[Footnote 8: Reprinted from _The Times Literary Supplement_ of Thursday, January 4, 1923, where this article followed an English version of a formal tribute to Marcel Proust, signed by nineteen English men and women, which appeared (in French) in the special number of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ for January 1923. Mr. Middleton Murry had already written, at greater length (too great, indeed, for reproduction in this volume), on Marcel Proust in _The Quarterly Review_ for July 1922.—C.K.S.M.] For Englishmen Marcel Proust has already become one of the great figures of modern literature. The feeling is common to many of his readers that in some way his work marks an epoch. What kind of epoch it is harder to say. Is he an end, or a beginning? And, again, yet another question insinuates itself continually as we pass slowly through his long volumes. What precisely—if answers to such questions can be made precise—was his own intention as a writer? Not that it necessarily makes the least difference to his own importance whether he succeeded or failed, whether he was consistent or spasmodic in following out his own plan. But we, at least, should be the happier for some indication of the thread to follow. For there comes a time in the reading of a long novel—and _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_ is surely one of the longest—when we feel the need to stand aside, to contemplate it as a whole, to grasp the pattern, to comprehend the general vision of life on which its essential individuality depends. Only thus, it seems, can we really make it our own.