all the many hard things said about the superstitions and practices of Lamaism that cannot be said with at least equal force against the only two branches of Christianity that have any historical right to call themselves orthodox, authoritative and traditional. A faith in which a Queen of Spain cannot bear a baby without recourse to miraculous' Girdles of the Virgin,' a faith in which a Russian Grand Duke openly ascribes his escape from shipwreck to a miraculous Ikon, cannot possibly throw a stone against another for carting copies of the Scriptures round a field to ensure fertility, or prompting the prostrations of a would-be mother round a sacred shrine; to say nothing of the fact that possibly the Grand Duke, and the Queen of Spain, may have had chances of a better education than my lady Aoo of Tibet. And who is to say, anyhow, in any creed, that an act of faith, if sincere, is necessarily powerless to react upon the material world? Many travellers, indeed, spoon-fed by the missionaries with whom they stay, have nothing but bad words for Lamaism and its monks. But missionaries are not qualified for tolerance, either by education or profession; it is curious to find how even the more candid of them will only admit the virtues and sanctities of their rivals, when native honesty leaves them no other choice, in the face of close questioning. Otherwise, they are anxious to continue the old stale wholesale condemnation of the monks as an utterly worthless crew in bulk, and never confess a more favourable truth until compelled by cross-examination.

Now, wholesale condemnations are invariably misleading; and, if the traveller looks at these things with his own eyes, he will soon see that the Lamas are a set of monks little better or worse than any other set of monks. There are all sorts in every monastery, saints and sinners too, all the world over; the mitre does not make the monk, least of all where one son (if not more) of every family is claimed for the religious life, vocation or no vocation. But learning and goodness can thrive as freely in the Halls of Heaven as in any little house of Christian sectaries; and perhaps at yet ampler leisure in the Abbey of Chebson. For this is a very different foundation from the last-much smaller, much richer, much less popular, and much more select, for here the

monks are chosen only from among the 'best' people: admission is difficult, and the foundation exclusive as that of a German Chapter. Each monk dwells apart in a spacious house of his own; no life and little bustle of devotion stir the tranquillity of the place; its atmosphere stands to that of the Halls of Heaven rather as that of a wealthy Oxford college to a poor and populous parish. Very stately and splendid are the successive guest-cloisters, filled with a sumptuous silence; the abbey nestles into a fold of high grassy downs, fronting the south, and in its midst rises the huge main church, with golden roof adorned with dragons. Its walls are of soft red brick diversified with a band of cut brush-wood ends, packed together till the effect is of a rich brown velvet. It is hedged all round with a wide precinct of cloisters, frescoed from end to end, and railed off, by a screen containing hundreds of Invocation wheels, from the smooth emerald expanse of turf, in the middle of which stands the church. At present a Buddha of much importance is on a visit to Chebson, fresh from Peking, and with a guard of smart Peking soldiers in attendance. His mere visit should be an asset to the place, whose Manifestation, just now in abeyance, is but crude and new; however, he makes no appearance, and does not stir from his allotted residence, unless it be to carry the last consolations of the Faith to a dying dignitary. But Chebson, rich and stately, is a more sophisticated place than the Halls of Heaven; and it is there, amid its Iris fields and friendly crowds of monks and novices and pilgrims of devotion, that one's memory most fondly lingers, rather than in the leisurely and expensive emptinesses of Chebson Abbey, despite the charm of its fat old Prior, a typical ecclesiastic, full of unction and twinkles (with heavy artificial-looking eyebrows, and the great mobile face of a Coquelin), as placidly the equal of his guests as any College Dean assured and portly.

REGINALD FARRER.

Art. 5.-THE WORKS OF PAUL CLAUDEL.

1. Works. Theatre Complet, four vols (1910-12); L'Art Poétique (1904); Connaissance de l'Est (1907). Paris: Société du Mercure de France. Cing Grands Odes (1910); L'Annonce faite à Marie (1911); L'ôtage (1911); Cette Heure qui est entre le Printemps et l'Été (1913); Corona Benignitatis Anni Dei (1915); Trois Poèmes de Guerre (1915). Nouvelle Revue Française.

2. Paul Claudel.

Par Georges Duhamel. Paris: Mer

cure de France, 1913.

It is a general rule among our French friends that an even more fervid adoration is lavished upon the unknown man of letters than upon the known. In France it is the laudable custom of the younger generation to wage merciless and incessant warfare upon its predecessor; and experience has established that the most potent weapon of assault is a secret literary cult. It affords at once a justification and a means of attack; it combines the advantages of a crusade and a conspiracy. Therefore, there are always good reasons, a priori, for heavily discounting the enthusiasm of such criticisms as have been M. Claudel's portion. His adherents are not merely estimating his positive worth, they are using him as a bludgeon to break the heads of their enemies. And the enemies reply in kind. Instead of merely insinuating a doubt whether M. Claudel is greater than Shakespeare, they deny him not only genius, but ordinary talent of a kind that is at all times common enough in France. In Paris unreadable plays are produced by the score, but they are all playable. M. Claudel's plays, say his adversaries, can be neither read nor played. 'Malheureux,' replies the crusader, 'celui que le premier choc n'effraiera point de cette terrible beauté et de cette formidable vérité.'

It is probable-once more to approach the question a priori-that M. Claudel will be rated neither so low nor so high when the fury of battle is calmed; but it is certain that the true judgment upon him does not lie in the mean between these extremes. No literary judgment is a mean; and that is why one mistrusts the action of the Academy, which, terrified at last by the clamour of

the crusaders, has delivered up to M. Claudel one of its average prizes and has endeavoured to strike an average of opinion for its justification: 'the poet is to be admired, but not to be imitated.' There have been so many French poets during the last quarter of a century who have been worthy to be admired but not to be imitated, that we are weary of them. A poet is worthy of both or neither.

At least it would appear that M. Claudel himself has spent long in playing 'the sedulous ape.' One of his seven plays is a translation of the 'Agamemnon'; and his vocabulary shows signs of royal borrowing from the Bible. Critics speak, also, of the influence of Shakespeare, but the evidences are visible only to the eye of naked intuition, unclothed and uncorrupted by a knowledge of Shakespeare. But, Shakespeare apart, Eschylus and the Bible are not the general food of modern French literature, which prefers its connexion with the Greek and Hebrew classics more delicately mediated; and Claudel's poetic language has, in comparison with the normal transparence of French style, an almost apocalyptic obscurity. Whether, therefore, he is the greatest of modern French poets or not, he is unquestionably in outward appearance the least French of them all. Not only is his language tumultuous and rhetorical, but his words leap from commonplace to recondite, while his lines are strangely shaped according to a plan which is by no means self-evident. The characters of his plays, moreover, do not speak; they chant; and not one only, like Cassandra, but all.

Yet, in spite of the initial strangeness, even upon those who approach Claudel's works in the order of their composition, the predominant effect is one of deliberate calculation. The lyrical frenzy with which the persons of his earlier dramas deliver themselves resolves into an argument built upon a firm structure of original thought. Even the impressive wealth of his imagery, the opulence of which has conciliated many hostile critics, is revealed as deliberate rather than spontaneous. His metaphors are links in a well-woven dialectic rather than the tumultuous visions of the seer. The novelty of his language is due rather to the logical precision with which he establishes the exact sense of his terms than to

an instinctive love of words in themselves arresting. In brief, Claudel's work is not merely philosophic poetry; it is essentially philosophy in poetry.

Perhaps the poet was conscious of his purpose from the first. Certainly, his evolution towards consciousness was rapid, for already the second version of his second drama, 'La Ville' (1897), has for its chief character a poet, Coeuvre, into whose mouth are put sibylline, yet definite statements concerning the nature of his art :

'Dilatant ce vide que j'ai en moi, j'ouvre la bouche,

Et ayant aspiré l'air, dans ce legs de lui-même par lequel l'homme à chaque instant expire l'image de sa mort,

Je restitue une parole intelligible.'

And in the same play, Besme, the arch-materialist, thus acknowledges the power of poetry: 'Tu n'expliques rien, ô poète, mais toutes choses deviennent par toi explicables.'

Here Science is made to confess that the secret of knowledge rests not with her, but with Poetry. The poet alone knows; to him alone it is given to elicit the inward order of the universe. He absorbs and comprehends the world, and by the natural movement of his physical being utters the word. Therefore the poetic knowledge, which is the only true knowledge, is fundamentally creative. It is the vocal recognition of the goodness and inevitable perfection of the created world; it is the recreation of the ordered universe. So in the metaphysical argument of the Art Poétique' (1904), which is only formally distinct from the rest of his poetic works by a bold stroke of etymology, Claudel proclaims: Nous ne naissons pas seuls. Naître, pour tout, c'est co-naître. Toute naissance est une connaissance.' This is a striking statement of the converse of his earlier proposition. Since every being implies and necessitates every other, the creation of a new being is essentially the assertion of a yet more perfect unity; and man, to whom it is given not merely to be, but to express in intelligible words his sense of being, is born, or born anew, when he recognises the inseparable community between himself and the created world, and allows the sense of perfect oneness to penetrate his soul. Then, by uttering the word which is the natural efflux