BOOKS AND WRITERS
pAUL VAL8RY had a glacial reputation. To most readers his name suggests, I suppose, Monsieur Teste, that cerebral masterpiece, and a single poem of an almost unthinkable perfection—" Le Cimetiere Marin." Valery did a good deal himself to encourage this idea of himself as pure Mind carved in crystal.
This image was what Yeats would have called his Mask—a Mask stamped out by truth because the quality of his intellect is what distinguished him from all other contemporary writers. The Mask was also to some extent a Flag of the duty of the intellectual to was also to some extent a Flag of the duty of the intellectual to think, which distinguished Valery sharply in his own mind from those novelists whose work he considered the dregs of literature. The fatality of Valdry's Mask is that it makes him inaccessible to many people who are chilled by the idea of such a super-highbrow.
Perhaps some of his works—including the beautiful prose poetic
dialogue Dance and the Soul*—are necessarily reserved for the happy few who can enter into the mystery of such things, and are
fenced off from a wider public. If so, it is a pity, because this dis- cussion of the ideas suggested in the minds of Socrates and his friends while they watch the dancers—and particularly one dancer Athikte—is as evocative as a Greek stele. It has sculptural audacity and incisiveness in portraying every gesture of the dance, and an equal penetration and luminosity of burning thought. " The toe which bears her whole weight is rubbing on the ground like a thumb on the parchment of a drum. What attention in that toe I What determination stiffens her and maintains her on that point l . . . But now she is beginning to turn on herself . . ." exclaims Phaedrus: whom Socrates answers: " She is turning on herself—and things that have been bound together for eternity are beginning to separate. She turns and turns. ..." The achievement of this dialogue is the perfect fusion of thought with physical move-
ment, the Dance with the Soul, until it ends with Athikte's own apos- trophe (which I shall quote in the French, since the new edition before me has the original opposite Dorothy Hussy's excellent trans- lation): "Asile, asile, 6 mon asile, 6 Tourbillon l—retais en toi, o inouvement, en dehors de toutes les choses. .. ."
Dance and the Soul is a work of transcendent beauty and truth, but must be recommended only to those who are sure they really wish to take trouble about such things. Reflections on the World Today,t on the other hand, is a book of essays of the utmost immediacy, the criticism of the world we live in by a man at once
absorbed in the values of the past and supersensitively aware of the
situation of the present. It is in this volume that we note the imme- diate advantages of Valery having a mind and an intelligence. He
is able to bring the intelligence of a scientist and philosqpher as well as his intuitive literary genius to bear on our time. I may as well say straight out that I think the result is the best book I have read on the problems of modern politics. By sheer force of intelli- gence—that is to say, by being really able to understand and state • the situations he is discussing—Valery is a revolutionary thinker who sees far beyond the pleadings of revolutionaries. The steps which are now very tentatively being taken to unify Europe appeared to him to be elementary first steps over 50 years ago ; and already in 1926 he wrote: "Europe obviously aspires to be governed by an American committee. Her entire policy is aimed toward that end."
As I cannot hope that my readers will accept me as having the authority to assert the superlatives of my previous paragraph, I must quote rather extensively: The book opens, in the foreword, with a brilliant analysis of history, " the sum of events or conditions of which some witness in the past has been aware." The interpreta- tion of history by historians is not a scientific analysis ; it is " left to the mercy of habits and traditional modes of thought or speech whose accidental or arbitrary nature we do not suspect." Again: " The real nature of history is to play a part in history itself. The idea of the past assumes a meaning and becomes a value only for men who have a passion for the future. By definition, the future has no image. History provides the future with the means of being thought about." But today a great deal of confusion is caused by the fact that terms which meant one thing in past history mean something quite different in our unprecedented modern epoch. For example, ' policy " to a Richelieu or even a Bismarck meant pur- suing a course in a world in which he could calculate the effects of fiction on other men with other policies, within a limited area and
* Dance and the Soul. By Paul Valery. (Lehmann. 10s. 64.) t Reflections on tho World Today. By Paul Valery. (Thames and Hudson. 15s.) over an extended period of time. " Until now, all policies used t speculate on the isolation of events. History used to consist o events which could be localised.. . . This age is drawing to add end. From pow on, every action will have repercussions pn a hos of unexpected interests in every quarter of the world and give ri to a series of instantaneous events, to the confusion resulting fro resonance in a confined space."
Valery was perhaps the greatest modern European. mind ; and hiP condemnation of European politics was final: " History will never record anything more stupid than European competition in politic and economics, compared, combined, and contrasted as it is wit European agreement in matters of science. At a time when th efforts of the best brains in Europe formed, an immense capital o applicable knowledge, the naïve tradition of the historical policy o greed and cunning was still pursued, and this Little European spi surrendered . . . the very methods and instruments of power into the hands of those over whom Europe intended to rule. ' The effect of Valery's criticism is to challenge all our thinki about everything, in the most fundamental way. " History," h tells us, "Is the most dangerous concoction, the chemistry of th mind has produced." As for politics, the political mind " in eve case opposes man, whose liberty, complexity and variability challenges," and it " achieves its full development under a dictator ship." He thinks that the modern passion for political liberty ha completed the enslavement of man almost as much as dictatorship) because governments justifying their actions in the name of freedo and welfare impose constraints " which are supposed to, emana from the will of all, which one is hardly in a position to contradict and this type of restriction and exaction, imposed by a faceless authority, entirely abstract and impersonal, acts with the insensitive% ness, the cold and inevitable power of a machine which, from birt to death, transforms each individual life into some indistinguishabl element of I know not what monstrous existence." But if politica freedom is a heresy which has resulted in increasing the restriction on individual liberty, dictatorship is the surrender of all liberty t one individual, as the result of a feeling that a society is §o fa incapable of maintaining itself that one ruthless personal will, to which all other wills and personalities are surrendered, is needed To those who divide the world into optimists and pessimists„ Valdry must seem• a black pessimist. Indeed, he sees little hope on the political horizon, and what little crumbs of co fort he has too offer are for the New World and not the Old. Eurd'pe is the victim of the catastrophe of the utter failure of its political minds to adapt themselves to new problems and new opportunities. Enslaved by traditions of, nationalist greed, Europe Europeanised the world In science and thought: it set on the march the masses outside Europe who were bound to outweigh the European predominance, and ,kt the same time, within Europe itself, it continued the political dog- fight of nationalities which made Europe weak and finally con- temptible in the eyes of the nascent Westernised world. AlthougH in modern times not a single Power or empire " has been able to stand supreme, to dominate others far and near, or even to retain its conquests for longer than fifty years," the nations of, the world and now the ideologies and the causes continue to struggle for world domination. Valery's view is that the politicians of Europe and even of the world have almost no programme to offer which can solve problems demanding world unity in attacking them. And: " All this is aimed at our brains. Soon we shall be obliged to build ourselves strictly isolated cloisters where neither the radio waves nor the newspapers can penetrate and in which our ignorance of all• politics can be preserved and cultivated. Their inhabitants will despise speed, numbers, the effects produced by mass, by surprise, by contrast, by repetition, by novelty, and by credulity. People will go there from time to time, in order to look through the bars at a few specimeng of free men."
Yet it is quite irrelevant to say that Val6ry is a pessimist, because, his views of civilisation and the freedom of human personality are' constructive and positive. His pessimism lies in his being unable to fit these concepts into the programmes of existing politiCal parties.' The immense force of Reflections on the World Today lies in its' statement on the one hand of the negative predicament of politics, on the other of the positive values of civilisation. From this whole, picture there emerges the possibility of a world politics at the servicie, of civilisation instead of a dozen political creeds enslaving men, sometimes In the name of dictatorship, sometimes in that of freedom.
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