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and self-martydom by which Madame Gide compensated herself for
her unhappiness. It is better, perhaps, to attempt no such moral judg–
ments upon their relationship, but merely to examine it.
The curious feature, perhaps, which strikes a modem reader
sharply is that in a post-Freudian world, Gide should have lived out a
classic textbook life with so little apparent realization of its Freudian
significance. To explain this, however, we have perhaps to remember
that however new theories of life may be accepted and absorbed, they
are not easily applied to things which have always been with us. Gide's
declaration of spiritual love for his cousin had been made in 1882; it
was not likely that it would ever be seen as the blind alley of his
Oedipus complex, an obsession which split his emotions from his physi–
cal desires. The horror and misery of the path that led through the
strait gate of spiritual love is laid bare in
Et nunc manet in te;
what
perhaps has not been so carefully examined is the other side of the
picture, the freedom which Gide found in Corydon's embraces. Pederasty
would seem of all sexual paths the least likely to give freedom from
sexual guilt, but this is essentially a Western, a Christian view-"it were
better for him, if a millstone were tied around his neck." This was
not the pederasty that Gide found in North Africa. For the Arabic
world, sensual pleasure with boys was a natural stage, in which the
man could indulge without fearing to affect his partner who would
as adolescence passed leave it behind and grow to man's estate and
man's pleasure unscarred by the experience. It was a purely fleshly
pleasure that gave Gide sex without the guilt in which his Calvinist
ancestry had dressed it. To such an experience all Claudel's citations
from Holy Writ about Sodom or talk of abuses of the natural order
were meaningless.
But if pederasty freed sex from guilt, so all the guilt and misery
became the more attached to Gide's spiritual love, to the lonely,
martyred figure of his deserted, wronged wife at Cuverville.
It
was
something so integral to his life, that his usual code of intellectual
sincerity, of open examination, could not touch it. It was, of course,
this unquestioned emotional ambivalence that laid Gide wide open
to his more dogmatic critics in their attacks upon his code of integrity
and sincerity. "You think that he really confesses his true motives?"
said Claudel scornfully. "Mirrors fascinate Gide. His journal is just
a long series of poses in front of himself." And again, "The real drama
of his life is never mentioned." "The teaching of Andre Gide, and
what he calls his influence," wrote Massis, "amount to no more than
this: that he stirs up every element of disquiet in the reader's mind,
