Two achievements in Proust’s output I should rank as great. The first is the section of _Swann_ entitled _Un amour de Swann_. He had a large theme here—love and jealousy. The love is physical and the object of it contemptible; the jealousy is fantastic. But the affair is handled with tremendous, grave, bitter, impressive power. The one fault of it is that he lets Swann go to a _soirée musicale_ and cannot, despite several efforts, get him away from it in time to save the interest of the situation entire. Yet in the _soirée musicale_ divagation there are marvellous, inimitable things. The second achievement, at the opening of _Sodome et Gomorrhe_, is the psychological picture of the type-pederast. An unpromising subject, according to British notions! Proust evolves from it beauty, and a heartrending pathos. Nobody with any perception of tragedy can read these wonderful pages and afterwards regard the pervert as he had regarded the pervert before reading them. I reckon them as the high-water of Proust. Speaking generally, Proust’s work declined steadily from _Swann_. _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_ was a fearful fall, and as volume followed volume the pearls were strung more and more sparsely on the serpentine string. That Proust was a genius is not to be doubted; and I agree that he made some original discoveries in the by-ways of psychological fiction. But that he was a supreme genius, as many critics both French and English would have us believe, I cannot admit. ARNOLD BENNETT. THE END _Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_. [Transcriber’s Notes: In two quotations from Proust’s _À la recherche du temps perdu_, words are missing, rendering the quotations unintelligible. The missing words, in brackets below, were supplied based on the authoritative French edition (Gallimard, Bibliothêque de la Pléiade, 1988, vol. III). Je n’avais [jamais] fait de différence entre les ouvriers si loin qu’on allât dans [ses] effets d’art raffiné Other obvious printer errors have been corrected without note.]