The normal, healthy person, still active, still complying with life, finds it more than soothing to commit himself to this peaceable, effluent mind-flow, a current of thought that has, like life, its eddies, its _transes_, but persists, as must we all who agree with our destinies, in its appointed borders and so gains something of the peace of resignation that Renan speaks of: “_Il n’y a rien de suave comme le renoncement de la joie, rien de doux comme l’enchantement du désenchantement._” For there is, indeed, no joy in all these myriad pages: how could there be, since joy is clear-cut and impermanent and all Proustian values fade and are merged in each other without such a thing as an edge anywhere! The sharp, dramatic point popular novelists excel in would break the spell. We surrender ourselves to these entrancing _longueurs_; to indescribable sensations that endure. Reading in Proust is, to me, like the long drink of a child whom, by and by, a solicitous elder bids put the cup down ... a gesture that this Master will never make. It is a suave, sensuous pleasure, like stroking the long, rippling beard of Ogier the Dane as he sits, stone-like, in his enchanted castle. It is a patient, monkish task like that of tending with loving, religious husbandry the Holy Rose at Hildesheim, that has gone on growing for four hundred years. It suggests a sense of going on, a promise of a future that may not be so very different, such as we got when our German nurse told us that Grimm’s tale of the man who fell in and was drowned, but, presently, found himself under the still waters of the mere, walking, _langweilig_, in meadows prankt with daisies and buttercups and fat flocks grazing.... Proust translated Ruskin’s _Bible of Amiens_—just the unexpected sort of thing he would do—and one might theorise and hint that his learned appreciation of the beauties that lie within due submission to architectural rules, and acceptance of the limitations and possibilities of shaped stones, have helped to form the backbone of his style. It has the precision and poise of the arch, supported by the virility and integrity of the pillar, with the permitted _fioriture_ of the pinnacle sparingly used, as one sees it in the Norman churches dotted all round about Combray and Balbec. And I am sure his style is the magician’s wand without whose composed and certain wielding we should never have allowed him to lead us, like willing children, through the mazes, winding, twisting, but always planned and in order, of his mind—or Swann’s. And if Swann—remote, withdrawn, half-unsympathetic character that he is—had not been so essentially lovable and had not, while telling us all, succeeded in being at the same time suggestive, we should not have yielded ourselves so utterly to _his_ mind-flow.