REGARDS TO THE ACTUAL WORLD
see ahead and cannot foresee itself. We can foresee neither our dreams
nor our projects, we can scarcely foresee anything but our own reactions.
If,
therefore, we imprint the form of our mind on the human world,
the world becomes all the more unforeseeable and assumes the mind's
disorder." It was this thoroughly rational pessimism, and no simple
sign of the times, that made Valery say in 1938: "The chances of a
conflict are . . . frightfully multiplied. The instability of the world
equilibrium is extreme. No one can any longer flatter himself that he
can foresee. The greatest statesmen and the most profound minds can
calculate nothing. An unforeseen invention can change overnight all
the conditions of economic or military power.... " He remarked that
the profoundest thoughts of Machiavelli or Richelieu would have today
about the reliability of a stock market tip.
Valery saw the skeleton of politics. He believed European politics
had failed to live up to the advances of European thought in other fields.
"Indeed, the very person who is able to think about physics or biology
with instruments of thought comparable with instruments of precision,
continues to think politically by means of impure terms, variable no–
tions, and illusory metaphors." European man, he said, has thrown
into politics all the instincts, idols, regrets, avarice, meaningless words,
everything science and the arts have rejected.
Perhaps Valery's least successful remarks are those concerning the
writing of history. Americans who have read at least Henry Adams will
be
likely to find his strictures hardly justified and his tone of smug orig–
inality a little provincial.
When an admirer of Andre Gide recently remarked to him that
he was the greatest living French writer, Gide replied: "Yes, since the
death of Valery." I doubt that Valery will ever have in America any–
thing like his European, to say nothing of his French reputation. That
such a writer, better known to the general public for the difficulty and
obscurity of his work than for any other feature of it, should rise to the
position of public importance he held in France and throughout Europe
(for example, as a delegate to the League of Nations) is puzzling to
Americans. They forget that nothing is more generally felt in Europe
than that Europe's fate is irrevocably tied up with the fate of ideas. And
this is true not only of European intellectuals; it is something felt at
the level of superstition by large populations. Nothing else about America
horrifies Europeans more than our distrust of ideas and our apparent
determination, in politics for example, to get along without them.
Now Paul Valery expressed constantly in his work, and fully in his
person, this European devotion to ideas and the mind. And he rose
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