The New Weekly

Valery LARBAUD

25 juillet 1914

 

FROM ABROAD.

Paris.

The first appearance of "Les Caves du Vatican," André Gide’s most recent book, is undoubtedly the principal event of the closing literary season.

The literary careeer of André Gide may be taken for an example of what was fifteen or twenty years ago, the state of criticism in France. Almost from the beginning, from the publication of his first essays, Gide has been considered as a master by the best writers and critics of the day. But these were the Left Bank élite, a small minority, and, between them and the public stood the mass of the boulevard and official critics, who, from system, excluded and ignored all the Left Bank writers, and who, when the name of a Gide or of a Jammes was mentioned, talked of coteries and cénacles. As if these artistic and literary brotherhoods, the cénacles, were not precisely the only schools where young writers could possibly train and educate themselves ! As if the cénacles were not, for literary men, what the master’s studios are for the painters ! A certain aloofness, a particular quality which we shall venture to call "evasiveness," a purist ‘s scruples, all these constituents of Gide’s style were enough to keep at arm’s length the Right Bank critics of the Sarcey or Mendès type. Besides, Gide was too steadily following his own artistic ideal to think of material success, and he did not care to write twice the same book ; and thus the superficial criticism of the day could not find any clue to the general meaning and tendency of his widely different books. Moreover, the overbearing and intolerant attitude of some of his admirers of the younger groups made matter worse ; and between Left Bank littérateurs and the critics of the other side of the river there was a permanent state of war, all to the detriment of the writers of the young reviews, to which André Gide was then one of the most remarkable contributors.

Justice began to be done to him by foreign critics ; and he found a small but appreciative public in Germany and in Italy. In France he had to wait till his spontaneously formed audience had grown large enough — and perhaps, alas, old enough — to constitute a respectable minority. Then, and only then, official criticism became aware of his existence, and some years later an essay of Jacques Rivière inaugurated a new phase in the study of André Gide’s works. But, meanwhile, Mr Edmund Gosse had written an article which is, with J. Rivière’s essay, the best survey we have of the whole of Gide’s work. When we have heard for so many years so many French critics declare that they could see nothing, for instance, in "Paludes," how conforting it is to hear Mr Edmund Gosse say : — "Paludes lends itself, quite simply, to the pure enjoyment of the reader." ("Paludes" can be said to be to the novel what Sheridan’s "Critic" is to the drama : a humorous analysis and satirical exposure of all vain and aimless literary effort and attitude.) Indeed, this remarkable essay on André Gide, which appeared in one of the leading English reviews some years ago, and which has been republished, with some important additions, in Edmund Gosse’s Collected Essays, not only gives all the important facts concerning Gide’s parentage (he belongs to an old South French Protestant family), education, and mental development, but sums up, in a cool and restrained though highly appreciative way, all that the French admirers of Gide thought on the subject ; and in writing it Mr Edmund Gosse has deserved well of all who are interested in French literature. The English reader will find in it ("Portraits and Sketches," p. 269, seq.) a thorough and subtle analysis of two of the best and most characteristic of his novels, "La Porte Étroite" and "Isabelle".

These were published after 1909, and "Les Caves du Vatican" is the third novel Gide has given us since that date. But all his friends know that the first idea of this novel, or rather of the principal character in it, the fascinating Lafcadio Wluiki, was formed more than ten years ago. So that "Les Caves du Vatican," more than any other of Gide’s books, corresponds to a long period of his career, and it would not be safe to look at it as being a new development of the author of "La Porte Étroite." In fact, Gide himself hinted as much for the benefit of the critics, when he put under the title of his new book the words "By the author of ‘Paludes.’ " Nevertheless, we may be sure that the critics will be puzzled. This André Gide, whom Edmund Gosse so aptly compared to Walter Pater, appears in "Les Caves du Vatican" a riotous follower of Le Sage and Fielding and the picaresque tradition generally. Even the subtle psychological element in "Paludes" has been boldly discarded. All sorts of grotesque figures, from the solemnly ludicruous Julius de Baraglianle [sic] to the comically foolish Fleurissoire, surround us. Each of the three chief comic characters is the centre of attraction of a whirl of witch-like impostors, who appear under various disguises, always putting new tricks on their victims, who are too fantastically typical of unpleasant people to be pitied ? And while telling us of these pranks, Gide writes a perfect satire on contemporary French society. But the axle-tree, the soul of the book is Lafcadio Wluiki. The natural son of a French nobleman and a Roumanian demi-mondaine, Lafcadio has been brought up by a cosmopolitan series of "uncles," his mother’s friends. And at twenty, he finds himself a perfectly unprincipled youth, beautiful, clever, and mannerly, with a large allowance just left him by his dying father. And then he puts into practice and carries on to its utmost consequences his more or less consciously acquired philosophy. All the ordinary prizes of life are too small for his appetite ; ambition seems to him too mean and vulgar. The only triumph that will satisfy him is a victory over the moral law in himself : he will commit a crime, accomplish in cold blood a perfectly useless crime. But as soon as the murder has been accomplished, when Lafcadio, absolutely certain that he will never be detected, begins to think that it would be a greater victory still to denounce himself to the police, life offers again to him all its prize, and for the first time that young stoic of immoralism hesitates. The book closes on a hint to the reader that Lafcadio will not give himself up, but will marry the rich heiress who is in love with him, and will live a normal, if luxurious, life. An amateur criminal, as he would have been, had his education been different, an amateur saint, he confesses himself beaten by the world, and submits to happiness, ordinary happiness. But not without a longing — an eternal longing — for the other kind of happiness.

 

 

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