XVITHE LITTLE PHRASE
MY only excuse for contributing anything to this collection is that it provides an opportunity to give some information. Readers may want to know whether the Sonata to which Proust refers inDu Côté de chez Swannas being played at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party was wholly an invention of Proust’s, or whether his refined and tortuous dithyrambs on the subject were inspired by an actual Sonata which the dullest may purchase at a Paris shop.
Well, the answer to this hypothetical question, like all real answers to all genuine questions, is “Yes” and “No.” For the Ayes there is the statement by Proust in a letter to a friend printed in the memorial number of theNouvelle Revue Française:[13]“La petite phrase de cette Sonate ... est ... la phrase charmante mais enfin médiocre d’une sonate pour piano et violon de Saint-Saëns....”
Explosion! Thus are our idols shattered! Even Proust’s deprecating “mais enfin médiocre” does not prepare for this shock the sturdy English connoisseur who likes only the best. Proust tells his friend that he can point out the precise passage, which is several times repeated; and adds—cunningly—thatits execution was a triumph for Jacques Thibaud.
He continues that, during the same evening, when the piano and violin are described as murmuring like two birds in a dialogue, he was thinking of a sonata by Franck (especially as played by Enesco). The tremolos over the little Saint-Saëns phrase when played at the Verdurins’ were, he says, suggested by the Prelude toLohengrin—he does not tell us, this time, in whose rendering, but that actually they were recalled that evening by a trifle from Schubert. The same evening, he tells us, as a final scrap of information, there was played “un ravissant morceau” for the piano by Fauré.
What are we to make of all this? Well, I am struck by the composite character of Proust’s material. It shows that his art consists in his power of making an exquisite synthesis of his sensibility by reprecipitating his sensations in a more generalised, more abstract form than that in which they came to him.
W.J. TURNER.