But I—I had become acquainted with Proust and had gained a world—one of the worlds in which, through a book, we can go to live awhile whenever we choose.
Proust! What is Proust? This is the cry of the Carping Uninitiated among us. To such persons, constitutionally unwilling to be instructed, one replies that Proust is a fashion—a disease—and that a Proustian, so-called, is an Opium-Eater. But, to those who know him and love him, he is a wise and cunning Prospero whose wand is style, and Combray an enchanted island—Ferdinand, not much Miranda, but Caliban, drunken sailors and all.
The Opium Trance, indeed, offers some parallel. Dr. Hochst tells us that the wily subconsciousness, at odds with its earthly environment, is able to invoke and maintain an attitude of benign stupor towards the universe, holding it, as it were, at arm’s length, able to subsist in tranquil abstraction from chill and hateful circumstance. And one can easily imagine some triply disillusioned soul, rebuffed of love and ambition and the fount of life itself, entering on a course of the Master, content to live, lullabyed by the slight movement as of flickering woodland leaves, warmed by the soft light that falls on grey cathedral walls and white, dusty roads, quietly appreciative of the Master’s passionless, infallible display of the complications and unconscious betrayals of their ego by Françoise and Tante Léonie, Odette and the Duchess; intrigued by his fine sense of social values shown by the apt posing of the social Inferiorities of the Verdurin ménage in Paris against the ineffable Aristocracies ensconced in their old château, Guermantes Way—and so on, through terms of months or even years, till the stupor, benign in character, ends at last in the ordinary manner, the patient dying, still en plein Proust, with, perhaps, a volume or two unread, to the good, for there are, or are to be, a good many.
The normal, healthy person, still active, still complying with life, finds it more than soothing to commit himself to this peaceable, effluent mind-flow, a current of thought that has, like life, its eddies, its transes, but persists, as must we all who agree with our destinies, in its appointed borders and so gains something of the peace of resignation that Renan speaks of: “Il n’y a rien de suave comme le renoncement de la joie, rien de doux comme l’enchantement du désenchantement.” For there is, indeed, no joy in all these myriad pages: how could there be, since joy is clear-cut and impermanent and all Proustian values fade and are merged in each other without such a thing as an edge anywhere! The sharp, dramatic point popular novelists excel in would break the spell.
We surrender ourselves to these entrancing longueurs; to indescribable sensations that endure. Reading in Proust is, to me, like the long drink of a child whom, by and by, a solicitous elder bids put the cup down ... a gesture that this Master will never make. It is a suave, sensuous pleasure, like stroking the long, rippling beard of Ogier the Dane as he sits, stone-like, in his enchanted castle. It is a patient, monkish task like that of tending with loving, religious husbandry the Holy Rose at Hildesheim, that has gone on growing for four hundred years. It suggests a sense of going on, a promise of a future that may not be so very different, such as we got when our German nurse told us that Grimm’s tale of the man who fell in and was drowned, but, presently, found himself under the still waters of the mere, walking, langweilig, in meadows prankt with daisies and buttercups and fat flocks grazing....
Proust translated Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens—just the unexpected sort of thing he would do—and one might theorise and hint that his learned appreciation of the beauties that lie within due submission to architectural rules, and acceptance of the limitations and possibilities of shaped stones, have helped to form the backbone of his style. It has the precision and poise of the arch, supported by the virility and integrity of the pillar, with the permitted fioriture of the pinnacle sparingly used, as one sees it in the Norman churches dotted all round about Combray and Balbec. And I am sure his style is the magician’s wand without whose composed and certain wielding we should never have allowed him to lead us, like willing children, through the mazes, winding, twisting, but always planned and in order, of his mind—or Swann’s. And if Swann—remote, withdrawn, half-unsympathetic character that he is—had not been so essentially lovable and had not, while telling us all, succeeded in being at the same time suggestive, we should not have yielded ourselves so utterly to his mind-flow.
Proust made Swann a financier, a Jew, and gave him a German name, because, I think, he wished to indicate to our subconscious judgments a cause of Swann’s curious racial patience, his waiting on and deference to the caprice of others. He allows life “to ride” him, Mme. Verdurin to patronise him, Odette to make him love her: just as the trees let the winds lash their boughs and break them, as rivers, flattened and contradicted by raindrops, flow on all the same under a grey sky. Swann, beautifully groomed as he is, apt for drawing-rooms, and acquainted with dukes and ashamed to say so, is a piece of Nature—Nature whom I always see as an old man working in a field, with a sack over his shoulders, bowed to the elements. For Swann doesn’t act; things happen to him. Even his deep and pertinacious affection is discounted by the inferior object of it. He is the golden mean in man, no more a crank than we would all be if we were rich, with weaknesses that we could, if we would, translate into heroisms. Most cultivated women infallibly must have loved Swann—he is probably, therefore, of the kind that finds only the Odettes of the world to its liking.
VIOLET HUNT.
XV
M. VINTEUIL’S SONATA
IT has never been published, never, so far as I can ascertain, been performed in any of our concert-halls. Indeed, its largest audience must have been the fashionable one which gathered for the soirée musicale given by the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, when Mme. de Cambremer’s head wagged to its rhythm like a metronome, and the Princesse des Laumes, to show that she was listening, beat time now and again with her fan; but, so as not to forfeit her independence, beat a different time from the musicians’. But most frequently it was to be heard in a piano arrangement played at Mme. Verdurin’s for the benefit of her “little clan,” which then included Odette de Crécy and, for a time, Charles Swann, by a pianist whom Madame had taken under her patronage, declaring that he left Planté and Rubinstein “sitting”; and, later, when she had become Mme. Swann, by Odette herself, when it first came to the notice of that most acute of critics, the narrator in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.