‘Il me semblait un être si extraordinaire que je trouvais merveilleux que des personnes que je fréquentais le connussent aussi et que dans les hasards d’une journée quelconque on peut-être amené à le rencontrer. Et une fois ma mère, en train de nous raconter comme chaque soir, à diner, les courses qu’elle avait faites dans l’après-midi, rien qu’en disant: “À ce propos, devinez qui j’ai rencontré aux Trois Quartiers, au rayon des parapluies: Swann,” fit éclore au milieu de son récit, fort aride pour moi, une fleur mystérieuse. Quelle mélancolique volupté d’apprendre que cet après-midi-là, profilant dans la foule sa forme surnaturelle, Swann avait été acheter un parapluie.’ Can I end better than with this brief and casual quotation, which, better than my criticism, will show the fresh and fine reality which these pages mysteriously recover from the back of our consciousness (where it exists in a warm penumbra of its own) and exhale, as naturally as vapour from a new-ploughed autumn furrow? Something older and deeper than knowledge pervades the book. FOOTNOTES: [3] Translated into English under the title of _The House on the Hill_. David Watt, 1904. EPILOGUE As we glance from across the Channel at these writers, so often consciously opposed, the charm of distance blends the tints, harmonises the outlines, and shows us in most of them a certain similarity. They are children of Dionysos, not of Apollo; they are mystics, not materialists; they conceive existence as a great religious symphony which you must experience and not seek to understand. More than once, in reading the most liberal and modern among them, the words of the Catholic, Claudel, have risen to my lips:-- ‘Il ne faut pas comprendre; il faut perdre connaissance!’ They have, most of them, the intuition of a state transcending reality--I mean objective reality. Yet, notwithstanding this spiritual ideal, they set a high value on action, on social energy. I have just said that, as a rule the French writers of the Twentieth Century are mystics, but they are not ecstatics wrapt in a solitary trance; they are eager to act on men and women, to bind them in associations--though, of course, their groups are different, for some of them are Socialists, like our pastoral novelists; many are Nationalists from points of view as different as Rostand and Boylesve and Barrès; and to some the only vital bond is a religion (since they are French, naturally the Roman Catholic religion).