the mistress of the world, loosing the knot of all the problems of humanity.  His poetic autobiography, the first Laude (1901)—­counterpart of Wordsworth’s Prelude and its very antipodes—­culminates in a prayer 900 lines long to Hermes, god of the energy which precipitates itself on life and makes it pregnant with invention and discovery, of the iron will ’which chews care as a laurel leaf’—­the god of the Superman.  And so he discovers the muse of the Superman, the Muse of Energy, a tenth Muse whose first poet he modestly disclaims to be, if he may only be, as he would have us interpret his name, her Announcer.

If D’Annunzio emulates Nietzsche, the two great militant poets of Catholic France would have scorned the comparison.  Charles Peguy’s brief career was shaped from his first entrance, poor and of peasant birth, at a Paris Lycee, to his heroic death in the field, September 1914, by a daemonic force of character.  His heroine, glorified in his first book, was Jeanne d’Arc, who attempted the impossible, and achieved it.  In writing, his principle—­shocking to French literary tradition—­was to speak the brutal truth brutalement.  As a poet he stood in the direct lineage of Corneille, whose Polyeucte he thought the greatest of the world’s tragedies.  As a man, he embodied with naive intensity the unsurpassed inborn heroism of the French race.

Claudel, even more remote as a thinker from Nietzsche than Peguy, exhibits a kindred temper in the ingrained violence of his art.  His stroke is vehement and peremptory; he is an absolutist in style as in creed.  It is the style of one who apprehends the visible world with an intensity as of passionate embrace, such as the young Browning expresses in Pauline.  ‘I would fain have seen everything,’ he cries, ’possessed and made it my own, not with eyes and senses only, but with mind and spirit.’  And after he was converted he saw and painted supernatural things with the same carnal and robust incisiveness.  The half-lights of Symbolist mysticism are remote from his hard glare.  As a dramatist he drew upon and exaggerated that which in Aeschylus and Shakespeare seems to the countrymen of Racine nearest to the limit of the terrible and the brutal permissible in art:  a princess nailed by the hands like a sparrow-hawk to a pine by a brutal peasant; the daughter of a noble house submitting to a loathed marriage with a foul-mouthed plebeian in order to save the pope.

And if we look, finally, for corresponding phenomena at home, we find them surely in the masculine, militant, and in the French sense brutal poetry of W.E.  Henley and Rudyard Kipling.  If any modern poets have conceived life in terms of will, and penetrated their verse with that faith, it is the author of ‘I am the Captain of my Soul’, the ’Book of the Sword’, and ‘London Voluntaries’, friend and subject of the great kindred-minded sculptor Rodin, the poet over whose grave in St. Paul’s George Wyndham found the right word when he said—­marking him off from the great contemplative, listening poets of the past—­’His music was not the still sad music of humanity; it was never still, rarely sad, always intrepid.’  And we know how Kipling, after sanctioning the mischievous superstition that ‘East and West can never meet’, refuted it by producing his own ‘two strong men’.