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Paul Valry, the preeminent French poet-critic of the twentieth century, published twice in The Yale Review. His Reections 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 air for images a stued Versailles courtier on display at the Museum of Ethnography, for instance reminds one of his extraordinary gift for imaginative concentration. The same year this essay appeared, The Yale Review also published work by Vita Sackville-West, Salvador 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 brutal operations of the engineer on the landscape, the tyranny of the machine, the simplication of human types which compensates for the complication of the collective organisms. By 1840, people R
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were already indignant at the rst eects of a transformation that had scarcely begun. The romantics, although they were contemporaries of Ampre and Faraday, freely ignored the sciences, or disdained them; or only retained their fantastic elements. Their minds sought to nd a refuge in the Middle Ages as they imagined them; they turned away from the chemist to the alchemist. 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 culture (and even a comedy). There is, however, a somewhat remarkable contradiction in the intellectual conduct of a great man of that time. The same Edgar Poe, who was one of the rst to denounce the new barbarity and superstition of the modern, was also the rst writer who thought of introducing into literary production, into the art of creating ction, and even into poetry, that same spirit of analysis and calculation 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 rst half of the nineteenth century, the artist discovered and dened his opposite the bourgeois. The bourgeois is a symmetrical gure to the romantic. Moreover, contradictory characteristics 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 palpable reality, but he has faith in some sort of increasing and almost inevitable 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 Y

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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 alliance, 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 industry 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 formerly no 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 consensus (the consensus on which our customs and our civil laws rest) was only the eect of the pleasure that most people experience on nding themselves in agreement with one another, and like their likes. Finally, almost all the dreams that humanity has had and that gure in our fables of various kinds ying, diving, the representation of absent things, the word caught and transported, separated from its time and its source and many strange things that had not even been dreamed have now come out of the impossible, 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 prodigies. 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 R

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hundredth part of the control over nature and the means of diverting himself, of cultivating his mind, or providing it with sensations, that today many men in quite mediocre circumstances have at their disposal. I do not count in, it is true, the delight of commanding, 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, ies 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 greatest 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 fty 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 entirely dierent 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. Everything 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; they depend 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. Y

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Already some native of one of the new countries who comes to visit Versailles, can and must regard those gures laden with great heads of dead hair, in their embroidered clothes, nobly caught in parading attitudes, with the same eye with which in the Museum of 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 had been Racine or Bossuet, take rank among the bizarre, manycolored, tattooed gures, exposed to smiles, and a little frightening, 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 denite 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 veriable 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 carnival of re, 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 calamitous but direct and inevitable consequence of the development of our ways and means. The extent, the duration, the intensity, and even the atrocity of that war corresponded to the degree of grandeur of our power. It was on the same scale as our resources and our industries in peace times; as dierent in its proportions from R

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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 its very quality ; it is only in pure geometry that similar gures exist. Similitude is nearly always of the mind. The last war cannot be considered as a simple enlargement of former conicts. 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 convention that 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 years ago 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 ring 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 modied 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 something essential to the universe. It is believed to have weight. The study 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 ordinary 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 hidden reality against the intelligence that hunts it down, and to put it in a word the unintelligible against the intelligible. Science should nd here its critical point. But the aair will be adjusted. Y