The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton — Read

It was one of the distinctive characters of Proust's genius that he combined with his great sweep of vision an exquisite delicacy of touch, a solicitous passion for detail. Many of his pages recall those mediaeval manuscripts where the roving fancy of the scribe has framed some solemn gospel or epistle in episodes drawn from the life of towns and fields, or the pagan extravagances of the Bestiary. Jane Austen never surpassed in conciseness of irony some of the conversations between Marcel's maiden aunts, or the description of Madame de Cambremer and Madame de Franquetot listening to music; and one must turn to "Cranford" for such microscopic studies of provincial life as that of the bed-ridden aunt, Madame Octave, who is always going to get up the next day, and meanwhile lies beside her bottle of Vichy and her purple velvet prayer-book "bursting with pious images," and listens to Francoise's report of what is going on in the street, down which Madame Goupil, just before a thunder-storm, is seen walking without her umbrella in the new silk dress she has made at Châteaudun!

But just as the reader is sinking delectably into the feather-bed of the small town, Proust snatches him up in eagle's talons and swings him over the darkest abysses of passion and intrigue-showing him, in the slow tortures of Swann's love for Odette, and of Saint-Loup's for Rachel, the last depths and involutions of moral anguish, or setting the frivolous careers of the two great Guermantes ladies, the Duchess and the Princess, on a stage vaster than any since Balzac's, and packed with a human comedy as multifarious. This changing but never confusing throng is composed of most of the notable types of a society which still keeps its aristocratic framework: the old nobility of the "Faubourg" with their satellites; rich and cultivated Jews (such as Swann and Bloch), celebrated painters, novelists, actresses, diplomatists, lawyers, doctors, Academicians; men of fashion and vice, déclassées Grand Duchesses, intriguing vulgarians, dowdy great ladies, and all the other figures composing the most various, curious, and restless of modern societies.