I HAVE at last found time, or rather, for it expresses our relations better, Time has been gracious enough at last to find me—in regard to Swann. It was a new and satisfactory experience. His reality is extraordinary—at least in the main part of the book: I hope for the sake of French upper middle-class society of his day that it is not ordinary in such things as the big dinner scene in vol. ii.[15]
Has anybody said that he partakes both of De Quincey and of Stendhal? He does to me, and I’m shot if I ever expected to see such a blend! You see, there is in him on the one hand a double measure of the analytical and introspective power that Beyle’s admirers make so much of; with what they also admire, a total absence of prettification for prettification’s sake. Yet he can be pretty in the very best sense, while Beyle never can, in the best or any other. Then, too, I at least find in him much less of the type-character which, though certainly relieved by individuality in the Chartreuse de Parme and other books (especially Lamiel), is still always more or less there. But the oddest and to me the most attractive thing is the way in which he entirely relieves the sense of aridity—of museum-preparations—which I find in Stendhal. And here it is that the De Quincey suggestion comes so unexpectedly in. For Proust effects this miracle by a constant relapse upon—and sometimes a long self-restriction to—a sort of dream element. It is not, of course, the vaguer and more mystical kind that one finds in De Quincey, not that of Our Ladies of Sorrow or Savannah-la-Mar, but that of the best parts of The English Mail Coach. In fact, it is sometimes Landorian rather than De Quinceyish in its dreaminess. But, however this may be, the dream quality is there, to me, as it is in few other Frenchmen—themselves almost always poets. Now, the worst of the usual realist is that, being blinder than any other heathen in his blindness, he tries to exorcise dream, though sometimes not nightmare, from life. Such a mixture as Proust’s I remember nowhere else.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
XIX
A REAL WORLD IN FICTION
MY presence among those who are offering a tribute to Marcel Proust would be an impertinence if the request for it had not been continued after I had confessed the poverty of my knowledge. As it is, I may be justified in taking the great pleasure it is to me to testify a sincere admiration, founded on howsoever little experience. I have to read a good deal for my bread, and the reading I can do for pleasure is limited by debility of eyesight; M. Proust’s books are long and in a language I read less easily than my own. So it has happened that so far I have read only the two volumes of a beautifully lucid translation, wonderfully lucid when the delicacy and subtlety of the thoughts translated are considered. I will not say that you can taste a wine without drinking a bottle—the analogy, like most analogies, would be false; I do not doubt that wider study would produce more valuable opinions. Yet my slight study has produced opinions which, I am convinced, further study will only confirm, and it is a pleasure to record them....
We all have our views as to what, for us, distinguishes great fiction from that which is less than great. Mine has always been that it causes me to live in a real world of visible, audible, and intelligible people—a world in which, however novel it may be to start with, I am at home and able, with sureness, to exercise my powers of understanding to the full; this last point matters, for of course the superficial may be superficially alive. No doubt the test is objectively unfair, because the reaction of a writer’s imagination on a reader’s is affected, though not conditioned, as the sympathy between the two is greater or less; but for my own use this test is the most profitable. Tolstoy has done this for me, so has Sterne, so has Miss Austen, so has Thackeray, so have not very many others, and so have not some almost universally acclaimed. Well, M. Proust has done this most considerable service for me, in those two volumes I have read in translation, and I am grateful. I know his hero’s grandfather and grandmother and mother and invalid aunt, and know them well, and my understanding has played with zest and to the limit of its power on the wealth of character revealed to me. M. Swann is of my intimates, and I think I have a perfect comprehension of his Odette. That is the first thing for which I am grateful. The second is the sheer intellectual joy with which, time and again, I came upon an achievement of divination in the subtleties of human emotion which caught one’s breath by its compelling truth. Jealousy of a man for a woman may have been more grandly expressed, but have all the subtleties of its tortuous and agonising course ever been so completely exposed as in the case of M. Swann? Or the feelings of a sensitive and imaginative boy in his first affections?... For these two things I have a sincere gratitude which I propose to increase. But the wretchedness of my present qualifications must terminate my expression of it now.
G.S. STREET.
XX
THE BIRTH OF A CLASSIC
THE pictures we make, for our own satisfaction, of our actions are generally as remote as the clichés of polite conversation from the psychological processes they pretend to reflect. It is convenient and very often necessary to limit consciousness of an action so that it receives a distinct and recognisable contour. With a certain resemblance to the achievement of the Impressionists, who revealed the fabric of a world worked-over with conceptual images, Proust breaks up the moulds into which our feelings are generally poured. He is curious to note the sensual deceits which agitate the mind no less profoundly than the reality would have done, and to separate the social stratagem (whether that of the Guermantes or of the servants in his own home) from the intention of which it was the paraphrase. He is dissociative only to that extent—a necessary one, since dissimulation is the mind’s first nature. But he is not at all destructive; for an action never really is a separate entity, cut off by crystalline walls from the mother-liquor of our lives. In the style which he created that glittering illusion is re-dissolved into the saturated mental life of which it is an inextricable component.
I know nothing, he says, that can, “autant que le baiser, faire surgir de ce que nous croyons une chose à aspect défini, les cent autres choses qu’elle est tout aussi bien, puisque chacune est relative à une perspective non moins légitime.... Dans ce court trajet de mes lèvres vers sa joue, c’est dix Albertines que je vis.” Not only the coarsening of the grain of the skin seen in this unaccustomed proximity (that would be comparatively insignificant), but the psychological perspective opened by this change in their relations; though Albertine refused his kiss at Balbec, she cannot now prevent him from gathering in one embrace the rose of the past and of the present. For Albertine is not only Albertine “simple image dans le décor de la vie” when later she calls on him in Paris; her image trails the multitudinous sensations of A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs; and though he no longer loves her, the appearances she had for him at Balbec, silhouetted against the sea or sitting with her back to the cliff, bring back with them the influence of that love. We are far from what we believed a thing with a definite appearance, a girl, and perhaps the example may indicate faintly the complexity of Proust’s art. Wishing to convey the shifting aspect of things, or perhaps the composite pile of aspects which represents, at any moment, our realisation of a thing—and as objective description reintroduces the pictorial cliché so far avoided,—he utilises the vast fabric of memory, shot, like iridescent silk, with many indefinable moods. To specify his method more exactly would not at present be easy, nor is there any enjoyment equal to the mere following of this marvellous web into the still obscure future, where half is, to our chagrin partly and to our delight, yet hidden. To the latter, because we have to be patient against our will; to the former, because there is still so much certain pleasure in store, and the excitement of seeing the completed design, whose symmetry so far is only felt, like that of a statue in its shroud before its resurrection, coincide with or contradict our anticipations. There is a delicious state (owing not a little of its charm to our knowledge of its transience) in which a book, having shaken off the first fever of novelty, is in a condition to be most artfully savoured, and at length. The classic features will never be dearer to us than while they are still flushed with contemporaneity. The classics are at least readable in so far as they are modern, but the modern, once firmly on his pedestal, is not at all approachable. So it is a great and marvellous privilege to be awake to this exquisite dawn, at the moment this many-leaved bloom is suspended in all its freshness which to-morrow—