2.50 MARCEL PROUSTWay. Proust saw his hosts stripped of the poetry with which he
himself had clothed them: a duchess was only an ordinary person
wearing a tiara, a duke was only a bourgeois with an exaggerated
hauteur or affability. He realised that in entering the heartless and
empty world of the Guennantes, in searching there for something
higher than himself, he had committed an absurdity and a sin. He
punished himself. His asthma descended, like a gaoler or a
guardian angel, never to leave him again. His face became haggard,
anxious and bearded. Exiled in the desert island of his bedroom, a
guiltless traitor to society, he must have felt very like Dreyfus.
But 'going-out' ceased to be one of his chief preoccupations
(though it always remained an occasional mixed pleasure), less
because society had banished him, than because, like Coriolanus,
he had banished them.
He had a further cause for despondency in the apparent failure
of Jean Santeuil. He had written out his life, hoping that the
answer to its mystery would somehow be revealed in the total,
but the riddle remained unsolved. He had worked discontinuously,
with innumerable fresh starts, as the fitful inspiration came; but
the sterile, disjointed incidents did not add up to a novel. Each
episode set out hopefully for the country of the imagination,
which he knew ought to be always everywhere, and led him into
a waste land. Four years of toil, as it seemed, nearly three hundred
thousand words, were wasted.
Yet the imperfections of Jean Santeuil should not be exag-
gerated. It is a fragment made of fragments, a jigsaw puzzle with
many of the pieces missing or refusing to fit; but another year's
labour would have sufficed to join the episodes, to remove super-
fluous characters and incidents, and to produce a novel fit for
publication. A revised Jean Santeuil would have been, in its theme
and style and freshness, something new and surprising in French
literature, yet not too new, not too far ahead of Anatole France. and Barr<~s for the public to assimilate it: it might have made
Proust's name, and rendered A la Recherche forever impossible.
The best of Jean Santeuil is not noticeably immature, except to
the modern reader, who is aware, with his knowledge of A la
Recherche, that its maturity of talent is also the immaturity of
genius. For such a reader there is in every page, besides the
conscious brilliance, unconscious genius, the sense of a miracle
about to happen: the overriding impression is of light and music,