280 MARCEL PROUSTand simpler, from which all obstacles and separations seemed to
have been removed.'l 'The universe suddenly regained an infinite
value in my eyes,' wrote Proust in retrospect, at a time when his
enthusiasm for Ruskin was cooling, 'and my admiration for
Ruskin gave such importance to the things he had made me love
that they seemed charged with something more precious than
life itself.'2 The quotations from Bergotte's works read at
Comb ray: 'the inexhaustible torrent of beautiful appearances',
'the moving effigies which forever ennoble the venerable and
delightful fa<;ades of cathedrals' ,3 are like pastiches of Ruskin.
Ruskin also led Proust to one of the most striking aspects of
Elstir. Elstir, no doubt, is a generalised Impressionist, just as
Vinteuil and Bergotte are generalisations of the great composers
and authors of Proust's youth; though each of the three is more
supreme in his genius than anyone actual artist of the time. In
giving to Elstir powers which belonged to so many different
painters-the cathedrals and Normandy cliffs of Monet, the race-
course subjects of Degas, the gods and centaurs of Gustave
Moreau, the firework nocturnes of Whistler, the bathing girls of
Renoir-Proust suggested not only the contemporary reality of
the imaginary painter, but also his superiority, since his greatness
included theirs. But Elstir's salient quality is one in which he
differs from the other impressionists. Both they and Elstir make
it their task to reproduce the primal freshness of reality as seen in
a first glance, before the viewer knows what it is he sees; but
whereas Monet, for example, works by decomposing colours and
their outlines, without wishing, however, to disguise the fact that
it is a tree or a sail that he is showing us, Elstir's art lies in what
the Narrator calls 'ambiguities' and 'metaphors': he reproduces
the moment in which we are so far from knowing what it is we
see, that we think it is something else. The charm of the pictures
seen by the Narrator in Elstir's studio at Balbec lay 'in a kind of
metamorphosis of tl,e things they represented, analogous to what
is called in poetry a metaphor; and if God the Father created
1 I, 94 2 Cf. Pastiches et lvf/langes, 193
3 I, 94. The phrase 'les belles apparences', however, was used more than
once by Anatole Fr:Jncc, and the whole comes from Leconte de Lisle's lines:
'La 1'ie untique est Jaiu in~tJuisab/ement
Du /(lurbilfon sans fin des apparences vaines.'
Nevertheless, the Ruskinian flavour of Proust's adaptations is unmistakable.