Urien's Voyage by André Gide Page A

the earlier Romantic generations. Philosophically and esthetically viewed, it is a modern means of giving expression to a fundamental arrangement of the human mind; it puts stress on the intuitive rather than the rational, on the subjective rather than the objective, on freedom rather than restraint.
    As formulated by Jean Moréas in an article published in Figaro in 1886, the doctrine of Symbolism was predicated on lofty aims and ambitions. Symbolist poets, whom others accused of being morbid and neurotic, were actually trying to create beauty, said Moréas. Beauty, according to the author of the abstract and verbose article later accepted as the manifesto of the Symbolists, was to be sought in “pure concepts” and “eternal symbols.”
    Five years later Gide defended the tenets of Symbolism in Narcissus. The views expressed in his treatise on Narcissus and illustrated in the allegory narrated by Urien may be summarized in these words: Visible forms are but the transient external symbols of eternal truths; the true poet sees beyond mere appearances (phenomena), grasps the Ideas (noumena) which they represent, and uses the former to suggest the latter; each man is born to make manifest an Idea—the truth, whether good or bad, which is his inmost self. Gide’s problem was to conciliate sincerity to the Idea that he was to represent with morality.
    The temptations, suffering, and surroundings of Urien and his companions are described with such profusion of detail that the reader can recreate them in their entirety, yet the pilgrims are never certain of the reality of either their experiences or their surroundings. The chimerical shores and crags that drift by their ship in the pathetic ocean are scarcely more chimerical than the “real” world was to Gide when he remarked in his Journal (in June, 1891) that things seemed to cease to exist for him when he “stopped thinking about them.”
    We note too that the crewmen made the mistake of confusing “passing things” with “eternal isles” while Urien and his companions, bending over the water like Narcissus (who saw both his own reflection and the moving panorama of life, realize that things reveal themselves through their changing aspects.
    Various temptations which Urien resists, the stagnation of the Sargasso Sea, the voyage through the frozen sea, and the agony of despair after a futile search—all this is easy to interpret. Urien’s resistance in the face of diverse temptations is the repressed side of Gide’s own nature while the sensuous details with which he embellishes the most trivial item betray his recognition of physical desire as the ridiculous counterpart of piety. The stagnation of the Sargasso Sea has as its counterpart the physical excesses that brought Gide to the verge of madness during the summer of 1892. The passage through the frozen sea and the march to the polar regions are his quest for conquest of the world of the senses and attainment of the realm of the spirit.
    Urien’s Voyage is perhaps more important because of what it suggests than what it says. Readers familiar with Gide’s later writings—especially his Journals and Et nunc manet in te —will find in this early allegory the elements that were to motivate the works of his maturity. “Without sensuality, sexuality and pride there could be no work of art,” he later wrote. It is somewhat ironic that he made his supreme effort to dominate or sublimate his passions through art—and of course failed—when these very passions were at their peak. For though later when tortured by desire he prayed that he might no longer be enslaved by his flesh, even in old age he longed to remain “carnal and desirous until death.”
    Viewed against the background of his other works, the unpolished declamations of his youth may be more revealing than the carefully wrought images of his maturity. We might not be