Time Lost ?
Introduction to Proust, His Life, His Circle and His IVork. By D zrrick Lean. (Kegan Paul. 12s. 6d.)
IT is eighteen years since Proust died and the bright young men of today would be surprised at the interest and distress the death caused among the bright young men of that remote period. It is to be feared that Proust's readers are mostly over thirty and that the notion of reading thousands of pages devoted to the extravagant conversation and unpleasant sexual habits of French dukes and millionairesses seems merely comic to the young. Proust, himself as far as he is remembered at all, is thought of as a kind of Mr. Wyke Bond, a rather pathetic snob who wasted real talents on unworthy subjects. We live in an iron age in which the entrée to good society is becoming as un- important as it is asserted to be in the speeches of the Fiihrer, and, except as illustrations of the pathology of a decadent bour- geoisie or pluto-democracy, the long series of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is time lost indeed!
It is true that we are not likely to see the like of the Guer- mantes circle again. The combination of the pride of birth and breeding, wealth and the sense of social security are gone. The world of Oriane and Charlus is as dead as the world of the Tale of Genii (surely the closest parallel to Proust's great novel?). And this new book on Proust has come out just as we learn of the death of Prince Saionji, who was not merely the last of the Genro but by birth and breeding a Xuge noble, brought up in a world in which refinements of the Cote des Guermantes must have seemed barbarously crude. That affair of the bow which won the Duke to admit that Marcel's social sense was adequate, like the affair of Odette and the orchids, would have been under- stood by Lady Murasaki, who might, however, have been puzzled by the importance attached to such a minimum of good manners.
But if we must have lessons, if the mere conquest of the imagination by a world created by the artist is not enough, there are lessons in Proust. The reader whose palate is a little re- volted by the crude manners of the courts of Berchtesgaden or Moscow will find here grounds for comfort. The Daily Worker of the future will find lessons in more refined flattery which it can use to glorify the genial leader or his heirs. But some of us are willing to relax and can do without learning anything of immediate social utility from our reading. And no one who has ever been really soaked in Proust is ever quite the same again. The fixed and rigid views of the characters of ourselves and our friends which are impressed on us by our parents and teachers dissolve ; the disturbing thought that we ourselves are not entirely set in our admirable ways, but had better be vigilant is inserted into our minds. We can hardly put the " lesson " of Proust at more than that. But the delight of Proust is to be found in contemplating an imaginary world with its own con- sistency and power of persuasion, and it is the great merit of this book that it recalls for the devotee the delights of past days and by its sincere enthusiasm may win new readers.
It must be said, however, that the definitive English book on Proust has yet to be written. Mr. Leon has zeal, but he has not enough knowledge. For example, the Dreyfus case is central to the problem of Proustian chronology. Yet Mr. Leon tells the story of the case inaccurately and with no real conception of its complexity. His bibliography does not contain the journals of Jules Renard, or of Andre Gide, or Leon Blum's Souvenirs sur PAffaire, or (though this is more excusable), the Cahiers of Maurice Banes. He does not seem to have used that excellent academic work, Mademoiselle Delhorbe's L'Affaire Dreyfus et les icrivains franfais. He rides to death his hobby-horse of the profound influence of Ruskin on Proust and ignores almost com- pletely the influence of his French masters, above all of Balzac and Saint-Simon. He is careless about points over which Proust took special care. He even commits two solecisms specifically reproved (unless my memory fails me) by M. de Charlus. He refers to the " Emperor of Germany " and to " de Charlus." He
tells us next to nothing about Proust's paternal and maternal relations, and, although he gives a few generalities about Proust's Jewish connexions, he ignores the significance of the racial origin of most of the boys whom Proust knew at the Lyle& Con- dorcet. Had he been sent to the College Stanislas, Proust might have had a different literary career. Proust, though a difficult writer, was not in the portions of his book that he revised, a careless or banal writer. Mr. Leon is both. He has a magnetic attraction for clichés and is at times so careless as to be unin- telligible or misleading. There is another criticism to be made of this book Mi. Leon is not snob enough to note as carefully as Proust did the grada- tions of good society. Proust, who was so careful to distinguish between the nobility of Robert de Saint-Loup and that of the Prince de Borodino, would have been distressed at the poor sense of discrimination shown here. And is it right in a serious book on Proust to evade the problem of the nature of Marcel's love affairs? Do the very names Andree, Gilberte, Albertine suggest nothing to Mr. Leon? The sexual theme of Proust is not the mere " contagion of the world's slow stain " as exemplified in the degeneration of Saint-Loup and the rest, but the entry of nearly all his characters into the cities of the plain. Mr. Leon has many merits as a salesman for his much admired author, but at times he reminds me of the cure whose amateur study of place-names was exposed by Brichot. D. W. BROGAN.
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