It is because of this that, though setting out to make a few observations upon Proust’s women, I feel it no digression if I draw attention here to a particular passage which occurs early in the novel, towards the end of the _Combray_ section in Volume I.—a passage in which he not merely gives the circumstances of his hero’s first literary composition, but puts before us the composed fragment itself. A few pages back and the boy has been bemoaning that, his choice of a literary career notwithstanding, his mind is blank of subjects, his intellect, at the mere idea of writing, a void. Now, suddenly, while out driving, he is so deeply enthralled by the charm of three steeples which withdraw and advance, disappear and reappear, always in different relations to each other, according as the setting sun catches their angles and the carriage winds along the country road, that words leap to frame themselves in his head and, for all the jolting and inconvenience of the moment, he must immediately write them down to “appease his conscience and to satisfy his enthusiasm.” The actual piece of prose so written is reproduced, says the narrator, “with only a slight revision here and there.” We may allow ourselves, I think, the presumption that it is substantially a true record.[2] Certainly it furnishes us with the key to the whole work. Passages from Proust more exquisite, even more characteristic, might easily be found; none so significant. Those ever-veering steeples, sometimes before, sometimes behind, lightening, darkening, changing, looking now like three golden pivots, now like three birds perched on the plain—they reveal, more fully and subtly than could any philosophic exposition, both the method and the philosophic preoccupation of the author. They declare that for him there was never an actual but always a psychological perspective, and that _peculiar to himself_. This is why there is no intellectual or logical means of checking Proust’s observations. Either we accept them as he gives them, emotionally, or we reject them as meaningless. He has, he repeatedly tells us, no faith in intellectual observation, neither will he presume upon logical deduction in questions of human feeling. He quietly discards that assumption of god-like knowledge for which we have come to look so confidently in our writers of fiction. He will have none of the sympathetic imagination that “puts itself in another’s place.” He refuses as an act of disingenuousness either to project himself into or to interpret the character of another. “We alone,” he says, “by our belief that they have an existence of their own, can give to certain of the things that we see a soul which they afterwards keep, which they develop in our minds.” Essentially, that is to say, he believes he can know nothing outside of his own sensations, and for him every sensation is inextricably interwoven with memory. Whether he writes of a woman