In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [73]
beauty independent of whatever his sentences might mean, and as human speech reflects the human soul, though without expressing it as does literary style, Bergotte appeared almost to be talking nonsense, intoning certain words and, if he were pursuing, beneath them, a single image, stringing them together uninterruptedly on one continuous note, with a wearisome monotony. So that a pretentious, turgid and monotonous delivery was a sign of the rare aesthetic value of what he was saying, and an effect, in his conversation, of the same power which, in his books, produced that harmonious flow of imagery. I had had all the more difficulty in discovering this at first since what he said at such moments, precisely because it was the authentic utterance of Bergotte, did not appear to be typical Bergotte. It was a profusion of precise ideas, not included in that “Bergotte manner” which so many essayists had appropriated to themselves; and this dissimilarity was probably but another aspect—seen in a blurred way through the stream of conversation, like an image seen through smoked glass—of the fact that when one read a page of Bergotte it was never what would have been written by any of those lifeless imitators who, nevertheless, in newspapers and in books, adorned their prose with so many “Bergottish” images and ideas. This difference in style arose from the fact that what was meant by “Bergottism” was, first and foremost, a priceless element of truth hidden in the heart of each thing, whence it was extracted by that great writer by virtue of his genius, and that this extraction, rather than the perpetration of “Bergottisms,” was the aim of the gentle Bard. Though, it must be added, he continued to perpetrate them in spite of himself because he was Bergotte, and so in this sense every fresh beauty in his work was the little drop of Bergotte buried at the heart of a thing and which he had distilled from it. But if, for that reason, each of those beauties was related to all the rest and recognisable, yet each remained separate and individual, as was the act of discovery that had brought it to the light of day; new, and consequently different from what was known as the Bergotte manner, which was a loose synthesis of all the “Bergottisms” already thought up and written down by him, with no indication by which men who lacked genius might foresee what would be his next discovery. So it is with all great writers: the beauty of their sentences is as unforeseeable as is that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object which they have thought of—as opposed to thinking about themselves—and to which they have not yet given expression. An author of memoirs of our time, wishing to write without too obviously seeming to be writing like Saint-Simon, might at a pinch give us the first line of his portrait of Villars: “He was a rather tall man, dark . . . with an alert, open, expressive physiognomy,” but what law of determinism could bring him to the discovery of Saint-Simon’s next line, which begins with “and, to tell the truth, a trifle mad”? The true variety is in this abundance of real and unexpected elements, in the branch loaded with blue flowers which shoots up, against all reason, from the spring hedgerow that seemed already overcharged with blossoms, whereas the purely formal imitation of variety (and one might advance the same argument for all the other qualities of style) is but a barren uniformity, that is to say the very antithesis of variety, and cannot, in the work of imitators, give the illusion or recall the memory of it save to a reader who has not acquired the sense of it from the masters themselves.
And so—just as Bergotte’s way of speaking would no doubt have charmed the listener if he himself had been merely an amateur reciting imitation Bergotte, whereas it was attached to the thought of Bergotte, at work and in action, by vital links which the ear did not at once distinguish—so it was because Bergotte applied that thought with precision to the reality which pleased him that