MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE announcers of the B.B.C. have been trained to read the news in a flat monotone: they adopt exactly the same tone whether they be recounting some Far Eastern bombardment or some cricket match at Lord's, whether their theme be international con- ciliation or domestic strife. This is a prudent regulation ; it would be intolerable to the listening public were the preferences or the prejudices of an individual announcer to become apparent from the variations of his expression. In one respect only are they allowed to depart from the accustomed monotone and to mark a difference of emphasis by the changed inflexion of their voice ; it is when they announce some terrible disaster or embark upon an obituary. Suddenly the familiar key will alter and one knows in advance what is coming. " We regret to announce . . ." they say ; and the attention remains poised for an instant while we wonder who has died. The name falls finally into a pool of silence. It was in this way that I heard last week of the death of Paul Valery, assuredly the greatest of contemporary French poets and perhaps the greatest poet of our modern world. I have upon my table a sketch of Paul Valery drawn by Marie Scheikevitch in 1932. Below a finely moulded forehead, above a sensitive and even tortured face, blaze
his black, enormous eyes ; in those dark pools are reflected what was the perpetual conflict of Valery's whole life—the conflict between faith and scepticism, between intellect and sensation, between knowledge and feeling. In those eyes one could detect, as it were, two superimposed expressions. There was the keen, the alert, the scrutinising glance of the scientist, intent upon examining empirically and without emotion every phenomenon that life presented. And behind it there was something else ; the veiled glance of the mystic, the reticent look of the artist. It was the combination of these two expressions which gave to Valery's eyes so curious a fusion of the challenging and the receptive, of the alert and the dreamy, of the mundane and the detached.
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