THE CRITIC AS IDEA MONGER
ANDRE GIDE.
By
Von Meter Ames. New Directions. $2.00.
Mr. Ames is not primarily a literary critic-which, no defi–
ciency in itself, does put him at a disadvantage in dealing with so
literary a figure as Gide. This is a volume in the New Directions series,
"The Makers of Modern Literature," but it does not deal with Gide's
works as literature and hardly comes close to Gide's real center as a
writer. Mr. Ames is interested in something else; it would not even be
true to say that he is interested in Gide's themes, which are personal,
subtle, and obsessive; his real interest is in certain large general ideas
(of Mead and Dewey) and in illustrating these from Gide's career.
These ideas are advanced persuasively enough, one has no objection to
them, but one puts aside this book feeling. that Mr. Ames might have
used a number of other authors equally well as a platform.
He is a critic who has found his author's "secret," and he announces
it with confident terseness: "It can be said in one word that his secret
is science."
If
our first response is one of shock in attempting to square
this with what we know of Gide's work, Mr. Ames as least comes to
our assistance with a prompt qualification:
It
must
be
understood that science for him [Gide] amounts to more than
for most people. It means not only the so-called natural but also the social
sciences.
It
means a creative and experimental procedure which unites science
with religion and art, as well as with industrial technology.
But the qualification is more misleading than helpful, and I, for one,
am quite unable to attach any meaning to a procedure which would
unite science with religion, or science with art, or all three together.
Mr. Ames, the victim of his own confusing rite of identification, pro–
ceeds farther on the same road by somehow fusing the sense of "experi–
mental" as applied to a new literary work with the sense of this word
as it is applied in science. When he says of
The Counterfeiters
that it is
"like a laboratory notebook," this does in a certain respect describe that
novel; but to proceed from this metaphor to an identification of Gide's
book with the scientist's setting up of an experimental situation in a
laboratory is to distort the nature of both literature and science. The
truth is probably somewhat in Mr. Ames's direction: that, despite his
obsession with the theme of the irrational in human nature, Gide is in
the end committed to the French tradition of rationality and lucidity;
but Mr. Ames has allowed himself to run amok in the critical pursuit
of "the message" so that Gide emerges as a mere literary exponent of
the philosophy of John Dewey.
503
