SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN "77in the original most of Ruskin's major works during his first
enthusiasm in 1899 and 1900, and the remainder by 1902, when
La Bible d' Amiens was completed.
The first section of John Ruskin, published in the Ga{ette des
Beaux-Arts of I April 1900 and probably written some eight
months before, is a discussion of the views of Milsand and La
Sizeranne. The quotations in it, as we have seen, are borrowed
with two exceptions from these authors, and it is only in the
second section of the essay that Proust shows an independent
knowledge of Ruskin's works. Nevertheless, the core of the whole
essay is the point at which, in this first section, he parts company
with La Sizeranne. He assents to La Sizeranne's concept of the
Religion of Beauty, but gives it a special meaning which, although
it is true of Ruskin, is henceforth Proust's own, and marks a
further advance towards the idea of Time Regained. The true
adorer of beauty, he writes, is not the man who 'spends his life
in the enjoyment which comes from the voluptuous contempla-
tion of works of art'. 'Beauty cannot be loved fruitfully if it is
loved only for the pleasures it gives. Just as the search for
happiness for its own sake brings nothing but boredom, be~ause
happiness can only be found by seeking something other than
happiness, so aesthetic pleasure is a mere by-product which comes
to us if we love beauty for itself, as something real which exists
outside ourselves and is infinitely more important than the joy
it gives us. Vety far from being a dilettante or an aesthete, Ruskin
was one of those men of whom Carlyle speaks, whose genius
warns them of the vanity of all pleasure, and, at the same time,
of the presence near at hand of an eternal reality to be perceived
intuitively by their inspiration .... The Beauty to which he
consecrated his life was not conceived by him as an object of
enjoyment made for our delight, but as a reality infinitely more
important than life, for which he would have sacrificed his
own ... The poet was, for Ruskin as for Carlyle, a kind of scribe
writing at the dictation of nature a more or less important part of
her secret; and the artist's primaty duty is to add nothing of his
own to this divine message.' Here is the bridge between Jean
Santeuil's meditation by the Lake of Geneva and the final meta-
physic of the Narrator. Only two elements are missing: un-
conscious memory, because Proust had still not solved its mystery,
and Time Lost, because he had as yet experienced only Time