Marcel Proust brought John Ruskin to French readers

Person: Marcel Proust
Lived: 1871–1922
Field: Literature
From: French

The story

From 1895 Marcel Proust spent years reading Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson and especially the English critic John Ruskin, whose ideas about art shaped his own. Ruskin, who died in 1900, had defended the painter J. M. W. Turner in Modern Painters and, in The Stones of Venice, linked the city's Gothic architecture to the moral and spiritual health of the society that built it. Proust claimed to know several of his books by heart.

Proust set out to translate Ruskin into French, but his English was imperfect. He made the translations a group effort: his mother, Jeanne Weil, who read English well, sketched out drafts; Proust revised them; Marie Nordlinger, an English cousin of his friend Reynaldo Hahn, checked them; and Proust polished the result. Asked about his method, he replied that he did not claim to know English, he claimed to know Ruskin.

The Bible of Amiens, Ruskin's study of the cathedral at Amiens, appeared in Proust's translation in 1904 with a long introduction and was well reviewed. The philosopher Henri Bergson praised the introduction as an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin. That same year Proust also published a Le Figaro article defending France's cathedrals.

Sesame and Lilies followed. Proust completed it in June 1905. His father had died in November 1903, and his mother died that September, and it was published in 1906 with a preface, "On Reading", that became a noted work in its own right.

The Ruskin translations were among the last projects Proust shared with his mother. They also served as an apprenticeship in thinking about art and memory, and two years later, in 1908, he began the writing that grew into In Search of Lost Time. Many of the ideas he refined through Ruskin found their fullest expression in that novel.