PARTISAN REVIEW
to his eminence in France less because of any general understanding or
popularity of his work than because he identified himself, to the point
of symbol, with the life of thought, with the
idea
of Europe. In a con–
stantly recurring system of images, Valery saw Europe as the "brain" of
the world, France as the "brain" of Europe, Paris as the "brain" of
France, and beyond much doubt, in the latter part of his life, himself
at the top of this pyramid.
We may hardly expect Valery's book to revive the uses of medita–
tion as a mode of political thought, for of all habits of mind that is
surely the one most out of practice. And yet, as Valery used it, this
habit produced insights not only of startling pertinence but general
enough in their validity to look prophetic. He wrote this in 1926:
Europe will be punished for her policy. She will be deprived of
wine, beer, and liquors. And other things....
Europe obviously aspires to be governed by an American committee.
Her entire policy is aimed toward that end.
Not knowing how to shake off our history, we shall be delivered
from it by happy peoples who have none or next to none. It is the happy
peoples who will impose their good fortune upon us.
I have saved mention of the matter of translation to the last be–
cause I think it is too important to be passed over
in
a single compliment
to the translator. Mr. Scarfe, an English poet, has given us a fairly
careful and lucid text that reads not at all like a translation.
It
is in
various ways an excellent job, but I do want to offer one counter re–
mark. His prose is often closer to Auden than to a possible English
Valery. The sly turns and involutions of Valery's oversimple-looking
prose may be impossible-or even undesirable?-in English. But I wish
Mr. Scarfe had been stouter in resisting the temptation to turn figures
of speech into abstractions and straighten out Valery's language toward
the commonplace. These are just the changes that risk damaging a
writer's meaning most, even to destroying his character as a writer.
Jackson AAathevvs
MAN AND AAACHJNE
MECHANIZATION TAKES COMMAND : A Contribution to Anonymous
History. By Siegfried Giedion. Oxford. $12.50.
"For the historian there are no banal things," Dr. Giedion
remarks. Everything has meaning, if we have the wit to see it. There is
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