Quotations from Proust's essay on Ruskin

The events of his life were intellectual ones and its important landmarks those when he penetrated into a new form of art, the year when he understood Abbeville, the year when he understood Rouen, the day when the painting of Titian and the shadow of Titian's painting seemed nobler to him than the painting of Rubens and the shadows of Rubens's painting.

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... when Ruskin says: "I am alone, as I believe, in thinking still with Herodotus." Anyone of a mind sufficiently discerning to be struck by the feature's of a writer's physiognomy , and who does not hold where Ruskin is concerned to everything he may have been told, that he was a prophet, a seer, a Protestant and other things which mean very little, will feel that such features, though certainly secondary, are yet very 'Ruskinian'. Ruskin lives in a sort of brotherhood with all the great minds of every age, and since he is interested in them only to the extent that they are able to answer the eternal questions, for him there are no ancients and moderns and he can talk of Herodotus as he would of a contemporary.

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But the stones which he so loved never became abstract examples for him. On each stone you can see the nuance of the passing moment joined with the colour of the centuries. "... Rushing down the street to see St Wulfran again," he tells us "before the sun was off the towers, are things to cherish the past for, - to the end."

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Whether or not the 'Beau Dieu of Amiens' is what Ruskin thought it was is of no importance for us ... so the truths making up the beauty of the passages in the Bible about Beau Dieu of Amiens have value independently of the beauty of the statue, but Ruskin would not have found them had he spoken of it disdainfully, for enthusiasm alone could give him the power to discover them.

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... he was one of those 'geniuses' of whom even those amongst us who were endowed at birth by the fairies have need if we are to be intiated into the knowledge of a new part of Beauty ... In death he continues to enlighten us, like the extinguished stars whose light still reaches us ...

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The object to which a thought like Ruskin's is applied and from which it is inseparable, is not immaterial, it is scattered across the surface of the earth. One must go to seek it wherever it is to be found, to Pisa, to Florence, to Venice, to the National Gallery, to Rouen, to Amiens, into the mountains of Switzerland. Such a thought, which has an object other than itself, which has realized itself in space, which is thought no longer infinite and free but limited and subjugated, which is incarnate in bodies of sculpted marble, in snow-covered mountains, in painted faces, is perhaps less godlike than pure thought. But it makes the universe more beautiful for us, or at least certain parts of it, certain named parts, because it has touched them and initiated us into them by forcing us, if we would understand them, to love them.

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There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.

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(all taken from the Penguin edition, Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. John Sturrock)