Proust, Bergson, and George Eliot

Author(s): L. A. Bisson
Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Apr., 1945), pp. 104-114
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3717803
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 PROUST, BERGSON, AND GEORGE ELIOT
The primary purpose of this essay is to trace a hitherto unnoticed strain of insp
tion in Proust's conception and literary treatment of the affective or involuntar
memoryl and its mode of operation in A la recherche du temps perdu. As I h
to show, there are resemblances too striking to be ignored between character
and central passages in Proust and passages equally characteristic and centr
in the English novelist and novel that he knew and liked best-George Eliot a
The Mill on the Floss.2 But the name of Bergson has come to be so persisten
associated with the organic principle of Proust's work that, to avoid confusio
will be well at the outset to consider briefly the scope and nature of their relatio
ship.
The influence of Bergson has become an axiom in Proust criticism, and it is no
part of the present argument to question its existence. The ideas commonly identi-
fied with Bergson's philosophy were very much in the intellectual air during the
last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. Proust's
student days coincided with the first shock and challenge of Bergson's thought;
he came, we know, within the philosopher's personal radius;3 it is clear from his
correspondence that they were on friendly terms.4 And quite apart from such direct
contact, in Paris during the nineties a young and sensitive mind could hardly
escape the stimulus of this new and exciting analysis of the processes of experience,
an analysis of a kind to which he was by nature susceptible. But it would be rash,
as his critics seem disposed to do, to confine the explanation of a similar or related
train of thought in the younger man's work to the specific influence of the older.5
In examining a mind as subtle and an art as complex as Proust's, it is particularly
easy to fall into the post hoc, propter hoc argument, and particularly desirable to
test it. The evidence for a clear teacher-pupil relationship is in fact confused and
even conflicting. It is significant, though not of course conclusive, that as late as
1921, when Proust's work was practically completed, a reference by Jacques
Boulenger to his 'esth6tique bergsonienne' called forth the reply: 'J'ignore enti6re-
ment les vues bergsoniennes sur l'art dont vous parliez. Quand je serai en etat
de lire je chercherai dans tous ses livres.'6 Both the categoric profession of ignorance
and the phrasing of the second sentence hardly suggest a close familiarity with
Bergson's writings; but, however much, on balance of other evidence, we may be
inclined to count or discount Proust's first-hand knowledge of Bergson's thought,
1 It is difficult to draw an absolute distinction 3 Bergson married Proust's second cousin on
between the two types. Miss de Souza says very his mother's side.
sensibly: 'Tandis qu'en g6n6ral, les voies de la 4 Cf. Corr. gin. II, 82. M. Pierre-Quint pro-
memoire affectiye n'ont rien de tres mysterieux, duces no evidence in support of his rather
c'est le propre du souvenir involontaire de sortir cryptic statement: 'C'est a la Sorbonne qu'il
spontan6ment du passe pour revenir a la con- devait connattre ce philosophe Bergson' (Marcel
science. A coup sfir, certaines manifestations Proust, p. 33).
de la memoire affective chez Proust apparaissent 5 The question of Bergson's influence on Proust
comme des approximations du souvenir involon- has been dealt with by S. de Souza, La Philo-
taire' (La Philosophie de Marcel Proust, p. 44). sophie de Marcel Proust, pp. 49-61.
Cf. also Blondel, La Psychographie de Monsieur 6 Corr. gen. in, 236.
Proust. 7 For our purpose, Le8 Donndes immidiates de
2 E. Jaloux has already noted the existence la conscience, 1889; Mat
of George Eliot's influence on Proust, and Le Rire, 1900.
sketches briefly that of Middlemarch; cf. Hom-
mages at Marcel Proust, pp. 157-8.

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 L. A. BISSON 105

the point of real importance is that

these two are striking, the fundame
The virtual identity of their con
toute pure est la forme que prend
notre moi se laisse vivre, quand il
present et les 6tats ant6rieurs.' S
only the premisses of much of hi
of Le temps perdu. Yet even on th
fully proven-whether he found his
tells us, he owed his conception o
Lycee Condorcet.2 It is just possi
neither at first nor even at second hand was Proust's 'time-formula' derived from
Bergson.3
Equally central and equally similar are their conceptions of art. Like Proust,
Bergson insists that its function is to reveal 'le rel': 'l'art n'est surement qu'une
vision plus directe de la r6alit6'.4 For him the artist is the exceptional being who
has a direct vision of reality, where mankind in general sees it through a veil. So
far the two are apparently in agreement; the broad likeness between them has been
thus summed up by Benjamin Cr6mieux:
Bergson a certainement aide Proust & s'orienter 'decisivement et c'est le langage
bergsonien qui rendra le mieux compte de son genre de m6moire: ce n'est pas le cours
du temps, c'est le cours de la duree que remonte Proust et ce qu'il veut restituer, ranimer,
ce n'est pas le deroulement spatialise de ce qui a 6t6, c'est le reel lui-meme, l'intuition
la plus int6grale possible du reel aboli.5
Cr6mieux's conclusion is echoed more faintly by Miss de Souza: 'I1 se pourrait,
cependant, que ce soit Bergson qui a aid6 Proust a orienter ses recherches litt6raires
du c6t6 de son pass6.' But when this often-noted resemblance was pointed out to
Proust, he was, rightly, careful to qualify it, and his qualification clarifies the
nature of the Bergson-Proust equation. The divergence, as he saw, has its roots
not in their attitude to time but in their conception of memory.
Proust's most categoric statement on this point occurs as early as 1913, in the
now famous interview by Slie Bois for Le Temps:
A ce point de vue mon livre serait peut-etre comme un essai d'une suite de 'romans
de l'inconscient': je n'aurais aucune honte & dire de 'romans bergsoniens', si je le croyais,
car a toute epoque il arrive que la litterature a tache de se rattacher & la philosophie
r6gnante. Mais ce ne serait pas exact, car mon ceuvre est domin6e par la distinction
entre la memoire involontaire et la memoire volontaire, distinction qui non seulement
ne figure pas dans la philosophie de M. Bergson, mais est meme contredite par elle.7
Yet, it will be noted, even as he insists that the difference in their thought is funda-
mental and profound, Proust uses Bergson's terminology to distinguish the two
types of memory. The accuracy of his interpretation of Bergson's teaching will be
considered in a moment; meantime it is important to see where, in Proust's own
artistic experience, his conception of memory leads:
Pour moi, la memoire volontaire, qui est surtout une memoire de l'intelligence et
des yeux, ne nous donne du passe que des faces sans verit6; mais qu'une odeur, une
1 ionndes immdiates, p. 76. Sodome et Gonorrhe, n, iii, 37-8, suggest an
2 Hommages a Marcel Proust, p. 25. But even acquaintance with the Bergsonian 'duree'.
Dr Proust suggests a subsequent Bergson in- 4 Le Rire, p. 161. 6 Hommages, p. 191.
fluence: 'cette influence de Darlu fut certaine- 6 Souza, op. cit. p. 51.
ment sur lui considerable, comme... ult6rieure- 7 LeTemp, Nov.1913,'quotedbyMissdeSouza,
ment celle de Bergson.' pp. 5-6; of. also Vial,' Le Symbolisme bergsonien
s It is true that the references to Bergson in dans l'ceuvre de Proust', P.M.L.A. vol. Lv.

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 106 Proust, Bergson, and George Eliot
saveur retrouv6es, dans des circonstances toutes differentes, reveillent en nous, ma
nous, le passe, nous sentons combien ce passe 6tait different de ce que nous croyio
nous rappeler, et que notre memoire volontaire peignait, comme les mauvais peint
avec des couleurs sans verit6.. ..Voyez-vous, ce n'est guere qu'aux souvenirs involon
taires que l'artiste devrait demander la matiere premiere de son ceuvre.1

A letter to Ren6 Blum, written in the same year, 1913, reveals how Proust's mind
was dwelling on the difference in value that Bergson and he attached to the
kinds of memory. In terms almost identical with those recorded by M. Bois
expresses his passionate recognition of the secret and hidden springs from w
flowed all that was truest in his own painting of life:
C'est un livre extremement reel mais supporte en quelque sorte pour imite
memoire involontaire (ce qui selon moi, bien que Bergson ne fasse pas cette distinct
est la seule vraie) la m6moire volontaire, la memoire de l'intelligence et des yeux n
nous rendant du pass6 que des facsimiles inexacts qui ne lui ressemblent pas plus q
les tableaux des mauvais peintres ne ressemblent au printemps.2
Six years later, in a letter to M. Camille Vettard, Proust's conviction that a peculi
vision of the past was 'the master light of all his seeing' has lost nothing in fervo
and he finds a still more precise image for its mode of operation:
Ce que je voudrais que l'on vit dans mon livre, c'est qu'il est sorti tout entier de
l'application d'un sens special qu'il m'est bien difficile de d6crire a ceux qui ne l'on
jamais exerc6...l'image (tres imparfaite) qui me parait la meilleure pour faire corm
prendre ce qu'est ce sens special c'est peut-etre celle d'un telescope qui serait braqu
sur le temps, car le telescope fait apparaitre des 6toiles qui sont invisibles A l'ceil
et j'ai tach6 de faire apparaitre a la conscience des ph6nomenes inconscients qui, co
pletement oublies, sont quelquefois situ6s tres loin dans le passe.
So far he is intent on his own experience; then the old association recurs i
sentence that Miss de Souza interprets as a recognition of Bergson's influen
upon him:
C'est peut-etre, a la r6flexion, ce sens special qui m'a fait quelquefois rencontrer-
puisqu'on le dit-Bergson, car il n'y a pas eu, pour autant que je peux me rendre compte,
suggestion directe.8

It is difficult to read much personal sense of affiliation into that sceptical 'puisqu'on
le dit'; the whole sentence is a more balanced willingness to admit an intellectual
affinity with Bergson than the earlier categoric denials, but it is not much more.
When his statements are considered more closely, the rightness of Proust's
instinctive rec6il from any identification of his views with Bergson's becomes
apparent. It is, of course, not true that Bergson denies the e'xistence of 'la memoire
involontaire', or that he fails to distinguish it from that other, and to Proust,
inferior kind of memory, 'la m6moire de l'intelligence et des yeux, (qui) ne nous
donne du passe que des faces sans v6rite'.4 The fundamental opposition between
them of which Proust is conscious springs from the curiously utilitarian attitude
revealed in Matiere et memoire. Bergson sees action, if not as the sole end, at least
as an inevitable function of human existence: 'Vivre c'est agir... .C'est n'accepter
des objets que l'impression utile.'6 The right use of memory is an indispensable
process in satisfactory human conduct; the man of action consults his memory
1 Le Temps, loc. cit. 3 Corr. g4n. -;,' 194-5; quoted by Miss de
2 L. Pierre-Quint, Lettres de' Marcde Proust, Souza, op. cit. pp. 55 and 134.
p. 60. For the comparison with the 'mauvais 4 Cf. Souza, op. cit. pp. 56 sqqc
peintres', cf. Guermante, I, 11, quoted from 5 Le Rire, pp. 154-5.
memory in this letter.

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 L. A. BISSON 107

consciouwly and voluntarily before

have a direct bearing on a particu
Ce qui caracterise l'homme d'action
secours d'une situation donn6e tous l
la barriere insurmontable que renc
conscience, les souvenirs inutiles ou ind

Again, in the same strain, he writes

Vivre dans le present tout pur...est
n'est guere mieux adapt6 a l'action
chez qui les souvenirs Emergent A la l
actuelle.2

In Bergson's view, then, the secret of right action lies in the conscious invoking
of memory as a guide, in the skill and resolution with which man learns to oppose
'une barriere insurmontable' against the inrush into his active consciousness of
the flood of 'souvenirs inutiles ou indiff6rents'. As a natural corollary to thi
selective process and principle, which should and does govern human action, he
sees the manifestation of involuntary memory as a characteristic accompanimen
of sleep and 'la vie de reve'-and so describes it in a sentence that comes very clos
to Proust's technique in the opening chapter of Swann: 'des souvenirs qu'on croyait
abolis reparaissent alors avec une exactitude frappante; nous revivons dans tous
leurs details des scenes d'enfance entierement oubli6es.'3
This is, indeed, to recognize the existence of the involuntary memory; of that
there can be no question. Yet Proust was right in maintaining that Bergson makes
no real distinction, in his sense, between the two kinds of memory, and that his
whole philosophy is opposed to a distinction that was of the first importance in
Proust's experience and on which all his work as a creative artist is based. To
Bergson, intent on the nature of human action, on the functioning of consciousness
in the 'active man', the processes of involuntary memory are irrelevant or dangerous.
In mentioning them his tone is one of indifference, or deprecation, or even censure;
they are an aberration from the normal ands proper function of the memory, a
hindrance to right action, a pathological symptom or a concomitant of sleep. He
gives little sign of recognizing their subtle, incalculable power in the strange dynamic
of the individual consciousness, and none at all of seeing in them what Proust saw,
the 'matibre premiere' of the artist.
At this point it becomes illuminating to transfer Bergson's insistence on voluntary
memory from the field of action to that of art,4 where it would seem to lead to the
reductio ad absurdum that the true aesthetic technique-diametrically opposed to
that of Proust-would work by the conscious remembering, selection and reproduc-
tion of the fleeting sensory impression, visual or auditory. It is the technique of
Kipling, who puts it into a characteristically neat and uncompromising formula:
Even now I can at will recall every tone and gesture, with each dissolving picture
inboard or overside-Hinchcliffe's white arm buried to the shoulder in a hornet's nest
of spinning machinery; Moorshed's halt and jerk to windward as he looked across the
water.5

This is not the recapturing of 'le temps perdu', and certainly not the recreating
of 'le r6el aboli'; it is a masterly selection from the disjecta membra of sensory
1 Matiere et m4moire, p. 166. 4 It is, of course, not suggested that Bergson
2 Loc. cit. does so.
Ibid. p. 161. ' 'Their lawful occasions', Trafics and Dis-
coveries, p. 130.

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 108 Proust, Bergson, and George Eliot
impressions noted in an aesthetic idiom that is almost too faithful an interpreta
tion of Horace's 'ut pictura poesis'.
Proust would certainly have condemned such a technique as giving a false an
misleading evocation of the past:
Pour moi, la m6moire volontaire, qui est surtout une m6moire de l'intelligence et
des yeux, ne nous donne du pass6 que des faces sans v6rit6... ne rendant du pass6 que de
facsimiles inexacts qui ne lui ressemblent pas plus que les tableaux des mauvais peintre
ne ressemblent au printemps.
He would have found the resulting work of art, in Carlyle's favourite word,
'simulacrum' and not the true embodiment and recreation of any living experience
whatsoever. For to Proust, the vast storehouse of personal memories, lying dor
mant and wholly irrecoverable at will, yet starting into life and motion at the touc
of the unforeseeable, uncontrollable stimulus, gave substance and texture, as it
were, and shape and continuity to the whole consciousness of the individual, an
through that consciousness to the world of space and time and humanity of which
it is a part, and which exists for each of us only in our awareness of it. For him
for the artist, he held, the clue to some pattern in the chaos of that awareness lay
in the unforced, unwilled awakening, by some sensory stimulus, of 'forgotten
memories of past experiences, 'en nous, malgre nous'. These memories were the
artist's 'matiere premiere', that state of receptivity, without effort of consciou
will, without interference of what Wordsworth called 'the meddling intellect', was
the essential preliminary to the work of creation. If this were Proust's own
experience-and there can be no doubt that it was-it is small wonder that he
recoiled from the facile identification of his.conceptions with those of Bergson
From all his pronouncements, slight as they are, it is clear that we must accep
as significant the emphasis with which he deprecates the suggestion that the paths
of their thought converge as a result of direct influence or conscious emulation
Bergson's philosophy of action in the present must have been profoundly repugnant
and painful to one whose life had been anchored by circumstance in the past, on
for whom the future could hold no meaning more certain and no inducement more
insistent than the prospect of his own mortality.
On any reading of the thought of these two men it is important to remember
the distinguishing fact that in Proust's work we have the application of what ar
primarily metaphysical concepts to the activity of the artist, to the creation o
literature. This shift of 'order' bears out the possibility, even the likelihood, of
more immediate and sympathetic suggestion in the literature of imagination. I
was there for Proust to find in the work of George Eliot.
He was early an admirer of her novels, two of which especially made a deep
impression on his mind in their very different ways. Middlemarch is mentione
twice in his letters to Mile Nordlinger 1-the first time as early as 1899; elsewhere
he quotes extensively from it.2 But he tells us himself that The Mill on the Flos
stirred him more profoundly still: 'I1 n'y a. pas de litt6rature qui ait sur moi un
pouvoir comparable a la litt6rature anglaise... deux pages du Moulin sur la Flos
me font pleurer.'3 Thus he wrote in 1910, giving us definite evidence that Georg
Eliot was much in his mind during the first decade of this century, the very years
when his great work was maturing and taking shape. It would therefore not be
Lettres a une amie, pp. 5 and 50. p. 38. Cf. also M. Proust to Luoien Daudet, circa
2 And from Adam Bede and Scene from Clerical 1916: '[le] livre qui j'ai le plus aim6... le Moulin
Life as well: P. et Mel. pp. 105-6. sur la Floss.'
3 Letter to R. de Billy, 1910, in Hommages,

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 L. A. BISSON 109

surprising if some impress of her were to be found in A la rech

and in The Mill on the Floss Proust can hardly have missed
the functioning of the involuntary, the 'affective' memory th
mon with his own. There, not once but several times, she d
reawakening, not the conscious remembering, of the experienc
the distant past, in all and more than all its early significa
present at the touch or sight of some object with which, it m
that past was linked. As to Proust, so in some degree to Ge
seemed to hold meaning, to unite and illumine the swift, chaot
consciousness.
This experience is explicitly described in three passages especially of The Mill
on the Floss, and these will serve to show how striking is their counterpart in Proust.
The first is the opening chapter, which, it will be remembered, contains a picture
of the Floss and Dorlcote Mill as they appeared on the February afternoon on
which the story begins, described as if they were even then present before the
watching narrator. As the beloved scene of her own childhood is thus brought
beautifully into the service of George Eliot's artistic purpose and method, some
interesting points emerge. Memory gives both the 'matibre premiere' of her novel
and its technique; and further, her 'memory' is, as she describes its operation,
Proust's 'm6moire involontaire'. For she has not tried to remember the past by
an effort of conscious will or by a process of selection; it has returned unbidden,
released by an unsought, unexpected stimulus. As the afternoon closes in, it is
time for the little girl in the watcher's vision to go indoors:
It is time, too, for me to leave off resting my arms on the cold stone of this bridge....
Ah, my arms are really benumbed. I have been pressing my elbows on the arms of
my chair, and dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill
as it looked one February afternoon many years ago.1
It is obvious that there is a marked resemblance between this introduction and
the much more fully developed one in the first book of Swann; here, too, is the
'livre support6... pour imiter la m6moire involontaire' of Proust's letter to Rene
Blum; here, in George Eliot as in Proust, the physical sensation (the numbness
of the down-pressed arms), with its at first imperfectly recognized stimulus (the
arm of the chair = the parapet of the bridge), releases in a living and present flux
an uncontrollable train of images from the experience of long ago. So Proust
describes a similar half-waking, half-sleeping state:
Mon c6t6 ankylos6, cherchant A deviner son orientation, s'imaginait, par exemple,
allong6 face au mur dans un grand lit C baldaquin et aussit6t ja me disais: 'Tiens,
j'ai fini par m'endormir quoique maman ne soit pas venue me dire bonsoir'... et mon
corps, le o6t6 sur lequel je reposais, gardiens fidefes d'un pass6 que mon esprit n'aurait
jamais di oublier, me rappelaient la flamme de la veilleuse de verre de Boheme... dans
ma chambre A coucher de Combray, chez mes grands-parents, en des jours lointains
qu'en ce moment je me figurais actuels... '.
Benumbed arms and 'c8t6 ankylos6', the particular, present cause in accustomed
chair and equally accustomed bed, the swift, unconscious substitution fronr the
'past '-the parapet of the bridge over the Floss and the 'grand lit a baldaquin' in
Combray--the involuntary switch-over into a stretch of previously lived experience:
the parallel is exact.
Both Proust and George Eliot are seeking to fix and describe a kind of waking
dream; and, though the details- and the sequence of stages in the process differ,
1 The Mill on the Floss, Book i, Chapter . ' Swann,, 12.

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110 Proust, Bergson, and George Eliot
the experience is essentially the same. Her statement of it, superficialy simple
but cunningly proportioned and ordered, is beautiful and impressive; but Proust
description in the first fourteen pages of Swann, inoomparably the richer, subtler,
more complex of the two, repays the closer consideration. It will be remembere
that he is analysing the awakening from sleep, the sleep of the invalid, in th
darkness of night, and the surge of memories that restore the outline of the all too
familiar bedroom and the awareness of his normal existence. All through his
account there is the explicit, insistent recognition that these instantaneously
relived experiences are different in essence from the life of active consciousness
present or past, immediate or voluntarily recalled. 'Un homme qui dort, tient en
cercle autour de lui le fil des heures, l'ordre des ann6es et des mondes.' But in th
instant of waking 'leurs rangs peuvent se meler, se rompre'; the sleeper awakes
to a state of 'neant', 'les mondes desorbit6s', his mind hesitating 'au seuil des
temps et des formes'. From this void, 'le souvenir', in Proust's phrase, 'comm
un secours d'en haut', restores the mind to consciousness of its place in time an
space; vast stretches of racial and personal experience are traversed with the
swiftness of dream, until the magic carpet settles in one point of space, one momen
of time, and the sleeper is his 'present' self again, brought back to his accustomed
surroundings and the conditions of normal existence. But the spell of this othe
mode of being is not yet wholly broken. The awaking is followed by 'longues
reveries'-Bergson's half-contemptuous 'vie de reve'-in which the purely per-
sonal memories evoked in those swift moments of transition, memories of othe
awakings in other beds and scenes and times, persist and reshape themselves wit
a life, a depth and tempo of their own. On Proust's concluding paragraph rests
the vast edifice of his book:

Certes, j'6tais bien eveill6 maintenant, mon corps avait vir6 une derniere fois et le
bon ange de.la certitude avait tout arret6 autour de moi, m'avait couch6 sous mes
couvertures, dans ma chambre, et avait mis approximativement a leur place dans
l'obscurit6 ma commode, mon bureau, ma cheminee, la fen6tre sur la rue et les deux
portes. Mais j'avais beau savoir que je n'6tais pas dans les demeures dont l'ignorance
du reveil m'avait en un instant sinon present6 l'image distincte, du moins fait croire
la presence possible, le branle 6tait donn6 A ma memoire; gen6ralement je ne cherchais
pas A me rendormir tout de suite; je passais la plus grande partie de la nuit A me
rappeler notre vie d'autrefois, a Combray chez ma grand'tante, & Balbec, a Paris, &
Doncieres, a Venise, ailleurs encore, a me rappeler les lieux, les personnes que j'y avais
connues, ce que j'avais vu d'elles, ce qu'on m en avait racont6.l
The subtle pattern, the labyrinthine interweavings of Proust's analysis in those
early pages have beauty and value in their own right; but their peculiar importance
is the disclosure of his inspiration and his technique as an artist. In those in-
voluntary memories, which he has 'isolated' as a symptom of his awakenings from
sleep, he found the 'matiere premiere' of his picture and interpretation of life;
'recollected in tranquillity' during the long hours of reverie, they nourished his
imagination and inspired him to the work of creation. Neither Proust in his
enormous, complicated tapestry, nor George Eliot in her work of smaller compass
and'more direct design, nor any of their. readers, could tell where involuntary
memory is charged and strengthened with memory of another sort, deliberately
sought and selected, and both become transformed in the immense energy of
creative art. In the first pages of Proust's narrative, he passes insensibly from his
starting-point, the 'involuntary' image of his Combray bedroom, to the delicate
reconstruction of the family group discussing whether, on a rainy day, he should
1 Swann, ,- 14.

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 L. A. BISSON 111

be sent to read in his room or al

imperceptible transition, to the unf
walking quickly along the paths of
et saccad6', her grey locks tossed
an eternal symbol of the free huma
against the imprisoning safety o
having 'lived' again the scene she
conscious power at her command
where dream and creation are on
Tulliver were talking about, as they
on that very afternoon I have be
alchemy proceeds until Tom and Ma
of the Floss.
Close as the parallel is, with all the differences of experience and notation be-
tween them, it is not likely that Proust consciously imitated and developed George
Eliot's beautiful revelation of her inspiration and technique. But it is much less
likely, indeed it is hardly possible, that he failed to perceive the deep affinity
between his own habit of mind and creative method and those which, though
they are present in some of her other novels, give a distinctive, a poetic quality
to The Mill on the Floss. Two passages elsewhere in the book serve to emphasize
the peculiar correspondence betwe.en the English novelist and the French. The first
of these, in an idiom that closely recalls that of Proust, occurs in Chapter v, where
George Eliot is describing one of many happy mornings when the two children,
content with each other and their pastimes in the only scenes they know, 'have
'no thought that life would ever change much for them':

Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that
the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives.... The
wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks
between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and
the ground ivy at my feet-what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid
broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as
this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky,
with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of per-
sonality given to it by the capricious hedgerows-such things as these are the mother
tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable
associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the
sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day, might be no more than the faint perception of
wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still
live in us, and transform our perception into love.l

In this comment and in the passage of narrative that inspires it, is the clear
recognition of the past that lives in the present, or, rather, of their continuity, the
time-continuum, 'la dur6e toute pure' of Bergson's formula. And this is not stated
as a metaphysical concept, a scientific abstraction, but evoked as a felt, familiar
experience. The shift from Tom and Maggie to the confession of the narrator
intensifies here the resemblance to Proust and the personal mode of narration in
Swann; and in the passage to be quoted next, where she again develops her theme
of the 'unconscious intercourse', in Wordsworth's phrase, between the sensitive
child and his earliest surroundings, this strong general resemblance is suddenly
and sharply defined by the mention of the particular object in George Eliot's

1 The Mi on the Flose, Book I, Chapter v.

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112 Proust, Bergson, and George Eliot
experience that acts as the unexpected, affective stimulus, 'the elderberry bush
that stirs an early memory':
There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born,
where objects became dear to us before we had known the labour of choice, and where
the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and
loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very common-
place, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction;
an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better
and better in our surroundings the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from
the brute...? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us, if our affections
had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things--if the loves and sanctities
of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush
overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight
than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an
entirely unjustifiable preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those severely
regulated minds who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest
on a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason for preferring
this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory-that it is no novelty in my life,
speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long
companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.1

It would be superfluous to labour the similarity of thought and even of language

in these two passages to Proust's infinitely more sustained, more subtly analytical,
and surely more richly poetic development of his thesis all through Du c6tg de
chez Swann. It is apparent everywhere, emerging strong and inescapable in the
incident of the 'petite madeleine',2 in the passage dealing with the 'aub6pine'3-
Proust's 'elderberry-bush'-and, with a still more precise correspondence in detail,
in the following less quoted sentences at the end pf Part I of the first volume:
Les fleurs qui jouaient alors sur l'herbe, l'eau qui passait au soleil, tout le paysage
qui environna leur apparition continue d accompagner leur souvenir de son visage incon-
scient ou distrait; et certes quand ils 6taient longuement contemples par cet humble
passant, par cet enfant qui revait;...ce coin de nature, ce bout de jardin n'eussent
pu penser que ce serait grace a lui qu'ils seraient appeles a survivre en leurs particularit,s
les plus ephemeres; et pourtant ce parfum d'aubepine qui butine le long de la haie ot
les 6glantiers le remplaceront bientot, un bruit de pas sans echo sur le gravier d'une
all6e, une bulle formee contre une plante aquatique par l'eau de la riviere et qui creve
aussit6t, mon exaltation les a portes et a reussi a leur faire traverser tant d'annees suc-
cessives....C'est surtout comme a des gisements profonds de mon sol mental, comme
aux terrains r6sistants sur lesquels je m'appuie encore, que-je dois penser au cote de
M6s6glise et au cot6 de Guermantes. C'est parce que je croyais aux choses, aux etres,
tandis que je les parcourais, que les choses, les etres qu'ils m'ont fait connaitre, sont
les seuls que je prenne encore au serieux et qui me donnent encore de la joie. Soit que la
foi qui cree soit tarie en moi, soit que la realite ne se forme que dans la memoire, les
fleurs qu'on me montre aujourd'hui pour la premiere fois ne me semblent pas de vraies
fleurs. Le cot6 de M6seglise avec ses lilas, ses aubepines, ses bleuets, ses coquelicots,
ses pommiers, le c6te de Guermantes avec sa riviere a tetards, ses nympheas et ses
boutons d'or, ont constitu6 a tout jamais pour moi la figure des pays oti j'aimerais
vivre...et les bleuets, les aubepines, les pommiers qu'il m arrive quand je voyage de
rencontrer encore dans les champs, parce qu'ils sont situ6s a la m6me profondeur, au
niveau de mon pass6, sont' immediatement en communication avec mon coeur.4
Whatever we are disposed to make of it, the resemblance is startlingly close, both
in the objects noted and in the train of thought. 'The sunshine and the grass in the
far-off years which still live in us', the elderberry bush which 'stirs an early
memory' and is 'the long companion of my existence', are exactly balanced by
'les fleurs qui jouaient alors sur l'herbe, l'eau qui passait au soleil, tout le paysage
1The Mill on the Floss, Book n, Chapter I. 2 Swann, I, 46.
3 Ibid. I, 106-7. 4 Ibid. I, 170-1.

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 L. A. BISSON 113

qui environna leur apparition con

inconscient.. .appel6s a survivre
its turn comes the idea of joy as
long companion of my existence,
vivid' has its echo in 'les choses, l
que je prenne encore au s6rieux e
her delight in the familiar flow
speedwell and the ground ivy' whic
strange ferns or splendid broad-
qu'on me montre aujourd'hui pou
fleurs. Le c6t6 de M6s6glise avec
avec.. .ses nymph6as et ses bouto
figure des pays ot j'aimerais viv
pays ou j'aimerais vivre'-has its c
'Tom thought people were at a di
globe '.1
All through the later volumes Proust is following, with intent, preoccupied gaze,
the almost invisible threads that join the figures that move in his larger world to
the unconsciously absorbed experience of a small boy in Combray; that is the clue
provided by his own sensibility, giving form and pattern to all the chaos of sensa-
tion and feeling. But though Proust does not forget, and indeed does not let us
forget, this deep,'ordered rhythm in the experience he describes, for long stretches
the reader may lose sense and sight of it, unless his submission is complete to what
may well prove to be the greatest single imaginative interpretation of life in the
fiction of our time. As we follow the tortuous social ramifications of his vast work,
it is therefore a corrective at times to come back to these early chapters, with their
clear and definite reminder that the roots of imagination in this most sophisticated
of writers are in 'des ph6nombnes inconscients situ6s, tres loin dans le pass6e'
and that chief among these phenomena are the simple sights and natural objects
of the countryside of his childhood. The way in which this experience operated in
Proust's mind, its conjunction with other modes of apprehending his world, the
validity of the resulting picture-all these are large questions that lie outside the
present inquiry, the main purpose of which was to consider one probable and
hitherto unregarded strain in his formation, the influence of George Eliot.
When we remember the multiple accretions that go to make up Proust's mind
and art, it is unlikely that the resemblances and echoes we have noted are wholly
fortuitous, and George Eliot would seem to have her incalculable share in the
making of A la recherche du temps perdu. It would be to strain the evidence to be
dogmatic about the connexion, or probable connexion, between her influence and
that of Bergson; a suggestive passage in Pater perhaps comes near the truth. His
theme-that the abstract speculations of the old Ionian physicists reached Marius
through Aristippus of Cyrene, who 'translated them...into terms, first of all, of
sentiment'-would seem, on the evidence, to indicate the natural operation of
related ideas in minds so dissimilar as these three, Bergson, George Eliot, Proust:
It has been sometimes seen, in the history of thought, that when thus translated
into terms of sentiment... the abstract ideas of metaphysics for the first time reveal
their true significance. The metaphysical principle, in itself, as it were, without hands
and feet, becomes effective, impressive, fascinating, when translated into a precept as
to how it were best to feel....In the reception of metaphysical formulae, all depends,
1 The Mill on the Floee, Book i, Chapter v.

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114 Proust, Bergson, and George Eliot
as regards their actual and ulterior effect, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil
human nature on which they fall-on the company they find already present ther
on their admission into the house of thought.l

In Proust's experience George Eliot came out of her chronological order, succeedin
his first contact with the new metaphysics, and, it would seem, helping to
the ideas that, directly or indirectly, he had derived from Bergson a different f
and colouring in his mind. She is the Aristippus who translates the Bergsonian fo
mulas of time and memory into terms of lyric sentiment for the young Mar
Proust. Awaiting him on the threshold of her novel that moved him most was th
stimulus to reject what was alien and, to the artist in him, sterile in the Bergson
metaphysic, the depreciation of the involuntary memory; there, too, was
positive impulse to turn his life of dream into the work of creation. But this wo
not have acted on him had his nature not chimed in unison with hers in precisely
those primal experiences from which the vision, the poetic power of Proust's wo
derives-the habit of unforced, unwilled response to the memories that belon
the dawn of his awareness, memories that bound all his days together in a natura
piety. Influence is a term too 'gross and palpable' for the subtle process by w
Proust took and used the matter he found in art and thought-in Ruskin on Venic
and Madame Leon Daudet on cookery, in Bergson, Baudelaire, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky
and countless others. Their action upon him is like the gentle corrosion of t
etcher's acid, or, rather, the deposit of a fine patina on an object, attenuating an
modifying its outline, giving it a new texture, a delicacy of tint and surface bey
the power of conscious human agency. For all their deep affinity in experie
at the root of their life and art, George Eliot's 'influence' may be no more than t
but surely it is no less. If Proust had never read The Mill on the Floss, A la reche
du temps perdu would be substantially what it is; but its evocation of the ete
memories of childhood would lack some touches of exquisite simplicity, so
freshness of beauty and bloom.
L. A. BISSON
OXFORD

1 Marius the Epicurean, I, 146.

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