Tender Shoots

PREFACE BY MARCEL PROUST

THE ATHENIANS ARE SLOW to deliver. So far, only three young ladies or gentlewomen have been given up to our minotaur Morand, and the treaty allows for seven. But the year is not yet ended. And many undisclosed postulants seek the glorious fate of Clarissa and Aurora. I should have liked to undertake the unnecessary task of composing a fitting preface for the charming novellas that bear the names of these fair creatures. But an unforeseen occurrence has prevented me from doing so. A stranger has chosen to make her home in my brain. She came and she went; before long, having observed the way she behaved, I came to know her habits. Furthermore, like an over-attentive lodger, she tried to strike up a personal relationship with me. I was surprised to discover that she was not beautiful. For I had always supposed Death so to be. Otherwise, how would she get the better of us? Be that as it may, she seems to have gone away today. Probably not for long, to judge by all she has left behind. And it would be more sensible to take advantage of the respite she allows me other than by writing a preface for an author who is already well known and has no need of one.

Another consideration should have deterred me. My dear master Anatole France, whom I have not seen, alas, for more than twenty years, has recently written an article for the Revue de Paris in which he asserts that all distinctiveness in style should be rejected. Now, it is certain that Paul Morand’s style is distinctive. Were I to have the pleasure once more of seeing M France, whose kindnesses to me are alive in my memory, I would ask him how he can believe in a uniformity of style, given that our sensibilities are distinctive. Stylistic beauty is indeed the infallible sign that the mind has become exalted, that it has discovered and established the necessary links between objects whose contingency had separated them. In Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, does not the twofold impression of wildness and sweetness provided by the cats radiate within an admirable passage: “Hamilcar, I said to him as I stretched out my legs, sleepy prince of the citadel of books … (I do not have the book to hand). In this citadel protected by the military virtues, sleep with the softness of a sultan’s wife. For you combine the formidable aspect of a Tartar warrior with the heavy grace of women from the East. Heroic, voluptuous Hamilcar …” and so on. But M France would not agree with me that this passage is admirable, for people have written badly ever since the end of the eighteenth century.

People have written badly ever since the end of the eighteenth century. In truth, here is something that could give much food for thought. There can be no doubt that many authors wrote badly in the nineteenth century. When M France asks us to relinquish Guizot and Thiers to him (a rapprochement that does great dishonour to Guizot) we happily obey him, and, without waiting for other names to be summoned forth, of our own accord we toss him all the Villemains and Cousins that he could wish. M Taine, with his prose as variegated as a relief map, so as to more keenly impress pupils in secondary schools, might receive some recognition but be banished nonetheless. If, for his legitimate expression of moral truths, we were to retain M Renan, we would still have to admit that he sometimes writes extremely badly. Without mentioning his recent works, in which the colour is so constantly out of focus that a comic effect seems to have been sought by the author, nor his very earliest work, littered with exclamation marks and with the constant over-exuberance of a choirboy, his fine Origines du christianisme is for the most part badly written. Rarely in a prose writer of outstanding ability does one encounter such pictorial impotence. The description of Jerusalem, the first time that Jesus arrives there, is composed in the style of Baedeker: “The buildings vie with the most perfect achievements of Antiquity in their grandiose character, the perfection of execution and the beauty of the materials. A number of superb tombs, of original taste …” And yet this was a ‘passage’ that was to be particularly ‘cherished’. And Renan felt obliged to invest all his passages with a pomposity very much in the Ary Scheffer, Gounod manner (we might add César Franck had he written nothing but the solemn, affected intermezzo of his Redemption). In order to give a dignified ending to a book or a preface, he uses those dutiful schoolboy images that are certainly not formed by any impression. “Now the apostolic bark will be able to fill its sails.” “When the overwhelming light had given way to the countless army of stars.” “Death struck us both with its wing.” And yet during those visits to Jerusalem, when M Renan calls him a “young Jewish democrat”, and speaks of the “naiveties” that fell “incessantly” from this “provincial” (how like Balzac!) one wonders, as I once allowed myself to do, whether, while fully recognising Renan’s genius, the Vie de Jésus is not a sort of Belle Hélène of Christianity. But M France shall not triumph quite so easily. As for our ideas about style, we will let him know some other time. But is he quite certain that the nineteenth century is lacking in this regard?

There is often something objective and incisive about Baudelaire’s style, but as far as power alone is concerned, has it ever been equalled? Surely no one has written anything less charitable, yet at the same time so forceful, as his lines on Charity:

A raging angel swoops from heaven like an eagle

He grasps the infidel’s hair in his fist

And, shaking him, says: “You shall know the rule!

[…]

Know that you must love, without contemptuous face,

The poor, the wicked, the tortured, the simpleton,

So that when Jesus passes you may make

A triumphal carpet with your charity.”

Nor anything more sublime but less expressive of the essence of devout souls than:

They say to Devotion who lent them his wings—

Mighty hippogryph, carry me to heaven.

Besides, Baudelaire is a great classic poet and, strangely enough, this classicism of form increases in proportion to the licence of his depictions. Racine may have written more profound verses, but with no greater purity of style than that of the sublime Poèmes condamnés. In the poem that caused the greatest scandal:

Her vanquished arms, cast down like futile weapons,

All served, all adorned her fragile beauty.

might have been taken from Britannicus.

Poor Baudelaire! After begging for an article from Sainte-Beuve (with what tenderness, what deference!), all he receives are tributes such as: “What is certain is that M Baudelaire benefits from being seen. Just when you expect a strange, eccentric man to enter the room, you find yourself in the presence of a polite, respectful, kindly young man, well spoken and wholly conventional in appearance.” So as to thank him for his dedication in Les Fleurs du mal, the only compliment that Sainte-Beuve can bring himself to offer is that the effect of these poems when collected together is altogether different. He goes on to pick out a few poems to which he applies double-edged epithets, such as “precious” and “subtle”, and asks: “But why were they not written in Latin, or rather in Greek?” A fine tribute to French poetry! Baudelaire’s relationship with Sainte-Beuve (whose stupidity is so obvious that one wonders whether it is not feigned so as to mask his cowardice) is one of the most distressing and at the same time comical episodes in French literature. For a time I wondered whether M Daniel Halévy was not making fun of me when, in a splendid article in La Minerve française, he attempted to gain my sympathy for Sainte-Beuve’s unctuous remarks, addressing Baudelaire with crocodile tears: “My poor child, how you must have suffered.” By way of thanks, Sainte-Beuve said to Baudelaire: “I’ve a good mind to scold you … you single out, you Petrarchise what is horrible. And (I quote from memory) one day when we are walking together by the seashore, I should like to trip you up, and force you to swim in the full current.” We must not pay too much attention to the image itself (which is likely to be better in its context), for Sainte-Beuve, who knew nothing at all about such things, took his imagery from the hunting field, from marine life, etc. He would say: “I should like to take a blunderbuss and march off into the middle of nowhere to fire off at will.” He would say of a book: “It’s an etching”, though he would not have been capable of recognising an etching. But he reckoned that in a literary way it struck the right note, and was dainty and graceful. But how could M Daniel Halévy (in the twenty-five years since I last saw him, he has continued to grow in authority) seriously think that rather than it being this crafty jumbler of phrases who “singles out and Petrarchises”, it is to the great genius that we owe (lines that are not in the least “singled out” and seem to me to be in “full current”):

For the child in love with maps and prints

The Universe is equal to his huge appetite.

How vast is the world by lamplight!

How small is the world in memory’s eyes!

Worse still, when Baudelaire was prosecuted on account of Les Fleurs du mal, Sainte-Beuve refused to testify on his behalf, but wrote him a letter which he immediately asked to be returned to him once he realised that it was intended to make it public. When he published it later in his Causeries du lundi, he felt it was his duty to preface it with a short preamble (which would have the effect of making it feebler still) in which he stated that this letter was written “with the thought of coming to the aid of the defence”. The accolade was scarcely compromising, however. “The poet Baudelaire (it was said) had spent years extracting from every subject, and from every flower, an essence that was poisonous, and even, one has to say, pleasantly poisonous. He was furthermore a witty man, fairly likeable, and, at times, very capable of affection. When he published this collection entitled Les Fleurs du mal, he was not merely dealing with his critics, justice was involved too, as if there really was danger in these disguised pranks, and hidden meaning in the elegant rhyming” (which, incidentally, hardly tallies with “My poor child, how you must have suffered”). What is more, in this scheme for his own defence, Sainte-Beuve speaks well of an illustrious poet (“far be it from me to detract in any way from the fame of an illustrious poet, of a poet dear to us all, whom the Emperor has deemed worthy of a public funeral”). Unfortunately, this poet who is ultimately glorified is not Baudelaire, but Béranger. When Baudelaire, on the advice of Sainte-Beuve, withdraws his candidature for the Académie, the great critic congratulates him, and believes he has filled his cup with joy by telling him: “When they read your final sentence of thanks, written in such modest and courteous terms, they said aloud: ‘Very good’.” The most alarming thing is that not only does Sainte-Beuve think that he has behaved very well towards Baudelaire, but, alas, that in the appalling lack of encouragement, or simple justice, accorded Baudelaire, the poet shares the critic’s opinion and literally does not know how to express his gratitude to him.

However enthralling this story of a genius who underestimated himself may be, we must tear ourselves away and return to the matter of style. It certainly did not have the same importance for Stendhal as it did for Baudelaire. When Beyle described a landscape as “these enchanting spots”, “these beautiful places”, and wrote of one of his heroines as “this admirable woman”, he did not wish to be any more specific. He was so unspecific that he could allow himself to write: “She wrote him an interminable letter.” But if we consider that vast unconscious framework that encompasses the desired structure of ideas as being an aspect of style, then Stendhal has it. How much pleasure it would give me to show that each time Julien Sorel or Fabrice leave behind their vain cares to live a selfless and pleasure-seeking life, they always find themselves in some elevated place (be it Fabrice’s prison, or Julien’s, in the Abbé Banès’s observatory). This is as beautiful as those homage-bearing creatures, rather similar to latter-day Angels who, here and there, in Dostoevsky’s work, bow down low at the feet of the one they imagine they have slaughtered.

Thus, Beyle was a great writer without being conscious of the fact. He ranked literature not merely lower than life, when, on the contrary, it is the goal, but beneath its dreariest distractions. I confess that, were it sincere, nothing would shock me more than this passage from Stendhal: “Some people arrived and we did not part until very late. The nephew ordered an excellent zambajon from the Café Pedroti. In the country where I am going, I said to my friends, I am unlikely to find a household such as this, and to pass the long evening hours, I shall write a novel about our kind Duchess Sanseverina.” La Chartreuse de Parme, written for lack of a household where there is pleasant conversation and where they serve zambajon, there you have the complete antithesis of the poem or even the one-line alexandrine, towards which, according to Mallarmé, the various and fruitless activities of universal life all aim.

“Since the end of the eighteenth century no one has known how to write.” Would not the converse be just as true? In every art form, it would appear that talent is a bringing together of the artist and the object that is to be expressed. As long as the gulf remains, the job is not finished. A violinist may play his solo part very well, but you can see the effect; you applaud, he is a virtuoso. When all that has eventually vanished, when the violinist’s phrasing is of one being with the artist, then the miracle will have been accomplished. In other centuries, it seems as if there had always been a certain distance between the object and the lofty minds that deliberated about it. But with Flaubert, for instance, his intellect, which may not have been among the greatest, strives to become the vibration of a steamship, the colour of the foam, an island in the bay. There then comes a point when we no longer see this intellect (even Flaubert’s moderate intellect), and we have before us the boat that sails on “encountering trails of logs that began to toss about in the waves made by the wash”. This tossing about is intellect transformed, mind that has integrated with matter. It also manages to penetrate the moors, the beech trees, the silence and the light of the undergrowth. This transformation of energy, in which the thinker has disappeared and trails things before us, is this not the writer’s first attempt at style?

But M France does not agree. “What is your canon?” he asks us in this article that launches André Chaumeix’s new Revue de Paris with such a splash. And among those he puts forward, and compared to whom we write badly, he mentions Racine’s Lettres aux imaginaires. We reject the very principle of a ‘canon’, which would imply a uniform style independent of the many aspects of thinking. But if we actually had to choose one, and one which in M France’s terms might be considered “heavy artillery”, we would never choose the Lettres aux imaginaires. Nothing so dry, so impoverished, so slender. It is not difficult for a form that embodies so little thought to be light and graceful. Yet that of the Lettres aux imaginaires is neither: “I would even go so far as to say that you are not from Port Royal as one of you claims … How many people have read his letter who would not have looked at it had Port Royal not approved of it, had not these gentlemen distributed it …” etc. “You believe you are saying something extremely agreeable, for instance, when you say of a remark made by M Chamillard, that his capital O is merely the number 0 … it is quite clear that you are doing your utmost to be pleasant. But this is not the way to be so.” These repetitions would certainly not have interrupted the flow of a sentence by Saint-Simon, but where is the flow here, where the poetry, or even the style? These letters to the author of Les Imaginaires are almost as feeble as the absurd correspondence in which Racine and Boileau exchange their medical views. Very little that is medical. Boileau’s snobbishness (or rather what would nowadays be the excessive deference of a functionary towards officialdom) is such that he prefers the opinion of Louis XIV (who was wise enough not to give it) to consultations with doctors. He was convinced that a prince who had succeeded in capturing Luxembourg must be “inspired by Heaven” and could not utter more than “oracles” even in medicine. (I feel sure that in their entirely justified admiration for the Duc d’Orléans, my masters M Léon Daudet and M Charles Maurras, and their charming disciple Jacques Bainville, would not go so far as to ask him for medical advice from afar.) Furthermore, Boileau adds, who would not be happy to “lose his voice and even his tongue” on discovering that the King had asked for news of him?

Let it not be said that this has to do with a particular period, and that at that time epistolary style was always like this. Without looking very far, on a certain Wednesday in 1673 (in December, as far as we know), that is to say just in between the Imaginaires in 1666 and the Lettres of Racine and Boileau in1687, Mme de Sévigné wrote from Marseilles: “I am charmed by the singular beauty of this city. Yesterday, the weather was divine, and the place from which I overlooked the sea, the farmhouses, the mountains and the town is astonishing. The throng of noblemen who came to see M de Grignan yesterday; well-known names, Saint-Hérems etc.; adventurers, swords, fashionable hats; people born to depict an idea of war, of romance, of embarkation, of adventure, of chains, of slaves’ shackles, of servitude, of captivity: I, who love romances, was delighted by it all.” Admittedly, this is not one of those letters by Mme de Sévigné that I like best. Nevertheless, in its composition, its colouring, its variety, what a picture for a “French gallery” in the Louvre this great writer succeeded in painting. Such as it is, in its splendour, I dedicate it to a member of the family to which Mme de Sévigné (she never stops saying this) was so proud to be related through the Grignans, to my friend the Marquis de Castellane.

Compared to such passages, the meagre correspondence we were discussing matters little. This does mean to say, of course, that Boileau was not an excellent, sometimes delightful, poet. And no doubt a hysterical genius was struggling in Racine’s mind, kept in check by a superior intellect, and in his tragedies it simulated for him, with a perfection that has never been equalled, the flux and reflux, the pitching and the tossing, fully grasped nevertheless, of passion. But all the admissions (withdrawn the moment they are felt to have been badly received, and reiterated, if it is feared, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they may not have been understood, and then, after many a tortuous detour, fanned into a raging blaze) that so inimitably enliven any scene from Phèdre cannot prevent us, retroactively, from feeling surprised and not remotely charmed by the Lettres aux imaginaires. Were we bound absolutely to adopt a canon of the kind that can be extracted from these Lettres, we should much prefer, at a time when, if we are to believe M. France, people no longer knew how to write, the preface (to do with his moods of near-insanity) that Gérard de Nerval dedicated to Alexandre Dumas: “They [his sonnets] would lose their charm by being explained, if that were possible; grant me credit at least for expressing myself; the last folly that will probably remain to me is to think of myself as a poet — it is up to the critics to cure me of it.” Here, if we are to take the Imaginaires as a canon, is something that is well written, that is much better written. But we do not want a “canon” of any sort. The truth is (and M France knows this better than anyone for he knows everything better than anyone else) that from time to time a new and original writer emerges (let us call him, if you will, Jean Giraudoux or Paul Morand, since, I cannot think why, Morand and Giraudoux are always being compared to each other, just as Natoire and Falconet are in the marvellous Nuit à Châteauroux, without their bearing any resemblance to one another). This new writer is generally fairly tiring to read and hard to understand because he brings things together through new relationships. We follow him easily through the first half of the sentence, but there we flag. And we feel that this is only because the new writer is nimbler than us. Original writers spring up just as original painters do. When Renoir began to paint, people did not recognise the things he depicted. Nowadays it is easy to say he was an eighteenth-century painter. But, in saying this, we omit the temporal factor, and that it took a long time, even well into the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be recognised as a great artist. To succeed, the original painter, the original writer, proceed in the way oculists do. The treatment — whether in their painting, their writing — is not always pleasant. When it is over, they tell us: “Now look”. And suddenly the world, which has not been created only once, but is recreated as often as a new artist emerges, appears to us — so different from the old world — in perfect clarity. We adore Renoir’s, Morand’s or Giraudoux’s women, whereas before they were given this treatment, we refused to see them as women. And we feel a need to walk in the forest that at first sight had seemed to us to be anything but a forest, and more, for example, like a tapestry of a thousand shades of colour in which the actual tints of the forests were lacking. Such is the new and perishable universe which the artist creates, and which will endure until a new one surfaces. To all of which there may be many things to add. But the reader, who has already guessed what they are, will be able to explain them, better than I could, by reading Clarissa, Aurora and Delphine.

The only criticism I might be tempted to suggest to Morand is that he sometimes uses imagery other than the inevitable images. Now, all approximate images do not count. Water (given certain conditions) boils at one hundred degrees. At ninety-eight, at ninety-nine, the phenomenon does not occur. Therefore, better not to have any images. Put someone who knows neither Wagner nor Beethoven in front of a piano for six months and let him try out every combination of notes on the keys that happen to occur to him, never from out of this jumble of notes will he give birth to the Spring theme in Die Walküre or the pre-Mendelssohnian (or rather infinitely super-Mendelssohnian) phrase of the Fifteenth Quartet. It is the same criticism that might have been levelled at Péguy while he was alive, of trying to say something in ten different ways, when there is only one. The glory of his admirable death has expunged everything.

It seems as if hitherto it has been in French and foreign mansions, built by architects inferior to Daedalus, that our minotaur Morand has sought the meanderings of his “vast retreat”, as Phèdre calls it in the scene to which I have just alluded. There he lies in wait for the young girls in their gowns, their sleeves fluttering like wings, who have been unwise enough to descend into the Labyrinth. I do not know these mansions any better than he does and would be of no use to him “in unwinding the uncertain predicament”. But if, before he becomes an Ambassador and competes with Consul Beyle, he wishes to visit the Hôtel de Balbec, then I will offer him the fatal thread.

C’est moi, prince, c’est moi dont l’utile secours

Vous a du labyrinthe enseigné les détours.*

* ’ Tis I, prince, ’tis I whose valuable assistance/Has taught you the winding path out of the labyrinth.