In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (61 page)

It was, for instance, for a metaphor of this sort—in a picture of the harbour of Carquethuit, a picture which he had finished only a few days earlier and which I stood looking at for a long time—that Elstir had prepared the mind of the spectator by employing, for the little town, only marine terms, and urban terms for the sea. Whether because its houses concealed a part of the harbour, a dry dock, or perhaps the sea itself plunging deep inland, as constantly happened on the Balbec coast, on the other side of the promontory on which the town was built the roofs were overtopped (as they might have been by chimneys or steeples) by masts which had the effect of making the vessels to which they belonged appear town-bred, built on land, an impression reinforced by other boats moored along the jetty but in such serried ranks that you could see men talking across from one deck to another without being able to distinguish the dividing line, the chink of water between them, so that this fishing fleet seemed less to belong to the water than, for instance, the churches of Criquebec which, in the distance, surrounded by water on every side because you saw them without seeing the town, in a powdery haze of sunlight and crumbling waves, seemed to be emerging from the waters, blown in alabaster or in sea-foam, and, enclosed in the band of a variegated rainbow, to form an ethereal, mystical tableau. On the beach in the foreground the painter had contrived that the eye should discover no fixed boundary, no absolute line of demarcation between land and sea. The men who were pushing down their boats into the sea were running as much through the waves as along the sand, which, being wet, reflected the hulls as if they were already in the water. The sea itself did not come up in an even line but followed the irregularities of the shore, which the perspective of the picture increased still further, so that a ship actually at sea, half-hidden by the projecting works of the arsenal, seemed to be sailing through the middle of the town; women gathering shrimps among the rocks had the appearance, because they were surrounded by water and because of the depression which, beyond the circular barrier of rocks, brought the beach (on the two sides nearest the land) down to sea-level, of being in a marine grotto overhung by ships and waves, open yet protected in the midst of miraculously parted waters. If the whole picture gave this impression of harbours in which the sea penetrated the land, in which the land was already subaqueous and the population amphibian, the strength of the marine element was everywhere apparent; and round about the rocks, at the mouth of the harbour where the sea was rough, one sensed, from the muscular efforts of the fishermen and the slant of the boats leaning over at an acute angle, compared with the calm erectness of the warehouse, the church, the houses in the town to which some of the figures were returning and from which others were setting out to fish, that they were riding bareback on the water as though on a swift and fiery animal whose rearing, but for their skill, must have unseated them. A party of holiday-makers were putting gaily out to sea in a boat that tossed like a jaunting-car on a rough road; their boatmen, blithe but none the less attentive, trimmed the bellying sail, everyone kept in his place in order not to unbalance and capsize the boat, and so they went scudding through sunlit fields and shady places, rushing down the slopes. It was a fine morning in spite of the recent storm. Indeed, one could still feel the powerful impulses that must first be neutralised in order to attain the easy balance of the boats that lay motionless, enjoying sunshine and breeze, in parts where the sea was so calm that the reflections had almost more solidity and reality than the floating hulls, vaporised by an effect of the sunlight and made to overlap one another by the perspective. Or rather one would not have called them other parts of the sea. For between those parts there was as much difference as there was between one of them and the church rising from the water, or the ships behind the town. One’s reason then set to work to make a single element of what was in one place black beneath a gathering storm, a little further all of one colour with the sky and as brightly burnished, and elsewhere so bleached by sunshine, haze and foam, so compact, so terrestrial, so circumscribed with houses that one thought of some white stone causeway or of a field of snow, up the slope of which one was alarmed to see a ship come climbing high and dry, as a carriage climbs dripping from a ford, but which a moment later, when you saw on the raised, uneven surface of the solid plain boats drunkenly heaving, you understood, identical in all these different aspects, to be still the sea.

Although it is rightly said that there can be no progress, no discovery in art, but only in the sciences, and that each artist starting afresh on an individual effort cannot be either helped or hindered therein by the efforts of any other, it must none the less be acknowledged that, in so far as art brings to light certain laws, once an industry has popularised them, the art that was first in the field loses retrospectively a little of its originality. Since Elstir began to paint, we have grown familiar with what are called “wonderful” photographs of scenery and towns. If we press for a definition of what their admirers mean by the epithet, we shall find that it is generally applied to some unusual image of a familiar object, an image different from those that we are accustomed to see, unusual and yet true to nature, and for that reason doubly striking because it surprises us, takes us out of our cocoon of habit, and at the same time brings us back to ourselves by recalling to us an earlier impression. For instance, one of these “magnificent” photographs will illustrate a law of perspective, will show us some cathedral which we are accustomed to see in the middle of a town, taken instead from a selected vantage point from which it will appear to be thirty times the height of the houses and to be thrusting out a spur from the bank of the river, from which it is actually at some distance. Now the effort made by Elstir to reproduce things not as he knew them to be but according to the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed, had led him precisely to bring out certain of these laws of perspective, which were thus all the more striking, since art had been the first to disclose them. A river, because of the windings of its course, a bay because of the apparent proximity to one another of the cliffs on either side of it, would seem to have hollowed out in the heart of the plain or of the mountains a lake absolutely landlocked on every side. In a picture of a view from Balbec painted upon a scorching day in summer an inlet of the sea, enclosed between walls of pink granite, appeared not to be the sea, which began further out. The continuity of the ocean was suggested only by the gulls which, wheeling over what seemed to be solid rock, were as a matter of fact sniffing the shifting tide. Other laws emerged vas, as, at the foot of immense cliffs, the moist vapour of from the same can the lilliputian grace of white sails on the blue mirror on whose surface they looked like sleeping butterflies, and certain contrasts between the depth of the shadows and the paleness of the light. This play of light and shade, which photography has also rendered commonplace, had interested Elstir so much that at one time he had delighted in painting what were almost mirages, in which a castle crowned with a tower appeared as a completely circular castle extended by a tower at its summit, and at its foot by an inverted tower, either because the exceptional purity of the atmosphere on a fine day gave the shadow reflected in the water the hardness and brightness of stone, or because the morning mists rendered the stone as vaporous as the shadow. And similarly, beyond the sea, behind a line of woods, another sea began, roseate with the light of the setting sun, which was in fact the sky. The light, fashioning as it were new solids, thrust back the hull of the boat on which it fell behind the other hull that was still in shadow, and arranged as it were the steps of a crystal staircase on what was in reality the flat surface, broken only by the play of light and shade, of the morning sea. A river running beneath the bridges of a town was caught from such an angle that it appeared entirely dislocated, now broadening into a lake, now narrowing into a rivulet, broken elsewhere by the interposition of a hill crowned with trees among which the townsman would repair at evening to breathe the cool air; and even the rhythm of this topsy-turvy town was assured only by the rigid vertical of the steeples which did not rise but rather, in accordance with the plumb-line of the pendulum of gravity beating time as in a triumphal march, seemed to hold suspended beneath them the blurred mass of houses that rose in terraces through the mist along the banks of the crushed, disjointed stream. And (since Elstir’s earliest works belonged to the time in which a painter would embellish his landscape by inserting a human figure), on the cliff’s edge or among the mountains, the path too, that half-human part of nature, underwent, like river or ocean, the eclipses of perspective. And whether a mountain ridge, or the spray of a waterfall, or the sea prevented the eye from following the continuity of the path, visible to the traveller but not to us, the little human figure in old-fashioned clothes, lost in those solitudes, seemed often to be stopped short on the edge of a precipice, the path which he had been following ending there, while, a thousand feet above him in those pine-forests, it was with a fond eye and a relieved heart that we saw reappear the threadlike whiteness of its sandy surface, grateful to the wayfarer’s feet, though the mountainside had concealed from us its intervening bends as it skirted the waterfall or the gulf.

The effort made by Elstir to strip himself, when face to face with reality, of every intellectual notion, was all the more admirable in that this man who made himself deliberately ignorant before sitting down to paint, forgot everything that he knew in his honesty of purpose (for what one knows does not belong to oneself), had in fact an exceptionally cultivated mind. When I confessed to him the disappointment I had felt on seeing the porch at Balbec:

“What!” he exclaimed, “you were disappointed by the porch! Why, it’s the finest illustrated Bible that the people have ever had. That Virgin and all the bas-reliefs telling the story of her life—it’s the most loving, the most inspired expression of that endless poem of adoration and praise in which the Middle Ages extolled the glory of the Madonna. If you only knew, side by side with the most scrupulous accuracy in rendering the sacred text, what exquisite
trouvailles
came to the old carver, what profound thoughts, what delicious poetry! The idea of that great sheet in which the angels carry the body of the Virgin, too sacred for them to venture to touch it with their hands” (I mentioned to him that this theme had been treated also at Saint-André-des-Champs; he had seen photographs of the porch there, and agreed, but pointed out that the eagerness of those little peasant figures, all scurrying together round the Virgin, was not at all the same thing as the gravity of those two great angels, almost Italian, so slender, so gentle); “and the angel who carries away the Virgin’s soul, to reunite it with her body; or in the meeting of the Virgin with Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s gesture when she touches the Virgin’s womb and marvels to feel that it is swollen; and the outstretched arm of the midwife who had refused, without touching, to believe in the Virgin Birth; and the loincloth thrown by the Virgin to St Thomas to give him proof of the Resurrection; that veil, too, which the Virgin tears from her own breast to cover the nakedness of her son, whose blood, the wine of the Eucharist, the Church collects from one side of him, while on the other the Synagogue, its kingdom at an end, has its eyes bandaged, holds a half-broken sceptre and lets fall, together with the crown that is slipping from its head, the tables of the old law. And the husband who, on the Day of Judgment, as he helps his young wife to rise from her grave, lays her hand against his own heart to reassure her, to prove to her that it is indeed beating, isn’t that also rather a stunning idea, really inspired? And the angel who is taking away the sun and the moon which are no longer needed since it is written that the Light of the Cross will be seven times brighter than the light of the firmament; and the one who is dipping his hand into Jesus’ bath, to see whether the water is warm enough; and the one emerging from the clouds to place the crown on the Virgin’s brow; and all the angels leaning from the vault of heaven, between the balusters of the New Jerusalem, and throwing up their arms in horror or joy at the sight of the torments of the wicked or the bliss of the elect! Because it’s all the circles of heaven, a whole gigantic poem full of theology and symbolism that you have there. It’s prodigious, it’s divine, it’s a thousand times better than anything you will see in Italy, where for that matter this very tympanum has been carefully copied by sculptors with far less genius. Because, you know, it’s all a question of genius. There never was a time when everybody had genius, that’s all nonsense, it would be more extraordinary than the golden age. The chap who carved that façade, take my word for it, was every bit as good, had just as profound ideas, as the men you admire most at the present day. I could show you what I meant if we went there together. There are certain passages from the Office of the Assumption which have been conveyed with a subtlety that not even a Redon could equal.”

And yet, when my eager eyes had opened before the façade of Balbec church, it was not this vast celestial vision of which he spoke to me that I had seen, not this gigantic theological poem which I understood to have been inscribed there in stone. I spoke to him of those great statues of saints mounted on stilts which formed a sort of avenue on either side.

“It starts from the mists of antiquity to end in Jesus Christ,” he explained. “You see on one side his ancestors after the spirit, on the other the Kings of Judah, his ancestors after the flesh. All the ages are there. And if you looked more closely at what you took for stilts you would have been able to give names to the figures standing on them. Under the feet of Moses you would have recognised the golden calf, under Abraham’s the ram, and under Joseph’s the demon counselling Potiphar’s wife.”