Marcel Proust

I

‘NIGHT before last we dined with R. and his mother, and as we were leaving his house a little after eleven he asked if we would drop him at the home of his friend Porel, son of Réjane, as Porel was giving a party. Next day, when we saw R., he gave us a most interesting account of the party, at which many of the Paris circles were represented, from Cécile Sorel to Marcel Proust. Proust, it seems, arrived at two in the morning, during a pause in the concert being given extempore by one of the new pianists of the Stravinsky school. The doors opened, and an apparition made its appearance which was Proust. It was, R. said, saisissant. Proust gave the impression of an exhumed corpse in remarkable preservation, in all black clothes, of the cut of 1890, hanging much too large on his emaciated figure. His dead-black hair was worn too long; the great dark rings round his eyes and his waxlike long hands which he does not fold, the fingers as straight as if they were not articulated, and his whispering voice, all made an impression which actually for a time threw a chill over the gathering.

‘R. conversed with him for a half hour or more, and in all that time Proust evidently talked genealogy (R.’s family counts all the quarterings and also a saint). He knows all the family trees in France, who married who, and so on; but his information stops somewhere round 1885. He is vague and uninformed and difficult to interest in anything modern; affects to have scarcely ever heard, even cursorily, of Debussy, Stravinsky, or the new painters; and to compliment the musician of the evening asked him if he would be good enough to go on playing until eight or nine in the morning. He made this mild request toward 4 A.M., when most of the guests were very sleepy, some taking French leave and others saying good-bye; but of course it was midday for Proust, who was beginning to be wide awake. (When he gives people appointments the hour is always round 4 A.M.) Strangeness is what most expressed him for R. But apart from the pose of being ill-dressed (he was the only man who was not in dinner clothes, and he is definitely rich), he looked very much a person of consequence, and with an abundant reserve of vitality, as if he might live to be really old; he is not over forty, if he is forty [he was really fifty], and does not look more than his age.

‘R. left round four o’clock; and, as you may imagine, it is not the easiest hour at which to find a taxi; but seeing a very shabby vagrant one, with a piratical black cover over its flag, — one of those unreconstructed war cars that belong to no taxi federation, but prowl alone, owned by the driver, — he thought it was waiting on the chance of a fare before returning to its garage in the Fortifications, so he went up to the sleepy driver inside the vehicle and made his request. But when the driver woke sufficiently he said he could n’t oblige, as he was le taxi de Monsieur Proust. For R. it was a final expression of Proust’s strange personality. Also it appears that Proust lives alone, with only a young butler sixteen years old to wait on him and run his housekeeping. Somehow I can’t summon up any vision of a butler of sixteen; but I suppose butlers are born and not made.’

The letter here quoted is dated merely ‘20 January,’ but on recently consulting the writer of it she confirms my supposition that the year was 1922, so that we here see Proust ten months only before his death. It is as he appeared to a stranger, who happened to belong to the aristocratic order Proust found specially attractive.

After a separating interval of over a century and a half it is possible, with an effort, to realize what Rousseau was like and what, for good or evil, he effected in the world. As at this distance we view his influence, — putting aside the crowd of those who have misunderstood it, — we may say that what he has done is to modify the air which we all have to breathe. There are various great and definite achievements to be placed to his credit or discredit. But, above and beyond those, there is one undesigned achievement far rarer: he has changed the spiritual and emotional atmosphere of our Western world. We feel and think a little differently since Rousseau lived. This does not mean that he was absolutely original; many others were moving in the same direction. But it was Rousseau who, by some natural personal quality, effected the general change.

As may already be detected, I suspect in Proust — with whatever hesitation I may still feel over the problem — something of that same type of genius which Rousseau illustrates. Not by any means that Proust displayed it in so splendid and overpowering a degree. The revelation itself was less overwhelming, and, moreover, not of a nature to appeal at first to more than a limited section of human beings.

Yet it may have been of the same nature in this essential respect, that here a man was born into the world who saw and felt in it something that had not been seen and felt before, or at all events not seen and felt in so convincing a way that the world itself became conscious of the revelation. We see evidence of this in the fact that there was at first an almost complete blindness to what Proust brought; even the publishers who later were glad to accept his work at first rejected it. New books and essays about Proust are now constantly pouring out from the press. They say all sorts of different things. But their abundance shows that here is a phenomenon that we have to grasp, and explain as we may.

It is worth while to quote, from the reminiscences of his friend Reynaldo Hahn, a small example of Proust’s method of direct observation. They were walking together in the country garden of a friend to whose house, it happened, they had both been invited, though at that time Hahn knew little or nothing of Proust’s literary interests. ‘“Would you mind,” asked Proust in his childishly gentle and rather sad voice, “if I stay behind a moment? I want to look again at those little rose trees.” I left him. At a turn in the path I glanced behind. Marcel had made his way back to the rose trees. I proceeded to stroll round the mansion, and then found him still at the same spot, gazing fixedly at the roses. His head was bent, his expression grave, his eyes winking, his brows rather frowning, as if by an effort of impassioned concentration, with his left hand pushing his little black moustache between his lips and biting it. I felt that he heard me coming but did not wish to speak or move. I passed without saying a word. A minute later he called, and rejoined me running, hoping that I was not angry. . . . How often have I later assisted at similar scenes! At such moments Marcel was in total communion with Nature, with art, with life, his whole being concentrated on a transcendent work of penetration, alternating with aspiration, entering, so to say, into a state of trance, reaching to the roots of things and discerning what none could see.’

In the last pages of his work Proust complained that even those readers who were sympathetic to the ‘truths’ he had set down looked upon them as having been discovered by the ‘ microscope.’ He had really, he protests, ‘used a telescope, to perceive things which were indeed very small but situated at a great distance and each a world.’ In reality, neither the microscope nor the telescope is here a helpful image. We are concerned with a task of penetration and revelation which is better described in the words used by Hahn, since things that are near and things that are far are brought together to be pierced by a vision in search of a more ultimate truth beyond. In seeking to define ‘style’ to Bois, Proust himself put it as ‘a quality of vision, the revelation of the particular universe which each of us sees and others fail to see. The pleasure the artist gives us is that of enabling us to know another universe.’

Yet another aspect of this attitude, belonging to a much later period, is reported by Stephen Hudson, the translator into English of the final section of Proust’s work. Céleste, the devoted bonne who looked after Proust at the end, told Hudson that he only observed things around him when he found in them some special beauty or interest. But if, for instance, the sun happened to light up some corner of the room in a way that pleased him or to give a fantastic tint to some object, — it might be a cup of coffee or a glass of beer half full, — his eyes would be fixed on it for an hour or more, and he would not allow it to be removed even at night, in the hope of renewing the impression.

The power of receiving impressions was accompanied in Proust by the power to imprint them in memory. Jacques Blanche the painter, who knew him well, refers to ‘the exceptional quality of the registering apparatus which enabled him to fix fugitive sensations and perceptions which for most of us have fled when scarcely caught, to recall them at will, to seize their most distant analogies.’ And to yet another friend he seemed to have those manyfaceted eyes we attribute to insects, a sort of polygonal vision.

He showed the same quality in his attitude toward his friends, a penetrating perspicacity. You could not deceive him; he saw through you. ‘This disconcerting psychologist photographed you with X-rays,’ says Jacques Blanche. He once had the fancy to have his fortune told by a palmist. After glancing at his hand she looked up into his face: ‘What do you expect of me, sir? It is rather you who should reveal my character.’ With this penetrating insight and endlessly detailed observation of nature and man there went, as indeed an essential part of it, the prodigious memory of which so many of his friends have spoken. He himself was accustomed to say, Paul Morand has noted, ‘The Muses are the daughters of Memory; no art without recollection.’

If he thus, like Rousseau before him, yielded a new revelation, it was, certainly, a revelation completely distinct from Rousseau’s. For Rousseau’s sensitive psychic organism — acting as a totality among people who reacted to life only in separate compartments, whether intellectual or emotional — responded at once and manifoldly to his experiences, so that, even if nothing more, he was the most genuinely alive man of his time, and taught the world by his example how to respond in a more or less similarly total fashion. To the French society of the mid-eighteenth century Rousseau offered the astonishing spectacle of a man for whom the external world really existed, as Charlier has remarked. That world of matter, so vile and so neglected by an age of classicism, he look up and made his own, therewith casting contempt on urban civilization and its superrefined minions. His success was so overwhelming because he was simply expressing — and marvelously well — the latent aspirations of the time, for he was (as Brunetière put it) ‘ one of the most sensitive and impressionable beings that ever existed.’

Rousseau lived and responded — incoherently it may indeed often have been — in a world with which he was in actual contact and by which he was often buffeted. Proust lived in a camera obscura; he was occupied with an immense world of reflections he had accumulated from afar. When a friend quoted to him the saying of Gourmont, ‘One only writes well what one has not lived,’ he jumped up exclaiming, ‘That is the whole of my work! ’

Here we may recall Montaigne. Montaigne’s supreme discovery was the interest of one’s self. It was a revelation which naturally came before either Rousseau’s or Proust’s, i.^ontaignehad lived in the large world, but was now apart from that world, shut up with himself, and he found infinitely interesting the shifting ideas and emotions of his intimate personal self in that seclusion. Naturally the influences that came to him were ultimately from outside, whether in the present or the past. But while Rousseau was concerned with his direct vital reactions to the living outside world, and Proust with the elaborate investigation of the past as mirrored in his conscious and unconscious mind, Montaigne was directly concerned with himself. He was revealing the ego, not with any design of magnifying himself, for it was an ego in which we may all have part; he was revealing the rich significance of personality. That was a revelation which must naturally come before either Rousseau’s or Proust’s.

II

In however summary and imperfect a form, it is necessary to state the nature of the task laid on these three memorable men, since without some such bird’s-eye vision of our spiritual world it is impossible to understand where our civilization in its intimate developments to-day stands. How essential that is we may realize when we find that even at the present time there are many who seem to know only the crudest notions, or none at all, of what even Rousseau stands for. They have not yet advanced beyond Montaigne, if so far. They are even shocked when, three centuries later, Whitman reasserts in a more grandiloquent shape the message of Montaigne.

The men who bring these revelations are necessarily abnormal, since they are doing something which the normal man has never, so completely or at all, been able to do before. Montaigne’s task was the most wholesome, and, when once accepted, the easiest; he was able to carry it out in freedom from outside impediments. We cannot consider him a strikingly abnormal person as was Rousseau, and, perhaps still more, Proust.

We have always to remember that Proust was an invalid, from the age of nine until his death. His affliction happened to be one which is not incompatible with high artistic and intellectual power. But, being a disorder of the nervous centres, it is apt to be associated with other nervous and psychic peculiarities, these, however, differing with the individual and not always resembling those noted in Proust. But always they tend to affect the general routine of life, implicating at last the whole personality, and demanding a readjustment of life. They peculiarly hampered Marcel Proust’s life, even, it seems, to an exaggerated degree, and the son of the distinguished professor who had done so much to introduce hygienic reform in the French State lived the most unhygienic life, for the most part shut up tightly in his room and spending much of the day in bed, to go out, if at all, at night.

Certainly of those narrowed opportunities he made an extraordinarily profound use. He learned to know more of the world, of society and men and Nature and art, than those who are free to move among them all. That was where his genius came in, though we may well believe that it was the limitation of his disease that gave concentration and penetration of insight to his genius.

He was also no stranger to the world of books. Indeed it was here that we first definitely trace the presence of his sensitive temperament, receptive and irregular. As a boy of fourteen, when asked to fill in the page of an English album, in reply to the question ‘ Your favorite prose authors? ’ he wrote ‘George Sand, Aug. Thierry.’ In reply to ‘Your favorite poets?’ — ‘Musset.’ That represented a youthful taste, yet there was perhaps always something a little unbalanced in Proust’s literary admirations, and rightly so. He was drawn by a sound intuition to the writers who by their subject, their attitude, or their style, best furthered his own task. His Pastiches, done at a rather early stage in his career, present writers whose manner he was seeking in some degree to absorb: such as Balzac, Flaubert, Henri de Régnier, the Goncourts, Renan, and above all SaintSimon, whose name has since often been mentioned in connection with Proust’s method.

His method in these Pastiches is really characteristic. He is always, in the first place, receptive; he lets his spirit soak into what he contemplates; in seeking what is essential he emphasizes it, he becomes a little caricatural, so that in the end there is ridicule as well as reverence in his attitude; not ridicule only or reverence only, but, subtle and sometimes mystifying, a blending of both. That is his attitude toward life throughout his great works; that is his attitude toward great stylists in Pastiches.

It may be noted here that Proust showed a special predilection for English and American writers. In 1910 he wrote to his friend Robert de Billy: ‘I have just been reading a very fine thing which unfortunately resembles a little (though a thousand times better) what I am doing, Thomas Hardy’s The WellBeloved. There is not even lacking that grotesque touch which belongs to all great works. It is curious that in all the different fields, from George Eliot to Hardy, from Stevenson to Emerson, there is no literature which has over me a power comparable to English or American literature. Germany, Italy, very often France, leave me indifferent. But two pages of The Mill on the Floss bring me to tears. I know that Ruskin execrated that novel; but in the Pantheon of my admirations I reconcile all these hostile gods.’

III

If it is instructive to investigate Proust’s attitude toward books, it is even more so to observe his attitude toward the actual persons he knew. The copious publication of his letters in recent years has made this easy, and has thrown much light, however ambiguously, on his way of thought and feeling.

We may specially note his correspondence with the Comtesse de Noailles, perhaps the most distinguished writer with whom he was during many years (about eighteen) in relations of personal friendship, though there seems to have been little contact during the later years. These letters were published in 1931 by Madame de Noailles herself in a volume of over two hundred pages, and they are a remarkable, even if disconcerting, revelation of their writer’s personality. So fine a critic as Denis Saurat (reviewing the book in the Nouvelle Revue Française) finds them altogether revolting and abominable. Like his letters generally that have been published, and still more, Saurat remarks, those that are shown without being published, ‘they leave a bad taste in the mouth.’ They reveal so fully those defects and vices which in Proust’s work become sublimated to an integral part of his genius. An extraordinary man, charming in some aspects, this critic admits, he was most repugnant in others. He possessed ‘a really Satanic capacity for lying’ and an extraordinary aptitude for sentimental violence, these two leading defects acting together to produce every form of treacherous flattery. Proust’s greatest pleasure was to make fools of his friends and he found a malicious joy in catching them in the traps he laid. He regarded all individuals, as well as all moments of life, as standing separate and alone and aloof. ‘Proust treats his friends as if they were as foreign as Patagonians and as inferior as slaves.’

There is an element of truth in this critic’s attitude. But his judgment is too unqualified. Proust treated his friends as he treated the characters in his books. He had real affection for the people whom, consciously or not, he made ridiculous, whether his friends or his creations, just as it has been said of Dickens that ‘he had a boy’s love for the persons who afforded him opportunities for horseplay.’ And there was much of the child in Proust. Yet we do not find his imaginary characters altogether unsympathetic, and it is certain that Proust’s numerous friends never regarded themselves as ‘Patagonians’ or ‘slaves’ in his eyes. They make deductions or qualifications of one kind or another when describing him as a friend, but the final estimate is appreciation. So also was the judgment of his social inferiors in close touch. ‘Madame,’ said to Madame Scheikévitch his faithful bonne Céleste after his death, ‘ when one has known Monsieur Proust everyone seems vulgar.’

Saurat’s austerely Puritanic condemnation of Proust’s ‘Satanic’ qualities in friendship seems to rest on a failure to understand his peculiar temperament. It was the temperament demanded for his work, and it was so intimately his own that it entered even into his closest relationships. He evidently possessed a deep craving for friendship; he was much absorbed in his friends, as even his frequent quarrels and misunderstandings with them — often due to what Madame de Noailles calls ‘the suspicious sensibility of this restless heart’ — should suffice to show, and that was a chief source of those extravagancies which can hardly be dismissed as treachery. The sentimental violence was a real trait, and it was fortified by a failure of judicial balance in criticism, for Proust’s extraordinary insight was not accompanied by any corresponding power to weigh and balance. He entered into the spirit of his friends; it was a real joy to him to appreciate their caricatural possibilities, with no thought of depreciating them, and, as so many of his friends have noted, he was an admirable mimic.

I cannot agree that he was deliberately making a fool of Madame de Noailles in these fantastic letters which, some years after his death, she was innocent or courageous enough to publish. He certainly had a genuine admiration for her work, which he also expressed elsewhere than in the letters, and shared with other eminent writers of the time. It was the natural impulse of his violently sentimental and critically unbalanced temperament when in contact with his friends to push that admiration to fantastic extremes of expression.

One characteristic figure we cannot avoid when we set out in search of Proust: the Comte Montesquiou-Fezensac, not only by reason of his long, if disturbed, friendship with Proust, but because he is the figure so frequently mentioned as chiefly serving to make up that most memorable of Proust’s creations, Charlus.

Montesquiou belonged to another generation. I remember in Paris, in 1890, before Proust’s days, one heard of Montesquiou as of an accomplished but highly eccentric personage, on the aristocratic outskirts of the literary world. I recall turning over the pages of a volume of his poems, not thinking them sufficiently important to read with any care, but amused at their elaborate and peculiar virtuosity. Recently Henri de Régnier, who moved in the same world and was of much the same generation, has in the course of his interesting reminiscences, De Mon Temps, set down the history of his own relations with this eccentric personage. Régnier is of urbane temperament, and always considerate of others’ feelings, but even his relations with Montesquiou had been stormy. He first heard of the Comte Robert de MontesquiouFezensac as a singular figure, descendant of an illustrious family, a dandy with sensational waistcoats, a poet who only revealed his choice productions to privileged friends, but who occasionally condescended to associate with the ordinary vulgar literary tribe. He was a tall and lean figure, most elegantly dressed, carrying high a small head with yellowish complexion and bright eyes, a personality at once courteous and insolent. He talked incessantly, sometimes incisively and wittily, in a voluble voice that was high almost to falsetto, and what he said revealed not only erudition but a boundless pride and an equal vanity. We cannot but see here the suggestion for Charlus.

At first when the figure of Charlus appears in the pages of La Recherche, Montesquiou is not its sole inspiration, but he becomes more and more so as Sodome et Gomorrhe progresses, so that Montesquiou may be said to be the key to Charlus in a sense in which no other character in the work can be said to have a single key.

Charlus — when we are content to look upon Proust’s work simply as a gallery of portraits — is Proust’s supreme creation. No doubt he felt that himself and therefore clung to his creation in spite of the reaction he foresaw that Charlus would arouse. He protested against conventional ‘taste.’ ‘In art,’ he said, ‘taste is a reactionary element.’ He knew that he was bringing a new theme into literature and he realized that in such a task there lay something grand and audacious. ‘When M. de Charlus comes out,’ he groaned (Pierre-Quint tells us), ‘you will see, all will turn their backs on me, and especially the English. Though I seldom leave my bed, people still invite me. Open that drawer in front of you and you will find an invitation from the Duchess of C., whom I scarcely know. (I show it you almost in confidence.) To-morrow none will invite me any more. On every side I shall be driven out.’

He was not far wrong as regards the English, at all events for a time. Without any delay, in 1922, A. B. Walkley, dramatic critic of the Times, as fine a representative of respectable English conventions as one could find, at once proceeded to verify Proust’s prophecy. He was by no means an anti-Proustian, but he could not stomach M. de Charlus. That ‘filthy brute and amazing cad is,’ he declares, ‘one of the most repulsive brutes ever conceived by a novelist’; it almost spoiled the whole work for him. He would have been surprised to know that in a few years’ time that same Charlus would be regarded by some critics as one of the chief figures in literature, on a level with Don Quixote. That is certainly an extravagant estimate. Charlus is not with the supreme figures of literature, with Ulysses and Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe. But it is not easy to find any figure in French fiction to put beside him.

Walkley brings in the criterion of moral approval where it is altogether out of place. We do not feel approval of Falstaff, who moves in the same circle of Art’s Heaven as Charlus, though we may find his vices more amiable. But to refuse to enjoy such superb creations as Falstaff and Charlus on the ground of moral disapproval is merely to show that one has not yet taken the first step over the threshold of the House of Art.

IV

No one fails to note Proust’s attraction to the aristocracy. The son of a successful professional man possessing a high reputation in hygienic science, and with a Jewish mother, Marcel belonged to a prosperous family of good social standing, but hardly with any native connection with the ancient aristocracy. Yet it was to that select social layer of Parisian society that from the first he was irresistibly drawn. At a very early age he began to be allowed a seat in the drawing-rooms of society, alike in its aristocratic and in its unconventional assemblies. On the one hand he could study the Bonapartist nobility in the salon of Princess Mathilde, and on the other hand he seems to have been little more than a boy when a celebrated courtesan presented him with a book bound in silk from her petticoat.

Proust has often been called a ‘snob’ in the English sense. But his snobbery was of so special and peculiar a character that the accusation has no sting. He took a genuine delight in aristocrats of ancient race, and had among them genuine friends. He liked to lose himself in the Almanach de Gotha and trace out the ancestries and the relationships and the heraldry of the exalted persons therein recorded. A friend found him one day laughing over the Gotha: ‘Did you know that Madame X is related to the Z’s? It is too amusing!’

‘ A marvelous source of compliments and mockeries,’ said, after Proust’s death, Maurice Barrès, who had known him fairly well. But in his art that attitude was transformed. The warm spirit of ingratiation combined with the cold spirit of cynical criticism to produce a penetrating attitude of scientific observation.

It used sometimes to be said that Proust’s conception of character had put the art of his predecessors in fiction out of date. He conceived a figure in the round, in all its vital complexity, while their representations are flat and superficial; he himself told Bois that he had tried to establish a three-dimensional psychology, and some critics have accepted this view, or we might say that he tried to effect in fiction something of what Cézanne strove after in painting. Feuillerat’s exploration of Proust’s manuscripts has now, however, discounted this estimate. He shows that Proust’s opinion of his characters tended to change progressively as his work advanced; so that the new dimensional character is not so much a deliberate method of the artist as simply an added complexity accidental to his changing view. We need not throw aside Stendhal and Flaubert because we also have Proust, any more than we need throw aside Pascal because we also have Rousseau.

Many of Proust’s characters, indeed, appear, as a result of their confused complexity, thoroughly unsatisfactory, and would hardly do much credit to a third-rate novelist. Even Albertine, who fills so large a place, less, it may well be true, for her own sake than for her action on the hero of the story, never — though I admit a difference of opinion on this point — becomes a vitally real person. She is supposed to have been built up from some halfdozen models of girls with whom Proust had come in contact, and we can well believe it; indeed at the end of his work he as much as says so himself. Elstir, again, is equally vague, though since he appears as a painter rather than as a man this may be of little moment; he is composed, as Feuillerat reasonably considers, of Monet, a little Manet, and much Whistler, from whom probably his name.

The progressive change in the characters is largely due, Feuillerat finds, to Proust’s growing disposition to pessimism. His retouches always tend to degrade his characters and make them less likable, more malevolent, even Françoise, even Saint-Loup. ‘ Formerly I believed in friendship; now it no longer exists for me,’ he wrote in latter years to Lucien Daudet. It was a significant confession for the man who had justified deception and practised so much insincerity even in his genuine friendships.

It is nevertheless generally agreed, however the result may be attained, not only that Proust’s figures — those that are best achieved — stand out in the round, but that he has admirably realized the tone of the society in which they move, even if he cannot sometimes help caricaturing it. No doubt it is the figures themselves that in the end remain in memory; and we can never too much admire the delicate skill with which this scientific entomologist of the aristocratic salons gently captures these creatures and pins them on the cardboard of his novel. ‘A far less sentimental Fabre, repeating the doings of human dung-beetles,’ I find a recent American critic describing Proust. But that is too prejudiced an account of the situation. It is more legitimate to say, with a more penetrating critic, that Proust had the spirit of the surgeon, and that in some of his volumes we seem even to be seeing the bright gleam of the scalpel making its incisions.

‘ Every social condition has its interest,’ he wrote in an article in the Figaro, ‘ and the artist may perhaps feel as curious to show the ways of a queen as of a dressmaker.’ He felt the seduction of the people of the world, but his final judgment of them was severe; he was never their dupe. ‘ What idiots they are!’ we are told he often exclaimed, as the outcome of this malicious sympathy. Yet there is the devil in it all!

V

This is but another way of saying that the key to Proust’s personality is of pathological nature. To turn ferociously against Proust the man may be on the surface natural and justifiable. But it is only so when we assume that we are concerned with a normal man, of ordinary healthy constitution, leading the average human life of his social class. We are concerned with a man who fulfills none of these conditions. Nor will heredity suffice to explain him. Rousseau’s heredity we can study; it is full of illumination on Rousseau the man, though his genius remains, as it always will remain, a mystery. But the Proustian heredity most naturally leads us by no means to Marcel, but to his younger brother Robert, following in his father’s footsteps, and attaining to distinction in his profession. In Marcel we have to recognize an exasperated sensibility which is morbid in origin, and we cannot find the key by approaching it in a mood of moral vituperation, but rather of tenderness.

We have to attempt to define a pathological foundation. As is known, the complaint which moulded the outward shape of Marcel Proust’s life, and furnished the conditions for his whole lifework, was spasmodic nervous asthma, allied to and often associated with the slighter form of the same disorder commonly called hay fever. Since Proust’s death this has become generally regarded as one of a group of disorders, having elements in common and tending to be associated, now going under the name of allergy. The allergic group of disorders especially includes asthma (with hay fever) and some skin complaints, with which it may be interchangeable. They are technically described as showing one common ætiological characteristic: hypersensitiveness to proteins or other substances that are innocuous to ordinary people. The symptoms come and go suddenly, though in severe cases there is more or less illness during the intervals. The nature of the attacks indicates disturbance of the autonomic nervous system. When repetitions are frequent the attacks are liable to be brought on by very slight causes, sometimes only psychical. Thus, while the provocation comes from without, the origin of the allergic condition is in an insecure internal metabolism, a sensitive autonomic nervous system. The victim of the allergic disorder is sometimes termed an ‘ autopath.¹

It is held that the source of the allergic condition is usually in some hereditary unbalance. This is not obvious in Marcel Proust. His father seems to have been vigorous and robust; we hear nothing against the mother’s constitution; the only brother, Dr. Robert Proust, active and distinguished in professional work, is apparently a normal man. I am inclined to find a clue in the differences of race; the father belonged to central France, the mother was Jewish. Such racial blends of rather unlike genes certainly lead to unusual psychoneurotic conditions, as is shown by the frequency with which an unusual level of ability is found in the offspring. We may quite reasonably expect the resulting condition sometimes to be pathological in character.

Not only were his parents healthy, but the boy Marcel seems himself to have enjoyed good health. It has been found, however, in England by the Asthma Research Council (Report for 1934), not only that the level of intelligence in asthmatic children is superior to that of normal children, but that the disorder specially tends to occur among those who are overprotected and fussed by their parents, and both these conditions were probably present in Marcel’s case. (At the age of fourteen, in reply to the album question ‘What is your idea of unhappiness?’ he put, ‘To be separated from Mamma.’) One day suddenly, after a walk in the Bois de Boulogne with parents and friends, he was seized by a terrible fit of suffocation. It was the first attack of that asthma by which he was tortured during the rest of his life. As is usual in these allergic cases, the attacks were intermittent, but always liable to occur, while in the intervals health was frequently impaired. Great care had always to be exercised, since even the open air, the country, the odor of trees, and the fragrance of flowers were liable to prove asphyxiating. The general nervous state became exasperatingly tense, and the senses abnormally acute. Hence it was that Proust lived in his room with a cork lining to deaden sound, and in hotels would sometimes engage the neighboring rooms to avoid disturbance. After the death of his father in 1903 he became wealthy, and was thus able to live as he liked and adopt every precaution, even every whim, which he chose to find desirable.

I must not be understood to assert that the form of Proust’s genius was entirely and directly shaped by allergic conditions. It was even more precisely shaped by the indirect results of that condition, arresting development when he was still a child.

VI

In genius, as I have often had occasion to observe, we seem to trace what we conventionally regard as elements of the child, the woman, and the man, the sensibilities of the child, the emotions of the woman, the intellect of the man. This held true of Marcel Proust. One need not go so far as Jean Prévost, who compares Proust to the child in the womb, folded on itself, and only able to view the outside world with suspicion. But one may clearly recognize that the arresting influence of disease at the age of nine retained young Marcel for an unduly long period, and to some extent permanently, in the protected position of the child. Those ways and feelings which we commonly consider feminine were also fostered by his life, and in the concentrated will power by which he was attached to his work we may perhaps find — in the absence of any obvious evidence of virile qualities of character — the chief proof he furnished of what is considered masculine energy.

It was Dandieu who first emphasized the significance in Proust of his schizoid tendency, the tendency toward that rupture of contact with reality which in its extreme form constitutes the form of insanity termed schizophrenia. This rupture I would associate with an inner division of personality, the presence of the infantile element carried into adult life. For the schizoid tendency to rupture of contact between the personality and external life may be said to have its origin in an initial rupture within, between the infantile element unable to contact with reality and the struggling adult tendency toward such contact, which in Proust is specially associated with fetishes (like the cup of tea) serving to evocate that deeper infantilism which, as Dandieu says, is ‘the secret alike of Proust’s weakness and his genius.’ Such a schizoid tendency, representing a stage on the way to schizophrenia, is thus not altogether remote from the cycloid tendency which represents a stage toward the insane manic-depressive state, for we might say that the alternate depressed and exalted moods of the latter condition are represented in the schizoid condition by opposed moods existing side by side.

We are thus led to various manifestations of ruptured vital contact with reality, marked in Proust as well as in Rousseau, the extreme sensitiveness, the morbid susceptibility, the aptitude for suspicion (associated in Proust with extravagant adulation) which made relations with friends, and sometimes even with strangers, so difficult. We may say it was the pressure within of the child element forever needing defense and seeking for protection. His absurdly exaggerated politeness was really, as Pierre-Quint remarks, a method of protecting himself. In this connection we may remember that, as has been said in connection with Proust’s genius, the power of observation only develops highly in the individual who has a personality to defend.

And in the same connection we may also recall that need, on which Proust (like Rousseau) so often insists, of solitude, as well as the flight from the present.

Dandieu refers to the significance of Proust’s systematic pessimism in love, and finally in friendship, and his belief in the necessity of pessimism as well as solitude for artistic creation. They rest on the schizoid lack of personal contact with external reality, the affirmation of a sole subjective reality, with the consequent incommunicability of human beings. ‘The artist who sacrifices an hour of work for an hour’s conversation with a friend,’ said Proust, ‘knows that he is sacrificing reality to something which has no existence. . . . The only reality, for everyone, is the region of his own sensibility.’

When we seek to explore Proust’s philosophy from a severe critical and intellectualistic standpoint we meet with much confusion and contradiction. He returns again and again on himself. Even in so simple a matter as that of friendship, on which I have just quoted an opinion, we see that there is really no place for it in his philosophy. His own self is the only reality for the artist; no communication is possible with other things, to attempt it is sheer waste of time. Yet, as we know, Proust had many friends, and we might even say that the whole of his life not devoted to his work was given to cultivating, with the most anxious and hyperæsthetic sensibility, his relations with these friends.

It is the miracle of genius — even from of old vaguely apprehended — that through an incomplete, defective, if not infantile instrument the voice of wisdom is heard. We must not say that in Proust disease was the actual cause of genius. We may, however, say with Martin-Chauffier, who knew him, that he courageously seized and utilized his disease to exploit his prodigious gifts. Forget the man Proust, and as we turn the pages of the sixteen volumes of his great novel we perpetually come on passages which reveal a profound insight into the mysteries of life, at the same time often expressing that insight in forms of new and singular beauty, mingling, in his own phrase, the dust of reality with magic sand.

Proust has remarked that the man who is often sleepless knows more about sleep than he who sleeps well. That indeed was a subject of which he had had much experience, and his meditations on it occupy the very first pages of his work.

I am here reminded afresh of his remark, for might we not say that the man who is abnormal knows more about normality than the normal man himself? We tend to become unconscious of what is habitual; the normal man feels no impulse to contemplate his own normality. At the most he only sees normal things from the outside, and Proust has declared that the observer who only sees things from the outside has seen nothing. The abnormal man is fascinated by normality; he sees it from his own angle, he meditates on it; he, as it were, gets behind it; he is able to embody it; in his vision the normal becomes flesh. It is so when he gazes even at living things of a lowly class. I have noted, for instance, the passage where Proust describes asparagus as it was never described before. Such a passage as that indeed might almost have been written by Huysmans, whose genius was somewhat akin to Proust’s (I do not know that Proust ever recognized this kinship), but the angle at which Huysmans viewed the world often tended to make the normal appear abnormal, while Proust’s visions tended to make the abnormal more normal, and to reveal a new universe.