At no time does Sainte-Beuve seem to have grasped what is peculiar to inspiration or the activity of writing, and what marks it off totally from the occupations of other men and the other occupations of the writer. He drew no dividing line between the occupation of writing, in which, in solitude and suppressing those words which belong as much to others as to ourselves, and with which, even when alone, we judge things without being ourselves, we come face to face once more with ourselves, and seek to hear and to render the true sound of our hearts – and conversation!
It is only the deceptive appearance of the image here which lends something vaguer and more external to the writer's craft and something deeper and more contemplative to sociability. In actual fact what one gives to the public is what one has written when alone, for oneself, it is very much the work of one's self… What one gives to sociability, that is to conversation (however refined it may be, and the most refined is the worst of all, because it falsifies our spiritual life by associating itself to it: Flaubert's conversations with his niece or with the clockmaker are without risk) or to those productions intended for one's intimates, that is to say reduced so as to appeal to a few and which are barely more than written conversation, is the work of a far more external self, not of the deep self which is only to be found by disregarding other people and the self that knows other people, the self that has been waiting while one was with others, which one feels clearly to be the only real self, for which alone artists end by living, like a god whom they leave less and less and to whom they have sacrificed a life that serves only to do him honour.
Of course, I knew it all along. But it's always reassuring to see your own thoughts put into words, by someone more accomplished than you. Here is Master Marcel, echoing my vague thoughts, setting them in clearer perception; assuring me that I am not dead yet, that I can still create, and that whatever was there worthy in me is there still intact.
Here is another echo I heard from him about style:
Style is not at all an embellishment as certain people think, it is not even a matter of technique, it is – like colour with painters – a quality of vision, the revelation of the private universe that each one of us can see and which others cannot see. The pleasure an artist affords us is to introduce us to one universe the more.
Thank you Proust!
