Reviews of the Week
Gide's Development
Andre Gide: The Ethic of the Artist. By D. L. Thomas. (Seeker and Warburg. I is.) Auttiottuti Mr. Thomas's statement that "Gide is neither liked nor understood in this country—except by perfervid Francophiles " is exaggerated, there is some truth in it, for Gide himself always declared that England was the country where he was least known. Yet the first honour he ever received was the Degree of Doctor of Letters conferred on him by the University of Oxford : it is true that a " perfervid Francophile " was largely responsible for this. Mr. Thomas is, however, not correct in claiming that before his own book there had appeared " no extended critical account of Gide written in English," since two were published in the United States, one by Van Meter Ames and the other by Klaus Mann which was also published in this country. Neither of these works is as good as his which, notwithstanding its faults, can rank as one of the best studies of Gide which has appeared in any language.
He has devoted years to the study ..f Gide's works ; he has analysed them deeply in an intellectual manner, and has, to a large extent, clarified them for his readers. It is a book which is invaluable for those who wish to reach a fuller understanding of Gide's compli- cated and complex nature and mind. It is a pity that, with all his thoroughness, Mr. Thomas should have shied away from a discus- sion of Gide's homosexuality and his attitude to it. This is essential for an understanding of his mind. It is possible to believe that, in reality, it played a far smaller part in his life than he would like us to believe ; he certainly does not seem to have been a homosexual in the ordinary sense. He wanted to be a martyr for this last stronghold of prejudice and hypocrisy.
The book has, unfortunately, many mistakes which impair its
usefulness for students and scholars. It has no bibliography or index, and its references are not full enough to be of use ; many names are so misspelt as to be unrecognisable ; almost all the dates of the works are incorrect, while there is the attribution of a quota- tion from Fontenelle to Fenelon which, to say the least, is mislead- ing. Mr. Thomas is wrong in stating that Gide's mother was a Catholic ; it is true that she came of Catholic stock but she herself was a Protestant, as is apparent from the description of her per- sonality by her son in Si le Grain ne Meurt. He is also wrong in saying that Les Caves du Vatican was an immediate success and became a best-seller, for Gide states in his Journal that it was amongst his three greatest failures commercially. Mr. Thomas tends to see Gide as painting himself in his various characters, but this is not really exact. Although he drew from his personal experience in everything that he wrote, none of his characters is exactly himself ; some—as Michel in L'Inanora!Lste- are what Gide might have been had one characteristic been allowed to develop unchecked. He nearly always wrote a book to study some psychological trait. This makes him less of a novelist than a moralist, less of a novelist than investigator. He did not really concern himself with creating complex characters giving the illusion of life ; he was an investigator less interested in men than in man. less anxious to make an amalgam of contradictions than to isolate special characteristics. He was a chemist who isolates a substance in order to obtain its purest essence. Each of his works is a chemical experiment in " purifying " some particular quality or vice which he pursued to its logical conclusions. Luckily he was also a great stylist who perfected the art of Racine, of expressing most by saying least, in a strict form containing, restraining, deep emotion.
Mr. Thomas makes the point that it was only when his creative powers were dying that Gide became preoccupied with social problems. He sees Les Faux-Monnayeurs as the last work of the creative period. It is true that it is at the top of the watershed and that thereafter Gide was more occupied with social problems than with personal ones, but this does not indicate a falling off in creative energy ; only a change of objective. First it was his relationship with God and with himself which preoccupied him ; when he had solved this he turned to social problems and later to problems of civilisation. In his first stage he was full of dissatisfaction and disquiet—Angst we were later to call it—and this is the period of his production which is best known and which had the greatest influence. For the post-war generation of the 'twenties he repre- sented the new "mat du siecle."
By a curious paradox, by this time Gide himself had left that stage behind him. By then he had cast aside self-torture, hair-splitting about motives and guilt and had become finally what he thought was really himself. He decided then to accept himself as he was and to be moral in his own way. With his liberation from personal conflict Gide was now freed from his obsession with self, and had energy to spare for objective considerations, not merely for the problem of personal guilt. Then he became the champion of victims and underdogs—criminal offenders, colonial natives and the under. privileged ; it was then that he took up Communism and went to Russia. There arose then a change in his conception of liberty and individualism ; he no longer wanted to be alone but to be part of a team. It was then that he spoke of "l'individualisme serviable mais non servile." This is a new departure from the entirely individualistic and personal sense of liberty expressed thirty years before, this added meaning of duty. Then looking for some sense of responsibility and obligation he thought that he would find it in Communism. At this time he was turning towards the future and denying the past. But Communism proved for him a " God that Failed."
After this a further development is seen in Gide's conception of liberty and individualism—a departure from the total and irrespon- sible liberty of his youth and from the liberty serviable of his middle years. He later believed that absolute liberty destroys the individual and also society unless it be closely allied to tradition. In Theseus, his last great work, he showed how the hero could only return safely from the Maze because he had clung tightly to the thread which linked him to the past. He returned to the same conception in the lecture which he gave in Oxford in 1947, when he took as his text the lines from Virgil where Aeneas is described as fleeing from burning Troy with his old father on his back. Gide said that these lines must be interpreted symbolically, that Aeneas was not merely bearing his father on his shoulders, but the whole weight of his past. In the same way we were fleeing from the burning city of our civilisation, with the burden of our past, our Christian civilisation based on the sanctity of each individual soul.
Gide ended in serenity, a Goethean figure vastly different from the tortured youth of the 'nineties. The last thing he is reported to have said on his death-bed was that, because he believed in that minority of those who would keep their integrity firm against all attacks, he could say: "C'est ld qui me permet a mai. si vieux et sf pres de quitter la vie. de ne pas mourir &respire. crois a la vertu des petits pettples. Je crois a la vertu du petit nombre. Le monde sera sauve par quelques-uns."
ENID STARKIE
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