PARTISAN REVIEW
blague,
and corruption. On the reception, in 1907, of Barres into the
Academy: "How I like his thin face, his flattened-down hair, even his
common accent. What a flat speech he made! And how I suffered from
the touches of cowardice, the flatteries, the concessions to the opinion
of the audience, which are perhaps natural to him (I mean for which he
probably did not have to distort his thought, but which met a too easy
applause here); and also his thrust at Zola!" In particular, Gide is quick
to scent clashes between spirit and talent, self and career. "Too much
intelligence and not enough personality," he writes in 1890 of Leon
Blum, then a member of his "group." A similar judgment is made
again and again, on Pierre Louys, on Anatole France, etc. Intelligence,
literary professionalism-the very traits Americans admire in the French
-are held by Gide in high suspicion.
· From literary society he takes refuge in various things. He travels
in Spain, Africa, Italy. "Flee! Ah! flee farther to the south and towards
a more total exile." Country landscapes and country weather inspire
some of his most ecstatic entries. He seems, however, to find most relief
in reading; and it is significant that he particularly enjoys English
novels-much life, little art, few ideas.
His disgust with the world is paralleled by his disgust with himself.
An early entry tells how he broke with the Protestant discipline of his
childhood: "Whereupon, ceasing to call my desires temptations, ceasing
to resist them, I strove on the contrary to follow them.... I was amazed
that nature was so beautiful, and I called everything nature." This, like
the literary dream of the Latin Quarter garret, resounds with a hopeful–
ness that is seldom echoed by the later entries. For Protestantism, as he
tells us, he too often merely substituted other strict disciplines, among
which was the keeping of this journal, the ordeal of self-analysis. And
he is reputed to be a great artist of self-analysis: his American publishers
are advertising the journal as a modern equivalent of Montaigne's essays.
Here one must take exception. Fascinating as Gide is in this respect,
he is very far from the great masters of introspection. Augustine liked to
compare the vistas of the inner life, terrible as their content might be,
to the beauty of "vast courts," of "caves and caverns," of "fields and
splendid palaces." Montaigne was a melancholy but passionately amused
spectator of self. Proust, more tragic than Montaigne, was also more
deeply convinced of the grandeur of mind. Now Gide has an undoubted
place in this tradition, if only because he, too, writes splendidly about
himself. He is even capable of a witty detachment: "I am merely a little
boy having a good time--compounded with a Protestant minister who
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