Claudel is, finally, one must admit, a great religious poet, and it is in that fact that the deepest unity of his work must be sought. His work, it has been said, is a long pilgrimage towards God; and the road has not been without its grievous strugglings, since the day when in his youth he was suddenly converted and flung himself towards God, but without winning light for his reason. “O my God,” he cries years after:
I remember the darkness where we two were face to face, those gloomy winter afternoons in Notre-Dame.
I, all alone below there, lit up the face of the great bronze Christ with a twopenny-halfpenny taper.
All men were then against us, science and reason; and I replied nothing.
Only the faith was in me, and I looked at You in silence like a man who prefers his friend.
I went down into Your sepulcher with You.
Claudel’s whole life has been a struggle for the faith, for he is one of those men for whom there is no life save in God, and who see nothing outside faith in Him save despair, death, and annihilation. A somber sadness burdens those first dramas which tell of man’s great struggle to dispense with God and his check; but this gives way to joy in proportion as Claudel’s faith strengthens and grow bright. That pilgrimage towards God is also a pilgrimage towards joy; and that joy breaks into great song, now austere, now delirious, in Claudel’s properly lyrical work—the Hymnes and the Cinq Grandes Odes. Here one hears only the most distant echoes of the great struggle; here are only cries of joy and certitude.
Blessed be Thou, my God, Who hast delivered me from death.... ... He who believes not in God, believes not in Being, and he
Who hates being, hates his own existence.
Lord, I have found Thee.
Who finds Thee has no more tolerance of death.
A strange phenomenon, this Christian poet, passionately, uncompromisingly, almost fanatically Catholic, in the country where Anatole France, the bantering and disillusioned master, holds sway, where Renan and Voltaire reigned, and with them hard reason, distrustful of the supernatural.
France, as Kipling has justly said, is the country most faithful to old things and most wildly enthusiastic about new ones. The present fashion for Roman Catholicism counts for something in Claudel’s sudden vogue, just as Claudel has done something to bring about the fashion. Various writers, tired of wandering far from safe harbors, have “been converted” by Claudel’s appeal; and the young men who reproached France for withering life up, and for lacking the “sense of the divine” have found in Claudel one of their masters. It is the perpetual oscillation of the human spirit from pure reason to exalted sentiment. Claudel stands head and shoulders above the little crowd which surrounds him, and he will outlast them and their ways of thought. Most of us must say to him, in the words of one of his own characters, “I cannot give you my soul.” But we love the poet in him and admire the passionate believer who compels us to question ourselves in the inner silence, the man who made for himself this prayer: