XVIIIA MOMENT TO SPARE
IHAVE at last found time, or rather, for it expresses our relations better, Time has been gracious enough at last to findme—in regard toSwann. It was a new and satisfactory experience. His reality is extraordinary—at least in the main part of the book: I hope for the sake of French upper middle-class society of his day that it is not ordinary in such things as the big dinner scene in vol. ii.[15]
Has anybody said that he partakesbothof De Quincey and of Stendhal? He does to me, and I’m shot if I ever expected to see such a blend! You see, there is in him on the one hand a double measure of the analytical and introspective power that Beyle’s admirers make so much of; with what they also admire, a total absence of prettification for prettification’s sake. Yet he can be pretty in the very best sense, while Beyle never can, in the best or any other. Then, too, I at least find in him much less of the type-characterwhich, though certainly relieved by individuality in theChartreuse de Parmeand other books (especiallyLamiel), is still always more or less there. But the oddest and to me the most attractive thing is the way in which he entirely relieves the sense of aridity—of museum-preparations—which I find in Stendhal. And here it is that the De Quincey suggestion comes so unexpectedly in. For Proust effects this miracle by a constant relapse upon—and sometimes a long self-restriction to—a sort of dream element. It is not, of course, the vaguer and more mystical kind that one finds in De Quincey, not that ofOur Ladies of SorroworSavannah-la-Mar, but that of the best parts ofThe English Mail Coach. In fact, it is sometimes Landorian rather than De Quinceyish in its dreaminess. But, however this may be, the dream quality is there, to me, as it is in few other Frenchmen—themselves almost always poets. Now, the worst of the usual realist is that, being blinder than any other heathen in his blindness, he tries to exorcise dream, though sometimes not nightmare, from life. Such a mixture as Proust’s I remember nowhere else.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.