Yet great advances were made. Balzac, for all his lack of balance and for all his hasty carelessness, was giant enough to make a hundred on his own account. The “naturalists,” without making any great advances in psychology, at least were in earnest in clearing out the old stage properties, in insisting that a love scene could take place as well in a railway carriage or a hansom cab at eleven o’clock in the morning as on a lake by moonlight or on a balcony at dawn. And Stendhal—but Stendhal was the first of the moderns, the master of the whole generation which is passing, and he had to wait till the ’eighties before his influence became important. Whatever is valuable in the advances that the novel has made during its latest period is valuable just in so far as it is the result of an insistence, with Rousseau, on being interested in the intricacies of human feeling, and an equal insistence, with Voltaire, in refusing to sentimentalise them. That these are the only lines on which the novelist can advance no one would dream of asserting. But it is more particularly because Marcel Proust seems here to stand head and shoulders above his generation, and not on account of his many other merits as an artist, that he has such a passionate, if still comparatively small, following to-day. He is, perhaps, if we return to that definition of the difference between a novel and a play, more of the essential novelist than any man has ever been. His aim is by a hundred different methods to make you know his chief characters, not as if you were meeting them every day, but as if you yourself had for the moment actually been living in their skins and inhabiting their minds. Everything possible must be done to help you to this end. You must feel the repulsions and attractions they feel; you must even share their ancestors, their upbringing, and the class in which they live, and share them so intimately that with you, as with them, they have become second nature. Nor is even this enough. The man who knows himself is not common, and to know Proust’s characters as you know yourself may only be a small advance in knowledge. So every motive of importance, every reaction to whatever stimulus they receive, is analysed and explained until your feeling will probably be, not only how well you know this being, who is in so many respects unlike you, but how far more clearly you have seen into the obscure motives of your own most distressing and ridiculous actions, how far more understandable is an attitude to life or to your neighbours that you yourself have almost unconsciously, and perhaps in mere self-protection, adopted.