Mystic and Man of Affairs

...Then befell an event that has influenced my whole life...

...Claudel changes all this...

...his contours, though sometimes luxuriously Gothic, climb straight up to the fleche of emotion...

...And this conception of the static puissance of God in the midst of His created things, is, I believe, the clue to Paul Claudel's character...

...The world of art, science, and literature was violently irreligious, and the young Claudel, as one of the enlightened minority, set up for a thoroughgoing agnostic...

...Any colloquializing or "correcting" of vocabulary and diction would be treacherous to the essence of Claudel's poetry, and fatal to its beauty...

...Amid the whirring responsibilities of international affairs in China, Italy, Brazil, Germany and Japan, Paul Claudel has led what seems at first glance to be a dual existence, the elements of which would threaten the happiness, or even the sanity, of a character less perfectly integrated...

...Of late years, it has turned its attention to a clinical discussion of the emotional ganglia, seeking to find in the microscopic analyses of cell and neuron material of literary and aesthetic importance...

...In his life and poetry he has leveled down to the stern foundations of faith...

...At no time in his life has he enjoyed the privilege of clear literary leisure, yet in volume alone his productivity equals that of any great contemporary...

...This gave rise to his famous "respiratory theory," which he has adapted to the stage, and has employed in all his lyric pieces...

...Under the solvent of this conception all things melt into their ultimate strata of importance, to achieve a daring kind of unity...

...Lord, You have delivered me from books and Ideas, from Idols and their preachers...

...It was Rimbaud who discovered the color of vowels in his famous vowel sonnet...

...He disdains the nuance, is impatient of analysis, and is concerned not at all with conscious style...

...Teacher and event arrived almost at the same moment: the master was Arthur Rimbaud, the "inventor of vers libre" and a tremendous spiritual force in Claudel's life...

...His syntax," writes Mme...

...In a world abandoned to perpetual motion and tinted ephemera he juts out like a challenging ledge of eternal stone...

...To attempt a solution of these questions it is necessary to glance backward forty years to a time when the young Claudel was emerging from adolescence into a world of frenzied negation and sceptic unbelief...

...He was the first "symbolist" and is generally credited with having introduced free verse into modern poetry...

...In the achieving of grand totalities, Paul Claudel is the most highly successful of modern poets...

...He has given a new lustre to Francis Thompson's truth that the Church is the mother of poets...

...Marie Perrin, "is justifiable but strange...

...Rimbaud, as we have noted, was also the first modern to break away from the old classic metres, on the ground that they compelled the poet to a rigid artificiality of thought and diction...

...His glance appraises the entire subject...

...Renan ruled and Montaigne was a deity...

...But this is a trait of all highly-charged poetry, which, seeking to avoid vague abstractions, in the very superabundance of its energy becomes richly freighted with sensuous metaphors...

...He is the poet of grand effects, a painter of ensembles, a creator of superbly synthetic power...

...The hymns and prayers in Corona Benigatitis are cast in large Gregorian rhythms that blow them grandly forward...

...I suddenly experienced a devastating knowledge of innocence, and of the eternal childhood of God...

...The younger poet adopted the theories of his teacher, and practised then...

...and the great event was a conversion to Catholicism, as swiftly dramatic as any mystical experience ever recorded in Christian history...

...One cannot walk far afield in the realm of contemporary culture without coming into contact with the personality of Paul Claudel...

...in his own art...

...He exclaims: I accept the world as it is, and I would alter nothing, Lord, give me Thyself and I am well content...

...His dominant interest is found in the relations of the human soul with its Creator...

...These symbols are manifestations of the operant will of God...

...What inner unity makes possible a life of such diverse accomplishment...

...But with Claudel the hierarchy of values is preserved...

...What miracle enables this poet, spending himself generously in the thousand contacts of daily affairs, to preserve for lyric utterance the pure language of the spirit...

...Paul Claudel is the regenerator of Catholic poetry in France, and has healed the century-old schism, if not between faith and science, then certainly between faith and imagination...

...His tower of values is rooted in terrestrial rock, but no man except Claudel himself can say what the cloud-washed battlements reveal...

...And this unity of perfect faith has enabled Paul Claudel to participate actively in the affairs of a shifting, vertiginous world, ever keeping in mind the world's central Reason, its one God...

...Paul Claudel is not a poetic loiterer, delighting in the arabesque for its own sake, nor much addicted to pressing his aching temples for the "mot juste...

...If Paul Claudel never writes another verse he is already assured of a place just below the very greatest of our Catholic poets of all time...

...But not without modifications, in* portant and original...

...Having penetrated at a stroke to the centre of reality, Paul Claudel now abandoned the old myths of "science," and erected a metaphysic based wholly upon faith...

...At this point it seems appropriate to mention Clau-del's technical debt to Arthur Rimbaud...

...In an instant my heart was pierced, and I believed...

...And if the poet clogs his vision with color, and drowns the inner ear with sound, the result is fatal...

...Claudel perceives the world of sensation with such sharp and thirsty joy, and asserts its beauty so positively that the reader is sometimes inundated by floods of sensuous imagery...

...The ecstasy of the inspired recluse, the fervor of the illumined soul, are seen on every page...

...Rimbaud was one of the most savagely original spirits in French literary history...

...Born in Villeneuve-sur-Fere on August 8, 1868, Paul Claudel studied law at the Lycee de Louis-le-Grand in Paris, and found himself at the age of eighteen projected into the mechanistic and scientifically formu-larized universe of the 'eighties...

...He believed, if indeed he believed anything, that somehow the mathematical laws of nature would speedily exert an influence on art and society, and that the millennium of high rationalism was imminent on the morrow...

...Others have instructed me, but this man constructed me...

...It is significant, also, to note that his utterance as a poet dates from the time of his mystical experience in Notre Dame, and that the road of faith was for Claudel the way of poetry...

...For him, the figure is merely the symbol and interpreter of the spirit, valuable because it intensifies the wonder of the poet and renders it more poignant to the reader...

...who first suggested that a limpid style was of necessity a superficial one—and that a profound subject could not be sincerely treated in a luminous manner so fashionable in the French tradition...

...Envisioning the relationship between the elements of his poem, he sweeps onward like a dithyrambic wave, gaining fresh strength at every breath, and washes at last over the highest cliffs of poetic emotion—cliffs that have daunted more meticulous poets, or cast them, shrieking, into the churning trough of language...

...Yet this preoccupation with the soul does not prevent Paul Claudel from devoting a large share of his poetic energy to the praise and demonstration of the world of nature...

...But it is the strangeness of Isaiah and of the Apocalypse...

...His concern henceforth was to be with this inner reality, and from the first his poetry deals wholly with this theme...

...He joyously perceived that mathematical formulas and "natural agents" could never explain for him the interior genesis of forms which are forever renewing the glory of the world...

...It would be impossible to achieve in clipped and regular verse the sonorous and rebounding music of this mediaeval poetry...

...Such is his passion for the physical appearances of things, that he has been accused by hostile critics of the very paganism he wishes to avoid...

...And he has done this by rediscovering the soul as a legitimate subject of poetry, placing it first among the concerns of the poet...

...The character of Violaine in The Tidings Brought to Mary is a penetrating study of the sacrificial impulse, operating on a sensitive soul...

...Claudel discovered that there is a rising inflection of the human voice toward the middle of any spoken phrase, and a falling away at the end of a sentence, in correspondence with the exhaustion of the breath...

...I believed with such adhesive force, with so complete a surrender of my entire being, with a conviction so powerful, and with a certainty leaving no room for any species of doubt—that ever since, all the books, all the reasonings, and all the hazards of a much-agitated life, have not been able to shake my faith, no, nor even touch it...

...Most of the lyrics are cast in flowing distichs, with loose internal rhythms that fall into elusive patterns, and terminate either in assonance or rhymes...

...514 MYSTIC AND MAN OF AFFAIRS By HENRY MORTON ROBINSON POET and diplomat, dramatist and metaphysician, mystic and man of affairs—these are the apparently conflicting terms of the equation that is Paul Claudel, the new ambassador from France to the United States...

...That this strangeness exists, cannot be denied...

...In Magnificat, the poet chants his liberation from the bondage of "ideas": My soul doth magnify the Lord, Who has delivered me from Idols And Who has ordained that I adore Him alone, and not Isis nor Osiris, Nor Justice, nor Progress, nor Truth, nor Divinity, nor Humanity, or the Laws of Nature, nor Art, nor Beauty...

...Claudel is convinced of the innate stability of God in a world of evolution and change...

...It was this man, who, at the height of his fame, powerfully fascinated the young Claudel...

...John of the Cross, Henry Vaughn, and Francis Thompson are of his fellowship...

...and in an age of diluted emotion he has dared to speak out passionately...

...By temperament robust and perfectly balanced, Claudel has accepted life as he finds it...

...His dramatic characters speak in a series of waves, the verses following as closely as possible the natural inflections of the human voice...

...All of Claudel's work abounds in biblical and archaic locutions...

...On Christmas day, 1886, Paul Claudel entered the Church of Notre Dame in Paris, "simply through curiosity, seeking in the Catholic ceremonies the appropriate excitant and material for some studies in decadency...

...One realizes that he has intensely lived his poems, that he is not a "literary mystic" nor a monger of sibylline phrases...

...Yet, if one were to casually examine a volume of his poetry, without previous knowledge of the author, the first comment would be: "Here is a meditative mystic, recording his visions in the solitude of a monastic cell...

...His brilliant diplomatic gifts are acknowledged—he knows how the world runs, and what makes it go...

...Recognition, sacrifice, surrender, and despair—the most harrowing and permanent emotions of the soul are reflected in Claudel's art as the incessant drama between God and the individual...

...And in Corona Benigatitis the poet anatomizes the experiences of mystical love, in language that has no parallel in English, and must of necessity be compared to the exclamations of Saint Teresa or the Canticles of Saint Francis...

...Poet and diplomat, mystic and man of affairs, Paul Claudel presents a phenomenon for which we are grateful, and offers an enigma that no amount of critical rationalizing can ever hope to solve satisfactorily...

...he starts for his goal at a gallop, dragging language and reader after him by sheer force of conviction...

...I owe everything to Rimbaud," says Claudel...

...Both his lyric and dramatic pieces are passionately motivated by a sense of God's reality in a world of external shadows, signs, and symbols...

...The inevitable result is a surprising increase in dignity and effectiveness...

...The poetry of Paul Claudel," says M. Mounet, "though mystical in intention, is pagan in fact...

...Ten dramas, nine volumes of poetry, translations of Aeschylus and Coventry Pat-more, a philosophical treatise on the Art of Poetry, and an uncollected mass of periodical literature are the fruits of a career devoted on the one side to the French diplomatic and consular service, and on the other to a lyric demonstration of the human soul...

...Such criticism is only partially deserved...

...he has reclaimed the soul for art...

...Merely by his presence we are reinvigorated and restored...

...Since the renaissance, the aesthetic expression of Europe and America has been almost completely pagan, devoted to the portrayal of merely sensual existences...

...Yet even this much-discussed and long-awaited millennium seemed a bit boring, and on the whole rather pitiful to a young man who, like Augustine, was awaiting a teacher who would illuminate the black void, and an event that would give savor to a flat and unprofitable world-machine...