Chapter 14
SALVATION THROUGH RUSKINE
XCEPT that it brought him joy unspoilt by suffering,
Proust's passion for Ruskin took precisely the same course
as his love-affairs or ardent friendships. There was a prelude of
tepid acquaintance; a crystallisation and a taking fire; and a falling
out of love, from which he emerged free, but changed and
permanently enriched. The period of mere acquaintance was as
protracted as the onset of devotion was sudden. He had learned of
Ruskin at second-hand during his student-days at the Ecole des
Sciences Politiques from his master Paul Desjardins; and he read
the brief translated extracts from Ruskin's works which appeared
every year from 1893 to 1903 (with the exception of 1894 and
1901) in a periodical edited by Desjardins, the Bulletin de l' Union
pour l'Action Morale, to which he was a regular subscriber. But
he knew also from Montesquiou, who gave him a sumptuously
bound copy of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies ~d was a
friend of Whistler, of Ruskin's outrageous attack in 1877 on
Whistler's Nocturnes; and this enemy of Elstir must have seemed
less a prophet than a reactionary, a persecutor rather than an
apostle of the religion of beauty. "I will walk with your Majesty,"
says the Duke of Brittany to tlie King of Portugal at the Opera in
Jean Santeuil; and "No, Brittany," replies the affable monarch,
"I'd rather go with my young friend Jean; he can finish telling me
about the libel-suit between Ruskin and Whistler, which fascinates
me, and besides, it will be one in the eye for Mme Marmet."l
In 1897 appeared Robert de La Sizeranne's charmingly written
and well-documented study, Ruskin et la religion de la heaute,
which Proust seems to have read immediately2; for in that year
1 Jean Santeuil, vol. 3, 70
t He may have read La Sizeranne's book even before its publication in
volume form, for it appeared serially in the Revue des Deux Mondes from
December 1895 to April 1897.
S Ai.nslie's dating is confirmed by the existence of letters to him from
Proust on the occasion of Alphonse Daudet's death in December 1897, afteI
Ainslie's retUln to England.