e 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