RODAUN BEI WIEN

d. 14 / 11 25

Dear Sir.

My husband is just leaving Vienna for a trip to north Afrika.
It was his thought to offer to the " Dial" a letter containing some of
his African impressions as he said that here nothing was going on
worth his telling to the readers of the " Dial "

He is only coming back in 2 month

420

NOTE ON PAUL VALERY

myself the maximum power,' and in his extraordinary Soireé avec Monsieur Teste¹ he gave an exact definition of his aspirations: 'Every great man is touched with error . . . genius is easy, fortune is easy, divinity is easy. I simply mean that I know how all these things are conceived.' Such a man was M Teste, absolute master of all concepts, and able to interpret and analyse the mechanism, the methods of existence and action, the use of which make us what we are. And such a man M Valéry would like to be, certain thereby of becoming the true poet, the poet in Greek being the 'maker.'"

It must not be supposed, however, that Valéry, who had started out as a somewhat precious poet and developed into one of the chief contemporary exponents of intellectual universality, was forgotten during the twenty years of rigorous self-development during which he refused to publish, or write for publication. His friends, Ghéon, Royère, Gide, Louy's, de Régnier, and others constituted a steadily increasing number of devotees. Royère brought his work to the attention of Thibaudet who became one of its staunchest admirers, and wrote in exegesis of it, a book similar to his other studies of Barrès and Mallarmé, though not, unfortunately, bereft of strange absurdities, as when he divides poets into two classes: those who write verse because they are poets, and those who are poets because they can write verse, and places Valéry among the latter. In an anthology of French verse issued in 1900 by Van Bever and Leau-taud, six of the one hundred, sixty poems belonged to Valéry and won him admirers. He was considered a bizarre poet, difficult to understand, and to be read only by the discerning. But—impor-tant to remember—he was being read and discussed continually, in Parisian salons. Abbé Brémond was converted to Valéry's, be-came an intense worshipper, and won for his idol, the seat in the Académie Française left vacant by the death of Anatole France. Three-fourths of the copies of Valéry's tenuous editions remained uncut in the hands of bookdealers and bibliophiles, but the remain-ing fourth was eagerly passed round, studied, admired. During the years preceding the appearance of La Jeune Parque, the poem on which he laboured four whole years ('I can well imagine that a poet in love with his art,' he says, 'would content himself with re-working the same poem during his whole life, making a new varia-tion every three, four, or five years, on the theme established once

¹ Cf. An Evening With M Teste, THE DIAL, February 1922.