Nor, as a fact, is this interest in cliques by any means confined to the aristocracy. Of at least equal importance are the Verdurins, who, in spite of their riches, are at the very opposite pole of civilisation. And yet with all their vulgarity, with all their intellectual snobbery, with all their lack of taste and breeding, with all their affectation of being a petit clan, is it not clear that, up to a certain point at any rate, intelligence is on their side of the ledger? Again, there is that glance at life in barracks, through the mediation of Saint-Loup, which, while small, is as good a summary of the military world as one knows. There are some unforgettable pages on the Jews. There is even that little world of the hotel servants that has plainly interested Proust almost as much as any of the larger worlds he has spent so much care in describing. And, especially in the early books, there are those descriptions of the world of the young man’s parents and grandparents, so typical of the honnête bourgeoisie, so profoundly drawn in their uprightness and their rather limited social ideas, so secure and anxious for security, so loving to their boy and yet so anxious not to “spoil” him. Never, with the exceptions of Saint-Simon and Tolstoy, has any author succeeded so well in giving the atmosphere of a particular house or a particular party; never has any one analysed so closely the behaviour of people in small homogeneous masses.
In 1896, when Proust was still a young man, he produced a book which, while not of great interest in itself, is naturally of value to students of his work, both for what it contains in the germ, and for what it omits, of the Proust who was to become a master. And to this book Anatole France wrote a charming preface, in which he said various things which must have appeared more friendly than critical to readers of that day. Among other things he wrote the following words:
Il n’est pas du tout innocent. Mais il est sincère et si vrai qu’il en devient naïf et plaît ainsi. II y a en lui du Bernardin de Saint-Pierre dépravé et du Pétrone ingénu.
The words are a singularly good description of the Proust that we know to-day. He is not innocent, and he remains naïf. There is a story of how in his last illness he insisted on being muffled up in a carriage and driven out into the country to see the hawthorn, which was then in bloom. The freshness of joy in all beautiful things remained with him, so far as we can see, to the end of his life. It is as obvious in the moving account of the Prince de Guermantes’ confession to Swann at the beginning of the last book as it is in the early Combray chapters of the first. He was supremely sensitive and continually surprised by beauty. But, unlike most sensitive people, he neither railed at mankind, nor shut himself up, nor built for himself a palace of escape from reality in his own theorising about the meaning of it all. He set himself to observe and to note his observations.
In many ways Anatole France’s description of him as the ingenuous Petronius of our times is extremely intelligent. And our times are in many ways extremely like the days in which Petronius wrote. There is an aristocracy that has lost its raison d’être, and a continual flow of new plutocrats without traditions, without taste, without any object in life beyond spending to the best of their power of self-advertisement. The faith in the old social order has gone, and nothing new has arisen to take its place. Where we differ entirely from that age is in self-consciousness. And that, too, is where a modern Petronius must differ from the old one. For better in some ways and for worse in others, we are far more complex than we have ever been; our motives are at once more mixed and more clearly scrutinised. And a writer who can satisfactorily cram this age within the pages of a book must not only be extremely intelligent and extremely observant, but must also have forged for himself a style capable of expressing the finest shades of feeling; he must refuse the easy simplifications both of the moralist and the maker of plots; he must be infinitely sensitive and infinitely truthful. That Marcel Proust personifies this ideal no one would completely claim. But he does, at least to some people, seem to have approached it more nearly than any other writer of our time.
RALPH WRIGHT.
V
THE “LITTLE PROUST”
TO those of us who have read or who are now reading Proust’s enormous novel, it is a curious experience to turn back to his earliest publication, to the book written by the precocious boy whose social successes are described at such length in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. This book, Les Plaisirs et les Jours, appeared in 1896, seventeen years before the publication of Du Côté de chez Swann. Les Plaisirs is a large, shiny volume, a pretentious “tome” for the drawing-room, printed in the most expensive manner, and made hideously elegant by Madeleine Lemaire’s illustrations of the higlif of the ’nineties—an amazing élite of melancholy great ladies, exquisitely fashionable in costumes which time, with its ironic touch, has made inconceivably out of fashion and dowdy. A few copies of this large book appeared recently in the London bookshops, when its rarity and value seem not to have been known; and one of these copies has come, in the happiest manner, into my possession. It contains the literary exercises and first attempts of the “little Proust” of the great novel, some verses of no especial merit, a few stories and set pieces of description, and a number of short poems in prose. These pieces were all written, the author tells us, between his twentieth and his twenty-third year; the style is somewhat sententious, immature and precious: it is the writing of a boy—but, one sees at once, of a boy of genius. For here, not only in their bud, but in their first exquisite flowering, we find all the great qualities of Proust’s later work: the beautiful sensibility, the observation, as of an insect with an insect’s thousand eyes, the subtle and elaborate study of passion, with its dawn, its torments of jealousy, and—what is so original in the great novel—the analysis, not only of falling in love, but of falling out of it—the slow, inevitable fading away of the most fiery passion into the coldest indifference. Indeed, most of the themes, and often the very situations, of the later work are not only adumbrated but happily rendered in this boyish volume—the romantic lure of the world and its heartless vulgarity, the beauty of landscapes, of blossoming trees and hedges and the sea, the evocative power of names, the intermittences of memory, the longing of the child for its mother’s good-night kiss, the great dinner-party, with all the ambitions and pretences of hosts and guests cynically analysed and laid bare. And here, too, we find something which, to my mind, is of even greater interest, and about which, as Proust’s other critics have hardly mentioned it, a few words may not be out of place.
When the little Proust plunged into the full stream of his Parisian experiences, he was, we are told by one of his friends, already, from his early studies, steeped in the philosophy of Plato; and although his feverish days were filled with love affairs and worldly successes, and he drained to its dregs, as we say, the enchanting cup of life, all that he felt and saw seems but to have confirmed in that precocious boy the lesson which Plato had already taught him—the lesson, namely, that the true meaning of life is never to be found in immediate experience; that there is another reality which can only be envisaged by the mind, and, as it were, created by the intellect—a deeper and more ultimate reality, in the presence of which life no longer seems contingent, mediocre, mortal, and its vicissitudes are felt to be irrelevant, its briefness an illusion. Certainly, in that great battle between the Giants and the Gods, which Plato describes in the Sophist, the battle in which the Giants affirm that only those things are real which can be touched and handled, while the Gods defend themselves from above out of an unseen world, “mightily contending” that true essence consists in intelligible ideas—in this eternal warfare Proust is found fighting as conspicuously as Shelley on the side of the Gods. Hope for him, as for Shelley,
creates