In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (17 page)

But my disappointment was scarcely more than mental. I was radiant
with happiness in this house where Gilberte, when she was still not
with us, was about to appear and would bestow on me in a moment, and
for hours to come, her speech, her smiling and attentive gaze, just as
I had caught it, that first time, at Combray. At the most I was a
trifle jealous when I saw her so often disappear into vast rooms
above, reached by a private staircase. Obliged myself to remain in the
drawing–room, like a man in love with an actress who is confined to
his stall 'in front' and wonders anxiously what is going on behind the
scenes, in the green–room, I put to Swann, with regard to this other
part of the house questions artfully veiled, but in a tone from which
I could not quite succeed in banishing the note of uneasiness. He
explained to me that the place to which Gilberte had gone was the
linen–room, offered himself to shew it to me, and promised me that
whenever Gilberte Had occasion to go there again he would insist upon
her taking me with her. By these last words and the relief which they
brought me Swann at once annihilated for me one of those terrifying
interior perspectives at the end of which a woman with whom we are in
love appears so remote. At that moment I felt for him an affection
which I believed to be deeper than my affection for Gilberte. For he,
being the master over his daughter, was giving her to me, whereas she,
she withheld herself now and then, I had not the same direct control
over her as I had indirectly through Swann. Besides, it was she whom I
loved and could not, therefore look upon without that disturbance,
without that desire for something more which destroys in us, in the
presence of one whom we love, the sensation of loving.

As a rule, however, we did not stay indoors, we went out. Sometimes,
before going to dress, Mme. Swann would sit down at the piano. Her
lovely hands, escaping from the pink, or white, or, often, vividly
coloured sleeves of her
crêpe–de–Chine
wrapper, drooped over the
keys with that same melancholy which was in her eyes but was not in
her heart. It was on one of those days that she happened to play me
the part of Vinteuil's sonata that contained the little phrase of
which Swann had been so fond. But often one listens and hears
nothing, if it is a piece of music at all complicated to which one is
listening for the first time. And yet when, later on, this sonata had
been played over to me two or three times I found that I knew it quite
well. And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first
time. If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from
the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally 'first
hearings' and there would be no reason why one should understand it
any better after the tenth. Probably what is wanting, the first time,
is not comprehension but memory. For our memory, compared to the
complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are
listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in
his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them, or as
that of a man in his second childhood who cannot recall, a minute
afterwards, what one has just been saying to him. Of these multiple
impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an
immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with
regard to works which we have heard more than once, we are like the
schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a
lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can
repeat it by heart next morning. It was only that I had not, until
then, heard a note of the sonata, whereas Swann and his wife could
make out a distinct phrase that was as far beyond the range of my
perception as a name which one endeavours to recall and in place of
which one discovers only a void, a void from which, an hour later,
when one is not thinking about them, will spring of their own accord,
in one continuous flight, the syllables that one has solicited in
vain. And not only does one not seize at once and retain an impression
of works that are really great, but even in the content of any such
work (as befell me in the case of Vinteuil's sonata) it is the least
valuable parts that one at first perceives. Thus it was that I was
mistaken not only in thinking that this work held nothing further in
store for me (so that for a long time I made no effort to hear it
again) from the moment in which Mme. Swann had played over to me its
most famous passage; I was in this respect as stupid as people are who
expect to feel no astonishment when they stand in Venice before the
front of Saint Mark's, because photography has already acquainted them
with the outline of its domes. Far more than that, even when I had
heard the sonata played from beginning to end, it remained almost
wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which its distance or a
haze in the atmosphere allows us to catch but a faint and fragmentary
glimpse. Hence the depression inseparable from one's knowledge of such
works, as of everything that acquires reality in time. When the least
obvious beauties of Vinteuil's sonata were revealed to me, already,
borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those
that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were
beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in successive
moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never
possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less
disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving
us all their best. In Vinteuil's sonata the beauties that one
discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired,
and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different
from what one already knows. But when those first apparitions have
withdrawn, there is left for our enjoyment some passage which its
composition, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to
our mind, had made indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and
this, which we have been meeting every day and have not guessed it,
which has thus been held in reserve for us, which by the sheer force
of its beauty has become invisible and has remained unknown, this
comes to us last of all. But this also must be the last that we shall
relinquish. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have
taken longer to get to love it. The time, moreover, that a person
requires—as I required in the matter of this sonata—to penetrate a
work of any depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one might say, of
the years, the centuries even that must elapse before the public can
begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new. So that the man of
genius, to shelter himself from the ignorant contempt of the world,
may say to himself that, since one's contemporaries are incapable of
the necessary detachment, works written for posterity should be read
by posterity alone, like certain pictures which one cannot appreciate
when one stands too close to them. But, as it happens, any such
cowardly precaution to avoid false judgments is doomed to failure;
they are inevitable. The reason for which a work of genius is not
easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is
extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It was Beethoven's
Quartets themselves (the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and
Fifteenth) that devoted half a century to forming, fashioning and
enlarging a public for Beethoven's Quartets, marking in this way, like
every great work of art, an advance if not in artistic merit at least
in intellectual society, largely composed to–day of what was not to be
found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable
of enjoying it. What artists call posterity is the posterity of the
work of art. It is essential that the work (leaving out of account,
for brevity's sake, the contingency that several men of genius may at
the same time be working along parallel lines to create a more
instructed public in the future, a public from which other men of
genius shall reap the benefit) shall create its own posterity. For if
the work were held in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that
audience, for that particular work, would be not posterity but a group
of contemporaries who were merely living half–a–century later in time.
And so it is essential that the artist (and this is what Vinteuil had
done), if he wishes his work to be free to follow its own course,
shall launch it, wherever he may find sufficient depth, confidently
outward bound towards the future. And yet this interval of time, the
true perspective in which to behold a work of art, if leaving it out
of account is the mistake made by bad judges, taking it into account
is at times a dangerous precaution of the good. No doubt one can
easily imagine, by an illusion similar to that which makes everything
on the horizon appear equidistant, that all the revolutions which have
hitherto occurred in painting or in music did at least shew respect
for certain rules, whereas that which immediately confronts us, be it
impressionism, a striving after discord, an exclusive use of the
Chinese scale, cubism, futurism or what you will, differs outrageously
from all that have occurred before. Simply because those that have
occurred before we are apt to regard as a whole, forgetting that a
long process of assimilation has melted them into a continuous
substance, varied of course but, taking it as a whole, homogeneous, in
which Hugo blends with Molière. Let us try to imagine the shocking
incoherence that we should find, if we did not take into account the
future, and the changes that it must bring about, in a horoscope of
our own riper years, drawn and presented to us in our youth. Only
horoscopes are not always accurate, and the necessity, when judging a
work of art, of including the temporal factor in the sum total of its
beauty introduces, to our way of thinking, something as hazardous, and
consequently as barren of interest, as every prophecy the
non–fulfilment of which will not at all imply any inadequacy on the
prophet's part, for the power to summon possibilities into existence
or to exclude them from it is not necessarily within the competence of
genius; one may have had genius and yet not have believed in the
future of railways or of flight, or, although a brilliant
psychologist, in the infidelity of a mistress or of a friend whose
treachery persons far less gifted would have foreseen.

If I did not understand the sonata, it enchanted me to hear Mme. Swann
play. Her touch appeared to me (like her wrappers, like the scent of
her staircase, her cloaks, her chrysanthemums) to form part of an
individual and mysterious whole, in a world infinitely superior to
that in which the mind is capable of analysing talent. "Attractive,
isn't it, that Vinteuil sonata?" Swann asked me. "The moment when
night is darkening among the trees, when the arpeggios of the violin
call down a cooling dew upon the earth. You must admit that it is
rather charming; it shews all the static side of moonlight, which is
the essential part. It is not surprising that a course of radiant heat
such as my wife is taking, should act on the muscles, since moonlight
can prevent the leaves from stirring. That is what he expresses so
well in that little phrase, the Bois de Boulogne plunged in a
cataleptic trance. By the sea it is even more striking, because you
have there the faint response of the waves, which, of course, you can
hear quite distinctly, since nothing else dares to move. In Paris it
is the other way; at the most, you may notice unfamiliar lights among
the old buildings, the sky brightened as though by a colourless and
harmless conflagration, that sort of vast variety show of which you
get a hint here and there. But in Vinteuil's little phrase, and in the
whole sonata for that matter, it is not like that; the scene is laid
in the Bois; in the
gruppetto
you can distinctly hear a voice saying:
'I can almost see to read the paper!'" These words from Swann might
have falsified, later on, my impression of the sonata, music being too
little exclusive to inhibit absolutely what other people suggest that
we should find in it. But I understood from other words which he let
fall that this nocturnal foliage was simply that beneath whose shade
in many a restaurant on the outskirts of Paris he had listened on many
an evening to the little phrase. In place of the profound significance
that he had so often sought in it, what it recalled now to Swann were
the leafy boughs, arranged, wreathed, painted round about it (which it
gave him the desire to see again because it seemed to him to be their
inner, their hidden self, as it were their soul); was the whole of one
spring season which he had not been able to enjoy before, not having
had—feverish and moody as he then was—enough strength of body and
mind for its enjoyment, which, as one puts by for an invalid the
dainties that he has not been able to eat, it had kept in store for
him. The charm that he had been made to feel by certain evenings in
the Bois, a charm of which Vinteuil's sonata served to remind him, he
could not have recaptured by questioning Odette, although she, as well
as the little phrase, had been his companion there. But Odette had
been merely his companion, by his side, not (as the phrase had been)
within him, and so had seen nothing—nor would she, had she been a
thousand times as comprehending, have seen anything of that vision
which for no one among us (or at least I was long under the impression
that this rule admitted no exception) can be made externally visible.
"It is rather charming, don't you think," Swann continued, "that sound
can give a reflection, like water, or glass. It is curious, too, that
Vinteuil's phrase now shews me only the things to which I paid no
attention then. Of my troubles, my loves of those days it recalls
nothing, it has altered all my values." "Charles, I don't think that's
very polite to me, what you're saying." "Not polite? Really, you
women are superb! I was simply trying to explain to this young man
that what the music shews—to me, at least—is not for a moment
'Free–will' or 'In Tune with the Infinite,' but shall we say old
Verdurin in his frock coat in the palm–house at the Jardin
d'Acclimatation. Hundreds of times, without my leaving this room, the
little phrase has carried me off to dine with it at Armenonville. Gad,
it is less boring, anyhow, than having to go there with Mme. de
Cambremer." Mme. Swann laughed. "That is a lady who is supposed to
have been violently in love with Charles," she explained, in the same
tone in which, shortly before, when we were speaking of Vermeer of
Delft, of whose existence I had been surprised to find her conscious,
she had answered me with: "I ought to explain that M. Swann was very
much taken up with that painter at the time he was courting me. Isn't
that so, Charles dear?" "You're not to start saying things about Mme.
de Cambremer!" Swann checked her, secretly flattered. "But I'm only
repeating what I've been told. Besides, it seems that she's an
extremely clever woman; I don't know her myself. I believe she's very
pushing, which surprises me rather in a clever woman. But everyone
says that she was quite mad about you; there's no harm in repeating
that." Swann remained silent as a deaf–mute which was in a way a
confirmation of what she had said, and a proof of his own fatuity.
"Since what I'm playing reminds you of the Jardin d'Acclimatation,"
his wife went on, with a playful semblance of being offended, "we
might take him there some day in the carriage, if it would amuse him.
It's lovely there just now, and you can recapture your fond
impressions! Which reminds me, talking of the Jardin d'Acclimatation,
do you know, this young man thought that we were devotedly attached to
a person whom I cut, as a matter of fact, whenever I possibly can,
Mme. Blatin! I think it is rather crushing for us, that she should be
taken for a friend of ours. Just fancy, dear Dr. Cottard, who never
says a harsh word about anyone, declares that she's positively
contagious." "A frightful woman! The one thing to be said for her is
that she is exactly like Savonarola. She is the very image of that
portrait of Savonarola, by Fra Bartolomeo." This mania which Swann had
for finding likenesses to people in pictures was defensible, for even
what we call individual expression is—as we so painfully discover
when we are in love and would fain believe in the unique reality of
the beloved—something diffused and general, which can be found
existing at different periods. But if one had listened to Swann, the
processions of the Kings of the East, already so anachronistic when
Benozzo Gozzoli introduced in their midst various Medici, would have
been even more so, since they would have included the portraits of a
whole crowd of men, contemporaries not of Gozzoli but of Swann,
subsequent, that is to say not only by fifteen centuries to the
Nativity but by four more to the painter himself. There was not
missing from those trains, according to Swann, a single living
Parisian of any note, any more than there was from that act in one of
Sardou's plays, in which, out of friendship for the author and for the
leading lady, and also because it was the fashion, all the best known
men in Paris, famous doctors, politicians, barristers, amused
themselves, each on a different evening, by 'walking on.' "But what
has she got to do with the Jardin d'Acclimatation?" "Everything!"
"What? You don't suggest that she's got a sky–blue behind, like the
monkeys?" "Charles, you really are too dreadful! I was thinking of
what the Cingalese said to her. Do tell him, Charles; it really is a
gem." "Oh, it's too silly. You know, Mme. Blatin loves asking people
questions, in a tone which she thinks friendly, but which is really
overpowering." "What our good friends on the Thames call
'patronising,'" interrupted Odette. "Exactly. Well, she went the
other day to the Jardin d'Acclimatation, where they have some
blackamoors—Cingalese, I think I heard my wife say; she is much
'better up' in ethnology than I am." "Now, Charles, you're not to make
fun of poor me."
"I've no intention of making fun, I assure you. Well, to continue, she
went up to one of these black fellows with 'Good morning, nigger!'…"
"Oh, it's too absurd!" "Anyhow, this classification seems to have
displeased the black. 'Me nigger,' he shouted (quite furious, don't
you know), to Mme. Blatin, 'me nigger; you, old cow!'" "I do think
that's so delightful! I adore that story. Do say it's a good one.
Can't you see old Blatin standing there, and hearing him: 'Me nigger;
you, old cow'?" I expressed an intense desire to go there and see
these Cingalese, one of whom had called Mme. Blatin an old cow. They
did not interest me in the least. But I reflected that in going to the
Jardin d'Acclimatation, and again on our way home, we should pass
along that Allée des Acacias in which I had loved so, once, to gaze on
Mme. Swann, and that perhaps Coquelin's mulatto friend, to whom I had
never managed to exhibit myself in the act of saluting her, would see
me there, seated at her side, as the victoria swept by.