We may take him at his word also when he acknowledges that the effort to penetrate behind the veil of these momentary perceptions was the chief interest of his life. The first of these illuminations—the vision of Martinville spire—had taken shape in a piece of writing which he gives us. We suspect that the last did also, and that its visible expression is the whole series of volumes which, after all, do bear a significant title—_A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_; we suspect that the last page of the last volume would have brought us to the first page of the first, and that the long and winding narrative would finally have revealed itself as the history of its own conception. Then, we may imagine, all the long accounts of the Guermantes’ parties and the extraordinary figure of M. de Charlus would have fallen into their places in the scheme, as part of the surrounding circumstances whose pressure drove the youth and the man into the necessity of discovering a reality within himself. What he was to discover, when the demand that he should surrender himself to his moments of vision became urgent and finally irresistible, was the history of what he was. Proust—and amid the most labyrinthine of his complacent divagations into the _beau monde_ a vague sense of this attends us—was much more than a sentimental autobiographer of genius; he was a man trying to maintain his soul alive. And thus, it may be, we have an explanation of the rather surprising fact that he began his work so late. The two volumes which went before _Du Côté de chez Swann_[10] were not indeed negligible, but they were the work of a dilettante. The explanation, we believe, is that in spite of his great gifts Proust was a writer _malgré lui_; he composed against the grain. We mean that had it been only for the sake of the satisfaction of literary creation, he probably would not have written at all. It was only when writing presented itself to him as the only available means for getting down to the bedrock of his own personality, as the only instrument by which his _fin-de-siècle_ soul—the epithet is, in his case, a true definition—could probe to something solid to live by, that he seriously took up the pen. It was the lance with which he rode after the Grail—“la vraie vie.” [Footnote 10: _I.e._, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_, published in 1896, and _Pastiches et Mélanges_, which, strictly speaking, did not come as a volume until after _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_, in the spring of 1919. But of the _Pastiches_ some at least had appeared in the _Figaro_ in 1908 and 1909, while the _Mélanges_ date even further, and include the introductions to Proust’s translations of Ruskin, _La Bible d’Amiens_ (1904) and _Sésame et les Lys_ (1906).—C.K.S.M.]