(The narrator goes to see La Berma for the second time.)

“My impression, to tell the truth, though more agreeable than before, was not really different. Only, I no longer pitted it against a preconceived, abstract, and false notion of dramatic genius, and I understood now, that dramatic genius was precisely this. I had been thinking earlier that if I had not enjoyed my first experience of La Berma it was because, as with my earlier encounters with Gilberte in the Champs-Élysées, I had approached it with too strong a desire. Between these two disappointments there was perhaps not only this resemblance, but another, deeper one. The impression made upon us by a person or a work of strong character (or its interpretation) is intrinsic to them. We have brought along with us the ideas of ‘beauty,’ ‘breadth of style,’ ‘pathos,’ which we might just possibly think we recognize in the banality of a passable talent or face, but our critical mind is confronted in fact with the nagging presence of a form for which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, the unknown part of which it needs to extricate. It hears a high-pitched sound, an oddly questioning intonation. It asks: ‘Is that good? It it admiration I am feeling? Is this what is meant by richness of color, nobility, power?’ And what answers back is a high-pitched voice, an oddly questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person we do not know, in which no scope is left for ‘breadth of interpretation.’ And for this reason, really fine works of art, if they are given genuine attention, are the ones that disappoint us most, because in the sum total of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.”

(Proust, The Guermantes Way, p.43, trans. Mark Treharne)