The more we study the great writers of all ages, and the more we observe for ourselves, the more we realise that the world never alters; we can only ring the changes on the same material. Harmony and discord, beauty and ugliness! It is like a gramophone disc. The records vary, the melodies, the arrangements, make their individual effect, but the substance is the same. The Masters make their records on an unchanging surface. Marcel Proust’s is a magnificent record; perhaps the most brilliant ever achieved. It requires only that we bring to it a sympathetic and sharp-pointed needle. Did his death leave his record incomplete? One would like to know what more he had in his mind to record of these people. Especially is one curious as to the future of M. de Charlus. What did he do in the Great War? Did he open one of his houses as a hospital for not too badly wounded soldiers? Or was he content with lending his name to charity bazaars? Or was he—likeliest of all—galvanised by his high breeding and undoubted courage into a vigour beyond his years, to make a hero’s end? Perhaps we shall never know. Does it much matter? We can finish off these people to our own liking, or—if indeed his book was unfinished—leave them as he left them. There they are for us, all alive—and likely to remain so. REGINALD TURNER. X _A FOOT-NOTE_ Though in England almost every one, who has read and understood, admires the works of Marcel Proust, it is not so in France. There, not to go beyond my own experience, I have met plenty of writers, and good ones too, who cannot away with them. Even that essay on the style of Flaubert, which I had supposed would be universally reckoned a masterpiece, I have heard described by a friend of mine, a charming poet and admired dramatist, as childish. Now, when I hear such a one, and others whom I respect, disparaging Proust, I do not fly into a passion; I seek the cause, instead. And I find it—though the discovery, should they ever come to hear of it, would a good deal shock some of my French friends and surprise perhaps a few of my English—in Politics.