XXTHE BIRTH OF A CLASSIC
THE pictures we make, for our own satisfaction, of our actions are generally as remote as theclichésof polite conversation from the psychological processes they pretend to reflect. It is convenient and very often necessary to limit consciousness of an action so that it receives a distinct and recognisable contour. With a certain resemblance to the achievement of the Impressionists, who revealed the fabric of a world worked-over with conceptual images, Proust breaks up the moulds into which our feelings are generally poured. He is curious to note the sensual deceits which agitate the mind no less profoundly than the reality would have done, and to separate the social stratagem (whether that of the Guermantes or of the servants in his own home) from the intention of which it was the paraphrase. He is dissociative only to that extent—a necessary one, since dissimulation is the mind’s first nature. But he is not at all destructive; for an action never really is a separate entity, cut off by crystalline walls from the mother-liquor of our lives. In the style which he created that glittering illusion is re-dissolved into the saturated mental life of which it is an inextricable component.
I know nothing, he says, that can, “autant que le baiser, faire surgir de ce que nous croyonsune chose à aspect défini, les cent autres choses qu’elle est tout aussi bien, puisque chacune est relative à une perspective non moins légitime.... Dans ce court trajet de mes lèvres vers sa joue, c’est dix Albertines que je vis.” Not only the coarsening of the grain of the skin seen in this unaccustomed proximity (that would be comparatively insignificant), but the psychological perspective opened by this change in their relations; though Albertine refused his kiss at Balbec, she cannot now prevent him from gathering in one embrace the rose of the past and of the present. For Albertine is not only Albertine “simple image dans le décor de la vie” when later she calls on him in Paris; her image trails the multitudinous sensations ofA l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs; and though he no longer loves her, the appearances she had for him at Balbec, silhouetted against the sea or sitting with her back to the cliff, bring back with them the influence of that love. We are far from what we believed a thing with a definite appearance, a girl, and perhaps the example may indicate faintly the complexity of Proust’s art. Wishing to convey the shifting aspect of things, or perhaps the composite pile of aspects which represents, at any moment, our realisation of a thing—and as objective description reintroduces the pictorialclichéso far avoided,—he utilises the vast fabric of memory, shot, like iridescent silk, with many indefinable moods. To specify his methodmore exactly would not at present be easy, nor is there any enjoyment equal to the mere following of this marvellous web into the still obscure future, where half is, to our chagrin partly and to our delight, yet hidden. To the latter, because we have to be patient against our will; to the former, because there is still so much certain pleasure in store, and the excitement of seeing the completed design, whose symmetry so far is only felt, like that of a statue in its shroud before its resurrection, coincide with or contradict our anticipations. There is a delicious state (owing not a little of its charm to our knowledge of its transience) in which a book, having shaken off the first fever of novelty, is in a condition to be most artfully savoured, and at length. The classic features will never be dearer to us than while they are still flushed with contemporaneity. The classics are at least readable in so far as they are modern, but the modern, once firmly on his pedestal, is not at all approachable. So it is a great and marvellous privilege to be awake to this exquisite dawn, at the moment this many-leaved bloom is suspended in all its freshness which to-morrow—
To-morrow will find fallen or not at all:
fallen, if the worst comes to the worst (as we have heard it always does), to a greatness in its decay and neglect more moving than the spick-and-span of a smart little subaltern of immortality.It is impossible to imagine how this titanic fragment can be trundled from age to age; nor is the future likely to have much time to spare from the production of domestic utensils which are so badly made that they must be continually replaced.A la Recherche du Temps Perduis not one of those things which are replaced, like the novel of the moment, but exactly what part of it is most likely to be saved the present cannot decide. There will always be some to follow the whole sweep of the Master’s gesture, which evokes the hours of adolescence flowering in the shade of girlhood and rebuilds the tormented cities of the plain; now stooping to dissect a snob or soaring to stroke a horizon, but never theatrical and never grandiose. Perhaps in the ray of this most intimate limelight we draw the greater part of our pleasure from the recognition of our own movements; the heirs of our sensibility will find there the original of many impulses which they accept as part of human nature.
EDGELL RICKWORD.