M. PROUST ; OR, RICHARDSON OUTWRITTEN.* IN an article recently

contributed to our columns a country- woman of the now so -celebrated M. Proust asked herself and us whether the vast enterprise represented by the words A la Recherche the Temps Perdu could in effect be classed as a book ? The translator of Du COM de Chez Swann employs perhaps a quaint but nevertheless a happy phrase when he calls his work " a translation of the first part of M. Proust's continuous novel." Continuous is the word. It is a work continuous as human life is continuous—far more so than any one actual life—changing a little from one incarnation to the other ; Du Cote de Chez Swann is not quite the same as A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filler en Fleurs. It changes, certainly, as the volumes defile from softness and haze to a sort of limpid certainty, but is liable perhaps to change back to a prophetic mysticism. Yet it is alive through all its length, in all its vicissitudes.

From it, to borrow the words of Doctor Johnson, a hermit might form his notion of the world—not merely of the world of a certain set, or even of the world of one country. Like all great writers M. Proust pierces down to the primary biped. He is neither more nor less interested in Aunt ',Conic, the provincial nzalade imaginaire, than in the Duchesses of the Faubourg St. Germain, who appear from time to time in Swann's Way and who form the chief dramatis personae of Le c-ote de Guermantes. Swann, the melancholy man of the world, who has refined and refined till elegance and wit—unmasked—have seemed of no more and no less worth than provinciasm and buffoonery, has his creator's profound understanding and sympathy. So, too, has the poor little composer and music master of Combray, Ventuille, whose daughter's disgrace breaks a gentle, ineffectual heart.

Irony, an almost ecstatic sense of the beautiful, a love of the strange and a passion for the commonplace, seem to divide M. Proust's strange and comprehensive mind. But, indeed, when we consider the nature of his task, we can at once see that this must be the case. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, which Mr. Scott Moncrieff translates as " Remembrance of things past," but which could perhaps be more happily rendered by some phrase such as " The harvest of lost days," is, in fact, an effort to recreate a whole world, and such an effort could obviously only be made by a mind thus passionate and meticulous. And here we must put in a word of warning to our readers. If, in fact, a whole world could be brought back into being, there would necessarily be a great deal in it which ordinarily presents itself only to the eye of the doctor, the lawyer, or the confessor. If for some scientific purpose it were possible to lift (as which of us has not desired to lift) the roofs off all the houses in a town, we know that a great deal would be revealed which we are

• Swami's Way. By Marcel Proust. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. 2 vols. London: Chat* and Windus. 1153. net.)

accustomed to call either common or else unclean. But if the purpose of the research were obviously and comprehensibly a scientific one, we should not for the most part demand that truth should be distorted as omissions inevitably distort. We should willingly admit that the consideration and taking into account of all the elements present were not so much desirable as ordinary and necessary. We should not begin to suspect the good faith of the inquirer unless the proportion of " horrible revelations " seemed excessive. If it did, then we should be justified in condemning our research worker for a type of distortion far worse and more damaging to the cause of truth than any of the distortions of prudery.

In fine, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is a book for a reader who is fairly far up in the school of life. The " junior forms " would be not improbably both hurt and bewildered as well as bored by it. But the pathologically, the pruriently minded would dislike it far more. Indeed, this judgment (that it is not a book for " the young person ") is perhaps an unsound one. Du COW de Chez Swann would be a lesson in proportion of the utmost value. For here is a witness who is certainly not on the side of the prudes—a witness, in fact, of a disinterestedness which is almost passionate ; and here is all he has to tell us. Are the skeletons in Society's cupboard, when they are all marshalled and grinning, no more seductive or more exciting than this ? For the reader of M. Proust will find the simple and happy, the funny and ordinary things of life shown to be as strange and as marvellous as those things for which the esteem of right thinking people (to say the least) must be forfeited. If, then, the novel, as some people hold, is the school of experience without the birch—the voyage in an atlas—then perhaps the reading of M. Proust might be a valuable addition to many a paternal homily.

Du Cote de Chez Swann is concerned with the early life of the narrator, and the complete histories of the people with whom a very quiet existence brought the boy into contact. There are some marvellously subtle descriptions of childish experience in it. Take, for instance, the recurring burden of the earlier chapters, which is the good-night kiss of the boy's mother. Without this kiss the affectionate, imaginative child believes that he cannot go to sleep. The father pooh- poohs this absurd idea, and when there is company to dinner —for instance, that hateful M. Swann--then the kiss must be given and received in the dining-room shorn of any attendant caress or whispered intimacy. This is an agony, and many, but pathetically simple, are the little stratagems to which the child resorts to secure that kiss in its proper setting.

How can he carry it intact all the way from the dining-room ? One dinner-party night his misery is so overwhelming that he resolves to commit the unheard of indiscretion of sitting up till his mother comes to bed. And as he waits he tries to imagine what awful form of retribution this conduct will call down upon him. At the least he will to-morrow be packed off to a boarding-school 1 But when his mother and father come, it is to a sorrow outside his childish power to have prophesied to which he is subjected. For his parents, genuinely distressed, then and there realize that their boy is, indeed, exceptionally highly strung. They tacitly abandon the idea of trying to cure him by a cheerful belittling of his whims. His mother does not scold but tries rather to console him, and promises she will sleep in the room with him for a great treat :—

" I ought then to have been happy ; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first step down from the ideal she had formed for me, and that, for the first time, she, with all her courage, had to confess herself beaten. It struck me that if I had just scored a victory it was over her ; that I had succeeded as sickness or sorrow or, age might have succeeded in relaxing her will, in altering her judgment. . . . And if I had dared now, I should have said to mama ' No, I don't want you to sleep here.' "

But we must set before the reader a sample of M. Proust's powers in the well-worn way of the descriptions of natural objects. He is not in the Tchekovian sense a symbolist.

If his description is to convey more to us than its ostensible meaning, he will tell us so. He has what many modern writers lack, an appetite for beautiful things for their own sake.

The boy is taking one of those many walk,: with his parents when suddenly they come to a great hedge of hawthorn in full flower. The hedge, irregular and generous, seems to

form in its bays a series of little chapels. He is enchanted, carried away by the sight of the sunbathed blossom and by the warm, pulsing waves of scent :—

" Combien naives et paysannes en conparaison sembleralent lea eglantines qui, dans quelques semaines monteraient elles aussi en plein soled le Wane chemin rustique, en la sole unie de leur corsage rougissant qu'un souffle defait. Mais j'avais beau rester devant les sub:Spines a respirer, A porter devant ma pens& qui ne savait ce qu'elle devait en faire, a perdre a retrouver leur invisible et fixe odeur, A m'unir au rythme qui jetait leurs fleurs, ici et ii,, avec une alldgresse juvenile et a des intervalles inattendus comme certain intervalles musicaux, elles m'offraient indefiniment le meme charme avec une profusion inepuisable, mail sans me le laisser approfondir davantage, comme ces melodies qu' on rejoue cent foie de suite sans descendre plus avant dans leur secret."

This passage Mr. Scott Moncrieff renders thus :— " How simple and rustic, in comparison with these, would seem the dog-roses, which, in a few weeks' time, would be climbing the same hillside path in the heat of the sun, dressed in the smooth silk of their blushing pink bodices, which would be undone and scattered by the first breath of wind. But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in, to marshal before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals of music ; they offered me an indefinite con- tinuation of the same charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve into it any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret."

This translation has a few obvious faults, but the English version as a whole is a piece of work to be proud of. If it is laborious in parts—often a little too literal quite to convey the flavour of the author—how difficult a task it was to translate the work of a writer who is all flavour, whose points are so fine, and whose fine points alone justify whole periods of our reading. The translation, if for nothing else, is of immense value as a " crib," to be read in conjunction with the French, enabling the slow or uncertain French scholar to read M.

Proust at the correct speed. That is a factor which the despisers of translations and of such works as Cowden Clarke's Riches of Chaucer often fail to take into account. For

every narrative, and, indeed, every piece of literature, prose or poem, is a thing unrolled in time. The speed of this unrolling is always, more or legs, consciously borne in mind by the author—poets have many devices with which they delay or increase the reader's speed. Mere pace can deform a work of art. Who does not know the limerick ?— " There was a young lady of Rio,

Who tried to play Handel's Grand Trio.

But her skill was so scanty

She played it Andante Instead of Allegro con Brio."

Subjected to such treatment by a slow reading a great deal of M. Proust's flavour is lost. He clearly wrote to be read Allegro. This is what Mr. Scott Moncrieff's translation will enable many of us to do for the first time, for M. Proust's French is of teneextremely crabbed in construction, a French to be laboured with, a French where all the words are easy and all the sentences difficult, a French wherein the dictionary will not help us. Let us therefore hope that Mr. Scott Moncrieff will continue the good work. There are some passages in the very next section, A l'Ombre des Jeunes Files en Fleurs, upon which this laborious reader at least would be extremely glad to have a second opinion.

What, we wonder, will be the faults which time will reveal in M. Proust's fabric ? He is discursive. He has raised the parenthesis to a fine art. He never sticks to his scene. All this is true, and these things would be faults in another.

But when he pours out upon us with such unmeasured generous fullness the good qualities which these individualities seem alone to allow to come to flower, it seems surly to challenge them. At any rate, it seems that it is for us of his own generation to praise rather than to appraise. Our censure could obviou sly not influence the character of M. Proust's output—so our responsibility to our entertainer

and instructor is nil. And therefore we can—with a good

conscience — let " The harvest of lost days " conduct us as it will, with even less hope of influencing it by act or opinion than we have of modifying that of days yet to come in our own life. We may learn and enjoy with a pleasant passivity, our critical activity left for once on one side.