When we turn to Proust we are in the presence of a writer about whom, no doubt, there is no violent dispute. There may be much about his work that is disturbing to many, but he was not concerned, like Joyce, to affront so many prejudices, and in France it is not even necessary, for the road has already been prepared by heroic pioneers of old during a thousand years. But the writer who brings a new revelation is not necessarily called upon to invite the execration of the herd. That is a risk he must be called upon to face, it is not an inevitable fate. When the mob yell: “Crucify him! Crucify him!” the artist, in whatever medium, hears a voice from Heaven: “This is my beloved son.” Yet it is conceivable that the more perfectly a new revelation is achieved the less antagonism it arouses. Proust has undoubtedly been the master of a new intimacy of vision, a new flexibility of expression, even though the style through which the revelation has been made, perhaps necessarily on account of the complexity involved, has remained a little difficult and also, it must be said, a little negligent. But it has achieved a considerable degree of clarity and a high degree of beauty. So there is less difficulty in recognising a great masterpiece in “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” than if it were more conspicuously the work of a daring pioneer. It is seen as the revelation of a new æsthetic sensibility embodied in a new and fitting style. Marcel Proust has experienced clearly what others have felt dimly or not at all. The significance of his work is thus altogether apart from the power of its dramatic incidents or its qualities as a novel. To the critic of defective intelligence, craving for scenes of sensation, it has sometimes seemed that “À l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleur” is the least important section of Proust’s work. Yet it is on that quiet and uneventful tract of his narrative that Proust has most surely set the stamp of his genius, a genius, I should like to add, which is peculiarly congenial to the English mind because it was in the English tradition, rather than in the French tradition, that Proust was moving.[69]