With all his literary art, and mastery of the mysterious powers that suggestion has to heighten awareness and deepen information, M. Proust does not succeed in enlightening us as to how the boy at Combray comes to possess so much information of people and such knowledge of the world. Part of it is intuitive, but understanding of Vinteuil's daughter, who “after a certain year we never saw alone, but always accompanied by a friend, a girl older than herself, with an evil reputation in the neighbourhood, who in the end installed herself permanently at Montjouvain,” thus leading M. Vinteuil broken-hearted to the grave because of the shame and scandal of her sadism, is beyond possibility even for a boy of his precocity and prehensibility.
“For a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to have to resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they are produced whenever there needs to establish itself in the security necessary to its development a vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might blend the colours of their eyes. And yet however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not follow that his adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.”
“For a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to have to resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they are produced whenever there needs to establish itself in the security necessary to its development a vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might blend the colours of their eyes. And yet however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not follow that his adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.”
Thus does he introduce most casually a subject which bulks large in “Sodome et Gomorrhe,” and which M. Proust understands like a composite priest, physician, and biologist.
Most of the grist of the boy's mill comes over the road that skirts Swann's park, but some comes the Guermantes Way. In “Le Côté de Guermantes,” which followed “A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs,” he makes us as intimately acquainted with the Duchesse de Guermantes, Mme. de Villeparisis, and other notables of thesociété élegante, as he does in “Swann's Way” with the Verdurins and their “little nucleus” which furnishes a background to Odette, and furnishes M. Proust with canvas upon which to paint the portrait of an Æsculapian bounder, Dr. Cottard, who, it has been said, is still of the quick. M. Proust was the son and the brother of a physician and had abundant opportunity not only to get first-hand information but to have his natural insight quickened. In the same way one discovers his Jewish strain (his mother was a Jewess) in his mystic trends and in his characters such as Bloch and Swann. “Whenever I formed a strong attachment to any one of my friends and brought him home with me that friend was invariably a Jew.” Moreover his lack of a sense of humour is an Hebraic trait. With the exception of the reaction provoked in his grandfather by the advent of one of these friends, “Swann's Way,” and indeed all M. Proust's writings, are humourless.
The genesis of Swann's love and the dissolution of Odette's take up one volume. If it is not a perfect description of the divine passion in a mature man surfeited by conquest and satiated by indulgence, it is an approximation to it.
He was introduced one day at the theatre to Odette de Crocy by an old friend of his, who had spoken of her to him as a ravishing creature with whom he might very possibly come to an understanding. She made no appeal to Swann; indeed she not only left him indifferent, aroused in him no desire, but gave him a sort of physical repulsion. ButOdette knew thears amandias did Circe or Sappho, and ere long she had entangled him in the meshes of Eros' net. When the net was drawn to her craft and the haul examined, it didn't interest her, though she kept it, for it contributed to her material welfare. Then M. Proust did a psychological stunt which reveals an important aspect of his mastery of the science. Swann identified Odette with Zipporah, Jethro's daughter, whose picture is to be seen in one of the Sixtine frescoes by Botticelli. Her similarity to it enhanced her beauty and rendered her more precious in his sight. Moreover it enabled him to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies where she assumed a new and nobler form. And whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by perpetually reviving his misgivings as to the quality of her face, her figure, the whole of her beauty, used to cool the ardour of his love, those misgivings were swept away and that love confirmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of her on the sure foundations of his æsthetic principles. Instead of placing a photograph of Odette on his study table, he placed one of Jethro's daughter, and on it he lavished his admiration and concentrated his intensity in all the abandon of substitution.
The author utilises the potency of suspense to bring Swann's ardour to the boiling point. One evening when Odette had avoided him he searched the restaurants of the Boulevards in a state of increasing panic.
“Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she should have pleased us up till then, any more, or even as much as others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her should become exclusive.”
“Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she should have pleased us up till then, any more, or even as much as others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her should become exclusive.”
He proceeded to cultivate his love in an emotional medium and to inoculate himself with the culture which rendered him immune to love of another. The culture medium was furnished by Vinteuil, the old composer, who had died of a broken heart. “He would make Odette play him the phrase from the sonata again ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, while she played, she must never cease to kiss him.”
“Watching Swann's face while he listened to the phrase, one would have said that he was inhaling an anæsthetic which allowed him to breathe more deeply.”
“Watching Swann's face while he listened to the phrase, one would have said that he was inhaling an anæsthetic which allowed him to breathe more deeply.”
The effect that it had was deep repose, mysterious refreshment. He felt himself transformed into a “creature foreign to humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimera-like creature conscious of the world through his two ears alone.”
Swann's discovery of the spiritual and bodily inconstancies of his mistress, the perfidies and betrayals of the Verdurins, his jealousy, planned resentments, and resurrection are related in a way that convinces us that Proust saw life steadily and saw it whole.
To appease his anguish, to thwart his obsession, to supplant his preoccupation he decided to frequent again the aristocratic circles he had forsaken. The description of the reception at Mme. de Saint Euverte's, showing the details of fashionable life, is of itself a noteworthy piece of writing. Not only is it replete with accurate knowledge of such society, but it gives M. Proust the opportunity to display understanding of motives and frailties and to record impressions of contact with the world abroad. Speaking of one of the guests he says:
“She belonged to that one of the two divisions of the human race in which the untiring curiosity which the other half feels about people whom it does not know is replaced by an unfailing interest in the people whom it does.”
“She belonged to that one of the two divisions of the human race in which the untiring curiosity which the other half feels about people whom it does not know is replaced by an unfailing interest in the people whom it does.”
The peculiar tendency which Swann always had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted itself here in a more positive and more general form. One of the footmen was not unlike the headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which represent executions, tortures, and the like. Another reminded him of the decorative warriors one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings. “He seemed as determined to remain as unconcerned as if he had been present at the massacre of the innocents or the martyrdom of St. James.” As he entered the salon one reminded him of Giotto's models, another of Albert Dürer's, another of that Greek sculpture which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, while a servant with a pallid countenance and a small pig-tail clubbed at the back of his head seemed like one of Goya's sacristans.
It was this soirée that conditioned irrevocably Swann's future life, and the little phrase from Vinteuil's Sonata did it for him. To have heard it “in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent” made him suffer insupportably. While listening to it
“suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition tore him with such anguish that his hand rose impulsively to his heart.... All his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded, up till that evening, in keeping invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love, whose sun, they supposed, had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”
“suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition tore him with such anguish that his hand rose impulsively to his heart.... All his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded, up till that evening, in keeping invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love, whose sun, they supposed, had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”
It raised the flood-gate of the dam in which he had stored the memories of Odette when she loved him and before he loved her. Not only did it liberate the memories of her, but the memories that were associated with them: all the net-workof mental habits, of seasonable impressions, of sensory reactions, through which it extended over a series of groups its uniform meshes, by which his body now found itself inextricably held.
“When, after that first evening at the Verdurins', he had had the little phrase played over to him again, and had sought to disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that, like a perfume or a caress, it swept over and enveloped him, he had observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid, a contracted sweetness; but in reality he knew that he was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind's convenience) for the mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before ever he knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party, when for the first time he had heard the sonata played....“In his little phrase, albeit it presented to the mind's eye a clouded surface, there was contained, one felt, a matter so consistent, so explicit, to which the phrase gave so new, so original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved the memory of it in the treasure-chamber of their minds. Swann would repair to it as to a conception of love and happiness....“Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness....“So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernaturalcreatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours.”
“When, after that first evening at the Verdurins', he had had the little phrase played over to him again, and had sought to disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that, like a perfume or a caress, it swept over and enveloped him, he had observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid, a contracted sweetness; but in reality he knew that he was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind's convenience) for the mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before ever he knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party, when for the first time he had heard the sonata played....
“In his little phrase, albeit it presented to the mind's eye a clouded surface, there was contained, one felt, a matter so consistent, so explicit, to which the phrase gave so new, so original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved the memory of it in the treasure-chamber of their minds. Swann would repair to it as to a conception of love and happiness....
“Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness....
“So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernaturalcreatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours.”
From that evening Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had once had for him would never revive. He had made his bed, and he resolved to share it in holy matrimony with Odette, though this discomforted his friends and made him a species of Pariah.
Mme. Swann in Combray was a solitary, but not in Paris. There she queened it, as many lovely ladies had done before her. The account of that, and of the narrator's love for Gilberte, Swann's daughter, who, when he had encountered her casually at Combray, had made a stirring and deep impression on him; and the advent of Albertine, a potential Gomorrite, make up the contents of the succeeding instalment, entitled “A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs.” Gilberte, Swann's daughter, and the narrator now approaching puberty, came to play together in the Champs Elysées, frolicking like children, innocently, though another feeling began soon to bud in him, a feeling which he did not yet understand. In this volume the narrator relates the experiences he had when a youth, and therefore there is more precision in the description of the persons with whom he came in contact. The volume also throws much light indirectly on Proust's personality. From a certain incident which he tells regarding the way he was brought up, one sees that his father was a rigourous aristocrat, stiff in his demeanour, and very particular in the choice of his connections. He, the narrator, was brought up in a way the Germans would call “schablonenmässig”: everything was discussed at a family council, as though he were an inanimate plaything. His naïvete, the result of such training, is very characteristic.
For some time he had been longing to see “Phèdre” playedby the famous Mme. La Berma (evidently Sarah Bernhardt, for at that time she was the only one who played “Phèdre”). After long deliberation because of his illness, it was decided he should go chaperoned by his grandmother, to see his ideal actress. The scene opened with two men who rushed on in the throes of heated argument. He did not know that this was part of the play and that the men were actors; he thought they were some ruffians who had forced their way into the theatre and who would surely be ejected by the officials. He wondered, though, that the spectators not only did not protest, but listened to them with the greatest attention. Only when the theatre re-echoed with applause did he understand that the two men were actors. Afterwards, when two ladies came upon the stage, both of portly bearing, he could not decide which one was La Berma; a little later he learned that neither of them was the great actress. To reconcile such unsophistication with the account of the peeping Tom episode when he laid bare Mlle. Vinteuil's deforming habituation is very difficult.
Swann, now ill, and repentant, was consumed with ambition to introduce his wife, Odette, into high society, in which he succeeded to a great extent. Though he did not like M. Buntemps because of his reactionary opinions, he, “the director of the minister's office,” was an important personage and his wife, Mme. Buntemps, was a steady visitor in Odette's salon. But once in a while he was malicious enough to exasperate Mme. Buntemps. He told her once he would invite the Cottards and the Duchesse de Vendome to dinner. Mme. Buntemps protested, saying it was not seemly that the Cottards should be at the same table with the Duchesse. In reality she was jealous of the Cottards who were going to share the honour with her. The Prince d'Agrigente was invited, because it was altogether “private”! Odette is described as a woman of low intelligence, without education, speaking faulty French, but shrewd, dominating her husband. One of her guests was Mme. Cottard, the wife of Dr. Cottard, the medical bounderwho had now become Professor, a woman who did not belong to her present circle. But she had to invite a person who could tell her former friends of her high connections, so as to raise their envy.
The Marquis de Norpais, a former ambassador, is admirably drawn. He was naturally considered by the narrator's father as the cream of society. Just think of it! a man with two titles: Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, and Son Excellence Monsieur le Marquis! It is true that he was an ambassador under a republican government. But because of this he was interesting, for despite his antecedents he was entrusted with several extraordinary missions by very radical ministers. When a monarchist would not accept that honour, the republican government having had no fear that he might betray it, M. de Norpais himself willingly accepted the charge. Being in his blood a diplomat, he could not help exercising the functions of a diplomat, though in his heart he detested the republican spirit of government.
The narrator's mother did not admire his intelligence, but for the father every word of M. l'Ambassadeur de Norpais was an oracle. He had always wished that his son should become a diplomat, while the son wished to take up literature so as not to be separated from Gilberte. M. de Norpais, who did not much like the new style diplomats, told the narrator's father that a writer could gain as much consideration and more independence than a diplomat. His father changed his mind.
It is quite impossible, within the space of an essay, to give even an outline of the remaining volumes that have already appeared of this amazing and epochal novel.
Without doubt M. Proust had a definite idea in mind, a determination to make a contribution: to prove that the dominant force in mental life is association, the chief resource of mentality reminiscence. Thus the primitive instincts of mankind and their efforts to obtain convention's approbation furnishthe material with which he has built. It is extraordinary how large association bulks: individuals remind him of famous paintings, not merely the general characters of the people whom he encounters in his daily life, but rather what seem least susceptible of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he knows. For instance, a bust of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, is suggested by the prominent cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in short a speaking likeness to his own coachman Rami; the colouring of a Ghirlandajo, by the nose of M. de Palancy; a portrait by Tintoretto, by the invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of Dr. du Bolbon.
If, on descending the stairs after one of the Doncières evenings, suddenly on arriving in the street, the misty night and the lights shining through suggest a time when he arrived at Combray, at once there is thrown on the screen of his consciousness a picture of incidents there and experiences elsewhere that are as vivid and as distinct as if he were looking at them on a moving-picture screen. Then suddenly there appears a legend “the useless years which slipped by before my invisible vocation declared itself, that invisible vocation of which this work is the history.” Like the monk who seeks God in solitude, like Nietzsche who sought Him in reason, M. Proust has sought to reveal his soul, his personality, the sum total of all his various forms of consciousness by getting memory to disgorge her contents, the key to the chamber being association.
“We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we verywell know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them.”
“We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we verywell know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them.”
There are so many features of M. Proust's work that excite admiration that it is possible to enumerate only a few. Despite a studied style of confusion and interminable sentences, suspended, hyphenated, alembicated, and syncopated, that must forever make him the despair of anyone whose knowledge of French is not both fundamental and colloquial, he makes telling, life-like pen pictures of things and persons. Such is one of Françoise, the maid at Combray,
“who looked as smart at five o'clock in the morning in her kitchen, under a cap whose stiff and dazzling frills seemed to be made of porcelain, as when dressed for church-going; who did everything in the right way, who toiled like a horse, whether she was well or ill, but without noise, without the appearance of doing anything; the only one of my aunt's maids who when Mamma asked for hot water or black coffee would bring them actually boiling; she was one of those servants who in a household seem least satisfactory, at first, to a stranger, doubtless because they take no pains to make a conquest of him and show him no special attention, knowing very well that they have no real need of him, that he will cease to be invited to the house sooner than they will be dismissed from it; who, on the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters and mistresses who have tested and proved their real capacity, and do not look for that superficial responsiveness, that slavish affability, which may impress a stranger favourably, but often conceals an utter barrenness of spirit in which no amount of training can produce the least trace of individuality.“The daughter of Françoise, on the contrary, spoke, thinking herself a woman of today and freed from all customs, the Parisian argot and did not miss one of the jokes belonging to it. Françoise having told her that I had come from a Princess: 'Ah, doubtless a Princess of the cocoanut.' Seeing that I was expecting a visitor, she pretended to think that I was called Charles. I answered 'No,' naïvely, which permitted her to exclaim 'Ah, I thought so! And I was saying to myself Charleswaits (charlatan).' It wasn't very good taste, but I was less indifferent when as a consolation for the tardiness of Albertine, she said, 'I think you can wait for her in perpetuity. She will not come any more.' Ah, our gigolettes of today!“Thus her conversation differed from that of her mother but what is more curious the manner of speaking of her mother was not the same as that of her grandmother, a native of Bailleau-le-Pin which was near the country of Françoise. However the patois were slightly different, like the two country places. The country of the mother of Françoise was made up of hills descending into a ravine full of willows. And, very far from there, on the contrary, there was in France a little region where one spoke almost exactly the same patois as at Meseglise. I made the discovery at the same time that I was bored by it. In fact, I once found Françoise talking fluently with a chambermaid of the house who came from the country and spoke its patois. They understood each other mostly. I did not understand them at all. They knew this but did not stop on this account, excused, so they thought, by the joy of being compatriots, although born so far apart, for continuing to speak before me this foreign language as if they did not wish to be understood. This picturesque study of linguistic geography and comradeship was followed each week in the kitchen without my taking any pleasure in it.”
“who looked as smart at five o'clock in the morning in her kitchen, under a cap whose stiff and dazzling frills seemed to be made of porcelain, as when dressed for church-going; who did everything in the right way, who toiled like a horse, whether she was well or ill, but without noise, without the appearance of doing anything; the only one of my aunt's maids who when Mamma asked for hot water or black coffee would bring them actually boiling; she was one of those servants who in a household seem least satisfactory, at first, to a stranger, doubtless because they take no pains to make a conquest of him and show him no special attention, knowing very well that they have no real need of him, that he will cease to be invited to the house sooner than they will be dismissed from it; who, on the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters and mistresses who have tested and proved their real capacity, and do not look for that superficial responsiveness, that slavish affability, which may impress a stranger favourably, but often conceals an utter barrenness of spirit in which no amount of training can produce the least trace of individuality.
“The daughter of Françoise, on the contrary, spoke, thinking herself a woman of today and freed from all customs, the Parisian argot and did not miss one of the jokes belonging to it. Françoise having told her that I had come from a Princess: 'Ah, doubtless a Princess of the cocoanut.' Seeing that I was expecting a visitor, she pretended to think that I was called Charles. I answered 'No,' naïvely, which permitted her to exclaim 'Ah, I thought so! And I was saying to myself Charleswaits (charlatan).' It wasn't very good taste, but I was less indifferent when as a consolation for the tardiness of Albertine, she said, 'I think you can wait for her in perpetuity. She will not come any more.' Ah, our gigolettes of today!
“Thus her conversation differed from that of her mother but what is more curious the manner of speaking of her mother was not the same as that of her grandmother, a native of Bailleau-le-Pin which was near the country of Françoise. However the patois were slightly different, like the two country places. The country of the mother of Françoise was made up of hills descending into a ravine full of willows. And, very far from there, on the contrary, there was in France a little region where one spoke almost exactly the same patois as at Meseglise. I made the discovery at the same time that I was bored by it. In fact, I once found Françoise talking fluently with a chambermaid of the house who came from the country and spoke its patois. They understood each other mostly. I did not understand them at all. They knew this but did not stop on this account, excused, so they thought, by the joy of being compatriots, although born so far apart, for continuing to speak before me this foreign language as if they did not wish to be understood. This picturesque study of linguistic geography and comradeship was followed each week in the kitchen without my taking any pleasure in it.”
Time, M. Proust was convinced, was made for slaves. It takes longer to read his account of a soirée at the Prince de Guermantes' than it would to attend it. It requires half a volume to narrate it. The account is masterly, and the reader is filled with the feelings that actual experience might produce. Those who have had contact with aristocracy, and whose lucidity of mind has not been impaired by it, also find such an account interesting. Here one meets aristocrats of every complexion, heirs of the oldest and proudest names in Gotha's Almanach, and those whose pedigree is not so ancient, upon whom the former look condescendingly. As in a Zoo, one sees a great variety of the aristocrat genus, and if one has believed that the nobility is formed of people different and better than the common herd the delusion is dissipated. Hereis a light that fairly dazzles those who are susceptible to the appeal of clothes, wealth, and jewels. If one's yearnings are for things more substantial in human nature he will not be satisfied as a guest of the Prince de Guermantes. Diogenes there would have used his lantern in vain.
One becomes intimately acquainted with thehaut monde, their colossal pride, and overweening conceit, concealed from the eyes of those below them in the hierarchy by thin veils of conventional and shallow amiability which they make more and more transparent as the people they deal with are further removed from the blue zone of thenobilior spectrum. One discovers also another characteristic: the capacity for putting up with such pride and conceit from above, and for making the best of it for the sake of securing the lustre which comes with the good will of those higher up, and contact with them.
In the society of the Guermantes one becomes acquainted with such specimens of human meanness and hatefulness, such hypocrisy, such paucity of the sentiments that ennoble life, that he finds himself wondering why better flowers do not grow in the enchanted gardens. Those which seemed so beautiful at a distance turn out to be not only without fragrance, but with a bad odour. Thegrand monde, in truth, seems to be nothing but a small world of gossiping and shallow talk, a world aware of no other nobility than that of inherited titles, and scorning the idea that real nobility is a refinement of the soul, produced by education, to which rich and poor, high and low, may all aspire. The feeling of a man not recognised as an aristocrat who, for some special reason, gains admission to this circle, is made vivid in the experience of a talented physician who has saved the life of the Prince de Guermantes and who owes his invitation to the reception to the Prince's gratitude. The experience of a Bavarian musician is also interesting. It shows how great can be the insolence of aristocracy swollen with vanity. At the soirée we meet nobles who never possessed ideals which acted asarmour against pollution, nobles with imaginations easily inflamed by the attractions of women servants, whose lust for a chambermaid is sufficient to dim all consciousness of their pedigrees. And we meet others who are even lower, noblemen and ladies who keep up the traditions of Sodom and Gomorrah in modern society.
It may be beside the question to inquire the intention of the author in painting this picture of high society and then dwelling on aspects of it that can only cause disgust. His words at times seem to reveal a sarcastic intention. His descriptions are so full of minute details and so rich in incidents of extreme naturalness that it is impossible to believe that even a lively imagination could fabricate them. One easily sees that they are fragments of real life. This keeps the interest alive, despite the involved style. His periods are so twisted and turgid with associated thoughts, so bristling with parenthetical clauses that often profound effort is required to interpret them. There is none of the plain, clear, sane, sunny style of a Daudet, or of Paul Bourget. This causes a sensation of discomfort at times, especially when the author indulges in introspection that reveals a morbid imagination and pathological sensitiveness; as, for instance, in the distinction between abiding sorrows and fugitive sorrows; on how our beloved departed ones live in us, act on us, transform us even more than the living ones; and how those who are dead grow to be more real to us who love them than when they were alive.
We feel an unhealthiness under it all. We have to stop and analyse, to unravel the main idea from the tangled skein in which it is hidden. But it is a work that brings its own reward. It brings real jewels offinesse de pensée et d'observation, such as those on the reminiscence of departed sensations and feelings; on the different selves which we have been in the past and which coexist in our present individuality; on the eclipses to which the latter is subject when one of its componentssuddenly steps from the dark recesses into the vivid light of consciousness; on the elements of beauty apparent in different individuals who are partial incarnations of one great beauty without; on reminiscence of Plato; on the anxiety of expectation while awaiting a person; on the effect which consciousness of his own sinfulness has on the sinner; on the interchange of moral qualities and idiosyncrasies of persons bound by mutual sympathy; on the permanence of our passions—in mathematical jargon, a function of the time during which they have acted on our spirit. It also discloses treasures of delicate feeling, such as are awakened in a person by the image of a beloved one that flashes vivid in his memory.
But to discover such treasures one has often to wade through a series of long and indigestible sentences of thirty or forty lines.
I recall reading in an English magazine, a number of years ago, an article entitled “A Law in Literary Expression.” Stated in its plainest terms, the law is this: that the length of the phrase—not the sentence, but its shortest fraction, the phrase—must be measured by the breath pause. M. Proust breaks this law oftener than any citizen of this country breaks the prohibition law, no matter how imperious may be his thirst.
Finally the frank and scientific way in which he has discussed a subject that has always been tabooed in secular literature calls for remark. Of the posterity of Sodom he says it forms a colony spread all over the world, and that one can count it as one can count the dust of the earth. He studies all the types and varieties of sodomists. Their manners and ways, their sentiments, their aberrations of the senses, their shame are passed in review. It is a sort of scientific, poetical treatise. The actions in which the sodomistic instinct finds its outlet are often compared to the seemingly conscious actions by which flowers attract the insects that are the instruments of their fecundation. Botany and sexuality are mixed together. Sometimes the scientific spirit, gaining the upper hand, leadshim to look upon these phenomena of genesic inversion as manifestations of a natural law, and therefore marvellous, like all the workings of nature. He is nearly carried away, and finds excuses for what is considered a vice, and seems to be on the verge almost of expressing his admiration.
Some of his observations on sodomistic psychology are highly interesting, although expressed in long periods.
I append a few pages of literal translation from the opening chapter of “Sodome et Gomorrhe”; first, that the reader may have a sample of M. Proust's style; second, that he may gain an insight of the grasp the writer has of one of nature's most unsolvable riddles; and finally, that he may have the description of an individual who plays an important part in the novel.
“At the beginning of this scene, before my unsealed eyes, a revolution had taken place in M. de Charlus, as complete, as immediate as if he had been touched by a magic wand. Until then, not understanding, I had not seen. The vice (so-called for convenience), the vice of each individual, accompanies him after the manner of those genii who are invisible to those who ignore their presence. Goodness, deceit, a good name, social relations do not allow themselves to be discovered, they exist hidden. Ulysses himself did not at first recognise Athene. But gods are immediately perceptible to gods, the like to the like, so M. de Charlus was to Julien. Until now, in the presence of M. de Charlus, I was like an absent-minded man in company with a pregnant woman, whose heavy figure he had not remarked and of whom, in spite of her smiling reiteration 'Yes, I am a bit tired just now,' he persists in asking indiscreetly, 'What is the matter with you then?' But, let some one say to him, 'She is pregnant,' he immediately is conscious of her abdomen and hereafter sees nothing but that. Enlightenment opens the eyes; an error dissipated gives an added sense.“Those persons who do not like to believe themselves examples of this law in others—towards the Messieurs de Charlus of their acquaintance whom they did not suspect even until there appears on the smooth surface of a character, apparently in every respect like others, traced in an ink until theninvisible, a word dear to the ancient Greeks, have only to recall, in order to satisfy themselves, how at first the surrounding world appeared naked, devoid of those ornamentations which it offers to the more sophisticated, and also, of the many times in their lives that they had been on the point of making a break. For instance, nothing upon the characterless face of some man could make them suppose that he was the brother, the fiancé or the lover of some woman of whom they are on the point of making an uncomplimentary remark, as, for example, to compare her to a camel. At that moment, fortunately, however, some word whispered to him by a neighbour freezes the fatal term on his lips. Then immediately appears, like aMene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, these words, 'This is the fiancé, or the brother, or the lover of the woman, therefore it would be impossible to call her a camel before him,' and, this new notion alone causes the retreat or advance of the fraction of those notions, heretofore completed, that he had had concerning the rest of the family.“The real reason that M. de Charlus was different from other men was because another being had been engrafted upon him, like the horse upon the centaur, that his being was incorporated with that of the Baron. I had not hitherto perceived. The abstract had not become materialised, the being, finally understood had lost its power of remaining invisible, and the transmutation of M. de Charlus into a new person was so complete that not only the contrasts of his face, of his voice, but retrospectively the heights and depths of his relations with me, everything, in fact, which had until then appeared incoherent, became intelligible, disclosed itself, like a phrase which, without meaning so long as the letters composing it are scattered becomes, if the characters be placed in their proper order, a thought impossible to forget.“Moreover I now understood why, a short time ago, when I saw M. de Charlus coming out from Mme. de Villeparisis' I thought he looked like a woman. It was because he was one! He belonged to that race of beings whose ideal is virile because their temperament is feminine, and who are, in appearance only, like other men. The silhouette cast in the facet of their eyes, through which they see everything in the universe, is not that of a nymph but of a beautiful young man. One of a race upon whom rests a curse, who is forced to livein an atmosphere of falsehood and perjury because he knows that his desire, that which gives to all creatures the greatest satisfaction in life, must be unavowed, being considered punishable and shameful, who must even deny God himself, since when even as a Christian he appears as an accused at the bar of the tribunal he must before Christ and in his name defend himself as if from a calumny from that which is his very life; son without a mother, forced to lie to her all her life, even to the moment when he is closing her eyes, friend without friendships, in spite of all those who are attracted by his charm, fully recognised, and whose hearts would lead them to be kind—for can those relations, which bloom only by favour of a lie, be called friendship, when the first burst of confidence he might be tempted to express, would cause him to be rejected with disgust? Should he, by chance, have to do with an impartial mind, that is to say a sympathetic one, even then diverted from him by a psychology of convention, would permit to flow from the confessed vice even the affection which is the most foreign to him—as certain judges extenuate and excuse more easily assassination amongst inverts and treason amongst Jews from reasons drawn from original sin and fatality of race.“Finally, lovers (at least according to the first theory advanced which one will see modified by the continuation and which would have angered them above everything had not this contradiction been wiped out from before their eyes by the same illusion that made them see and live) to whom the possibility of this love (the hope of which gives them the force to bear so many risks, so much solitude) is nearly closed since they are naturally attracted to a man who does not resemble in any way a woman, a man who is not an invert and who therefore cannot love them; consequently their desire would remain forever unappeased if money did not deliver to them real men or if the imagination did not cause them to take for real men the inverts to whom they are prostituted. Whose only honour is precarious; whose only liberty provisory, up to the discovery of the crime; whose only situation is unstable like the poet, who, fêted at night in all the salons, applauded in all the theatres of London is chased from his lodgings in the morning and can find no place to lay his head. Turning the treadmill like Sampson and saying like him, 'The two sexes will die each on his own side.' Excluded even (exceptduring the days of great misfortune when the greatest number rallies around the victim like the Jews around Dreyfus—from the sympathy—sometimes of society) excluded even from their kind who see with disgust, reflected as in a mirror which no longer flatters, all those blemishes which they have not been willing to see in themselves and which make them understand that that which they call their love (and to which, playing upon the word, they have annexed everything that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism can add to love) comes not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen, but from an incurable malady. Like the Jews again (save a few who only care to consort with their own race and have always on the lips ritualistic words and consecrated pleasantries); they fly from each other, seeking those who are most unlike them, who will have nothing to do with them, pardoning their rebuffs, intoxicating themselves with their condescensions; but also reassembled with their kind by the very ostracism which strikes them, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, and finally taking on (as a result of a persecution similar to that of Israel) the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often frightful, finding (in spite of all the mockeries that those more homogeneous, better assimilated to the other race, in appearance less of an invert heap upon him who is apparently more of one) finding even a kind of expansion in frequenting with their kind, even an aid from their existence so that while denying that they belong to that race (whose very name is the greatest of injuries) those who have succeeded in hiding the truth, that they also are of that despised race, unmask those others, less to injure them, not detesting them, than to excuse themselves, as a physician seeks the appendicitis inversion in history, they find pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of them and that the same thing was said of Jesus by the Israelites, without remembering that then when homo-sexuality was normal there was no abnormality, as there were no anti-Christians before Christ, also that opprobrium alone makes it crime, since it has been only allowed to exist as crime because it is refractory to all predication, all example, to all punishment by virtue of special innate disposition which repulses men more (although it may accompany high moral qualities) than certain vices which contradict high moral qualities, such as theft, cruelty, bad faith,better understood, therefore more easily excused by men in general.“Forming a free-masonry, much more extended, more efficacious and less suspected than that of the lodges, because it rests upon an identity of tastes, of needs, of habits, of dangers, of apprenticeships, of knowledge, of traffic and of language. Whose members avoid one another and yet immediately recognise each other by natural or conventional signs, involuntary or studied, which disclose to the mendicant one of his kind in the lord whose carriage door he opens, to the father in the fiancé of his daughter, to him who had wished to be cured, to confess, in the physician, the priest or the lawyer whom he had gone to consult; all obliged to protect their secret, but, at the same time, sharing the secret of the others, which was not suspected by the others and which makes the most improbable romances of adventure seem true to them, for, in their romantic life, anachronically, the ambassador is the friend of the criminal, the prince who, with a certain freedom of manner, (which an aristocratic education gives and which would be impossible with a little trembling bourgeois) leaves the house of the duchess to seek the Apache. Rejected part of the human collectivity but all the same an important part, suspected where it does not exist, vaunting itself, insolently with impunity where it is not divined; counting its adherents everywhere, amongst the people, in the army, in the temple, in the prison, upon the throne; finally living, at least a great number of them, in a caressing and dangerous intimacy with men of the other race, provoking them, enticing them to speak of this vice as if it were not theirs, a game which is made easy by the blindness or the falseness of the others, a game which may be prolonged for years—until the day of Scandal, when these conquerors are devoured. Until this time obliged to hide their true life, to turn away their regards from where they would wish to fix them, to fix them upon that from which they would naturally turn away—to change the meaning of many adjectives in their vocabulary, a social constraint merely, slight compared to that interior constraint which their vice, or that which is improperly called so, imposes upon them, less with regard to others than to themselves and in a manner which makes it seem not to be a vice—to themselves. But certain ones, more practical, more hurried, who have not time to bargain and torenounce the simplification of life and the gain of time that might result from cooperation, have made two societies, of which the second is exclusively composed of beings like themselves.”
“At the beginning of this scene, before my unsealed eyes, a revolution had taken place in M. de Charlus, as complete, as immediate as if he had been touched by a magic wand. Until then, not understanding, I had not seen. The vice (so-called for convenience), the vice of each individual, accompanies him after the manner of those genii who are invisible to those who ignore their presence. Goodness, deceit, a good name, social relations do not allow themselves to be discovered, they exist hidden. Ulysses himself did not at first recognise Athene. But gods are immediately perceptible to gods, the like to the like, so M. de Charlus was to Julien. Until now, in the presence of M. de Charlus, I was like an absent-minded man in company with a pregnant woman, whose heavy figure he had not remarked and of whom, in spite of her smiling reiteration 'Yes, I am a bit tired just now,' he persists in asking indiscreetly, 'What is the matter with you then?' But, let some one say to him, 'She is pregnant,' he immediately is conscious of her abdomen and hereafter sees nothing but that. Enlightenment opens the eyes; an error dissipated gives an added sense.
“Those persons who do not like to believe themselves examples of this law in others—towards the Messieurs de Charlus of their acquaintance whom they did not suspect even until there appears on the smooth surface of a character, apparently in every respect like others, traced in an ink until theninvisible, a word dear to the ancient Greeks, have only to recall, in order to satisfy themselves, how at first the surrounding world appeared naked, devoid of those ornamentations which it offers to the more sophisticated, and also, of the many times in their lives that they had been on the point of making a break. For instance, nothing upon the characterless face of some man could make them suppose that he was the brother, the fiancé or the lover of some woman of whom they are on the point of making an uncomplimentary remark, as, for example, to compare her to a camel. At that moment, fortunately, however, some word whispered to him by a neighbour freezes the fatal term on his lips. Then immediately appears, like aMene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, these words, 'This is the fiancé, or the brother, or the lover of the woman, therefore it would be impossible to call her a camel before him,' and, this new notion alone causes the retreat or advance of the fraction of those notions, heretofore completed, that he had had concerning the rest of the family.
“The real reason that M. de Charlus was different from other men was because another being had been engrafted upon him, like the horse upon the centaur, that his being was incorporated with that of the Baron. I had not hitherto perceived. The abstract had not become materialised, the being, finally understood had lost its power of remaining invisible, and the transmutation of M. de Charlus into a new person was so complete that not only the contrasts of his face, of his voice, but retrospectively the heights and depths of his relations with me, everything, in fact, which had until then appeared incoherent, became intelligible, disclosed itself, like a phrase which, without meaning so long as the letters composing it are scattered becomes, if the characters be placed in their proper order, a thought impossible to forget.
“Moreover I now understood why, a short time ago, when I saw M. de Charlus coming out from Mme. de Villeparisis' I thought he looked like a woman. It was because he was one! He belonged to that race of beings whose ideal is virile because their temperament is feminine, and who are, in appearance only, like other men. The silhouette cast in the facet of their eyes, through which they see everything in the universe, is not that of a nymph but of a beautiful young man. One of a race upon whom rests a curse, who is forced to livein an atmosphere of falsehood and perjury because he knows that his desire, that which gives to all creatures the greatest satisfaction in life, must be unavowed, being considered punishable and shameful, who must even deny God himself, since when even as a Christian he appears as an accused at the bar of the tribunal he must before Christ and in his name defend himself as if from a calumny from that which is his very life; son without a mother, forced to lie to her all her life, even to the moment when he is closing her eyes, friend without friendships, in spite of all those who are attracted by his charm, fully recognised, and whose hearts would lead them to be kind—for can those relations, which bloom only by favour of a lie, be called friendship, when the first burst of confidence he might be tempted to express, would cause him to be rejected with disgust? Should he, by chance, have to do with an impartial mind, that is to say a sympathetic one, even then diverted from him by a psychology of convention, would permit to flow from the confessed vice even the affection which is the most foreign to him—as certain judges extenuate and excuse more easily assassination amongst inverts and treason amongst Jews from reasons drawn from original sin and fatality of race.
“Finally, lovers (at least according to the first theory advanced which one will see modified by the continuation and which would have angered them above everything had not this contradiction been wiped out from before their eyes by the same illusion that made them see and live) to whom the possibility of this love (the hope of which gives them the force to bear so many risks, so much solitude) is nearly closed since they are naturally attracted to a man who does not resemble in any way a woman, a man who is not an invert and who therefore cannot love them; consequently their desire would remain forever unappeased if money did not deliver to them real men or if the imagination did not cause them to take for real men the inverts to whom they are prostituted. Whose only honour is precarious; whose only liberty provisory, up to the discovery of the crime; whose only situation is unstable like the poet, who, fêted at night in all the salons, applauded in all the theatres of London is chased from his lodgings in the morning and can find no place to lay his head. Turning the treadmill like Sampson and saying like him, 'The two sexes will die each on his own side.' Excluded even (exceptduring the days of great misfortune when the greatest number rallies around the victim like the Jews around Dreyfus—from the sympathy—sometimes of society) excluded even from their kind who see with disgust, reflected as in a mirror which no longer flatters, all those blemishes which they have not been willing to see in themselves and which make them understand that that which they call their love (and to which, playing upon the word, they have annexed everything that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism can add to love) comes not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen, but from an incurable malady. Like the Jews again (save a few who only care to consort with their own race and have always on the lips ritualistic words and consecrated pleasantries); they fly from each other, seeking those who are most unlike them, who will have nothing to do with them, pardoning their rebuffs, intoxicating themselves with their condescensions; but also reassembled with their kind by the very ostracism which strikes them, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, and finally taking on (as a result of a persecution similar to that of Israel) the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often frightful, finding (in spite of all the mockeries that those more homogeneous, better assimilated to the other race, in appearance less of an invert heap upon him who is apparently more of one) finding even a kind of expansion in frequenting with their kind, even an aid from their existence so that while denying that they belong to that race (whose very name is the greatest of injuries) those who have succeeded in hiding the truth, that they also are of that despised race, unmask those others, less to injure them, not detesting them, than to excuse themselves, as a physician seeks the appendicitis inversion in history, they find pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of them and that the same thing was said of Jesus by the Israelites, without remembering that then when homo-sexuality was normal there was no abnormality, as there were no anti-Christians before Christ, also that opprobrium alone makes it crime, since it has been only allowed to exist as crime because it is refractory to all predication, all example, to all punishment by virtue of special innate disposition which repulses men more (although it may accompany high moral qualities) than certain vices which contradict high moral qualities, such as theft, cruelty, bad faith,better understood, therefore more easily excused by men in general.
“Forming a free-masonry, much more extended, more efficacious and less suspected than that of the lodges, because it rests upon an identity of tastes, of needs, of habits, of dangers, of apprenticeships, of knowledge, of traffic and of language. Whose members avoid one another and yet immediately recognise each other by natural or conventional signs, involuntary or studied, which disclose to the mendicant one of his kind in the lord whose carriage door he opens, to the father in the fiancé of his daughter, to him who had wished to be cured, to confess, in the physician, the priest or the lawyer whom he had gone to consult; all obliged to protect their secret, but, at the same time, sharing the secret of the others, which was not suspected by the others and which makes the most improbable romances of adventure seem true to them, for, in their romantic life, anachronically, the ambassador is the friend of the criminal, the prince who, with a certain freedom of manner, (which an aristocratic education gives and which would be impossible with a little trembling bourgeois) leaves the house of the duchess to seek the Apache. Rejected part of the human collectivity but all the same an important part, suspected where it does not exist, vaunting itself, insolently with impunity where it is not divined; counting its adherents everywhere, amongst the people, in the army, in the temple, in the prison, upon the throne; finally living, at least a great number of them, in a caressing and dangerous intimacy with men of the other race, provoking them, enticing them to speak of this vice as if it were not theirs, a game which is made easy by the blindness or the falseness of the others, a game which may be prolonged for years—until the day of Scandal, when these conquerors are devoured. Until this time obliged to hide their true life, to turn away their regards from where they would wish to fix them, to fix them upon that from which they would naturally turn away—to change the meaning of many adjectives in their vocabulary, a social constraint merely, slight compared to that interior constraint which their vice, or that which is improperly called so, imposes upon them, less with regard to others than to themselves and in a manner which makes it seem not to be a vice—to themselves. But certain ones, more practical, more hurried, who have not time to bargain and torenounce the simplification of life and the gain of time that might result from cooperation, have made two societies, of which the second is exclusively composed of beings like themselves.”
M. Proust's work is the first definite reply in the affirmative to the question whether fiction can subsist without the seductive power due to a certain illusory essence of thought. Whether in this respect he will have many, if any, successful followers is to be seen. But his own volumes stand as an astonishing example of an organic and living fiction obtained solely by the effort to portray truth.
Because of the unique qualities of his novels and the fact that they are developed on a definite psychological plan, more than the usual interest in a favourite writer is attached to the personality of M. Proust. During his lifetime inaccessible both because of aristocratic taste and of partial invalidism, his figure is likely to become more familiar to the reading world—even to those who never read his books—than the figures of great authors who walked with the crowd and kept the common touch.
Neither Proust the man nor Proust the author can be considered apart from his invalidism. It shows all through his writings, although what the malady was which rendered him, if not ade factoinvalid, certainly a potential invalid, is not known. Some of his friends accused asthma, others a disease of the heart, while still others attributed it to “nerves.” In reality his conduct and his writings were consistent with neuropathy and his heredity. And if the hero of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” is to be identified with himself, as is popularly supposed, he was from early childhood delicate, sensitive, precocious, and asthmatic, that is profoundly neuropathic.
He was fastidious in his tastes; he liked the best styles, the most elegant ladies, aristocratic salons, and fashionable gatherings. He was noted for the generosity of his tips. Hislife reminds one of the hero of Huysman's famous novel. In his early days, M. Proust was a great swell, and there is no doubt that many of his descriptions of incidents and persons are elaborations of notes that he made after attending a reception given by the Duchesse de Rohan, or other notables of the Faubourg St. Germain, in whose houses he was an habitué.
His social activity may have been deliberate preparation for his work, as his fifteen-year apprenticeship to Ruskin was preparation. Or it may have been a pose, much the same as his mannerisms, habits, customs, and possibly some features of his invalidism, were a pose. Surely he enjoyed the reputation of being “different.”
He ruminated on Rousseau and studied Saint-Simon. When he arrived at the stage where he could scoff at one and spurn the other, he learned Henry James by heart. Then he wrote; he had prepared himself. The deficit which art and endeavour failed to wipe out was compensated by his maternal inheritance.
One may infer whither he is going by reading Proust once, but to accompany him he must be read a second time. Those who would get instruction and enlightenment must read him as Ruskin, his master, said all worth while books must be read: “You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable.”
The discerning reader must look intensely at M. Proust's words. If he looks long enough they seem to take on the appearance ofMene, Tekel, Phares.