XIXA REAL WORLD IN FICTION
MY presence among those who are offering a tribute to Marcel Proust would be an impertinence if the request for it had not been continued after I had confessed the poverty of my knowledge. As it is, I may be justified in taking the great pleasure it is to me to testify a sincere admiration, founded on howsoever little experience. I have to read a good deal for my bread, and the reading I can do for pleasure is limited by debility of eyesight; M. Proust’s books are long and in a language I read less easily than my own. So it has happened that so far I have read only the two volumes of a beautifully lucid translation, wonderfully lucid when the delicacy and subtlety of the thoughts translated are considered. I will not say that you can taste a wine without drinking a bottle—the analogy, like most analogies, would be false; I do not doubt that wider study would produce more valuable opinions. Yet my slight study has produced opinions which, I am convinced, further study will only confirm, and it is a pleasure to record them....
We all have our views as to what, for us, distinguishes great fiction from that which is less than great. Mine has always been that it causes me to live in a real world of visible, audible, and intelligible people—a world in which, howevernovel it may be to start with, I am at home and able, with sureness, to exercise my powers of understanding to the full; this last point matters, for of course the superficial may be superficially alive. No doubt the test is objectively unfair, because the reaction of a writer’s imagination on a reader’s is affected, though not conditioned, as the sympathy between the two is greater or less; but for my own use this test is the most profitable. Tolstoy has done this for me, so has Sterne, so has Miss Austen, so has Thackeray, so have not very many others, and so have not some almost universally acclaimed. Well, M. Proust has done this most considerable service for me, in those two volumes I have read in translation, and I am grateful. I know his hero’s grandfather and grandmother and mother and invalid aunt, and know them well, and my understanding has played with zest and to the limit of its power on the wealth of character revealed to me. M. Swann is of my intimates, and I think I have a perfect comprehension of his Odette. That is the first thing for which I am grateful. The second is the sheer intellectual joy with which, time and again, I came upon an achievement of divination in the subtleties of human emotion which caught one’s breath by its compelling truth. Jealousy of a man for a woman may have been more grandly expressed, but have all the subtleties of its tortuous and agonising course ever been so completely exposed as in the case of M. Swann?Or the feelings of a sensitive and imaginative boy in his first affections?... For these two things I have a sincere gratitude which I propose to increase. But the wretchedness of my present qualifications must terminate my expression of it now.
G.S. STREET.