Aesthetics

     As we were liable, there, to meet M. Vinteuil, who held very strict views on "the deplorable slovenliness of young people, which seems to be encouraged these days," my mother would first see that there was nothing out of order in my appearance, and then we would set out for the church. It was in the "Month of Mary" that I remember having first fallen in love with hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, where, holy ground as it was, we had all of us a right of entry, but arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they participated, thrusting in among the tapers and the sacred vessels their serried branches, tied to one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration still further embellished by the festoons of leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train, little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness. Though I dared not look at it except through my fingers, I could sense that this formal scheme was made of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened up here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous adornment, its bunch of stamens, slender as a gossamer and entirely veiling each corolla, that in following, in trying to mimic to myself the action of their efflorescence, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head, with a provocative glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, insouciant and vivacious.

     “What is this I have been hearing, Father, about a painter setting up his easel in your church, and copying one of the windows? Old as I am, I can safely say that I have never heard of such a thing in all my life! What is the world coming to! And the ugliest thing in the whole church, too.”
     “I will not go so far as to say that it’s quite the ugliest , for although there are certain things in Saint-Hilaire which are well worth a visit, there are others that are very old now in my poor basilica, the only one in all the diocese that has never even been restored. God knows our porch is dirty and antiquated, but still it has a certain majesty. I’ll even grant you the Esther tapestries, which personally I wouldn’t give a brass farthing for, but which the experts place immediately after the ones at Sens. I can quite see, too, that apart from certain details which are—well, a trifle realistic—they show features which testify to a genuine power of observation. But don’t talk to me about the windows. Is it common sense, I ask you, to leave up windows which shut out all the daylight and even confuse the eyes by throwing patches of colour, to which I should be hard put to it to give a name, on to floor in which there are not two slabs on the same level and which they refuse to renew for me because, if you please, those are the tombstones of the Abbots of Combray and the Lords of Guermantes, the old Counts, you know, of Brabant, direct ancestors of the present Duc de Guermantes and of the Duchess too since she was a Mademoiselle de Guermantes who married her cousin?”

For in his later books, if he had hit upon some great truth, or upon the name of an historic cathedral, he would break off his narrative, and in an invocation, an apostrophe, a long prayer, would give free reign to those exhalations which, in earlier volumes, had been immanent in his prose, discernible only in a rippling of its surface, and perhaps even more delightful, more harmonious when they were thus veiled, when the reader could give no precise indication of where their murmuring began or where it died away.

Then I observed the rare, almost archaic expressions he liked to employ at certain moments, in which a hidden stream of harmony, an inner prelude, would heighten his style; and it was at such points as these, too, that he would begin to speak of the "vain dream of life," of the "inexhaustible torrent of fair forms," of the "sterile and exquisite torment of understanding and loving," of the "moving effigies which ennoble for all time the charming and venerable fonts of our cathedrals," that he would express a whole system of philosophy, new to me, by the use of marvellous images that one felt must be the inspiration of the harp-song which then arose and to which they provided a sublime accompaniment.

     Even when our errands lay in places behind the church, from which it could not be seen, the view seemed always to have been composed with reference to the steeple, which would loom up here and there among the houses, and was perhaps even more affecting when it appeared thus without the church. And, indeed, there are many others which look best when seen in this way, and I can call to mind vignettes of housetops with surmounting steeples in quite another category of art than those formed by the dreary streets of Combray. I shall never forget, in a quaint Norman town not far from Balbec, two charming eighteenth-century houses, dear to me and venerable for many reasons, between which, when one looks up at it from the fine garden which descends in terraces to the river, the Gothic spire of a church (itself hidden by the houses) soars into the sky with the effect of crowning and completing their façades, but in a style so different, so precious, so annulated, so pink, so polished, that one sees at once that it no more belongs to them than would the purple, crinkled spire of some sea-shell spun out into a turret and gay with glossy colour to a pair of handsome, smooth pebbles between which it had been washed up on the beach. Even in Paris, in one of the ugliest parts of the town, I know a window from which one can see, across a first, a second, and even a third layer of jumbled roofs, street beyond street, a violet dome, sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest “prints” which the atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of black, which is, in fact, none other than the dome of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this view of Paris the character of some of the Piranesi views of Rome. But since into none of these little etchings, whatever the discernment my memory may have been able to bring to their execution, was it able to contribute an element I have long lost, the feeling which makes us not merely regard a thing as a spectacle, but believe in it as a unique essence, so none of them keeps in its thrall a whole section of my inmost life as does the memory of those aspects of the steeple of Combray from the streets behind the church. Whether one saw it at five o’clock when going to call for letters at the post-office, some doors away from one, on the left, raising abruptly with its isolated peak the ridge of housetops; or whether, if one were looking in to ask for news of Mme Sazerat, one’s eyes followed that ridge which had now become low again after the descent of its other slope, and one knew that it would be the second turning after the steeple; or again if, pressing further afield, one went to the station and saw it obliquely, showing in profile fresh angles and surfaces, like a solid body surprised at some unknown point in its revolution; or if, seen from the banks of the Vivonne, the apse, crouched muscularly and heightened by the perspective, seemed to spring upwards with the effort which the steeple was making to hurl its spire-point into the heart of heaven—it was always to the steeple that one must return, always the steeple that dominated everything else, summoning the houses from an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the finger of God, whose body might have been concealed below among the crowd of humans without fear of my confusing it with them. And so even today, if, in a large provincial town, or in a quarter of Paris which I do not know very well, a passer-by who is "putting me on the right road" shows me in the distance, as a point to aim at, some hospital belfry or convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap at the corner of the street which I am to take, my memory need find in it some resemblance to that dear and vanished outline, and the passer-by, should he turn round to make sure that I have not gone astray, may be amazed to see me still standing there, oblivious of the walk I had planned to take or the place where I was obliged to call gazing at the steeple for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt, and then more anxiously than when, just now, I asked him to direct me, I seek my way again, I turn a corner...but...the goal is in my heart...

     Often in the Square, as we came home, my grandmother would make me stop to look up at it. From the tower windows, placed two by two, one pair above another, with that right and original proportion in their spacing which gives beauty and dignity not only to human faces, it released, it let fall at regular intervals, flocks of jackdaws which would wheel noisily for a while, as though the ancient stones which allowed them to disport themselves without seeming to see them, becoming of a sudden untenantable and discharging some element of extreme perturbation, had struck them and driven them out. Then, having crisscrossed in all directions the violet velvet of the evening air, they would return, suddenly calmed, to absorb themselves in the tower, baleful no longer but benignant, some perching here and there (not seeming to move, but perhaps snapping up some passing insect) on the points of turrets, as a seagull perches with an angler’s immobility on the crest of a wave. Without quite knowing why, my grandmother found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that absence of vulgarity, pretension, and niggardliness which made her love, and deem rich in beneficent influences, nature itself—when the hand of man had not, as did my great-aunt’s gardener, trimmed it—and the works of genius. And certainly every part of the church that one saw distinguished it from any other building by a kind of innate thoughtfulness, but it was in its steeple that it seemed most truly to find itself, to affirm its individual and responsible existence. It was the steeple that spoke for the church. I think, too, that in a confused way my grandmother found in the steeple of Combray what she prized above anything else in the world, namely, a natural air and an air of distinction. Ignorant of architecture, she would say:
     "My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face that pleases me. If it could play the piano, I’m sure it wouldn’t sound tinny." And when she gazed up at it, when her eyes followed the gentle tension, the fervent inclination of its tiny slopes which drew together as they rose, like hands joined in prayer, she would absorb herself so utterly in the effusion of the spire that her gaze seemed to leap upwards with it; her lips at the same time curving in a friendly smile for the worn old stones of which the setting sun now illumined no more than the topmost pinnacles and which, at the point where they entered that sunlit zone and were softened by it, seemed to have mounted suddenly far higher, to have become truly remote, like a song taken up again in a "head voice," an octave above.

     And then the apse of Combray: what can one say of that? It was so crude, so devoid of artistic beauty, even of religious feeling. From the outside, since the street crossing which it commanded was on a lower level, its great wall was thrust upwards from a basement of unfaced ashlar, jagged with flints, in which there was nothing particularly ecclesiastical, the windows seemed to have been pierced at an abnormal height, and its whole appearance was that of a prison wall rather than of a church. And certainly years later, when I recalled all the glorious apses that I had seen, it would never have occurred to me to compare with any one of them the apse of Combray. Only, one day, turning out of a little street in some country town, I came upon three alley-ways that converged, and facing them an old wall, rough-hewn and unusually high, with windows pierced in it far overhead and the same asymmetrical appearance as the apse of Combray. Only, one day, turning out of a little street in some country town, I came upon three alley-ways that converged, and facing them an old wall, rough-hewn and unusually high, with windows pierced in it far overhead and the same asymmetrical appearance as the apse of Combray. And at that moment I did not say to myself, as I might have done at Chartres or at Rheims, with what power the religious feeling had been expressed therein, but instinctively I exclaimed: “The Church!”