Ruskin, Proust and the Art of Failure

AS RUSKIN’S READERSHIP and reputation inexorably waned, the six years Proust worked on him were increasingly seen as a waste of time. As early as 1927, Virginia Woolf noted that a recent abridged edition of Modern Painters would suggest that, while people still wanted to read Ruskin, they no longer had leisure to read him in the mass. Happily, there remained Praeterita, a book ‘which contains as in a teaspoon the essence of those waters from which the many-coloured fountains of eloquence and exhortation spring’. ‘We none of us need many books’, wrote the Ruskin of Sesame and Lilies, and if only one of his books is to be retained for our critical attention, the compact and accessible Praeterita would seem the most fitting for those who value its serenity and restraint. As Ruskin’s last work, it also possesses a certain valedictory charm which intimates some solace after the bouts of madness of later years. It anticipates Proust, its title alluding to things past possibly reminding us of the Shakespearian tag which Scott-Moncrieff applied to his translation. Like A la recherche du temps perdu, it is unfinished, and its evocative treatment of the narrator’s childhood recalls some of the most characteristic Proustian reveries. The fact that a plan for Proust to translate Praeterita was mooted in 1907-8 might suggest that Proust’s novel is based on Ruskin’s autobiography. Nevertheless, Ruskin’s autobiography is patently not an English analogue of A la recherche du temps perdu, whatever its occasional similarities in subject matter and structure. Where Proust aimed to create a text which would constitute itself in the relation of its own genesis,