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tachment (the old sufferer from asthma who took to his bed twenty-five
years ago and claims that he alone knows how to live), or in the belief
that God has planned everything in life with a purpose (the priest Pane–
loux), or in an attitude of complete moral anarchy (Cottard), or in the
refuge of art (Grand), or in a certainty of one's own superiority (the
state's attorney Othon). One of the characters, the philosophical Tar–
rou, reflects that all humanity can be divided into two categories, the
scourges and the victims. There must be another category, he adds,
formed of the real doctors-but there are not many of them. Putting
himself deliberately among the victims, he is striving toward the third
category through sympathy. Maybe someday he can become "a saint
without God."
Right after the liberation of Paris some of us began to be aware of
a vigorous new personality in French journalism: the chief editorialist
of
Combat,
whom everyone in Paris identified as the young Albert
Camus, born in Algiers in 1913. His name was already known by one
novel,
L'Etranger,
two plays, and a philosophical essay entitled
L e M ythe
de Sisyphe,
all devoted to expounding the notion of the absurdity of
life and illustrating the problem of human freedom. His essay was
written directly against philosophical existentialism but because he had
read Heidegger, Husser!, and Kierkegaard and because he knew Sartre
EXPLORATIONS
By
L.
C.
Knights
Brilliant critical essays including: How Many Children Had Lady
Macbeth?; Shakespeare's Sonnets; Prince Hamlet; Shakespeare
and Shakespeareans; Bacon and the Seventeenth-century Dis–
sociation of Sensibility ; George Herbert; Restoration Comedy:
The Reality and the Myth; Notes on a Marxian View of the
Seventeenth Century; Henry James and the Trapped Spectator;
Poetry and Social Criticism: The Work of W. B. Yeats ; The
University Teaching of English and 'History: A Plea for Correlation .
Mr. Eric
Bentley says:
" L.
C. Knights is perhaps the most impres–
sive [of the collaborating editors of
Scrutiny],
one of the best
literary journals of today.... But one does not see his full
strength until one has a whole bundle of his essays under a single
cover."
$3.00
at
all bookstores
GEORGE W. STEWART, PUBLISHER, INC., NEW YORK
