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By Root 1896 0

’s dinner-table, for example Prince Von’s stories about the German Emperor, General Botha and the British Army. I had just slid them into the internal stereoscope through the lenses of which, as soon as we are no longer ourselves, as soon as, endowed with a worldly spirit, we wish to receive our life only from other people, we give depth and relief to what they have said and done. Like a tipsy man filled with tender feeling for the waiter who has been serving him, I marvelled at my good fortune, a good fortune not recognised by me, it is true, at the actual moment, in having dined with a person who knew Wilhelm II so well and had told stories about him that were—upon my word—extremely witty. And, as I repeated to myself, with the Prince’s German accent, the story of General Botha, I laughed out loud, as though this laugh, like certain kinds of applause which increase one’s inward admiration, were necessary to the story as a corroboration of its hilariousness. Through the magnifying lenses, even those of Mme de Guermantes’s pronouncements which had struck me as being stupid (as for example the one about the Hals pictures which one ought to see from the top of a tram-car) took on an extraordinary life and depth. And I must say that, even if this exaltation was quick to subside, it was not altogether unreasonable. Just as there may always come a day when we are glad to know the person whom we despise more than anyone in the world because he happens to be connected with a girl with whom we are in love, to whom he can introduce us, and thus offers us both utility and agreeableness, attributes in which we should have supposed him to be permanently lacking, so there is no conversation, any more than there are personal relations, from which we can be certain that we shall not one day derive some benefit. What Mme de Guermantes had said to me about the pictures which it would be interesting to see, even from a tram-car, was untrue, but it contained a germ of truth which was of value to me later on.

Similarly the lines of Victor Hugo which I had heard her quote were, it must be admitted, of a period earlier than that in which he became something more than a new man, in which he brought to light, in the order of evolution, a literary species hitherto unknown, endowed with more complex organs. In these early poems, Victor Hugo is still a thinker, instead of contenting himself, like Nature, with providing food for thought. His “thoughts” he at that time expressed in the most direct form, almost in the sense in which the Duke understood the word when, feeling it to be “old hat” and otiose for the guests at his big parties at Guermantes to append to their signatures in the visitors’ book a philosophico-poetical reflexion, he used to warn newcomers in a beseeching tone: “Your name, my dear fellow, but no ‘thoughts,’ please!” Now, it was these “thoughts” of Victor Hugo’s (almost as absent from the Légende des Siècles as “tunes,” as “melodies” are from Wagner’s later manner) that Mme de Guermantes admired in the early Hugo. Nor was she altogether wrong. They were touching, and already round about them, before their form had yet achieved the depth which it was to acquire only in later years, the rolling tide of words and of richly articulated rhymes rendered them unassimilable to the lines that one can discover in a Corneille, for example, lines in which a romanticism that is intermittent, restrained, and thus all the more moving, has nevertheless in no way penetrated to the physical sources of life, modified the unconscious and generalisable organism in which the idea is latent. And so I had been wrong in confining myself, hitherto, to the later volumes of Hugo. Of the earlier ones, of course, it was only with a fractional part that Mme de Guermantes embellished her conversation. But it is precisely by thus quoting an isolated line that one multiplies its power of attraction tenfold. The lines that had entered or returned to my mind during this dinner magnetised in turn, summoned to themselves with such force, the poems within which they