Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [27]
Between 1900 and 1906, Proust was entirely (if never uncritically) consumed by Ruskin and translated The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies. Since Marcel could not read English, he relied on a word-by-word trot provided by his mother and by a young Englishwoman named Marie Nordlinger, a cousin of Reynaldo Hahn. Proust adapted their literal translations into beautiful, idiomatic French. In order to prepare for his Ruskin work Proust traveled to Amiens with Hahn to look at the cathedral and to Venice with his mother. He also read mountains of books, including, in 1899, The Religious Art of the Thirteenth Century in France by Emile Mâle, and Robert de La Sizeranne’s Ruskin and the Religion of Beauty, written in French, as well as those works of Ruskin that had already appeared in French translation. The style Proust worked out in French and retained for his later fiction, with its complex syntax and long sentences (so unusual in French literature), sounds very much like Ruskin.
It is difficult for people today to understand the enormous influence Ruskin (1819–1900) exerted everywhere in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In the United States aesthetes belonged to Ruskin Clubs; his doctrines, for instance, had a particular impact on the San Francisco Bay region shingle style of architecture with its adhesion to Arts and Crafts designs and techniques. But Ruskin’s ideas were not just practical. They were primarily idealistic—an affirmation of the dignity of the individual in the face of urban anonymity, of the importance of culture in uplifting workingmen and -women. Even nature hikers invoked the name of Ruskin.
Proust responded to Ruskin’s idealism, his anti-intellectualism, and his cult of beauty, but he was indifferent to his moral programs for the poor. Partly this indifference was attributable to the political distance between France, where reform was always staunchly anti-Catholic and secular and a matter of political struggle instead of sentimental compassion, and England, where most progressive schemes were tinged with Christian evangelism (Ruskin’s mother had been extremely pious and had introduced him when he was still a child to the study of the Bible). But Proust had more personal objections to Ruskin. Sesame and Lilies is about the importance of reading as a way of improving the lot of the working class; whereas Proust prefaced his translation with one of his most moving texts, “On Reading,” about the magical power of reading to awaken the imagination of a child—an end in itself.
Proust’s essay on reading is his first mature piece of writing, the one in which he discovered the full, personal style that would characterize Remembrance of Things Past. Already he was writing about his childhood in the village that would become Combray. In his essay he contrasts his own aesthetic principles with those of Ruskin and associated figures in the Arts and Crafts movement such as William Morris:
After lunch my reading began again immediately; especially if the day was a bit hot everyone went upstairs “to retire to their chambers,” which permitted me to return right away by the little staircase with the small steps to my room on the only floor so low-ceilinged that a child could have just jumped down from the overhanging windows and found himself in the street. I couldn’t close my window without acknowledging the nod of the gunsmith across the street; pretending he had to lower his awnings, he stood in front of his door every day after lunch to smoke a cigarette and to say hello to the passersby who sometimes stopped to chat. The theories of William Morris, which have been so persistently applied by Maple and English decorators, decree that a bedroom is beautiful only to the degree that the things in it are useful and that every useful thing, even if it