Marcel Proust, an English Tribute

by Unknown

But Proust, like Montaigne and like Racine, besides having an extreme sensitiveness to all forms of beauty and ugliness, happiness and misery, that he has met in his social existence, has also read widely in the works of other sensitive men, has compared their impressions with each other and with his own, has learnt from their successes and failures; he is armed with more than his natural equipment, has more eyes to see through than his own. Actually his books are filled from end to end with criticisms of music, of painting, of literature, not in the way that is unfortunately familiar in this country, as unassimilated chunks in the main stream of the narrative, but as expressions of the opinions of different characters.

This is not the only, nor indeed the chief, advantage that a wide experience in other arts, and other men’s art, has given him. What is of more importance is the attitude that springs from it of seeing historically the age and society in which he lives. Nothing for him stands still, not even to-day; and, because he realises that to-day itself will to-morrow be only part of the stream of the past, he can view it with the same calmly passionate interest as that which we bring to the discoveries at Luxor. As few men are to-day, he appears to be “au-dessus de la mêlée,” not, like the ancient gods, “careless of mankind,” but curious, acutely sympathetic, and able at any moment to bring his own experience and the experience of a thousand other men in tens of other centuries to the understanding of one small case at the tiny point of time which is momentarily under his observation.

To give any idea of the plot of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu—and it has a plot, and a very closely knit one, too (how closely one only begins to realise after several re-readings)—is, of course, out of the question. Its form is that of an imaginary autobiography, and it is obvious that much genuine autobiography is inextricably woven with work of imagination. The first book (Du Côté de chez Swann) is occupied in part by memories of childhood, and in part, as it seems at first, by another story altogether, the account of a love affair of M. Swann’s. Of course this story is not a mere excrescence, but it is only slowly, as the later books are read, that we begin to see Proust’s immense cunning in introducing us early in the novel to Swann’s affairs. For they have a purpose beyond the fact that Swann becomes in time a friend of the young man, who is then in his childhood, and beyond the fact that he is very intimately mixed up with many others of the most important characters in the book. And this purpose is that of a prelude to the later and fuller story. It is, as it were, a standing example at the outset of the truism that no one ever learns by the mistakes of others—that what has been will be again in the next generation, with only the mere outward changes which time and place impose. In the second book (A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs) we accompany the hero (it is one of the significant curiosities of Proust, akin to his refusal to divide his book into chapters, that never once is this hero named in the whole course of the work) to the seaside, and feel with him the emotions of an acutely sensitive boy just growing into manhood. And the remaining books are all occupied more or less with his efforts to assimilate the new social worlds in Paris and at Balbec Plage which are opening out before his curious and very sharply observant eyes.

There are those who, after enjoying the first two books, have complained rather bitterly of the succeeding ones. One charge against Proust seems to be that he deals more than is necessary with what are called “unpleasant” subjects and people; another is clearly, though not usually put into so few words, that he is a snob. As regards the first charge, it is true that Proust, like most French writers, is apt to claim with Terence, Humani nihil a me alienum puto; to urge that he is ever coarse, that he is ever anything, in fact, but extremely discriminating in his touch, is, as a matter of fact, absurd. But the other charge is more valuable because, while mistaken, it does emphasise a side of Proust’s interests in life which is of some considerable significance. It is true that Proust is extremely interested not only in individuals but in those extensions of personality which are classes, cliques, bodies of men and women, which, however formed, by coming together succeed in developing a sort of communal outlook upon life. It is true also that a good deal of the book is occupied with two of these classes in particular, both of them rich, the aristocracy and the pushing bourgeoisie that likes to employ the artist and the intellectual as “stepping-stones from their dead selves to higher things.” But to call this interest snobbery is, surely, a sign of rather careless reading. It is to assume that the naïveté of the young man’s first adoration of the old families of France, long before he had learnt to know them, is, in fact, the attitude of Proust himself. Even in the case of the young man snobbery seems a hard term for his actual state of mind.

Nor could we ever reach that goal to which I longed so much to attain, Guermantes itself. I knew that it was the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who did actually exist, but whenever I thought about them I pictured them to myself either in tapestry, as was the “Coronation of Esther” which hung in our church, or else in changing rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad in his window, where he passed from cabbage green when I was dipping my fingers in the holy-water stoup, to plum-blue when I had reached our row of chairs; or again altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève de Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the magic lantern sent wandering over the curtains of my room or flung aloft upon the ceiling—in short, always wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age, and bathed, as in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the resounding syllable antes. And if in spite of that they were for me, in their capacity as a duke and duchess, real people, though of an unfamiliar kind, this ducal personality was in its turn enormously distended, immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that Guermantes of which they were duke and duchess, all that sunlit “Guermantes way” of our walks, the course of the Vivonne, its water-lilies and its overshadowing trees, and an endless series of hot summer afternoons.

Is there any wonder that this young poet—and he was very young—when first he meets the Duchess in real life, and is welcomed into the select circle of her friends, should feel tremendously excited? But snob is not the right word.

As a fact, of course, what these complainants have missed is the use to which this aristocratic circle has been put in the life-history of the hero. For Proust, like any writer that can be read over and over again, has stamped his work through and through with his own peculiarly coloured personal psychology. And if there is one theme that is being insistently played throughout the whole work (like Swann’s and Odette’s phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata), in incident after incident, in the adventures of one character after another, it is that theme of sadness that no ideal state is attainable in this world, not so much because we cannot climb, nor even because the ideal becomes illusion on attainment, but because the object to which we attach our ideal is, of necessity, not seen as it really is, but always as we long for it to be. This, with its complement that the mere fact of not being able to possess may lead to desire even when the object in itself does not seem very desirable, is at the very heart of Proust’s philosophy.

This worship of his hero’s for aristocracy is only an incident in this continual theme. It is in essence exactly the same as all his other deceptions. When Gilberte was the beautifully dressed child of his idol, Swann, surrounded by a halo of romance owing to her friendship with the writer Bergotte, and when she appeared to look down on his advances, there was nothing on earth he would not give, nothing he would not do, to obtain her friendship. Yet when once that friendship is attained the interest in her fades away imperceptibly till she plays no more part in his life than a memory of what was once so bitterly wanted. So it is with the petite bande of young girls at Balbec while it presented a united and exclusive front to the world. So it is with the chief of that band, Albertine herself. Desirable while she has held aloof, she becomes through knowledge, through the loss of that mystery which had existed, as it always does, not in her, but only in him who longed for her, almost boring. He is on the point of leaving her, of finishing with the liaison once and for all. Suddenly all is changed. He has reason to doubt her complete faithfulness to him. With the pain of this doubt love is once more awakened, and at the end of the last published volume we leave him on the point of rushing off to Paris to marry her. This, again, is the whole meaning of Swann’s marriage with the vulgar and impossible Odette de Crécy. It is the continual theme of all the pitiable deceptions of M. de Charlus. “Besides,” he says in one place,

the mistresses with whom I have been most in love have never coincided with my love for them. True love it must have been, since I subordinated everything else in the world to the chance of seeing them, of keeping them to myself, and would burst into tears if, one evening, I had heard them speak. But they themselves must be regarded rather as endowed with the property of arousing that love, of raising it to its paroxysm, than as being its embodiments.... You would have said that a virtue which had nothing to do with them had been arbitrarily attached to them by Nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-galvanic power, had the effect on me of exciting my love—that is to say, of controlling all my actions and causing all my sorrows. But from this the looks or the brains or the favours shown me by these women were entirely distinct.

It is in this setting, then, that one must think of the young man’s fascination by what was after all far the most socially charming circle that he could have entered. The desire for a real aristocracy, not merely of brains, but surrounded by all the wealth of history and legend, is understandable enough. The only doubt is whether its representatives exist. But in Proust himself the charm undoubtedly is a subtler thing than that. It has something of the appeal of a dead religion for him. While it was still a power in the world one would have found him in opposition, as the Prince de Guermantes found himself in opposition to the army authorities when at last, and at such pain to himself, he began to suspect their conduct of the Dreyfus case. But aristocracy as a power in France is dead; it is only the ritual, the historic associations, the complete existence of a little world within a world, that remain.