A writer's talent is often nothing but the terrible faculty of retelling, in phrases that seem beautiful, the eternal clamors of mediocre humanity. Even gigantic geniuses, like Victor Hugo or Adam de Saint-Victor were destined to utter an admirable music whose grandeur consists in concealing the immense emptiness of the deserts: their soul is like the formless docile soul of deserts and crowds; they love, think, and desire the loves, thoughts, desires of all men and of all beasts; poets, they magnificently declaim what is not worth the trouble of being thought.
The human species, doubtless, in its entire aspect of a hive or colony, is only superior to the bison species or the king-fisher, because we are a part of it; here and there man is a sorry automaton; but his superiority lies in his ability to attain consciousness; a small number reach this stage. To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that one no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,--while social fraternity is based on resemblances.
The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul,--and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which André Gide belongs.
The misfortune of these beings, when they wish to express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar and almost understood, as parchments are seen and read above sealed glass cases.
But all this is related in _Paludes_, a story, as is known, "of animals living in dusky caverns, and which lose their sight through never being used"; it is also, with a more intimate charm than in the _Voyage d' Urien_, the ingenuous story of a very complicated, very intellectual and very original soul.
At this moment there is a little movement of neo-paganism, of sensual naturalism and erotism at once mystic and materialistic, a springtime of those purely carnal religions where woman is adored even for the very ugliness of her sex, for by means of metaphors we can idealize the imperfect and deify the illusive. A novel of Marcel Batilliat, a young unknown man, is, despite its serious faults, perhaps the most curious specimen of this erotic religiosity which zealous hearts are cultivating as dreams or ideals. But there is a famous manifestation, the _Aphrodite_ of Pierre Louys, whose success, doubtless, henceforth will stifle as under roses, all other claims of sexual romanticism.