VI A Reader’s Gratitude
A French uncle of mine once took me as a boy to visit a distinguished mathematician who lived with his melons and his roses on the outskirts of a small town in the Lyonnais. On the way thither I was admonished not to interrupt with foolish questions what I was given to suppose would be an important inquiry by two learned men into the origin of the universe: Monsieur X—— would never have me inside his house again if I could not behave myself better than most of the children of the present day. We waited for our host in a large musty room of subdued sunlight, where not even a fly buzzed and where the only hint of life was the shadow of a passing bird across the yellow blind or the quivering filigree of a reflected bough. Presently Monsieur X—— came in to greet us; but without showing any inclination to discuss philosophy with my uncle he led us to some chairs and a table set out upon the sparse turf under what I think must have been a big catalpa tree. Here he heaped my plate with cakes and fruit and sweets, insisted that I was old enough to drink two glasses of a cordial, and, when he did begin to talk, talked most entertainingly about his neighbours.
Gratitude may be childhood’s greatest embarrassment; not merely the verbal expression of thanks, but the emotion itself, which the more deeply it is felt, the more miserably it is involved in shame. As we grow older, we learn what is called politeness; and although we are still capable of being confused by and of actually suffering from excess of gratitude, we have learnt to cover that speechless confusion and pain with a glib phrase like ‘I do not know how to thank you.’ But the child’s silence does convey the depth of his gratitude; and even as I hung my head in silent embarrassment when I was invited to thank Monsieur X—— for his kindness, so now when I ought to be thanking Marcel Proust, against interrupting whose discourse I have been as it were warned by the respect accorded to him by our uncles the critics, but who when I met him as a reader filled my plate with one delicious fruit and sweet and cake after another (steeped those cakes in tisane of limeflowers or tea), I feel incapable of expressing gratitude; and I fear to indulge in criticism, lest I should be just one more uncle standing between Proust and that innocent, appreciative, timorous, awkward child, the public.
If I say that I regard Proust as the only completely satisfying poetical record, the most important literary phenomenon of our time, I feel that I am involved in an argument with people who think that the relentless effusion of modern verse has more significance than, let us say, a bath tap which has been left running. And I simply do not want to argue about what I enjoy. If I say that Proust represents the apex hitherto reached by the feminine or realistic art of this age, just as Stendhal represents the culmination of the masculine or ideological art of the eighteenth century, or that Proust arrives at the general through an incredibly sensitive exploration of the particular, whereas Stendhal achieves the particular by his exquisite consciousness of the general, I am involved in a lecture. And I simply do not want to lecture about what I enjoy. The trouble is that, in order to demonstrate Proust to people who have not read him, one ought to have as subtle a power of evocation, as rich a manner of suggestion as Proust himself, who could, I believe, make even a dream interesting, so that we should live in that dream and extract from it the essential flavour of its peculiarity as authentically as the dreamer. That is why Proust writes of childhood with such magic. He manages to recognize, in the complication of events that merely occur and are forgotten, the ideal duration in which they were imbedded and which gave them their material weight and spiritual portentousness. It is only in childhood, or at any rate only in isolated fragments of time later, that we possess at all intimately this sense of duration when objects appeal to us as their essential selves, as pure energies. At other periods we value them according as they forward our lives, according as they are useful to us, and thus we lose our sense of their independent existence. I have just read once more the Combray chapter (marvellously enshrined in a translation that, like the translation of a saint’s bones, destroys not a bit of their efficacy), and I have laid it aside, thinking of Leopardi’s Ricordanze and listening to where, under the scintillations of the Great Bear,
sotto al patrio tetto
sonavan voci alterne, e le tranquille
opre de’ servi.
COMPTON MACKENZIE.