Page 149 - swanns-way

sibility for it; as who should say ‘the ‘hierarchy,’ don’t you
know, as silly people call it.’ But then, if it was so absurd,
why did he say the ‘hierarchy’? A moment later he went
on: ‘Her acting will give you as noble an inspiration as any
masterpiece of art in the world, as—oh, I don’t know—‘ and
he began to laugh, ‘shall we say the Queens of Chartres?’
Until then I had supposed that his horror of having to give
a serious opinion was something Parisian and refined, in
contrast to the provincial dogmatism of my grandmother’s
sisters; and I had imagined also that it was characteristic of
the mental attitude towards life of the circle in which Swann
moved, where, by a natural reaction from the ‘lyrical’ en-
thusiasms of earlier generations, an excessive importance
was given to small and precise facts, formerly regarded as
vulgar, and anything in the nature of ‘phrase-making’ was
banned. But now I found myself slightly shocked by this at-
titude which Swann invariably adopted when face to face
with generalities. He appeared unwilling to risk even hav-
ing an opinion, and to be at his ease only when he could
furnish, with meticulous accuracy, some precise but unim-
portant detail. But in so doing he did not take into account
that even here he was giving an opinion, holding a brief (as
they say) for something, that the accuracy of his details had
an importance of its own. I thought again of the dinner that
night, when I had been so unhappy because Mamma would
not be coming up to my room, and when he had dismissed
the balls given by the Princesse de Léon as being of no im-
portance. And yet it was to just that sort of amusement that
he was devoting his life. For what other kind of existence

149