In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (21 page)

If, however, despite all the analogies which I was to perceive later
on between the writer and the man, I had not at first sight, in Mme.
Swann's drawing–room, believed that this could be Bergotte, the author
of so many divine books, who stood before me, perhaps I was not
altogether wrong, for he himself did not, in the strict sense of the
word, 'believe' it either. He did not believe it because he shewed a
great assiduity in the presence of fashionable people (and yet he was
not a snob), of literary men and journalists who were vastly inferior
to himself. Of course he had long since learned, from the suffrage of
his readers, that he had genius, compared to which social position and
official rank were as nothing. He had learned that he had genius, but
he did not believe it because he continued to simulate deference
towards mediocre writers in order to succeed, shortly, in becoming an
Academician, whereas the Academy and the Faubourg Saint–Germain have
no more to do with that part of the Eternal Mind which is the author
of the works of Bergotte than with the law of causality or the idea of
God. That also he knew, but as a kleptomaniac knows, without profiting
by the knowledge, that it is wrong to steal. And the man with the
little beard and snail–shell nose knew and used all the tricks of the
gentleman who pockets your spoons, in his efforts to reach the coveted
academic chair, or some duchess or other who could dispose of several
votes at the election, but while on his way to them he would endeavour
to make sure that no one who would consider the pursuit of such an
object a vice in him should see what he was doing. He was only
half–successful; one could hear, alternating with the speech of the
true Bergotte, that of the other Bergotte, ambitious, utterly selfish,
who thought it not worth his while to speak of any but his powerful,
rich or noble friends, so as to enhance his own position, he who in
his books, when he was really himself, had so well portrayed the
charm, pure as a mountain spring, of poverty.

As for those other vices to which M. de Norpois had alluded, that
almost incestuous love, which was made still worse, people said, by a
want of delicacy in the matter of money, if they contradicted, in a
shocking manner, the tendency of his latest novels, in which he shewed
everywhere a regard for what was right and proper so painfully rigid
that the most innocent pleasures of their heroes were poisoned by it,
and that even the reader found himself turning their pages with a
sense of acute discomfort, and asked himself whether it was possible
to go on living even the quietest of lives, those vices did not at all
prove, supposing that they were fairly imputed to Bergotte, that his
literature was a lie and all his sensitiveness mere play–acting. Just
as in pathology certain conditions similar in appearance are due, some
to an excess, others to an insufficiency of tension, of secretion and
so forth, so there may be vice arising from supersensitiveness just as
much as from the lack of it. 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. It is the vices (or merely the weaknesses
and follies) of the circle in which they live, the meaningless
conversation, the frivolous or shocking lives of their daughters, the
infidelity of their wives, or their own misdeeds that writers have
most often castigated in their books, without, however, thinking it
necessary to alter their domestic economy or to improve the tone of
their households. And this contrast had never before been so striking
as it was in Bergotte's time, because, on the one hand, in proportion
as society grew more corrupt, our notions of morality were
increasingly exalted, while on the other hand the public were now told
far more than they had ever hitherto known about the private lives of
literary men; and on certain evenings in the theatre people would
point out the author whom I had so greatly admired at Combray, sitting
at the back of a box the mere composition of which seemed an oddly
humorous, or perhaps keenly ironical commentary upon—a brazen–faced
denial of—the thesis which he had just been maintaining in his latest
book. Not that anything which this or that casual informant could tell
me was of much use in helping me to settle the question of the
goodness or wickedness of Bergotte. An intimate friend would furnish
proofs of his hardheartedness; then a stranger would cite some
instance (touching, since he had evidently wished it to remain hidden)
of his real depth of feeling. He had behaved cruelly to his wife. But
in a village inn, where he had gone to spend the night, he had stayed
on to watch over a poor woman who had tried to drown herself, and when
he was obliged to continue his journey had left a large sum of money
with the landlord, so that he should not turn the poor creature out,
but see that she got proper attention. Perhaps the more the great
writer was developed in Bergotte at the expense of the little man with
the beard, so much the more his own personal life was drowned in the
flood of all the lives that he imagined, until he no longer felt
himself obliged to perform certain practical duties, for which he had
substituted the duty of imagining those other lives. But at the same
time, because he imagined the feelings of others as completely as if
they had been his own, whenever he was obliged, for any reason, to
talk to some person who had been unfortunate (that is to say in a
casual encounter) he would, in doing so, take up not his own personal
standpoint but that of the sufferer himself, a standpoint in which he
would have been horrified by the speech of those who continued to
think of their own petty concerns in the presence of another's grief.
With the result that he gave rise everywhere to justifiable rancour
and to undying gratitude.

Above all, he was a man who in his heart of hearts loved nothing
really except certain images and (like a miniature set in the floor of
a casket) the composing and painting of them in words. For a trifle
that some one had sent him, if that trifle gave him the opportunity of
introducing one or two of these images, he would be prodigal in the
expression of his gratitude, while shewing none whatever for an
expensive present. And if he had had to plead before a tribunal, he
would inevitably have chosen his words not for the effect that they
might have on the judge but with an eye to certain images which the
judge would certainly never have perceived.

That first day on which I met him with Gilberte's parents, I mentioned
to Bergotte that I had recently been to hear Berma in
Phèdre
; and he
told me that in the scene in which she stood with her arm raised to
the level of her shoulder—one of those very scenes that had been
greeted with such applause—she had managed to suggest with great
nobility of art certain classical figures which, quite possibly, she
had never even seen, a Hesperid carved in the same attitude upon a
metope at Olympia, and also the beautiful primitive virgins on the
Erechtheum.

"It may be sheer divination, and yet I fancy that she visits the
museums. It would be interesting to 'establish' that." ('Establish'
was one of those regular Bergotte expressions, and one which various
young men who had never met him had caught from him, speaking like him
by some sort of telepathic suggestion.)

"Do you mean the Caryatides?" asked Swann.

"No, no," said Bergotte, "except in the scene where she confesses her
passion to Œnone, where she moves her hand exactly like Hegeso on the
stele in the Ceramicus, it is a far more primitive art that she revives.
I was referring to the Korai of the old Erechtheum, and I admit that
there is perhaps nothing quite so remote from the art of Racine, but
there are so many things already in
Phèdre
,…that one more…Oh,
and then, yes, she is really charming, that little sixth century
Phaedra, the rigidity of the arm, the lock of hair 'frozen into
marble,' yes, you know, it is wonderful of her to have discovered all
that. There is a great deal more antiquity in it than in most of the
books they are labelling 'antique' this year."

As Bergotte had in one of his volumes addressed a famous invocation to
these archaic statues, the words that he was now uttering were quite
intelligible to me and gave me a fresh reason for taking an interest
in Berma's acting. I tried to picture her again in my mind, as she had
looked in that scene in which I remembered that she had raised her arm
to the level of her shoulder. And I said to myself, "There we have the
Hesperid of Olympia; there we have the sister of those adorable
suppliants on the Acropolis; there is indeed nobility in art!" But if
these considerations were to enhance for me the beauty of Berma's
gesture, Bergotte should have put them into my head before the
performance. Then, while that attitude of the actress was actually
existing in flesh and blood before my eyes, at that moment in which
the thing that was happening had still the substance of reality, I
might have tried to extract from it the idea of archaic sculpture. But
of Berma in that scene all that I retained was a memory which was no
longer liable to modification, slender as a picture which lacks that
abundant perspective of the present tense where one is free to delve
and can always discover something new, a picture to which one cannot
retrospectively give a meaning that is not subject to verification and
correction from without. At this point Mme. Swann joined in the
conversation, asking me whether Gilberte had remembered to give me
what Bergotte had written about
Phèdre
, and adding, "My daughter is
such a scatter–brain!" Bergotte smiled modestly and protested that
they were only a few pages, of no importance. "But it is perfectly
charming, that little pamphlet, that little 'tract' of yours!" Mme.
Swann assured him, to shew that she was a good hostess, to make the
rest of us think that she had read Bergotte's essay, and also because
she liked not merely to flatter Bergotte, but to make a selection for
herself out of what he wrote, to control his writing. And it must be
admitted that she did inspire him, though not in the way that she
supposed. But when all is said there is, between what constituted the
smartness of Mme. Swann's drawing–room and a whole side of Bergotte's
work, so close a correspondence that either of them might serve among
elderly men to–day, as a commentary upon the other.

I let myself go in telling him what my impressions had been. Often
Bergotte disagreed, but he allowed me to go on talking. I told him
that I had liked the green light which was turned on when Phaedra
raised her arm. "Ah! The designer will be glad to hear that; he is a
real artist. I shall tell him you liked it, because he is very proud
of that effect. I must say, myself, that I do not care for it very
much, it drowns everything in a sort of aqueous vapour, little Phaedra
standing there looks too like a branch of coral on the floor of an
aquarium. You will tell me, of course, that it brings out the cosmic
aspect of the play. That is quite true. All the same, it would be more
appropriate if the scene were laid in the Court of Neptune. Oh yes,
of course, I know the Vengeance of Neptune does come into the play. I
don't suggest for a moment that we should think only of Port–Royal,
but after all the story that Racine tells us is not the 'Loves of
the Sea–Urchins.' Still, it is what my friend wished to have, and it
is very well done, right or wrong, and it's really quite pretty when
you come to look at it. Yes, so you liked that, did you; you
understood what it meant, of course; we feel the same about it, don't
we, really; it is a trifle unbalanced, what he's done, you agree with
me, but on the whole it is very clever of him." And so, when Bergotte
had to express an opinion which was the opposite of my own, he in no
way reduced me to silence, to the impossibility of framing any reply,
as M. de Norpois would have done. This does not prove that Bergotte's
opinions were of less value than the Ambassador's; far from it. A
powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges
it. Being itself a part of the riches of the universal Mind, it makes
its way into, grafts itself upon the mind of him whom it is employed
to refute, slips in among the ideas already there, with the help of
which, gaining a little ground, he completes and corrects it; so that
the final utterance is always to some extent the work of both parties
to a discussion. It is to ideas which are not, properly speaking,
ideas at all, to ideas which, founded upon nothing, can find no
support, no kindred spirit among the ideas of the adversary, that he,
grappling with something which is not there, can find no word to say
in answer. The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of art) were
unanswerable simply because they were without reality.

Since Bergotte did not sweep aside my objections, I confessed to him
that they had won the scorn of M. de Norpois. "But he's an old
parrot!" was the answer. "He keeps on pecking you because he imagines
all the time that you're a piece of cake, or a slice of cuttle–fish."
"What's that?" asked Swann. "Are you a friend of Norpois?" "He's as
dull as a wet Sunday," interrupted his wife, who had great faith in
Bergotte's judgment, and was no doubt afraid that M. de Norpois might
have spoken ill of her to us. "I tried to make him talk after dinner;
I don't know if it's his age or his indigestion, but I found him too
sticky for words. I really thought I should have to 'dope' him." "Yes,
isn't he?" Bergotte chimed in. "You see, he has to keep his mouth
shut half the time so as not to use up all the stock of inanities that
hold his shirt–front down and his white waistcoat up." "I think that
Bergotte and my wife are both very hard on him," came from Swann, who
took the 'line,' in his own house, of a plain, sensible man. "I quite
see that Norpois cannot interest you very much, but from another point
of view," (for Swann made a hobby of collecting scraps of 'real
life') "he is quite remarkable, quite a remarkable instance of a lover.
When he was Secretary at Rome," he went on, after making sure that
Gilberte could not hear him, "he had, here in Paris, a mistress with
whom he was madly in love, and he found time to make the double
journey every week, so as to see her for a couple of hours. She was,
as it happens, a most intelligent woman, and is quite attractive to
this day; she is a dowager now. And he has had any number of others
since then. I'm sure I should have gone stark mad if the woman I was
in love with lived in Paris and I was kept shut up in Rome. Nervous
men ought always to love, as the lower orders say, 'beneath' them, so
that their women have a material inducement to do what they tell
them." As he spoke, Swann realised that I might be applying this maxim
to himself and Odette, and as, even among superior beings, at the
moment when you and they seem to be soaring together above the plane
of life, their personal pride is still basely human, he was seized by
a violent ill–will towards me. But this was made manifest only in the
uneasiness of his glance. He said nothing more to me at the time. Not
that this need surprise us. When Racine (according to a story the
truth of which has been exploded, though the theme of it may be found
recurring every day in Parisian life) made an illusion to Scarron in
front of Louis XIV, the most powerful monarch on earth said nothing to
the poet that evening. It was on the following day, only, that he
fell.