama of many stories. Indeed, who reads Proust for the “story”? His book is really a picture of the modern world and the modern spirit, and that is its peculiar fascination for us. There are “morbid” elements in it, to be sure—you cannot read a page without seeing that it must have been written by some one who was anything but a normal, healthy human being, and it is not for nothing thatThe Times[4]has compared him to Petronius Arbiter. But one of the advantages of this hyperaesthesia is a heightened sensibility foreverything, the perception and accurate notation of innumerable details in thought and feeling that escape a normal observer.

Take, for instance, the account of the famous author “Bergotte.” Proust, little more than a child, but already his ardent reader, meets him at luncheon. And, first, the boy’s imagined author, a “langoureux vieillard,” has to give place to the reality, much younger, a little man with a chin-tuft and a nose like a snail-shell. Then comes an elaborate description of his spoken diction, pronunciation, etc., and an attempt to reconcile these with the peculiarities of his written style. Special “notes”:

Doubtless, again, so as to distinguish himself from the previous generation, too fond as it had been of abstractions, of weighty commonplaces, when Bergotte wished to speak favourably of a book, what he would bring into prominence, what he would quote with approval, would always be some scene that furnished the reader with an image, some picture that had no rational significance. “Ah, yes!” he would exclaim, “it is quite admirable! There is a little girl in an orange shawl. It is excellent!” Or again, “Oh, yes, there is a passage in which there is a regiment marching along the street; yes, it is excellent!” As for style, he was not altogether of his time (though he remained quite exclusively of his race, abominating Tolstoy, George Eliot, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky), for the word that always came to his lips when he wished to praise the style of any writer was “mild.” “Yes, you know, I like Chateaubriand better inAtalathan inRené; heseems to me to be milder.” He said the word like a doctor who, when his patient assures him that milk will give him indigestion, answers: “But, you know, it’s very mild.” And it is true that there was in Bergotte’s style a kind of harmony similar to that for which the ancients used to praise certain of their orators in terms which we now find it hard to understand, accustomed as we are to our own modern tongues, in which effects of that kind are not sought.[5]

It is, further, explained how this man of genius came to pay court to his intellectual inferiors with an eye on the Academy, and how, while his own private morals were bad, the moral tone of his books was of the loftiest.

Perhaps it is only in really vicious lives that the moral problem can arise in all its disquieting strength. And of this problem the artist finds a solution in the terms not of his own personal life but of what is for him the true life, a general, a literary solution. As the great Doctors of the Church began often, without losing their virtue, by acquainting themselves with the sins of all mankind, out of which they extracted their own personal sanctity, so great artists often, while being thoroughly wicked, make use of their vices in order to arrive at a conception of the moral law that is binding upon us all.[6]

Nor is the portrait finished yet. Bergotte was at bottom a man who really loved only certain images and to compose and paint them in words. Had he had to defend himself before a tribunal, in spite of himself he would have chosen his words, not for their effect on the judge, but in view of images which the judge would certainly never have perceived.

It is this extraordinarily minute “psychometry” that is the peculiar mark of Proust’s work. The sensations Swann derives from a sonata of Vinteuil’s, the special quality of Elstir’s pictures of the sea-shore, the effect of afternoon light in the church at Combray, glimpses of military life at Doncières, with its contrast of the First Empire aristocracy and theancien régime,—it is the first time that such things as these have been put into words and brought intimately home to you. Then there are the studies ofle grand monde—the “gilded saloons,” as Disraeli would have called them, of the Guermantes and the rest. Here you have a picture of the Faubourg Saint-Germain that is as true, you are assured, as Balzac’s was false.[7]

I confess “ma mère” and “ma grand’mère” bore me. And there is just a little too much of “le petit clan.” But in this vast banquet of modern life and thought and sensation there is plenty of room to pick and choose. Since Henry Bernstein first mentioned Proust’s name to me in the year before the war I have returned again and again for a tit-bit to that feast. Proust is dead; but we can still go on enjoying his work. In that sense the cry of the child in Maeterlinck’sOiseau Bleuis true enough: “There is no death.”

A.B. WALKLEY.

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