This is the proof, to me, of Marcel Proust’s (as one might think, indisputable; yet by a few disputed) genius. The _Swann_ book contains the largest share of interest, no doubt—that merer, franker kind of interest which other books can give us in a hardly less degree. But in the later volumes, as they “grow on” us, there is far more (if also there is less) than this; and it is through the more that we come finally to clear perception of Proust’s purpose and his mastery. For in these less immediately attractive volumes we are conscious of an ever-growing sense of the significance so deeply interfused through the whole work. He had by then become absorbed to such degree in his interpretation of the microcosm which he saw as a sufficing symbol of the irony, absurdity, and the incessant alternation, “intermittency,” and travail of the consciousness of man, that we are sensible, as he proceeds, of powers more transcendent than the highest of the writer’s mere accomplishment—stupendous as that is in Proust, who could “write” anything he chose, and chose to write so many things, from satire that is blighting in its smiling subtlety (so muted as to mock the hasty ear!), to lyric flower-pieces like the paradisal hawthorn-hedge in _Swann_, and the unrivalled comments upon buildings, pictures, fashions in dress and manners (who will forget the monocles at the big evening-party at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s?), books, the drama, even photographs! In the great elegiac glories of the death of Bergotte (not yet published in book-form), and of that _grand’mère_ who is the _motif_, as it were, in the symphonic composition of the unnamed central figure’s personality, Proust sounded chords which lay till then beyond the compass of his readers’ hearing, but were then revealed to sense that shall not lose them while it yet survives.