A book to read:
Le Nez de Cléopâtre by Henri de Saussine
If the new generation differs
from the preceding one and improves upon it, it is assuredly
through the intensity of its intellect, its soaring vision, the
high ideal of restoring thought to its rightful place which the
materialists had banished from the universe and naturalists from
art, by the perhaps vague, but assuredly powerful aspirations,
that strain to provide life with a background, to give a sense to
our destiny, a sanction to our actions. But if, up till now, save
for a few very precious exceptions, they have run aground in
their generous endeavours, it is because by studying life too
closely one loses the gift of giving it, that an over reflective
work is seldom alive, that the more analysis gains in depth the
more its colour loses in intensity, and that living creatures are
like butterflies that have been stripped, by pinning them down in
order to study them, of a little of the mirage of their wings.
Art is instinctive, and reflections are a little ineffectual,
such almost is the sense of ill-feeling thrown at noble modern
works, which are doomed to immediate death the moment they are
born.
Has the evil spell been conjured up? Count
Henri de Saussine has just written a book, under the title Le
Nez de Cléopâtre, as bursting with life as it is infinite
in its depth, in which the most absolute abstraction is realized
and, so to speak, becomes incarnate in the most brilliantly
concrete style and in the deepest relief, in which characters
come to life as if described by Zola, as thoroughly annotated and
explained as if by Stendhal, and finally judged as if by Tolstoy,
without prejudice to the originality of the author in which the
rhythm and the individual refrain of his language sing to us
across all moods, so as to fill us with delight. Exquisite
language that we are tempted to compare to bees, charming
inhabitants of Hymettus, all too rare in our age. Like them the
language of our author has a sting which pierces through into
daylight, the sweet taste of honey - and wings!
His characters, like people in real life, are
at the same time moulded in a beautiful and extraordinary way,
socially situated, actors in the dramas of love and death, which
are played out in every family, and eternally suffering subjects
who are responsible for their own destiny which they create ever
more the less they submit to it. In which we have descriptions of
painting, poetic intuition, incredibly fine moral studies,
accounts of passions and great melancholic insights into the
deepest causes of our joys and sorrows, which sometimes feels
like the protractions of Hamlet (the scene of the mother's death
and the son's doubts) and at other times like the critique of
Romeo (deception after his possession of Christine). Here and
there (without slowing down the dialogue which leads us from the
road to Hell to the sky of the "vita nuova" paved by
our endeavours and cooled by our tears), we find thoughts of such
profundity as: "For beauty, as is often the case for talent
too, celebrity begins at the very time that the cause that gave
it birth ceases, justifying the eternal law which states that
reputation follows enlightenment rather than accompanying
it", or this: "The cult of snobs classes a woman in the
same way that a barrel-organ consecrates the air".
I do not want to say anything about this book:
anything that by touching it we feel we are ravaging a rare
flower, with its pure shoots, its intoxicating perfume, its
glowing colourization, which forces its delicate roots through
the soil in all directions. The reader will understand for
himself to what extent through the fraternity of all the arts
when they reach a certain level of elevation, that here are
Wagnerian leitmotivs, so to speak, transposed into
writing, joined together by example, as in the summoning up of
Bassompierre's ancestor in a manner that is at the same time
profoundly philosophical and strangely poetic, the present to the
past which guides it by hypnotizing it. In order to comprehend
all this from an art that is so rich and so new, in order to
enlighten oneself through the stirring lesson of such modern
philosophy which is free in its range of all constraint, allow
yourself the profound, rare, new and noble pleasure of reading Le
Nez de Cléopâtre.
This article appeared, unsigned, in July 1893, in Gratis-Journal. But the text in Gratis-Journal was in effect unfaithful. Proust had submitted his article to Count Henri de Saussine who modified it. His daughter later gave the original manuscript text to M. Kolb and Price and it was first published in Textes retrouvés. The text here is from the original manuscript text.