The writers with whom Marcel Proust is most commonly compared are probably Balzac, Flaubert, La Bruyère, and principally, of course, Saint-Simon. I have chosen the latter for particular comparison with Proust because these two present many obvious and interesting similarities. It may be noted first of all that Proust had studied Saint-Simon so attentively that he had attained a certain “saturation” in his style and method.

When Keats was at Naples, on his way to Rome, in November, 1820, he became irritated at evidences of aristocratic government and determined to leave the place at once. “We will go to Rome,” he said;“ I know my end approaches, and the continued visible tyranny of this government prevents me from having any peace of mind. I could not lie quietly here. I will not leave even my bones in the midst of this despotism.” Keats was ill at the time and inclined to peevish moods: the immediate cause of this outburst seems, indeed, to have been no more than the sight of sentinels posted on the stage at the opera. Yet these were words he might under similar circumstances have spoken at any time in his life. There are, scattered throughout Keats's writings, many anti-aristocratic passages which reveal a deeply-rooted, often fervid republicanism, comparable to that of his more generally recognized liberal contemporaries. These passages show, moreover, that contrary to an impression which once prevailed and is in some quarters still current, he was an unusually close observer of men and affairs, intently alert to the social, economic, and political conditions of his day, and capable on occasion of expressing pungent and wise opinions about them. The evidence for this, to be found in part in his poetry, but to a larger extent in his letters, is corroborated by the testimony of his friends and others in a position to furnish first-hand information. It is my purpose in this paper to present this evidence in a more complete and systematic way than has heretofore been attempted, though the exigencies of space will prevent my using the full volume of available material.

In a previous article I tried to make clear the essentially autobiographical character of Thomas Mann's works. His writings, as I interpreted them, are primarily concerned with the problem of his own inheritance and career, more particularly manifest in the conflict raging in his breast between his bourgeois origins and his artistic profession (see pp. 564, 565). This same dominant dualism, which has been later elaborated in more recent critical works, is nowhere more clearly apparent than in the artist-heroes of his stories, to which important class of characters the present investigation prefers to restrict itself.

Hans naumann gibt in seiner Deutschen Dichtung der Gegenwart (1923) folgende Darstellung von Clara Viebigs Kunst:

Naturalismus wie Heimatkunst, peinlichst genaue Gegenstandsmalerei, sozialen wie psychologischen Realismus, all dies beherrscht diese verspätete, aber konsequent gebliebene und bedeutendste Naturalistin in ganz ausserordentlichem Mass.

A man's friends sometimes do him a great injustice by their very eagerness to explain him to others. Such has been Proust's fate. Since his death enthusiastic friends, lacking a certain sense of discrimination, have surrounded him with a legend which the world too readily accepted. Many stories and reminiscences about him have been published, but the real man is still hidden behind the legendary one. From the thousands of his letters said to exist, only about two or three hundred are thus far accessible, and these have made their appearance piece-meal during the last three years. Most of his correspondence remains in the care of his brother, who apparently is reticent about giving it to the public.

After the death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1834, while Hazlitt, DeQuincey, Cottle, and Allsop were publishing unwise and sometimes unfounded accounts of his life, Henry Nelson Coleridge, the poet's nephew and Sara Coleridge's husband, thought that some effort should be made to prepare an authentic biography. His additions to the Biographia Literaria and his Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge show how well he succeeded.

The discussion of an author in terms of a literary school invites two methods of procedure. The investigator may touch lightly on each of a large number of works, or he may limit himself to a more exhaustive study of a single work. The latter method is the one adopted for this paper, since it has the double advantage of involving lighter obligations and of leading to more definite results. The work selected for examination is Per Hallström's short story, A Secret Idyll.

According to entries in his Note Books which have often been pointed out, Hawthorne in 1843 was reading a “tale of Tieck”; and it has been conjectured that this tale was Die Vogelscheuche, which thus served as the source of Feathertop. On the other hand, the resemblance of Feathertop to the following entry of 1840 in the Note Books has also been frequently noted: “To make a story out of a scarecrow, giving it odd attributes. From different points of view it should appear to change—now an old man, now an old woman—a gunner, a farmer, or the Old Nick.” And it has been suggested that if this note of 1840 be accepted as the source of Feathertop, the probability of Hawthorne's indebtedness to Tieck is thereby lessened.

One of the commonest headings in the notebooks on which Charles Reade founded his novels is fœmina vera. He considered himself an authority on woman. In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette he calls himself “a patient drudge, who has studied that sex profoundly in various walks of life.” Certainly his women are more memorable, and the subject of more comment and criticism, than his men. To them W. D. Howells devoted a long essay in his Heroines of Fiction. Though, like his men, they fall into easily recognizable, frequently repeated types, they are more alive, more real, less subordinate to the demands of story structure. The result of more study and more enthusiasm, they are less romanticized, less melodramatized than his heroes and villains.

Among the contents of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, 1866, few pieces aroused more hostility than The Leper. John Morley and Robert Buchanan, it is true, ignored that poem in their damaging critical notices in The Saturday Review and The Athenæum for August 4, nor did Swinburne mention it in Notes on Poems and Reviews. But The Spectator of September 22, discussing the question of immorality in literature, after citing Swinburne's Faustine as a poem in which artistic treatment justifies the subject, added: “It is entirely otherwise with his Anactoria and Phaedra, and other foul stuff, worst of all, The Leper, which we think no critics can speak worse of than they deserve.” An article in Fraser's Magazine for November, though predominantly favorable to Poems and Ballads, named The Leper among the poems that should be suppressed. The Athenæum for November 3, in a criticism of Notes on Poems and Reviews, remarked: “To our thinking, nothing can be more horribly impure, more utterly loathsome, than the story of the unclean priest [sic] and his leprous mistress [sic].” The Westminster Review for April 1, 1867, mentioned Laus Veneris, The Leper, and Les Noyades as the chief objects of popular clamor.

By no means the least factors in the unity and critical effectiveness of The National Observer and The New Review, the magazines edited by W. E. Henley, were the conscious and definite canons by which they were guided. Although he never formulated an æsthetic system, Henley nevertheless worked and judged in accordance with several clearly perceived principles, the exposition of which is our immediate task.