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 the innovators, 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 effects have 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 report the 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.
II
Fashions in 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 theories which 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 was un 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 failures that 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 who waits 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, beginning very 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 it will come, 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: “One score ’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.