VMARCEL PROUST
VMARCEL PROUST
Thedifficulty of speaking at all adequately of Marcel Proust has grown with the number of volumes of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” and also with the lapse of time since the first were published. The cycle, moreover, is still incomplete (though we now know that its conclusion will appear); and the critic who ventures to see a definite intention in the dense and branching pages already published does so at his peril, and on the faith of that sense of inner continuity communicated from the outset by all the greatest novels, from the rambling and extravagant “Gil Blas” to the compact and thrifty “Emma.”
The death of Marcel Proust, premature though it was, yet did not happen till his dying hand had put the last words to the last page of his vast narrative. Last words;but unhappily not last touches. The appearance of “La Prisonnière” confirms the report circulated after his death that the volumes then unpublished were left without those innumerable enriching strokes which gave their golden ripeness to the others. But, whether or not these final chapters, written in illness, and clouded (as one perceives from “La Prisonnière”) by physical weakness and deep mental distress, fulfil the promise of that unity to which all the strands of the elaborate fabric seem to tend, the first volumes (by which the author’s greatness will perhaps finally be measured) make it clear that he himself felt the need of such unity, and would have submitted his restless genius to it if illness had not disintegrated his powers. On this inference the critic will probably have to rest; and it is enough to justify treating the fragment before us as already potentially a whole.
More serious for the critic is the obstacle caused by the long lapse of years since “Du Côté de chez Swann” led off the astoundingprocession. Since then the conception of the art of fiction, as it had taken shape during the previous half-century, has been unsettled by a series of experiments, each one too promptly heralded as the final and only way of novel-writing. The critics who have handed down these successive ultimata have apparently decided that no interest, even archæological, attaches any longer to the standards and the vocabulary of their predecessors; and this wholesale rejection of past principles has led to a confusion in terms which makes communication difficult and conclusions ambiguous.
An unexpected result of the contradictory clamour has been to transfer Proust, who ten or twelve years ago seemed to many an almost unintelligible innovator, back to his rightful place in the great line of classic tradition. If, therefore, the attempt to form a judgment of his art has become doubly arduous it has also become doubly interesting; for Proust, almost alone of his kind, is apparently still regarded as a great novelist by theinnovators, and yet is already far enough off to make it clear that he was himself that far more substantial thing in the world of art, a renovator.
With a general knowledge of letters extending far beyond the usual limits of French culture he combined a vision peculiarly his own; and he was thus exceptionally fitted to take the next step forward in a developing art without disowning its past, or wasting the inherited wealth of experience. It is as much the lack of general culture as of original vision which makes so many of the younger novelists, in Europe as in America, attach undue importance to trifling innovations. Original vision is never much afraid of using accepted forms; and only the cultivated intelligence escapes the danger of regarding as intrinsically new what may be a mere superficial change, or the reversion to a discarded trick of technique.
The more one reads of Proust the more one sees that his strength is the strength of tradition. All his newest and most arresting effectshave been arrived at through the old way of selection and design. In the construction of these vast, leisurely, and purposeful compositions nothing is really wasted, or brought in at random. If at first Proust seemed so revolutionary it was partly because of his desultory manner and parenthetical syntax, and chiefly because of the shifting of emphasis resulting from his extremely personal sense of values. The points on which Proust lays the greatest stress are often those inmost tremors, waverings, and contradictions which the conventions of fiction have hitherto subordinated to more generalized truths and more rapid effects. Proust bends over them with unwearied attention. No one else has carried as far the analysis of half-conscious states of mind, obscure associations of thought and gelatinous fluctuations of mood; but long and closely as he dwells on them he never loses himself in the submarine jungle in which his lantern gropes. Though he arrives at his object in so roundabout a way, that object is always to reportthe conscious, purposive conduct of his characters. In this respect he is distinctly to be classed among those whom the jargon of recent philosophy has labelled “behaviourists” because they believe that the proper study of mankind is man’s conscious and purposive behaviour rather than its dim unfathomable sources. Proust is in truth the aware and eager inheritor of two great formulas: that of Racine in his psychology, that of Saint-Simon in its anecdotic and discursive illustration. In both respects he is deliberately traditional.
Fashionsin the arts come and go, and it is of little interest to try to analyze the work of any artist who does not give one the sense of being in some sort above them. In the art of one’s contemporaries it is not always easy to say what produces that sense; and perhaps the best way of trying to find out is to apply a familiar touchstone.
Out of all the flux of judgments and theorieswhich have darkened counsel in respect of novel-writing, one stable fact seems always to emerge; the quality the greatest novelists have always had in common is that of making their people live. To ask why this matters more than anything else would lead one into the obscurest mazes of æsthetic; but the fact is generally enough admitted to serve as a ground for discussion. Not all the other graces and virtues combined seem to have in them that aseptic magic. Vivacity, virtuosity, an abundance of episodes, skill in presenting them: what power of survival have these, compared with the sight of the doddering Baron Hulot climbing his stairs to a senile tryst, to Beatrix Esmond descending hers in silver clocks and red-heeled shoes?
M. Jusserand, in his “Literary History of the English People,” says of Shakespeare that he wasun grand distributeur de vie, a great life-giver; it is the very epithet one needs for Proust. His gallery of living figures is immense, almost past reckoning; so far, in that ever-growing throng, it is only the failuresthat one can count. And Proust’s power of evocation extends from the background and middle distance (where some mysterious law of optics seems to make it relatively easy for the novelist to animate his puppets) to that searching “centre front” where his principal characters, so scrutinized, explained, re-explained, pulled about, taken apart and put together again, resist in their tough vitality his perpetual nervous manipulation, and keep carelessly on their predestined way. Swann himself, subjected to so merciless an examination, Swann, as to whose haberdashery, hats, boots, gloves, taste in pictures, books, and women we are informed with an impartial abundance, is never more alive than when, in that terrible scene of the fifth volume, he quietly tells the Duchesse de Guermantes that he cannot promise to go to Italy the following spring with her and the Duke because he happens to be dying. Equally vivid are the invalid aunt in the pale twilight of her provincial bedroom, and the servant Françoise whowaits on her, and at her death passes as a matter of course to the rest of the family—amazing composite picture of all the faults and virtues of the old-fashioned French maid-servant. And then there is the hero’s grandmother, who fills the pages with a subdued yet tingling vitality from the moment when we first see her dashing out for one of her lonely walks in the rain to that other day, far on in the tale, when, fiercely and doggedly nursed by Françoise, she dies in an equal loneliness; there is the Marquis de Saint-Loup, impetuous, selfish, and sentimental, with his artless veneration for the latest thing in “culture,” his snobbishness in the Bohemian world, his simplicity and good-breeding in his own; the Jewish actress, his mistress, who despises him because he is a mere “man of the world” and not one of her own crew of æsthetic charlatans; the great, the abject, the abominable and magnificent Monsieur de Charlus, and the shy scornful Duchesse de Guermantes, with her quickness of wit and obtuseness of heart,her consuming worldliness and her sincere belief that nothing bores her as much as the world—the poor Duchess, mistress of all the social arts, yet utterly nonplussed, and furious, because Swann’s announcement that he is dying is made as she is getting into her carriage to go to a big dinner, and nothing in her code teaches her how to behave to a friend tactless enough to blurt out such news at such a moment! Ah, how they all live, and abound each in his or her own sense—and how, each time they reappear (sometimes after disconcertingly long eclipses), they take up their individual rhythm as unerringly as the performers in some great orchestra!
The sense that, through all his desultoriness, Proust always knows whither his people are tending, and which of their words, gestures and thoughts are worth recording; his ease in threading his way through their crowded ranks, fills the reader, from the first, with the feeling of security which only the great artists inspire. Certain novels, beginningvery quietly—carelessly, almost—yet convey on the opening page the same feeling of impending fatality as the first bars of the Fifth Symphony. Destiny is knocking at the gate. The next knock may not come for a long time; but the reader knows that itwillcome, as surely as Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyitch knew that the mysterious little intermittent pain which used to disappear for days would come back oftener and more insistently till it destroyed him.
There are many ways of conveying this sense of the foot-fall of Destiny; and nothing shows the quality of the novelist’s imagination more clearly than the incidents he singles out to illuminate the course of events and the inner workings of his people’s souls. When Imogen, setting forth to meet her adored Posthumus at Milford Haven, asks his servant Pisanio (who has been ordered by the jealous Posthumus to murder her on the way): “How many score of miles may we well ride ’twixt hour and hour?” and, getting the man’s anguished answer: “Onescore ’twixt sun and sun, Madam, ’s enough for you, and too much too,” exclaims: “Why, one that rode to’s execution, man, could never go so slow—” or when Gretchen, opening her candid soul to Faust, tells him how she mothered her little sister from the cradle—“My mother was so ill ... I brought the poor little creature up on milk and water ... the cradle stood by my bed, she could hardly stir without my waking. I had to feed her, take her into the bed with me, walk the floor with her all night, and be early the next morning at the wash-tub; but I loved her so that I was glad to do it”—when the swift touch of genius darts such rays on the path to come, one is almost tempted to exclaim: There is nothing in mere “situation”—the whole of the novelist’s art lies in the particular way in which he brings the given conjuncture home to the imagination!
Proust had an incredible sureness of touch in shedding this prophetic ray on his characters. Again and again he finds the poignant word, the significant gesture, as when,in that matchless first chapter (“Combray”) of “Du Côté de chez Swann” he depicts the suspense of the lonely little boy (the narrator) who, having been hurried off to bed without a goodnight kiss because M. Swann is coming to dine, persuades the reluctant Françoise to carry to his mother a little note in which he implores her to come up and see him “about something very important.” So far, the episode is like many in which the modern novelist has analyzed—especially since “Sinister Street”—the inarticulate tragedies of childhood. But for Proust such an episode, in addition to its own significance, has a deeper illuminative use.
“I thought to myself,” he goes on, “how Swann would have laughed at my anguish if he had read my letter, and guessed its real object” (which was, of course, to get his mother’s goodnight kiss); “but, on the contrary, as I learned later, for years an anguish of the same kind was the torture of Swann’s own life. That anguish, which consists in knowing that the being one loves is in somegay scene [lieu de plaisir] where one is not, where there is no hope of one’s being; that anguish, it was through the passion of love that he experienced it—that passion to which it is in some sort predestined, to which it peculiarly and specifically pertains”—and then, when Françoise has been persuaded to take the child’s letter, and his mother (engaged with her guest) does not come, but says curtly: “There is no answer”—“Alas!” the narrator continues, “Swann also had had that experience, had learned that the good intentions of a third person are powerless to move a woman who is irritated at feeling herself pursued in scenes of enjoyment by some one whom she does not love—” and suddenly, by one touch, in the first pages of that quiet opening chapter in which a little boy’s drowsy memories reconstitute an old friend’s visit to his parents, a light is flashed on the central theme of the book: the hopeless incurable passion of a sensitive man for a stupid uncomprehending woman. The foot-fall of Destiny has echoedthrough that dull provincial garden, her touch has fallen on the shoulder of the idle man of fashion, and in an instant, and by the most natural of transitions, the quiet picture of family life falls into its place in the great design of the book.
Proust’s pages abound in such anticipatory flashes, each one of which would make the fortune of a lesser novelist. A peculiar duality of vision enabled him to lose himself in each episode as it unrolled itself before him—as in this delicious desultory picture of Swann’s visit to his old friends—and all the while to keep his hand on the main threads of the design, so that no slightest incident contributing to that design ever escapes him. This degree of saturation in one’s subject can be achieved only through something like the slow ripening processes of nature. Tyndall said of the great speculative minds: “There is in the human intellect a power of expansion—I might almost call it a power of creation—which is brought into play by the simple brooding upon facts”; and he mighthave added that this brooding is one of the most distinctive attributes of genius, is perhaps as near an approach as can be made to the definition of genius.
Nothing can be farther from the mechanical ingenuities of “plot”-weaving than this faculty of penetrating into a chosen subject and bringing to light its inherent properties. Neither haste to have done, nor fear lest the reader shall miss his emphasis, ever affects the leisurely movement of Proust’s narrative, or causes him to give unnatural relief to the passages intended to serve as sign-posts. A tiny “blaze,” here and there, on the bark of one of the trees in his forest, suffices to show the way; and the explorer who has not enough wood-craft to discover these signs had best abstain from the adventure.
Itwas one of the distinctive characters of Proust’s genius that he combined with his great sweep of vision an exquisite delicacy of touch, a solicitous passion for detail. Manyof his pages recall those mediæval manuscripts where the roving fancy of the scribe has framed some solemn gospel or epistle in episodes drawn from the life of towns and fields, or the pagan extravagances of the Bestiary. Jane Austen never surpassed in conciseness of irony some of the conversations between Marcel’s maiden aunts, or the description of Madame de Cambremer and Madame de Franquetot listening to music; and one must turn to “Cranford” for such microscopic studies of provincial life as that of the bed-ridden aunt, Madame Octave, who is always going to get up the next day, and meanwhile lies beside her bottle of Vichy and her purple velvet prayer-book “bursting with pious images,” and listens to Françoise’s report of what is going on in the street, down which Madame Goupil, just before a thunder-storm, is seen walkingwithout her umbrellain the new silk dress she has had made at Châteaudun!
But just as the reader is sinking delectably into the feather-bed of the small town,Proust snatches him up in eagle’s talons and swings him over the darkest abysses of passion and intrigue—showing him, in the slow tortures of Swann’s love for Odette, and of Saint-Loup’s for Rachel, the last depths and involutions of moral anguish, or setting the frivolous careers of the two great Guermantes ladies, the Duchess and the Princess, on a stage vaster than any since Balzac’s, and packed with a human comedy as multifarious. This changing but never confusing throng is composed of most of the notable types of a society which still keeps its aristocratic framework: the old nobility of the “Faubourg” with their satellites; rich and cultivated Jews (such as Swann and Bloch), celebrated painters, novelists, actresses, diplomatists, lawyers, doctors, Academicians; men of fashion and vice,déclasséesGrand Duchesses, intriguing vulgarians, dowdy great ladies, and all the other figures composing the most various, curious, and restless of modern societies.
Without visible effort Proust’s art marshalsthese throngs and then turns serenely aside to put the last tender touches to his description of the hawthorns at Combray, or the lovely episode of Marcel’s first visit to Rachel, where the young man walks up and down under the blossoming pear-trees while Saint-Loup goes to fetch his mistress. Every reader enamoured of the art must brood in amazement over the way in which Proust maintains the balance between these two manners—the broad and the minute. His endowment as a novelist—his range of presentation combined with mastery of his instruments—has probably never been surpassed.
Fascinating as it is to the professional to dwell on this amazing virtuosity, yet the lover of Proust soon comes to feel that his rarest quality lies beyond and above it—lies in the power to reveal, by a single allusion, a word, an image, those depths of soul beyond the soul’s own guessing. The man who could write of the death of Marcel’s grandmother: “A few hours ago her beautiful hair, just beginning to turn gray ... hadseemed less old than herself. Now, on the contrary, it placed the crown of age on a face grown young again, and from which the wrinkles, the contractions, the heaviness, the tension, the flaccidity caused by suffering had all disappeared. As in the far-off time when her parents had chosen her bridegroom for her, the features of her face were delicately traced in lines of purity and submission, the cheeks shone with chaste hopes, with a dream of bliss, even with an innocent gaiety that the years, one by one, had slowly destroyed. Life, in leaving her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to rest upon my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral bed, death, like the mediæval sculptor, had laid her down in the guise of a young girl—” the man who could find words in which to express the inexpressible emotion with which one comes suddenly, in some apparently unknown landscape, upon a scene long known to the soul (like that mysterious group of trees encountered by Marcel in the course ofa drive with Madame de Villeparisis)—the man who could touch with so sure and compassionate a hand on the central mysteries of love and death, deserves at such moments to be ranked with Tolstoy when he describes the death of Prince Andrew, with Shakespeare when he makes Lear say: “Pray you, undo this button....”
HithertoI have only praised.
In writing of a great creative artist, and especially of one whose work is over, it is always better worth while to dwell on the beauties than to hunt down the blemishes. Where the qualities outweigh the defects the latter lose much of their importance, even when, as sometimes in Proust’s case, they are defects in the moral sensibility, that tuning-fork of the novelist’s art.
It is vain to deny, or to try to explain away, this particular blemish—deficiency, it should be rather called—in Proust’s work. Undoubtedly there are blind spots in hisbooks, as there are in Balzac’s, in Stendhal’s, in Flaubert’s; but Proust’s blind spots are peculiarly disconcerting because they are intermittent. One cannot dismiss the matter by saying that a whole category of human emotions is invisible to him, since at certain times his vision is acutest at the precise angle where the blindness had previously occurred.
A well-known English critic, confusing the scenes in which Proust’s moral sense has failed him with those (far more numerous) in which he deliberately portrays the viler aspects of the human medley, suggests that timorous readers might find unmingled enjoyment in the perusal of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” by the simple expedient of “thinking away” M. de Charlus—as who should propose “thinking away” Falstaff from the plays in which he figures! It would, in fact, be almost as difficult to dismiss M. de Charlus with an “I know thee not, old man,” as Falstaff; and quite as unnecessary. It is not by daring to do “in the round” a mean or corrupt character—an Iago, a LordSteyne, a Philippe Bridau, or a Valérie Marneffe—that a novelist diminishes the value of his work. On the contrary, he increases it. Only when the vileness and the cruelty escape him, when he fails to see the blackness of the shadow they project, and thus unconsciously flattens his modelling, does he correspondingly empoverish the picture; and this Proust too often did—but never in drawing M. de Charlus, whose ignominy was always as vividly present to him as Iago’s or Goneril’s to their creator.
There is one deplorable page where the hero and narrator, with whose hyper-sensitiveness a hundred copious and exquisite passages have acquainted us, describes with complacency how he has deliberately hidden himself to spy on an unedifying scene. This episode—and several others marked by the same abrupt lapse of sensibility—might be “thought away” with all the less detriment that, at such moments, Proust’s characters invariably lose theirprobablenessand begin to stumble through their parts like goodactors vainly trying to galvanize a poor play. All through his work there are pages literally trembling with emotion; but wherever the moral sensibility fails, the tremor, the vibration, ceases. When he is unaware of the meanness of an act committed by one of his characters, that character loses by so much of its life-likeness, and, reversing Pygmalion’s gesture, the author turns living beings back to stone.
But what are these lapses in a book where countless pages throb with passionate pity and look at one with human eyes? The same man who thus offends at one moment, at the next has one by the heartstrings in a scene such as that where the hero, hearing his grandmother speak for the first time over the telephone, is startled into thoughts of death and separation by the altered sound of a familiar voice; or that in which Saint-Loup comes up to Paris on twenty-four hours’ leave, and his adoring mother first exults at the thought that he is going to spend his evening with her, then bitterly divines thathe is not, and finally trembles lest, by betraying her disappointment, she shall have spoilt his selfish pleasure. And it is almost always at the very moment when the reader thinks: “Oh, if only he doesn’t fail menow!” that he floods his squalid scene with the magic of an inexhaustible poetry, so that one could cry out, like Sigmund when the gale blows open the door of the hut: “No one went—some one came!It is the spring.”
M. Benjamin Crémieux, whose article on Proust is the most thoughtful study of his work yet published, has come upon the obstacle of Proust’s lapses of sensibility, and tried, not very successfully, to turn it. According to this critic, Proust’s satire is never “based on a moral ideal,” but is always merely “complementary to his psychological analysis. The only occasion” (M. Crémieux continues) “where Proust incidentally speaks of a moral ideal is in the description of the death of Bergotte.” He then cites the beautiful passage in question: “Everything happens in our lives as though we had enteredupon them with a burden of obligations contracted in an anterior existence; there is nothing in our earthly condition to make us feel that we are under an obligation to be good, to be morally sensitive [être délicats], even to be polite; nor, to the artist, to begin over again twenty times a passage which will probably be admired only when his body has been devoured by worms.... All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world founded on goodness, on moral scruple, on sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one, a world whence we come when we are born on earth, perhaps to return there and live once more under the rule of the unknown laws which we have obeyed here because we carried their principles within ourselves, without knowing who decreed that they should be; those laws to which every deep intellectual labour draws us nearer, and which are invisible only—and not always!—to fools.”
It is difficult to see how so deliberate aprofession of faith in a moral ideal can be brushed aside as “incidental.” The passage quoted would rather seem to be the key to Proust’s whole attitude: to its weakness as well as to its strength. For it will be noticed that, among the mysterious “obligations” brought with us from that other “entirely different” world, he omits one; the old stoical quality of courage. That quality, moral or physical, seems never to have been recognized by him as one of the mainsprings of human action. He could conceive of human beings as good, as pitiful, as self-sacrificing, as guided by the most delicate moral scruples; but never, apparently, as brave, either by instinct or through conscious effort.
Fear ruled his moral world: fear of death, fear of love, fear of responsibility, fear of sickness, fear of draughts, fear of fear. It formed the inexorable horizon of his universe and the hard delimitation of his artist’s temperament.
In saying so one touches on the narrow margin between the man’s genius and hisphysical disabilities, and at this point criticism must draw back, or linger only in reverent admiration of the great work achieved, the vast register covered, in spite of that limitation, in conflict with those disabilities.
Nietzsche’s great saying, “Everything worth while is accomplished notwithstanding” [trotzdem], might serve as the epitaph of Proust.