Dutch Touch.(Johannes Vermeer's The Milkmaid)

A useful myth of aesthetic experience took shape when, in "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu," the ailing writer Bergotte weighed the value of his life against that of a "little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof," in Johannes Vermeer's "View of Delft" (c. 1660-61), and then, with a fleeting thought that undercooked potatoes at lunch were causing him indigestion, fell dead of a heart attack. The "little patch" filled Bergotte with remorse for his "too dry" writing style, which had not risked such gorgeous emphases. Anyone who pays open-hearted attention to very good art (dying is optional) may have had similar emotions. Beauty of the sort that Proust dramatizes is a wordless sermon, urging our betterment. As usual with Proust, the passage--written after he had left his own sickroom in Paris, in 1921, to attend a show of Dutch art that included "View of Delft"--suspends profundity and triviality in a sort of vapor, which we breathe as we read. It happens to be erroneous. There is no yellow wall under a sloping roof in Vermeer's cityscape. (There is a yellow sloping roof.) Scholars have earnestly debated what Bergotte saw, failing to consider that, like the rest of us, Proust had a lousy …