It is not very amusing to be either a snake or a lizard in Italy. Lizards are caught in nooses and then tied by one leg and made to run on the remaining three; or secured by a cord round the neck and swung about in the air—mighty good sport, this; or deprived of their tails and given to the baby or cat to play with; or dragged along at the end of a string, like a reluctant pig that is led to market. There are quite a number of ways of making a lizard feel at home.
On the whole, one prefers to read Mr. Douglas on the subject of wine, or on the rarity of the use of red things (wine excepted) in Italy, or on the little flames that are supposed to be seen at night over the graves in cemeteries. Mr. Douglas may be gross at times, but he is never a bore. He gives us a meal of many courses, and allows none of the courses to last too long. But it would be a more enjoyable meal if we did not hear in the crabbed laughter of our host the undertones of despair—the despair that comes of “considering your neighbour, what an imbecile he is,” and failing to realise that in order to enjoy his imbecility to the full you must first see him a little lower than the angels. Cervantes did this. Dickens did it. Mr. Chesterton does it. That is why they are not “for the fastidious in particular.”
XV
M. ANDRÉ GIDE MAKES A JOKE
Lady Rothermere does not measure her praise of M. Gide, whose Prometheus Illbound she has translated into English. His is “a mind,” she declares, “which must be ranked among the greatest of the world’s literature.” “Must” is a challenging word. Of how many contemporary writers dare we use it in this sense? Dare we use it of Anatole France, or Bergson, or Hardy, or Shaw, or d’Annunzio, or Croce? We should be foolhardy, indeed, much as we rightly admire these authors, to put any of them just yet into the pantheon that contains the images of Plato and Shakespeare and Voltaire. Call no man happy till he is dead, says an old proverb. It would be still wiser to call no man one of the world’s greatest writers till he has been dead a hundred years. One cannot, if one is a quite human being, judge one’s contemporaries with the same impartial scrutiny with which one judges the mighty dead. The great man gives to his own age much to which posterity is indifferent, and gives to posterity much to which his own age may even be hostile. Tennyson served his age as a giant, and he was accepted as a giant by most of the fine critics of his age, from Edgar Allan Poe downwards. If an occasional critic such as Edward FitzGerald came to have doubts about Tennyson, it was because he himself stood monastically aloof from the age. It is one of the functions of criticism, no doubt, to separate the temporary from the immortal elements in the work of contemporary writers. But this is one of the counsels of perfection in criticism. The thing has never been infallibly done. Sainte-Beuve was as ridiculous in writing about Balzac as Lamb was about Shelley. Not that even posterity is capable of pronouncing what we call final judgments. We have a way of turning to posterity in despair for a true verdict on authors. Alas! posterity, though it has not the same reasons for erroneous judgments, is (like ourselves) of a variable and uncertain mind. Posterity has made strange blunders about Euripides, about Ronsard, about Donne, about Pope. Good authors constantly have to be rescued from the neglect of posterity. All we can be sure of is that an author who appeals to a succession of generations has given us something of the true gold of literature. Even if each new generation to some extent re-estimates the world’s classics, it usually leaves them secure in the position of classics. Or almost secure, for who knows whether the world will not one day cease to read Lucian or Virgil, or The Pilgrim’s Progress?
As for contemporary literature, how much of it is there that we dare confidently add to the ranks even of the minor classics? One is sure of a certain number of lyrics, notably those of Mr. Yeats. But in prose one has to be more cautious. Prose, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch lamented the other day, has fallen upon styleless days, and without style it is difficult to live for ever. Plutarch has survived with a minimum of it, and so has Marcus Aurelius, and so has Balzac. But on the whole, it must be admitted that most of the great writers, whether in prose or poetry, wrote well. M. Gide, it must be admitted, writes admirably, though not wonderfully. Lady Rothermere does not communicate the delicacies of his style in Prometheus Illbound, but one could not read even this translation without feeling that the author is a man of skill and wit in words. I doubt, however, whether there is enough style in it to give it a place on a shelf with the world’s important books. Lady Rothermere does not assert, indeed, that Prometheus Illbound is itself a masterpiece. She claims for it only that it is “the expression of the humorous side” of one of the world’s greatest minds. The humour, it seems to me, is too elusive to proceed from a great mind. Great minds, if they are humorous at all, are humorous in such a way that the ordinary man can see at least a part of the joke. M. Gide makes jokes for the favoured few. Many a man who is amused by the jokes of Plato and of Gibbon will be merely bewildered by the jokes of M. Gide. He enjoys the swift change of episode as Sterne does, but, whereas Sterne always saves the situation by giving us comic human beings passing across his haphazard stage, M. Gide does not create human beings at all. Lady Rothermere admits that “his world is a world of abstract ideas, under the action of which most of his characters move as marionettes.” She quotes: “Time and space are the boards which, with the help of our minds, have been set up by the innumerable truths of the universe as a stage for their own performances. And there we play our parts like determined, convinced, devoted, and voluptuous marionettes.” This dilettante and purely intellectual attitude to life is, I believe, impossible to a great mind. It is very tedious to hear sentimental people repeating the platitude that “great thoughts come from the heart”; but the platitude happens to be true. Shakespeare, it may be replied, in some of his moods saw the world as a stage and an “insubstantial pageant.” On the other hand, he never saw men and women as marionettes. He was always interested in character, and M. Gide is not. M. Gide is interested in problems. He is interested in ideas. He is not interested in men and women. He is a philosopher at play. Even when he introduces a tragic element into his work, as in Le Roi Candaule, we feel that the whole thing is a game, an experiment. A great deal of modern French literature makes one think of clever men amusing themselves in a laboratory. The French are Epicureans of ideas. They test creeds and philosophies and scepticisms with an exquisite freshness of curiosity. They seek after truth itself as an amusement. In no other nation can men talk so admirably of the universe while smoking cigarettes. In England, if a man talks of God, he either lights a pipe or stops smoking.
In Prometheus Illbound M. Gide has lit a cigarette, a rather fragrant cigarette, at the sun. There is perhaps something a little disproportionate in the action, something, too, a little audacious; but he does it, if the phrase is not too stale, with a fine gesture, and as he puffs at it, the glow of his cigarette seems to throw a tiny light on the immense problems of human existence. He is cosmic in his interests, if Parisian in his manners. He has Zeus and Prometheus and the eagle among his chief characters. Zeus, like M. Gide himself, is an experimentalist. He evidently rules the universe for the sensations with which it provides him. At least, when we find him walking along the most famous of the Parisian boulevards, he has just made up his mind to perform a perfectly gratuitous act—an act which not only will bring no return but will have no motive. In this mood, he drops a handkerchief in the street, and, when a thin gentleman named Cocles gives it back to him, he invites him to write the address of anyone he pleases on an envelope so that he may send a £20 note to him. The thin gentleman writes the name of Damocles which he has seen by accident, and Zeus strikes him on the face and disappears. He sends Damocles the £20 note, however. Damocles becomes worried as to where the anonymous note has come from and why. His good fortune, instead of satisfying him, only raises problems in his mind. He does not know to whom he owes it or what to do with it. The last we see of him, he is babbling incoherent questions about it on his death-bed.
Some time before this, however, Prometheus has arrived, and dined with Cocles and Damocles in a Paris restaurant. He finds Cocles discoursing in perplexity on the meaningless blow he had received from the unknown stranger, and he himself unwittingly becomes the cause of a second and still more distressing accident to Cocles. The conversation having turned on his eagle, Cocles and Damocles express their desire to see it, and Prometheus calls it from afar, whereupon “bursting through the window, it put out Cocles’ eye with one stroke with its wing, and then, chirruping as it did so, tenderly indeed but imperiously, fell with a swoop upon Prometheus’ right side. And Prometheus forthwith undid his waistcoat and offered his liver to the bird.” For the moment, however, we may leave Prometheus. The important event just now is the damage to Cocles’ eye. Neither the undeserved blow nor the accident to his eye ultimately causes misery as the undeserved £20 causes Damocles misery. When he sees Damocles’ misery on his death-bed, Cocles comments: “There you see the fate of a man who has grown rich by another’s suffering.” “But is it true that you suffer?” Prometheus asks him. “From my eye occasionally,” said Cocles, “but from the blow no more; I prefer to have received it. It does not burn any more; it has revealed to me my goodness. I am flattered by it; I am pleased about it. I never cease to think that my pain was useful to my neighbour and that it brought him £20.” “But the neighbour is dying of it,” said Prometheus.... It is clear that M. Gide has not taken it as his province to justify the ways of God to man. I fancy he suspects Zeus of having acted without a motive on many previous occasions before the strange adventure of the boulevard. He is also clearly amused by the workings of the human conscience. If Damocles had not had a conscience, he would not have died.
Cocles and Damocles, however, are only minor characters in this thin fantastic story. Prometheus is the real hero, though the accidents do not happen to him. He has only his eagle and his habit of lecturing about it. But it is his lectures about his eagle that give the book its meaning. His eagle is really a figure in an allegory—an allegory on a new plan. In the old-fashioned allegory one was more conscious of what the allegorical figures meant, than of the figures themselves. It was as if the author had tied labels round their necks. M. Gide realizes that we have got beyond such ancient simplicities. He consequently gives his figures no labels, but bids us “Guess!” and we go on guessing till the end of the story. He has constructed a puzzle, and, though we do not know whether it is worth solving or not, he contrives to make us immensely curious about it and immensely determined to solve it. Most people, when they have read his story, will ask, “What does he mean? What is this eagle of Prometheus?” Why does he first say that everyone has an eagle and that one must nourish one’s eagle? And why does he in the end kill his eagle and make a meal of it? And does M. Gide approve of the last proceeding? I see that the majority of critics identify the eagle with the human conscience. I think it is more than that. It is everything that prevents man from resting satisfied with a pagan philosophy of acceptance before the world’s beauty. It is that fury in the human breast that makes men desire progress. It is the moral consciousness of the race that leads men into profound self-denials and profounder questionings. When Prometheus kills and eats his eagle, he grows fat and cheerful. Does M. Gide then look back regretfully on the moral history of mankind? On the contrary. The eagle was found to be delicious, and at dessert they all drank his health. “‘Has he, then, been useless?’ asked one. ‘Do not say that, Cocles!—his flesh has nourished us. When I questioned him he answered nothing; but I eat him without bearing him a grudge: if he had made me suffer less, he would have been less fat; less fat he would have been less delectable.’ ‘Of his past beauty, what is there left?’ ‘I have kept all his feathers.’” “It is with one of them,” adds M. Gide, “that I write this little book.” Yes, M. Gide is a moralist, though a gay one, and Prometheus Illbound is a tract. He, too, desires progress—even if it be progress somewhere beyond and away from progress. His book is an amusing, though not a very amusing, parable. It will appeal to those who prefer subtle little thoughts to vehement great ones.