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'Ôtage 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 nothing to offer and nothing to ask.
I come only, Mother, to gaze at you.
To gaze at you, to weep for happiness, to know
That I am your son and that you are there.
Nothing at all but for a moment when all is still,
Noon! to be with you, Marie, in this place where you are.
To say nothing, to gaze upon your face,
To let the heart sing in its own speech.'
There the nationalist passion of Claudel animates his Catholic religion, yet does not break through its confines. But sometimes the strain of suffering and ruin is too intense for Christian submission, and he takes his God to task truculently for not doing his part in the contract; we are his partner in running the world, and see, he is asleep!
'There is a great alliance, willy-nilly, between us henceforth, there
is this bread that with no trembling hand
We have offered you, this wine that we have poured anew,
Our tears that you have gathered, our brothers that you share with us,
leaving the seed in the earth,
There is this living sacrifice of which we satisfy each day's demand,
This chalice we have drunk with you!'
Yet the devout passion emerges again, with notes of piercing pathos:
'Lord, who hast promised us for one glass of water a boundless sea,
Who knows if Thou art not thirsty too?
And that this blood, which is all we have, will quench that thirst
in Thee,
We know, for Thou hast told us so.
If indeed there is a spring in us, well, that is what is to be shown,
If this wine of ours is red,
If our blood has virtue, as Thou sayest, how can it be known
Otherwise than by being shed?'