MARCEL PROUSTWasted. The meditation by the lake, which was a real event of
September r899, began, as has been seen, with a complete
occurrence of unconscious memory; but this, since Proust
proceeded ~ explain it mistakenly as an effect of poetic imagina-
tion, was a false start. In John Ruskin, however, although by
temporarily abandoning the concept of unconscious memory he
has retreated, he has also made a vital advance: the duty of the
writer, he has decided, is not to imagine, but to perceive realiry;
the artist is a scribe; and since his task is 'infinitely more important
than life', its fulfilment will bring salvation.
In defining the mission of Ruskin, Proust had discovered his
own. Temporarily he put the knowledge away; for salvation,
perhaps, is a state in which we cannot hope to live, but only, at
best, to die. Nine years later he would begin to write the work
that would kill and save him: meanwhile he had to live, if not in
salvation, then touched, if possible, with grace. During his first
worship of Ruskin it seemed sufficient to live as he supposed
Ruskin had lived, in a perpetual adoration of gothic churches.
This dury, in seeming anticlimax, is the subject of the second
section of John Ruskin, which describes, as a pendant to the trip
to Amiens in Ruskin a Notre-Dame d'Amiens, his visit to Rouen
and the rediscovery of the stone mannikin. There was another
aspect of Ruskin's way of life which attracted him: he learned
from Collingwood's Lifo and Works of John Ruskin, published
in r893, of the master's habit of making his tours in the company
of a chosen band of young friends; and in his Figaro article Proust
appealed to these ('whom I have so often envied') for information
on Ruskin's opinions of Chartres and Rouen. In the same way
the Narrator envies Gilberte when Swann tells him that Bergotte
'is my daughter's great friend-they visit old towns and
cathedrals and castles together'; and when he thinks of Gilberte
he sees her 'in the porch of a cathedral, explaining to me the
meaning of the statues, and introducing me as her friend to
Bergotte'.l For the next three years Proust's answer to the
question: 'What shall I do to be saved?' was: 'Visit cathedrals
1 I, 99-100. Proust is thinking also of another Gilberte and Bergotte: of
Jeanne Pouquet's journeys with Anatole France, who with Mme Arman and
Gaston de Caillavet accompanied her on her honeymoon in Italy in the
summer of 1893, and on other occasions. But the pagan and Grecian France
cared little for the art of gothic churches.