WITH the publication of "The Past Recaptured," the translation of Marcel Proust's great novel, "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu," under the title "Remembrance of Things Past," is brought to a close. As the Italian critic Umberto Morra has said, men may imitate parts of it with some success, but the whole will never again be equaled. In the present literary world where few writers and critics have been able to agree about anything, all have joined in their homage to the work of Proust.

The motif of this, the seventh and last part of the novel, is Time and Change. Throughout the years Proust traces, things and people have slowly altered, but it took the war to give the final impetus for the complete reversal of the Paris society, the society of the "Guermantes set," he pictures. From the time that the narrator sees the stricken M. de Charlus bow like a slave before Mme. de Sainte-Euverte, a woman he had always refused to recognize, till the author decides to write this work, it is the change that has come about that he emphasizes. The unevenness of two stones in the Prince de Guermantes courtyard, for instance, brings back to him the whole atmosphere of Venice, where he had stopped on stones of the same unevenness, and of his early years. In contrast to these reminiscences are the facts of the present. Mme. Verdurin has become the Princess de Guermantes, Gilberte is fat and has a daughter grown up, Bloch is in society, and the Duchess de Guermantes is completely out of it.

Throughout the novel hundreds of characters, as diverse as life itself, appear and reappear, and their every motive is analyzed. Proust reflects their world, which, like himself, is neurotic, tortured, and decadent. It is in the great piling up of character and detail that the overpowering effect is produced. The author knows, better than any other contemporary writer, the human mind; and he makes each character living and real. He has two primary interests: sexual perversion and social change. Few have had better subjects to show these than Proust in the Paris from 1890 till after the War, and he presents them with an amazing vividness.

A word might be said about Dr. Blossom's translation. In many ways it lacks that which made C. K. Scott-Moncriess' translation, one of the best examples of the art in English. The Classic flavor, for instance, of that great scholar's prose, so admirably suited to the epic "Remembrance of Things Past" is, has disappeared. On the other hand, Dr. Blossom has a marvelous command of the colloquial idiom which brings out another side of Proust's French. But in any case, "The Past Recaptured" is a vast improvement over the former translation, never published in this country, titled "Time Regained."