In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (16 page)

At half-past twelve I would finally make up my mind to enter the house which, like an immense Christmas stocking, seemed ready to bestow upon me supernatural delights. (The French name “Noël” was, by the way, unknown to Mme Swann and Gilberte, who had substituted for it the English “Christmas,” and would speak of nothing but “Christmas pudding,” what people had given them as “Christmas presents,” of going away—the thought of which maddened me with grief—“for Christmas.” Even at home I should have thought it degrading to use the word “Noël,” and always said “Christmas,” which my father considered extremely silly.)

I encountered no one at first but a footman who, after leading me through several large drawing-rooms, showed me into one that was quite small, empty, its windows beginning to dream already in the blue light of afternoon. I was left alone there in the company of orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire, preciously ensconced behind a crystal screen, in a basin of white marble over which it spilled from time to time its dangerous rubies.

I had sat down, but rose hurriedly on hearing the door open; it was only another footman, and then a third, and the slender result that their vainly alarming entrances and exits achieved was to put a little more coal on the fire or water in the vases. They departed, and I found myself alone again, once that door was shut which Mme Swann was surely soon to open. Of a truth, I should have been less ill at ease in a magician’s cave than in this little waiting-room where the fire appeared to me to be performing alchemical transmutations as in Klingsor’s laboratory. Footsteps sounded afresh, but I did not get up; it was sure to be yet another footman. It was M. Swann. “What! all by yourself? What is one to do? That poor wife of mine has never been able to remember what time means! Ten minutes to one. She gets later every day. And as you’ll see, she will come sailing in without the least hurry, and imagine she’s in heaps of time.” And since he was still subject to neuritis, and was becoming a trifle ridiculous, the fact of possessing so unpunctual a wife, who came in so late from the Bois, forgot everything at her dressmaker’s and was never in time for lunch, made Swann anxious for his digestion but flattered his self-esteem.

He would show me his latest acquisitions and explain to me the interesting points about them, but my emotion, added to the unfamiliarity of being still unfed at this hour, stirred my mind while leaving it void, so that while I was capable of speech I was incapable of hearing. In any event, as far as the works of art in Swann’s possession were concerned, it was enough for me that they were contained in his house, formed a part there of the delicious hour that preceded luncheon. The Gioconda herself might have appeared there without giving me any more pleasure than one of Mme Swann’s indoor gowns, or her bottles of smelling-salts.

I continued to wait, alone, or with Swann and often Gilberte, who came in to keep us company. The arrival of Mme Swann, prepared for me by all those majestic apparitions, must, I felt, be something truly immense. I strained my ears to catch the slightest sound. But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer’s leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting; after those liveried footmen, suggesting the chorus whose processional entry upon the stage leads up to and at the same time diminishes the final appearance of the queen, Mme Swann, creeping furtively in, in a little otter-skin coat, her veil lowered to cover a nose pink-tipped by the cold, did not fulfil the promises lavished upon my imagination during my vigil.

But if she had stayed at home all morning, when she arrived in the drawing-room she would be clad in a brightly coloured crêpe-de-Chine housecoat which seemed to me more exquisite than any of her dresses.

Sometimes the Swanns decided to remain in the house all afternoon, and then, as we had lunched so late, very soon I would see, beyond the garden-wall, the sun setting on that day which had seemed to me bound to be different from other days; and in vain might the servants bring in lamps of every size and shape, burning each upon the consecrated altar of a console, a wall-bracket, a corner-cupboard, an occasional table, as though for the celebration of some strange and secret rite, nothing extraordinary transpired in the conversation, and I went home disappointed, as one often is in one’s childhood after midnight mass.

But that disappointment was scarcely more than spiritual. I was radiant with happiness in this house where Gilberte, when she was not yet 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 as I had glimpsed it for the 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 an interior staircase. Obliged myself to remain in the drawing-room, like a man in love with an actress who is confined to his stall and wonders anxiously what is going on behind the scenes, in the green-room, I put to Swann some artfully veiled questions with regard to this other part of the house, but in a tone from which I could not succeed in banishing a slight uneasiness. He explained to me that the room to which Gilberte had gone was the linen-room, offered to show it to me himself, and promised me that whenever Gilberte had occasion to go there again he would insist on her taking me with her. By these last words and the relief which they brought me, Swann at once abolished for me one of those terrifying inner 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, his daughter’s master, was giving her to me, whereas she withheld herself at times; I had not the same direct control over her as I had indirectly through Swann. Besides, it was she whom I loved and whom I could not therefore see without that anxiety, without that desire for something more, which destroys in us, in the presence of the person we love, the sensation of loving.

As a rule, however, we did not stay indoors but went out. Sometimes, before going to dress, Mme Swann would sit down at the piano. Her lovely hands emerging from the pink, or white, or, often, vividly coloured sleeves of her crêpe-de-Chine housecoat, 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 for me the passage in Vinteuil’s sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had been so fond. But often one hears nothing when one listens for the first time to a piece of music that is at all complicated. And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played to me two or three times I found that I knew it perfectly 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, relative 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 said to him. Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape in the memory, and, with regard to works 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. But I had not, until then, heard a note of the sonata, and where Swann and his wife could make out a distinct phrase, it 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, at one bound, the syllables that one has solicited in vain. And not only does one not grasp at once and remember works that are truly rare, but even within those works (as happened to me in the case of Vinteuil’s sonata) it is the least precious parts that one at first perceives. So much so 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 Mme Swann had played 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 façade 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 from beginning to end, it remained almost wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which distance or a haze allows us to catch but a faint and fragmentary glimpse. Hence the melancholy inseparable from one’s knowledge of such works, as of everything that takes place in time. When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil’s sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the grasp of my sensibility, those that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to elude me. Since I was able to enjoy everything that this sonata had to give me only in a succession of hearings, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us the best of themselves. In a work such as Vinteuil’s sonata the beauties that one discovers soonest are also those of which one tires most quickly, and for the same reason, no doubt—namely, that they are less different from what one already knows. But when those first impressions have receded, there remains for our enjoyment some passage whose structure, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to our mind, had made it indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and this, which we had passed every day without knowing it, which had held itself in reserve for us, which by the sheer power of its beauty had become invisible and remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But we shall also relinquish it last. 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 case 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 spare himself 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 in reality any such cowardly precaution to avoid false judgments is doomed to failure; they are unavoidable. The reason why 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 is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply. It was Beethoven’s quartets themselves (the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth) that devoted half a century to forming, fashioning and enlarging the audience for Beethoven’s quartets, thus marking, like every great work of art, an advance if not in the quality of artists at least in the community of minds, largely composed today of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of appreciating it. What is called posterity is the posterity of the work of art. It is essential that the work (leaving out of account, for simplicity’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, from which other men of genius will benefit) should 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, should launch it, there where there is sufficient depth, boldly into the distant future. And yet, if leaving out of account this time to come, the true perspective in which to appreciate a work of art, is the mistake made by bad judges, taking it into account is at times a dangerous precaution of good ones. No doubt it is easy to 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 respect certain rules, whereas that which immediately confronts us, be it Impressionism, the pursuit of dissonance, an exclusive use of the Chinese scale, Cubism, Futurism or what you will, differs outrageously from all that has occurred before. This is because everything that went before we are apt to regard as a whole, forgetting that a long process of assimilation has converted it into a substance that is varied of course but, taken as a whole, homogeneous, in which Hugo is juxtaposed with Molière. Let us try to imagine the shocking disparities we should find, if we did not take account of the future and the changes that it must bring, in a horoscope of our own riper years cast for 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 into our judgment something as conjectural, and consequently as barren of interest, as any prophecy the non-fulfilment of which will in no way 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.