All things hold together in the practice of any art, and character and manners, and the climaxes springing out of them, cannot, in the art of fiction, be dealt with separately without diminution to the subject. It is a matter for the novelist’s genius to combine all these ingredients in their due proportion; and then we shall have “Emma” or “The Egoist” if character is to be given the first place, “Le Père Goriot” or “Madame Bovary” if drama is to be blent with it, and “War and Peace,” “Vanity Fair,” “L’Education Sentimentale” if all the points of view and all the methods are to be harmonized in the achievement of a great picture wherein the individual, the group and their social background have each a perfectly apportioned share in the composition.
“Four great walls in the New Jerusalem
Meted on each side by the angel’s reed—”
Yes; but to cover such spaces adequately happens even to the greatest artists only once or twice in their career.
V
MARCEL PROUST
V
MARCEL PROUST
I
The difficulty 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 The appearance of “La Prisonnière” confirms the report circulated after his death that the volumes then unpublished were left without those innumerable enriching strokes which gave their golden ripeness to the others.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 astounding procession. 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.