Proust has some of the corrupt mysticism of Huysmans, but not so perilous as his; nor has he that psychology which can be carried so far into the soul’s darkness that the flaming walls of the world themselves fade to a glimmer; he does not chronicle the adventures of this world’s Vanity Fair: he is concerned with the revelation of the subconscious self; his hero’s confessions are not the exaltation of the soul. He is concerned, not so much with adventures as with an almost cloistral subtlety in regard to the obscure passions which work themselves out, never with any actual logic. With all his curiosity, this curiosity never drives him in the direction of the soul’s apprehension of spiritual things. He does, at times, like Mallarmé, deform ingeniously the language he writes in; and, as in most of these modern decadents, perversity of form and perversity of manner bewilder us in his most bewildering pages. I find to my surprise that a French critic, Carcassonne, compares Proust with Balzac. As an observer of society, yes; as a creator, no. “Never,” he writes, “since Stendhal and Balzac has any novelist put so much reality into a novel. Stendhal, Balzac: I write those great names without hesitation beside that of Marcel Proust. It is the finest homage I can render to the power and originality of his talent.” During Balzac’s lifetime there was Benjamin Constant, whose _Adolphe_ has its place after _Manon Lescaut_, a purely objective study of an incomparable simplicity, which comes into the midst of those analysts of difficult souls—Laclos, who wrote an unsurpassable study of naked human flesh in _Les Liaisons dangereuses_; Voltaire, Diderot; Rousseau, in whose _Nouvelle Héloïse_ the novel of passion comes into existence. After these Flaubert, the Goncourts, Huysmans, Zola, Maupassant. I should place Proust with those rare spirits whose _métier_ is the analysis of difficult souls. Browning wrote in regard to his _Sordello_: “My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study; I, at least, always thought so.” This certainly applies to Proust; and, as he seems to me to derive some of his talent from Stendhal and from no other novelist, I can imagine his casuistical and cruel creation of the obscure soul of M. de Charlus in much the same fashion as Stendhal’s when he undresses Julien Sorel’s soul with a deliberate and fascinating effrontery. Consider the question of Balzac’s style: you will find that it has life, that it has idea, that it has variety; that there are moments when it attains a rare and perfectly individual beauty. To Baudelaire he was a passionate visionary. “In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius.” I have often wondered whether, in the novel, perfect form is a good or even a possible thing if the novel is to be what Balzac made it, history added to poetry. A novelist with style will not look at life with an entirely naked vision.