Some one has said that the difference between a play and a novel is that while watching a play you have the privileges of a most intimate friend, but while reading a novel the privileges of God. However true this may be of the novel as it exists to-day (and, to read some modern novels, one might hardly suspect one’s divine position), it is by no means true of the novel throughout its history. It is clear, if we go back far enough, for example, that with Longus, or Plutarch, or Petronius, the reader’s position is very nearly as much that of a spectator as when he is watching a play by Shakespeare. And the same thing remains roughly true of all novels up to the middle of the eighteenth century. It is not, indeed, until we come to Richardson and Rousseau that we find anything like the modern insistence on the personal and intimate life of a man or a woman as a thing valuable in itself. No one except Montaigne and Burton, neither of whom was a novelist, appears to have been introspective before that date. What mattered before was conduct; what was to matter afterwards was feeling.
But if the world had long to wait for this revolution, none has certainly taken so instantaneous an effect. Every one knows how the reading of Clarissa Harlowe influenced such an independent and sturdy mind as Diderot’s, and what Diderot felt that day the whole of literary France was feeling on the morrow. The days of the petits maîtres and the epigrammatists were past, and all eyes were turned towards the rising sun of sentiment; Le Sopha had given place to the Vie de Marianne. But this advance was attended very closely by its compensating drawback.
It was perhaps necessary, if anything is ever necessary, that this newly awakened interest in the individual mind should be accompanied by a new idealism to falsify it from the outset. However this may be, there can be small doubt that the result of this revolution was a new crop of conventionalities considerably less truthful and, as it seems to us to-day, more harmful than the old. Sentimentality had come to birth in a night. The newly discovered world was apparently too painful a spectacle to be faced, and to cover its nakedness new doctrines like “the perfectibility of man,” new angles of vision like those of Romanticism, had somehow to be invented. Fifty years were to pass before another honest work of the imagination, with one exception, could come to light in France; and the author of that exception, Laclos, is as interesting a commentary on the generation succeeding Rousseau as one can find. Les Liaisons dangereuses is for its own or any other time an extraordinarily truthful book; the characters, as they express themselves in their letters, are not inhuman, but human monsters; not spotless, but only foolish innocents. The tragedy is moving in the modern way; you identify your feelings with those of the characters themselves. But Laclos was not satisfied with the book as it stands. He was a fervent disciple of Rousseau’s, and there appears to be little doubt that the book which exists was only intended to be a picture of the “false” society in which they, and we, live, and was to be followed by another showing what men and women would immediately be like if only they could live and act “naturally.” “Le grand défaut de tous ces livres à paradoxes,” said Voltaire of Rousseau, “n’est-il pas de supposer toujours la nature autrement qu’elle n’est?”
La nature telle qu’elle est—such is to be the aim of the French nineteenth-century novelists if only they can see their opportunity. It must be confessed that several of them failed. An interest in psychology had been awakened, yet one compares Les Misérables with La Princesse de Clèves and may be excused for forgetting it. Throughout the first part of the century, at any rate, it seems as if the last thing a novelist ever asked himself was, “Would I or any reasonable creature act or feel like that?” Common-sense had gone by the board again, and “the fine,” “the noble,” “the proud,” “the pathetic,” and “the touching” held the stage.
Yet great advances were made. Balzac, for all his lack of balance and for all his hasty carelessness, was giant enough to make a hundred on his own account. The “naturalists,” without making any great advances in psychology, at least were in earnest in clearing out the old stage properties, in insisting that a love scene could take place as well in a railway carriage or a hansom cab at eleven o’clock in the morning as on a lake by moonlight or on a balcony at dawn. And Stendhal—but Stendhal was the first of the moderns, the master of the whole generation which is passing, and he had to wait till the ’eighties before his influence became important. Whatever is valuable in the advances that the novel has made during its latest period is valuable just in so far as it is the result of an insistence, with Rousseau, on being interested in the intricacies of human feeling, and an equal insistence, with Voltaire, in refusing to sentimentalise them. That these are the only lines on which the novelist can advance no one would dream of asserting. But it is more particularly because Marcel Proust seems here to stand head and shoulders above his generation, and not on account of his many other merits as an artist, that he has such a passionate, if still comparatively small, following to-day.
He is, perhaps, if we return to that definition of the difference between a novel and a play, more of the essential novelist than any man has ever been. His aim is by a hundred different methods to make you know his chief characters, not as if you were meeting them every day, but as if you yourself had for the moment actually been living in their skins and inhabiting their minds. Everything possible must be done to help you to this end. You must feel the repulsions and attractions they feel; you must even share their ancestors, their upbringing, and the class in which they live, and share them so intimately that with you, as with them, they have become second nature. Nor is even this enough. The man who knows himself is not common, and to know Proust’s characters as you know yourself may only be a small advance in knowledge. So every motive of importance, every reaction to whatever stimulus they receive, is analysed and explained until your feeling will probably be, not only how well you know this being, who is in so many respects unlike you, but how far more clearly you have seen into the obscure motives of your own most distressing and ridiculous actions, how far more understandable is an attitude to life or to your neighbours that you yourself have almost unconsciously, and perhaps in mere self-protection, adopted.
But a short example of this is needed, and a short example of anything in Proust is not easy to find. A character just sketched in one volume will be developed in another, and to grasp the significance of the first sketch one has to wait for the fuller illumination of the development. And even then the short sketch is as often as not several pages of the most closely written analysis, quite impossible to quote from, or in full. There is, however, a very small character in the first book, Du Côté de chez Swann, who may serve. M. Vinteuil is an obscure musician of genius, living in the country. He holds his head high among his neighbours, and, on account of his daughter, refuses to meet the only other really cultured man in the district, Swann, who has made what M. Vinteuil considers a disreputable marriage. Suddenly M. Vinteuil’s daughter forms a disgraceful friendship. There is scandal in the eyes of every man or woman he meets, scandal which he, poor man, knows quite well to be founded on the most deplorable facts.
And yet, however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his daughter’s conduct, it did not follow that his adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without interruption, into the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith either in the clemency of its God or in the capacity of its physician. But when M. Vinteuil regarded his daughter and himself from the point of view of the world, and of their reputation, when he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank which they occupied in the general estimation of their neighbours, then he was bound to give judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely the terms which the inhabitants of Combray most hostile to him and his daughter would have employed; he saw himself and her in “low,” the very “lowest water,” inextricably stranded; and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom he must now look up (however far beneath him they might hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some means of rising again to their level, which is an almost mechanical result of any human misfortune.
The quotation is chosen on account of its shortness, and there are perhaps many hundred other examples which, could they be quoted in full, would show more fully this essential difference between the novel as Proust understands it and the older novel or the play. Here, at least, we have his method compressed. We have M. Vinteuil’s unshakable faith in his daughter, as a jumping-off ground, founded on the past and unaltered by the facts of the present. We have also the pitying attitude of the world to himself and its hostile attitude to his daughter. And from this comes M. Vinteuil’s other feeling, no less strong than his faith in his daughter, that they two have somehow sunk, become degraded, not only in the eyes of the world, but also, and because of it, in their own eyes as well. Lastly, as a reaction from this, we have the effect of these feelings on M. Vinteuil’s manner—his attitude of humility before the world for sins that he has not committed, for the conduct of a person in whom he still completely believes, which, however ridiculous to the logician, can only be recognised by the rest of us as most disquietingly true to our own experience. It is this complexity in our emotions, this capability of feeling many different things at the same time about any one particular incident or person, that the novel alone can give; and it is on these lines that Marcel Proust has adventured farther than any other man.
And here, of course, he has great advantages. Proust, unlike so many of the great creative artists, started late in life the work by which he will be judged. He is mature as few great men have been mature, cultured as still fewer have been cultured. Wide reading is far from common among great artists. The driving force necessary to the accomplishment of any work of art is seldom found in alliance with wide culture; that, more often than not, is to be found among the world’s half-failures. Neither Shakespeare, nor Molière, nor Fielding, nor Richardson, nor Balzac, nor Dickens, nor Dostoevsky, nor Ibsen was a widely cultured man. In Shakespeare, the loss is more than compensated by surety of intuition. In Balzac, there is a lack of the critical faculty that makes it possible for him, even towards the end of his life, to give in the same year one thing as beautiful as Eugénie Grandet and another as puerile as Ferragus, that allows him to compare the novels of “Monk” Lewis with La Chartreuse de Parme and to call Maturin “un des plus grands génies de l’Europe.”