In 1932 John H. Birss caused something of a sensation in Keats circles by his discovery of the MS of the letter Keats wrote to Charles Cowden Clarke on October 9, [1816]—one of the two earliest known Keats letters. Although fragments of it had been printed in Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke's Recollections of Writers (1878), and before that in Clarke's reminiscences of Keats published in the Atlantic Monthly (1861) and the Gentleman's Magazine (1874), its full text was not known to Keats scholars until its discoverer printed it in Louis A. Holman's Within the Compass of a Print Shop (Boston: October, 1932) and in Notes and Queries for November 5, 1932. In both periodicals, an editorial note appended to the text of the letter described the circumstances under which the MS had been discovered: Birss, looking through “a little-known catalogue of manuscript letters and documents” in search of letters by Melville, happened to open the volume to K instead of M, and there found “a notation of an early Keats letter.” Following this clue, he succeeded in locating the holograph itself in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia.

On the evening of 13 May 1921 André Gide spent an hour with Marcel Proust, apparently for the first time in several years. For the past four days Proust had sent a car and chauffeur to fetch Gide every evening. Finally on the night when the latter could come, the invalid who had not been up in some time, had dressed to go out. The meeting took place in the little salon at 44, rue Hamelin, with its hideous Barbedienne bronze on the mantel and the Jacques Blanche portrait of the foppish young Marcel on the next wall. To one the atmosphere seemed stifling, but the other, having just left a still warmer room, was shivering.

Perhaps no reproach is oftener addressed to those who call themselves philologists than that they are unconcerned with that beauty which has furnished a distinctive epithet for the word “literature” in the phrase belles lettres, that they lack imagination and insight, and that they are quite unfitted to impart to others a sense of the spiritual values which inhere in the productions that form the subject matter of their studies. An eloquent writer, who is himself a capable investigator, has recently presented this view in an essay which deserves the attention of every teacher of literature, and especially of every teacher of English literature.

One day, in the darkest period of the Inquisition, Christ came back to Earth (so Ivan Karamzov begins his parable in Dostoyevsky's novel); but the Cardinal Inquisitor had Him imprisoned because His return was disturbing the order established by the Church. Sixteen hundred years earlier, when Christ had first come, He had refused to enslave the will of men; although by miracle, power, and authority He could have established himself beyond dispute (and Satan had tempted Him to do so), He chose to leave men free to decide what is good and what evil. But can man bear the torment of having to make such a decision? Did Christ not ask too much of man? Dostoyevsky's Great Inquisitor thought so, and therefore he and the Church substituted obedience for freedom; they lifted from man the terrible burden of free choice, they made the decision for man so that he merely needed to submit to rule and law. They, the Cardinal Inquisitor and the Church, took upon themselves the curse of knowledge; they suffered and were unhappy so that millions might be happy and relieved of the necessity of choice. Man dreads freedom and is eager to exchange it for certainty and security, so the Cardinal Inquisitor informed Christ; and Christ listened and understood how heavy was the burden of freedom which the Great Inquisitor took upon himself. Christ understood, we may assume, when he approached the old man in silence and kissed him, even though this kiss was the only answer that Christian love, humility, and forgiveness could give.

Much of the richness, as well as the fascination, of Rimbaud's art is due to the incongruities with which it is studded. These incongruities indicate a boyish sense of humor noticeable even in his treatment of serious subjects, imparting to them a certain cocasserie—a tough and sardonic humor indeed for a boy, but still a distinctive quality, savored by many. Like Hamlet, Arthur Rimbaud was given to madness, half feigned, half tragically-true, and his peevish jokes are of the same kind as those of that other embittered youth. These surprises also serve to color his descriptive poems, in verse and in prose, and in fact they may be thought to arise necessarily in the poetic process consciously cultivated by Rimbaud the voyant, who was not afraid to force his senses out of focus as a means of gaining access to the paradise of pure truth.

In two passages of his recent book on Thomas Wolfe (1947), Herbert J. Muller has briefly, but incisively, dealt with the time concepts of Wolfe and Proust. He points out that while both writers depended upon sensory impressions to recall the past, Wolfe lacked the keen subjective analysis of Proust and stayed closer to the actual experience that produced his memories. Wolfe's interest was in fixity and change as they are in real life, while Proust “aspired to the realm of Essence or Being, where change is mere appearance” (p. 75). It is important, I believe, that these distinctions be made, for Wolfe, unlike Proust, was no philosopher and would without question have been confused by an array of Bergsonian metaphysics. While outwardly the time concepts of Wolfe and of Proust seem somewhat alike, a closer examination reveals that these concepts are in many respects different. But no distinctions were made, for instance, by Mary M. Colum in her article on “Literature of Today and Tomorrow” (Scribner's, Dec. 1936, p. 102), which stated that Wolfe's work might well be described as “Remembrance of Things Past”—that “like Proust he tells us of his struggles with Time elements.” And Joseph Warren Beach, in American Fiction 1920–1940 (1941), while acknowledging that Wolfe could not have accepted fully the implications of Proust's theories, found that Wolfe and Proust had had a common psychological experience. “It is found in the recall by means of present sensations or impressions of closely similar impressions received in extreme youth” (p. 192).

Joseph Conrad's Mss provide a curiously intimate link with the personal life of their author. Among other things, the reader may note that Conrad was a smoker, that he had had drawing lessons at some period in his life, that he was on occasion worried about money, and that he was not averse to a refreshing glass. But the greatest importance of his MSS is that they tempt surmises about his creative rather than his personal life. It is lucky that Mr. John Quinn and other collectors were not discouraged by the fact that the holographs were anything but fair copies. The MSS they have preserved contain a full scale of revision offering an unusual opportunity to observe how a narrative art came into being. Conrad says much in his letters of how slow and painful the creative process was for him. His MSS confirm this, not so much by the inordinate amount of revision as by the fact that they show little evidence of pages thrown away or of imaginative lungings. In Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, they suggest an obstinate effort at total recall of scenes and situations that the author had either witnessed or believed he had witnessed. One feels that he was the slave as well as the master of his creations. When he put something on paper, it took on the objectivity of fact for him. He could serve such facts, but he could not alter them.

There are two truths about death: first, it is certain; second, its significance has always been a mystery. Man may think of death in one of two ways. He may consider it the goal of life and dedicate himself to preparation for it; or he may consider it a hostile power that attacks and destroys life. The idea that death is a desirable goal was heightened by many romantics of the early nineteenth century to a fascinated interest in death—a kind of intoxication. For them life existed for the sake of death. But in their philosophy death was merely a phase of “Werden und Vergehen.” They longed for and often sought death because they saw beyond it “absolute life”, life unhampered by the limitations of individual existence. This romantic concept, of course, had nothing in common with the traditional Christian idea of immortality.