do we not feel that the solidarity of England with the English folk and of the English folk with the English soil, is burnt into our imaginations in a new and distinctive way?
But the poetry of shires and provinces reacts too upon the poetry of nationality. It infuses something of the more instinctive and rudimentary attachments from which it springs into a passion peculiarly exposed to the contagion of rhetoric and interest. Some of the most strident voices among living nationalist poets have found an unexpected note of tenderness when they sang their home province. Mr. Kipling charms us when he tells, in his close-knit verse, of the 'wooded, dim, Blue goodness of the Weald'. And the more strident notes of D'Annunzio's patriotism are also assuaged by the tenderness and depth of his home feeling. We read with some apprehension his dedication of La Nave to the god of seas:
'O Lord, who bringest forth and dost efface
The ocean-ruling Nations, race by race,
It is this living People, by Thy grace
Who on the sea
Shall magnify Thy name, who on the sea
Shall glorify Thy name, who on the sea
With myrrh and blood shall sacrifice to Thee
At the altar-prow,
Of all earth's oceans make our sea, O Thou!
Amen!
But he dedicated a noble drama, the Figlia d'Iorio, in a different tone, 'To the land of the Abruzzi, to my Mother, to my Sisters, to my brother in exile, to my father in his grave, to all my dead and all my race in the mountains and by the sea, I dedicate this song of the ancient blood.'
(2) Democracy
The growth of democratic as of national feeling during the later century naturally produced a plentiful harvest of eloquent utterance in verse. With this, merely as such, I am not here concerned, even though it be as fine as the Socialist songs of William Morris or Edward Carpenter. But the Catholic Socialism of Charles Péguy,—itself an original and, for most of his contemporaries, a bewildering combination—struck out a no less original poetry,—a poetry of solidarity. Péguy's Socialism, like his Catholicism, was single-souled; he ignored that behind the one was a Party, and behind the other a Church. It was his bitterest regret that a vast part of humanity was removed beyond the pale of fellowship by eternal damnation. It was his sublimest thought that the solidarity of man includes the damned. In his first version of the Jeanne d'Arc mystery, already referred to, he tells how Jesus, crucified,
Saw not his Mother in tears at the cross-foot
Below him, saw not Magdalen nor John,
But wept, dying, only for Judas' death.
The Saviour loved this Judas, and though utterly
He gave himself, he knew he could not save him.
It was the dogma of damnation which for long kept Péguy out of its fold, that barbarous mixture of life and death, he called it, which no man will accept who has won the spirit of collective humanity. But he revolted not because he was tolerant of evil; on the contrary to damn sins was for him a weak and unsocial solution; evil had not to be damned but to be fought down. Whether this vision of Christ weeping because he could not save Judas was un-Christian, or more 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 Péguy's powerful personality set its own stamp upon whatever he believed, and though a close friend of Jaurès, 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 Rémy 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 naïvete 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.'