So much so that it made their value be
confessed, their divine sweetness be tasted by all those same
onlookers--provided only that they were in any sense musical--who, the
next moment, would ignore, would disown them in real life, in every
individual love that came into being beneath their eyes. Doubtless the
form in which it had codified those graces could not be analysed into any
logical elements. But ever since, more than a year before, discovering to
him many of the riches of his own soul, the love of music had been born,
and for a time at least had dwelt in him, Swann had regarded musical
_motifs_ as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled
in shadows, unknown, impenetrable by the human mind, which none the less
were perfectly distinct one from another, unequal among themselves in
value and in significance. When, after that first evening at the
Verdurins', he had had the little phrase played over to him again, and had
sought to disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that, like
a perfume or a caress, it swept over and enveloped him, he had observed
that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes which
composed it and to the constant repetition of two of them that was due
that impression of a frigid, a contracted sweetness; but in reality he
knew that he was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but
merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind's convenience)
for the mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before ever he
knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party, when for the first time he had
heard the sonata played.
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