PARTISAN REVIEW
any substantial doctrine valid beyond the existence of the particular
man and writer.
His
hunt through the thickets of consciousness came
up only with some fine phrases, metaphors for poetry. The chase could
lead nowhere else, for the point of departure was illusory. The mind
disappears into its subject matter; consciousness is known only through
its objects and the conditions under which it arises; "The mind is in
a way its objects," said old Aristotle in one of the most triumphant
statements in his
Psychology.
In another direction, psychoanalysis has
shown us that the contents of the psyche hardly lie open to direct in–
spection by the conscious ego. Introspection is a trap: it opens infinite
mirrors in which our image is redoubled infinitely, and each new attitude
and posture of questioning is likely to beget only a new image of distor–
tion. Valery loved these mirrors, he loved to wander in this labyrinth,
but he forgot the minotaur that must be found at the end of all those
stumbling passageways.
(To sum this up in the jargon of the philosophers: nothing is
understood except as an object, not even the mind; we do not under–
stand it by experiencing it exquisitely as a subject.)
And,
in
fact, the important thing
is
the work to be done, the beast
to be dispatched, and perhaps the greater the mind the more directly
it
will traverse these passageways. Thus we might well ask whether
the two essays on Leonardo do not represent one of the most misguided,
though marvelous and exciting, explorations of the psychology of artistic
and intellectual creation. That the work may be
willed,
brought into
being step by step by a deliberate method that excludes chance, hardly
tells the real story of creation. Probably the figure of Leonardo that
Valery constructs is as impossible of existence as Teste, and even
in
the
historical Leonardo it may have been some real deficiency that was re–
sponsible for his halting production. We think of other examples of
creators,
beside~
Leonardo, on whom Valery might have drawn: Newton
coming home tired from the Mint to write off the solution of a mathe–
matical problem over which the scholarly brains of Europe had been
poring for months; Pascal on his sickbed solving the problem of the
cycloid; Mozart writing an overture with the spontaneity of a bird
producing its song. We do not know what Shakespeare's method of com–
position was, but we suspect that
it
did not resemble the one elaborated
by Valery, and we remember Ben Jonson's remark that he never. blotted
a line. These would be illustrations of a creativity derived from the
total immersion of the mind in its objects. Man advances intellectually,
Whitehead says in another connection, to the extent that the mind
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