SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN 281things by naming them, it was by taking away their names, or
giving them different ones, that Elstir created them anew'.! The
most frequent metaphor in his seascapes was one which made sea
seem land, and land seem sea. In these characteristics Elstir differs
from any of the French impressionists, and resembles Turner, to
whom Ruskin consecrated Modem Painters, the chief work of
his youth. Proust knew, as early as 1 900, Turner's album The
Rivers of France, which he mentioned in John Ruskin. He
borrowed from La Sizeranne in the same essay an anecdote of
Turner in Ruskin's The Eagle's Nest: to a naval officer who
complained that the ships in his view of Plymouth had no port-
holes, the painter retorted: "My business is to paint not what I
know, but what I see."2 'My imagination,' says the Narrator,
'like Elstir reproducing some effect of perspective, painted for
me not what I knew, but what I saw.'3 'Turner,' wrote Ruskin
in The H arhours of England, 'was never able to recover the idea
of positive distinction between sea and sky, or sea and land.' As
Jean Autret has shown, Elstir's Port ofCar'luethuit is a combina-
tion of Turner's Plymouth and Scarhorough, which Proust knew
from the plates in The Harhours of England as published in 1904
in the Library Edition.^4 Turner's and Elstir's aesthetic of meta-
phor, the description of one thing in terms of another, is employed
by Proust throughout A la Recherche. Elstir, indeed, is uniquely
blessed, in that he has direct and immediate access to reality,
without the intercession and long delay of unconscious memory;
he alone can see reality in the present, when it is actually there.
On the other hand, this very gift condemns him to perceive
reality through one sense only, the vision of the eye; and more-
over, he is cut off from the dimension of time, without which the
metaphysical significance of reality remains invisible. Thus his
art is still inferior to the full revelation of Time Regained: it
cannot bemore than a symbol of something greater which is out
of its reach.
1 I, 835 • Pastiches et Melanges, 169 • II, 568
'J. Autret, L'lnfluence de Ruskin sur Proust, 130-6. M. Autret has
also shown (ihid., 119-24) that Proust was indebted for his knowledge
of Botticelli's painting of Jethro's daughter Zipporah, of which Odette so
obsessively reminds Swann, to the frontispiece of Ruskin's Val J'Aroo.
The figure reproduced by P. Abraham, Proust, pI. XVI, as Zipporah is in
fact Moses' wife, whose features are nothing like Odette's. The real Zipporah
is reproduced by Autret, op. cit., "9.