Colette died in 1954; since that time there has been little worthwhile critical note taken of her writing. This, despite the fact that she is allowed, although often grudgingly, a place of importance in contemporary French letters, with frequent reference made to a pervasive lucidity in her work. No one, however, has gone on to further define this elusive quality. The prevailing clichés continue, in the form of vague statements about natural style, classical tone, instinctive comprehension, and primitivistic orientation to the world. Colette has often been called the descriptivist of nature par excellence, but she has been accused equally often of shallowness, superficiality, and a lack of concern for larger human problems.

Thomas Mann's debt to Sigmund Freud is well-known. It is an important part of the larger question of Freud's influence on twentieth-century literature in general. Conversely, it was two major essays by Mann, “Die Stellung Freuds in der modernen Geistesgeschichte” (1929), and “Freud und die Zukunft” (1936), which did much to establish Freud's reputation as one of the great thinkers of the century. Mann referred to psychoanalysis in many of his works, as witness the caricature of an analyst in Der Zauberberg. He freely admitted its importance for him, as in his confirmation of the apparent Freudianism of the Joseph stories. It remains far from clear, however, just when he first encountered Freud's ideas, and how much he learned from them. It would be particularly desirable to know with certainty whether the new psychological theories came as exciting revelations to the youthful Mann, or whether they merely confirmed conclusions which he had already intuitively reached. The latter possibility is suggested, inter alia, by the interesting anticipations of Freudian ideas in the early works of Arthur Schnitzler. Mann himself remained strangely vague and noncommittal concerning his first acquaintance with the new psychology. His reticence on this point contrasts with the openness and relish with which he discussed the chronology and extent of his debts to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wagner.

Although Albert Camus furnished us with only one rather vague acknowledgement of influence by Alfred de Vigny, I believe that their affinity goes beyond a recognized common distress in the face of certain aspects of the human predicament. I think further that superficial differences in the situation of the two authors mask attitudes which are fundamentally similar. In order to give this kinship the attention it deserves, I should like first to examine the relationship between the moral, social, and intellectual forces which formed the two men, and with this background to discuss two bases for affinity of metaphysical, social, and artistic points of view.

Camus's humble origins had much the same significance as the romantic's aristocratic attachment to the past had for him. Each writer tended to insist on his alienation from the dominant middle class, but both noted a relationship between the popular and aristocratic milieux. The 1957 Nobel Prize winner stated that in the nineteenth century official social values were attacked by revolutionaries and by aristocrats like Vigny. “Dans les deux cas, peuple et aristocratie, qui sont les deux sources de toute civilisation, s'inscrivent contre la société factice de leur temps.” And in recounting the realization that his classmates hated him for his aristocracy, Vigny added, “J'étais pareil à un jeune ouvrier qui part avant l'aube pour faire sa journée . . . ”

In novel after novel,“ William York Tindall says, in Forces in Modern British Literature, ”sensitive lads are apprenticed to life, formed by its forces, rebelling against them, sometimes failing, sometimes emerging in victory. . . . From 1903 onwards almost every first novel was a novel of adolescence.“ Samuel Butler, he adds, started the vogue with The Way of All Flesh (1903). He ”wrote this book between 1872 and 1884 to express hatred for his father, admiration for himself, and his dearest prejudices.“

Perhaps we can push the date back of 1903 to Huysmans' À rebours (1884) and his sensitive protagonist, des Esseintes. From Huysmans we go to Oscar Wilde, to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which owes much to À rebours. The world in which these sensitive young men find themselves is Philistine, money-grubbing, dull, insensitive.