In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

Bergotte is what I call a flute-player. It must of course be admitted that he tootles on his flute quite mellifluously, albeit with more than a modicum of mincing mannerism and affectation. But when all’s said and done, tootling is what it is, and tootling does not amount to a great deal. His works are so flaccid that one can never locate in them anything one could call a framework. There’s never any action in ’em, well, hardly any, and especially no scope. It’s their base which is their weak point – or rather, they have no base. In this day and age, when the increasing complexity of modern life leaves one barely any time for reading, when the map of Europe has undergone a profound recasting, and may well be on the point of undergoing another which may prove to be even more profound, when so many new and threatening problems are cropping up on all sides, you will allow that one may fairly claim the right to expect that a writer might aspire to be something higher than a glib wit, whose futile hair-splittings on the relative merits of merely formal matters distract us from the fact that we may be overrun at any moment by a double wave of barbarians, those from within and those from without! Now, I know that to speak thus is to utter blasphemies against the sacrosanct school of what certain gentlemen call Art for Art’s Sake – but in our day and age there are more urgent tasks than stringing jingles of words together. I must admit that Bergotte’s jingles can at times be quite...