19. Proust's translations of Ruskin are The Bible of Amiens ( La Bible d' Amiens , 1904) and Sesame and Lilies ( Sesame et les lys , 1906). Much of the preface to Sesame and Lilies is repeated in Days of Reading , I (1919), trans. G. Hopkins, in Marcel Proust: A Selection from His Miscellaneous Writings (London, 1948), pp. 107-146. See also Proust's discussion of Ruskin: In Memory of a Massacre of Churches , in G. Hopkins's Marcel Proust , pp. 11-107. Throughout these essays Proust concedes Ruskin's formative influence on Proust's art tastes; he also remarks Ruskin's prose style, even his "retrospective unity" in Sesame and Lilies (pp. 170-171). For early critical studies of Ruskin's influence on Proust, see:               J. Murray, "Influence of Ruskin on Proust," Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society , 1928-32; and S. de Souza, L'Influence de Ruskin sur Proust (Montpellier, 1932). Most discussions of Ruskin and Proust emphasize the stylistic influence rather than Ruskin's art-theoretical impact. Recently there has been a critical turning away from claims of stylistic similarities between Ruskin and Proust in an attempt to show Proust's stylistic innovations. See B. Bucknall, The Religion of Art in Proust (Urbana, Ill., 1969), for an intelligent discussion of Proust's departures from Ruskin. break

The few instances in which Ruskin is mentioned directly in A la recherche are generally ironic in tone, meant to distinguish the dreaming, immature Marcel from an architectural critic or literary artist. See, for instance, A la recherche , I, 493: Marcel's grandmother gently teases the tearful Marcel on his way to Balbec, for Marcel is already missing his mother. "Surely this is not the enraptured tourist Ruskin speaks of," Marcel's grandmother remarks. At the end of A la recherche , the mature Marcel comments on the importance of his architectural studies, "The study of architecture corrected in me some of the instincts I had formed at Combray" (II, 972). There are many quotations from Ruskin throughout A la recherche , mostly from Modern Painters , I; while these are set off by quotation marks, they are generally not acknowledged as Ruskin's.

20. Days of Reading , I, 142.

21. Albertine's action is destructive, Marcel's constructive. Destruction, however, is not equivalent to the dematerializing I speak of later. Albertine destroys the essence of architecture by making it into ices even before she destroys it by eating. In my description of the writer's task, I have chosen the term must to suggest Proust's concept of artistic imperative; "necessity" distinguishes art from the voluntarism of the intellectual or philosophical. See A la recherche , II, 1001.

22. Among the many ways in which Marcel restates the writer's task are these: "But recreating through memory impressions which must then be plumbed to their depths, brought into the light and transformed into intellectual equivalents, was this not one of the prerequisites, almost the very essence, of a work of art such as I had conceived it in the library a few moments ago?" (II, 1122). And literary style, for Marcel, "is the revelation—impossible by direct and conscious means—of the qualitative differences in the way the world appears to us, differences which, but for art, would remain the eternal secret of each of us" (II, 1013). See also A la recherche , II, 1008-1009, and the end of this chapter section. Coupled with his rejection of subjective or solipsistic perceptions not transformed into something public and accessible is Marcel's criticism of superficial thinking which neither "plumbs depths" nor propounds anything of value: for an "art of continue

reality," Marcel comments, "more than anything else, I would exclude, therefore, all those remarks that come from the lips rather than the mind, clever remarks such as one makes in conversation" (II, 1014-1015). Facile, conversational images have nothing to do with essences and art.

23. Marcel cites his own, early misreadings: A la recherche , II, 1000, 1001, and 1003.

24. Cf. A la recherche , II, 1013 passim. "Literature is more than art; it is truth" (II, 1014). Music is, for Proust, "pure essence," and " sine materia " (I, 160); as such, it, too, is inadequate as an art analogue of literature because it has no material counterpart to metaphor. Re architecture as a non-referential structure, see Ruskin, "The Nature of the Gothic," The Stones of Venice, Works , X, 213-214. Ruskin states, ''A picture or poem is often little more than a feeble utterance of man's admiration of something out of himself; but architecture approaches more to a creation of his own, born of his necessities, and expressive of his nature. It is also, in some sort, the work of the whole race . . . therefore we may expect that the first two elements of good architecture should be expressive of some great truths commonly belonging to the whole race, and necessary to be understood or felt by them in all their work that they do under the sun." While Proust does not put poetry into the category that Ruskin does, he agrees with Ruskin's definition of architecture's greatness, applying the same qualities to literary art. (What must also be noted is that Ruskin distinguishes between "poems" and "poetry," never disparaging the latter.)

In terms of Proust's objection to certain misuses of subjective impressions, see A la recherche , II, 1019. The artist must "transcribe [forgotten words] into a universal language, which at any rate will be permanent and would make of our lost ones, in the truest essence of their natures, an eternal acquisition for all human beings." The passage goes on to develop the image of the artist constructing his "building of the monument" out of "stones" brought to him by each woman he has known. The literary structure is thus universal and accessible; moreover, it is a composite of many particulars, continue

of many stones, from the artist's life and can therefore teach "love of the general" as well as the particular. See also II, 1022.

For the two-fold nature of art and experience, see A la recherche , II, 1010. Albertine does not perceive that "every                  impression has two parts, one of them incorporated in the object and the other prolonged within ourselves." Without analysis of both aspects of an impression, there can be no real communication.

25. See note 6 above. Proust's definition stands in contrast to Pater's "minute dead bodies." See Chapter I above.

26. Ruskin as quoted by Proust, "Days of Pilgrimage," from In Memory of a Massacre of Churches , p. 54.

27. Proust, "Days of Pilgrimage," p. 53. See also the remarkable rendering or "reading" of Saint-Hilaire, A la recherche , I, 45-51. Not only does Marcel decipher every sign in the church; he also attributes to the church literary qualities. The steeple of Saint-Hilaire "inscribes" its form upon the sky; its "memorial stones" overflow their ''margins," or are "reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately scattered" (I, 45).

28. Proust, Days of Reading , I, 142-143.

29. See, for instance, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Composition , trans. and ed. W. R. Roberts (London, 1910). Of the arrangement of words, he writes: "It must be remembered that, in the case of all the other arts which employ various materials and produce from them a composite result—arts such as building, carpentry, embroidery and the like—the faculties of composition are second in order of time to those of selection, but are nevertheless of greater importance" (p. 73). Even more striking is Dionysius' discussion of the three processes in the art of composition. His analogue is the house builder: "When a builder has provided himself with the material from which he intends to construct a house—stones, timbers, tiling, and all the rest—he then puts together the continue

structure from these, studying the following three things: what stone, timber and brick can be united with what other stone, timber and brick; next how each piece of the material that is being so united should be set, and on which of its faces; thirdly, if anything fits badly, how that particular thing can be chipped and trimmed and made to fit exactly. A like course should, I affirm, be followed by those who are to succeed in literary composition. They should first consider in what groupings with other nouns, verbs, or other parts of speech, will be placed appropriately, and how not so well; for surely every possible combination cannot affect the ear in the same way" (p. 105). Regarding "Austere Composition," Dionysius of Halicarnassus assents that each word "should be seen on every side, and . . . the parts should be appreciable distances from one another, being separated by perceptible intervals. It [austere composition] does not in the least shrink from using frequently harsh sound-clashings which jar on the ear; like blocks of building stone that are laid together unworked, blocks that are not square and smooth, but preserve their natural roughness and irregularity. It is prone for the most part to expansion by means of great, spacious words. It objects to being confined to short syllables, except under occasional stress of necessity" (p. 211). In this composition, Dionysius of Halicarnassus cites tapestry as an analogue for interweaving, painting for gradations and shading, music for tone and pitch. See my discussion of the architecture-literature analogue in tradition, in Chapter V, section four, pp. 249-252.

30. Proust, Days of Reading , I, 143-144.

31. Ibid., pp. 144-145.

32. Ibid., p. 144.

30. Proust, Days of Reading , I, 143-144.

31. Ibid., pp. 144-145.

32. Ibid., p. 144.

30. Proust, Days of Reading , I, 143-144.

31. Ibid., pp. 144-145.

32. Ibid., p. 144.

33. Proust, "About Flaubert's Style," in Marcel Proust , trans. G. Hopkins, p. 226.

34. In the sense that it connects or spans, the metaphor is the linguistic counterpart of Time which, as it traverses, is likewise rendered incarnate by the architectural analogue. But in another sense, the metaphor is the antithesis of Time continue

because it presents essences "freed from the contingencies of Time" (II, 1008-1009).

35. These are two of the four section titles from In Memory of a Massacre of Churches .