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, the 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.
Perhaps Mme de Guermantes would smile next day when she referred to the headdress, a little too complicated, which the Princess had worn, but certainly she would declare that the latter had been none the less quite lovely and marvellously got up; and the Princess, whose own tastes found something a little cold, a little austere, a little “tailor-made” in her cousin’s way of dressing, would discover in this strict sobriety an exquisite refinement. Moreover, the harmony that existed between them, the universal and pre-established gravitational pull of their upbringing, neutralised the contrasts not only in their apparel but in their attitude. At those invisible magnetic longitudes which the refinement of their manners traced between them, the natural expansiveness of the Princess died away, while towards them the formal correctness of the Duchess allowed itself to be attracted and loosened, turned to sweetness and charm. As, in the play which was now being performed, to realise how much personal poetry Berma extracted from it one had only to entrust the part which she was playing, which she alone could play, to any other actress, so the spectator who raised his eyes to the balcony would have seen in two smaller boxes there how an “arrangement” intended to suggest that of the Princesse de Guermantes simply made the Baronne de Morienval appear eccentric, pretentious and ill-bred, while an effort as painstaking as it must have been costly to imitate the clothes and style of the Duchesse de Guermantes only made Mme de Cambremer look like some provincial schoolgirl, mounted on wires, rigid, erect, desiccated, angular, with a plume of raven’s feathers stuck vertically in her hair. Perhaps this lady was out of place in a theatre in which it was only with the brightest stars of the season that the boxes (even those in the highest tier, which from below seemed like great hampers studded with human flowers and attached to the ceiling of the auditorium by the red cords of their plush-covered partitions) composed an ephemeral panorama which deaths, scandals, illnesses, quarrels would soon alter, but which this evening was held motionless by attentiveness, heat, dizziness, dust, elegance and boredom, in the sort of eternal tragic instant of unconscious expectancy and calm torpor which, in retrospect, seems always to have preceded the explosion of a bomb or the first flicker of a fire.
The explanation for Mme de Cambremer’s presence on this occasion was that the Princesse de Parme, devoid of snobbishness as are most truly royal personages, and by contrast eaten up with a pride in and passion for charity which rivalled her taste for what she believed to be the Arts, had bestowed a few boxes here and there upon women like Mme de Cambremer who were not numbered among the highest aristocratic society but with whom she was in communication with regard to charitable undertakings. Mme de Cambremer never took her eyes off the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes, which was all the easier for her since, not being actually acquainted with either, she could not be suspected of angling for a sign of recognition. Inclusion in the visiting lists of these two great ladies was nevertheless the goal towards which she had been striving for the last ten years with untiring patience. She had calculated that she might possibly reach it in five years more. But having been smitten by a fatal disease, the inexorable character of which—for she prided herself upon her medical knowledge—she thought she knew, she was afraid that she might not live so long. This evening she was happy at least in the thought that all these women whom she scarcely knew would see in her company a man who was one of their own set, the young Marquis de Beausergent, Mme d’Argencourt’s brother, who moved impartially in both worlds and whom the women of the second were very keen to parade before the eyes of those of the first. He was seated behind Mme de Cambremer on a chair placed at an angle, so that he might be able to scan the other boxes. He knew everyone in them and to bow to his friends, with the exquisite elegance of his delicately arched figure, his fine features and fair hair, he half-raised his upright torso, a smile brightening his blue eyes, with a blend of deference and detachment, a picture etched with precision in the rectangle of the oblique plane in which he was placed, like one of those old prints which portray a great nobleman in his courtly pride. He often accepted these invitations to go to the theatre with Mme de Cambremer. In the auditorium, and, on the way out, in the lobby, he stood gallantly by her side amid the throng of more brilliant friends whom he saw about him, and to whom he refrained from speaking, to avoid any awkwardness, just as though he had been in doubtful company. If at such moments the Princesse de Guermantes swept by, lightfoot and fair as Diana, trailing behind her the folds of an incomparable cloak, making every head turn round and followed by all eyes (and, most of all, by Mme de Cambremer’s), M. de Beausergent would become engrossed in conversation with his companion, acknowledging the friendly and dazzling smile of the Princess only with constraint, and with the well-bred reserve, the considerate coldness of a person whose friendliness might have become momentarily embarrassing.
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 129