the last pages of _Du Côté de chez Swann_ and the first part of _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ presented in unfaltering analysis. It is a series of emotions that has been treated many times and has inspired more than one masterpiece of the world’s literature. For, whatever else in life comes twice, that does not come. Love may advance down the years often enough and gaily enough, “overthrowing all ancient memories with laughter”: the passions of maturity may be deeper, stronger, less impermanent. But the particular charm of that first flowering is irrecapturable. Whence its unique fascination for the novelist. To compare Proust’s treatment of it with that of other writers—with, for example, Turgenev’s beautiful _First Love_—would be a forlorn and foolish business. To praise the one at the expense of the other would be to blame a big writer for failing to achieve a thing at which he never aimed. Those who find themselves in sympathy with Proust’s methods, who recognise in the technique of his work a new formula, in its style a new prose rhythm, and in the spirit of it an alert and original intelligence, will always look on Gilberte as one of his most fortunate successes. ALEC WAUGH. VIII _PROUST’S WOMEN_ The literature of imagination has always been rich in autobiography, confessed and unconfessed. It is in its essence, perhaps one should say in its impulse, largely an affair of passionate reminiscence. Taken, therefore, as merely a recent writer of distinction who has chosen to deal avowedly with _Things Remembered_, Proust must challenge comparison with dozens of eminent men, his forerunners and contemporaries. Tolstoy has given us his own life-history, not only diffusively throughout his novels and pamphlets, but in that wonderful piece of reconstruction, _Childhood and Youth_. Among living men, James Joyce, with an epic gift and an heroic feat of memory, has recorded for us an impression of his past, physical, mental, spiritual, and has shown it interwoven with countless other lives. And these are two taken at random. _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_—Proust was not the first, nor will he be the last, to choose it as a theme.