Jenny Eagleton

Since, of the charm, the grace, the forms of nature, the public knows only what it has absorbed from the cliches of an art slowly assimilated, and since an original artist begins by rejecting these cliches, M. and Mme. Cottard, being in this sense typical of the public, found neither in Vinteuil’s sonata, nor in the painter’s portraits, what for them created the harmony of music and the beauty of painting. It seemed to them when the pianist played the sonata that he was randomly attaching to the piano notes that were not in fact connected to the forms they were used to, and that the painter was randomly hurling colors onto his canvases. When they were able to recognize a form in these canvases, they found it heavy and vulgarized (that is, lacking the elegance of the school of painting through which they viewed all living creatures, even in the street), and lacking truth, as if Monsieur Biche did not know how a shoulder was constructed or that women do not have lavendar hair.

— Marcel Proust Swann’s Way in In Search of Lost Time (Penguin’s Lydia Davis translation.)

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