Of all these books--save, perhaps, Alain-Fournier’s, for which I have, I own, a peculiar weakness; of all these novels of childhood--unless I except M. Boylesve’s, and _Marie-Claire_, and _Jean-Christophe_ (for so many of them, when you come to think of it, are really quite first-rate)--the most delicate, the most pregnant with a sensibility extraordinarily rich, and ample, and yet sensitive as the impressions of convalescence or the first images of childhood, is an immense novel, published in the winter of 1913-14 by M. Marcel Proust, under the enigmatic title, _À la Recherche du Temps Perdu_: _Du Côté de chez Swann_. The book with which it is easiest to compare it, is Henry James’s _A Small Boy_, though that, indeed, is concise and simple compared with M. Marcel Proust’s attempt at reconstituting the vague shimmering impressions of a young mind, the wonderment with which--inexplicably to us--it regards places and people which in our eyes possess no magic. M. Proust’s hero is a small boy living in the bosom of the most regular of families--one of those vast French families, closely knit, whose tissue unites grandparents, great-aunts, uncles, cousins in such quantity as to limit the possible supply of outside acquaintance. One most familiar friend, however, there is, the friend of the family, a ‘hereditary friend,’ as Homer would say, M. Swann. He is a man of the world, a member of the Jockey Club, a friend of the Prince of Wales, a comrade of the Comte de Paris, a great collector; but for the small boy and his family he is especially ‘le fils Swann,’ the son of their old friend the member of the Stock Exchange (‘qui a bien dû lui laisser quatre ou cinq millions’) who has made a ridiculous marriage with a demi-mondaine--a case of all for love and the world well lost. And the world is lost the more completely that the impossible lady continues her adventures unabashed and unabated after matrimony. She therefore is not ‘received,’ or indeed hardly mentioned, in the ample respectable home of the small boy; so that Swann and this unlikely love of Swann’s, this beautiful wife of Swann’s, and Swann’s remote, intangible, but not invisible little girl, are the constant objects of his romantic curiosity.