SOURCE: Hindus, Milton. “Minor Works.” In A Reader's Guide to Marcel Proust, pp. 181-95. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, first published in 1962, Hindus offers an overview of Pleasures and Days, Pastiches and Mélanges, and Chroniques, all of which are considered minor works of Proust.]

PLEASURES AND DAYS

The first book published by Proust in 1896 at the age of twenty-five, with a perceptive preface by Anatole France, is a collection of prose and verse (the English translation retains the prose but drops the half dozen pages of verse “portraits of painters and musicians” which the French text includes). This excision, except perhaps from a scholarly point of view, seems to me to have been advisable, not only because it is difficult to carry over the quality and felicities of even the greatest poetry from one language to another but because Proust's gift was definitely not for verse. To convince ourselves of this fact, we have only to compare the fifteen line verse tribute to Chopin with the beautiful passage which he devoted to that composer in Swann's Way (429).

But the prose is another matter. The dichotomy between the two gifts is a matter of repeated observation in literary history. When John Dryden, according to tradition, said to Jonathan Swift: “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet!” he was right in the technical sense, if we identify poetry and verse as people were inclined to do in England at the time, but he was wrong if we use the word poet in its larger Aristotelian sense as a maker of plots and creator of characters. Swift, though indifferent as a versifier, became the greatest prose writer in his language. In our own time in America, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald all tried their hands at poetry in the narrower sense and published the results, which are not very interesting except in the documentary or biographical sense. Like Melville, whose poetry is to be found mainly in Moby Dick rather than in his voluminous verse, Proust incorporated his poetry into Remembrance.

This earliest collection of his sketches, stories, satires, verses is by no means a negligible production. In the authentic sense of a much abused and frequently undeserved term of praise, it is promising. Of course it does not promise so much as Proust was to perform, for whereas it is characteristic of facile and clever talents to promise more than they are able to redeem, it is characteristic of something far higher than talent sometimes to promise less. Anatole France (or, according to malicious legend, his mistress), who had the advantage of knowing the young writer personally and was consequently better able to gauge the depth of meaning in his words, caught the hint of “things to come” completely. His oft-quoted descriptive phrase about Proust as “a depraved Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and an ingenuous Petronius” is possibly more applicable to Remembrance, which was many years away, than to the slim volume to which it is affixed.

André Gide, after changing his mind for the better about Swann's Way, went back to this earlier book of Proust's and did penance by confessing that he had not done justice to it on first reading and that viewing it retrospectively it turns out to have many of the themes and qualities which later went into its author's masterpiece. Edmund Wilson, who did not have to change his mind because he came to Proust's work when it had long been famous, has also done a good job of tracing the connections of subject and manner of treatment evident between Les plaisirs et les jours and Remembrance. Without attempting to deny the validity of the insights of such gifted creators and critics, which are only too easy to document satisfactorily with quotations, it must be admitted, I think, that this book of Proust's is by no means as ripe an artistic production as, for example, Joyce's Dubliners is. Had Joyce died before he wrote Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake (not to mention Chamber Music or Exiles) his first precocious publication should have survived and been rediscovered in time. The same, I am afraid, cannot be said of Les Plaisirs et les Jours, which owes its continuing interest and preservation solely to its author's later work.

The resemblances in some details to Remembrance are not difficult to discover. In the story “A Young Girl's Confession,” which deals with a familiar Proustian theme: the profanation of the parental image and the intolerable burden of guilt this brings with it, we come across a clear reminder of the incident involving the mother's good-night kiss in the opening section of Swann's Way. (Pleasures and Days, p. 80). And two pages later on, there is an aphorism which is an abbreviation of the same theme that in its most complete development appears in the volume Sweet Cheat Gone: “Absence taught me other and still more bitter lessons, that one grows accustomed to absence, that the greatest diminution of oneself, the most humiliating suffering is to feel that one no longer suffers.” (82)

The protagonist of this story, though of a different sex, obviously has the same basic character (or maybe the more appropriate word is characterlessness) as the narrator of Remembrance, and her mother is just as concerned about it as his is: “What grieved my mother was my lack of will. I did everything on the impulse of the moment.” (83-84)

When he speaks of the benefits we derive from suffering and of those who cause us to suffer (women, “cruel friends”) as benefactors, we are reminded of how much his vision of life has in common with that of Schopenhauer. Proust adds to the fundamental pessimism of this philosopher a masochistic twist of his own which occasionally has the effect of giving to it an air of affectation or preciosity. The theme of the vanity of snobbery and ambition could come from the same source or be traceable all the way back to Ecclesiastes, and yet there is a Proustian grace in the phrasing, a sense of style that is personal to himself and is the initial gift he brought with him to the art of writing. This stylistic grace is evident when he speaks, for example, of “the universal scandal of human lives, not excepting his own, that walked toward death backward with eyes turned toward life.” (10)

In the story “Violante, or Worldly Vanities,” there is an evocation of the torrid, lustful atmosphere of Gomorrah (32-33) which is significant in the light of the importance of this theme later on and at the same time makes more understandable Anatole France's mention of the name of Petronius in connection with that of Proust, though I do not see his reason for qualifying with the adjective “ingenuous” the name of the Roman satirist, unless the adjective indicates (aside from adding a characteristic spice of paradox) that the old author was loathe to believe that his young friend was as sophisticated about corruption in sexual mores as certain passages in this book seemed to suggest. But Proust was certainly not ingenuous, and if his work reminds one of the satire of the Roman decadence it may be because he was so well acquainted with the seamier side of contemporary manners and morals.

But Petronius is not the only Latin satirist whom Proust brings to mind. In “Fragments from Italian Comedy,” in addition to its titular models, the reader is reminded of a range of satire from the relative good-nature of Horace to the bitter sarcasm of Martial's epigrams. Here is one of the characters whom he rather mildly makes fun of: “Myrto, witty, pretty, and kind, but something of a social climber, prefers, to all her other friends, Parthénis who is a duchess and smarter than herself; yet she enjoys the companionship of Lalagé whose social standing is exactly equal to her own, and she is also by no means indifferent to the attractions of Cléanthis who is obscure and has no pretensions to brilliant rank. But the friend Myrto cannot endure is Doris. Doris's worldly situation is a little below that of Myrto, and she seeks out Myrto, as Myrto does Parthénis, because she is more fashionable.” (36)

The eccentric Oranthe is delineated in a more incisive, epigrammatic manner. In this character, foibles and vices are almost indistinguishable from each other: “So you didn't go to bed last night? You haven't washed this morning? But why proclaim it from the housetops, Oranthe? Brilliantly gifted as you are, isn't that enough to distinguish you from common mortals? Must you insist upon acting such a pitiful role besides? You are hounded by creditors, your infidelities drive your wife to despair … You know how to make yourself very agreeable, and your wit, without your long hair, would be enough to make people notice you … The trouble with you is that to the soul of an artist you have added all the prejudices of a bourgeois, only showing the reverse side and without deceiving us.” (43)

The character Olivian, though he is described in more than a page, is really caught with a single sentence: “Olivian, you are truly unfortunate. Because, almost before you were a man, you were already a man of letters.” (51)

But if he is clearly indebted to ancient models (beginning with the very title of his book, which is an ironic echo of Hesiod's Works and Days) he has learned from the standard authors in his own culture as well. A maxim such as the following is a recognizable variation upon a well-known theme by La Rochefoucauld: “A libertine's need of virginity is another form of the eternal homage love pays to innocence.” (45) And a passage such as the following derives not only from observation but even more obviously from Madame Bovary: “There are women in the provinces, it would seem, little shopkeepers whose brains are tiny cages imprisoning longings for Society as fierce as wild animals. The postman brings them the Gaulois. The society page is gobbled up in a flash. The ravenous provincial ladies are satisfied. And for the next hour their eyes, whose pupils are inordinately dilated by veneration and delight, will shine with an expression of perfect serenity.” (41)

At least one other literary debt of Proust's deserves mention—the one he owes to Tolstoy. The last story in the book entitled “The End of Jealousy” and particularly its concluding pages read in parts (152-153, 161-162) almost like involuntary pastiches of the Russian master's great story The Kreutzer Sonata and the scene at the death-bed of Prince Andrey Bolkonsky in War and Peace. Tolstoy is explicitly mentioned by Proust on a number of occasions, and it is certain that his work was one of the most lasting admirations in Proust's life.

PASTICHES ET MéLANGES

In an essay on Flaubert reprinted in the volume Chroniques, Proust speaks of the therapeutic function of writing conscious imitations or pastiches of famous authors. His idea is that the styles of the masters are so infectious to the sensitive beginner that if he does not get them out of his system somehow, he will continue in involuntary servitude to them all of his life without knowing it. To exorcise them and neutralize their gravitational pull upon himself, he must consciously imitate them (to the degree of parody) instead of unconsciously doing so.

This may have been a rationalization of his own delight in mimicry (of the mannerisms of his friends as well as those of celebrated stylists in literature). In any case, he succeeds in these pastiches in being both amusing and instructive. (Especially excellent, I think, is his take-off on a typical Lundi article by Sainte-Beuve. (24 ff) Here, in a few lively pages, he has condensed the essence of his hundreds of expository pages directed against Sainte-Beuve in his then unpublished work of that name, and furthermore he has made his serious point in a delightfully entertaining way. Presumably criticizing a mythical novel by Flaubert (a portion of which served for the previous pastiche), Sainte-Beuve displays a positive aversion to the prospect of coming to grips with the work he is supposed to be criticizing. He escapes from his duty as a critic somewhat in the manner of Stephen Leacock's celebrated horseman who galloped rapidly off in all directions. The “article” consists of an endless series of irrelevancies: digressions about Flaubert's father, digressions about the lack of complete realism in his portrayal of a scene in a law court (Sainte-Beuve's authority is an eminent lawyer of his acquaintance), pedantic allusions—a la Brichot—to Martial, to Napoleon, to Villemain and to whatever and whomever else the critic's capacious memory can dredge up. At the end, we realize (if we are reflective—but how many newspaper readers reflect on what they have read?) that we have been titillated, interested, and informed on every possible subject but the one that the critic is ostensibly concerned with and ought to have dealt with—namely, the work of art by Flaubert. And we realize, through the distortion of caricature, that this parody has exposed the journalistic technique of Sainte-Beuve, which is never so completely awry from its critical purpose as Proust pretends here but is so only at its weakest points which the parodist has mercilessly seized upon.

And we realize the cardinal sin of journalism—which according to Proust means writing to please others, in distinction from “true” writing which is more subjective in its motivation (to the point of being self-centered) and derives its possible importance from this central characteristic. In another connection, later in this book, he writes: “When one works to please others, one cannot succeed, but the things one has done to please oneself always have a chance of interesting someone else.” (102-103) The sentence refers to Ruskin whose analysis and appreciations of the Gothic Cathedrals of France are the subjects of the greater part of this volume. Ruskin for Proust was “one of the greatest writers of all times and of all countries.” (187) So great was his feeling for the English master, some of whose works he translated and annotated meticulously, that at the latter's death in 1900 Proust describes a pilgrimage he made to the Cathedral at Rouen in search of an obscure, small bit of sculpture there which Ruskin had discovered and spoken of with infectious enthusiasm. (174) This is one of the more striking passages in Proust himself and invites comparison with the passage in The Captive describing the death of Bergotte which happened during an art exhibition where, as we recall, he had gone in search of a painting by Vermeer in which a sensitive critic had brought to light a hitherto unnoticed little patch of yellow wall, exquisitely done. It is enthusiasm rightly directed that for Proust is the touchstone of the quality of aesthetic criticism: “Great literary beauties correspond to something, and it is perhaps enthusiasm in art which is the criterion of truth.” (178) He applies to Ruskin himself the words which that great enthusiast spoke at the death of his favorite contemporary English painter, Turner: “It is with these eyes, closed forever at the bottom of the tomb, that generations yet unborn will look at nature.” (180)

But Proust points out that while Ruskin himself recommended reverence as the proper attitude to assume towards great art and great artists, he rejected what can only be labelled as blind infatuation and dared to find fault even with sacred scripture since there is no form of writing which does not contain an admixture of error. (188) This authority is used to justify his finding some fault with Ruskin. In light of the fact that Proust himself has been subjected to the same criticism by religiously oriented critics, it is especially interesting that he should accuse Ruskin of what he calls the “idolatry of art.” (181) Briefly, he believes, that Ruskin was so sensitive to beauty that, without knowing it, he elevated aesthetics above every other consideration, including ethics, and he cites passages from The Stones of Venice which are impressively eloquent and lovely prose without ringing really true or sincere. (183-185) In other words, he thinks that excessive devotion to art forms led this most consciously moral of men (who carried sincerity to the point of giving away his private fortune and of recommending to his readers that before allowing themselves to enjoy the beauties of a Cathedral like Amiens they should give alms to the beggars at the door!) into unconscious prevarications by which (through the process of what Freud was to call rationalization) he disguised from himself the luxurious sensuality of his own basic motivations. Proust plays with the curious notion that immoral ideas (or amoral ones? Nietzsche, for example?) sincerely expressed may be less dangerous to integrity of spirit than moral ideas insincerely expressed. (182) Such a notion complicates the problem of evaluative judgment almost beyond belief, and Proust may (from what we know of the problems of his personal life as well as those he faced in choosing his artistic subjects) have been pleading his own case; yet the distinction he insists on appears to be valid. The greatest of all aesthetic as well as ethical virtues for him is to be sincere, which is another way of saying that it is tremendously difficult to know when one is being really honest with oneself! He criticizes Ruskin, too, (and perhaps this technical fault which he discovers grows out of the substantive one just discussed) for emphasizing overmuch the ideas or literary equivalents of painting. For Proust (and his point of view was to gain increasing currency with artists and critics later in the twentieth century) painting can hope to rival literature only when it realizes that its peculiar genius is not at all literary! (157)

Yet in spite of such criticisms which establish his independence, his overwhelmingly favorable reaction to Ruskin is allowed to stand. He quotes pages and pages of Ruskin's text and accompanies each quotation with learned footnotes which cite parallel passages from Ruskin's other works. He is himself evidently steeped in Ruskin's works and invites the reader to immerse himself in it as well. He warns of the danger of trying to get to know an author through selections, anthologies, or even a complete book: “To read but one book by an author,” he tells us, “is to enjoy merely a passing acquaintance with him” (107) His own knowledge of Ruskin is clearly not superficial but thorough, broad and deep. To give us a sample of the richness his master's work contains, he composes a detailed guide to Ruskin's Bible of Amiens, which is itself a guide to that Cathedral. (131 ff) Though the following words are not meant to be applied directly to him, Ruskin in Proust's estimation was undoubtedly one of those who realized and is capable of making us realize that “the supreme effort of the writer as of the artist is partially to lift the veil of ugliness and insignificance which leaves us without curiosity about the world.” (250)

A strange thing to find in the volume is the evidence of what can only be called, in a predominantly romantic setting of materials and ideas, elements of a classical point of view concerning art (which may help to explain how it came about—biographers have offered some ad hominem explanations of the phenomenon—that one of the most favorable criticisms of Proust's first book was written by the reactionary classicist, Charles Maurras, a fact which Proust remembered with gratitude all his life). In true romantic vein he speaks of “the man of genius” but notice that the romantic man of genius in the following passage is engaged in a seemingly classical activity: “The man of genius cannot give birth to undying works save by creating them not in the image of the mortal being that he is, but in the image of the representative example of humanity that he bears within him.” (148) And he notes the paradox that while the most intelligent public tends to be romantic in its taste today, “the masters (even the so-called romantic masters preferred by the romantic public) are classical!” (267) To compound the ambiguity, he claims that the romantics have always made the best commentators on classics, like Phèdre.

Part of the greatness of Ruskin for him consists of the fact that he was so enamored of the past and turns our thoughts towards it with understanding, love, and humility. Writing against an anti-clerical bill introduced into the Chamber of Deputies by Briand in the wake of the Dreyfus Case—a bill that would have ended the state subvention of services in the great Cathedrals of France—Proust foresees with trepidation the ultimate result, so dear to the heart of all progressive thinkers, that “the dead (that “great silent democracy” as Proust called it in a phrase resembling one of Chesterton's) will no longer govern the living. And the oblivious living will cease to fulfill the vows of the dead.” (209) Passages such as this one help us to understand better why, though some Catholics have been among the most outspoken critics of Proust, other Catholic writers like Mauriac have by and large found it possible, with some reservations, to defend his work strongly.

But the most interesting selection in Pastiches et Mélanges to my mind is the one most frequently translated and reprinted entitled “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide.” (211-225) The story in brief has to do with a man, Henri van Blarenberghe, whom Proust knew very casually over a long period but with whom, due to circumstances relating to the death of both their fathers, he was in touch by letter shortly before van Blarenberghe was involved in a family tragedy so macabre that it supplied the subject of a horrifying item in the press of the day, the kind of sensational story we glance at briefly, read with indifference, and immediately pass over. The newspaper item was headed with the words “Drama of a Lunatic” and it told how van Blarenberghe, a wealthy, sensitive man (his sensitive nature has been established by Proust previously through quoting from a couple of the letters he had received from him over the years) had in a fit of rage killed his mother suddenly and then, when he realized what he had done, shot himself so awkwardly in the head that he died a tortured, lingering death, with a police inspector at his elbow badgering him in his final moments in search of some clue which might help to unravel the motives of the catastrophe.

Proust's idea in his little piece is to go back of the bare journalistic facts reported in the paper, not by analyzing the psychology of the participants in the action (he didn't know any of them well enough to do so) but to point out how various of the incidents reported by the press serve to remind the reader who is in some way sympathetically attuned to the people involved, of moments in the highest classical drama of Greece and novels of the modern world—of Ajax by Sophocles and of Oedipus, of Shakespeare's King Lear, of Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov and of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Proust's object is to show that this journalistic sensation is not just cheap melodrama but has within it the stuff of great tragedy. To use his own words: “I want to bring into the room of the crime something of the breath of heaven, to show that what this newspaper paragraph recorded was precisely one of those Greek dramas, the performance of which was almost a sacred ceremony; that the poor parricide was no criminal brute, no moral leper beyond the pale of humanity, but a noble example, a tender and a loving son whom an ineluctable fate—or, let us say, pathological, and so speak the language of today—had driven to crime, and to its expiation, in a manner that should be forever illustrious.” (In other words, Proust's theme has something in common with that of Kafka's story The Hunger Artist, in which the author tries to indicate that the ethic of asceticism, which once gave rise to so many illustrious religious martyrdoms, is today regarded as merely ridiculous, meaningless, or diseased; martyrs are thus robbed of the attention which was once theirs, without ceasing to suffer or to be less worthy of fame and celebration than their great predecessors—the saints over whom so many tears have been shed and for whom so many prayers have been intoned. It is humanity that is fickle and from time to time changes its style in heroes or refuses to recognize the existence of the hero altogether, as at the present time).

But there is another idea that Proust develops at the end—that such a newspaper melodrama, like the high tragedies of the Greeks and Elizabethans, merely carries to an extreme of crudity, impulses and actions that are far from uncommon, and his conclusion is that every man and woman in this world is to some degree guilty of parricide (and matricide) though the means used are not usually revolver and dagger but only words, hateful looks, etc. “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide” is an extraordinarily powerful piece of literature which, appearing years ago in English translation in one of our more fashionable literary periodicals, so completely dwarfed and put into the shadow the articles and stories which the editors had to print side by side with it that there was no sense of competition or comparison between them. Proust is able to breathe life and imagination into the classical myth while using it to give a higher meaning to an otherwise sordid contemporary scandal. His handling of his materials has something so masterful about it that it brings to my mind the story about Cezanne, who, after rebelling successfully against a lifeless academicism in painting, proposed that modern artists measure their art against the solidity characteristic of the classics displayed in the museums. Cezanne proposed to be modern and alive and exciting (unlike the academic painters) without ceasing to be monumental and permanent in his intentions. If anything by Proust aside from Remembrance deserves the attention of the conscientious, careful or merely curious reader, I suggest that it is the pages entitled “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide.”

CHRONIQUES

This is a miscellaneous collection of pieces by Proust in various newspapers and magazines up to a year before his death in 1922. It was made by his brother Robert in collaboration with the publisher Gallimard, and it contains a good many things of interest to the Proustian reader. For example, an anecdote about the Prince Edmond de Polignac reveals that this personage “sat” for a moment to supply at least one touch in the portrait of the writer Bergotte (whose more important models are Anatole France and John Ruskin) in Remembrance. In The Captive, the ailing Bergotte in his last years always feels chilly, wears his plaids and travelling clothes, and apologetically quotes to his friends a Greek sage to justify his change of habits: “Anaxagoras has said: Life is a journey!” Well, Polignac is evidently the personage from real life about whom this story was told. In fact, a good many of the incidents in Remembrance have sources traceable in contemporary history, sometimes in the journalistic writings of Proust himself, and this is the reason undoubtedly that he referred to the form of his greatest work as a cross between fiction and the memoir.

Among the most interesting of the selections are those modified excerpts from Swann's Way which Proust chose to publish in the newspaper Figaro from 1912 to March 1913, just before the first installment of Remembrance went into print. (92-122) The striking thing about all these selections is their distinction of style, and if one were to do a pastiche of Proust himself one would have to capture in particular his habitual use of what I have elsewhere called “the Art-Simile”—that is to say, the simile in which nature is compared to a work of art, rather than vice versa, as is usually the case in romantic art. The Art-Simile seems to me the most important Proustian innovation in imagery, and the number and quality of such images in these selections indicate that the author himself was conscious of how characteristic they were of his vision of the world, which elevated art to a pinnacle of importance in a hierarchy of values previously occupied for Rousseau and the Romantic poets by nature unretouched.

A ray of sunlight on the balcony breaking through the clouds on a day which had started out to be gloomy is strikingly compared to the crescendo in an orchestral overture in which a single note is artfully led through all sorts of intermediary stages until it reaches the utmost degree of sound in a fortissimo. (103) Street noises become for the writer's ear: “a thousand popular themes finely written for different instruments … orchestrating lightly the morning air.” (106) A childhood reminiscence that he has evoked becomes “something fantastic, melancholy and caressing, like a phrase of Schumann.” (105)

Proust's feeling for just comparisons which form the bases of similes and metaphors gives substance to Aristotle's observation in The Poetics that the quality of metaphor constitutes the hallmark of poetic genius, and it is interesting to note that in a discriminating essay on Flaubert's style reprinted in this book in which Proust praises Flaubert's originality in the way he employs certain tenses (past definite, past indefinite, present participle) as well as his use of certain pronouns and prepositions, he also takes occasion to criticize the flat commonplaceness of that prose master's metaphors. (193 ff) It is clear, on the other hand, that the originality and freshness and unexpectedness of Proust's own metaphors are among the chief beauties of his poetic style.

The essay on Flaubert is one of Proust's attempts to confirm his thesis that “we no longer know how to read.” (206) Lack of careful discrimination and failure of sensibility alone could account, so far as he is concerned, for recent harsh criticisms that had been leveled at Flaubert (without doing justice to his genuine originality) and flattering notices directed once more towards the criticism of Sainte-Beuve. In 1920, as more than a decade earlier, the difference between a Sainte-Beuve and a Flaubert appeared to him to be the difference between very good paste and slightly-flawed pearl. He protests vehemently against the injustices and perversities in which the world, under the dictates of fashion and in its restless, frantic search for novelties, indulges itself in the course of time. He detects, for example, a tendency among musicians and the public in the wake of the First World War to depreciate the compositions of Wagner, just as certain avant-garde Wagnerians a generation earlier had depreciated the music of Chopin. (218) The reaction against Wagner appeared to him to be connected with an absurd cultural nationalism aimed against all things German. He tells us of a recent so-called History of Philosophy which somehow managed to exclude the names of Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel! (218-219) To the excessively refined aesthetes and intellectuals, whose thirst for novelty and the bizarre accounts for many of the idiocies in contemporary judgments, he makes the plea (rather unusual for an avant-garde writer!) that “we must read the masters with more simplicity.” (209)

Yet even in the act of admiring and imitating them, he cannot help noting the fact that “all the ‘sages’ of our time have been more or less mad—from Auguste Comte to Nietzsche.” (147) Even the lucid Tolstoy was “singular” and Proust tells us that he has heard that his great master Ruskin in his last years appears to have suffered from a mental illness. From these observations, however, he does not draw Irving Babbitt's conclusion that there is something radically unsound about the romanticism of the nineteenth century and that we had better begin searching for wisdom in a new, a more traditional direction. However much Proust loved the classics, he was conscious of the importance of being sensitive to the literary situation of one's own time. To write as well as Voltaire he tells us (since this had become a common critical compliment of late) would involve writing not at all like Voltaire now but very differently from him. Only tone-deaf academicians could think otherwise; empty formalism repels him.

He makes one remark which seems to suggest an adequate criterion by which his own accomplishment will ultimately be measured as well as the accomplishments of other significant writers (“more or less mad”) of the time in which he lived. “Posterity,” he says, “cares about quality of work; it does not judge quantity.” If Proust's work contained no more quality than that of some of his prolific contemporaries, then indeed quantity even much greater than the 4,000 pages of Remembrance should not be sufficient to protect his name against oblivion.

One thing above all seems to me to promise well for the permanence of Proust at his best: It is the clarity and radiance of his work, the absence in it of those difficulties, obscurities, and (let us admit it) outright impossibilities which too often disfigure the work of even the more gifted among his contemporaries. This being so, I find it interesting that one of the best articles in this book should be entitled “Contre l'Obscurité” written when Proust was no more than twenty-five years old and directed against the affectation and lack of clarity which he found in some of the “ideas and images” fashionable among the young Symbolists of his day. Taking a conservative point of view, which he himself recognizes is unusual at his age and therefore “all the more meritorious in the mouth of a young man,” he cautions his contemporaries that “talent is in effect more than originality of temperament. … It is the power of reducing an original temperament to the general laws of art, to the permanent genius of the language.” (138) It is because he never forgets this, never pretends to be more profound than he is, that Proust's work seems to some of us more than the merely “mammoth” production which is, even according to its harsher critics, one of the wonders of modern world literature.