Marcel Proust died in Paris on the 18th day of November last. To many Englishmen his name is still unknown; to others his death came as a shock so great that it was as if one of their most intimate acquaintances had suddenly passed from them; and even among those who have read his works there is, in this country at least, quite pointed disagreement. On one side there are many who will confess in private, though not so willingly in public, that they have never been able to “get through” his great work; that “the man is a bore,” is “undiscussable in mixed society,” is “a snob,” and that, if you ask their opinion, “there is too much fuss made about the fellow altogether.” On the other are men, not given to overpraising the age in which they live, who unashamedly compare him with Montaigne, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and other “masters of the human heart”; and not that only, but will discuss by the hour together Swann, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Madame de Villeparisis, Bloch, M. de Charlus, Albertine, Gilberte, Odette, the impossible and indefatigable Verdurins, and a hundred of his other characters, as if they were personal friends, and as if it were of real importance to them to discover what exactly were the motives of So-and-so on such and such an occasion, and how So-and-so else would view their actions if he knew.
The reason for these disagreements is not, perhaps, hard to find. Proust, let us own to it at once, is not every one’s novelist. He is difficult to read in the sense that he does demand complete attention and considerable efforts of memory. He has an outlook on life which is bound to be unsympathetic to a good many Englishmen—and a good many Frenchmen too, for that matter. He is very “long”; and it is necessary to have read _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ more than once to be able to see the general plan for the hosts of characters and scenes that, as one reads it book by book, so vividly hold the stage. But before we attempt to discuss the book it is important to see what its author had in mind when he first sat down, a good many years ago, to start writing it.
Some one has said that the difference between a play and a novel is that while watching a play you have the privileges of a most intimate friend, but while reading a novel the privileges of God. However true this may be of the novel as it exists to-day (and, to read some modern novels, one might hardly suspect one’s divine position), it is by no means true of the novel throughout its history. It is clear, if we go back far enough, for example, that with Longus, or Plutarch, or Petronius, the reader’s position is very nearly as much that of a spectator as when he is watching a play by Shakespeare. And the same thing remains roughly true of all novels up to the middle of the eighteenth century. It is not, indeed, until we come to Richardson and Rousseau that we find anything like the modern insistence on the personal and intimate life of a man or a woman as a thing valuable in itself. No one except Montaigne and Burton, neither of whom was a novelist, appears to have been introspective before that date. What mattered before was conduct; what was to matter afterwards was feeling.