Where Proust stands as yet alone is in his manner of approaching his theme. Or, with more exactitude it may be said, his manner, vigilantly passive, eagerly quiescent, of letting his theme encroach upon and claim him. All attempted recapture of the past is for him “futile,” a “labour in vain.” Not reconstruction, but understanding of things remembered, is his aim. And to this end with deliberation he permits himself what the realist rejects but the plain man all unknowingly cherishes—the glamour in which for every one of us our own past is bathed. Divest the past, Proust seems to say, of the present’s gift to it—the light that never was on sea or land—and you take away its essence; treat the present as independent of the past and you destroy its integrity. That this is true we, as human beings—acting, thinking, receiving impressions from moment to moment—must recognise when it is pointed out. Our actual existence is not so much a narrative as a web in which the shuttle of events flies back and forth between the warp and woof of past and present, from neither of which it can escape any more than can we ourselves. The trouble is that it is pointed out so seldom, and least of all perhaps by novelists, who in this matter still lag far behind our common human experience. The grasp with which Proust has laid hold upon the philosophic and aesthetic values of memory—as, for example, in the passage where he describes the eating, after an interval of many years, of a _petite madeleine_ soaked in tea—is a new thing in literature. Here is pre-eminently the novelist with a past. None before him has taken _Things Remembered_ not merely for theme but for medium as well. To forget this, or even for one moment to minimise it, in speaking of Proust, is utterly to lose one’s bearings. But, accustomed as we are in our own hearts to his treatment of the past, we are so unaccustomed to it in literature that it is really not easy to avoid the artificial standpoint, the more that Proust proclaims his naturalism neither explicitly nor by freakishness of style. So quiet, so classical is his bearing that it hardly strikes one to investigate his premises. And so, concerning his long book of memory, one hears questions put by intelligent and even admiring readers. There are his “shadowy” women—“Did women at any time mean anything to Proust?”: there is his disconcerting chronology—“How old is his hero supposed to be during such or such an incident?”: there is his social pose—“Was Proust not himself as bad a snob as any he describes?” But such questions can be asked only in forgetfulness, answered only in constant remembrance of the author’s unique attitude toward his main subject, the past.