PROUST AND THE VICTORIANS

Also by Robert Fraser *THE MAKING OF THE GOLDEN BOUGH THE NOVELS OF AYI KWEI ARMAH WEST AFRICAN POETRY: A Critical History *SIR JAMES FRAZER AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION

(editor)

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF GEORGE BARKER (editor)

* From the same publishers

Proust and the Victorians The Lamp of Memory ROBERT FRASER

M

St. Martin's Press

© Robert Fraser 1994

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1994

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WI P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1994 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTO Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-23249-9 (eBook) ISBN 978-1-349-23251-2 DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-23249-9

First published in the United States of America 1994 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-10364-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fraser, Robert, 1947Proust and the Victorians : the lamp of memory I Robert Fraser. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-10364-4 I. Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922-Knowledge-Literature. 2. English prose literature-19th century-Appreciation-France. 3. American prose literature-19th century-Appreciation-France. 4. French fiction-American influences. 5. French fiction-English influences. 6. Memory in literature. 7. Time in literature. 8. Literary form. I. Title. PQ263I.R63Z599 1994 93-26913 843'.912--dc20 CIP

For my wife Catherine

Contents List of Plates Preface Acknowledgements A Note on Sources

ix xi xiv XV

1 The Lamp of Memory: The Child in the House (1)

1

2 The Lamp of Heroism: Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau

28

3 The Lamp of Servitude: Ruskin

56

4

The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot

87

5 The Lamp of Form: Proust, Whistler and Ia peinture

anglaise

114

6 The Lamp of Geometry: Thomas Hardy

140

7 The Lamp of Adventure: Robert Louis Stevenson

168

8 The Lamp of Observation: H. G. Wells

187

9

The Lamp of Artifice: Proust, Darwin and Wilde

10 The Lamp of Time: The Child in the House (2) 11

The Lamp of Eternity: Proust, Time and the English

201 237 259

Appendices

I

A Firefly: Proust and Dickens

285

Contents

viii II

Proust's Letter to his Publisher

III Victorian Literature in French Translation: Versions Available to Proust

Notes

Index

290

293 300

316

List of Plates 1 A lampascope manufactured by the Lapierre brothers of Paris, with story slide inserted. (Courtesy of the Bayerische Stoatsbibliothek.) 2 (a) James MacNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: The Artist's Mother. (Courtesy of the Mansell Collection.) {b) James MacNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No.2: Thomas Carlyle. (Courtesy of the Mansell Collection.) (c) Marcel Proust, pen sketch after Whistler's Carlyle. 3 Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral: Sunset Effect (cobalt/yellow/ orange). (Courtesy of the Mansell Collection.) 4 Carpaccio, from the St Ursula cycle. (Courtesy of the Mansell Collection.) 5 George Eliot painted by Fran~ois D' Albert-Durade in 1850, a rare instance of an author being painted by her own translator (now hanging in Coventry Library). (Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.) 6 James MacNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, casus belli in a famous libel suit. (Courtesy of the Founders Society, Detroit Institute of Arts.) 7 Van Dyck, Charles I, which hangs where Proust saw it, in the Louvre. (Courtesy of the Mansell Collection/Alinari.) 8 J. M. W. Thrner, The Harbours of England. XII: Scarborough. Reproduced C&W, XIII, facing p. 73. (Courtesy of the Bodleian Library.) 9 J. M. W. Turner, Stormscape of Port Ruisdael. Reproduced C&W, III, Plate 11 facing p. 568. (Courtesy of the Bodleian Library.)

ix

I.ist of Plates 10 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Prosperpine. (Courtesy of the Mansell Collection.)

X

Preface This book began life as a study of the relationship between memory, time and form. It was while researching the nature of that relationship in the late nineteenth century, and more especially the relationship between time and what I have ventured to call'mimetic', 'mnemonic' and 'abstract' form, that I was struck by how distinctive was Proust's way of thinking about such matters, and how interestingly his views had been filtered through his reading of literature in English. The book then transformed itself into a study of Proust and the Victorians, but its main focus remains memory, time and form - or rather the imaginative exploration of connections between these three. It is therefore a book with a theme that has found an appropriate content, rather than a book with a content that has gone in search of a theme. Short studies exist of Proust's debt to various English writers, but there is as yet no study of his total indebtedness. This is surprising since Proust himself had a lively sense of it. Not to know one's literature in English was for him a sign of barbarity rendering one prone to cultural malapropisms. In Jean Santeuil Madame Desroches condemns herself: 'Once she had been heard speaking of Waverley, the novel by Duns Scotus; then she had flushed bright red and added ul'm very sorry; I seem to be somewhat confused".' Madame Desroches either had not read Sir Walter Scott, or else possessed a defective memory. This book is devoted to proving that Proust had a better one. The book is organised on a simple principle. One of the first English books that Proust read, and among the most influential, was Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture, across one chapter of which, 'The Lamp of Memory', he stumbled in a Belgian journal in 1899. The book, a product of Ruskin's great early period, describes and promulgates the seven great moral principles on which he belieVf~d any great and humane architecture should infallibly be ordered: 'Sacrifice', 'Truth', 'Power', 'Beauty', 'Life', 'Memory', 'Obedience'. I have simply rekindled two of Ruskin's lamps and lighted nine of my own in the belief that a reading of xi

xii

Preface

nineteenth-century literature in English helped furnish Proust with an equivalent set of aesthetic principles on which his critical priorities, and the creative practice based upon them, came to be ordered. I do not intend these chapters to be mutually exclusive; they are, to use a phrase of Virginia Woolf's, gig-lamps symmetrically arranged and each will be caught in the cross-glare. But that they shed light on Proust's work, and on his relationship with the Victoran literature he knew and loved, I have little doubt. Two quibbles will occur to readers: the first concerning Proust's often asserted debt to Dickens, the second concerning his uncertain mastery of spoken English. Both of these caveats are disposed of in appendices. The first appendix is speculative and comparative rather than strictly historical. Readers who manage to convince themselves, despite the evidence, or rather lack of it, that Proust knew the work of Dickens well are free to read it in a quite different way. I have tried to keep the needs of three different kinds of reader in mind. There are Proustians who may or may not be au fait with the broad corpus of Victorian literature, and Victorianists who may or may not know Proust. There are also readers who will have specialised in neither area who for reasons of their own may wish to learn about one of the more interesting cultural ententes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the sake of the first and third of these groups I have tried to give some sense of the drift of Victorian culture as I go along. It is convenient for my purposes that Proust's intimacy with writing in English follows a rough chronological line, his involvement with Carlyle, for example, being early, his involvement with Hardy much later. The two arguments, the two progressions, may therefore proceed hand in hand. For the sake of those whose French is not up to Proustian standards (though he is not as difficult as some make out) I have followed the practice of Sylvia Townsend Warner and George D. Painter, two British Proustians I much admire, by quoting in English. The exceptions are places where the French words are of primary importance. Here I have either cited the relevant French words in square brackets within the quotation, or in rarer instances given both passages in parallel. To have rendered all quotations thus would, however, have lengthened the book unconscionably, while to have confined myself to French would

Prefoce

xiii

have left some Victorianists and some general readers, if not in the dark, at least in the gloaming. ROBERT FRASER

'Dinity College, Cambridge

Acknowledgements I am indebted to George D. Painter, Proust's biographer, who encouraged me from the very beginning, sharing with me his conviction that 'no one before you will have done this obvious and indispensable and fascinating task, or have written on it, among the scores if not hundreds of articles in your ... field'. I would also like to thank Mr Stephen Herbert of the Museum of the Moving Image for advice on magic lanterns. I am grateful to the Wingate Foundation for three years' financial support while researching the book, to Royal Holloway and Bedford New College in the University of London for a Research Associateship during part of this period, and to liinity College, Cambridge for its moral and professional support since. I would also like to thank the staff of three libraries: the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the British Library in London and the University Library in Cambridge for their courtesy and help. There are several individuals whose conversation has also been of use to me. I have in mind Pam Bickley, Eric Griffiths, Robert Hampson, Sir Andrew Huxley, David Kelley, Jeremy Maule, Adrian Poole, Theodore Redpath, Barbara Rosebaum, Sir Martin Roth, Yifeng Sun and Deirdre Toomey. I would like to express my loving appreciation to my son Benjo, our own 'child in the house', for helping me with the print-out. Finally, and far from least, I have to thank my French reading class at liinity for putting up with endless Proustian unseens when they had every right to expect other, and more immediate, things.

xiv

A Note on Sources To help weed out the notes, I have where convenient placed citations to repeatedly used sources in the text. The translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. Both in the text and in the notes certain abbreviations have been used, namely:

Amiens

CS-B

John Ruskin, La Bible d'Amiens, trad. et intr. Marcel Proust (Paris: Mercure de France, 1903). Marcel Proust, Le Camet de 1908, ed. Philip Kolb, Cahiers Marcel Proust, nouvelle serie 8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903-12). Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. Philip Kolb, 20 vols to date (Paris: Pion, 1970- ). Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard,

JS

Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard,

NP

Marcel Proust, the new Pll~iade Edition of A la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987-9). Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil precede de l.es Plaisirs et les jours, ed. Pierre Clarac et d'Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). John Ruskin, Sesame et les lys, trad. et intr. Marcel Proust (Paris: Mercure de France, 1906).

Camet C&W

Cor

P&J S&L

1971). 1952).

XV