On Reading (On Series)

by Marcel Proust

A tragedy by Racine, a volume of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, is like those beautiful things which are made no longer. The language in which they were cast by the great artists, with a freedom that makes their sweetness shine and their native force stand out, moves us like the sight of certain kinds of marble, no longer in use today but used often by the workmen of the past. There is no question that the stone in these old buildings has faithfully preserved the sculptor’s thought, but the sculptor has also preserved for us the stone of a type unknown today, clothed it in all the colours he knew how to draw from it, bring out, and harmonise. It is likewise the living syntax of seventeenth-century France - and in it vanished customs and turns of thought - that we love to find in Racine’s poetry. The forms themselves of this syntax, laid bare, honoured, embellished by a chisel as sturdy as it is delicate, are what move us in his turns of phrase, colloquial to the point of strangeness and daring,19 whose abrupt pattern we see, in the sweetest and most touching passages, flash by like an arrow or turn back in beautiful broken lines.