IT is the privilege of those known as the world’s greatest artists to create the illusion of dragging the reader through the whole mechanism of life. Such was pre-eminently the gift of Shakespeare, whose tragedies appear to be microcosms of the universe. Such a gift was that of Balzac, for all his vulgarities and absurdities, if we may treat the whole Comédie Humaine as a single novel. Such, in his rare moments of prodigal creation, was the power of Tolstoy, whom Proust in some ways so much resembles. Such is the gift of Proust in his astonishing pseudo-autobiography, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. For it is the sense of imaginative wealth and creative facility that is the hallmark of the first-rate genius, who must never appear to be reaching the end of his tether, but must always, on the contrary, leave the impression of there being better fish in his sea than have ever come out of it.
The outpouring of the romantic school of authors, their neglect of form, their absence of critical faculty, their devastating facility, have made this truth disagreeable and even doubtful to many minds, who feel more in sympathy with the costive author of Adolphe than with the continual flux of Victor Hugo. Yet if Victor Hugo be a great author at all, as he evidently is, it is because of this very fertility that we so much dislike; and if Benjamin Constant be not a great artist, as he evidently is not, the reason must be sought in the absence of fertility, though we may find its absence sympathetic; while this same fertility, which is the whole essence of Balzac, is rendering him formidable and unattractive to a generation of readers. Now, Proust was eminently fertile, and, within the limits imposed by his own delicate health, he could go on indefinitely, so profound and so all-embracing was his interest in human beings and human emotions. But he was fertile in a new way. Not for him was the uncritical spate of nineteenth-century verbiage. His intellectual integrity, of which M.C. Dubos has written so well in his Approximations, always compelled him to check and ponder every move upon the chessboard of life, every comment on human feelings. For Proust is the latest great prophet of sensibility, and it is bearing this in mind that we can trace the intellectual stock of which he comes.
One of the great landmarks in French literature is pegged out for us by the Abbé Prévost’s translation of Clarissa Harlowe, which burst on the new sentimental generation, starved on the superficial brilliance of the Regnards and their successors, with all the energy of a gospel. The adoration with which this great novel was received by the most brilliant intellects of eighteenth-century France seems to-day somewhat excessive, however deep be our sympathy with the mind and art of Richardson. Remember how Diderot speaks of him: Diderot the most complete embodiment of the eighteenth century with its sentimental idealism and fiery common sense—the man in whom reason and spirit were perfectly blended, the enthusiastic preacher of atheism and humanity:
O Richardson, Richardson! homme unique à mes yeux. Tu seras ma lecture dans tous les temps. Forcé par les besoins pressants si mon ami tombe dans l’indigence, si la médiocrité de ma fortune ne suffit pas pour donner à mes enfants les soins nécessaires à leur éducation je vendrai mes livres, mais tu me resteras; tu me resteras sur le même rayon avec Virgile, Homère, Euripide, et Sophocle. Je vous lirai tour à tour. Plus on a l’âme belle, plus on aime la vérité, plus on a le goût exquis et pur, plus on connaît la nature, plus on estime les ouvrages de Richardson.
The new sentimental movement, developed to such a pitch of perfection by the author of Clarissa Harlowe, was one of enormous value to life and art. But inevitably it was pushed much too far, and the novels of the école larmoyante are now well-nigh intolerable, even when written by men of genius like Rousseau, whose characters seem to spend their lives in one continual jet of tears in a country where the floodgates of ill-controlled emotion are never for an instant shut.
Rousseau had one great pupil, a great name in the history of the French novel, Stendhal. But he wore his Rousseau with a difference. For Rousseau represented, in his novels, but one side of the eighteenth century, the sentimental; but there was another, the scientific—and the life work of Stendhal consisted in an untiring effort to combine the two. For what was the avowed ambition of the self-conscious sentimentalist that was Stendhal? Soaked in the writings of Lavater, de Tracy, and the Scotch metaphysicians, crossed with a romantic passion for Rousseau and the Elizabethan drama, he wished to be as sec as possible, and boasted that he read a portion of the Code Civil every day—a document Rémy de Gourmont may be right in calling diffuse, but which is certainly not romantic. Nourished on Shakespeare, Rousseau, and de Tracy, Stendhal became one of the first completely modern men, who study the working of their minds with the imaginative enthusiasm, but also with the cold objectivity, of a scientist dissecting a tadpole. Like the young scientist in Hans Andersen, his first instinct was to catch the toad and put it in spirits; but in this case the toad was his own soul. Stendhal was too much of a revolutionary in writing ever to have been completely successful; but the immensity of his achievement may be gauged by the fact that parts of L’Amour, and still more of Le Rouge et le Noir, are really of practical value to lovers, who might profit considerably in the conduct of their affairs by a careful study of Stendhal’s advice, if only they were ever in a position to listen to reason. Now, this is something quite new in fiction, and would have astonished his grandfather Richardson. Proust is in turn the intellectual child of Stendhal, and has bespattered A la Recherche du Temps Perdu with expressions of admiration for his master. In truth, he has taken over not only the methods but the philosophy of his teacher. It will be remembered that Stendhal insists in his analysis of L’Amour-Passion that crystallisation can only be effected after doubt has been experienced. So, for Proust, love, the mal sacré as he calls it, can only be called into being by jealousy, le plus affreux des supplices. We can want nothing till we have been cheated out of getting it; whence it follows that we can get nothing till we have ceased to want it, and in any case, once obtained, it would ipso facto cease to be desirable. Hence Man, “how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god,” is doomed by the nature of his being to unsatisfied desire and restless misery, till Proust becomes, as I have called him above, the prophet of despair. He is a master of the agonising moments spent hanging in vain round the telephone, the weeks passed waiting for letters that never come, and the terrible reactions after one’s own fatal letter has been irrevocably posted and not all the jewels of Golconda can extract it from the pillar-box. For how does the hero of his novels finally pass under the sway of Albertine? Through agony caused by the cutting of an appointment.
Comme chaque fois que la porte cochère s’ouvrait, la concierge appuyait sur un bouton électrique qui éclairait l’escalier, et comme il n’y avait pas de locataires qui ne fussent rentrés, je quittai immédiatement la cuisine et revins m’asseoir dans l’antichambre, épiant, là où la tenture un peu trop étroite qui ne couvrait pas complètement la porte vitrée de notre appartement, laissait passer la sombre raie verticale faite par la demi-obscurité de l’escalier. Si tout d’un coup, cette raie devenait d’un blond doré, c’est qu’Albertine viendrait d’entrer en bas et serait dans deux minutes près de moi; personne d’autre ne pouvait plus venir à cette heure-là. Et je restais, ne pouvant détacher mes yeux de la raie qui s’obstinait à demeurer sombre; je me penchais tout entier pour être sûr de bien voir; mais j’avais beau regarder, le noir trait vertical, malgré mon désir passionné, ne me donnait pas l’enivrante allégresse que j’aurais eue, si je l’avais vu, changé par un enchantement soudain et significatif, en un lumineux barreau d’or. C’était bien de l’inquiétude, pour cette Albertine à laquelle je n’avais pensé trois minutes pendant la soirée Guermantes! Mais, réveillant les sentiments d’attente jadis éprouvés à propos d’autres jeunes filles, surtout de Gilberte, quand elle tardait à venir, la privation possible d’un simple plaisir physique me causait une cruelle souffrance morale.
Indeed, happiness in love is by nature impossible, as it demands an impossible spiritual relationship.
If we thought that the eyes of a girl like that were merely two glittering sequins of mica, we should not be athirst to know her and to unite her life to ours. But we feel that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due solely to their material composition; that it is, unknown to us, the dark shadows of the ideas that the creature is conceiving, relative to the people and places that she knows—the turf of racecourses, the sand of cycling tracks over which, pedalling on past fields and woods, she would have drawn me after her, that little peri, more seductive to me than she of the Persian paradise—the shadows, too, of the home to which she will presently return, of the plans that she is forming or that others have formed for her; and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. I knew that I should never possess this young cyclist if I did not possess also what was in her eyes. And it was consequently her whole life that filled me with desire; a sorrowful desire because I felt that it was not to be realised, but exhilarating, because what had hitherto been my life, having ceased suddenly to be my whole life, being no more now than a little part of the space stretching out before me, which I was burning to cover and which was composed of the lives of these girls, offered me that prolongation, that possible multiplication of oneself, which is happiness. And no doubt the fact that we had, these girls and I, not one habit, as we had not one idea, in common, was to make it more difficult for me to make friends with them and to please them. But perhaps, also, it was thanks to those differences, to my consciousness that there did not enter into the composition of the nature and actions of these girls a single element that I knew or possessed, that there came in place of my satiety a thirst—like that with which a dry land burns—for a life which my soul, because it had never until now received one drop of it, would absorb all the more greedily in long draughts, with a more perfect imbibition.[1]
Proust, having thus reduced all human society to misery, builds upon the ruins his philosophy of salvation: Only by much suffering shall we enter into the Kingdom of Heaven—that is to say, shall we be enabled to see ourselves solely and simply as members of the human race, to perceive what is essential and fundamental in everybody beneath the trappings of manners, birth, or fortune, learn to be really intelligent. Love and jealousy alone can open to us the portals of intelligence. Thus, in the opening pages of Du Côté de chez Swann, the poor little boy, who, because M. Swann is dining with his parents, cannot receive in bed his mother’s kiss, starts on the long spiritual journey which is to run parallel to that of the brilliant, unhappy mondain guest. Miserable at being left alone, he desperately sends down to his mother an agonised note by his nurse, and in his agitation he hates Swann, whom he regards as the cause of his misery, and continues to reflect: