Marcel Proust vs. Saint Beuve

...Shades of Sainte-Beuve...

...it would make a man find out sooner his own level, and it would do infinitely less mischief...

...The celebrated method . . . consists of not separating the man and his work, of holding the opinion that in forming a judgment of an author—short of his book being 'a treatise on pure geometry'—it is not immaterial to begin by knowing the answers to questions which seem at the furthest remove from his work (How did he conduct himself, etc...

...More than any other writer, he put his own experience into his work massively, little altered, with brilliant power of recollection...

...The method of Proust, on the other hand, is a universal reliance upon personal impressions and a refusal to rely for a single moment upon anything but personal impressions...

...Like other literary men he depends for his permanence upon qualities of wisdom and sensitivity which he somehow managed to distil out of the very impure materials which life supplied to him in an even greater measure than it does to the rest of us...

...Nevertheless: "Les Lundis, the outward show...

...la plus grande gloire du critique est dans Fapprobations et dans I'estime des bons esprits...

...There it remains captive, captive for ever, unless we should happen on the object, recognize what lies within, call it by its name, and so set it free...

...If we would try to understand that particular self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct it there, that we may arrive at it...

...Proust's conclusion, not surprisingly, is that "at times I wonder if after all Sainte-Beuve's best work is not his poetry...

...6.50...

...But equally it militates against certain successes that are possible to a more objective approach than Proust's...

...What Proust objects to in the method of Sainte-Beuve is not so much the erroneousness to which it leads as the objectivity (or pseudo-objectivity) which is the road by which it reaches its errors in judgment...

...ThiS' form he hit on is unique to the point of grotesqueness...

...What governed his actions, what was his daily way of life?' What was his vice or his weakness...

...But what has the critic Sainte-Beuve to do with this thesis, and why does Proust think it important to launch a polemic against him...

...it is ceasing to be literary and becoming historical and biographical and scientific...

...Plainly enough, this program offers us at best a biographical, historical...

...Sainte-Beuve's method is not, at first sight, such an important affair...

...His notations of the dangers of that method and its possible consequences of superficiality, journalism and sheer irrelevance are in themselves sound...

...Not that the poetry is so good, you understand...

...But when one recalls with what enthusiasm he spoke of Mme...

...He tries to do what he admires in Theocritus, or Cowper, or Racine...

...By Richard H. Barker...

...His rejection of an approach dealing largely with the surfaces of literature was instinctive and, as I have already implied, self-defensive...

...He properly noted the dangers inherent in Sainte-Beuve's approach, and he was not the only one to do so...

...and if Sainte-Beuve's and Arnold's trust in their objectity occasionally betrays them it is only fair to say that at times it also sustains them and makes them more continuously interesting and informative...

...then, added to the paradox of an amateur possessing more skill than a professional, the paradox of an intellectual siding with an anti-intellectual or, at least, a non-intellectual theory of art...

...Proust's conclusion to his account of Sainte-Beuve's slighting treatment of Stendhal sums up his entire contention: "I don't mean that Sainte- Beuve was wrong in everything he said about Stendhal...

...Criterion...

...Sainte-Beuve, it would appear, is the symbol to Proust of how a too exclusive reliance upon the intellect can lead one astray in aesthetic matters...

...Anything we can learn about Proust's manner of living is useful to the ultimate purpose of reading him clearly...

...Unlike Andre Gide, for instance, he was not victimized by his vices into constructing an elborate rationalization of them...

...At first glance, Proust's objection to Sainte-Beuve's critical method would seem to put him in line, during the first decade of the 20th century (when this work was composed), with the literary tendencies that go under the name of "the New Criticism" some three to four decades later...

...On this score, by the way, Proust would seem to be in agreement with Sainte-Beuve himself, who is quoted to the same effect in Matthew Arnold's obituary notice of him: "Personne ne sail mieux que a quoi s'en tenir sur le merite absolu de ces articles qui sont tout au plus, et meme lorsqu'ils reussissent le mieux, des choses sensees dans un genre mediocre...

...Reservons I'admiration pour les oeuvres de poesie et d'art, pour les compositions elevees...

...But Proust's reaction against Sainte-Beuve's method does not necessarily have to take the form of radical subjectivity which it took in him...

...Contre Sainte-Beuve is concerned with the recognition of this marvelous feat...

...In it we see Proust struggling to achieve an adequate form to harness the plenitude of his materials...

...and I note that a rather well-known literary man says in his review of the book: "Proust's personal life and his great public novel are inseparable...

...But such an ad hominem approach to the question raised by Proust does not dispose of what he says or tell us whether or not he is right...

...The truth is that Proust has not escaped the pitfalls of his own method...

...What intellect restores to us under the name of the past, is not the past...

...What were his religious views...

...And if intellect only ranks second in the hierarchy of virtues, intellect alone is able to proclaim that the first place must be given.to instinct...

...a little poetry, the reality...

...The reason is given at the end of the opening chapter from which 1 have quoted...

...How did he conduct himself in regard to women, in regard to money...

...Of his own, of what was involuntarily and profoundly his own almost the only thing is clumsiness...

...No one has suffered from the biographical method of treatment more than Proust himself...

...Nothing can exempt us from this pilgrimage of the heart...

...The more we study Proust's life, it seems to me, the more we realize how successfully he managed to disengage his work from his personal limitations...

...A partisan of Sainte-Beuve's method might argue in turn that Proust's vision of the work of art as a sort of immaculate conception, produced by a secret self of the artist unknown to the society of which he is a part—save in its manifestation as art—is a highly personal plea by a writer, justifiably fearful of submitting his foibles and vices to an unsympathetic critical scrutiny...

...Gasparin's stories, or Toepffer's, it is clear enough that if all nineteenth century literature bar Les Lundis had been destroyed by fire, we should see Stendhal ranked below Charles de Bernard, below Vinet, below Mole, below Mme...

...Was he rich, was he poor...

...But Proust is not really a part of the tendency toward the New Criticism because his cure for the abuses of Sainte-Beuvism is what might be called a Radical Impressionism...

...Just the other day, for example, another in a long list of biographical studies appeared of him (Marcel Proust...

...He allows Sainte-Beuve to speak for himself first of all...

...This method, to be sure, guarantees the critic against such failures as he clearly demonstrates in Sainte-Beuve...

...de Verdelin...

...Nothing could be further from the truth than this point of view...

...The genius of Keats is precisely that part of him that cannot be explained by the fact that he was the son of the keeper of a London livery stable...

...I do not look on literature," said Sainte-Beuve, "as a thing apart, or, at least, detachable, from the rest of the man and of his nature...

...Undoubtedly, he was an interested party in the debate to a greater extent than he allows us to see, and it is precisely his interest that marshals the forces of his crushing polemic...

...Because if intellect does not deserve the crown of crowns, only intellect is able to award it...

...And it is just as obviously the product of an amateur artist—using the term amateur not in its pejorative sense of indicating a lesser competence than is possessed by the professional but in its original, etymological sense: the sense in which it is used as a term of praise, for example, when Sainte-Beuve says of Joseph Joubert that be was "le veritable amateur des belles choses...

...His remarks on Goethe, Chateaubriand, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Robert de Montesquiou and Leon Daudet are interesting because it is Proust who makes them rather than revealing in themselves...

...373 pp...

...Yet all the same, it is intellect we must call on to establish this inferiority...

...What was the nature of the critical method of Sainte-Beuve to which Proust objected, and what exactly were his objections...

...How did he react to the sight of nature...

...This new biography, therefore, will help the reader understand Remembrance of Things Past as few biographies contribute to a grasp of other men's writing...

...nor to surround oneself with every possible piece of information about a writer . . . this method ignores what a very slight degree of self-acquaintance teaches us: that a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices...

...It is a very centaur of literature...

...That something was his genius, for genius is the possibility of raising oneself by one's own bootstraps...

...In the scales of eternity, a critic's verses outweigh all the rest of his works...

...In reality, as soon as each hour of one's life has died, it embodies itself in some material object, as do the souls of the dead in certain folk-stories, and hides there...

...One cannot provide oneself with too many means or too many objectives if one is to know a man—by which I mean something other than a pure intelligence...

...But perhaps' in the course of these pages we may be led to realize that it touches on very important intellectual problems, and on what is perhaps for an artist the greatest of all: this relative inferiority of the intellect which I spoke of at the beginning...

...Contre Sainte-Beuve is not only a curiosity in the canon of Proust's work but is one of the strangest works in literature...

...Proust's comment is: "SainteBeuve's great work does not go very deep...

...The theme of Contre Sainte-Beuve is stated in its first paragraph: "Every day I set less store on intellect...

...Midway in this work, after a great deal of preparations dealing with his own private life, Proust presents us with a powerful analysis, which is lethal to his victim but completely fair to him...

...Compare Proust's two meager pages on Joubert with SainteBeuve's fine essay on the same subject or Matthew Arnold's...

...We have...

...So long as one has not asked an author a certdin number of questions and received answers to them, though these were only whispered in confidence, one cannot be certain of having a complete grasp of him, even though these questions might seem at the furthest remove from the nature of his writings...

...For what he does is to examine Sainte-Beuve's critical record with regard to those contemporaries of his to whom posterity has given its accolade...

...Such men are independent of the public because they are not compelled to make a living by their skill, which may be greater than that of those who are dependent on pleasing a certain public...

...objective approach to the tasks of criticism and at the worst an anecdotal or even gossipy approach...

...If Proust displays the strength of his subjectivity he also indicates its inadequacies as an exclusive method of approach...

...Like its predecessor, Jean Santeuil, this new work is an abortive attempt by its author to deliver himself of the burden of his message to the world which is contained in A la recherche du temps perdu...

...Four case-histories are subjected by Proust to the finest (one is tempted to say almost ferocious) analytical dissection: Sainte-Beuve and Stendhal, Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve and Balzac and Sainte- Beuve and Gerard de Nerval...

...And it may be noted that both Proust and Sainte-Beuve, in this respect, go back to the romantic tradition exemplified in such poets as Wordsworth who is reported by Arnold to have said in conversation: "If the quantity of time consumed in writing critiques on the works of others were given to original com position, of whatever kind it might be, it would be much better em ployed...

...History and biography and science are at best preparations for literary criticism, preparations that are always relevant to be sure, but likely to be less relevant in direct ratio to the distinction of the man being criticized...

...He took the same line towards almost all his contemporaries who were genuinely original—a fine record for a man who laid down that the critic's whole function is to point out the great men of his time...

...Something enabled him to rise above himself...

...Around the same time, for example, we find Irving Babbitt saying in his Masters of Modern French Criticism: "Criticism in Sainte-Beuve is plainly moving away from its own center towards something else...

...For a man to limit himself, as Proust does, to judgments based upon the data supplied to him by his subjective sensorium and nothing more is to narrow himself down to eccentricity and possibly solipsism...

...It is a combination of criticism and creation, of essay, autobiography and story...

...Every day I see more clearly that if the writer is to repossess himself of some part of his impressions, get to something personal, that is, and to the only material of art, he must put it aside...

...Reviewed by Milton Hindus Professor of English, Brandeis University: author, "The Crippled Giant" THE MAJOR PART of this book consists of Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust's posthumously published work which first appeared in France five years ago...

...The greater the man, for example, the more baffling he is likely to be to students of heredity...