ANDRE GIDE AND HIS WORK

In this fragment, with its suggestive title, M. Gide tells us something of his childhood ; but not ail. A solitary child, he moved, at times, within shadow, as when, caught by the dark Angers of some inexplicable fear, he threw himself into his mother’s arms with the cry, ‘I am not like other people!’ It is true. He is not as other people ; he is not like other writers ; he stands alone.

In him meet many influences. Through Southern father and Norman mother he unités the extremes of France. He is as much at home in little Southern Uzès, where, from the summer dust, rise bright-winged grasshoppers light as butterflies, and the hot sun beats down on asphodel and laurier-rose and honey-scented cistus flowers, as he is in the Norman valley where on wet days, he says, falling rain and stream and waterfall sound like rippling silver. He learned his first lessons in the austere magnificence of the Bible and the fantasy of eastern taies. He says elsewhere that influences do not create, they awaken. Ail these influences, then, hâve awakened an individualism which makes André Gide one of the most noted writers of the day.

His first book — Les Cahiers d' André Walter — written when he was twenty, was published anonymously. Critic, novelist, essayist, translator (although his own work is untranslatable he has translated into French such diverse writers as