For this is important. When it comes to his male characters, Proust takes a different tone. Here he finds himself able, quite consistently with his philosophy, for far more positive assertion. In various ways he can allow them to reveal and expound themselves, and even each other, as when Bergotte speaks of the married Swann as a man who “has to swallow a hundred serpents every day.” The point of view, the intellectual outfit which all males have in common—these give the male novelist a certain tract of solid ground when dealing with characters of his own sex. A man’s fellow-feeling for other men is very strong. It has but a faint and imperfect parallel as between woman and woman. Proust, accordingly, without any sacrifice of conscience, can, “by his belief,” endow Swann with a soul. But—marvellous and highly characteristic creation as he is—Swann may be put in the same category with other male characters by other male novelists. Odette, Gilberte, Albertine, are in a category by themselves. Outside of Proust’s book they are only to be met with in life.
It is in this differential treatment of his women that we perceive how rigorously Proust applies his artistic method. He never seeks to transcend his own personality. In him, the observer, the whole of creation lives and moves and has its being. Men are creatures made in his own image. He can faithfully follow his own emotions, and “by his belief” can conscientiously endow his men with souls. But women are in a different case. He has no inner guide to assure him that they are anything more than the phantoms they seem. Strictly speaking, this should imply no more than a negative attitude. In fact, however, Proust goes further. Because he has no grounds for belief he passes into unbelief. In his philosophy esse est percipi, therefore, the souls of women for him have no existence. Herein it is likely that he has borne out the unavowed experience of most men. Whether or no, he certainly has expressed the truth of his own experience with a purity that few, even among great writers, can rival.
One thing more. There is Proust’s mother.
No doubt the avenging eagerness with which I reintroduce her here for my conclusion is due in part to my being myself of the soulless sex. But quite apart from any such feelings, to speak of this novelist’s women without reckoning especially with his mother would be inexcusable. That he adored her in childhood he makes manifest. Further, that throughout his life this adoration effectively debarred him from profound emotion where other women were concerned becomes clear enough to the reader. It hardly appears, however, that Proust was himself wholly conscious of this. True, there is a passage in the Combray section in which he speaks of “that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation, unburdened by any liability save to myself.” But this is the only place where he seems to allow that the love he bore his mother was even comparable in kind with the love aroused by other women later in his life. Indeed, though he repeatedly speaks of the anguish with which in his childhood he longed for his mother’s good-night kiss, the ecstasy with which he received it, as if it were the Host in an act of communion, conveying to him “her real presence and with it the power to sleep”; though he tells how, for that “frail and precious kiss,” he prepared himself in advance so as to “consecrate” the whole minute of contact; though he dreaded to prolong or repeat the kiss lest a look of displeasure should cross those beautiful features with the slight, beloved blemish under one of the eyes; yet he describes himself at this time as one “into whose life Love had not yet entered,” as one whose emotion, failing love and as yet awaiting it, happened to be at the disposal of “filial piety.” No wonder if, when temporary “loves” came, he compared with them as unconsciously as unfavourably this good and gracious mother—so admiringly timid as a wife, so gentle towards strangers, so perfect socially, so full of stern solicitude as a parent (“she never allowed herself to go to any length of tenderness with me”)—and found them merely exciting to the senses. He had already, so far as woman was concerned, given his heart away.
Yet, after all, perhaps he knew it well enough and merely takes his own way of saying it. He tells us little enough of his mother, though probably he tells as much as he knows. What her own real thoughts and feelings were we are left to guess. But “never again,” he says, after describing one very special visit of hers to the boy’s bedroom—“never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs ... which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually their echo has never ceased.”
CATHERINE CARSWELL.
IX
THE BEST RECORD
ONE of my feelings whenever I read Marcel Proust is regret that Henry James is not alive to enjoy him, as he would have done immensely and amazedly, though, judging from the letters of that great master of the art of writing fiction, no doubt he would not have given him his unqualified approval. But he would have recognised him as working at his own level, while not in his own groove. Yet, for all that Proust is the author of practically only one book, big though that book is, in that one book he has spread his nets wider, and sunk them deeper, than did Henry James in the sum of all his novels. One wonders if such mastery has ever been obtained so suddenly and so completely; indeed, the sureness of touch seems a little less certain in the last published volumes than in the earlier ones. We had revealed to us from the beginning a new way of writing fiction, or rather of describing life. It had never so been done before. Let us pray that he will have no disciples—one can foresee the horror of them; but influence he must have.
My own interest begins with the second volume of Swann, though my admiration begins with the first sentence of the first; and my advice to new readers would be to take up any volume after Swann—to start in the middle—when I am sure they will insist on knowing everything the author has to say about his characters from the beginning. You become soaked in the lives of these people as a sponge becomes soaked with water. In the process you live your own life over again, and, if you have lived in Paris and in Normandy, you tread the same ground.
Proust has no “story” to tell. He sets down life as it was lived by certain people at a certain period: Parisian society from the middle of the Dreyfus case to the present day. From the amazing brilliance of the whole opening two details presently detach themselves—the love of Swann for Odette, and the boy and girl idyll in the Champs-Élysées: they are beyond words to praise, for they are not Art, but life recorded with matchless insight or remembrance. We need not compare, but how pale is Jean Christophe beside these pages! So when we get to Normandy, the Plage, the hotel, and the countryside with its little railway, and childhood has melted into adolescence, we live again those days, and tread those paths, which we thought beyond recapture, save by indistinct memory. It is an exquisite pleasure which I, at any rate, never expected to experience.