“ For Proust combines, to a degree never before realised in literature, the qualities of the aesthete and the scientist. It is the quality which first strikes the reader who does not notice, in the aesthetic rapture communicated by perfect style, that all pleasures are made pegs for disillusion. Human beauty, the beauty of buildings, of the sea, of the sky, the beauty of transmitted qualities in families and in the country-side, the beauty of history, of good breeding, of self-assurance—few people have felt these things as Proust. ”

“ But here, happening in our own days, is an obvious instance of this contemporary blindness; and I, at least, as I read the little Proust’s first volume, and see spread so clearly before me, as in the light of a beautiful dawn, the world of his creation, try to make myself believe that if the noontide of his genius had never illuminated that world and made it familiar to me, that if Proust had never lived to write Swann and the Guermantes, I too should be as blind as were his friends to its beauty and merits. ”

“ The more we study the great writers of all ages, and the more we observe for ourselves, the more we realise that the world never alters; we can only ring the changes on the same material. Harmony and discord, beauty and ugliness! It is like a gramophone disc. The records vary, the melodies, the arrangements, make their individual effect, but the substance is the same.-82- The Masters make their records on an unchanging surface. Marcel Proust’s is a magnificent record; perhaps the most brilliant ever achieved. It requires only that we bring to it a sympathetic and sharp-pointed needle. ”

“ Proust made Swann a financier, a Jew, and gave him a German name, because, I think, he wished to indicate to our subconscious judgments a cause of Swann’s curious racial patience, his waiting on and deference to the caprice of others. He allows life “to ride” him, Mme. Verdurin-116- to patronise him, Odette to make him love her: just as the trees let the winds lash their boughs and break them, as rivers, flattened and contradicted by raindrops, flow on all the same under a grey sky. ”

“ Within the flux of our past and our present, figures outside ourselves seem to rise, to move, to act. But such movements have reality only in so far as they are reflected in the unique mirror of a soul. And for Proust this mirror is combined of the individual and his memory.
No wonder if such a novelist is sometimes called difficult. He is too like life to be easy. ”

“ For Albertine is not only Albertine “simple image dans le décor de la vie” when later she calls on him in Paris; her image trails the multitudinous sensations of A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs; and though he no longer loves her, the appearances she had for him at Balbec, silhouetted against the sea or sitting with her back to the cliff, bring back with them the influence of that love. We are far from what we believed a thing with a definite appearance, a girl, and perhaps the example may indicate faintly the complexity of Proust’s art. ”

“ Such, in his rare moments of prodigal creation, was the power of Tolstoy, whom Proust in some ways so much resembles. Such is the gift of Proust in his astonishing pseudo-autobiography, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. For it is the sense of imaginative wealth and creative facility that is the hallmark of the first-rate genius, who must never appear to be reaching the end of his tether, but must always, on the contrary, leave the impression of there being better fish in his sea than have ever come out of it. ”

“ Proust has some of the corrupt mysticism of Huysmans, but not so perilous as his; nor has he that psychology which can be carried so far into the soul’s darkness that the flaming walls of the world themselves fade to a glimmer; he does not chronicle the adventures of this world’s Vanity Fair: he is concerned with the revelation of the subconscious self; his hero’s confessions are not the exaltation of the soul. He is concerned, not so much with adventures as with an almost cloistral subtlety in regard to the obscure passions which work themselves out, never with any actual logic. ”

“ In life, that is to say, the more important a character is to us the more we are thrown back for our ultimate knowledge on the emotions aroused by that character in ourselves. In fiction it is usually the other way about. It is his central figures whom the novelist pretends to know best. Proust, however, has recognised this discrepancy with scientific clearness. He devotes himself, therefore, where his important women are concerned—aside from the very minimum of detached, objective observations—to a presentment of the effect they have upon the men that love them. ”

“ Proust’s books are the autobiography of a sensitive soul, for whom the visible world exists; only, he could never say with Gautier, “I am a man for whom the visible world exists”; for in this famous phrase he expresses his outlook on life, and his view of his own work: Gautier, who literally discovered descriptive prose, a painter’s prose by preference; who, in prose and in verse alike, is the poet of physical beauty, of the beauty of the exterior of things. Proust, with his adoration of beauty, gives one an equal sense of the beauty of exterior things and of physical beauty ”

“ In his feverish attempt to explain himself to himself, his imaginary hero reminds me of Rousseau, who, having met Grimm and vexed Voltaire, was destined by his febrile and vehement character to learn in suffering what he certainly did not teach in song; who, being avid of misunderstandings, was forced by the rankling thorns of his jealousy to write his Confessions, in which he unburdens himself of the exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, driven, in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people—a coward before his own conscience. ”

“ Proust, having thus reduced all human society to misery, builds upon the ruins his philosophy of salvation: Only by much suffering shall we enter into the Kingdom of Heaven—that is to say, shall we be enabled to see ourselves solely and simply as members of the human race, to perceive what is essential and fundamental in everybody beneath the trappings of manners, birth, or fortune, learn to be really intelligent. Love and jealousy alone can open to us the portals of intelligence. ”

“ And one can easily imagine some triply disillusioned soul, rebuffed of love and ambition and the fount of life itself, entering on a course of the Master, content to live, lullabyed by the slight movement as of flickering woodland leaves, warmed by the soft light that falls on grey cathedral walls and white, dusty roads, quietly appreciative of the Master’s passionless, infallible display of the complications and unconscious betrayals of their ego by Françoise and Tante Léonie, Odette and the Duchess ”

“ In many ways Anatole France’s description of him as the ingenuous Petronius of our times is extremely intelligent. And our times are in many ways extremely like the days in which Petronius wrote. There is an aristocracy that has lost its raison d’être, and a continual flow of new plutocrats without traditions, without taste, without any object in life beyond spending to the best of their power of self-advertisement. The faith in the old social order has gone, and nothing new has arisen to take its place. Where we differ entirely from that age is in self-consciousness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is why there is no intellectual or logical means of checking Proust’s observations. Either we accept them as he gives them, emotionally, or we reject them as meaningless. He has, he repeatedly tells us, no faith in intellectual observation, neither will he presume upon logical deduction in questions of human feeling. He quietly discards that assumption of god-like knowledge for which we have come to look so confidently in our writers of fiction. He will have none of the sympathetic imagination that “puts itself in another’s place.” ”

“ Whether he writes of a woman or a musical theme, of a love affair or of trees in the park, he never forgets that in the very act of observing there are several elements to be reckoned with. The thing observed may seem to casual eyes fixed like the three steeples. But Proust knows better. He knows that he himself is moving, that within him his past is in a different kind of motion, dictating, suggesting, comparing,-71- reminding, side-tracking, and that therefore the steeples themselves are never in reality still. Nothing in life is stable. ”

“ THE BIRTH OF A CLASSIC THE pictures we make, for our own satisfaction, of our actions are generally as remote as the clichés of polite conversation from the psychological processes they pretend to reflect. It is convenient and very often necessary to limit consciousness of an action so that it receives a distinct and recognisable contour. With a certain resemblance to the achievement of the Impressionists, who revealed the fabric of a world worked-over with conceptual images, Proust breaks up the moulds into which our feelings are generally poured. ”

“ In this respect Marcel Proust’s book may be fairly said to bristle with difficulties. Its obvious theme, its surface intention, as we perceive it in the brilliant opening pages of Du côté de chez Swann, is the presentation by an adult man of his memories of childhood. We feel, though with peculiar qualifications to which we must return, that we are on the threshold of a spiritual autobiography; we are to be the enchanted witnesses of the unfolding and growth of a strangely sensitive consciousness. ”

“ Treating this important social phenomenon as neither more nor less important than it is, he has derived from it new material for his study of social relations, and has greatly enriched and complicated the texture of his plot. His extreme honesty meets nowhere with more triumphant rewards. It is by the splendid use of so much unusual knowledge that Proust gains his greatest victories as a pure novelist. Royalty, actresses, bourgeois, servants, peasants, men, women, and children—they all have the genuine third dimension and seem to the reader more real than his own friends. ”