“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 some gay 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 echoed through 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 might have 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.
III
It was 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. Many of 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 walking without her umbrella in 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, déclassées Grand 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 marshals these 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 ... had seemed 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 of a 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....”
IV
Hitherto I have only praised.