XIIIPROUST AND THE MODERNCONSCIOUSNESS[8]
FOR Englishmen Marcel Proust has already become one of the great figures of modern literature. The feeling is common to many of his readers that in some way his work marks an epoch. What kind of epoch it is harder to say. Is he an end, or a beginning? And, again, yet another question insinuates itself continually as we pass slowly through his long volumes. What precisely—if answers to such questions can be made precise—was his own intention as a writer? Not that it necessarily makes the least difference to his own importance whether he succeeded or failed, whether he was consistent or spasmodic in following out his own plan. But we, at least, should be the happier for some indication of the thread to follow. For there comes a time in the reading of a long novel—andA la Recherche du Temps Perduis surely one of the longest—when we feel the need to stand aside, to contemplate it as a whole, to grasp thepattern, to comprehend the general vision of life on which its essential individuality depends. Only thus, it seems, can we really make it our own.
In this respect Marcel Proust’s book may be fairly said to bristle with difficulties. Its obvious theme, its surface intention, as we perceive it in the brilliant opening pages ofDu côté de chez Swann, is the presentation by an adult man of his memories of childhood. We feel, though with peculiar qualifications to which we must return, that we are on the threshold of a spiritual autobiography; we are to be the enchanted witnesses of the unfolding and growth of a strangely sensitive consciousness. But no sooner are we attuned to the subtleties of this investigation and have accustomed ourselves to Proust’s breathless, tiptoe following of the faint and evanescent threads of association: no sooner have we begun to take a deep and steady breath of the rich fragrance of Aunt Léonie’s house at Combray, and to imbibe the luxurious atmosphere of the old town, whose shifting colours are as opulent as the lights of the windows in the church round which it clings: no sooner have we prepared ourselves to watch with absorbed interest the process of growth of a mind nurtured in this almost intoxicating soil,—than the thread is abruptly snapped. We do not complain at the moment, for the episodeAmour de Swannis the highest sustained achievement of Proust as a prose-writer. Perhaps the devouring passion of love—“Venustoute entière à sa proie attachée”—the smouldering, torturing flame of unsatisfied passion which by the law of its own nature can never be satisfied, has never been so subtly and so steadily anatomised before. Perhaps it has been more wonderfully presented, but never more wonderfully analysed.
It is not surprising that in the fascination of this intolerable and unwonted history, in which every psychological subtlety of the author is properly and beautifully dominated by the tragic theme, we forget that this is not at all the thing we went out to see. The boy whose history we have been following could not have known of Swann’s discomfiture before he was a man. It has happened, indeed, before the narrative ofDu Côté de chez Swannopens, before the bell of the garden-gate tinkles and Swann takes his place with the family on the verandah; but it can have no place in the story of the boy’s development until he is old enough to understand it. In other words, the angle of presentation has abruptly changed. Into a narrative concerned, as we imagine, solely with what a boy knew and felt, and how he knew and felt it, is suddenly thrust an episode of which he could have known nothing at all.
These two sections of the book—composing the yellow-backedDu Côté de chez Swannwith which Proust’s admirers had so long to remain content—were at once baffling and fascinating.Moreover, they do actually contain Proust’s very finest work: he was never again to sustain himself on this level for so long. But, considered in themselves (and there were three or four years in which we had no choice but to consider them so), they could be made to yield a pattern. On the one side was the vague and heroic figure of Swann as he loomed on the extreme horizon of the boy’s world, the mysterious visitant whose appearances in the household made an agony of his solitary going to bed; on the other was the Swann of reality, the reserved, silent, ineffably refined darling of thebeau monde, who held his teeth clenched, like the Spartan, while the fox gnawed at his vitals. The contrast, the building up of the character of Swann, as it were, from two sides at once, was the quite sufficient motive of the book. But, so understood, it was Swann’s book, not the boy’s.
But the next volumes brought us back to the boy’s history. As we read of his love affair with Albertine, his adoration of the Duchesse de Guermantes, his adventures in the rarefied atmosphere of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it became more and more evident thatAmour de Swannwas, in spite of its beauty and power, only an irrelevant interlude, after all. And in the narrative of the boy’s stay in the hotel at Balbec came frequent hints that the key to the story as a whole might be found in the earlier emphasis upon the manner in which the author went in searchof the past. At the beginning ofDu Côté de chez Swannhe had been at pains to give us not merely his results but his method also. He was a grown man, suddenly waking from sleep, trying to locate himself once more in his room, and his room in the world; and something familiar in this strange sensation had reminded him of his sensations in his bedroom as a child. But “reminded” is altogether too coarse and summary a word for the delicate process on which his researches depended; rather it is that a familiarity in the strange sensation whispers to him that it holds a secret for him if he will only explore it. It conceals something that he must know. Again, it is the vague familiarity of the faint flavour of amadeleinedipped in tea, which the grown man is eating in his mother’s company, which ultimately yields up the magnificently vivid picture of Combray and Aunt Léonie. These sensations, or presentiments of the past, come to the boy also. There is, for example, the beautiful account of his mysterious excitement at a sight of the spire and towers of Martinville church when he is driving home in Dr. Percepied’s carriage. Again he has the sense of memories he cannot grasp, of a secret and mystical message that he cannot make his own; it is the occasion of his first attempt at writing.[9]These premonitions becomemore frequent during his stay with his grandmother at the Balbec hotel. Then the sudden sight of a tiny clump of trees seen while he is driving with the Marquise de Villeparisis makes him feel that they are stretching out imploring arms towards him in a mute appeal. If he can divine what they have to tell him (they seem to say) he will touch the secret of “la vraie vie,” of life indeed. And then the writer warns us that the story of his search to make this secret his own is to come, and that this premonition of a task to be accomplished was to haunt him throughout his life.
At this moment Marcel Proust came nearest, we may believe, to revealing to the reader the hidden soul of his own book. There is room for different interpretations, of course, and it is admitted that in any case he was frequently distracted from whatever plan he had by his delight in a pure description of the human comedy from the angle most familiar to him. Nevertheless, we are persuaded that Proust brought to the exact and intimate analysis of his own sensations something more than the self-consciousness of talent—some element, let us say, of an almost religious fervour. This modern of the moderns, thisraffinéofraffinés, had a mystical strain in his composition. These hidden messages of a moment, these glimpses and intuitions of “la vraie vie” behind a veil, were of the utmost importance to him; he had some kind of immediatecertainty of their validity. He confessed as much, and we are entitled to take a man so reticent at his word.
We may take him at his word also when he acknowledges that the effort to penetrate behind the veil of these momentary perceptions was the chief interest of his life. The first of these illuminations—the vision of Martinville spire—had taken shape in a piece of writing which he gives us. We suspect that the last did also, and that its visible expression is the whole series of volumes which, after all, do bear a significant title—A la Recherche du Temps Perdu; we suspect that the last page of the last volume would have brought us to the first page of the first, and that the long and winding narrative would finally have revealed itself as the history of its own conception. Then, we may imagine, all the long accounts of the Guermantes’ parties and the extraordinary figure of M. de Charlus would have fallen into their places in the scheme, as part of the surrounding circumstances whose pressure drove the youth and the man into the necessity of discovering a reality within himself. What he was to discover, when the demand that he should surrender himself to his moments of vision became urgent and finally irresistible, was the history of what he was. Proust—and amid the most labyrinthine of his complacent divagations into thebeau mondea vague sense of this attends us—was much more than a sentimentalautobiographer of genius; he was a man trying to maintain his soul alive. And thus, it may be, we have an explanation of the rather surprising fact that he began his work so late. The two volumes which went beforeDu Côté de chez Swann[10]were not indeed negligible, but they were the work of a dilettante. The explanation, we believe, is that in spite of his great gifts Proust was a writermalgré lui; he composed against the grain. We mean that had it been only for the sake of the satisfaction of literary creation, he probably would not have written at all. It was only when writing presented itself to him as the only available means for getting down to the bedrock of his own personality, as the only instrument by which hisfin-de-sièclesoul—the epithet is, in his case, a true definition—could probe to something solid to live by, that he seriously took up the pen. It was the lance with which he rode after the Grail—“la vraie vie.”
Proust at the first glance looks wholly different from a man who rides off on a desperate adventure. There seems to be no room for desperate adventures in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It is hardly congruous to some senses to ride through the waste land in a sixty horse-power limousine.Nevertheless, it can be done. The outward and visible sign is, not for the first time, different from the inward and spiritual grace.
So by a devious path we return to our first question. Proust marks an epoch. What kind of epoch? Is it an end or a beginning? And the answer we have reached is the answer we might have expected in the case of a figure so obviously considerable. Proust is both an end and a beginning. More an end than a beginning, perhaps, if we have regard to the technique and texture of his work. In the art of literature itself he opens up no new way. And, in the deeper sense, he indicates a need more than he satisfies it. The modern mind, looking into the astonishing mirror which Proust holds up to it, will not see in it the gleam of something to live by; but it will see, if it knows how to look, an acknowledgement of that necessity and a burning desire to satisfy it. By so much Marcel Proust marks a beginning also. It is the flame of this desire which smoulders always through his book, and at times breaks out; it is this which makes it his own, and this which gives it, in the true sense, style.
J. MIDDLETON MURRY.