Proust Moment, May 16, 2003

Painter of Light

No, we are not discussing the egregious hack. We are discussing the way light pours through stained glass in the church at Combray, altering the picture over the course of a day.

Before we go into it, though, pardon me if I pause to reflect on the great English art critic John Ruskin and the great American historian Henry Adams, who keep coming to mind in these passages where Proust is in church, for a number of reasons.

First of all, they both wrote at length about Chartres Cathedral, which is about as old as the church at Combray, albeit a good deal more impressive.

Second, Proust was an early disciple of Ruskin, whose The Bible of Amiens he translated into French. When Proust writes of the church at Combray, as he does here, you can't help but sense traces of Ruskin describing Chartres Cathedral -- both have the same sense of awe. And you have in Ruskin what you have in Proust: a near constant meditation on the art of nature and the art of mankind, of the sometimes rebellious relationship of the latter to the former.

In the pages ahead, where Proust describes the church at Combray, he focuses on how very distinct the church is, how it's a holy place that carries with it a weight of history. It's worthwhile, I think, in regard to the Proust passage, to note what both Ruskin and Adams said about where, exactly, that sense of holiness comes from: the absolute unswerving belief of the people who built the church.

Here is Ruskin, in his Oxford lecture "The Relation of Art to Religion":

"You have [in Chartres] the most splendid coloured glass, and the richest sculpture, and the grandest proportions of building, united to produce a sensation of pleasure and awe. We profess that this is to honor the Deity; or, in other words, that it is pleasing to Him that we should delight our eyes with blue and golden colours, and solemnize our spirits by the sight of large stones laid one on another, and ingeniously carved."

Adams goes a good deal further in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Adams noted how the glass-workers specifically worked in such a way as to please a deity. The glassworker "was in the Virgin's employ; he was decorating her own chamber in her own palace; he wanted to please her; and he knew her tastes, even when she did not give her personal orders … His reward was to come when he should be promoted to decorate the Queen of Heaven's palace in the New Jerusalem, and he served a mistress who knew better than he did what work was good and what was bad, and how to give him his right place. Mary's taste was infallible; her knowledge like her power had no limits; she knew men's thoughts as well as acts, and could not be deceived. Probably, even in our own time, an artist might find his imagination considerably stimulated and his work powerfully improved if he knew that anything short of his best would bring him the gallows, with or without trial by jury; but in the twelfth century the gallows was a trifle; the Queen hardly considered it a punishment for an offence to her dignity. The artist was vividly aware that Mary disposed of Hell."

This is not, as I said, what Proust is directly focusing on in the next few pages, but I think you discern it at the edges. The church is holy, unique, distinct, set off from all else, he notes. And I suspect it's at least partly because it was built with a holy intent, unencumbered by the Age of Enlightenment or Reason or whaterver.

Anyway, here is Proust in the church at Combray:

"Its windows were never so brilliant as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside you might be certain of fine weather in church. One of them was filled from top to bottom by a solitary figure, like the king on a playing-card, who lived up there beneath his canopy of stone, between earth and heaven; and in the blue light of its slanting shadow, on weekdays sometimes, at noon, when there was no service (at one of those rare moments when the airy, empty church, more human somehow and more luxurious with the sun shewing off all its rich furnishings, seemed to have almost a habitable air, like the hall—all sculptured stone and painted glass—of some mediaeval mansion), you might see Mme. Sazerat kneel for an instant, laying down on the chair beside her own a neatly corded parcel of little cakes which she had just bought at the baker's and was taking home for her luncheon. In another, a mountain of rosy snow, at whose foot a battle was being fought, seemed to have frozen the window also, which it swelled and distorted with its cloudy sleet, like a pane to which snowflakes have drifted and clung, but flakes illumined by a sunrise—the same, doubtless, which purpled the reredos of the altar with tints so fresh that they seemed rather to be thrown on it for a moment by a light shining from outside and shortly to be extinguished than painted and permanently fastened on the stone. And all of them were so old that you could see, here and there, their silvery antiquity sparkling with the dust of centuries and shewing in its threadbare brilliance the very cords of their lovely tapestry of glass. There was one among them which was a tall panel composed of a hundred little rectangular windows, of blue principally, like a great game of patience of the kind planned to beguile King Charles VI; but, either because a ray of sunlight had gleamed through it or because my own shifting vision had drawn across the window, whose colours died away and were rekindled by turns, a rare and transient fire—the next instant it had taken on all the iridescence of a peacock's tail, then shook and wavered in a flaming and fantastic shower, distilled and dropping from the groin of the dark and rocky vault down the moist walls, as though it were along the bed of some rainbow grotto of sinuous stalactites that I was following my parents, who marched before me, their prayer-books clasped in their hands; a moment later the little lozenge windows had put on the deep transparence, the unbreakable hardness of sapphires clustered on some enormous breastplate; but beyond which could be distinguished, dearer than all such treasures, a fleeting smile from the sun, which could be seen and felt as well here, in the blue and gentle flood in which it washed the masonry, as on the pavement of the Square or the straw of the market-place; and even on our first Sundays, when we came down before Easter, it would console me for the blackness and bareness of the earth outside by making burst into blossom, as in some springtime in old history among the heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling and gilded carpet of forget-me-nots in glass."

--"Combray," Swann's Way