The doctor looks at literature

by Joseph Collins

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. Here is 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 the haut 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 the nobilior 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. The grand 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 as armour 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 of finesse 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 components suddenly 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, leads him 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.