FICTION

PROLTST.-4.

PRUDENCE and good nature have been keeping me quiet: about Proust. A year ago some twenty or thirty or forty English novelists and critics rose to adore him. Mr. Scott Monerieff, the translator of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu,. and the instigator of Marcel Proust : an English Tribute, succeeded in extracting eulogies from Joseph Conrad, Arnold. Bennett, George Saintsbury, Arthur Symons, A. B. Walkley,. John Middleton Murry—let us say everybody. And.perhaps one or two of them wrote in that same spirit of prudence and good nature (for it is not malicious, I think, to suggest that there were contributors who had never read more than a sentence or two of Proust) ; but at all events they were most mpressive in chorus. Wouldn't it give anyone a shock to find himself apparently at variance with the whole literary profession ? It was the more serious because there was an exception to this universal praise. Mr. George Moore would have nothing to do with Proust. I think I would side with any man in the world rather than with Mr. George Moore. I questioned myself anxiously, " Haven't I somehow lost balance ? Isn't it perverse and provincial to go on disparaging Proust ? Is there still in my nature some undisciplined moralism ? And anyhow, I myself haven't read much of him, comparatively, out of those fourteen volumes. Hadn't I better hide myself for a year or two and read them all ? "

But a prudent reviewer is a nuisance. He is prudent only in order to forestall a charge of bad taste and ignorance ; or to stop himself from arriving at any judgment at all. Or perhaps he thinks that his readers hold him in awe and spend their studious lives in weighing his lightest word. I should. never argue that a reviewer ought to pass hasty judgments : he ought to spend all the labour at his disposal in making his intuitions clear tb himself, till they reach the status of judgments ; then he should place them, speciously and—if

the occasion demands.—majestically, before his readers. His handbooks to teach him expression should be Whateley's Logic, Schopenhauer's Art of Controversy, and a pocket Life of Napoleon. He must be moderately civilized, that is to say ; but all the rest, the most incalculable and important part, hangs on the quality of his primary reactions ; and

those he must not manoeuvre ; he must never attempt to display himself as better than he really is ; he must lay himself open to be judged as freely as he himself is judging. As to Proust. then. If someone had asked me, in private and with no grandeur of approach, what I thought of Proust, I should probably have replied, " Quite interesting, but rather a bore." And that is ever so obviously no fit judgment for a review. It is here that Whateley comes in, I imagine. Opinion and expression must be purified and made lucid. After that, with help from Sehopenhauer, examples must be worked in to give an appearance of good sense and righteousness. Finally, the reviewer puts on a mood of taking himself seriously : I might call this exercise the Imitation of Napoleon. Marcel Proust, who throughout his life had suffered from a complicated and disastrous asthma, cutting him off from any quick succession of experience and from the sturdier joys of the body and the mind, when at last he was reduced to staying indoors and had the certain prospect of death before him, set himself with energy and persistence to the task of recalling the circle of diplomats and aristocrats among whom he had lived. It was an odd and rather laughable order of society, soon to fade out of the world, but still trailing with it a part of the old glory of systematic manners, leisure, cultivation, and coherent standards. His own childhood was to be por- trayed, too ; he was trying to bring back the sensations which had troubled that eccentric, hyperaesthetic body of his. As a man with rheumatism reacts uneasily and vividly to the approach of rain or cold winds, so he, with a hundred ailments about him, had been unusually affected by the smell or feel of everything in his vicinity. It was natural, too, that he should have a peculiar awareness to the relations of men with their fellows ; for his illnesses forced him into a detachment in which he could well observe such relations, and made them a chief interest for his mind.

It is not a great ambition to attempt to immortalize so straightforwardly the eke:411sta flees of one's own life, the whole of one's own past ; genius delights more in the creation: ofnew worlds than in the imitation of old, and the autobiographical novel corresponds, on the plane of literature, to the Egyptian mummy, to the demand for the immortality of the body. The ideal in this kind could keno more than an infinitely suggestive record of fact and of process of mind ; and, though it is true that life as it comes to us is the one true type of art, yet the past itself can never be exhaustively understood, and every re-creation of fact, from however many aspects viewed, must fall abysmally beneath the perfection of art : it is possible to approach perfection only by inyentinglacts from intuition ; for it will then happen that you understand exhaustively the fictitious universe of trhich you were yourself thesereator.

But even for the smaller and less dignified craft to which Proust devoted himself, he was in many ways ill-equipped. Instead of keeping his memory at its brightest and his analysis at its keenest, he allowed himself rather to dream through his past, he cast himself back into the sentiment, not the sensation, of his life. We find Proust (whom Joseph Conrad mistook for a supreme analyst) continually perverting his characters into stock types, continually taking romantic and false instances.

" Which of us cannot call to mind some royal princess," he asks, " of limited intelligence, who let herself be carried

off by a footman . ? " " As When- a millionaire . . ."

" As when a, lunatic. . ." " As a barber, seeing an officer whom he is accustomed to shave with special deference and care recognize a customer who has just entered the shop and stop for a moment to talk to him, rejoices in the thought that these are two men of the same social order, and cannot help smiling as he goes to fetch the bowl of soap . . ." The illus- trations are pleasant, but they are repetitive, literary, novelet- tish almost. And when thoj appear in the narrative we are warned that Proust is engaged in slumber while he professes to be engaged in concentration. _ But the unreality of the characters is a graver defect. M. de Norpois, for example, is a pompous diplomat ; and he represents, in this half realistic book, no more than that " humour " of pompousness. The portrait, we may say, is satirical and amusing ; and to some extent that is true : but he bulks too largely in the book and is introduced too seriously for our comfort. Consider how we can trust the portraiture of other characters after reading M. de Norpois' commendation of a young acquaintance who has taken to literature :-

" Ho published two years ago—of course, he's much older than you, you understand—a book dealing with the Sense of the Infinite on the Western Shore of Victoria Nyanza, and this year he has brought out a little thing, not so important as the other, but very brightly, in places perhaps almost too pointedly written, on the Repeating Rifle in the Bulgarian Army ; and these have put him quite in a class by hirpself. He's gone pretty far already, and he's not the sort of man to stop half-way ; I happen to know that (without any suggestion, of course, of his standing for election) his name has been mentioned several times in conversation, and not at all unfavourably, at the Academy of Moral Sciences. And so, one can't say yet, of course, that he has reached the pinnacle of fame, still he has made his way, by sheer industry, to a very fine position indeed, and success—which doesn't come only to agitators and mischief-makers and men who make trouble which is usually more than they are prepared to take—success has crowned his efforts."

Even 'where we should expect' the clearest triumphs for Proust, in the description of sensuous images, we are disap- pointed ; for he remembers so little the occasion of his sensa- tion, and so much the depth of his reaction, that he can give us no picture of circumstances, he can evoke no answering image in ourselves ; we can only listen with scepticism and a forced interest to his descriptions. We may find that his insistence upon his sensitiveness has " suggested " to us that we are perceiving with a new intensity ; but if we come

away with violent impressions, we have charitably put them there ourselves.

The truth is that Proust was chiefly an aphorist ; and he was delicate and witty in the art of the aphorism. It is an attitude of culture and level-headedness which is the cause of the French epigram, and Once this attitude is attained it will illuminate everything with an easy and equal light. " The bonds that unite us to another creature," Proust writes, " receive their consecration when that creature adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imper- fections " ; and the sentence might have been taken from Stendhal or from Constant. And again : " Generosity is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them." It is more in the application of his talent than in its quality that Proust is original.

– ANDREW CAREY.

[This article will be concluded in next week's Spectator.]