Description
Towards the end of 1908 Marcel PRoust took advantage of a respite brought about by illness to begin an article for Le Figaro entitled ‘Contre sainte-Beauve’. Within six months this article — it was an attack on Sainte-Beuve’s theory that the critic should be as neutral as the scientist — had become an essay running to 250 pages. Here, in conversation with his mother, Proust weaves round his central theme a fascinating tapestry of personal recollections, portraits of friends, jotting from his reading. We find, for example a description of the Chateau de Guermantes, an important essay on inversion, a portrait of his brother Robert at the age of five, a criticism of Sainte-Beauve’s view of Balzac. This volume also contains a series of shorter essays, in which Proust discourses on Chardin, Monet, Watteau and other painters; on such writers as Goethe and Tolstoi, Chateaubriand and George Eliot, Stendhal and Dostoievski. In reviewing the original French edition, The Times Literary Supplement justly described it as ‘an astonishing essay, a piece of criticism dissimilar in form from any model before or after it.’ Readers of Miss Townsend Warner’s brilliant translation will realise that Proust, the greatest novelists of his period, is also a critic of remarkable distinction. Indeed, they will concur with the judgement of the same reviewer who declared: ‘for those for whom the great critic is the connoisseur, not the analyst, he is among the great critics of the world. For him the first, the intuitive flash, is all-important.”
