The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  I no longer felt the same indulgence as on the former occasion for the scrupulous efforts to express tenderness or anger which I had then remarked in the delivery and gestures of Aricie, Ismène and Hippolyte. It was not that the players—they were the same—did not still seek, with the same intelligent application, to impart now a caressing inflexion or a calculated ambiguity to their voices, now a tragic amplitude or a suppliant gentleness to their movements. Their tones bade the voice: “Be gentle, sing like a nightingale, caress,” or on the contrary: “Make yourself furious,” and then hurled themselves upon it, trying to carry it along with them in their frenzy. But it, mutinous, independent of their diction, remained unalterably their natural voice with its material defects or charms, its everyday vulgarity or affectation, and thus presented a complex of acoustic or social phenomena which the sentiment contained in the lines they were declaiming was powerless to alter.

  Similarly the gestures of the players said to their arms, to their garments: “Be majestic.” But the unsubmissive limbs allowed a biceps which knew nothing of the part to flaunt itself between shoulder and elbow; they continued to express the triviality of everyday life and to bring into prominence, instead of fine shades of Racinian meaning, mere muscular relationships; and the draperies which they held up fell back again along vertical lines in which the natural law that governs falling bodies was challenged only by an insipid textile pliancy. At this point the little woman who was sitting near me exclaimed:

  “Not a clap! And did you ever see such a get-up? She’s too old; she can’t do it any more; she ought to give up.”

  Amid a sibilant protest from their neighbours the two young men with her quietened her down and her fury raged now only in her eyes. This fury could be prompted only by the notion of success and fame, for Berma, who had earned so much money, was overwhelmed with debts. Since she was always making business or social appointments which she was prevented from keeping, she had messengers flying with apologies along every street in Paris, hotel suites booked in advance which she would never occupy, oceans of scent to bathe her dogs, heavy penalties for breaches of contract with all her managers. Failing any more serious expenses, and being less voluptuous than Cleopatra, she would have found the means of squandering provinces and kingdoms on telegrams and hired carriages. But the little woman was an actress who had never tasted success, and had vowed a deadly hatred against Berma. The latter had just come on to the stage. And then, miraculously, like those lessons which we have laboured in vain to learn overnight and find intact, got by heart, on waking up next morning, and like those faces of dead friends which the impassioned efforts of our memory pursue without recapturing and which, when we are no longer thinking of them, are there before our eyes just as they were in life, the talent of Berma, which had evaded me when I sought so greedily to grasp its essence, now, after these years of oblivion, in this hour of indifference, imposed itself on my admiration with the force of self-evidence. Formerly, in my attempts to isolate this talent, I deducted, so to speak, from what I heard, the part itself, a part, the common property of all the actresses who appeared as Phèdre, which I myself had studied beforehand so that I might be capable of subtracting it, of gleaning as a residuum Mme Berma’s talent alone. But this talent which I sought to discover outside the part itself was indissolubly one with it. So with a great musician (it appears that this was the case with Vinteuil when he played the piano), his playing is that of so fine a pianist that one is no longer aware that the performer is a pianist at all, because (by not interposing all that apparatus of digital effort, crowned here and there with brilliant effects, all that spattering shower of notes in which at least the listener who does not quite know where he is thinks that he can discern talent in its material, tangible reality) his playing has become so transparent, so imbued with what he is interpreting, that one no longer sees the performer himself—he is simply a window opening upon a great work of art. I had been able to distinguish the intentions underlying the voices and the mime of Aricie, Ismène and Hippolyte, but Phèdre had interiorised hers, and my mind had not succeeded in wresting from her diction and attitudes, in apprehending in the miserly simplicity of their unbroken surfaces, those inventions, those effects of which no sign emerged, so completely had they been absorbed into it. Berma’s voice, in which there subsisted not one scrap of inert matter refractory to the mind, betrayed no visible sign of that surplus of tears which, because they had been unable to soak into it, one could feel trickling down the voice of Aricie or of Ismène, but had been delicately refined down to its smallest cells like the instrument of a master violinist in whom, when one says that he produces a beautiful sound, one means to praise not a physical peculiarity but a superiority of soul; and, as in the classical landscape where in the place of a vanished nymph there is an inanimate spring, a discernible and concrete intention had been transformed into a certain limpidity of tone, strange, appropriate and cold. Berma’s arms, which the lines of verse themselves, by the same emissive force that made the voice issue from her lips, seemed to raise on to her bosom like leaves displaced by a gush of water; her stage presence, her poses, which she had gradually built up, which she was to modify yet further, and which were based upon reasonings altogether more profound than those of which traces could be seen in the gestures of her fellow-actors, but reasonings that had lost their original deliberation, had melted into a sort of radiance whereby they sent throbbing, round the person of the heroine, rich and complex elements which the fascinated spectator nevertheless took not for a triumph of dramatic artistry but for a manifestation of life; those white veils themselves, which, tenuous and clinging, seemed to be of a living substance and to have been woven by the suffering, half-pagan, half-Jansenist, around which they drew themselves like a frail and shrinking cocoon—all these, voice, posture, gestures, veils, round this embodiment of an idea which a line of poetry is (an embodiment that, unlike our human bodies, is not an opaque screen, but a purified, spiritualised garment), were merely additional envelopes which, instead of concealing, showed up in greater splendour the soul that had assimilated them to itself and had spread itself through them, lava-flows of different substances, grown translucent, the superimposition of which causes only a richer refraction of the imprisoned, central ray that pierces through them, and makes more extensive, more precious and more beautiful the flame-drenched matter in which it is enshrined. So Berma’s interpretation was, around Racine’s work, a second work, quickened also by genius.

  My impression, to tell the truth, though more agreeable than on the earlier occasion, was not really different. Only, I no longer confronted it with a pre-existent, abstract and false idea of dramatic genius, and I understood now that dramatic genius was precisely this. It had just occurred to me that if I had not derived any pleasure from my first encounter with Berma, it was because, as earlier still when I used to meet Gilberte in the Champs-Elysées, I had come to her with too strong a desire. Between my two disappointments there was perhaps not only this resemblance, but another, deeper one. The impression given us by a person or a work (or an interpretation of a work) of marked individuality is peculiar to that person or work. We have brought with us the ideas of “beauty,” “breadth of style,” “pathos” and so forth which we might at a pinch have the illusion of recognising in the banality of a conventional face or talent, but our critical spirit has before it the insistent challenge of a form of which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, in which it must disengage the unknown element. It hears a sharp sound, an oddly interrogative inflexion. It asks itself: “Is that good? Is what I am feeling now admiration? Is that what is meant by richness of colouring, nobility, strength?” And what answers it again is a sharp voice, a curiously questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person whom one does not know, in which no scope is left for “breadth of interpretation.” And for this reason it is the really beautiful works that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the
storehouse of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.

  This was precisely what Berma’s acting showed me. This was indeed what was meant by nobility, by intelligence of diction. Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have nothing mythological about them. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap. It was to some extent this gap, this fault, that I had to cross when, that afternoon on which I first went to see Berma, having strained my ears to catch every word, I had found some difficulty in correlating my ideas of “nobility of interpretation,” of “originality,” and had broken out in applause only after a moment of blankness and as if my applause sprang not from my actual impression but was connected in some way with my preconceived ideas, with the pleasure that I found in saying to myself: “At last I am listening to Berma.” And the difference which exists between a person or a work of art that are markedly individual and the idea of beauty exists just as much between what they make us feel and the idea of love or of admiration. Wherefore we fail to recognise them. I had found no pleasure in listening to Berma (any more than, when I loved her, in seeing Gilberte). I had said to myself: “Well, I don’t admire her.” But meanwhile I was thinking only of mastering the secret of Berma’s acting, I was preoccupied with that alone, I was trying to open my mind as wide as possible to receive all that her acting contained. I realised now that that was precisely what admiration meant.

  Was this genius, of which Berma’s interpretation was only the revelation, solely the genius of Racine?

  I thought so at first. I was soon to be undeceived, when the act from Phèdre came to an end, after enthusiastic curtain-calls during which my furious old neighbour, drawing her little body up to its full height, turning sideways in her seat, stiffened the muscles of her face and folded her arms over her bosom to show that she was not joining the others in their applause, and to make more noticeable a protest which to her appeared sensational though it passed unperceived. The piece that followed was one of those novelties which at one time I had expected, since they were not famous, to be inevitably trivial and of no general application, devoid as they were of any existence outside the performance that was being given of them at the moment. But also I did not have, as with a classic, the disappointment of seeing the eternity of a masterpiece occupy no more space or time than the width of the footlights and the length of a performance which would accomplish it as effectively as an occasional piece. Then at each set speech which I felt that the audience liked and which would one day be famous, in the absence of the celebrity it could not have won in the past I added the fame it would enjoy in the future, by a mental process the converse of that which consists in imagining masterpieces on the day of their first frail appearance, when it seemed inconceivable that a title which no one had ever heard before could one day be set, bathed in the same mellow light, beside those of the author’s other works. And this role would eventually figure in the list of her finest impersonations, next to that of Phèdre. Not that in itself it was not destitute of all literary merit; but Berma was as sublime in it as in Phèdre. I realised then that the work of the playwright was for the actress no more than the raw material, more or less irrelevant in itself, for the creation of her masterpiece of interpretation, just as the great painter whom I had met at Balbec, Elstir, had found the inspiration for two pictures of equal merit in a school building devoid of character and a cathedral which was itself a work of art. And as the painter dissolves houses, carts, people, in some broad effect of light which makes them homogeneous, so Berma spread out great sheets of terror or tenderness over the words which were equally blended, all planed down or heightened, and which a lesser artist would have carefully detached from one another. Of course each of them had an inflexion of its own, and Berma’s diction did not prevent one from distinguishing the lines. Is it not already a first element of ordered complexity, of beauty, when, on hearing a rhyme, that is to say something that is at once similar to and different from the preceding rhyme, which is prompted by it, but introduces the variety of a new idea, one is conscious of two systems overlapping each other, one intellectual, the other prosodic? But Berma at the same time made the words, the lines, whole speeches even, flow into an ensemble vaster than themselves, at the margins of which it was a joy to see them obliged to stop, to break off; thus it is that a poet takes pleasure in making the word which is about to spring forth pause for a moment at the rhyming point, and a composer in merging the various words of the libretto in a single rhythm which runs counter to them and yet sweeps them along. Thus into the prose of the modern playwright as into the verse of Racine, Berma contrived to introduce those vast images of grief, nobility, passion, which were the masterpieces of her own personal art, and in which she could be recognised as, in the portraits which he has made of different sitters, we recognise a painter.

  I had no longer any desire, as on the former occasion, to be able to arrest Berma’s poses, or the beautiful effect of colour which she gave for a moment only in a beam of limelight which at once faded never to reappear, or to make her repeat a single line a hundred times over. I realised that my original desire had been more exacting than the intentions of the poet, the actress, the great decorative artist who directed the production, and that the charm which floated over a line as it was spoken, the shifting poses perpetually transformed into others, the successive tableaux, were the fleeting result, the momentary object, the mobile masterpiece which the art of the theatre intended and which the attentiveness of a too-enraptured audience would destroy by trying to arrest. I did not even wish to come back another day and hear Berma again; I was satisfied with her; it was when I admired too keenly not to be disappointed by the object of my admiration, whether that object was Gilberte or Berma, that I demanded in advance, of the impression to be received on the morrow, the pleasure that yesterday’s impression had denied me. Without seeking to analyse the joy which I had just felt, and might perhaps have turned to some more profitable use, I said to myself, as in the old days some of my schoolfellows used to say: “Certainly, I put Berma first,” not without a confused feeling that Berma’s genius was not perhaps very accurately represented by this affirmation of my preference and this award to her of a “first” place, whatever the peace of mind that they might incidentally restore to me.

  Just as the curtain was rising on this second play I looked up at Mme de Guermantes’s box. The Princess, with a movement that called into being an exquisite line which my mind pursued into the void, had just turned her head towards the back of her box; the guests were all on their feet, and also turned towards the door, and between the double hedge which they thus formed, with all the triumphant assurance, the grandeur of the goddess that she was, but with an unwonted meekness due to her feigned and smiling embarrassment at arriving so late and making everyone get up in the middle of the performance, the Duchesse de Guermantes entered, enveloped in white chiffon. She went straight up to her cousin, made a deep curtsey to a young man with fair hair who was seated in the front row, and turning towards the amphibian monsters floating in the recesses of the cavern, gave to these demi-gods of the Jockey Club—who at that moment, and among them all M. de Palancy in particular, were the men I should most have liked to be—the familiar “good evening” of an old friend, an allusion to her day-to-day relations with them during the last fifteen years. I sensed but could not decipher the mystery of that smiling gaze which she addressed to her friends, in the azure brilliance with which it glowed while she surrendered her hand to them one after another, a gaze which, could I have broken up its prism, analysed its crystallisations, might perhaps have revealed to me the essence of the unknown life which was apparent in it at that moment. The Duc de Guermantes followed his wife, the gay flash of his monocle, t
he gleam of his teeth, the whiteness of his carnation or of his pleated shirt-front relegating, to make room for their light, the darkness of his eyebrows, lips and coat; with a wave of his outstretched hand which he let fall on to their shoulders, vertically, without moving his head, he commanded the inferior monsters who were making way for him to resume their seats, and made a deep bow to the fair young man. It was as though the Duchess had guessed that her cousin, of whom, it was rumoured, she was inclined to make fun for what she called her “exaggerations” (a noun which, from her point of view, so wittily French and restrained, was instantly applicable to the poetry and enthusiasm of the Teuton), would be wearing this evening one of those costumes in which the Duchess considered her “dressed up,” and that she had decided to give her a lesson in good taste. Instead of the wonderful downy plumage which descended from the crown of the Princess’s head to her throat, instead of her net of shells and pearls, the Duchess wore in her hair only a simple aigrette which, surmounting her arched nose and prominent eyes, reminded one of the crest on the head of a bird. Her neck and shoulders emerged from a drift of snow-white chiffon, against which fluttered a swansdown fan, but below this her gown, the bodice of which had for its sole ornament innumerable spangles (either little sticks and beads of metal, or brilliants), moulded her figure with a precision that was positively British. But different as their two costumes were, after the Princess had given her cousin the chair in which she herself had previously been sitting, they could be seen turning to gaze at one another in mutual appreciation.