In fact, both French and English readers marveled at how well Proust captured Ruskin’s meaning and style (Tadié 400, 433). Proust wanted his translations to be vivid and ‘faithful like love and like pity’ (Tadié 867, n.5), and he succeeded.
All biographical details aside, ‘On Reading’, the centerpiece of the present volume, is full-fledged Proust at his best and a work that repays unending attention and love. Its long first section, on childhood reading, marks the first time Proust sees his personal past as a vanished world, and has developed the techniques to bring it back to life. It could almost come straight out of ‘Combray’, except for its lack of links to Gilberte and Albertine; at one point, he refers to ‘the Méséglise way’, calling it by the fictional name it would bear in Remembrance of Things Past, rather than ‘Méréglise’, the real place.
The section’s balanced construction is another perfection, with a framing paragraph that introduces four set pieces, in the dining room, bedroom, park, and bedroom again, taking place in the morning, early afternoon, late afternoon, and night, and ending with the end of the book he is reading and its being shelved away – only to be unexpectedly reopened in the second half of the essay, like the way the past returns in the present.
There is, throughout, the systematic imagery which always gives the Proustian world its unified atmosphere, with the whole in all of the parts, ‘every sentence, fundamentally, like every other, because they have all been spoken with the unique inflection of a single personality’ (p. 34): for example, in the long sentence describing the objects in Proust’s bedroom (pp. 9–11), all eight clauses use metaphors connecting the things in the room to springtime flowers, to the church, or to both (flowers on the altar). These are the two dominant features of the world outside the room, and the next sentence in turn mentions that outdoor altars for the holidays (the boy is on vacation) connect him to the church ‘with a path of flowers’.8
The second half of ‘On Reading’, after Proust turns back to his task of introducing, analysing, and arguing against Ruskin, is Proust the critic at his most brilliant and Proust the self-analyst at his most revealing. In the transition to the second section, he explicitly says that the first section’s ‘delays on flowered and winding paths’ were intended to lead the reader to re-create in his own mind the psychological act called Reading: Proust’s entire mission, as an artist, was always to re-create in the reader’s mind what there was in Proust’s, and in ‘On Reading’ you can see him exploring, one after the other, analytically and almost scientifically, various methods for how to do so. His footnote laying out the disparate facts that went into the description of an imagined trip to Holland is as explicit an account of Proust’s fictional method, of the way he transforms elements of his lived experience into a composite experience, as he would ever give – at the moment when he is discovering it.
Finally, he ends ‘On Reading’ with his great theme, recapturing the past. Compare the despondent conclusion to his first Ruskin preface, just two years earlier, when he had not yet discovered his techniques for recapturing lost time and had at his disposal only a memory which does not correspond to the facts… Not being able to reawaken the flames of the past, we want to at least gather its ashes… It is when Ruskin is far from our heart that we translate his books and set out to portray the lineaments of his thought in a faithful image. So perhaps you will not be able to hear the sounds of our faith or our love; perhaps it is only our piety you can perceive here and there, cold and furtive, and busy, like the Theban Virgin, restoring a tomb.9
The contrast with the glorious finale of ‘On Reading’ could not be greater: there, in a fivefold metaphor, a five-note chord of sublime harmony, Proust equates Dante or Shakespeare’s presence in the reader, the columns in the busy Venetian square, Eastern artifacts in the West, the twelfth century in the present, and personal memories of Venice in his present writing, enrapturing them all in seven final adjectives like the seven themes he claimed to find in the last sentence of ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’. In a 1904 letter (Tadié 443), Proust described beauty as ‘a kind of blending, a transparent unity in which all things, having lost their initial aspect as things, have lined up beside each other in a sort of order, are instilled with the same light and are seen within each other’: in ‘On Reading’, Proust has the depth of experience and discipline of technique to create it.
About the Texts
This book was originally intended to be a full English version of Proust’s Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, with all of Ruskin’s text and all of Proust’s notes as well as Proust’s preface ‘On Reading’. But the nature of the Hesperus ‘On’ series has led to a more focused book, which still provides a new encounter with Ruskin’s great work, a glimpse into the workshop where Proust developed his techniques for Remembrance of Things Past, and a unique example of the translator’s creative art. ‘On Reading’ is given in full; some, but not all, of Proust’s notes to Sesame and Lilies are included, with notes occasionally abbreviated without comment when not omitted; the other four excerpts on the nature of reading – , ‘Makeshift Memory’, ‘Ruskin in Venice’, ‘Servitude and Freedom’, and ‘Resurrection’ (titles are supplied by me) – are drawn from Proust’s preface to his earlier translation of Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens. ‘Ruskin in Venice’ skips passages after the first sentence, second sentence, and third-to-last paragraph; I indicate the omissions here to avoid ellipses in the text.
’Of Kings’ Treasuries’, the ‘Sesame’ lecture from Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, is included in this book not only to show Ruskin’s ideas on reading, worthy in themselves and against which Proust defined his own, but also to show Proust’s manner of reading (annotating, cross-referencing, arguing) in action. Ruskin’s footnotes are noted as such; all the other notes are Proust’s.
About twenty per cent of ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ had to be cut for space, so I took out what one might call ‘political’ material, although Ruskin would be the first to deny the distinction between matters of reading and matters of ethical action – as Sesame and Lilies makes clear, Ruskin shared the theory of language best described by Thoreau in his Journal in praise of John Brown: ‘the one great rule of composition – and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this – is to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third.’
The Proustian and Ruskinian universes are vast and full of echoes, and tempting though it was for me to add my own connections and remembrances, offer my own makeshift memory, I have refrained from adding further translator’s notes, explanatory or cross-referential. The layers of reading and reinterpretation already present in this book – Ruskin’s writing, Proust’s translation, Proust’s notes, my own translation and selection and introduction, Eric Karpeles’ foreword – make yet another layer prohibitive, and since many of Proust’s notes had to be omitted for space, it seemed wrong to add notes of mine. Besides, as Borges says, ‘I was a hospitable reader in those days, and I accepted everything with providential and enthusiastic resignation; I believed everything, even errata and poor illustrations.’
Thus I neither correct nor indicate the omissions in Proust’s inexact quotations (you can see his method by comparing §6 of ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ with his quotation of that passage in ‘On Reading’, pp. 19–20). When giving the passages Proust quotes, I skip words and phrases to reflect as faithfully as possible Proust’s condensations; I also use original English texts throughout rather than retranslating Proust’s French, foregoing the cheap pleasure of translation gotchas as well as the more interesting matter of Proust’s sometimes substantive and arguably intentional mistranslations. ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ in particular is Ruskin’s original, with my omissions (which are not Proust’s) indicated by bracketed ellipses.
Most of the Proust material in this book has been translated into English before, although his notes and prefaces have never appeared together with Ruskin’s full (or almost full) texts. I referred to, and learned much from, Jean Autret and William Burford’s translation On Reading (1971), reprinted in On Reading Ruskin: Prefaces to La Bible d’Amiens and Sésame et les Lys with Selections from the Notes to the Translated Texts (1987); the other translations in the latter volume, namely Jean Autret and Phillip J. Wolfe’s of the preface to La Bible d’Amiens and William Burford’s of selected notes to Sésame et les Lys; John Sturrock’s translations in Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays (1988), reprinted in Days of Reading (2008); and Euan Cameron’s translations of relevant passages in Jean-Yves Tadié’s Marcel Proust: A Life (2000).
My source texts were the Library Edition of Ruskin’s works, Antoine Compagnon’s edition of Sésame et les Lys, précédé de Sur la lecture (1987), and Yves Michel-Ergal’s of La Bible d’Amiens (2007); I also referred to the earlier editions of the French volumes available online. For information about Proust, I relied on Tadié’s biography and the notes by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre in the 1971 Pléiade edition of Contre Sainte-Beuve, précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles.
I would also like to acknowledge Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1958 translation Marcel Proust On Art and Literature: 1896-1919, where I first read Proust’s
