PARTISAN REVIEW
affinities be passed on to the English reader, since some of them may be
described only through verbal parallels in the original text. When Theseus
says "Je n'ai jamais aime la demeure, fUt-ce au sein des delices," it is
possible to recall that Gide has written of his old friend Paul Valery
that "Fut-ce dans les delices, il ne lui plaisait pas d'attarder."
Valery has always symbolized, for Gide, an ideal undistractable
vigor; and Theseus, too, is endowed with the same grand individual–
ism. Theseus at times is not so much a man as a committee, with Gide
at is head.
Olympian Goethe takes his place on the committee, beside Valery
and beside Racine's Titus. For whereas, in politics, Theseus pursues a
modified Stalinism, and he has, in the life of the senses, the uninhibited
command of enjoyment which Gide has tried to transplant from the
Tunis of 1894 into the Western Europe of our own epoch, he also
derives, in religion and in personal morality, from the Goethe whom
Gide has pictured in his preface to the Pleiade edition of Goethe's plays.
Even his motto, "Passez Outre," which clangs like a bell-bouy throughout
the story, is attributed also to Goethe. Theseus, as much as Goethe,
valued love as a liberating force; and, like him, he knew when to have
done with it. Nor can one fail to detect the Goethean affirmation which
Theseus opposes to the mysticism of the transfigured Oedipus. There
Theseus makes, on Gide's behalf, an act of confidence. The story of
Theseus, once begun, took on a panoramic aspect, as if Gide were out
to display every resource of art and language, and to rediscover his
own spiritual history in the story of the founder of Athens. No palpable
city bears witness to Gide's own long effort; but he has passed on his
conviction that man has not yet said his last word; in the last few
years he has gathered up the ends of a lifetime of work; his language
has taken on a definitive grandeur; and it is only just to acclaim
him,
as he has acclaimed Goethe, as "the finest example, at once grave and
smiling of what man can wrest from himself without the help of Grace."
J·
R.
I wanted to tell the story of my life as a lesson for my son
Hippolytus: but he is no more, and I am telling
it
all the same. For
his
sake I should not have dared to include, as I shall now do, certain
passages of love; he was extraordinarily prudish, and
in
his company
I never dared to speak of my attachments. Besides, these only mat-
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