Claudel to Riviere
Shuster, George N.
WE ARE a generation which has walked across the earth and through much of time. It was not until we approached manhood that the whole cargo of the renaissance had been unloaded and surveyed....
...One may note in passing that this primal decision of Claudel's, stirring as martial ardor and rugged as masculine will, has been made by numberless Christian young men in our time...
...After all, Maurice Barres and Marcel Proust photographed rather than initiated the intellectual habits of their time...
...Surely, however, he was all the more representative for being still in the bud...
...Everything takes its start from a sort of interior rumbling, amid which, more or less defined, certain detached gleams begin to appear, the poem being still submerged...
...Claudel was at that time in China, devoting such morsels of time as were left from a busy life to the writing of poetry which always struggled to express a vision of "living with God in the world...
...Were these baubles, unsatisfying and innately useless, the proofs we had been asked to accept so that our faith in the developing majesty of man, in, the ultimate utility of our own pain, might make us free...
...Riviere will not go down it, advancing any number of shrewd reasons...
...When at last the news came that Jacques...
...This imperious mandate all but begins the first of many letters which Jacques Riviere sent to Paul Claudel, and which have now been collected and translated.* It is the correspondence of a young French university man to the poet in whose work he had seen the flare of singularly firm conviction—a flare rising from a source deeper than easy theories and emancipations, and fed by unique experience...
...Art is but a pale counterfeit of sanctity...
...Over and beyond problems of aesthetics, Claudei sought vigorously (as indeed he had with Francis Jammes, whose account of the process is delightful) to enlist his young friend in a service of the highest intellectual importance...
...Each thought is a complete entity—is never developed without the consonance or dissonance of other thought-entities making itself apparent...
...A morbid zest for the "labyrinthine ways" of one's own mind...
...Like so many of his companions in the peculiar modern age, he had separated from Christian practice for the sake of an interior debauch...
...The vegetation its tepid raysi bring to life has no roots and is as ephemeral as that of the gardens of Adonis...
...Riviere has narrated...
...Here we are back again at the road, the route of conversion...
...Riviere had gone to the Table of the Lord, the poet knew a moment of perfect happiness...
...Nevertheless, "Oh, this God, this God I I long so to feel Him present, here, close to me, solid and unmistakable, to be done with seeking Him, to put an end once and for all to this dreaming of happiness...
...the third is practical counsel, in which respect the method is like instructing^ an arctic explorer to make certain necessary provisions...
...He who has not responded to it, who has not at least felt it close beside his heart like some swift presage of immaculate glory, does not know of what stuff the inheritors of Christendom are made in our day...
...Quantum potes, tantum aude," he quotes upon one occasion, adding, "This is the great device of Christian art and civilization...
...It is this which once made Europe something more than a stupid empire of the average...
...I see nothing anywhere save nullity and absence of meaning...
...Well, ini the record of that service these rescued and lovingly edited letters, now available to English readers in a careful and spirited translation, have their noble place as a singularly representative testimonial to the sources from which Catholic "imagination and sensibility" derive in this epoch, and to the bitter need there is for them...
...to us they could bring only an infinite nausea...
...The first is direction, which is like pointing out the right road to a hesitant traveler...
...What you have done is so fine a thing...
...This apologetic is tripartite, therefore...
...I am a simple and serious man: as an artist I despise virtuosity and fail to understand facetiousness...
...Every conversion, Pascal tells us, is a sentence of doom...
...Logic has never meant anything to me...
...bachelor apartments are the scenes of frenzied revels in bizarre, contradictory, abstract ideas...
...The fat dead geniuses in the Paris Pantheon had been intoxicated by them...
...the second is argument, in which recourse is had to philosophy and history quite in the same way as one might answer a voyager's questions as to whether a route indicated were the most practicable and had been safely trav ersed in the past...
...He preserved always that remarkable ability to comprehend Claudel which is one of the most attractive aspects of the correspondence in question here...
...Jacques Riviere felt it, indeed, but he did not wish to capitulate...
...2.50...
...New York: Albert and Charles Boni...
...he wrote on the morning of January 5, 1914...
...From this point of view the carefully preserved and now relatively pathetic Riviere letters are, I think,, precious aids toward an understanding of the time...
...That, stated with unusual forcefulness and psychological insight, is Riviere's and the whole modern problem...
...I make bold to tell you," he declares, "that your place is with Patmore, Peguy, Chesterton, and, if I dare say so, with myself, writers all of us whose task it is to restore a Catholic imagination and sensibility which have been withered and parched for four centuries, thanks to the triumph of a purely lay literature whose ultimate corruption we are witnessing today...
...In all apologetics there are, perhaps, thred important acts which remain distinct even though they are always correlated...
...And still again, "How would you have me ask a cure from faith when my sickness is precisely the impossibility of having any faith in the world's reality...
...I am not an emancipated spirit...
...I am not a man who thinks consecutively and piecemeal," says the poet in one place...
...But be brave I It must be done...
...But though his life was perforce vagrant spiritually, his feet had been set bravely on the right path and the great deed of decision had been done...
...Youth is not formed for pleasure, but for heroism...
...Treasures over which our fathers, during one or two centuries, had gloated in prophetic dreams and magnified out of all proportion to reality, suddenly looked meagre, therefore, and shocked us like imitation pearls which had been mistaken for precious gems...
...From Tete-d'Or onward, resolute orthodoxy had revealed itself through him as the spring of verve and originality...
...Again, "I do not accord any demonstrative value to philosophy...
...The two men discussed poetic art on many an informal and intimate page, so that one does not know where there is more authentic information about Claudel's work than here, unless it be in Riviere's critical essays...
...Claudel is all for action, bombarding his friend's logical niceties with an almost peasant-like common sense and urging the practical aids of prayer and sacramental practice with the directness of an ancient hermit...
...It is interesting beyond measure to see how Claudel, who knew from experience much of his young correspondent's difiSculty, set about his task...
...As for Jacques Riviere, he frankly displayed all the major symptoms...
...To the secret, tragic delights of inchoate epicureanism he opposes the virility of the "light" which is "never refused to him who seeks it with a sincere heart...
...The more I know of it, the more I see that it is only a game...
...For me—I believe in a good God and a profitable life, wherein it matters a great deal which road a man takes...
...That drink which makes the spirit taut for adventure—"wind-beaten but ascending," as Meredith says—we could not find...
...For it is unfortunately true that not many men listen so sharply to the inevitable knocking of God...
...It is also homely as a proverb, though bright with the same luminous poetic insight which transfigures plays like Tete-d'Or and the magnificent odes...
...His mind and discipline were thus directly opposite to those of Riviere...
...an interest in philosophy which, however, is taken no more seriously than a circle of breezy club-women take telling futures with cards...
...And so, wherever we were young amid the ruins of civilization, a cry was heard: "Be brutal if you will, fling me| to the ground, insult me, but give me my answer...
...All these have rarely been defined with so much precision and veracity as in this book...
...the classical Thomistic and patristic doctrine with which he displays a remarkable familiarity, but his faith...
...Therefore the series of philosophical speculations, remarkably keen but confessedly futile, with which he began to attack Claudel...
...There are many things which appear to you infinitely sweet, terribly desirable, which you will have to renounce...
...The resolve to do battle with doubt in one's own breast, with the multitudinous scepticisms and hesitancies of modernity—this has rallied us in the service of the most illustrious declaration ever to have been heralded to mankind...
...translated by Henry Lonffan Stuart...
...As yet this gifted youngster had not displayed the gifts of subtle analysis and complex experience which would later make him so able a director of that intellectual kaleidoscope...
...a discriminating enjoyment of the pleasures of pessimism, intensified by the mellow light on country scenes at evening and by such things as Wagner's poisoned Tristan...
...In this respect Riviere is absolutely typical of a psychical habit that characterizes violently uproarious atheists like Trotski as it does scores of tidy New Yorkers whose *Letters to a Doubter, by Paul Claudel...
...Those sensual sources of chaos which the older romantic rebels had habitually turned to were simply not interesting to the modern revolutionary...
...La Nouvelle Revue FranSaise...
...Remember: 'I have conquered the world,' " This initial programmatic declaration guides Claudel's hand throughout the correspondence, as indeed it seems to have regulated all of his literary conduct...
...My sole excuse is that pessimism is the sincerest part of me, that it was born with me, that it is so attached to my soul by now that I never dream of parading it, that I never speak of it to anyone but you...
...And again, "I will wager to take any idea whatsoever and merely by taking advantage of its essential plasticity, to construct any system you please, or even two mutually contradictory systems, out of it...
...But—and this I implore you to believe—never, never has the thought entered my head that there is a reason for what goes on, any order in the world or any happiness possible for mankind...
...The essence of the poet's response, however, is not...
...Much was to descend, however, upon the shoulders of the young disciple, as Mme...
...How did Paul Claudel deal with the problem...
Vol. 6 • May 1927 • No. 3
