Paul Valery Art and Progress

7/27/2019 Paul Valery Art and Progress

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A R T A N D P R O G R E S S

P A U L V A L R Y

Paul Valry, the preeminent French poet-critic of the twentieth

century, published twice in The Yale Review. His Reflections

on Common Sense and Personality appeared in 1929, and the

essay below appeared a year later. Valrys sense of progress as

a combination of power and precision seems a sleek bit of

intellectual Art Deco, and his flair for images a stued

Versailles courtier on display at the Museum of Ethnography,

for instance reminds one of his extraordinary gift for imag-

inative concentration. The same year this essay appeared, TheYale Reviewalso published work by Vita Sackville-West, Sal-

vador de Madariaga, Andr Gide, Virginia Woolf, Walter de

la Mare, Walter Lippmann, Archibald MacLeish, Marjorie

Nicolson, and Paul Horgan.

Formerly artists did not like what was called progress. They did

not see it in works any more than philosophers saw it in customs.

They condemned the barbarous acts of knowledge, the brutaloperations of the engineer on the landscape, the tyranny of the

machine, the simplification of human types which compensates

for the complication of the collective organisms. By 1840, people


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were already indignant at the first eects of a transformation that

had scarcely begun. The romantics, although they were contem-

poraries of Ampre and Faraday, freely ignored the sciences,

or disdained them; or only retained their fantastic elements.Their minds sought to find a refuge in the Middle Ages as they

imagined them; they turned away from the chemist to the alche-

mist. They took pleasure only in legend or history that is to say,

in the antipodes of physics. They escaped from organized existence

through passion and the emotions, for which they created a cul-

ture (and even a comedy).

There is, however, a somewhat remarkable contradiction in the

intellectual conduct of a great man of that time. The same EdgarPoe, who was one of the first to denounce the new barbarity and

superstition of the modern, was also the first writer who thought

of introducing into literary production, into the art of creating

fiction, and even into poetry, that same spirit of analysis and cal-

culation in construction the enterprises and misdeeds of which he

otherwise deplored.

In a word, to the idol of progress the answer was the idol of the

malediction of progress which resulted in two commonplaces.

For our part, we do not know what to think of the prodigious

changes that are manifest around us and even within us. New

powers, new hindrances the world has never known less where it

was going.

As I was thinking of this antipathy of artists for progress, there

came to mind some secondary ideas which I oer for whatever

they may be worth, unimportant as you may choose to think them.In the first half of the nineteenth century, the artist discovered

and defined his opposite the bourgeois. The bourgeois is a sym-

metrical figure to the romantic. Moreover, contradictory charac-

teristics are ascribed to him, for he is represented as a slave of

routine and at the same time an absurd votary of progress. The

bourgeois loves what is solid and believes in perfectibility. He is

the incarnation of common sense, of fondness for the most palpa-

ble reality, but he has faith in some sort of increasing and almostinevitable amelioration of life conditions. The artist reserves for

himself the domain of the Dream.

Now, time in its passage or if you like, the evil spirit of

unexpected combinations (the spirit which draws and deduces


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from what is, the most surprising consequences out of which it

makes what will be) played with creating a most admirable

confusion of two notions formerly exactly opposed. It came about

that the marvellous and the real contracted an astonishing al-liance, and that these two ancient enemies conspired to involve

our existence in a career of transformations and of unlimited

surprises. We can say that men are accustoming themselves to

regard all knowledge as transitory, every condition of their indus-

try and of their material relations as provisional. This is new. The

statute law of the general life is bound more and more to take

account of the unexpected. The real is no longer clearly limited.

Place, time, matter admit liberties of which there was formerlyno intimation. Rigorousness begets dreams. Dreams take forms.

Common sense, a hundred times confounded, scouted by fortunate

experiences, is no longer invoked but by ignorance. The value of

average obviousness has falled to nothing. The fact of general

acceptance, which once gave an irresistible force to judgments and

opinions, depreciates them today. What was believed by everyone,

always, and everywhere, no longer seems to have much weight. To

the kind of certainty that came from the concurrence in belief or

testimony of a great number of persons is opposed the objectivity

of the records controlled and interpreted by a small number of

specialists. Perhaps the price that was placed on the general con-

sensus (the consensus on which our customs and our civil laws

rest) was only the eect of the pleasure that most people experi-

ence on finding themselves in agreement with one another, and

like their likes.Finally, almost all the dreams that humanity has had and that

figure in our fables of various kinds flying, diving, the represen-

tation of absent things, the word caught and transported, sepa-

rated from its time and its source and many strange things that

had not even been dreamed have now come out of the impossi-

ble, out of the mind. The fabulous is for sale. The manufacture of

machines that perform wonders enables thousands of individuals

to live. But the artist has had no part in this production of pro-digies. It has come from science and capital. The bourgeois has

invested his funds in phantasms and is speculating on the ruin of

common sense.

Louis XIV, at the height of his power, did not possess the


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hundredth part of the control over nature and the means of divert-

ing himself, of cultivating his mind, or providing it with sensa-

tions, that today many men in quite mediocre circumstances have

at their disposal. I do not count in, it is true, the delight of com-manding, of overpowering, of intimidating, of dazzling, of striking,

or of absolving, which is a divine and theatrical delight but time,

distance, speed, liberty, images of the whole earth

A man of today, young, healthy, fairly well-to-do, flies where he

will, swiftly crosses the world, sleeping every night in a palace. He

can experience life in a hundred forms; enjoy a little love, a little

certainty almost everywhere. If he has some intelligence (it need

not be a very profound intelligence) he plucks the best of what is,he transforms himself each moment into a happy man. The great-

est monarch is less enviable. Physically the great king was a good

deal less fortunate than he when it is a question of heat or of

cold, of the skin or of the muscles. For if the king was ill, he was

very indierently relieved. He had to writhe and groan on his

feather bed, under the plumed canopy, without the hope of sudden

repose or of that unconscious absence that chemistry accords the

least of aicted moderns.

Thus, for pleasure, against pain, against boredom, and for the

maintenance of interests of every kind, a multitude of men are

better endowed than was the most powerful man in Europe two

hundred and fifty years ago.

Assuming that the immense transformation which we see,

which we live in, and which moves us, may develop further, end in

altering what is left of our customs, and co-ordinate in an entirelydierent way the needs and means of life, soon a wholly new era

will give birth to men no longer holding to the past by any habit of

mind. History will oer them strange, nearly incomprehensible

tales; for nothing in their time will have had an example in the

past, nor will anything of the past survive in their present. Every-

thing that is not purely physiological in man will have changed,

since our ambitions, our politics, our wars, our customs, our arts,

are at present under a rgime of very rapid substitutions; theydepend more and more closely than in the past on the positive

sciences and therefore less and less on what has been. The new fact

tends to take on all the importance that tradition and historical

fact have possessed up to now.


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Already some native of one of the new countries who comes to

visit Versailles, can and must regard those figures laden with great

heads of dead hair, in their embroidered clothes, nobly caught in

parading attitudes, with the same eye with which in the Museumof Ethnography we look at the manikins covered with cloaks of

feathers or skins that represent the priests and the chiefs of extinct

tribes.

One of the surest and cruelest eects of progress is, therefore, to

add to death an additional pang, which increases in the same

proportion as the revolution of customs and of ideas is enforced

and accelerated. It was not enough merely to die; one had to

become unintelligible, almost ridiculous and, though one hadbeen Racine or Bossuet, take rank among the bizarre, many-

colored, tattooed figures, exposed to smiles, and a little frighten-

ing, who stand in rows in the galleries and blend imperceptibly

with the stued representatives of the animal group.

I have attempted before to arrive at a definite idea of what is

called progress. Eliminating, then, every consideration of a

moral, political, or aesthetic order, progress seems to me to reduce

itself to the very rapid and very marked increase in (mechanical)

power utilizable by men and in the precision which they can

achieve in their forecasts. The number of horse power, the number

of verifiable decimals, those are the indices which one cannot

doubt have greatly increased in the last century. Think of what is

consumed every day by the many engines of all kinds, and of the

destruction of reserve supplies which goes on in the world. A street

of Paris labors and vibrates like a factory. In the evening, a carnivalof fire, treasures of light express to the half-dazzled sight a power

of extraordinary dissipation, an almost criminal prodigality. I

wonder whether waste has not become a public and permanent

necessity? Who knows what would be discovered by a suciently

prolonged analysis of these excesses which have grown familiar?

Maybe some observer far enough away, considering our state of

civilization, would suppose that the Great War was only a calami-

tous but direct and inevitable consequence of the development ofour ways and means. The extent, the duration, the intensity, and

even the atrocity of that war corresponded to the degree of gran-

deur of our power. It was on the same scale as our resources and

our industries in peace times; as dierent in its proportions from


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previous wars as our instruments for doing things, our material

resources, our superabundance necessitated. But the dierence was

not only in proportions. In the physical world, one cannot make

something larger without its soon being transformed also in itsvery quality; it is only in pure geometry that similar figures exist.

Similitude is nearly always of the mind. The last war cannot be

considered as a simple enlargement of former conflicts. The wars

of the past were ended a long time before the actual exhaustion of

the nations engaged. For a single lost piece, good chess players give

up the match. Thus, it was by a sort of conventionthat the drama

ended, and the event that decided the inequality of the forces was

more symbolic than real. But in contrast to this, a very few yearsago we saw an entirely modern war go on fatally to the complete

exhaustion of the adversaries, whose every resource, even to the

last, was consumed, one after another, on the firing line. The

celebrated words of Joseph de Maistre that a battle is lost because

one thinks he has lost it, have themselves lost something of their

old truth. The battle, from now on, is really lost, because men,

bread, gold, coal, oil, are lacking not only for the armies, but

throughout the country.

In all this progress that has been accomplished, there is nothing

more astonishing than that which has been made by light. It was,

a few years ago, only a phenomenon for the eyes. It could be or not

be. It extended in space where it met matter that modified it more

or less, but which remained foreign to it. It has now become the

greatest enigma in the world. Its speed expresses and limits some-

thing essential to the universe. It is believed to have weight. Thestudy of its radiation destroys ideas that we had of void space and

absolute time. It presents mysteriously grouped resemblances to

and dierences from matter. So this very light that was the ordi-

nary symbol of clear, distinct, and perfect understanding, is found

to be involved in a kind of intellectual scandal; it is compromised

with its accomplice matter in the action that the discontinuous

brings against the continuous, probability against appearances,

unity against great numbers, analysis against synthesis, and hid-den reality against the intelligence that hunts it down, and to

put it in a word the unintelligible against the intelligible. Sci-

ence should find here its critical point. But the aair will be

adjusted.

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Paul Valery Art and Progress