It was the dogma of damnation which for long kept Peguy 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 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 nothing to offer and nothing to ask. 
    I come only, Mother, to gaze at you.