It was one of the distinctive characters of Proust’s genius that he combined with his great sweep of vision an exquisite delicacy of touch, a solicitous passion for detail. Many of his pages recall those mediaeval manuscripts where the roving fancy of the scribe has framed some solemn gospel or epistle in episodes drawn from the life of towns and fields, or the pagan extravagances of the Bestiary. Jane Austen never surpassed in conciseness of irony some of the conversations between Marcel’s maiden aunts, or the description of Madame de Cambremer and Madame de Franquetot listening to music; and one must turn to “Cranford” for such microscopic studies of provincial life as that of the bed-ridden aunt, Madame Octave, who is always going to get up the next day, and meanwhile lies beside her bottle of Vichy and her purple velvet prayer- book “bursting with pious images,” and listens to Francoises report of what is going on in the street, down which Madame Goupil, just before a thunder-storm, is seen walking without her umbrella in the new silk dress she has made at Chateaudun!

But just as the reader is sinking delectably into the feather-bed of the small town, Proust snatches him up in eagle’s talons and swings him over the darkest abysses of passion and intrigue — showing him, in the slow tortures of Swann’s love for Odette, and of Saint-Loup’s for Rachel, the last depths and involutions of moral anguish, or setting the frivolous careers of the two great Guermantes ladies, the Duchess and the Princess, on a stage vaster than any since Balzac’s, and packed with a human comedy as multifarious. This changing but never confusing throng is composed of most of the notable types of a society which still keeps its aristocratic framework: the old nobility of the “Faubourg” with their satellites; rich and cultivated Jews (such as Swann and Bloch), celebrated painters, novelists, actresses, diplomatists, lawyers, doctors, Academicians; men of fashion and vice, declassees Grand Duchesses, intriguing vulgarians, dowdy great ladies, and all the other figures composing the most various, curious, and restless of modern societies.

Without visible effort Proust’s art marshals these throngs and then turns serenely aside to put the last tender touches to his description of the hawthorns at Combray, or the lovely episode of Marcel’s first visit to Rachel, where the young man walks up and down under the blossoming pear-trees while Saint-Loup goes to fetch his mistress. Every reader enamoured of the art must brood in amazement over the way in which Proust maintains the balance between these two manners — the broad and the minute. His endowment as a novelist — his range of presentation combined with mastery of his instruments — has probably never been surpassed.

Fascinating as it is to the professional to dwell on this amazing virtuosity, yet the lover of Proust soon comes to feel that his rarest quality lies beyond and above it — lies in the power to reveal, by a single allusion, a word, an image, those depths of soul beyond the soul’s own guessing. The man who could write of the death of Marcel’s grandmother: “A few hours ago her beautiful hair, just beginning to turn gray . . . had seemed less old than herself. Now, on the contrary, it placed the crown of age on a face grown young again, and from which the wrinkles, the contractions, the heaviness, the tension, the flaccidity caused by suffering had all disappeared. As in the far-off time when her parents had chosen her bridegroom for her, the features of her face were delicately traced in lines of purity and submission, the cheeks shone with chaste hopes, with a dream of bliss, even with an innocent gaiety that the years, one by one, had slowly destroyed. Life, in leaving her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to rest upon my grandmother’s lip. On that funeral bed, death, like the mediaeval sculptor, had laid her down in the guise of a young girl—” the man who could find words in which to express the inexpressible emotion with which one comes suddenly, in some apparendy unknown landscape, upon a scene long known to the soul (like that mysterious group of trees encountered by Marcel in the course of a drive with Madame de Villeparisis) — the man who could touch with so sure and compassionate a hand on the central mysteries of love and death, deserves at such moments to be ranked with Tolstoy when he describes the death of Prince Andrew, with Shakespeare when he makes Lear say: “Pray you, undo this button...