The difficulty of speaking at all adequately of Marcel Proust has grown with the number volumes of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” and also with the lapse of time since the first were published. The cycle moreover, is still incomplete (though we now know that its conclusion will appear); and the critic who ventures to see a definite intention in the dense and branching pages already published does so at his peril, and in the faith of that sense of inner continuity communicated from the outset by all the greatest novels, from the rabbling and extravagant “Gil Blas” to the compact and thrifty “Emma.”

The death of Marcel Proust, premature though it was, yet did not happen till his dying hand had put the last words to the last page of his vast narrative. Last words; but unhappily not last touches. The appearance of “La Prisonniere” confirms the report circulated after his death that the volumes then unpublished were left without those innumerable enriching strokes which gave their golden ripeness to the others. But, whether or not these final chapters, written in illness, and clouded (as one perceives from “La Prisonniere”) by physical weakness and deep mental distress, fulfil the promise of that unity to which all the strands of the elaborate fabric seem to tend, the first volumes (by which the author’s greatness will perhaps finally be measured) make it clear that he himself felt the need of such unity, and would have submitted his resdess genius to it if illness had not disintegrated his powers. On this inference the critic will probably have to rest; and it is enough to justify treating the fragment before us as already potentially a whole.

More serious for the critic is the obstacle caused by the long lapse of years since “Du Cote de chez Swann” led off the astounding procession. Since then the conception of the art of fiction, as it had taken shape during the previous half-century, has been unsettled by a series of experiments, each one too promptly heralded as the final and only way of novel-writing. The critics who have handed down these successive ultimata have apparently decided that no interest, even archaeological, attaches any longer to the standards and the vocabulary of their predecessors; and this wholesale rejection of past principles has led to a confusion in terms which makes communication difficult and conclusions ambiguous.

An unexpected result of the contradictory clamour has been to transfer Proust, who ten or twelve years ago seemed to many an almost unintelligible innovator, back to his rightful place in the great line of classic tradition. If, therefore, the attempt to form a judgment of his art has become doubly arduous it has also become doubly interesting; for Proust, almost alone of his kind, is apparently still regarded as a great novelist by the innovators, and yet is already far enough off to make it clear that he was himself that far more substantial thing in the world of art, a renovator.

With a general knowledge of letters extending far beyond the usual limits of French culture he combined a vision peculiarly his own; and he was thus exceptionally fitted to take the next step forward in a developing art without disowning its past, or wasting the inherited wealth of experience. It is as much the lack of general culture as of original vision which makes so many of the younger novelists, in Europe as in America, attach undue importance to trifling innovations. Original vision is never much afraid of using accepted forms; and only the cultivated intelligence escapes the danger of regarding as intrinsically new what may be a mere superficial change, or the reversion to a discarded trick of technique.

The more one reads of Proust the more one sees that his strength is the strength of tradition. All his newest and most arresting effects have been arrived at through the old way of selection and design. In the construction of these vast, leisurely, and purposeful compositions nothing is really wasted, or brought in at random. If at first Proust seemed so revolutionary it was partly because of his desultory manner and parenthetical syntax, and chiefly because of the shifting of emphasis resulting from his extremely personal sense of values. The points on which Proust lays the greatest stress are often those inmost tremors, waverings, and contradictions which the conventions of fiction have hitherto subordinated to more generalized truths and more rapid effects. Proust bends over them with unwearied attention. No one else has carried as far the analysis of half-conscious states of mind, obscure associations of thought and gelatinous fluctuations of mood; but long and closely as he dwells on them he never loses himself in the submarine jungle in which his lantern gropes. Though he arrives at his object in so roundabout a way, that object is always to report the conscious, purposive conduct of his characters. In this respect he is distinctly to be classed among those whom the jargon of recent philosophy has labelled “behaviourists” because they believe that the proper study of mankind is man’s conscious and purposive behaviour rather than its dim unfathomable sources. Proust is in truth the aware and eager inheritor of two great formulas: that of Racine in his psychology, that of Saint-Simon in its anecdotic and discursive illustration. In both respects he is deliberately traditional.