Hitherto I have only praised.
In writing of a great creative artist, and especially of one whose work is over, it is always better worth while to dwell on the beauties than to hunt down the blemishes. Where the qualities outweigh the defects the latter lose much of their importance, even when, as sometimes in Proust’s case, they are defects in the moral sensibility, that tuning-fork of the novelist’s art.
It is vain to deny, or to try to explain away, this particular blemish — deficiency, it should be rather called — in Proust’s work. Undoubtedly there are blind spots in his books, as there are in Balzac’s, in Stendhal’s, in Flaubert’s; but Proust’s blind spots are peculiarly disconcerting because they are intermittent. One cannot dismiss the matter by saying that a whole category of human emotions is invisible to him, since at certain times his vision is acutest at the precise angle where the blindness had previously occurred.
A well-known English critic, confusing die scenes in which Proust’s moral sense has failed him with those (far more numerous) in which he deliberately portrays the viler aspects of the human medley, suggests that timorous readers might find unmingled enjoyment in the perusal of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” by the simple expedient of “thinking away” M. de Charlus — as who should propose “thinking away” Falstaff from the plays in which he figures! It would, in fact, be almost as difficult to dismiss M. de Charlus with an “I know thee not, old man,” as Falstaff; and quite as unnecessary. It is not by daring to do “in the round” a mean or corrupt character — an Iago, a Lord Steyne, a Philippe Bridau, or a Valerie Marneffe — that a novelist diminishes the value of his work. On the contrary, he increases it. Only when the vileness and the cruelty escape him, when he fails to see the blackness of the shadow they project, and thus unconsciously flattens his modelling, does he correspondingly empoverish the picture; and this Proust too often did — but never in drawing M. de Charlus, whose ignominy was always as vividly present to him as Iago’s or Goneril’s to their creator.
There is one deplorable page where the hero and narrator, with whose hyper-sensitiveness a hundred copious and exquisite passages have acquainted us, describes with complacency how he has deliberately hidden himself to spy on an unedifying scene. This episode — and several others marked by the same abrupt lapse of sensibility — might be “thought away” with all the less detriment that, at such moments, Proust’s characters invariably lose their probableness and begin to stumble through their parts like good actors vainly trying to galvanize a poor play. All through his work there are pages literally trembling with emotion; but wherever the moral sensibility fails, the tremor, the vibration, ceases. When he is unaware of the meanness of an act committed by one of his characters, that character loses by so much of its life-likeness, and, reversing Pygmalion’s gesture, the author turns living beings back to stone.
But what are these lapses in a book where countless pages throb with passionate pity and look at one with human eyes? The same man who thus offends at one moment, at the next has one by the heartstrings in a scene such as that where the hero, hearing his grandmother speak for the first time over the telephone, is startled into thoughts of death and separation by the altered sound of a familiar voice; or that in which Saint- Loup comes up to Paris on twenty-four hours’ leave, and his adoring mother first exults at the thought that he is going to spend his evening with her, then bitterly divines that he is not, and finally trembles lest, by betraying her disappointment, she shall have spoilt his selfish pleasure. And it is almost always at the very moment when the reader thinks: “Oh, if only he doesn’t fail me now!” that he floods his squalid scene with the magic of an inexhaustible poetry, so that one could cry out, like Sigmund when the gale blows open the door of the hut: “No one went — some one came! It is the spring.”
M. Benjamin Cremieux, whose article on Proust is the most thoughtful study of his work yet published, has come upon the obstacle of Proust’s lapses of sensibility, and tried, not very successfully, to turn it. According to this critic, Proust’s satire is never “based on a moral ideal,” but is always merely “complementary to his psychological analysis. The only occasion” (M. Cremieux continues) “where Proust incidentally speaks of a moral ideal is in the description of the death of Bergotte.” He then cites the beautiful passage in question: “Everything happens in our lives as though we had entered upon them with a burden of obligations contracted in an anterior existence; there is nothing in our earthly condition to make us feel that we are under an obligation to be good, to be morally sensitive [etre delicats], even to be polite; nor, to the artist, to begin over again twenty times a passage which will probably be admired only when his body has been devoured by worms. ... All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world founded on goodness, on moral scruple, on sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one, a world whence we come when we are born on earth, perhaps to return there and live once more under the rule of the unknown laws which we have obeyed here because we carried their principles within ourselves, without knowing who decreed that they should be; those laws to which every deep intellectual labour draws us nearer, and which are invisible only — and not always! — to fools.”
It is difficult to see how so deliberate a profession of faith in a moral ideal can be brushed aside as “incidental.” The passage quoted would rather seem to be the key to Proust’s whole attitude: to its weakness as well as to its strength. For it will be noticed that, among the mysterious “obligations” brought with us from that other “entirely different” world, he omits one; the old stoical quality of courage. That quality, moral or physical, seems never to have been recognized by him as one of the mainsprings of human action. He could conceive of human beings as good, as pitiful, as self-sacrificing, as guided by the most delicate moral scruples; but never, apparently, as brave, either by instinct or through conscious effort.
Fear ruled his moral world: fear of death, fear of love, fear of responsibility, fear of sickness, fear of draughts, fear of fear. It formed the inexorable horizon of his universe and the hard delimitation of his artist’s temperament.
In saying so one touches on the narrow margin between the man’s genius and his physical disabilities, and at this point criticism must draw back, or linger only in reverent admiration of the great work achieved, the vast register covered, in spite of that limitation, in conflict with those disabilities.
Nietzsche’s great saying, “Everything worth while is accomplished notwithstanding” [trotzdem], might serve as the epitaph of Proust.