In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (63 page)

I seized every pretext for going down to the beach at the hours when I
hoped to succeed in finding them there. Having caught sight of them
once while we were at luncheon, I now invariably came in late for it,
waiting interminably upon the 'front' for them to pass; devoting all
the short time that I did spend in the dining–room to interrogating
with my eyes its azure wall of glass; rising long before the dessert,
so as not to miss them should they have gone out at a different hour,
and chafing with irritation at my grandmother, when, with unwitting
malevolence, she made me stay with her past the hour that seemed to me
propitious. I tried to prolong the horizon by setting my chair aslant;
if, by chance, I did catch sight of no matter which of the girls,
since they all partook of the same special essence, it was as if I had
seen projected before my face in a shifting, diabolical hallucination,
a little of the unfriendly and yet passionately coveted dream which,
but a moment ago, had existed only—where it lay stagnant for all
time—in my brain.

I was in love with none of them, loving them all, and yet the
possibility of meeting them was in my daily life the sole element of
delight, alone made to burgeon in me those high hopes by which every
obstacle is surmounted, hopes ending often in fury if I had not seen
them. For the moment, these girls eclipsed my grandmother in my
affection; the longest journey would at once have seemed attractive to
me had it been to a place in which they might be found. It was to them
that my thoughts comfortably clung when I supposed myself to be
thinking of something else or of nothing. But when, even without
knowing it, I thought of them, they, more unconsciously still, were
for me the mountainous blue undulations of the sea, a troop seen
passing in outline against the waves. Our most intensive love for a
person is always the love, really, of something else as well.

Meanwhile my grandmother was shewing, because now I was keenly
interested in golf and lawn–tennis and was letting slip an opportunity
of seeing at work and hearing talk an artist whom she knew to be one
of the greatest of his time, a disapproval which seemed to me to be
based on somewhat narrow views. I had guessed long ago in the
Champs–Elysées, and had since established to my own satisfaction, that
when we are in love with a woman we simply project into her a state of
our own soul, that the important thing is, therefore, not the worth of
the woman but the depth of the state; and that the emotions which a
young girl of no kind of distinction arouses in us can enable us to
bring to the surface of our consciousness some of the most intimate
parts of our being, more personal, more remote, more essential than
would be reached by the pleasure that we derive from the conversation
of a great man or even from the admiring contemplation of his work.

I was to end by complying with my grandmother's wishes, all the more
reluctantly in that Elstir lived at some distance from the 'front' in
one of the newest of Balbec's avenues. The heat of the day obliged me
to take the tramway which passed along the Rue de la Plage, and I made
an effort (so as still to believe that I was in the ancient realm of
the Cimmerians, in the country it might be, of King Mark, or upon the
site of the Forest of Broceliande) not to see the gimcrack splendour
of the buildings that extended on either hand, among which Elstir's
villa was perhaps the most sumptuously hideous, in spite of which he
had taken it, because, of all that there were to be had at Balbec, it
was the only one that provided him with a really big studio.

It was also with averted eyes that I crossed the garden, which had a
lawn—in miniature, like any little suburban villa round Paris—a
statuette of an amorous gardener, glass balls in which one saw one's
distorted reflexion, beds of begonias and a little arbour, beneath
which rocking chairs were drawn up round an iron table. But after all
these preliminaries hallmarked with philistine ugliness, I took no
notice of the chocolate mouldings on the plinths once I was in the
studio; I felt perfectly happy, for, with the help of all the sketches
and studies that surrounded me, I foresaw the possibility of raising
myself to a poetical understanding, rich in delights, of many forms
which I had not, hitherto, isolated from the general spectacle of
reality. And Elstir's studio appeared to me as the laboratory of a
sort of new creation of the world in which, from the chaos that is all
the things we see, he had extracted, by painting them on various
rectangles of canvas that were hung everywhere about the room, here a
wave of the sea crushing angrily on the sand its lilac foam, there a
young man in a suit of white linen, leaning upon the rail of a vessel.
His jacket and the spattering wave had acquired fresh dignity from the
fact that they continued to exist, even although they were deprived of
those qualities in which they might be supposed to consist, the wave
being no longer able to splash nor the jacket to clothe anyone.

At the moment at which I entered, the creator was just finishing, with
the brush which he had in his hand, the form of the sun at its
setting.

The shutters were closed almost everywhere round the studio, which was
fairly cool and, except in one place where daylight laid against the
wall its brilliant but fleeting decoration, dark; there was open only
one little rectangular window embowered in honeysuckle, which, over a
strip of garden, gave on an avenue; so that the atmosphere of the
greater part of the studio was dusky, transparent and compact in the
mass, but liquid and sparkling at the rifts where the golden clasp of
sunlight banded it, like a lump of rock crystal of which one surface,
already cut and polished, here and there, gleams like a mirror with
iridescent rays. While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I
wandered about in the half–light, stopping to examine first one
picture, then another.

Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly
have liked to see of his work, paintings in what an English art
journal which lay about on the reading–room table in the Grand Hotel
called his first and second manners, the mythological manner and the
manner in which he shewed signs of Japanese influence, both admirably
exemplified, the article said, in the collection of Mme. de
Guermantes. Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost
all seascapes done here, at Balbec. But I was able to discern from
these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of
the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call
metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming
them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names
that Elstir created them anew. The names which denote things
correspond invariably to an intellectual notion, alien to our true
impressions, and compelling us to eliminate from them everything that
is not in keeping with itself.

Sometimes in my window in the hotel at Balbec, in the morning when
Françoise undid the fastenings of the curtains that shut out the
light, in the evening when I was waiting until it should be time to go
out with Saint–Loup, I had been led by some effect of sunlight to
mistake what was only a darker stretch of sea for a distant coastline,
or to gaze at a belt of liquid azure without knowing whether it
belonged to sea or sky. But presently my reason would re–establish
between the elements that distinction which in my first impression I
had overlooked. In the same way I used, in Paris, in my bedroom, to
hear a dispute, almost a. riot, in the street below, until I had
referred back to its cause—a carriage for instance that was rattling
towards me—this noise, from which I now eliminated the shrill and
discordant vociferations which my ear had really heard but which my
reason knew that wheels did not produce. But the rare moments in which
we see nature as she is, with poetic vision, it was from those that
Elstir's work was taken. One of his metaphors that occurred most
commonly in the seascapes which he had round him was precisely that
which, comparing land with sea, suppressed every line of demarcation
between them. It was this comparison, tacitly and untiringly repeated
on a single canvas, which gave it that multiform and powerful unity,
the cause (not always clearly perceived by themselves) of the
enthusiasm which Elstir's work aroused in certain collectors.

It was, for instance, for a metaphor of this sort—in a picture of the
harbour of Carquethuit, a picture which he had finished a few days
earlier and at which I now stood gazing my fill—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 its houses
concealed a part of the harbour, a dry dock, or perhaps the sea itself
came cranking in among the land, 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 it had been by mill–chimneys or
church–steeples) by masts which had the effect of making the vessels
to which they belonged appear town–bred, built on land, an impression
which was strengthened by the sight of 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 far 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 particoloured rainbow, to form an unreal, a mystical
picture. On the beach in the foreground the painter had arranged that
the eye should discover no fixed boundary, no absolute line of
demarcation between earth and ocean. 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 their 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 across the middle of the town; women who were
gathering shrimps among the rocks had the appearance, because they
were surrounded by water and because of the depression which, after
the ringlike barrier of rocks, brought the beach (on the side nearest
the land) down to sea–level, of being in a marine grotto overhung by
ships and waves, open yet unharmed in the path of a miraculously
averted tide. If the whole picture gave this impression of harbours in
which the sea entered into 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, you felt from the
muscular efforts of the fishermen and the obliquity of the boats
leaning over at an acute angle, compared with the calm erectness of
the warehouse on the harbour, the church, the houses of the town to
which some of the figures were returning while others were coming out
to fish, that they were riding bareback on the water, as it might be 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
boatman, blithe but attentive, also, to what he was doing, trimmed the
bellying sail, every one kept in his place, so that the weight should
not be all on one side of the boat, which might capsize, and so they
went racing over sunlit fields into shadowy places, dashing down into
the troughs of waves. It was a fine morning in spite of the recent
storm. Indeed, one could still feel the powerful activities that must
first be neutralized 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 its reflexions had almost more solidity and
reality than the floating hulls, vaporised by an effect of the
sunlight, parts which the perspective of the picture dovetailed in
among others. Or rather you 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. Your reason then set to work and made a single
element of what was here black beneath a gathering storm, a little
farther 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 you thought of some
white stone causeway or of a field of snow, up the surface of which it
was quite frightening to see a ship go climbing high and dry, as a
carriage climbs dripping from a ford, but which a moment later, when
you saw on the raised and broken surface of the solid plain boats
drunkenly heaving, you understood, identical in all these different
aspects, to be still the sea.

Although we are justified in saying that there can be no progress, no
discovery in art, but only in the sciences, and that the artist who
begins afresh upon his own account an individual effort cannot be
either helped or hindered by the efforts of all the others, we must
nevertheless admit that, in so far as art brings into prominence
certain laws, once an industry has taken those laws and vulgarised
them, the art that was first in the field loses, in retrospect, a
little of its originality. Since Elstir began to paint, we have grown
familiar with what are called 'admirable' 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
picture of a familiar object, a picture different from those that we
are accustomed to see, unusual and yet true to nature, and for that
reason doubly impressive to us because it startles us, makes us emerge
from our habits 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
shew us some cathedral which we are accustomed to see in the middle of
a town, taken instead from a selected point of view from which it will
appear to be thirty times the height of the houses and to be thrusting
a spur out from the bank of the river, from which it is actually a
long way off. 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 exactly to this point; he
gave special emphasis to certain of these laws of perspective, which
were thus all the more striking, since his art had been their first
interpreter. A river, because of the windings of its course, a bay
because of the apparent contact of the cliffs on either side of it,
would look as though there had been 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 appeared to be enclosed in walls of pink
granite, not to be the sea, which began farther out. The continuity of
the ocean was suggested only by the gulls which, wheeling over what,
when one looked at the picture, seemed to be solid rock, were as a
matter of fact inhaling the moist vapour of the shifting tide. Other
laws were discernible in the same canvas, as, at the foot of immense
cliffs, the lilliputian grace of white sails on the blue mirror on
whose surface they looked like butterflies asleep, and certain
contrasts between the depth of the shadows and the pallidity of the
light. This play of light and shade, which also photography has
rendered commonplace, had interested Elstir so much that at one time
he had painted what were almost mirages, in which a castle crowned
with a tower appeared as a perfect circle of castle prolonged by a
tower at its summit, and at its foot by an inverted tower, whether
because the exceptional purity of the atmosphere on a fine day gave
the shadow reflected in the water the hardness and brightness of the
stone, or because the morning mists rendered the stone as vaporous as
the shadow. And similarly, beyond the sea, behind a line of woods,
began another sea roseate with the light of the setting sun, which
was, in fact, the sky. The light, as it were precipitating new solids,
thrust back the hull of the boat on which it fell behind the other
hull that was still in shadow, and rearranged like the steps of a
crystal staircase what was materially a plane surface, but was broken
up by the play of light and shade upon the morning sea. A river
running beneath the bridges of a town was caught from a certain point
of view so that it appeared entirely dislocated, now broadened into a
lake, now narrowed into a rivulet, broken elsewhere by the
interruption of a hill crowned with trees among which the burgher
would repair at evening to taste the refreshing breeze; and the rhythm
of this disintegrated town was assured only by the inflexible
uprightness of the steeples which did not rise but rather, following
the plumb line of the pendulum marking its cadence as in a triumphal
march, seemed to hold in suspense beneath them all the confused mass
of houses that rose vaguely in the mist along the banks of the
crushed, disjointed stream. And (since Elstir's earliest work
belonged to the time in which a painter would make his landscape
attractive by inserting a human figure), on the cliff's edge or among
the mountains, the road, that half human part of nature, underwent,
like river or ocean, the eclipses of perspective. And whether a sheer
wall of mountain, or the mist blown from a torrent, or the sea
prevented the eye from following the continuity of the path, visible
to the traveller but not to us, the little human personage in
old–fashioned attire seemed often to be stopped short on the edge of
an abyss, the path which he had been following ending there, while, a
thousand feet above him in those pine–forests, it was with a melting
eye and comforted heart that we saw reappear the threadlike whiteness
of its dusty surface, hospitable to the wayfaring foot, whereas from
us the side of the mountain had hidden, where it turned to avoid
waterfall or gully, the intervening bends.