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deficiency is then connected with Gide's idea of culture and indeed his
entire career, as if a few months' behavior were an adequate sample and
trial of a lifetime's dedication to culture, morality, and humanity. The
process of using an author's political opinions as a criterion of his work
ough t to be left to those who are interested solely in politics: totalitarian
politics.
There is much more to be said of Gide's journals and Gide's entire
work as representative of all the virtues and limitations of modern
literature. The limitations are real enough and nothing is gained by
denying them or overlooking the necessary task of attempting to
transcend them. But it is just as false to forget the virtues, and to over–
emphasize the limitations. There are always a sufficient number of
philistines and middlebrows to remind us of the limitations while ignor–
ing the virtues. And it is always tempting to listen to the sweet nothings
of the
Zeitgeist
(that fickle, promiscuous, fancy lady who is so often get–
ting married, divorced, and compromised). Any examination of Gide's
work, his journals, and his idea of culture mUSt include the valor with
which he repudiated the Soviet Union, the strong and fruitful criticism
he made of French colonial imperialism after visiting the Congo, his
ceaseless effort to enlarge and extend the borders of sensibility and con–
sciousness by learning foreign languages and studying foreign literatures.
At the same time, bearing in mind these virtues, we ought also to remem–
ber his weakness as a genuine novelist, the limitation involved in making
sexual inversion the most important of moral problems or the symbol
of moral freedom, and the errors in literary taste and sensibility which
are at least in part the consequence of an omnivorous study of literature:
such errors as his overestimation of Edmund Gosse, Pearl S. Buck, John
Steinbeck, Dashiell Hammett, and many others.
When we think of Gide reading Milton in the moonlight in
the French Congo, we must also think of how this literary pursuit in
Africa was matched by
his
equal perception of the social injustice which
prevailed about him and which he did much to make public. He was
full of humility about his friend and peer, Paul Valery; he was contrite,
remorseful, and noble in acknowledging his failure, at first, to recognize
Proust's genius; he was candid about and critical of his anti-Semitic emo–
tions. He experienced to the full the attitude of the artist isolated from
society and pursuing art for art's sake, just as he lived out and lived
through the problem of the individual's moral freedom and moral
justification; and just as he experienced with his whole being the burden
and bewilderment of the author who attempts to find out what his social
responsibilities are, as an author and as a human being.
