The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (207 page)

The vulgar arrogance that was to be detected in the familiarity of a Guermantes—as opposed to the distinction that it had in Robert, because hereditary disdain was in him only the outer garment, transmuted into an unconscious grace, of a genuine moral humility—had been brought home to me, not by M. de Charlus, in whom certain characteristic faults for which I had so far been unable to account were superimposed on his aristocratic habits, but by the Duc de Guermantes. And yet he too, in the general impression of commonness which had so repelled my grandmother when she had met him years earlier at Mme de Villeparisis’s, showed glimpses of ancient grandeur of which I became conscious when I went to dine at his house the following evening.

They had not been apparent to me either in himself or in the Duchess when I had first met them in their aunt’s drawing-room, any more than I had discerned, on first seeing her, the differences that set Berma apart from her colleagues, although in her case the distinctive qualities were infinitely more striking than in any social celebrity, since they become more marked in proportion as the objects are more real, more conceivable by the intellect. And yet, however slight the shades of social distinction may be (and so slight are they that when an accurate portrayer like Sainte-Beuve tries to indicate the shades of difference between the salons of Mme Geoffrin, Mme Récamier and Mme de Boigne, they appear so alike that the cardinal truth which, unknown to the author, emerges from his investigations is the vacuity of that form of life), nevertheless, for the same reason as with Berma, when I had ceased to be dazzled by the Guermantes and their droplet of originality was no longer vaporised by my imagination, I was able to distil and analyse it, imponderable as it was.

The Duchess having made no reference to her husband at her aunt’s party, I wondered whether, in view of the rumours of divorce, he would be present at the dinner. But I was soon enlightened on that score, for through the crowd of footmen who stood about in the hall and who (since they must until then have regarded me much as they regarded the children of the evicted cabinet-maker, that is to say with more fellow-feeling perhaps than their master but as a person incapable of being admitted to his house) must have been asking themselves to what this social revolution could be due, I caught sight of M. de Guermantes, who had been watching for my arrival so as to receive me on his threshold and take off my overcoat with his own hands.

“Mme de Guermantes will be as pleased as Punch,” he said to me in a glibly persuasive tone. “Let me help you off with your duds.” (He felt it to be at once companionable and comic to use popular colloquialisms.) “My wife was just the least bit afraid you might defect, although you had fixed a date. We’ve been saying to each other all day: ‘Depend upon it, he’ll never turn up.’ I’m bound to say that Mme de Guermantes was a better prophet than I was. You are not an easy man to get hold of, and I was quite sure you were going to let us down.” And the Duke was such a bad husband, so brutal even (people said), that one felt grateful to him, as one feels grateful to wicked people for their occasional kindness of heart, for those words “Mme de Guermantes” with which he appeared to be spreading a protective wing over the Duchess, so that she might be one with him. Meanwhile, taking me familiarly by the hand, he set about introducing me into his household. Just as some common expression may delight us coming from the lips of a peasant if it points to the survival of a local tradition or shows the trace of some historic event, unknown, it may be, to the person who thus alludes to it, so this politeness on the part of M. de Guermantes, which he was to continue to show me throughout the evening, charmed me as a survival of habits many centuries old, habits of the seventeenth century in particular. The people of bygone ages seem infinitely remote from us. We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying intentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when we come upon a sentiment more or less akin to what we feel today in a Homeric hero, or a skilful tactical feint by Hannibal during the battle of Cannae, where he let his flank be driven back in order to take the enemy by surprise and encircle him; it is as though we imagined the epic poet and the Carthaginian general to be as remote from ourselves as an animal seen in a zoo. Even with certain personages of the court of Louis XIV, when we find signs of courtesy in letters written by them to some man of inferior rank who could be of no service to them whatever, these letters leave us astonished because they reveal to us suddenly in these great noblemen a whole world of beliefs which they never directly express but which govern their conduct, and in particular the belief that they are bound in politeness to feign certain sentiments and to exercise with the most scrupulous care certain obligations of civility.

This imagined remoteness of the past is perhaps one of the things that may enable us to understand how even great writers have found an inspired beauty in the works of mediocre mystifiers such as Ossian. We are so astonished that bards long dead should have modern ideas that we marvel if in what we believe to be an ancient Gaelic epic we come across one which we should have thought as most ingenious in a contemporary. A translator of talent has only to add to an ancient writer whom he is reconstructing more or less faithfully a few passages which, signed with a contemporary name and published separately, would seem agreeable merely; at once he imparts a moving grandeur to his poet, who is thus made to play upon the keyboards of several ages at once. The translator was capable only of a mediocre book, if that book had been published as his original work. Offered as a translation, it seems a masterpiece. The past is not fugitive, it stays put. It is not only months after the outbreak of a war that laws passed without haste can effectively influence its course, it is not only fifteen years after a crime which has remained obscure that a magistrate can still find the vital evidence which will throw light on it; after hundreds and thousands of years the scholar who has been studying the place-names and the customs of the inhabitants of some remote region may still extract from them some legend long anterior to Christianity, already unintelligible, if not actually forgotten, at the time of Herodotus, which in the name given to a rock, in a religious rite, still dwells in the midst of the present, like a denser emanation, immemorial and stable. There was an emanation too, though far less ancient, of the life of the court, if not in the manners of M. de Guermantes, which were often vulgar, at least in the mind that controlled them. I was to experience it again, like an ancient odour, when I rejoined him a little later in the drawing-room. For I did not go there at once.

As we left the outer hall, I had mentioned to M. de Guermantes that I was extremely anxious to see his Elstirs. “I am at your service. Is M. Elstir a friend of yours, then? I’m mortified not to have known that you were so interested in him. I know him slightly, he’s an amiable man, what our fathers used to call an ‘honest fellow.’ I might have asked him to honour us with his company at dinner tonight. I’m sure he would have been highly flattered at being invited to spend the evening in your company.” Very untrue to the old world when he tried thus to assume its manner, the Duke then relapsed into it unconsciously. After inquiring whether I wished him to show me the pictures, he conducted me to them, gracefully standing aside for me at each door, apologising when, to show me the way, he was obliged to precede me, a little scene which (since the time when Saint-Simon relates that an ancestor of the Guermantes did him the honours of his house with the same punctilious exactitude in the performance of the frivolous duties of a gentleman) before reaching our day must have been enacted by many another Guermantes for many another visitor. And as I had said to the Duke that I would like very much to be left alone for a few minutes with the pictures, he discreetly withdrew, telling me that I should find him in the drawing-room when I had finished.

However, once I was face to face with the Elstirs, I completely forgot about dinner and the time; here again as at Balbec I had before me fragments of that world of new and strange colours which was no more than the projection of that great painter’s peculiar vision, which his speech in no way expressed. The parts of the walls that were covered by paintings of his, all homogeneous with one another, were like the luminous images of a magic lantern which in this instance was the brain of the artist, and the strangeness of which one could never have suspected so long as one had known only the man, in other words so long as one had only seen the lantern boxing its lamp before any coloured slide had been slid into its groove. Among these pictures, some of those that seemed most absurd to people in fashionable society interested me more than the rest because they re-created those optical illusions which prove to us that we should never succeed in identifying objects if we did not bring some process of reasoning to bear on them. How often, when driving, do we not come upon a bright street beginning a few feet away from us, when what we have actually before our eyes is merely a patch of wall glaringly lit which has given us the mirage of depth. This being the case, it is surely logical, not from any artifice of symbolism but from a sincere desire to return to the very root of the impression, to represent one thing by that other for which, in the flash of a first illusion, we mistook it. Surfaces and volumes are in reality independent of the names of objects which our memory imposes on them after we have recognised them. Elstir sought to wrest from what he had just felt what he already knew; he had often been at pains to break up that medley of impressions which we call vision.

The people who detested these “horrors” were astonished to find that Elstir admired Chardin, Perronneau, and many other painters whom they, the ordinary men and women of society, liked. They did not realise that Elstir for his own part, in striving to reproduce reality (with the particular trademark of his taste for certain experiments), had made the same effort as a Chardin or a Perronneau and that consequently, when he ceased to work for himself, he admired in them attempts of the same kind, anticipatory fragments, so to speak, of works of his own. Nor did these society people add to Elstir’s work in their mind’s eye that temporal perspective which enabled them to like, or at least to look without discomfort at, Chardin’s painting. And yet the older among them might have reminded themselves that in the course of their lives they had gradually seen, as the years bore them away from it, the unbridgeable gulf between what they considered a masterpiece by Ingres and what they had supposed must for ever remain a “horror” (Manet’s
Olympia
, for example) shrink until the two canvases seemed like twins. But we never learn, because we lack the wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine ourselves always to be faced with an experience which has no precedents in the past.

I was moved by the discovery in two of the pictures (more realistic, these, and in an earlier manner) of the same person, in one of them in evening dress in his own drawing-room, in the other wearing a frock-coat and tall hat at some popular seaside festival where he had evidently no business to be, which proved that for Elstir he was not only a regular sitter but a friend, perhaps a patron, whom he liked to introduce into his paintings, as Carpaccio introduced—and in the most speaking likenesses—prominent Venetian noblemen into his; in the same way as Beethoven, too, found pleasure in inscribing at the top of a favourite work the beloved name of the Archduke Rudolph. There was something enchanting about this waterside carnival. The river, the women’s dresses, the sails of the boats, the innumerable reflexions of one thing and another jostled together enchantingly in this little square panel of beauty which Elstir had cut out of a marvellous afternoon. What delighted one in the dress of a woman who had stopped dancing for a moment because she was hot and out of breath shimmered too, and in the same way, in the cloth of a motionless sail, in the water of the little harbour, in the wooden landing-stage, in the leaves of the trees and in the sky. Just as, in one of the pictures that I had seen at Balbec, the hospital, as beautiful beneath its lapis lazuli sky as the cathedral itself, seemed (more daring than Elstir the theorist, than Elstir the man of taste, the lover of things mediaeval) to be intoning: “There is no such thing as Gothic, there is no such thing as a masterpiece, a hospital with no style is just as good as the glorious porch,” so I now heard: “The slightly vulgar lady whom a man of discernment wouldn’t bother to look at as he passed her by, whom he would exclude from the poetical composition which nature has set before him—she is beautiful too; her dress is receiving the same light as the sail of that boat, everything is equally precious; the commonplace dress and the sail that is beautiful in itself are two mirrors reflecting the same image; their virtue is all in the painter’s eye.” This eye had succeeded in arresting for all time the motion of the hours at this luminous instant when the lady had felt hot and had stopped dancing, when the tree was encircled with a perimeter of shadow, when the sails seemed to be gliding over a golden glaze. But precisely because that instant impressed itself on one with such force, this unchanging canvas gave the most fleeting impression: one felt that the lady would presently go home, the boats drift away, the shadow change place, night begin to fall; that pleasure comes to an end, that life passes and that instants, illuminated by the convergence at one and the same time of so many lights, cannot be recaptured. I recognised yet another aspect, quite different it is true, of what the Moment means, in a series of water-colours of mythological subjects, dating from Elstir’s first period, which also adorned this room. Society people who held “advanced” views on art went “as far as” this earliest manner, but no further. It was certainly not the best work he had done, but already the sincerity with which the subject had been thought out took away its coldness. Thus the Muses, for instance, were represented as though they were creatures belonging to a species now fossilised, but creatures it would not have been surprising in mythological times to see pass by in the evening, in twos or threes, along some mountain path. Here and there a poet, of a race that would also have been of peculiar interest to a zoologist (characterised by a certain sexlessness), strolled with a Muse, as one sees in nature creatures of different but of kindred species consort together. In one of these water-colours one saw a poet exhausted by a long journey in the mountains, whom a Centaur, meeting him and moved to pity by his weakness, has taken on his back and is carrying home. In others, the vast landscape (in which the mythical scene, the fabulous heroes occupied a minute place and seemed almost lost) was rendered, from the mountain tops to the sea, with an exactitude which told one more than the hour, told one to the very minute what time of day it was, thanks to the precise angle of the setting sun and the fleeting fidelity of the shadows. In this way the artist had managed, by making it instantaneous, to give a sort of lived historical reality to the fable, painted it and related it in the past tense.