It is also worth remark that Proust is the first author to treat sexual inversion as a current and ordinary phenomenon, which he describes neither in the vein of tedious panegyric adopted by certain decadent writers, nor yet with the air of a showman displaying to an agitated tourist abysses of unfathomable horror. Treating this important social phenomenon as neither more nor less important than it is, he has derived from it new material for his study of social relations, and has greatly enriched and complicated the texture of his plot. His extreme honesty meets nowhere with more triumphant rewards. It is by the splendid use of so much unusual knowledge that Proust gains his greatest victories as a pure novelist. Royalty, actresses, bourgeois, servants, peasants, men, women, and children—they all have the genuine third dimension and seem to the reader more real than his own friends. The story is told of an English naval officer that he once knocked down a Frenchman for casting doubt on the chastity of Ophelia. It is to the credit of Shakespeare’s supreme genius that our sympathies are with the naval officer, for Shakespeare’s characters, too, are as real to us as our parents and friends and more real than our relations and our acquaintances. But to how few artists can this praise be given, save to Shakespeare and to Tolstoy! Yet to Proust it can be given in full measure. To read _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ is to live in the world, at any rate in Proust’s world—a world more sensitive, variegated, and interesting than our own. It is difficult to analyse the ultimate quality of an artist’s triumph; yet such is the function of criticism, the sole justification of writing books about books. Proust, it seems to me, had the extremely rare faculty of seeing his characters objectively and subjectively at the same moment. He can project himself so far into the mind of the persons he is describing that he seems to know more about them than they can ever know themselves, and the reader feels, in the process, that he never even dimly knew himself before. At the same time he never takes sides. The warm, palpitating flesh he is creating is also and always a decorative figure on the huge design of his tapestry, just as in _Petroushka_ the puppets are human beings and the human beings puppets. For Proust, though the most objective, is also the most personal of writers. As we get accustomed to the long, tortuous sentences, the huge elaboration of conscientious metaphor, the continual refining on what cannot be further refined, we insensibly become listeners to a long and brilliant conversation by the wisest and wittiest of men. For Proust, as much as any man, has grafted the mellowness and also the exacerbation of experience on to the untiring inquisitiveness of youth. In a page of amazing prophecy, written as long ago as 1896, M. Anatole France summed up the achievement of Proust at a moment when his life work had barely begun: