But, of course, the boy, as he was then, must have heard a good deal more about the Sonata from Swann, who himself was no mean judge of music, as of painting; though, in his appreciation of the latter art, he does seem to have derived more pleasure from the discovery in an “old master” of a likeness to one of his friends than from the aesthetic merits it might possess. But Swann’s opinion of the Sonata cannot perhaps, for other reasons, be trusted altogether; it was too closely linked up in his mind with certain occurrences in his private life. Yet we can accept the favourable impression it made upon him at a time when he had not met Mme. de Crécy. On that occasion he had appreciated at first “only the material quality of the sounds which the instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon of the violin-part, delicate, unyielding, substantial, and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure in his memory, the phrase or harmony—he knew not which—that had just been played and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power to dilate our nostrils.... Hardly had the delicious sensation which Swann had experienced died away, before his memory furnished him with an immediate transcript, summary, it is true, and provisional, but one on which he had kept his eyes fixed while the playing continued, so effectively that, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer uncapturable. He was able to picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, the strength of its expression; he had before him that definite object which was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished, quite clearly, a phrase which emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound. It had at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt that nothing but this phrase could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire.”
And, though he seems to have failed to make head or tail of the Sonata at that first hearing, that little phrase stuck in his memory. It so haunted him that, when a year later he was sitting beside Odette on Mme. Verdurin’s Beauvais sofa (which his hostess vowed wasn’t to be matched anywhere), and heard a high note held on through two whole bars, he foresaw the approach of his beloved phrase and promptly associated it with the woman at his side. In this way it became the symbol of his passion, developed into a Wagnerian leit-motif of his liaison with Odette, until, when they had inevitably quarrelled, it became for him an exquisite anguish to hear. An anguish which the unhappy man had to dissemble from the ironical scrutiny of all those monocles at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party, when “the violin had risen to a series of high notes, on which it rested as though expecting something, an expectancy which it prolonged without ceasing to hold on to the notes, in the exaltation with which it already saw the expected object approaching, and with a desperate effort ... to keep the way open a moment longer, so that the stranger might enter in, as one holds a door open that would otherwise automatically close. And before Swann had had time to understand what was happening, to think, ‘It is the little phrase from Vinteuil’s Sonata. I mustn’t listen!’ all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded, up till that evening, in keeping invisible ... had risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”
But we may find ample corroboration of Swann’s testimony to the excellence of this work in the comments of that acute critic already mentioned. Although he has preferred to remain anonymous himself, it will be convenient for purposes of reference to find him a name, and the name which for some odd reason or other flows from my pen is “Marcel Proust.” Well, this young “Proust,” when he heard Mme. Swann play the Sonata, was much impressed, though he also had some difficulty in grasping the music at first. He goes into the question much more deeply than the dilettante Swann, and begins by asking whether it is not wrong to talk about “hearing a thing for the first time,” when nothing has been understood. The second and third times are from this point of view just as much “first times.” Then he makes the vital discovery that probably what fails us the first time is not our intelligence but our memory. “For our memory,” he says, “compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep dreams of a thousand things and at once forgets them.... Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard two or three times, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and can repeat it by heart next morning.... So, where Swann and his wife could make out a distinct phrase, that was as far beyond the range of my perception as a name which one tries in vain to recall.... And not only does one not seize at once and retain an impression of works that are really great, but even in the content of any such work (as befell me in the case of Vinteuil’s Sonata) it is the least valuable parts that one at first perceives.”[11]
But “Proust” also carried away from his first hearing the recollection of a phrase; and, since it seems to have been the fate of M. Vinteuil’s work to become implicated in the love affairs of its admirers, we find him at Balbec contemplating his new friend Albertine thus: “I seized the opportunity, while she stood still, to look again and discover once and for all where exactly the little mole was. Then, just as a phrase of Vinteuil which had delighted me in the Sonata, and which my recollection had allowed to wander from the Andante to the Finale, until the day when, having the score in my hands, I was able to find it, and to fix it in my memory in its proper place, in the Scherzo, so this mole, which I had visualised now on her cheek, now on her chin, came to rest for ever on her upper lip, just below her nose.”[12]
And if again it be thought that this association of the music with the critic’s sentiment may have vitiated his judgment, I can only point to the exquisite sensibility of these passages, where music is brought to the touchstone of life, and human experience, in its turn, is elucidated in terms of music. Indeed, this “Proust” shows himself preternaturally sensitive both to musical sounds and to unorganised noises, so that he instinctively registers the pitch of a voice; so that the wall, when rapped by his grandmother, at once assumes for him the resonance of a drum, and her triple knock takes its place automatically in a symphonic scheme; so that the vision of M. de Charlus making somewhat embarrassed conversation with a new acquaintance immediately brings to his mind “those questioning phrases of Beethoven, indefinitely repeated at equal intervals, and destined, after a superabundant wealth of preparation, to introduce a new motif, a change of key, or a recapitulation”; and so that the old reprobate’s sudden descent from high dudgeon to docility suggests the performance of “a symphony played through without a break, when a graceful Scherzo of idyllic loveliness follows upon the thunders of the first movement.”
We cannot but regret, then, that this Sonata, which, after reading what “Proust” has to say of it, we seem to know as well as we know César Franck’s or the “Kreutzer,” and which has made a profound impression on persons so different in temperament as Charles Swann and Mme. Verdurin (who could not hear it without crying till she got neuralgia all down her face), should have suffered such neglect at the hands of concert-artists, whose only excuse is, presumably, to throw the blame upon the equal neglect of the publishers.
DYNELEY HUSSEY.
XVI
THE LITTLE PHRASE
MY only excuse for contributing anything to this collection is that it provides an opportunity to give some information. Readers may want to know whether the Sonata to which Proust refers in Du Côté de chez Swann as being played at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party was wholly an invention of Proust’s, or whether his refined and tortuous dithyrambs on the subject were inspired by an actual Sonata which the dullest may purchase at a Paris shop.
Well, the answer to this hypothetical question, like all real answers to all genuine questions, is “Yes” and “No.” For the Ayes there is the statement by Proust in a letter to a friend printed in the memorial number of the Nouvelle Revue Française:[13] “La petite phrase de cette Sonate ... est ... la phrase charmante mais enfin médiocre d’une sonate pour piano et violon de Saint-Saëns....”