PARTISAN REVIEW
thought, that is to say his own mission, to have and nurture in every cir-
cumstance "the sense of the universal."
'
Refections on the World Today
is, I believe, the fourth volume of his
work to appear in this country over a period of twenty years. It is a
collection of addresses, prefaces, essays on politics., history, dictatorship,
freedom, progress, France, and the fall of Europe generally. Anyone who
knows something of Valery's work will not expect to find here any usual
treatment of these subjects. What he will find is the happily formulated
insights and articulate attitudes of an important poet and highly civil–
ized man discoursing after a lifetime of meditation on these same sub–
jects. It is no doubt Valery's main limitation as a prose writer that
his interest and value lie too narrowly in the expression of particular
insights and attitudes, brilliant and rewarding as these nearly always are.
It is with the intention of giving the reader some sense of this poet's per–
spective on the world, of the depths and distances in his book, that I
have risked heading these remarks with the sort of Mark Twain trans–
lation of the book's French title.
I think it may be said that Valery had a method of meditation.
His little discourses have the closely argued texture of a sermon of
Donne: he announces as a text some perception, some product of his
insight, and then proceeds to a close examination of its meaning, to a
logical, frequently philological, analysis of the possibilities it offers to
action and practical application. Language for Valery was a precision
instrument capable of bringing different fields of knowledge together
at their critical points to precipitate new ideas. His conception of
creative thought strongly recalls Whitehead's remark that "in our most
theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications."
Valery persistently identified man's destiny with the destiny of
man's mind.
It
was his constant practice in writing to set the mind
up in full view, in an arrangement of images, so as to watch the effect
upon it of such forces as politics, war, or the progress of science. He
then judged these forces, judged all history in fact according to its in–
fluence on man's mind. The plight of the mind in the present world is
the theme that unifies these scattered essays. But man's mind is not only
acted upon by history, it acts of course upon history in turn. And this
accounts for another of Valery's ruling perceptions about the world to–
day. We are living an extraordinary adventure, he says. "The modern
world is assuming the shape of man's mind. Man has sought in nature
all the means and powers that are necessary to make the things around
him as unstable, volatile, and mobile as himself, as admirable, as ab–
surd, as disconcerting and prodigious as his own mind. But mind cannot
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