The final volumes of Marcel Proust's novel have at last been published (Le Temps Retrouvé. Paris: Librairie Gallimard) and it has now for the first time become possible to judge the work as a whole. A La Recherche du Temps Perdu has been peculiarly unfortunate in the conditions under which it has had to appear. The whole book was written by Proust between 1906 and 1912. The first section was published in the November of 1913, on the eve of the War. The publication of the second section, of which the proofs had already been printed when war was declared, was postponed until after the Armistice. At this time, Proust expressed a desire to have the whole book (which, in the meantime, he was rewriting so as to include the War) published at once in four volumes; but the publishers would only consent to bring out A l'Ombre des jeunes Filles en Fleur by itself. The other volumes, however, followed at intervals of a year, until Proust's death in 1922. This created another obstacle: we can well believe that the difficulties of the editors in deciphering Proust's manuscript and correcting the text were extreme. In any case, Albertine Disparue did not appear until 1925; and Le Temps Retrouvé has only just brought the story to its conclusion, fourteen years after the appearance of the beginning and five years after Proust's death.
It has thus been peculiarly difficult, not merely to estimate Proust's success as an artist, but even to read him properly. The situation seems to have got on his nerves: he is always worrying in his letters for fear the early part of his novel, read without the rest, may seem incoherent and meaningless, or protesting against critics who have accused him of following a random association of ideas: "Where I was looking for fundamental laws, I was described as preoccupied with detail." What astonishes us today, with the whole enormous book before us, is the steadiness and the logic with which he has carried out so vast a design, his complete mastery of his complex subject; and it is worth while to review the whole work, making such reflections as would have been impossible with anything less than the whole before us.
Proust's novel is, then, a symphonic structure rather than, in the ordinary sense, a narrative. Like so many other important modern writers, Proust had been reared in the school of symbolism and had all the symbolist's preoccupation with musical effects. Like many of his generation, he was probably as deeply influenced by Wagner as by any writer of books, and it is characteristic of his conception of his art that he was in the habit of speaking of the "themes" of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. The book begins with what is really an overture, of which it is important, as we shall see later, to note the first chord: "Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure," followed by a second sentence inwhich the word "temps" twice recurs. It is the vague world of sleep: the narrator, in his darkened room, has lost all sense of external reality, all perception even of the room itself. He fancies himself in other places where, in the course of his life, he has slept: a child at his grandfather's house; a visitor in a country house; at a summer hotel; in winter in a military town; in Paris; at Venice. "Ah, at last I've fallen asleep, even though mother never came to say good-night!" This is the first theme to be developed: we find ourselves in the grandfather's house. M. Swann is coming to dinner, and the boy's father sends him to bed without his mother's good-night kiss. The child is sensitive and nervous: he cannot sleep till his mother has kissed him. He sends her a note by the maid, but she refuses to come. The child is in anguish. He lies for hours awake, till he hears the door-bell ring and knows that M. Swann has left. Then he goes out into the hallway and throws himself upon his mother, as she is coming up to bed. She is angry at first: she and his grandmother, who are already aware of his tendency toward morbid sensibility, have adopted with him a policy of firmness. But the father takes pity on him and induces the mother to go in and comfort him. She reads him to sleep and spends the night in his room.
Thereafter we are introduced to a variety of personages associated with Combray, the small provincial town where the boy's grandfather lives: a hypochondriac aunt who refuses to stir from her bed; a provincial snob who longs to know the great people of the countryside, the Guermantes; an unhappy old music teacher, whom everybody pities because his daughter has disgraced him. M. Swann has married beneath him and comes to stay, with his wife and daughter, at his estate outside the town. The memories of boyhood are suddenly dropped and Proust tells us at length about Swann's marriage: though rich and in smart society, he falls in love, rather late in life, with a stupid cocotte, who drives him mad with jealousy. When Du Côté de chez Swann first appeared, even those who recognized its genius were troubled by its apparent lack of direction. Today, we can admire the ingenuity with which Proust, in these first pages of his book, has succeeded in introducing nearly every important character. And not merely every strand of his plot, but also every philosophic theme. We are able here to observe already one feature which all of his characters appear to exhibit in common. All seem to be suffering from some form of unsatisfied longing or disappointed hope: all are sick with some form of the ideal. Legrandin wants to know the Guermantes; Vinteuil is wounded in his love for his daughter; Swann, associating,the beauty of Odette with that of the women of Botticelli, identifies his passion for her, ridiculously and tragically, with all the neglected artistic ambitions which he has always desired to pursue. At the end of the history of Swann, we are back in the narrator's boyhood: he has himself conceived a romantic admiration for the beautiful, Mme. Swann and he makes a practice of waiting for her in the Bois de Boulogne merely to see her pass. This very November, he concludes, he has happened to walk in the Bois: the trees were brilliant with autumn; he describes the cold beauty of the day; but it is entirely a different beauty from the beauty which once intoxicated him. "The reality which I had known existed no longer. Because Mme. Swann did not arrive at the same time as when I was young and looking as I used to see her, the Avenue seemed quite different. The places which we have known do not belong only to the world of space, where we locate them for convenience. They have been only a narrow slice among other adjacent impressions which made up our life of that time; the memory of a certain image is only the regret of a certain instant; and the houses, the roads and the avenues are fugitive, alas! like the years."
Proust had at one time had the idea of dividing his novel into three parts and calling them respectively: "The Age of Names," "The Age of Words," and "The Age of Things." We are now in the age of names: we see everything--love, art and the great--through the imagination of boyhood. A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleur is, as it were, one long revery. It contains only one conspicuous episode. The boy falls in love with the daughter of Swann, with whom he plays in the Champs-Elysées. But the hysterical over-eagerness, the undisciplined need to lean excessively on other people, of the spoiled child he has become, now that his parents have already begun to treat him like an invalid who must be humored and indulged, end by exasperating the little girl and rendering her indifferent. She snubs him one day, and he is still able to muster enough strength of will to satisfy his wounded pride by breaking off with her: he betrays his weakness, however, by carrying his policy to the extreme of refusing ever to see her again.
As I have said, we have been submerged through these volumes-and for most tastes, have been submerged far too long-in the reveries of adolescence. But people who have stuck in the "Jeunes Filles en Fleur" and thus know only the subjective Proust inevitably acquire a quite false idea of what his genius is like. We are now to be violently thrown forward into the life of the world outside. The contrast between, on the one hand, the dreams, the broodings and the repinings of the neurasthenic hero, as we get them for such long stretches, and, on the other, the vivid and elaborate social scenes, dramatized and animated by so powerful a vitality, is one of the most curious features of the book. These latter scenes, indeed, contain so much broad humor and so much violent satire, in short, so much extravagance, that, coming in a modern French novel, they amaze us. Proust, however, was much addicted to English literature: "It is strange," he writes in a letter, "that, in the most widely different departments, from George Eliot to Hardy, from Stevenson to Emerson, there should be no other literature which exercises over me so powerful an influence as English and American." In the descriptive parts of the early volumes, we have recognized the rhythms of Ruskin; and in the social scenes which now engage us, though Proust has been compared to Henry James, who was deficient in precisely those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, we shall look in vain for anything like them outside the novels of Dickens. We have already been struck, in Du Côté de chez Swann, with the singular relief into which the characters were thrown as soon as they began to speak or act.
I feel sure that Proust had read Dickens and that this almost grotesque heightening of character had been partly learned from him. Proust, like Dickens, was a remarkable mimic: as Dickens enchanted his audiences by, dramatic readings from his novels, so, we are told, Proust was celebrated for impersonations of his friends; and both, in their books, carried the gift of caricaturing habits of speech and of inventing things for their personages to say which are almost invariably outrageous without ever ceasing to be characteristic, to a point where it becomes impossible to compare them to anybody but each other. As, furthermore, it has been said of Dickens that his villains are so amusing--in their fashion, so generously alive--that we are reluctant to see the last of them, so we acquire a curious affection for even the most objectionable characters in Proust: Morel, for example, is certainly one of the most odious figures in fiction, yet we never really hate him or wish we did not have to hear about him, and it is with a genuine regret that Mme. Verdurin, with her false teeth and her monocle, finally vanishes from our sight. This generous sympathy and understanding for even the monstrosities which humanity produces, and Proust's capacity for galvanizing them into energetic life, are at the bottom of the extraordinary success of the comic and tragic hero of Proust's Sodom, M. de Charlus. But Charlus surpasses Dickens and, as Edith Wharton has said, is almost comparable to Falstaff. In a letter in which Proust explains that he has borrowed certain traits of Charlus from a real person, he adds that the character in the book is, however, intended to be "far bigger," to "contain much more of humanity"; and it is one of the strange paradoxes of Proust's genius that he should have been able to create in a character so special a figure of heroic proportions and universal significance.
Nor is it only in these respects that Proust reminds us of Dickens. The incidents, as well as the characters, in Proust are sometimes of a violent grotesqueness almost unprecedented in French: Mme. Verdurin dislocating her jaw through laughing at one of Cottard's jokes, the furious smashing by the narrator of Charlus's hat and the latter's calm substitution of another hat in its place, are strokes which no one but Dickens would dare. This heightening in Dickens is theatrical; and we sometimes--though considerably less often--get the same impression in Proust that we are watching a look or a gesture deliberately underlined on the stage--so that Charlus's first encounter with the narrator, when the former looks at his watch and makes "the gesture of annoyance with which one aims to create the impression that one is tired of waiting, but which one never makes when one is actually waiting," and Bloch's farewell to Mme. de Villeparisis, when she attempts to snub him by closing her eyes, seem to take place in the same world as Lady Dedlock's swift second glance at the legal papers in her lover's writing and Mr. Merdle's profound stare into his hat, "as if it were some twenty feet deep," when he has come to borrow the penknife with which he is to kill himself. And I furthermore believe that there is plainly distinguishable in the Verdurin circle an unconscious reminiscence of the Veneerings of Our Mutual Friend: note especially the similarity between theroles played by Twemlow in the latter and in the former by Saniette.
To return, however, the structure of the novel now begins to appear. Proust has made of these social scenes (often several hundred pages long) enormous solid blocks, cemented by, or rather embedded in, a dense medium of introspective revery and commentary mingled with incidents treated on a smaller scale. Proust's handling of these complex social scenes is masterly: it is only in the intermediate sections that we feel he has blurred his effects by allowing the outline of the action to become obscured by the profusion of the hero's reflections on it. We become further aware that these main scenes follow a regular progression. In the early "flashback" to the life of Swann which has been described above, we have already assisted at two social scenes on something less than the full scale. First of all, Swann has gone to dinner at the Verdurins', at whose house he first knows Odette: the Verdurins are outside society altogether and pretend to think smart people "tiresome." They are extremely vulgar bourgeois, who, however, have a furious appetite for entertaining artists and other persons whom they consider clever. Later on, we see Swann at an evening party given by Euverte: a few smart people go to Mme. De Sainte-Euverte's, but they do so with a clear consciousness of being kind to her.
In the part of the book at which we have now arrived, the part which is predominantly social, the narrator first attends an afternoon reception at the house of Mme. de Villeparisis, an aunt of the Guermantes, who, though still on good terms with her family, has at the same time become rather déclassée by reason of a scandalous past, but who is a step above Mme. de Saint-Euverte, as Mme. de Saint-Euverte is a step above Mme. Verdurin; then, a dinner at the house of the Duchesse de Guermantes, who, though one of the smartest hostesses in Paris, occupies not quite the most exalted rank; and finally an evening reception held by the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes, representatives of German royal families and, not merely of the purest blood, but of the most inviolable dignity and correctitude. In the latter part of the book, we shall assist at three more of these scenes: in the first two, we return to the Verdurins, into whose salon the people from the upper strata have now, for one reason or another, begun to filter down; and in the last, which occupies the last chapter, we return to the top again, to the Prince de Guermantes's, at whose matinee we encounter, not only Legrandin and the Saint-Euvertes, but also Odette and a son of the valet of the narrator's uncle; and where the new Princesse de Guermantes turns out to be none other than Mme. Verdurin, whom the Prince, ruined by the defeat of Germany, has married for her money.
In the meantime, however, to return to the section we have been discussing (Le Côté de Guermantes and the first part of Sodome et Gomorrhe), which is principally concerned with the "world" and with worldly people, we here begin also to understand for the first time the author's moral attitude. We are presented with three great social episodes, separated only by briefer incidents and each following the same formula and pointing the same moral. The first of these, the narrator's debut at Mme. de Villeparisis's, is followed immediately by the death of the grandmother, which serves entirely to discredit the values of the snobs with whom the hero has lately been consorting. The grandmother, who has long been ill, goes out for a walk with the boy in the Champs-Elysées. While she has gone to the toilet, the grandson overhears the conversation of the woman who tends the toilet with the keeper of the grounds: "I choose my clients," she explains, "I don't receive everybody in what I call my salons!" The grandmother returns: she also has overheard the conversation: "It sounded exactly like the Guermantes and the Verdurins," she says, as they walk away; and she quotes, as is her habit, from Mme. de Sevigne. But she keeps her head turned away in order to conceal from the boy that she has just had a paralytic stroke. In a flash, by the goodness of the grandmother, for whom any sort of meanness or malice, for whom any sort of snobbery or worldliness, are impossible, Proust has swept down the whole web of social relations which he has just been at such pains to spin.
The next episode, the dinner at the Duchesse de Guermantes's, is followed by thevisit of Swann to the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes just as they are leaving for a costume ball. Swann, with one of those lapses of taste which we have been told are characteristic of him, clumsily discloses the fact that he has justbeen warned by the doctors that he is dying. But the Guermiantes are made to behave with far worse taste than Swann, for they are so much preoccupied with getting to the ball, they take their social activities so much more seriously than anything else, that they cannot even attempt to think of anything human to say, in this distressing situation, to a man who is an old friend of both and whom the Duchesse, at least, admires. In the third episode, Swann appears at the reception of the Prince de Guermantes during the bitterest period of the Dreyfus case: Swann is a Jew and has sided with the Dreyfusards; and he is not so wellreceived as formerly. The Prince takes him aside, and the guests murmur that the host has requested him to leave. Instead, we learn at the end of the evening that the Prince, whom Proust, with his masterly skill at what the conjurors call"false direction," has allowed us to suppose not only stiff but stupid, is, with his aristocratic sense of responsibility and his Teutonic seriousness of mind, the only person present who has attempted to form a just opinion of the merits of the case: he has come to the conclusion that Dreyfus is probably innocent and he has simply wished to ask Swann's opinion. (In the latter part of the novel, this formula is twice repeated: first, after the dinner at the Verdurins', in the conversation with the elevator boy, in which the latter explains how his sister, who has risen from the servant class by being kept by a rich man, exhibits her superiority to the other menials; then, in the final social scene of the book, where the daughter and son-in-law of the great tragic actress, "La Berma," who, by returning to the stage, has shortened her own life in order to pay for their social career, desert her in her illness and old age to attend the reception of the Princesse de Guermantes, to which they have not been invited and where the princess herself is Mme. Verdurin.)
In each of these cases, Proust has destroyed, and destroyed with ferocity, the whole social hierarchy which he has just so learnedly expounded. Its values, he tells us, are an imposture: pretending to distinction, it accepts all that is vulgar and base; its pride is nothing nobler than the instinct which it shares with the woman who keeps the toilet and the elevator boy's sister, to spit upon the person whom we have at a disadvantage. And whatever the social world may say to the contrary, it either ignores or seeks to kill those few impulses toward justice and beauty which make men admirable. It seems almost inconceivable that there should have been critics to describe Proust as "unmoral": it would be far nearer to the truth to say that he sometimes tends to deal in melodrama. Proust was himself (on his mother's side) half-Jewish; and for all his Parisian sophistication, there remains in him much of the moral indignation of the classical Jewish prophet. That tone of lamentation and complaint which pervades his book, which, indeed, never deserts him, save for the amazing humor of the social scenes, themselves in their implications so bitter, is really very un-French and in the vein of Hebrew literature.
The French novelist of the line of Stendhal and Flaubert and France, with whom otherwise Proust has so much in common, differs fundamentally from Proust in this: the sad or cynical view of mankind with which these former begin, which is implicit in their first page, has been arrived at by Proust only at the cost of much pain and protest, and this ordeal is one of the subjects of his book: Proust has never, like these others, been reconciled to disillusionment. This fact is clearly one of the causes of that method which we find so novel and so fascinating of making his characters undergo a succession of transformations: humanity is only gradually revealed to us in its vanity, its selfishness and its inconsistency. AnatoleFrance would probably, for example, have put before us the whole of Odette in a single brief description--a few facts exactly noted and two adjectives which, contradicting each other, would have pricked us with the contradiction of her stupidity and her beauty; Stendhal would have stripped her of romance in the first sentence in which he recorded the simplest of her acts. But with Proust, Odette's past life is one of the last things we learn about her; and her mediocrity is never fully exposed until the very last pages. And even then, Proust cannot forgive her her moral insensibility, but must punish her with humiliation.
In that part of the book which we are discussing, we have fully emerged from the Age of Names and are well advanced with the Age of Things, that is, of realities; and we are becoming able to draw a conclusion as to why Proust finds these realities bitter, by considering the standards to which he brings them. These standards are supplied, on the one hand, by such artists as Bergotte, the novelist, and Vinteuil, the composer; but on the other, by Swann and by the mother and grandmother. I do not doubt that both of these latter were drawn, as Swann admittedly is, from Jewish originals; and it is plain that a certain Jewish family piety, a certain Jewish intensity of idealism and a certain rigorous Jewish morality, which never left his habits of self-indulgence and his worldly morality at peace, were among the fundamental elements of Proust's nature. The world is different from Combray, not merely because Combray is provincial, but because it is the world and occupied with the things of the world. It is really not Combray, but the soul of the grandmother, with its kindness, its spiritual nobility, its rigid moral principles and its utter self-abnegation, from which Proust's hero sets out on his ill-fated journey. And, as he is equipped, like many modern travelers, with moral passion but no religion, he will be compelled, as we shall presently see, to make a religion of art.
In the section which I have just been discussing, we have been shown the life of the worldlings and we have seen that it was vanity. Now we shall be shown the world of lovers and we shall find it an inferno. First, however, we may pause a moment to examine the architecture of the structure of which we now stand in the center; and we observe with astonishment that, despite the appearance of careless profusion and the real prolixity of detail, Proust, in handling his material, has practised a deliberate economy. We have noted the regular progression of the social scenes: we see now that Proust has made all sorts of efforts to secure the closest unity: half the characters are Guermantes; and almost the whole of the other balf are people whom the hero knew at Combray (as the Guermantes, in a sense, also are). The Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, Mme. de Villeparisis and Charlus's tailor all live in the same building in Paris as the family of the hero himself. All the themes have been stated in the first volumes; and all the pieces are now before us. No new elements will be introduced: Proust has provided himself with all that are necessary for his demonstration (the word is his own). We have become aware that the characters all illustrate general principles and that they have been carefully selected by Proust to cover the whole of the world that he knows: Odette is all that is stupid in woman which at the same time arouses men's passions and enchants their dreams; Charlus, the struggle in one soul between the masculine and feminine, and beyond that, the cruel paradox of a fine mind and a sensitive nature at the mercy of instincts which humiliate them; Mme. de Guermantes, the best that a snob can hope to be without becoming a serious person, etc., etc. These colossal figures, without losing individuality--we hear the very sound of their voices take on universal significance. They continue, as Proust would say, to illustrate the same laws throughout their development.
Some readers have been deceived by Proust's method into supposing that the characters of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu have actually no continuity; but they have fallen into an error similar to that of those persons who imagine that the clocks of modern physics are actually accelerated and retarded, and that the measuring rods shrink and expand. In the case of the clocks and the measuring rods, it is the conditions under which we observe them which make them appear to behave in this way; and with Proust, in a similar fashion, it is the point of view of the observer which makes the difference. Proust's method of presentation is one of his great technical discoveries. The more important characters in Proust undergo so many transformations that it would be impossible briefly to indicate their course. But we may consider a subordinate character.
When we first meet Mme. de Villeparisis, it is at the seaside summer resort, Balbec: the narrator's grandmother has known her during their schooldays, but, with her characteristic modesty and good taste, taking it for granted that Mme. de Villeparisis belongs to a superior social class, has never since attempted to see her. Mme. de Villeparisis, however, recognizes the grandmother and insists upon entertaining her. To the boy, who goes out driving with Mme. de Villeparisis, she is the perfect type of the great lady; she enchants him with her anecdotes of the distinguished people she has met at her father's house. When the hero next encounters her, however, it is at the reception I have mentioned above: he knows now that her social position is by no means so brilliant as he had supposed: in some way, she has lost caste; many people will not come to her house; she is also a sort of blue stocking: she paints and publishes memoirs, and has thereby ceased to be typical of her class; she is envious, sometimes mean, a little stuffy and a little pathetic. It sometimes occurs to the young man to wonder what dreadful sin Mme. de Villeparisis can have committed to have warranted such ostracism: he cannot imagine anything disgraceful enough, anything which such a woman might have done which such women did not do every day with impunity. Some time afterward, he makes an attempt to find out from her nephew, Charlus, only to discover that, so far as Charlus is concerned, Mme. de Villeparisis is not déclassée at all: she is simply his aunt and a Guermantes, and the opinion of the general world has never penetrated to him. He explains, however, to the young man that the late M. de Villeparisis was a nobody, with no title of his own, and that they had merely invented "de Villeparisis" in order that she might still have one. Years afterward, at Venice, the narrator once again comes upon Mme. de Villeparisis in the dining-room of his hotel. He overhears her conversation at table with the old diplomat, M. de Norpois, who has been her lover for years: it is one of those banal and laconic exchanges on the part of persons who have long been together and who have no longer anything to say to each other: they discuss their shopping, the stock market, the menu. Mme. de Villeparisis is disfigured by some sort of eczema which has broken out on her face: she seems tired and old. When an Italian prince comes over to their table, M. de Norpois watches her relentlessly with a severe blue eye to see that she does not say anything silly.
An ordinary novelist would leave it at this. With Proust, however, the point of the story is still to come--in a final transformation which is retrospective. When the narrator leaves the dining-room and rejoins his mother outside, he finds also a Mme. Sazerat, an old, excellent and rather boring neighbor from Combray. Mme. Sazerat, ever since they have known her, has been living in very reduced circumstances. When the narrator happens to mention that Mme. de Villeparisis is in the dining-room, Mme. Sazerat begs him to point her out: it was Mme. de Villeparisis, Mme. Sazerat explains, that her father had ruined himself: "Now that father is dead," she adds, "my consolation is that he loved the most beautiful woman of his time." The hero takes her into the dining-room, but, "We can't be counting from the same place," she objects. "As I count, the second table is a table where there's only an old gentleman and a dreadful blowzy little hunched-up old woman." We understand with astonishment that what the young man had been unable to imagine was simply that Mme. de Villeparisis had once been beauitiful, unscrupulous and cruel, had wasted lives and broken hearts, like Rachel and Odette. Proust's skill at producing these effects is one of the most amazing features of his art: as each successive revelation is made, we see perfectly that the previous descriptions of the character fit equally well our new conception, yet we have never foreseen the surprise. Behind the varied series of aspects, we divine the personality as a solid and indestructible entity: the series, in Proust's own language, describes its curve.
To return, however, to the story where we left it, we now enter the inferno of the passions, of which we have previously had only glimpses. The hero's love affair with Albertine, which is balanced, near the beginning, by his childhood infatuation with Swann's daughter, is the culminating, and the most enormously elaborated, episode of the book. The narrator falls in love with a girl in almost every way the opposite of himself: she is lively, sensual, piquante. She is an orphan and has no money and is obliged to live with an aunt, who dislikes her and whom she dislikes. The aunt is a dull bourgeoise, but there is about Albertine a good deal of the Parislan gamine. While his mother is away at Combray, the hero brings Albertine to live in the family apartment, where he is, for the time being, alone. There commences between him and Albertine one of those fatal emotional see-saws which seem first to have been described by Stendhal in the love affair between Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole. So long as Proust's hero is sure of Albertine, he finds himself indifferent to her and decides that he will not marry her; but as soon as he suspects her of infidelity, he becomes furiously jealous of her and can think of nothing else.
In the meantime, he has become more self-indulgent, more lazy, more egoistic and more hypochondriac. He lies in bed till noon every day and will not take Albertine out: he keeps her like a prisoner. He leans too hard upon her, just as he leaned too hard upon Gilberte, but with consequences far more serious, because he has by this time lost the self-control which might have enabled him to end the situation, as he did in the former case. He becomes at last so morbid and exigent that, one morning, after a jealous scene, Albertine runs away while he is still in bed. The night before he has heard her, in her room, violently throw open her window--opening the windows at night was supposed to be bad for his asthma--as if to say: "This life is smothering me! Asthma or no asthma, I must have air!" He is filled with an agitation which shakes him more profoundly than anything he has known since the time, in his childhood at Combray, when his mother did not kiss him good-night; and as he had done on that former occasion, he goes out into the hall, hoping in vain to attract Albertine's attention. In the morning, he finds a letter, which says: "I leave you the best of myself." She goes back to her aunt in the country. Only then does it occur to her lover that she is, after all, a jeune fille à marier and that he has taken advantage of her situation to put her in an impossible position. He makes frantic efforts to get her back; then suddenly hears that she has fallen from her horse and been killed.
After the news of her death, he receives a letter she has written him, in which she tells him she is willing tocome back. He has suspected her of Lesbian propensities, and this is one of the things that has tortured him; but he is never now to know certainly how much of what he has suspected is the product of his imagination and how much is true.Some evidence, after she is dead, leads him to believe that she is innocent;other reports, that she was far more depraved than he had ever guessed, that she had finally come to believe herself suffering from a form of "criminal insanity" and that she had really allowed herself to be killed out of remorse for a suicide she had caused. In either event, he feels that he is to blame: if she was innocent, he has wronged her; if she was guilty, he has abandoned her tothe perversity which she herself dreaded: "It seemed to me that, by reason of the fact that my love had been altogether selfish, I had allowed Albertine to die, just as I had killed my grandmother." In any case, this harrowing failure undermines his own morale. He completely collapses and takes refuge in a sanitarium, where be remains for years.
This episode with Albertine, upon which Proust put so much labor and which he intended for the climax of his book, has undoubtedly hitherto been the section least popular with his readers. I believe, however, that future readers will do Proust the justice of recognizing it as one of the most important love affairs in fiction. It is presented on so vast a scale that it makes considerable demands on the attention; and the interruption of its publication at the time of Proust's death made it particularly difficult to follow. Albertine is seen in so many varying moods, made the subject of so many ideas, dissociated into so many different images, that we sometimes become submerged and lose sight of the basic situation, of Proust's unwavering and masterly grasp of the characters of both the lovers, which make the catastrophe inevitable. Furthermore, the episode of Albertine does not supply us with any of the the things which we ordinarily expect from love affairs in novels. But that is precisely its strength: it is one of the most original studies of love in fiction and, in spite of the rather highly special conditions under which it is made to take place, it has a profound universal truth. And it ends by moving us in a curious way, precisely when Proust seems casually to have neglected all the customary machinery by which emotion is produced. The tragedy of Albertine is the tragedy of the little we know and the little we are able to care about those persons whom we know best and for whom we care most; and those pages which tell how Albertine's lover forgot her after she was dead, by reason of their very departure from any other treatment of death which we remember in literature, give us that impression of a bolder honesty, of a closer approach to reality, which we get only from the highest and most original genius.
We must now, however, attack Proust's central ideas, of which this episode is the chief illustration. We have already been shown the failure of Swann to realize in Odette his vague esthetic longings. So the narrator's friend, Saint-Loup, has made himself miserable over a wretched little actress whom the hero has formerly known in a brothel, but who wears the aspect for Saint-Loup of all the charms and all the talents. So now the narrator himself has proved the fatal impossibility of ever finding our happiness in another individual. A woman will not, and cannot, live in the world in which we would have her--that is, the world in which we live, which we ourselves imagine; and what we love in her is merely the product of our own imagination: we have supplied her with it ourself. This tragic subjectivity of love is even more striking in the case of the sexual inverts (for Proust supplements the normal love affairs of Swann and of the narrator, with, as it were, homosexual annexes, consisting, on the one hand, of Charlus and his friends, and, on the other, of Albertine and her Lesbian companions); for here, to the eyes of a normal person, there is nothing romantic to be seen at all. In the case of a wholly noble and disinterested love, such as the grandmother's for the boy, the discrepancy is perhaps even more hopeless: for the boy simply takes all her attentions for granted, is too self-centered to be aware of her sufferings and scarcely thinks about her at all until after she is dead. And by one of his happiest strokes, Proust further shows us that the odious Mme. Verdurin is a victim of the same malady as the rest: her fierce despotism over her "little clan," her frenzied efforts to keep them together, her nagging them to come to her house and her persecuting them when they fail to, are all merely another form of the same passion which has tormented the narrator, Charlus and Swann: jealousy--in this case, transferred from an individual to a group. Nor are the lovers the only persons who fail through seeking to share their lives with other human beings, to extend their own private reality to the external world. Legrandin lives to abandon his snobbery; when he is finally invited everywhere, he no longer cares to go out. And, in a terrible culminating episode, Proust shows us the whole futile comedy enacted in unexpected form: Charlus, who has been steadily degenerating, has finally arrived at a phase where all his more human impulses have perished and he has become perverse for the sake of perversity: vice itself has become the ideal. But his efforts to degrade himself are as ill-fated as the grandmother's efforts to consecrate her life to others: for the persons he pays to collaborate with him care nothing about being vicious; their heart is hopelessly not in their work. Even in pursuing evil, where satisfaction depends on others, man is doomed to disappointment. And even here Proust does not fail to show us in Charlus's senile and abject soul the last vibrations of that hope and love which life has nearly destroyed.
Nor does Proust's pursuit of this theme stop here. The conviction that it is impossible to know, impossible to master, the external world, permeates his whole book. It is reiterated on almost every page, in a thousand different connections: Albertine's lies; the gossip about the heir-apparent of Luxemburg; the contradictory diagnoses of the doctors on the grandmother's illness: the ticking of the watch in Saint-Loup's room, which the visitor is unable to locate; the names in the railway timetable of the towns in the neighborhood of Balbec, which first rouse romantic images in the mind of the boy and whose etymologies are explained by the cure of Combray, then become for the young man simply the stations of the Balbec railway and are later explained differently and authoritatively by Brichot, so that they take on an entirely new suggestiveness. This subjective world, in Proust, presents itself, like the universe of certain modern philosophers, as a continual flux: just as the alleys of the Bois de Boulogne, as he once saw them in his youth, under the influence of Odette, have now changed to something else; so love changes and fails us, and so society, which at first seems so stable, in a few years has recombined its groups and merged and transformed its classes. And, as in the universe of those philosophers who employ the concepts of modern physics, the world is a structure of events, interdependent, each event involving the whole, an organism; so Proust's application on an unprecedented scale of the metaphysics implicit in literary symbolism has the effect of enmeshing his whole book in a dense network of relations, of complicated cross-references between different groups of characters and of a multiplication of metaphors and similes connecting the phenomena of infinitely varied fields--biological, zoological, physical, esthetic, social, political and financial.
And as James Joyce, in Ulysses, varies the texture of his narrative to representthe varying times of day and the varying states of mind of his characters, so does Proust, on his scale of a life-time, where the varying color and tone of the narrative correspond to the varying periods of the hero's career. To the iridescent reveries of boyhood succeed the talk, the sociability and the vivacity of young manhood; and to these, with that wonderful sunrise which brings to the hero, not the splendor of the morning, but the dawning of the knowledge of human corruption and cruelty, succeeds a nightmare of the passions, which at its climax, in the almost demoniacal scene where the Verdurins set Morel against Charlus, seems blasted with the dry breath of Hell. It is characteristic of Proust that, for all the fascination which the vices with which lie is here preoccupied undoubtedly had for him and for all the comedy which he extracts from them, he should give to this part of his book the Scriptural title, "Sodom and Gomorrah". We feel indeed that all the characters are damned. Swann and the grandmother are dead. Bergotte dies; and at his death it is intimated, as it has already been intimated in connection with the composer Vinteuil, that only in artistic creation may we hope to find our compensation for the horror, the sterility and the despair of the world.
There is, however, yet another phase. After the death of Albertine, the fumes begin to clear away. When the narrator finally emerges, after the War, from his sanitarium, the world seems more sober, more level, less colorful, less troubling. He accepts an invitation to a reception at the Princesse de Guermantes's. On his way and while waiting in the library, he is several times visited by certain curious sensations such as he has already had occasion to record in connection with a clump of trees seen while driving, in his boyhood, with Mme. de Villeparisis, and at other moments. Why had he derived from them a mysterious satisfaction? He now determines to get to the bottom of them, and begins to see that they are simply the moments when, for an instant, external reality coincides with the reality within him. It is this internal world which is the true reality; and it is the business of the artist to find out what is beneath its symbols, which obtrude themselves on our minds upon the slightest provocation; to decipher its hieroglyphics. When he finally goes in among the guests and, after his long absence, meets the people he has known, he feels acutely the passage of time, which has profoundly affected them all. Still haunted by the image of Albertine, as he first knew her at the seaside, he expresses to Gilberte Swann (who has since been married) a desire to meet some young girls. Gilberte brings her daughter to him, and when he sees her, he knows fully at last that he himself is old. He has a vision of the time which he has lived and which he is still dragging with him in memory. While waiting in the library, he has happened to take down the same novel of George Sand which his mother had read him that night, in his childhood, when he had lain awake so long because she had not come to kiss him. And now, across all the years, he hears the ringing of the bell which announced M. Swann's departure, and is terrified suddenly to know that it must ring in his mind forever. From that night, when his parents first indulged him, dates the decline of his will. The slope which he had that night commenced to descend has brought him to the debacle with Albertine and has left him, already old, with his wasted life, le temps perdu--a hypochondriac like his aunt Leonie, with whom he had supposed in his youth that he had nothing in common. Now he will turn away from the world: he will no longer look for happiness in others. The reality lies within him and it is only through literature that he can hope to rejoin it, to experience it. He will make of his life a book: only so can he retrieve that past which he now must carry along with him, with no power to change it, to better it. In the long last sentence of the book the word "Time" begins to sound, and it closes the symphony, as it began it.
In some such fashion, without doubt, Proust really composed his book. He began it late in life, when he had published and written little, "knowing," as he makes his narrator say, "nothing of his trade." A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is, therefore, even aside from Proust's genius, a very exceptional production. Proust worked under the unusual disadvantage of never really having written to be read: he had never put himself into communication with any body of readers: he had no public; the whole of his book had been written before he published a word. As a result of this, he often wrote sentences so long and so complicated that we are obliged to read them several times, and he allowed himself to fall into a repetitiousness which, as an artist, is perhaps his worst fault. Furthermore, as, with the exception of an early volume of miscellanies, he had never before written a book, he put into A la Recherche du Temps Perdu everything he knew--so that he often swamps his effects by overloading them with a cargo, a part of which, at any rate, if he had been a literary man in regular practice, he would already have disposed of, and perhaps to better advantage, elsewhere. On the other hand, the fact that Proust had never had to write for a living, and that he was able to command unlimited leisure, brought with it the immense advantage of making it possible for him to plan and carry through a work of the most ambitious kind. Proust was never obliged to go slowly, or to meet the demands of a current market: he was able, in a single work, to show his mind and his imagination in their full scope and depth; and he could allow himself any liberty. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is one of those bold and self-dependent works, produced in absolute indifference to popular standards and commercial expediencies, which make the principal glory of literature.
Proust was a fairly rich man, who had inherited money and who had never had to work: he had always been able to afford to indulge himself. He had perhaps never, except in the army, had to associate with other men under everyday conditions and on absolutely equal terms. And as a result, besides the manias and morbidities of the solitary man, he betrays also some of the suspicions of the millionaire who is always afraid that the servants are lying to him, and is incessantly haunted by a delusion that everyone who shows him kindness is only after his money. And he has also had the opportunity of indulging his imagination in certain subjects, such as homosexuality, in a way which makes us feel, sometimes, that he takes too gruesome a view of them and on other occasions disgusts us with his appetite for the scabrous. And is there not also some self-indulgence in Proust's appetite for suffering? A la Recherche du Temps Perdu for all its humor and its beauty, is one of the gloomiest books ever written: Proust tells us that the idea of death has "kept him company as incessantly as the idea of his own identity"; and the very water-lilies of the little river at Combray, continually straining to follow the current and continually jerked back by their stems, are likened to the futile attempts of the neurasthenic to break the habits which are eating his life. Proust's lovers are always suffering: we never see them when they are not unhappy. His artists are unhappy, too: they have only the consolation of art. During those interminable and not infrequently almost intolerable disquisitions on jealousy and the writhings of unrequited love, we sometimes find ourselves irritated as we do with those dialogues of Leopardi in which he makes us listen while he rings so many ingenious changes on the theme that life is never enjoyable. With Leopardi, we are made uneasy by the spectacle of so vigorous an intellect and so distinguished a style applied persistently to the reiteration of the pitiful complaint of a sick man. If we did not know that Leopardi was sick, we should want to retort that the trouble with life was not that happiness does not exist, but merely that it doesn't last; and so with Proust, we long to suggest to him that there are other forms of creative activity than that made possible by literature--that his diplomat, M. de Norpois, when he created his alliances, must have enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing that he had imposed a little of his own private reality on the world outside; that Mme. De Guermantes must have felt it when she created her salon; and Cottard, the doctor, when he supervised his cases. Might not a better man than the hero have even succeeded in recreating Albertine at least partly in his own image? We are willing to agree with Ortega y Gasset that Proust has shown himself guilty of the medieval sin of accidia, that combination of slothfulness and gloom for which Dante submerged his sinners in mud. And we recognize in the atrocious cruelty which seems to dominate Proust's world, in the social scenes no less than in the love affairs, the hysterical complement of the hero's hysterical passivity.
But when we come to these concluding pages of Le Temps Retrouvé, so somberand so moving, perhaps the finest in the whole work, when we hear the door-bell still ringing from Combray like the knock of Fate at the door, we become for the first time fully aware of Proust's bitter judgment of himself. We see how he has systematically created a character which shall represent him only on his weakest side. The man whom he has depicted, whose moral defeat is the theme of his story, could never have had the strength of this strange exaltation of art, so utterly divorced from every other source of human joy, which retrieves the moral defeat and which burns in these last pages; could never, in fact, have written the book. The person whom Proust has omitted was one of the most powerful minds of our time and one of the great writers of the world.