[Footnote 5: [Transcriber’s Note: See next footnote.]]
It is, further, explained how this man of genius came to pay court to his intellectual inferiors with an eye on the Academy, and how, while his own private morals were bad, the moral tone of his books was of the loftiest.
Perhaps it is only in really vicious lives that the moral problem can arise in all its disquieting strength. And of this problem the artist finds a solution in the terms not of his own personal life but of what is for him the true life, a general, a literary solution. As the great Doctors of the Church began often, without losing their virtue, by acquainting themselves with the sins of all mankind, out of which they extracted their own personal sanctity, so great artists often, while being thoroughly wicked, make use of their vices in order to arrive at a conception of the moral law that is binding upon us all.[6]
[Footnote 6: I am glad that the acknowledgement here of Mr. Walkley’s courtesy in allowing me to substitute my version for his of these two passages from _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ gives me an opportunity to acknowledge also my borrowing and to congratulate him upon the discovery of the word “mild”—“une véritable trouvaille,” as Norpois would undoubtedly have called it.—C.K.S.M.]
Nor is the portrait finished yet. Bergotte was at bottom a man who really loved only certain images and to compose and paint them in words. Had he had to defend himself before a tribunal, in spite of himself he would have chosen his words, not for their effect on the judge, but in view of images which the judge would certainly never have perceived.
It is this extraordinarily minute “psychometry” that is the peculiar mark of Proust’s work. The sensations Swann derives from a sonata of Vinteuil’s, the special quality of Elstir’s pictures of the sea-shore, the effect of afternoon light in the church at Combray, glimpses of military life at Doncières, with its contrast of the First Empire aristocracy and the _ancien régime_,—it is the first time that such things as these have been put into words and brought intimately home to you. Then there are the studies of _le grand monde_—the “gilded saloons,” as Disraeli would have called them, of the Guermantes and the rest. Here you have a picture of the Faubourg Saint-Germain that is as true, you are assured, as Balzac’s was false.[7]