When we read the lives of the great artists of the past, we are apt to be amazed at the indifference of their contemporaries to their early achievements; and we cannot believe that we too, in the same circumstances, would have been equally undiscerning. But here, happening in our own days, is an obvious instance of this contemporary blindness; and I, at least, as I read the little Proust’s first volume, and see spread so clearly before me, as in the light of a beautiful dawn, the world of his creation, try to make myself believe that if the noontide of his genius had never illuminated that world and made it familiar to me, that if Proust had never lived to write Swann and the Guermantes, I too should be as blind as were his friends to its beauty and merits. I tell myself this, and yet, with the book before me, I cannot believe it. But then I remind myself of what I already know very well, that new dawns in art are apt to appear on just the horizons towards which we are not looking, and to illuminate landscapes of which we have as yet not the slightest knowledge; and that it is only afterwards, when the master’s whole _œuvre_ is familiar to us, that we can see the real merits of his early attempts, and read back into them the meaning and value of his complete and acknowledged achievement. The moral of all this (and it is pleasant to end, if possible, one’s reflections with a moral)—the moral is that we do not know, we cannot know, what those disquieting persons, our younger contemporaries, are really up to; that we must “look to the end,” as the old saying has it; and that in the first attempts of other youths who, like Proust, were endowed with genius, but whose gifts, unlike his, came to no fruition, we possess no doubt early masterpieces of which we can have no conception, worlds of the imagination which actually exist and shine in the light of an exquisite dawn before our eyes, although our eyes cannot see them. LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH. VI _A READER’S GRATITUDE_