In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (20 page)

And so—just as Bergotte's way of speaking would no doubt have been
charming if he himself had been merely an amateur repeating imitations
of Bergotte, whereas it was attached to the mind of Bergotte, at work
and in action, by essential ties which the ear did not at once
distinguish—so it was because Bergotte applied that mind with
precision to the reality which pleased him that his language had in it
something positive, something over–rich, disappointing those who
expected to hear him speak only of the 'eternal torrent of forms,' and
of the 'mystic thrills of beauty.' Moreover the quality, always rare
and new, of what he wrote was expressed in his conversation by so
subtle a manner of approaching a question, ignoring every aspect of it
that was already familiar, that he appeared to be seizing hold of an
unimportant detail, to be quite wrong about it, to be speaking in
paradox, so that his ideas seemed as often as not to be in confusion,
for each of us finds lucidity only in those ideas which are in the
same state of confusion as his own. Besides, as all novelty depends
upon the elimination, first, of the stereotyped attitude to which we
have grown accustomed, and which has seemed to us to be reality
itself, every new conversation, as well as all original painting and
music, must always appear laboured and tedious. It is founded upon
figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speaker appears
to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us, and
gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms
of speech must in their time have been images difficult to follow when
the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they
depicted. But he has long since decided that this must be the real
universe, and so relies confidently upon it.) So when Bergotte—and
his figures appear simple enough to–day—said of Cottard that he was a
mannikin in a bottle, always trying to rise to the surface, and of
Brichot that "to him even more than to Mme. Swann the arrangement of
his hair was a matter for anxious deliberation, because, in his
twofold preoccupation over his profile and his reputation, he had
always to make sure that it was so brushed as to give him the air at
once of a lion and of a philosopher," one immediately felt the strain,
and sought a foothold upon something which one called more concrete,
meaning by that more ordinary. These unintelligible words, issuing
from the mask that I had before my eyes, it was indeed to the writer
whom I admired that they must be attributed, and yet they could not
have been inserted among his books, in the form of a puzzle set in a
series of different puzzles, they occupied another plane and required
a transposition by means of which, one day, when I was repeating to
myself certain phrases that I had heard Bergotte use, I discovered in
them the whole machinery of his literary style, the different
elements of which I was able to recognise and to name in this spoken
discourse which had struck me as being so different.

From a less immediate point of view the special way, a little too
meticulous, too intense, that he had of pronouncing certain words,
certain adjectives which were constantly recurring in his
conversation, and which he never uttered without a certain emphasis,
giving to each of their syllables a separate force and intoning the
last syllable (as for instance the word
visage
, which he always used
in preference to
figure
, and enriched with a number of superfluous
v's and s's and g's, which seemed all to explode from his outstretched
palm at such moments) corresponded exactly to the fine passages in
which, in his prose, he brought those favourite words into the light,
preceded by a sort of margin and composed in such a way in the
metrical whole of the phrase that the reader was obliged, if he were
not to make a false quantity, to give to each of them its full value.
And yet one did not find in the speech of Bergotte a certain
luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers,
often modified in the written phrase the appearance of its words. This
was doubtless because that light issues from so profound a depth that
its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which,
thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain
extent closed against ourselves. In this respect, there were more
intonations, there was more accent in his books than in his talk; an
accent independent of the beauty of style, which the author himself
has possibly not perceived, for it is not separable from his most
intimate personality. It was this accent which, at the moments when,
in his books, Bergotte was entirely natural, gave a rhythm to the
words—often at such times quite insignificant—that he wrote. This
accent is not marked on the printed page, there is nothing there to
indicate it, and yet it comes of its own accord to his phrases, one
cannot pronounce them in any other way, it is what was most ephemeral
and at the same time most profound in the writer, and it is what will
bear witness to his true nature, what will say whether, despite all
the austerity that he has expressed he was gentle, despite all his
sensuality sentimental.

Certain peculiarities of elocution, faint traces of which were to be
found in Bergotte's conversation, were not exclusively his own; for
when, later on, I came to know his brothers and sisters, I found those
peculiarities much more accentuated in their speech. There was
something abrupt and harsh in the closing words of a light and
spirited utterance, something faint and dying at the end of a sad one.
Swann, who had known the Master as a boy, told me that in those days
one used to hear on his lips, just as much as on his brothers' and
sisters', those inflexions, almost a family type, shouts of violent
merriment interspersed with murmurings of a long–drawn melancholy, and
that in the room in which they all played together he used to perform
his part, better than any of them, in their symphonies, alternately
deafening and subdued. However characteristic it may be, the sound
that escapes from human lips is fugitive and does not survive the
speaker. But it was not so with the pronunciation of the Bergotte
family. For if it is difficult ever to understand, even in the
Meistersinger
, how an artist can invent music by listening to the
twittering of birds, yet Bergotte had transposed and fixed in his
written language that manner of dwelling on words which repeat
themselves in shouts of joy, or fall, drop by drop, in melancholy
sighs. There are in his books just such closing phrases where the
accumulated sounds are prolonged (as in the last chords of the
overture of an opera which cannot come to an end, and repeats several
times over its supreme cadence before the conductor finally lays down
his baton), in which, later on, I was to find a musical equivalent for
those phonetic 'brasses' of the Bergotte family. But in his own case,
from the moment in which he transferred them to his books, he ceased
instinctively to make use of them in his speech. From the day on which
he had begun to write—all the more markedly, therefore, in the later
years in which I first knew him—his voice had lost this orchestration
for ever.

These young Bergottes—the future writer and his brothers and
sisters—were doubtless in no way superior, far from it, to other
young people, more refined, more intellectual than themselves, who
found the Bergottes rather "loud", that is to say a trifle vulgar,
irritating one by the witticisms which characterised the tone, at once
pretentious and puerile, of their household. But genius, and even what
is only great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social
refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of
transposing, and so transforming them. To heat a liquid over an
electric lamp one requires to have not the strongest lamp possible,
but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted
so as instead of light to give heat. To mount the skies it is not
necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor
which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface,
intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal which it began by
following, is capable of converting its speed into ascending force.
Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live
in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant
or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing
in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their
personality as of a mirror, in such a way that their life, however
unimportant it may be socially, and even, in a sense, intellectually
speaking, is reflected by it, genius consisting in the reflective
power of the writer and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene
reflected. The day on which young Bergotte succeeded in shewing to the
world of his readers the tasteless household in which he had passed
his childhood, and the not very amusing conversations between himself
and his brothers, on that day he climbed far above the friends of his
family, more intellectual and more distinguished than himself; they in
their fine Rolls Royces might return home expressing due contempt for
the vulgarity of the Bergottes; but he, with his modest engine which
had at last left the ground, he soared above their heads.

But there were other characteristics of his elocution which it was not
with the members of his family, but with certain contemporary writers,
that he must share. Younger men, who were beginning to repudiate him
as a master and disclaimed any intellectual affinity to him in
themselves, displayed their affinity without knowing it when they made
use of the same adverbs, the same prepositions that he incessantly
repeated, when they constructed their sentences in the same way, spoke
in the same quiescent, lingering tone, by a reaction from the
eloquent, easy language of an earlier generation. Perhaps these young
men—we shall come across some of whom this may be said—had never
known Bergotte. But his way of thinking, inoculated into them, had led
them to those alterations of syntax and of accent which bear a
necessary relation to originality of mind. A relation which,
incidentally, requires to be traced. Thus Bergotte, if he owed nothing
to any man for his manner of writing, derived his manner of speaking
from one of his early associates, a marvellous talker to whose
ascendancy he had succumbed, whom he imitated, unconsciously, in his
conversation, but who himself, being less gifted, had never written
any really outstanding book. So that if one had been in quest of
originality in speech, Bergotte must have been labelled a disciple, a
writer at second–hand, whereas, influenced by his friend only so far
as talk went, he had been original and creative in his writings.
Doubtless again, so as to distinguish himself from the previous
generation, too fond as it had been of abstractions, of weighty
commonplaces, when Bergotte wished to speak favourably of a book, what
he would bring into prominence, what he would quote with approval
would always be some scene that furnished the reader with an image,
some picture that had no rational significance. "Ah, yes!" he would
exclaim, "it is quite admirable! There is a little girl in an orange
shawl. It is excellent!" or again, "Oh, yes, there is a passage in
which there is a regiment marching along the street; yes, it is
excellent!" As for style, he was not altogether of his time (though he
remained quite exclusively of his race, abominating Tolstoy, George
Eliot, Ibsen and Dostoievsky), for the word that always came to his
lips when he wished to praise the style of any writer was 'mild.'
"Yes, you know I like Chateaubriand better in
Atala
than in
René
;
he seems to me to be 'milder.'" He said the word like a doctor who,
when his patient assures him that milk will give him indigestion,
answers, "But, you know, it's very 'mild'." And it is true that there
was in Bergotte's style a kind of harmony similar to that for which
the ancients used to praise certain of their orators in terms which we
now find it hard to understand, accustomed as we are to our own modern
tongues in which effects of that kind are not sought.

He would say also, with a shy smile, of pages of his own for which
some one had expressed admiration: "I think it is more or less true,
more or less accurate; it may be of some value perhaps," but he would
say this simply from modesty, as a woman to whom one has said that her
dress, or her daughter, is charming replies, "It is comfortable," or
"She is a good girl." But the constructive instinct was too deeply
implanted in Bergotte for him not to be aware that the sole proof that
he had built usefully and on the lines of truth lay in the pleasure
that his work had given, to himself first of all and afterwards to his
readers. Only many years later, when he no longer had any talent,
whenever he wrote anything with which he was not satisfied, so as not
to have to suppress it, as he ought to have done, so as to be able to
publish it with a clear conscience he would repeat, but to himself
this time: "After all, it is more or less accurate, it must be of some
value to the country." So that the phrase murmured long ago among his
admirers by the insincere voice of modesty came in the end to be
whispered in the secrecy of his heart by the uneasy tongue of pride.
And the same words which had served Bergotte as an unwanted excuse for
the excellence of his earliest works became as it were an ineffective
consolation to him for the hopeless mediocrity of the latest.

A kind of austerity of taste which he had, a kind of determination to
write nothing of which he could not say that it was 'mild,' which had
made people for so many years regard him as a sterile and precious
artist, a chiseller of exquisite trifles, was on the contrary the
secret of his strength, for habit forms the style of the writer just
as much as the character of the man, and the author who has more than
once been patient to attain, in the expression of his thoughts, to a
certain kind of attractiveness, in so doing lays down unalterably the
boundaries of his talent, just as if he yields too often to pleasure,
to laziness, to the fear of being put to trouble, he will find himself
describing in terms which no amount of revision can modify, the forms
of his own vices and the limits of his virtue.