But Proust, like Montaigne and like Racine, besides having an extreme sensitiveness to all forms of beauty and ugliness, happiness and misery, that he has met in his social existence, has also read widely in the works of other sensitive men, has compared their impressions with each other and with his own, has learnt from their successes and failures; he is armed with more than his natural equipment, has more eyes to see through than his own. Actually his books are filled from end to end with criticisms of music, of painting, of literature, not in the way that is unfortunately familiar in this country, as unassimilated chunks in the main stream of the narrative, but as expressions of the opinions of different characters.
This is not the only, nor indeed the chief, advantage that a wide experience in other arts, and other men’s art, has given him. What is of more importance is the attitude that springs from it of seeing historically the age and society in which he lives. Nothing for him stands still, not even to-day; and, because he realises that to-day itself will to-morrow be only part of the stream of the past, he can view it with the same calmly passionate interest as that which we bring to the discoveries at Luxor. As few men are to-day, he appears to be “_au-dessus de la mêlée_,” not, like the ancient gods, “careless of mankind,” but curious, acutely sympathetic, and able at any moment to bring his own experience and the experience of a thousand other men in tens of other centuries to the understanding of one small case at the tiny point of time which is momentarily under his observation.
To give any idea of the plot of _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_—and it has a plot, and a very closely knit one, too (how closely one only begins to realise after several re-readings)—is, of course, out of the question. Its form is that of an imaginary autobiography, and it is obvious that much genuine autobiography is inextricably woven with work of imagination. The first book (_Du Côté de chez Swann_) is occupied in part by memories of childhood, and in part, as it seems at first, by another story altogether, the account of a love affair of M. Swann’s. Of course this story is not a mere excrescence, but it is only slowly, as the later books are read, that we begin to see Proust’s immense cunning in introducing us early in the novel to Swann’s affairs. For they have a purpose beyond the fact that Swann becomes in time a friend of the young man, who is then in his childhood, and beyond the fact that he is very intimately mixed up with many others of the most important characters in the book. And this purpose is that of a prelude to the later and fuller story. It is, as it were, a standing example at the outset of the truism that no one ever learns by the mistakes of others—that what has been will be again in the next generation, with only the mere outward changes which time and place impose. In the second book (_A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_) we accompany the hero (it is one of the significant curiosities of Proust, akin to his refusal to divide his book into chapters, that never once is this hero named in the whole course of the work) to the seaside, and feel with him the emotions of an acutely sensitive boy just growing into manhood. And the remaining books are all occupied more or less with his efforts to assimilate the new social worlds in Paris and at Balbec Plage which are opening out before his curious and very sharply observant eyes.