But over all this virtuosity there rules a mightier gift—the master-gift of insight. Proust, one could say, “knows everything,” in the restricted meaning of the words. No bent, no twist, of modern thought escapes him; yet, as one reader writes to me, “there is no dead psychology”—no case stretched on a Procrustean bed, with all that does not fit lopped comfortably, and discomfortingly, off. He, unlike Nature, is most careful of the single life. If ever we had questioned that—and we had very little questioned it—the Charlus portrait answered us: that masterpiece of the undaunted, following eye and mind. Proust leads us with him on this journey of the visual and mental powers; we are no more involuntarily drawn on than he has been into the state of an astounded fondness and appreciation for the maudlin, overbearing, ludicrous, yet constantly pathetic or superb old “invert.” We are offended personally by the insolences of his favourites; the tears in his unholy eyes can well-nigh wet our own ... and this though, with the master’s hand upon our shoulders, we have gone through every phase of the degrading intimacies, seen and heard the tragi-comic outbursts of the princely victim, every now and then remembering his “rank” and seeking to restore the true relation between him and those whom in his view he honours by his merest word, yet who are his disdainful masters through his helpless depravation. If there were nothing else than Charlus in the books, Proust must be given pride of place among the masters. But with the plenitude there is—what must we give? More than a master, one would say, a writer cannot be. Yet in the image here suggested of the magic circle, there is possibly the one thing more that causes Proustians to divide their reading lives into the time before and after they have read these books. No spell had yet been worked on us of potency like this; for though we are pent within the ring, we move within it too—the world revolves, for us, as in a crystal held beneath our gaze by one who, moving with us, will reveal the secret hidden not there only but in our own dim sense, when at the last _le temps perdu_ shall have become _le temps retrouvé_. ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE. XII _A NEW PSYCHOMETRY_[3] [Footnote 3: Reprinted from _The Times_ of Wednesday, November 29, 1922. _The Times_ had been almost alone among English newspapers in giving “publicity” to the death of Marcel Proust in its issue of Monday, November 20.—C.K.S.M.]