[Footnote 10: _I.e._, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_, published in 1896, and _Pastiches et Mélanges_, which, strictly speaking, did not come as a volume until after _A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs_, in the spring of 1919. But of the _Pastiches_ some at least had appeared in the _Figaro_ in 1908 and 1909, while the _Mélanges_ date even further, and include the introductions to Proust’s translations of Ruskin, _La Bible d’Amiens_ (1904) and _Sésame et les Lys_ (1906).—C.K.S.M.]
Proust at the first glance looks wholly different from a man who rides off on a desperate adventure. There seems to be no room for desperate adventures in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It is hardly congruous to some senses to ride through the waste land in a sixty horse-power limousine. Nevertheless, it can be done. The outward and visible sign is, not for the first time, different from the inward and spiritual grace.
So by a devious path we return to our first question. Proust marks an epoch. What kind of epoch? Is it an end or a beginning? And the answer we have reached is the answer we might have expected in the case of a figure so obviously considerable. Proust is both an end and a beginning. More an end than a beginning, perhaps, if we have regard to the technique and texture of his work. In the art of literature itself he opens up no new way. And, in the deeper sense, he indicates a need more than he satisfies it. The modern mind, looking into the astonishing mirror which Proust holds up to it, will not see in it the gleam of something to live by; but it will see, if it knows how to look, an acknowledgement of that necessity and a burning desire to satisfy it. By so much Marcel Proust marks a beginning also. It is the flame of this desire which smoulders always through his book, and at times breaks out; it is this which makes it his own, and this which gives it, in the true sense, style.
I went Proust’s way for the first time one rainy winter evening five years ago, waiting in her warm boudoir for a foolish Society woman to come in and give me tea and an introduction to the new popular novelist. But she had not come in, and on a table near me, by the powder-puff and the cigarettes, I found an author who had not yet swept the board as he has since done.