CHAPTER VMARCEL PROUST: MASTER PSYCHOLOGISTAND PILOT OF THE “VRAIE VIE”
Marcel Proust may justly be hailed as the greatest psychological novelist of his time. He was to normal psychology what Dostoievsky was to abnormal psychology: an unsurpassed observer, interpreter, and recorder of men's thoughts and conduct.
It would be hazardous to attempt to estimate the place he will eventually have in literature until the remaining volumes of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” and “Le Temps Retrouvé” are published. But the volumes of the former that have appeared: “Du Côté de Chez Swann,” “Á l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs,” “Le Côté de Guermantes,” and “Sodome et Gomorrhe” justify the statement that with the death of their author in November, 1922, France lost a writer whose fame will rank with that of Balzac. It is not likely that he will ever have a popularity comparable to Balzac or even to Bourget, Barbusse, or several other contemporaries, for M. Proust is an author for writers. He will never be read by the large class of novel readers who create the market demand for novels of action and plot; nor will he appeal to that hardly less numerous class—chiefly women—who find the emotional novel palatable food. However, those who, like the writer, cannot punish themselves by struggling through a detective story and by whom the most skillfully contrived plot can be endured only if the harassment which it causes is counterbalanced by the charm of its literary style or its interpretation of the personality of the author reactingto conditions more or less common to all mankind, may find in M. Proust a novelist whom they can ill afford to ignore. And no writer of fact or fiction today would be just to himself were he to proceed with his art without making the acquaintance of this master artificer and psychologist. Proust will be remembered as a pioneer who explored the jungle of the unconscious memory, and a marvellous interpreter of the laws governing associated memories. I doubt not his name will be as inseparably connected with the novel of the future as that of de Maupassant or Poe has been with the short story of the last few decades, even while his wares will still find scant sale, save to writers, dilettantes, professional students of letters, of form, and of psychology.
The measure of success that was vouchsafed him came late in life. He was fifty when the Goncourt Prize was awarded “A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs” in 1919. Until that time his writings were known to readers of “La Nouvelle Revue Française,” to friends, and to a limited circle whose members have an urge for the unusual, and a flair for the picturesque in literature. Then readers began to nibble at “Du Côté de Chez Swann,” and the more they nibbled, that is the oftener they read it, or attempted to read it—for it is difficult even for a cultured Frenchman—the more keenly aware did they become that they had encountered a new force, a new sensibility in literature, and, like appetite that comes with eating, the greater was their desire to develop an intimacy with him. “Le Côté de Guermantes” showed that he walked and talked, dined and wined, registered the thoughts and interpreted the dreams of the aristocracy with the same security, understanding, perspicacity, and clairvoyancy that he had brought to bear on the bourgeoisie in “Du Côté de Chez Swann.” In “Sodome et Gomorrhe” he did the impossible. He talked with frankness and with a tone of authority of an enigmatic, inexplicable aberration of nature, inversion of the genesic instinct, which antedates possibly by millions of yearsthe differentiation of man from anthropoid stock; which has always been with us, now the patent of good form, the badge of intellectual superiority, the hallmark of æsthetic refinement, as in the days of Hellenic supremacy; now the stigma of sin, the scarlet letter of infamy, the key of the bottomless pit, as today; and which unquestionably will always continue to be with us. He divested it of pruriency; he rescued it from pornography; he delivered it from pathology; and at the same time he made the penologist pause and “normal” man thoughtful.
Whether this freakishness of nature is as common as M. Proust says, whether it bulks so large in the conduct of daily life as he intimates, is a matter for the individual to estimate. No statistics are available, but experienced psychiatrists and discerning pedagogues know that a considerable proportion of mankind is so constituted. To deny it is equivalent to acknowledging that one is immune to evidence; to consider it a vice is to flaunt an allegation of falsehood in the face of biology. One can imagine the shock the world would have today if everyone told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about his genesic instinct. If, then, it was decided to segregate and deprive of liberty the inverted, what a strange medley it would be of general and soldier, of prince and pauper, of priest and parishioner, of genius and moron, of ambassador and attaché, of poet, artist, and savant. It will mark an epoch in modern civilisation when this strange variation from the normal shall be subject to study by such investigators as Mendel, de Vries, Tschermak, and the host of biologists who are slowly solving the mysteries of heredity. Meanwhile the preparation for such work is the formation of public opinion, and probably there is no better way to accomplish it than that adopted by M. Proust.
So far the only one of M. Proust's books that has appeared in English is “Du Côté de Chez Swann,” (Swann's Way), by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. The translation itself is a work of art, and the reading public is under profound obligation to this master stylist.