Free In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust Page B

present, when the
ever–increasing complexity of life leaves one scarcely a moment for
reading, when the map of Europe has undergone radical alterations, and
is on the eve, very probably, of undergoing others more drastic still,
when so many new and threatening problems are arising on every side,
you will allow me to suggest that one is entitled to ask that a writer
should be something else than a fine intellect which makes us forget,
amid otiose and byzantine discussions of the merits of pure form, that
we may be overwhelmed at any moment by a double tide of barbarians,
those from without and those from within our borders. I am aware that
this is a blasphemy against the sacrosanct school of what these
gentlemen term 'Art for Art's sake,' but at this period of history
there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a
harmonious manner. Not that Bergotte's manner is not now and then
quite attractive. I have no fault to find with that, but taken as a
whole, it is all very precious, very thin, and has very little
virility. I can now understand more easily, when I bear in mind your
altogether excessive regard for Bergotte, the few lines that you
shewed me just now, which it would have been unfair to you not to
overlook, since you yourself told me, in all simplicity, that they
were merely a childish scribbling." (I had, indeed, said so, but I did
not think anything of the sort.) "For every sin there is forgiveness,
and especially for the sins of youth. After all, others as well as
yourself have such sins upon their conscience, and you are not the
only one who has believed himself to be a poet in his day. But one can
see in what you have shewn me the evil influence of Bergotte. You will
not, of course, be surprised when I say that there was in it none of
his good qualities, since he is a past–master in the art—incidentally
quite superficial—of handling a certain style of which, at your age,
you cannot have acquired even the rudiments. But already there is the
same fault, that paradox of stringing together fine–sounding words and
only afterwards troubling about what they mean. That is putting the
cart before the horse, even in Bergotte's books. All those Chinese
puzzles of form, all these deliquescent mandarin subtleties seem to me
to be quite futile. Given a few fireworks, let off prettily enough by
an author, and up goes the shout of genius. Works of genius are not so
common as all that! Bergotte cannot place to his credit—does not
carry in his baggage, if I may use the expression—a single novel that
is at all lofty in its conception, any of those books which one keeps
in a special corner of one's library. I do not discover one such in
the whole of his work. But that does not exclude the fact that, with
him, the work is infinitely superior to the author. Ah! there is a man
who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an
author except through his books. It would be impossible to imagine an
individual who corresponded less to his—more pretentious, more
pompous, less fitted for human society. Vulgar at some moments, at
others talking like a book, and not even like one of his own, but like
a boring book, which his, to do them justice, are not—such is your
Bergotte. He has the most confused mind, alembicated, what our
ancestors called a diseur de phébus , and he makes the things that he
says even more unpleasant by the manner in which he says them. I
forget for the moment whether it is Loménie or Sainte–Beuve who tells
us that Vigny repelled people by the same eccentricity. But Bergotte
has never given us a Cinq–Mars , or a Cachet Rouge , certain pages
of which are regular anthology pieces."
    Paralysed by what M. de Norpois had just said to me with regard to the
fragment which I had submitted to him, and remembering at the same
time the difficulties that I experienced when I attempted to write an
essay or merely to devote myself to serious thought, I felt conscious
once again of my