e Christian than
Christianity itself, we need not discuss here; but I am sure that the
spirit of a Catholic democracy as transfigured in the mind of a great
poet could not be more nobly rendered.

(3) _Catholicism_

But Peguy's powerful personality set its own stamp upon whatever he
believed, and though a close friend of Jaures, he was a Socialist who
rejected almost all the ideas of the Socialist school. As little was
his Catholicism to the mind of the Catholic authorities. And his
Catholic poetry is sharply marked off from most of the poetry that
burgeoned under the stimulus of the remarkable revival of Catholic ideas
in twentieth-century France. I say of Catholic ideas, for sceptical
poets like Remy de Gourmont played delicately with the symbols of
Catholic worship, made 'Litanies' of roses, and offered prayers to
Jeanne d'Arc, walking dreamily in the procession of 'Women Saints of
Paradise', to 'fill our hearts with anger'.[18] The Catholic adoration
of women-saints is one of the springs of modern poetry. At the close of
the century of Wordsworth and Shelley, the tender Nature-worship of
Francis of Assisi contributed not less to the recovered power of
Catholic ideas in poetry, and this chiefly in the person of two poets,
in France and in England, both of whom played half-mystically with the
symbolism of their names, Francis Thompson and Francis Jammes. The
child-like naivete of S. Francis is more delicately reflected in Jammes,
a Catholic W.H. Davies, who casts the idyllic light of Biblical pastoral
over modern farm life, and prays to 'his friends, the Asses' to go with
him to Paradise, 'For there is no hell in the land of the Bon Dieu.'

But the most powerful creative imagination to-day in the service of
Catholic ideas is certainly Paul Claudel. I pass by here the series of
dramas, where a Catholic inspiration as fervent as Calderon's is
enforced with Elizabethan technique and Elizabethan violence of terror,
cruelty, and pity.[19] From the ferocious beauty of _L'Otage_ turn
rather to the intense spiritual hush before the altar of some great
French church at noon, where the poet, not long after the first
decisive check of the invaders on the Marne, finds himself alone, before
the shrine of Marie. Here too, his devotion finds a speech not borrowed
from the devout or from their poetry:

'It is noon. I see the Church is open. I must enter.
Mother of Jesus Christ, I do not come to pray.

I have nothi