432 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

menes extraordinaires, des realisations brusques de paradoxes, des decep-
tions brutales de 1'evidence.

*Je ne citerai qu'un exemple: les grandes vertus des peuples allemands
ont engendre plus de maux que 1'oisivete jamais n'a cree de vices. Nous
avons vu, de nos yeux vu, le travail consciencieux, 1'instruction la plus
solide, la discipline et 1'application les plus serieuses, adaptes a d'epou-
vantables desseins.

'Tant d'horreurs n'auraient pas ete possibles sans tant de vertus. II a
fallu, sans doute, beaucoup de science pour tuer tant d'hommes, dissiper
tant de biens, aneantir tant de villes en si peu de temps; mais il a fallu
non moins dequalites morales. Savoir et Devoir, vous etes done suspects ?'r

This keen-eyed castaway, peering down into the depths of Western
Man's Subconscious Psyche from a revealing observation-post on the
flotsam from a spiritual shipwreck, had anticipated the experience that
Thor Heyerdahl and his comrades were to have when they peered down
into the depths of the Pacific Ocean between the logs of their balsa-
wood raft. This perilously intimate commerce with elemental Nature
brought into view deep-sea monsters that had been invisible to the com-
fortable passengers on board a mechanically propelled Modern Western
luxury liner;2 and Valeryhad the imagination to realize that there must
be yet more horrifying depths below the depths so far surveyed by eyes
receiving only a first lesson in enlightenment through suffering. The
inhabitants of London needed the harsher ordeal of a Second World War
to transfigure their mood from the hysterical abandon of Armistice Day,
1918, to the sober restraint of VE Day, 1945. An observer who, on both
days, was out and about in the streets of London, in the neighbourhood
of Buckingham Palace and Whitehall, could hardly fail to be struck by
the contrast between the temper of a crowd who had jumped to the
childish conclusion that they had seen the last of War in their time,
and perhaps for all time, and the temper of the same crowd when
another twenty-seven years of disillusioning experience had taught them
to suspect that, in their time, world wars were not just meaninglessly
hideous accidents in a normally rational and benign order of Nature, but
were the very stuff of which the thread of contemporary world history
was being spun. This lesson, which the Londoners were taking to heart
in AJX 1945, had been learnt by the French man of letters twenty-seven
years earlier. At the moment of the sounding of the first cease-fire, Paul
Valery had been aware that he was witnessing the end of an act which
was not the end of the tragedy—as he testifies in the following exordium
of an address delivered by him at Zurich on the i5th November, 1922.

*L*orage vient de finir, et cependant nous sommes inquiets, anxieux,
comme si Torage allait eclater.

Tresque toutes les choses humaines demeurent dans une terrible incerti-
tude. Nous considerons ce qui a disparu, nous sommes presque d6truits
par ce qui est detmit; nous ne savons pas ce qui va naitre, et nous pouvons
raisonnablement le craindre. Nous esperons vaguement, nous redoutons
precisetnent; nos craintes sont infiniment plus precises que nos esperances;

1 Valfey, op. cit., op, 12-13.

* See UeyeniaH, Tbor: Kon-Tiki, Across ike Pacific by Rttft (Chicago 1950, Rand
BicNrfly), p. 117, quoted on pp. 398-9, above.