WILSON AMONG THE RUINS
everything they assert implies the persistence of a robust faith, while
everything they feel is tinged with gloom and spreads gloom. Not many
of them, however, are willing to develop the logic of their attitude
in
any definite direction. One should be grateful to Mr. Wilson for the
frankness with which he has sketched out his own image of the world–
his own non-miraculous mythology, that is.
Nicola Chiaramonte
ILLUSIONS OF PURE CONSCIOUSNESS
MONSIEUR TESTE.
By
Poul Volery. Tronsloted ond with en introduction
by Jockson Mothews. Knopf. $5.00.
"A pure thought lasts only for a moment," Valery once said,
and in Monsieur Teste he sought to project a character who would live
only to reach, extend, and enrich such moments. Valery was in the habit,
Mr. Mathews tells us in his introduction, of rising at five in the morn–
ing to take notes on the coming of consciousness, and of this prodigious
labor of introspection carried on over a lifetime
Monsieur Teste
is one
of the most remarkable fruits. We are grateful to Knopf for its publica–
tion in English, and to Mr. Mathews for an excellent introduction; but
I think the public might have been better served if, instead of making
this single brief work a
de luxe
item at five ·dollars, the publishers had
permitted Mr. Mathews to range more widely and collect Valery's other
prose works which deal with the same themes as
Monsieur Teste.
The
subject, and possible title, of such an anthology would be: Valery as
Thinker; and it might contain, besides
Teste,
the two essays on Leonardo,
one of the essays on Descartes, the extraordinary
"Mauvaises Pensees"
(Wicked Thoughts), as well as several other items. It would be a valuable
collection, one of the imperishable records in modern literature of a
mind at grips with itself.
And yet, Valery as thinker is probably unimportant apart from
Valery as poet, and what we call his "thought" is perhaps of fundamental
interest only in relation to the poetry. There is a deep irony in this when
we reflect that Valery gave up poetry and literature for almost twenty
years because they were not "precise" enough-a renunciation that came,
significantly enough, not long after the publication of
Monsieur Teste;
yet the more we seek to pin down his "thought," so volatile and so
often at odds with itself, the less likely we are to find that it conveys
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