is still an abundant spring from which a group not to be under-estimated among the champions of theatrical thought draw their water. We may say that in France today there is a Catholic literature and a Catholic theater, whose leaders are Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Gabriel Marcel, and Bernanos, followed by a consid-erable company of brilliant critics and thinking university professors.

We cannot but pause a little at Paul Claudel to say a word about him, for he stands in the front rank, commanding by his mighty personality, by his ardent faith — the spring of his abundant inspira-tion — and by the purity of his art and the clarity of his message.

Claudel grew up at the end of the nineteenth century in the secular atmosphere of France — that atmosphere over which Taine and Renan presided with their monistic secular spirit. Young Claudel was an atheist like most of his educated young comrades of that time. He tells his own story: he once went to the church of Notre-Dame to watch the religious rites and listen to the chanted prayers, and there befell him what sometimes befalls atheists — grace suddenly descended into his heart, and the Lord spoke to him and entrusted him with a message to carry to the world. Claudel left the church a believer, and the road opened clearly before him toward his final goal, namely, to harness his pen to spread the message of the Church. He read Rimbaud, the symbolist poet of genius, and through him his faith was awakened "humanly"; he studied at the hands of Mallarmé, the father and philosopher of symbolism, and from him he took a lesson in the purity and clarity of art; he studied Thomas Aquinas, who worked upon him a "generative" effect; and the spring of his faith burst forth upon a world of his beauty — poetry and

glad tidings in a violent, purifying tragedy whose key is God...

As for the plays that over-flowed from this spiritual vitality, the most important are "The Tidings Brought to Mary," "The Satin Slipper," "The Hostage," "The Exchange," and "Christopher Columbus"; and his message in all of them is the unity of the world in Christ — this world for which heaven split open and opened its gates ever since a ladder was set up joining it to heaven.

Perhaps "The Tidings Brought to Mary" (L'Annonce faite à Marie) is among the most splendid things that Claudel's genius has bestowed on the world of the theater. He composed it in 1912, and since that time it has been performed on the various stages of Paris. Its events take place in the Middle Ages, in a peasant family living in a simple atmosphere of warm, sincere faith, made up of a father, a mother, and two daughters. The father hears the call of his Lord to go

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