A Poet Among Ambassadors

...By the one, we were exalted by the heroic ardor of affection for the homeland...

...He repudiates the divorce be- tween the flesh and the spirit, which is called jan- s~nisme in Europe and puritanism in America...

...Such is not the ease of Claudel...

...On the contrary, the life of the Christ-child as de- picted in mediaeval literature, is vitalized and elevated...

...Le Repos du Septitme Jour...

...Thus, from the human point of view, that rebirth of mysticism, that return to religion, that blazing forth of Catholicism in the art, literature and thought of France is explained...

...That he should have a world of interests separated from the world of his parents was inconceivable...

...for example, that poig- nant tragedy, L'Annonce Faite ~ Marie, which marks an epoch in French literature...

...He is a strik-ing example of creative spontaneity, which doffs the garb of schools, and casts off the fetters of narrow and unenlightened logic...

...Able to decipher the enigma of individuali- ties, he is capable of exploring and reconnoitering the sensibilities of foreign countries, even the most myste- rious and strange, such as Japan and China--which is real diplomacy...

...Yet this brilliant d6but probably needed, I have good reason to suppose, support of his increasingly prominent muse, often an obstacle to a successful practical career...

...Still the artists it sponsored were, for the most part, full of promise which they later fulfilled...

...We all welcomed Claudel's work at once as a unique and rare creation, despite the protests of the Philistines...

...This mystic is sound, robust, well-rooted in his French province, l'Aisne...

...His reports to the Quai d'Orsay attested to a superior precision and correct documentation, and, by a "special diaphaneity of soul," to use Waker Pater's phrase, he knew how to see the present and foresee the future...

...in his native village, Villeneuve-sur- F~re, in Tardenois...

...It is in the great bulk of generally read- able writings that one finds children of all kinds, figu- ratively running and playing through the pages...

...There is a tendency to explain exceptional qualities in the lives of the saints by extending them retroactively to their childhood days, so that the child saints are very often immature only in years, having fully developed faculties and powers to perform all sorts of astonishing feats...

...He was a boy during those troubling and troubled times which accompanied the fall of the Second Em- pire and the establishment of the Third Republic...

...And perhaps THE CHRIST-CHILD By DOLORES were it not for this Catholicism which illumined and reassembled his dispersions, his too rich nature would have been lost in its own opulence...

...All his work is, as M. Georges Duhamel has said, a pil...

...Most of the holy children are destined to sainthood...

...The highest problems of life, of death and destiny, the intensity of the passions tran- scended by grace, the century-old soul of France fash- ioned by her saints and her martyrs, the mirade of faith, that renewal of the whole being resulting from conversion, that something in the French maiden which is so angelical and so delicately human--in short, the true voice of the people which only the aristocracy of genius understands and interprets--these in my opinion characterize especially the many-sided life-work of Claude1, master of our language and ideas...

...Is it astonishing then, if, beset by doubt, sorrow, disillusion- ment, they sought to cling to something stable...

...The first time I met Paul Claudel in Paris, at L~on Bailly's, the publisher of the Librairie de l'Art Ind& pendant, T&e d'Or, and La Ville were fresh from the press...

...He starts, so to speak, a fresh tradition...

...It was, however, in the Far East that he proved himself a diplomat of the first rank...

...Paul Claudel appeared at Bailly's with the &fat of a meteor...

...In the cosmic cataclysm compelling them to question everything anew, they have turned their eyes and hearts toward Christ and His kingdom...

...The Librairie de l'Art Inddpendant has never made money, no doubt because it published the first writings of a generation that was trying to find itself...

...Feuilles de Saints...

...del's teaching, we may say that reason beguiles, that chimerical fancy dazzles in vain, but the spirit urges us to peace...

...But he believes also in the sun...

...New-comers, sometimes they were not of least importance, joined the army of veterans...

...They may become government leaders, as did Lamartine, or diplomats after the pattern of Chateau- briand...

...In style and in ideas, Anatole France has done no more than rearrange Voltaire and Renan...

...On the contrary, the world sees a glorious sincerity that develops between nations, not a courtesy purely verbal, but a sympathy generous and effectual...

...In the realm of literature and art, men live by creation, not by imitation...

...L'Otage...

...Through the punctual efficiency of his work, and his extraordinary gift of psychological penetration, he earned steady advance- ment...

...But so he climbed to spirituality, though keeping his feet on the ground...

...Then we perceive that beauty is only a path to lead higher...

...That his per- sonality should require special care and study to insure its unblemished blossoming was a dream not yet dreamed...

...Summing up Clau...

...Cinq Grandes Odes...

...He is a beginning...

...Paul Claudel, the new ambassador whom Aristide Briand, a connoisseur of men, is sending to Washing- ton, first took the examination for foreign service in the diplomatic corps at the age of twenty-one...

...And in the crisis through which Asia is passing today, we need in Europe and in America, this kind of seer...

...Naturally this requires of individual poets that they be, not mere rhymers, but possess the wide beat of the eagle's wings and its high vision...

...Rumor has it that his book, La Connais- sance de l'Est, served to place him before his govern- ment as the Frenchman best qualified to be ambassador in the Far East...

...IN OLD ENGLAND BENARDETE T HE idea that there are no child characters in middle-English literature may possibly occur to those not steeped in the study and spirit of the middle-ages...

...This great poet is a "diviner," a vates, as Carlyle puts it...

...Among them were literary men like Maeterlinck, Henry de Rtgnier, Andrt Gide, and Paul Adam...

...This movement of heroic Christianity has nothing of the superficial or pedantic...

...But works of this nature are few in comparison with the mass of material left us in the English vernacular of the middle-ages...

...Thus Psichari, the "lily of the trenches," died like his elder comrade Prguy, with the name of Christ on his lips...

...When one studies Paul Claudel and his works, one can perhaps better realize why, some time ago, I declared in these col- umns that a distinguished litterateur like Anatole France is only a brilliant subordinate character, since he corresponds to the moment when the old wave dies...

...Le Pain Dur...

...Indeed, many people are under the im- pression that the only manuscripts of the period (that is, between about I ioo and i5oo) in which children are even mentioned or referred to, are frankly peda- gogical or didactic, like The Babees Book...

...They were born in mourn-ing, later witnessed a smiling period of civilization, and finally suffered from frightful upheavals, as much in the life of the spirit as in that of society...

...Broadly speaking, there are two general types of children in middle-English literature--the lay or ordi- nary children, and the holy children...

...When quite young, Paul Claudel spent a few years of apprenticeship in the consulates of Boston and New York, and so came to understand, during a formative age, the vivifying virtues of this country...

...December 22, I926 THE COMMONWEAL I75 A POET AMONG AMBASSADORS By JULES-BOIS T HE poets are like the god Proteus in that they adjust themselves to all the manners of life...

...It is in virtue of this magical power of intuition that Paul Claudel ~tly represents a large portion of the new France, and perhaps also the newer ways of thinking and feeling the world over...

...But history amply supports the view that the child was a very insignificant member of pre-renaissance society...

...It was Catholicism that revealed his genius to him, as he acknowledges in Ma Conversion...

...In my career as dramatic author and critic, two memorable Paris premieres stand out --Cyrano, and L'Annonce Faite/~ Marie...

...grimage toward God, yet treading through the road- ways of the earth...

...It is utterly spontaneous...

...Paul Claudel is great, thanks to qualities essentially opposite to those char- acterizing Monsieur Bergeret...

...on the contrary, knowing that "the spirit bloweth where it listeth," they taught the youth who came to them, not to imitate them, but to find them- selves, to be themselves...

...To the man of the middle-ages, his child was only a reduced facsimile of himself--nothing more than an homunculus...

...Then no one will attribute to them a suavity after the man- ner of Machiavelli, which gilds the lie and travesties the truth...

...The I76 THE COMMONWEAL December 22, I926 Frenchmen who in I889 were twenty years old and had a distinct vocation, were marked, if I dare say so, with a fatidical sign...

...Tramping our pride in the dust, even our intellectual pride, we endeavor to rise to humility, and to understand why, in a letter to Jacques Rivi~re, the Christian poet has formulated this avowal : "Art is only a pale counterfeit of sanctity...

...by the other, which is an equally en-thusiastic homage to France, our patriotism was trans- figured into a religious rapture...

...Claudel has his origin in himself...

...ing and purifying himself, has remained loyal to his principles...

...Therein was found a prin-ciple of energy when everything else crumbled...

...He has attempted something which has no counterpart in the past...

...for fleets and armies are inadequate to smooth out racial misunderstandings...

...The child-hood of the saints is invariably idealized to correspond to the mediaeval vagary of what saints ought to be as children...

...Since then, the author of T&e d'Or, though elevat...

...Neither P~gny with his Jeanne flare, nor Claudel with his L'Annonce Faite ~ Marie, has sought to gain disciples...

...Regarded by his elders as a potential, if as yet inactive, adult, he seemed to differ but slightly from his mother and father, uncles and aunts...

...One may like or dislike his aesthe- tics, but no one can deny his originality, his strength, his contribution to the literary history of his time...

...There have been converts who had already behind them an important literary achievement...

...He incarnates the French ideal of simple grandeur, of dignity without arrogance, of lyricism that weds the human to the superhuman...

...Nevertheless, one quickly distinguishes a poet wholly intellectual like Rostand, from a poet aflame with the divine, like Claudel...

...Paul Claudel is the wind that makes the new wave rise...

...Most of the child charac- ters in the literature of the period are therefore inane...

...He proclaims jubilantly: "I am a thousand times more certain of the existence of God than of the sun which shines upon us...

...There is something proud and pure, magnetic and irreconcilable with commonplaces and vulgarities in the books and plays that followed T&e d'Or...