I have at last found time, or rather, for it expresses our relations better, Time has been gracious enough at last to find _me_—in regard to _Swann_. It was a new and satisfactory experience. His reality is extraordinary—at least in the main part of the book: I hope for the sake of French upper middle-class society of his day that it is not ordinary in such things as the big dinner scene in vol. ii.[15] [Footnote 15: _I.e._, of _Du Côté de chez Swann_; the dinner at the Verdurins’ at which Forcheville is present for the first time with the Cottards, Brichot the painter, Swann, and Odette. It is only fair, to both critic and reader, to explain that Mr. Saintsbury had read nothing of Proust save _Swann_, and that only in an inadequate translation. On the other hand, it was as impossible for the editor to contemplate a book of this sort without a promise of collaboration from his old friend and master as it was, at the moment, for the doyen of English (if not of European, which is to say the world’s) critics to qualify himself for saying more than is printed on this leaf.—C.K.S.M.] Has anybody said that he partakes _both_ of De Quincey and of Stendhal? He does to me, and I’m shot if I ever expected to see such a blend! You see, there is in him on the one hand a double measure of the analytical and introspective power that Beyle’s admirers make so much of; with what they also admire, a total absence of prettification for prettification’s sake. Yet he can be pretty in the very best sense, while Beyle never can, in the best or any other. Then, too, I at least find in him much less of the type-character which, though certainly relieved by individuality in the _Chartreuse de Parme_ and other books (especially _Lamiel_), is still always more or less there. But the oddest and to me the most attractive thing is the way in which he entirely relieves the sense of aridity—of museum-preparations—which I find in Stendhal. And here it is that the De Quincey suggestion comes so unexpectedly in. For Proust effects this miracle by a constant relapse upon—and sometimes a long self-restriction to—a sort of dream element. It is not, of course, the vaguer and more mystical kind that one finds in De Quincey, not that of _Our Ladies of Sorrow_ or _Savannah-la-Mar_, but that of the best parts of _The English Mail Coach_. In fact, it is sometimes Landorian rather than De Quinceyish in its dreaminess. But, however this may be, the dream quality is there, to me, as it is in few other Frenchmen—themselves almost always poets. Now, the worst of the usual realist is that, being blinder than any other heathen in his blindness, he tries to exorcise dream, though sometimes not nightmare, from life. Such a mixture as Proust’s I remember nowhere else. GEORGE SAINTSBURY. XIX _A REAL WORLD IN FICTION_