SAL VA TION THROUGH RUSKIN ~75
his competence in English: 'I'm so bad at languages; he wrote to
Marie Nordlinger in August 1903; he bitterly lamented, in a letter
to Walter Berry in January 1918, his inability to talk English to
American soldiers met one night in Paris; 'I read English with
great difficulty; he told Violet Schiff in 1919. He was always
prone to the typical mistakes of the beginner. In the John Ruskin
essay he translated Ruskin's 'a liYing soul' by 'une ame aimante',
because in English at least he was unaware of the difference
between living and loving; and twenty-two years later, only two
months before his death, he was horrified to learn that the title
chosen for the English translation of Du COt! de che{ Swann was
Swann's Way: he thought the words could only mean 'in the
manner of Swann', and died in the pathetic belief that Scott-
Moncrieff's great work would be an ignorant travesty of A la
R~cherche. He had no doubt begun English at the Lycee
Condorcet\ he continued while studying for his licence es lettres,
in which he seems to have taken English as his first language^2 ;
and perhaps he learned a little from Edgar Aubert, and from
Willie Heath during their mornings in the Bois. But with the sole
exception of Ruskin he seems to have read all the English writers
he knew-Dickens, George Eliot, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Pater,
and later Stevenson, Kipling, Barrie, Wells and Hardy-in trans-
lation. He was exacting in his demands for help from his mother,
who knew English well, and from his English-speaking friends,
Mile Nordlinger, Reynaldo Hahn, Robert de Billy, Robert
d'Humieres (the translator of Kipling), and others. He corres-
ponded with Ruskin's friends, Charles Newton Scott and
Alexander Wedderburn. In translating The Bible of Amiens he
was provided with a crib: according to Mile N ordlinger, the
patient Mme Proust wrote for him a word-for-word translation
'in several red, green and yellow school exercise-books'.. Such are the ascertainable limitations of Proust's knowledge
of English: they may seem formidable,. but they are, in fact,
irrelevant to his knowledge of Ruskin. Even if we assume that
1 During Proust's first two years at Condorcet Mallarme was English
master there. But Proust was only thirteen years old when Mallarme left in
July ,884, and it is unlikely that he had begun English so early.
- It is known that he took German as his second language. He knew
enough of it to read and review two German books on Ruskin in '?OJ and
'904. As he never shows any considerable knowledge of any others, it seems
likely that he took English as his first language.