XXII The Last Word
Two of the contributors to the stout Proust memorial number of La Nouvelle Revue Française remind me that I met Marcel Proust many years ago at a Christmas Eve party given by Madame Edwards (now Madame José Sert) in her remarkable flat on the Quai Voltaire, Paris. (Not that I needed reminding.) With some eagerness I turned up the year, 1910, in my journal. What I read there was this: “Doran came on Sunday night for dinner. We went on to Misia Edwards’ ‘Réveillon,’ and got home at 4 A.M.” Not a word more! And I cannot now remember a single thing that Proust said.
I have, however, a fairly clear recollection of his appearance and style: a dark, pale man, of somewhat less than forty, with black hair and moustache; peculiar; urbane; one would have said, an aesthete; an ideal figure, physically, for Bunthorne; he continually twisted his body, arms, and legs into strange curves, in the style of Lord Balfour as I have observed Lord Balfour in the restaurants of foreign hotels. I would not describe him as self-conscious; I would say rather that he was well aware of himself. Although he had then published only one book, Les Plaisirs et les Jours—and that fourteen years before—and although the book had had no popular success, Proust was undoubtedly in 1910 a considerable lion. He sat at the hostess’s own table and dominated it, and everybody at the party showed interest in him. Even I was somehow familiar with his name. As for Les Plaisirs et les Jours, I have not read it to this day.
A few weeks before his death, while searching for something else in an overcrowded bookcase, I came across my first edition of Du Côté de chez Swann, and decided to read the book again. I cared for it less, and I also cared for it more, than in 1913. The longueurs of it seemed to me to be insupportable, the clumsy centipedalian crawling of the interminable sentences inexcusable; the lack of form or construction may disclose artlessness, but it signifies effrontery too. Why should not Proust have given himself the trouble of learning to “write,” in the large sense? Further, the monotony of subject and treatment becomes wearisome. (I admit that it is never so distressing in Swann as in the later volumes of Guermantes and of Sodome et Gomorrhe.) On the other hand, at the second reading I was absolutely enchanted by some of the detail.
About two-thirds of Proust’s work must be devoted to the minutiæ of social manners, the rendering ridiculous of a million varieties of snob. At this game Proust is a master. (Happily he does not conceal that, with the rest of mankind, he loves ancient blood and distinguished connections.) He will write you a hundred pages about a fashionable dinner at which nothing is exhibited except the littleness and the naïveté of human nature. His interest in human nature, if intense and clairvoyant, is exceedingly limited. Foreign critics generally agree that the English novelist has an advantage over the French in that he walks all round his characters and displays them to you from every side. I have heard this over and over again in conversation in Paris, and I think it is fairly true, though certainly Balzac was the greatest exponent of complete display. Proust never “presents” a character; he never presents a situation: he fastens on one or two aspects of a character or a situation, and strictly ignores all the others. And he is scarcely ever heroical, as Balzac was always; he rarely exalts, and he nearly always depreciates—in a tolerant way.
Again, he cannot control his movements: he sees a winding path off the main avenue, and scampers away further and further and still further, merely because at the moment it amuses him to do so. You ask yourself: He is lost—will he ever come back? The answer is that often he never comes back, and when he does come back he employs a magic but illicit carpet, to the outrage of principles of composition which cannot be outraged in a work of the first order. This animadversion applies not only to any particular work, but to his work as a whole. The later books are orgies of self-indulgence; the work has ruined the moral of the author: phenomenon common enough.
Two achievements in Proust’s output I should rank as great. The first is the section of Swann entitled Un amour de Swann. He had a large theme here—love and jealousy. The love is physical and the object of it contemptible; the jealousy is fantastic. But the affair is handled with tremendous, grave, bitter, impressive power. The one fault of it is that he lets Swann go to a soirée musicale and cannot, despite several efforts, get him away from it in time to save the interest of the situation entire. Yet in the soirée musicale divagation there are marvellous, inimitable things.
The second achievement, at the opening of Sodome et Gomorrhe, is the psychological picture of the type-pederast. An unpromising subject, according to British notions! Proust evolves from it beauty, and a heartrending pathos. Nobody with any perception of tragedy can read these wonderful pages and afterwards regard the pervert as he had regarded the pervert before reading them. I reckon them as the high-water of Proust.
Speaking generally, Proust’s work declined steadily from Swann. A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs was a fearful fall, and as volume followed volume the pearls were strung more and more sparsely on the serpentine string. That Proust was a genius is not to be doubted; and I agree that he made some original discoveries in the by-ways of psychological fiction. But that he was a supreme genius, as many critics both French and English would have us believe, I cannot admit.
ARNOLD BENNETT.
The End
Footnotes
1 Mr. Birrell, whose essay, though first printed in The Dial, was written for inclusion in this volume, has kindly consented to my substituting for the original text my own versions of this and the following quotations from A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs and Du Côté de chez Swann respectively.—C.K.S.M.
2 See, however, my foot-note on page 106 and Pastiches et Mélanges, pp. 91-99.—C.K.S.M.
3 Reprinted from The Times of Wednesday, November 29, 1922. The Times had been almost alone among English newspapers in giving “publicity” to the death of Marcel Proust in its issue of Monday, November 20.—C.K.S.M.
4 The Times, Monday, November 20, 1922: “Marcel Proust: An Appreciation.” (From a Correspondent.)—C.K.S.M.
6 I am glad that the acknowledgement here of Mr. Walkley’s courtesy in allowing me to substitute my version for his of these two passages from A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs gives me an opportunity to acknowledge also my borrowing and to congratulate him upon the discovery of the word “mild”—“une véritable trouvaille,” as Norpois would undoubtedly have called it.—C.K.S.M.
7 In his article, published in The Times three weeks later, on December 20, 1922, Mr. Walkley replied to a criticism of this statement:—“The old complaint of ‘misrepresenting’ modern France is now beginning to be heard about the great novelist just dead, Marcel Proust. An eminent English novelist tackles me about this. He says Proust is not entitled to the highest rank in literature because his representation of French society is partial only, and therefore unfair; that he writes only of the Faubourg Saint-Germain set, which stands for the ‘dead’ France, and not of the ‘live’ people, soldiers and statesmen and others, who have made and are making France to-day. And he contrasts him with Balzac, who aimed at giving a panorama of the whole social scheme. Well, it strikes me as an unfortunate comparison. Balzac’s Comédie Humaine was like Zola’s Rougon-Macquart Family, a mere afterthought, a specious formula designed to suggest continuity and completeness in what was merely casual and temperamental. As a ‘representation of France’ it is not to be taken seriously; what it represents—like any other work of art—is its author’s genius. His men of action, his statesmen, his men of affairs, are, frankly, preposterous. Proust never set out to ‘represent’ France; he represented the side of its social life that happened to interest him. What he did magnificently represent was the hitherto unexplored in human nature and the human mind. As M. Jacques Rivière says of him in the current Nouvelle Revue Française, ‘The discoveries he has made in the human mind and heart will one day be considered as capital, and of the same rank as those of Kepler in astronomy, Claude Bernard in physiology, or Auguste Comte in the interpretation of the sciences.’ That strikes me as better work than producing a portrait-group of ‘Modern France,’ with General Lyautey arm-in-arm with Marshal Foch, and M. Clemenceau putting on his celebrated pearl-grey gloves.”—C.K.S.M.
8 Reprinted from The Times Literary Supplement of Thursday, January 4, 1923, where this article followed an English version of a formal tribute to Marcel Proust, signed by nineteen English men and women, which appeared (in French) in the special number of La Nouvelle Revue Française for January 1923. Mr. Middleton Murry had already written, at greater length (too great, indeed, for reproduction in this volume), on Marcel Proust in The Quarterly Review for July 1922.—C.K.S.M.
9 In another and rather complicated sense this is a presentiment of the future. The spires appear to have been those of Caen, the carriage a motor car, the year evidently much later. The original article will be found in Pastiches et Mélanges, on pp. 91 to 99.—C.K.S.M.
10 I.e., Les Plaisirs et les Jours, published in 1896, and Pastiches et Mélanges, which, strictly speaking, did not come as a volume until after A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs, in the spring of 1919. But of the Pastiches some at least had appeared in the Figaro in 1908 and 1909, while the Mélanges date even further, and include the introductions to Proust’s translations of Ruskin, La Bible d’Amiens (1904) and Sésame et les Lys (1906).—C.K.S.M.
12 Mr. Hussey, whose essay by his kindness and Mr. Filson Young’s I have been enabled to repeat from the Saturday Review, has, like Mr. Birrell, authorised the substitution of my version for the original text of these two quotations from A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs.—C.K.S.M.
13 Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 112 (N.S.), January 1923, pp. 201-2. The friend is M. Jacques de Lacretelle.—C.K.S.M.
14 This is, in fact, an extract from Mr. Conrad’s letter in reply to a request that he would justify the project of this volume by contributing to it.—C.K.S.M.
15 I.e., of Du Côté de chez Swann; the dinner at the Verdurins’ at which Forcheville is present for the first time with the Cottards, Brichot the painter, Swann, and Odette. It is only fair, to both critic and reader, to explain that Mr. Saintsbury had read nothing of Proust save Swann, and that only in an inadequate translation. On the other hand, it was as impossible for the editor to contemplate a book of this sort without a promise of collaboration from his old friend and master as it was, at the moment, for the doyen of English (if not of European, which is to say the world’s) critics to qualify himself for saying more than is printed on this leaf.—C.K.S.M.