One has to believe that capharnaüm was one of the worn-away words from Sand’s pastoral dens that Proust had in mind here — and yet in the original, where we would hope to visit un véritable capharnaüm we confront, instead, a mere mobilier ancien, not a packed attic but something old packed away in an attic, as if Proust were deliberately obscuring his tracks by the Galilean lake, or as if he had interrupted his writing to think over “capharnaüm” and then had chosen to redirect his phrasing slightly, unwilling to dose his clause with Emma’s arsenic, or unable to tolerate so thoroughly vulgarized a metaphor in his own prose, although he could love it and celebrate it in his grandmother’s speech and in his mother’s evening readings from Sand. Or Proust could here have fallen in step with some allied passage in an English book — possibly something from one of Ruskin’s cathedral-threnodies (the mention of the fine points of ornament effaced by the rough usury of the modern tongue has a Lombardic stonemason’s provenance that recalls Ruskin), flamboyancies that Proust’s mother had diligently translated for him into “several red, green and yellow school exercise books” (see chapter 9 of Ronald Hayman’s biography), as he, fired up with Ruskin-love despite his own TOEFL-unready English, wrote a series of essays about the church sites that Ruskin had so copiously empurpled. But I must resist the urge to page through the thirty volumes of Ruskin that Proust said he owned, or even through the French studies of Ruskin by Robert de la Sizeranne and J. A. Milsand whose translated passages Proust drew on for his essays before his English improved. I’m sure the lumber rests somewhere there; I’m sure that I would have to spend only four or five days holed up in the ornate 39-volume library edition by Cook and Wedderburn (1903) and — as in the story Ruskin tells in Sesame and Lilies (a work Proust translated) of some schoolboys throwing stones at their books, which they had piled on gravestones — the dead ~ would live again:
So, also, we play with the words of the dead that would teach us, and strike them far from us with our bitter, reckless will; little thinking that those leaves which the wind scatters had been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an enchanted vault — nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings, who would awake for us, and walk with us, if we knew but how to call them by their names.
New lamps for old — that’s what the novelist gives us: he beats the rugs, and with a bit of torn T-shirt he works the Old English petroleum distillate into the starved fleurette of the doubtful fauteil, and suddenly those huddled movables we always vaguely knew we owned and yet never gave their due seem worth hauling out into sunlit living rooms: the city of sleeping things and kings starts up, staggers in, and begins raving like Vault Whitman, who in 1855, ten years before Ruskin had imagined saying “Open Sesame” to the enchanted and encrypted city of the dead, in his thereafter suppressed Introduction to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (an edition that Malcolm Cowley calls, in his Penguin introduction, “the buried masterpiece of American writing”), wrote:
The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet … he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you.
Whitman, though, only uses lumber to mean timber.
Or, less hysterically, Proust could be remembering Middlemarch. During his tussles with the writing of Jean Santeuil he said in a letter: “There are moments when I wonder whether I do not resemble the husband of Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch, and whether I am not collecting ruins.”3 Of Middle-march’s pasty and cold-fingered Mr. Casaubon — the collector of dead mythologies, whose promised Key to them all turns out to open nothing more than a cabinet of dry and worthless salvages from a lifetime of severe study — the impassioned Will Ladislaw says to Dorothea:
“Do you not see that it is no use now to be crawling a little way after men of the last century — men like Bryant — and correcting their mistakes? — living in a lumber-room and furbishing up broken-legged theories about Chus and Mizraim?”
(I skimmed 165 pages of the Riverside edition before I found this; the fact that it was embedded in dialogue made it harder to spot.) Some pages earlier George Eliot lays out another lumber-room or curiosity-shop image. “The idea of this dried-up pedant,” thinks Ladislaw as he falls in love with Dorothea,
this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor’s back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole) — this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust … (Riverside edition, p. 152.)
Eliot probably was thinking of Faust’s line to Wagner about the spirit of the age being a Rumpelkammer when she had Will talk scornfully of living in a lumber-room. She translated Goethe and “read probably every word” by him, according to Gordon Haight, one of her biographers; and she helped G. H. Lewes with his once well-known biography, The Life and Works of Goethe (1855).
Mark Pattison, editor of Pope and biographer of Isaac Casaubon, was George Eliot’s primary model for the character of Mr. Casaubon,4 though Pattison is a more likable and (on paper, at least) a more complicated figure than the Middlemarch dry goods merchant. “To be mesmerized by a vast subject is a dilettante feature and a recipe for disaster,” writes C. O. Brink, in his English Classical Scholarship. “It devitalizes activity and tends to cause such creative powers as there are to wither. I wonder,” he adds, “if not something like it happened to Pattison.”5 And yet the last chapter of Pattison’s best book, his biography Isaac Casaubon, is a frightening but inspiring portrait of a compulsive reader, a Greek-citation-hoarder, an urn-burier, who was (like all scholars, but especially those who spend a lifetime preparing themselves to write something that is too big for one brain to encompass) “greater than his books.”6 Books Isaac Casaubon did write, as Mark Pattison himself did, but they were never the Big Book, and instead he took Alp-blebs of notes. Unfortunately, the notes are useless without the mind they served:
What he jots down is not a remark of his own on what he reads, nor is it even the words he has read; it is a mark, a key, a catchword, by which the point of what he has read may be recovered in memory.
“To this vast mass of material,” writes Pattison of the real Casaubon, “his own memory was the only key.” A sympathetic scrutineer, looking over Isaac Casaubon’s shoulder with Pattison’s help at his literary remains, sees only what Dorothea Brooke finally worked up the courage to examine in her fictional Mr. Casaubon’s cabinet — he sees (again in Pattison’s surprisingly lyrical and heartfelt words)
disjointed fragments, lying there massive and helpless, like the boulders of some abraded stratification.
7
But the observer must nonetheless acknowledge, Pattison urges, that in the posthumous rubble of Isaac Casaubon (as in that of Mark Pattison, who abandoned his huge history of Renaissance scholarship) he is witnessing “the remains of a stupendous learning,” which is something valuable and admirable, after all. Eliot called her Middlemarch notebook “Quarry,” and this Ozymandian final chapter by Pattison, uninsistently autobiographical, was certainly one of the marmoreal desolations from which she prised chunks and cooked them for lime.8