MARCEL PROUSTAt the end of John Ruskin Proust applied to Ruskin words
which Ruskin had used of Turner: 'It is through those eyes, now
closed for ever in the grave, that unborn generations will look
upon nature.' Ruskin had given him new eyes, or, rather,
restored the sight of his own, on which the years of Time Wasted,
the vain pleasures of the Guermantes Way, the sterile sorrows of
perverted love, the contamination of justice by politics in the
Dreyfus Affair, had cast their temporary scales. But in one work,
at least, Ruskin had shown himself aware of Time Regained: it
was a book whose very title, Praeterita, might be literally trans-
lated as 'Things Past', or 'Temps Perdu'. Ruskin had written the
story of his childhood and youth, of the discovery of his vocation,
at a time long afterwards when he had realised the meaning of his
life; and his method was to re-create each moment, by a deliberate
exercise of unconscious memory not unlike Proust's, so that the
past should become eternally present. Proust knew Praeterita
well: it was one of the works of Ruskin which in his letter to
Mile Nordlinger of 8 February 1900 he claimed to know by
heart; and a few years later he began a translation of it which he
soon abandoned. It is very likely that both the title and the theme
of A fa Recherche owed something to Praeterita. There is also
at least one particular incident in Praeterita which Proust seems
to have remembered. In the early summer of 1842. Ruskin set out
for Switzerland by the devious way of Rouen, Chartres,
Fontainebleau and Auxerre. On the day before he reached
Fontainebleau he must have passed through, or very near to
Illiers, where Adrien Proust was then a child of eight, and Louis
Proust was still selling candles in the Place du Marche. 'The flat
country between Chartres and Fontainebleau,' Ruskin recalled,
'with an oppressive sense of Paris to the north, fretted me
wickedly.' That night he lay feverishly awake; at noon he
'to ttered out, still in an extremely languid and woe-begone
condition', into the fores t, and lay in anguish on a sandy bank
under a group of young trees. He tried in vain to sleep; until
gradually 'the branches against the blue sky began to interest me,
motionless as the branches of a tree of Jesse on a painted window •
.. • Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw the tree; and as I
drew the languor passed away: the beautiful lines insisted on
being traced-without weariness. More and more beautiful they
became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air.