To-morrow will find fallen or not at all:
fallen, if the worst comes to the worst (as we have heard it always does), to a greatness in its decay and neglect more moving than the spick-and-span of a smart little subaltern of immortality. It is impossible to imagine how this titanic fragment can be trundled from age to age; nor is the future likely to have much time to spare from the production of domestic utensils which are so badly made that they must be continually replaced. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is not one of those things which are replaced, like the novel of the moment, but exactly what part of it is most likely to be saved the present cannot decide. There will always be some to follow the whole sweep of the Master’s gesture, which evokes the hours of adolescence flowering in the shade of girlhood and rebuilds the tormented cities of the plain; now stooping to dissect a snob or soaring to stroke a horizon, but never theatrical and never grandiose. Perhaps in the ray of this most intimate limelight we draw the greater part of our pleasure from the recognition of our own movements; the heirs of our sensibility will find there the original of many impulses which they accept as part of human nature.
EDGELL RICKWORD.
XXI
A CASUIST IN SOULS
PATER, who desired to find everywhere forces producing pleasurable sensations, “each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind,” says: “Few artists, not Goethe nor Byron even, work quite clearly, casting off all débris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and transformed.” Has the heat of Proust’s imagination fused and transformed his material as Balzac and Rodin transformed and fused theirs? Are his characters creations? Has he the strange magical sense of that life in natural things, which is incommunicable? I think not; there is too much débris in his prose which he has not cast off.
Proust’s books are the autobiography of a sensitive soul, for whom the visible world exists; only, he could never say with Gautier, “I am a man for whom the visible world exists”; for in this famous phrase he expresses his outlook on life, and his view of his own work: Gautier, who literally discovered descriptive prose, a painter’s prose by preference; who, in prose and in verse alike, is the poet of physical beauty, of the beauty of the exterior of things. Proust, with his adoration of beauty, gives one an equal sense of the beauty of exterior things and of physical beauty; with infinite carefulness, with infinite precautions, he gives one glimpses of occult secrets unknown to us, of our inevitable instincts, and, at times, of those icy ecstasies which Laforgue reveals in Moralités légendaires. Only, not having read books of mediaeval magic, he cannot assure us that the devil’s embraces are of a coldness so intense that it may be called, by an allowable figure of speech, fiery.
In his feverish attempt to explain himself to himself, his imaginary hero reminds me of Rousseau, who, having met Grimm and vexed Voltaire, was destined by his febrile and vehement character to learn in suffering what he certainly did not teach in song; who, being avid of misunderstandings, was forced by the rankling thorns of his jealousy to write his Confessions, in which he unburdens himself of the exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, driven, in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people—a coward before his own conscience. There is no cowardice in the conscience of Proust’s hero; his utter shameless sincerity to the naked truth of things allows him “avec une liberté d’esprit” to compete, near the end of the last volume, in his unveiling of M. de Charlus, with the outspokenness of Restif de la Bretonne in Monsieur Nicolas.
Some of the pages of Sodome might have been inspired by Petronius. The actual fever and languor in the blood: that counts for so much in Petronius’s prose, and lies at the root of some of his fascinations. He is passionately interested in people, but only in those who are not of the same nature as he is: his avid curiosity being impersonal. Some of Proust’s curiosity is not so much vivid as impersonal. Petronius—like the writer I refer to—is so specifically Latin that he has no reticence in speaking of what he feels, none of that unconscious reticence in feeling which races drawn farther from civilisation have invented in their relations with nature. This is one of the things which people mean when they say that Petronius’s prose is immoral. So is that of Proust. Yet, in the prose of these writers, both touched with the spirit of perversity, the rarest beauty comes from a heightening of nature into something not quite natural, a perversity of beauty, which is poisonous as well as curious.
Proust has some of the corrupt mysticism of Huysmans, but not so perilous as his; nor has he that psychology which can be carried so far into the soul’s darkness that the flaming walls of the world themselves fade to a glimmer; he does not chronicle the adventures of this world’s Vanity Fair: he is concerned with the revelation of the subconscious self; his hero’s confessions are not the exaltation of the soul. He is concerned, not so much with adventures as with an almost cloistral subtlety in regard to the obscure passions which work themselves out, never with any actual logic. With all his curiosity, this curiosity never drives him in the direction of the soul’s apprehension of spiritual things. He does, at times, like Mallarmé, deform ingeniously the language he writes in; and, as in most of these modern decadents, perversity of form and perversity of manner bewilder us in his most bewildering pages.
I find to my surprise that a French critic, Carcassonne, compares Proust with Balzac. As an observer of society, yes; as a creator, no. “Never,” he writes, “since Stendhal and Balzac has any novelist put so much reality into a novel. Stendhal, Balzac: I write those great names without hesitation beside that of Marcel Proust. It is the finest homage I can render to the power and originality of his talent.” During Balzac’s lifetime there was Benjamin Constant, whose Adolphe has its place after Manon Lescaut, a purely objective study of an incomparable simplicity, which comes into the midst of those analysts of difficult souls—Laclos, who wrote an unsurpassable study of naked human flesh in Les Liaisons dangereuses; Voltaire, Diderot; Rousseau, in whose Nouvelle Héloïse the novel of passion comes into existence. After these Flaubert, the Goncourts, Huysmans, Zola, Maupassant. I should place Proust with those rare spirits whose métier is the analysis of difficult souls. Browning wrote in regard to his Sordello: “My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study; I, at least, always thought so.” This certainly applies to Proust; and, as he seems to me to derive some of his talent from Stendhal and from no other novelist, I can imagine his casuistical and cruel creation of the obscure soul of M. de Charlus in much the same fashion as Stendhal’s when he undresses Julien Sorel’s soul with a deliberate and fascinating effrontery.