The Ivory Tower
Paul Valery. By G. Turquet-Milnes. (Cape. 5s.)
IT is surprising that the work of Paul Valery and Charles Maurras should not have been more deliberately studied in this country during the last ten years, for the former has supplied the mood, and the latter the dogma, of English poetry during that decade. Perhaps to the literary historian writing in the future this period will appear as one of the most abnormal in the life of our literature. For we have been expressing un- consciously the ideas and emotional reactions of these French poets, imported and re-labelled by an American.
Paul Valery, however, is too strong a personality to be accepted for long at second-hand, and critics are beginning to turn their attention to his work. The latest of these is Mrs. Turquet-Milnes, who traces Valery's literary origins in itaudelaire and the Symbolists, and shows how comfortably -his metaphysical interests accommodate themselves to the
English_ genius, It-. force_ thatZ'Obrks instinctively- aknig The lines of Bergson's philosophical principles.
Valery is a difficult poet to discuss, for in spite of the rich and even sensual firmness of his phrase, his meaning is veiled by reason of its approach to negativeness. He is the true esoteric, withdrawing like Mr. Yeats into a self-contem- plating aloofness, and adopting Jean Paul's aristocratic dictum that truths discovered on the way should be veiled before the mob is allowed to inspect them. So we have the complicated case of a poet who, by reason of his personality, must be crystalline and succinct in expression, using that technique for a contrary purpose,. since, as he says, " every- thing which counts is veiled."
Mrs. Turquet-Milnes' essay is mainly an attempt to reconcile this apparent contradiction, and she does it-with a remarkable display of sensitiveness and scholarship. Her argument con- vinces one—I am not sure whether she intends it to be so emphatic—that Valery is a poet of an almost fanatic devotion to introspectiveness, who yet cannot escape by that path, since his intellect—and perhaps even some fundamental earth-rooted sensuality—forces him to a lively interest in the passing scene. As she says, " from whatever angle we observe him, at one moment we catch .M1 Valery shutting his eyes to avoid seeing the world, and the moment after opening them wide to scrutinize that world which his mind• would like to annihilate."
She traces down the motives for this aesthetic tergiversa- tion, watching the poet beaten about by the storms of his own sincerity, and trying to ride those storms by means of Bergson's principles of spiritual and intellectual navigation. The inevitable course of this fierce sincerity is towards a unification of the unreconcilable elements in his personality, and therefore we find Valery " appearing to decry thought, because he is so rich in ideas," and forcing his poetry towards .a -Schopenhaurean identification "bf itself with pure music, deliberately stating that le symbolisme se resume dans l'intention commune a plusieurs families de poetes, de reprendre a la musique leer vie."
The best part,; because the most profoundly intuitive, of Mrs.,Turquet-Milnes' essay is -where she -shows the,,_rewlt of this belief, a belief that can be so disastrous to the work of a Minor poet, and which has been so fruitful in the poetry of Pkul Valery. The critic demonstrates how this extremely sophisticated mind became " aware that poetry is the absolute contrary of what is generally called literature," and that "absolute poetry is for him Music, whicI carries art beyond the frontiers of-mind " toward a primitive consciousness that can be expressed only by some form of movement, a kiss, a sigh, a gesture of dance.
0. But how complicated is that simplicity, how super-civilized that primitiveness, we recognize from the enormous aware. ness with which this poet accepts that idea of " movement." For him the word contains all the elaborations, the saturation with psychology, with which Bergson re-sensitized the fabric of. European philosophy woven during the last two thousand
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