ABSTRACT
The ancient opposition between creator and critic no longer prevails in tutored minds. Andre Gide—who quoted part of Baudelaire’s statement as an epigraph to his essay on Paul Valery—could confidently state elsewhere: “Criticism is at the base of all art.” Partly because Gide himself produced so much critical work and partly because, like every great artist, he never failed to temper his lyricism with an almost infallible critical sense, Gide belongs in the tradition of the Goethe, Baudelaire, and Eliot—in the tradition of the creator-critics. Gide himself, who never tired of quoting Oscar Wilde to the effect that “the imagination imitates, whereas the critical spirit creates,” would have liked Albert Camus’s remark. The qualities that made Gide a good critic are simply those that are doubtless essential to any good critic. Late in life he took pride in the fact that many of his “judgments of unclassified works were premonitory.”
