[Footnote 2: See, however, my foot-note on page 106 and _Pastiches et Mélanges_, pp. 91-99.—C.K.S.M.]
No wonder if such a novelist is sometimes called difficult. He is too like life to be easy. Other novels, beside his, seem accommodatingly static, other characters finished, understood in each spring of each action—precisely as those we know in life are never finished or understood.
A man of particular sincerity once said to me that after twenty years of married life he understood his wife no better than on the day he married her. He had of course become familiar with her modes of thought and action which served as knowledge for practical daily purposes. But familiarity had never bred understanding. Her underlying motives, the ultimate significance of her looks and words, remained hidden.
This, I think, is Proust’s position, more especially when the woman happens to affect him powerfully. In every case we can _see_ his women, and thus far they are the reverse of shadowy. Grandmother, mother, aunts, and servant—the women that surround his childhood; Mlle. Vinteuil and the Duchesse de Guermantes—female figures that shock or thrill his boyish imagination; Odette—the mature cocotte that stands throughout his youth for feminine mystery and glamour; Odette’s daughter Gilberte, and later Albertine—the young girls, minxes both, with whom he falls in love; Madame Verdurin and her circle—the social climbers who call forth his most delicate adult irony as well as his most rancid contempt;—these, simply as pictures, leap out at us complete. Nothing could be more objective than their presentation to the eye and ear of the reader. We feel with each one as if we had met her in the flesh—as one has met a casual acquaintance. The mother’s submissive wifeliness; the almost masculine incorruptibility of the grandmother; the raciness of the servant; the neurosis of Aunt Léonie; the half-hearted viciousness of the music-master’s daughter; the slightly comic social splendour of the Duchesse; the unmeaning melancholy of Odette’s eyes; the unredeemed vulgarity of Madame Verdurin; the domineering girlishness of Gilberte, by turns frank and secretive, appealing and repellent; the smile with which Albertine, at once innocent and wanton, receives the youth in her bedroom—in depicting these Proust never trespasses beyond natural as compared with literary experience. We all know with what liveliness in conversation any man with the gifts of observation and wit can create an image for us of some female “character” met with in his childhood or his travels. But let that same man come to speak out of his emotions of some woman who has moved him deeply, then his heart will cloud his brain, his tongue will falter or run away with him, and he will no longer be capable of outlining a portrait. As listeners our impressions of his subject will be gained, not from what he says, but independently from what we perceive that he feels, which may well be in direct conflict with his words. In life, that is to say, the more important a character is to us the more we are thrown back for our ultimate knowledge on the emotions aroused by that character in ourselves. In fiction it is usually the other way about. It is his central figures whom the novelist pretends to know best. Proust, however, has recognised this discrepancy with scientific clearness. He devotes himself, therefore, where his important women are concerned—aside from the very minimum of detached, objective observations—to a presentment of the effect they have upon the men that love them.