MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON SOME years ago I read a story by Sir John Squire dealing with the adventures of an unsuccessful poet employed in the obituary department of a newspaper. Since then I have taken a mild interest in the functions, character and habits of these necrologists. To spend full hours totting up the triumphs and misfortunes of eminent contemporaries must leave in the mind a sad sense of the mutability of human fortune. It must be exhilarating, in its way, to note the falsity of some statesman's guffaw and to decide to add forthwith to his card a deft and venomous sentence indicating his lack of authenticity. Those whose task it is to compile these obituary notices must acquire a posthumous attitude towards their contemporaries: they see them front-a peculiar angle, even as a dentist must visualise his patients, not in forms of size and colour, but in forms of molars, canines, cavities and lateral incisors. I am glad that it is not my fate to spend my working hours upon these premature autopsies. It must be bad for the soul to indulge so constantly in the revolting art of innuendo, and to conceal the thorns of veracity amid the arums and smilax of funeral wreaths. I do not blame the necrologists if from time to time they get things rather wrong ; it is but rarely that I am moved to protest. Such a movement of negation was, however, aroused within me when I read the obituary in The Times on Andre Gide. The writer of this erring notice expressed surprise that the author of the Nourritures Terrestres should have enjoyed but " faint and sporadic " recognition in this country. " Very different," he added, " from the English welcome given, for example, to Andre Maurois."
* * * * I am willing to believe that the gentleman wno wrote this notice had some limp conception of what he wanted to say. Yet had he devoted more vigorous attention to his remarks, it might have occurred to him that when the University of Oxford, "n despite of probable objections, confers upon a toreign author the degree of Doctor of Letters, the recognition implicit in this gesture cannot accurately be described as " faint." I may be obtuse, but it does not seem to me that the epithet " sporadic " or the festive words " English welcome " reflect the powerful precision that one associates with the newspaper in which they occurred. Nor do I understand why the inauspicious name of Andre Maurois should have been inserted in this memorial tribute. Did the writer of the notice seriously suppose that any comparison• can usefully be drawn between Les Silences du Colonel Bramble and Le Retour de !'Enfant Prodigue? Did he equate Ariel with Pahtdes? On what grounds, above all, does he assert that the works of Gide " failed to stir the English public " ? Undoubtedly Gide's novels and diaries do not figure with any ptpminence upon our railway bookstalls. But is it by those standards that our great national newspaper is accustomed to estimate the literary value of those who win the Nobel Prize ? Few twentieth-century writers, I assert, have exercised as great an influence upon the educated English reader. Proust furnishes the only possible parallel. It is embarrassing to feel that many Frenchmen may have read this obituary and have taken it as a sample of our English thought.
• • * * The French. in their prudish moments, become very prim indeed. Many of my French friends, while admitting that Gide was a magnificent artist, are shocked by the suggestion that this exquisite immoralist had any moral message to convey. Even M. Mauriac, in defending Gide's memory against the charge that he corrupted the minds of a younger generation. contends that he exercised no ethical influence whatsoever. " Nobody." he writes with some asperity, " can be persuaded to become a hunchback." I cannot but feel that these denials are due to the exaggerated emphasis given to Gide's rather boyish defiance of propriety. Admittedly he denounced current taboos with a nay serenity which, to quote M. Mauriac, " faisait peter." Yet his attacks upon convention were not delivered in order to make people laugh ; they were delivered with the more serious purpose of forcing people to think. As The Times pointed out in the admirable leading article that atoned for its unfortunate obituary, the real theme of Gide's whole work is the theme of personal liberty. It quotes him as saying, " To free oneself is nothing ; it is being free that is so difficult." Nurtured as he had been in the rigid tenets of French Protestantism, he felt himself to be horribly abandoned once he lost his faith. " It is the uncertainty," he wrote in the Nourritures Terrestres," of the paths of life that is so torturing. To choose is terrifying, once one stops to think. Liberty undirected by duty is a most alarming thing." On almost every page that he wrote one finds the constant preoccupation with the conflict between a desire for individual freedom and the frightening loneliness, the sense of spiritual abandonment, that assail those who strive to follow solitary paths. It is upon this theme that he plays so many sensitive variations.
The accusation levelled against Andre Gide is that, with tranquil but daemonic subtlety, he destroyed the valuable certitudes of the young. Such a charge was brought by Meletus, Anytus and Lyco against the veteran Socrates two thousand three hundred and fifty years ago. I am angered by such an imputation. When I first came to read and to admire Andre Gide, I was every bit as young and malleable as were Lysis and Charmides. Am I conscious that the Nourritures Terrestres, or even Limmoraliste, seared the spring buds of principle or withered my young con- cepts of the beautiful and the good ? Not in the very least. I do not remember even that I obtained any jubilant release from boyhood prejudices and inhibitions. The effect upon me was not negative but positive. His writings enhanced my curiosity and my zest ; from them I derived a distrust of pragmatic injunctions and a delight in the variety of human life. I am certain that they did me not harm but good. They came as a relief to me from the sharp facets of Anatole France's cynicism, from the mystic selfishness of Barres, from the weary aestheti- cism of Walter Pater. I did not interpret-Gide's questing method as in any sense identifiable with the pernicious doctrine of art for art's sake. He seemed to me perplexed and alive. I revelled in his perplexity. What an admirable antidote he furnished, with his brooding consciencse to the sterile injunctions of the crdte du moi ! For me he became the great intermediary, the gay liberator, bringing with him a message of encouragement and light. Certainly he taught me that this world was a cryptic maze, yet he also showed that tile sole thread to guide one's footsteps was the thread of probity. How can these pedants assert that Gide exercised no moral influence, when he taught us all that insincerity and cruelty were absolute crimes ? " Do not aspire," he whispered, " to discover God except in every- thing." I became one of the band of his Nathanaels ; my gratitude and my esteem for the modern Socrates are neither sporadic nor faint. * * * * Gide suffered much, I suppose, from his unquenchable sincerity. He suffered from his own outspokenness ; he suffered when he denounced the principles of French colonial admini- stration ; he suffered when he repudiated the " abominable failure " of Russian Commintism. Yet to the last he retained his provocative gaiety. When in his eightieth year he was asked what he had enjoyed most in, life he answered': " The Arabian Nights, the Bible, the pleasures of the flesh and the Kingdom of God." There are those, I know, who discovered in his recently published correspondence with Paul Claudel symptoms of intolerable levity. Was Socrates flippant ? Of course Gide was an ironist ; but a teacher. too.
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