Monsieur,
the first question you do me the honour to ask is not an issue for me.
I think that schools represent only the time necessary for a man of genius
to be recognized. Immediately the school is dissolved and the new master
comes to take his place beside the ancients of whom he is the
continuation. It may take a very long time. No interior political crisis,
no exterior conflict comes as a surprise, when one considers that Olympia,
so much in harmony with the Ingres in the Louvre, was the prohibited work,
the horror before which the best judges of the period recoiled in shock. I
like to say over and again that Baudelaire, the condemned poet, was the
most Racinian of poets. There is no doubt that one of these two - and I am
talking about Racine here - is more immoral than the other. But the style
is the same. Of course, owing nothing to anyone else, their contribution
differs most importantly in Racine with respect to the accumulation of
psychological truths, in Baudelaire in that which concerns the laws
governing recollection. The latter, nevertheless, pleases me better in
Chateaubriand, in Gérard de Nerval, where we see it suddenly occur,
disconcerting the narrative. It takes up more of a place in Baudelaire but
in a static state.
Draft of Proust's reply to André Lang, c. October 1921, different from the version printed in Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 26 February 1922. From Kotte Autographs GmbH, 2014.
[…] it is already there when the poem begins and Baudelaire describes it:
When both eyes closed by a warm autumn’s evening
etc. We have no need of schools to see this (any more than we do for Olympia,
or Olympio as Robert de Montesquiou would say). We disband the
schools when the Master has been consecrated, who in any case is far more
open than his pupils towards the beauties of the past, Wagner towards the
Italians and the poet of La Légende towards Boileau whom he
almost certainly secretly preferred to Vacquerie.
To your second question I will gladly tell you that I prefer composed
literature to analytical literature. Of course literature would have no
meaning if it did not make us understand the great hidden realities. But
on condition that it is not deceived about how many there are, what use is
it to make its calculations in front of the reader. In any case I prefer
the term “introspective novel” to “analytical novel”.
Another draft fragment of Proust's reply to André Lang. Printed in
Lettres retrouvées, p.160, but not in Correspondance.