VARIETY. By Paul Valery. Translated from the French by T. Malcolm Crosby. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1927. $3.00.

THE curiosity of anyone who has followed recent literary reviews should be excited by the mere mention of the name, Paul Valery. This man has been compared to Baudelaire, to Pascal, even, if I remember rightly, to Plato. Such raptuous enthusiasm, issuing from eminent and sober critics, arouses in one the intense desire to examine Valery himself in the hope that there may be a slight bit of justification for this holiday from professional reserve.

Valery is by reputation the defender of the conscious mind. A man of wide and profound learning, as well as a poet, and an admirer of the creations of the mind which constitute our civilization, he has set himself the problem of discussing the basis of the intellectual life. The exterior dissimilarities of the sciences and arts have lead to the belief that they are widely separated. 'These labors, however, differ only by variations from a common basis." So he goes beneath the surface, down into the depths of the mind as it is at work in propounding a mathematical or physical law, in conceiving a great architectural structure, in finding God. "The operations of the mind can serve our purpose of analysis only while they are moving, unresolved, still at the mercy of the moment. . . . Having examined them, we can guess by what starts and snatches of thought, by what strange suggestions from human events or the flow of sensation, and after what immense moments of lassitude, men are able to see the shadows of their future works . . . the secret--that of Leonardo and that of Bonaparte, like that which the highest intelligence once possessed--resides and can only reside in the relations which they find--which they are forced to find--between things of which we cannot grasp the law of continuity . . . Their supreme achievement, the one which the world admires, was only a simple matter, like comparing two lengths."

The operation of the mind Valery has examined in a way to which could be applied the motto of Leonardo, which he admires so much, "obstinate rigour." And with remarkable keenness he has applied what he has found to philosophical problems, to religious revelations, to the theory of poetry.

But in the end he sees no more in the law of poetry than the artificial and arbitrary rules of the game which we adopt as unnecessary limits that we may in the end better express ourselves; he seems to imply that we might just as well have adopted an entirely different set of rules. And he has missed Pascal altogether. We suspect that he has substituted a psychology for its more ultimate. Indeed, he says it best himself: "The affairs of the world interest me only as they relate to the intellect--everything in relation to the intellect--everything in relation to the intellect. Bacan would call this intellect an idol. I agree, but have found none better . . . . This point of view is false, since it separates the mind from all other activities; out this obstruction and falsification are inevitable; every point of view is false."

It is possible that the task of M. Valery is incomplete. Might he not well examine the questions, how a certain point of view comes to be adopted, what is the essential basis of all points of view, and the relation of this to other things