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. To gaze at you, to weep for happiness, to know That I am your son and that you are there. Nothing at all but for a moment when all is still, Noon! to be with you, Marie, in this place where you are. To say nothing, to gaze upon your face, To let the heart sing in its own speech.' There the nationalist passion of Claudel animates his Catholic religion, yet does not break through its confines. But sometimes the strain of suffering and ruin is too intense for Christian submission, and he takes his God to task truculently for not doing his part in the contract; we are his partner in running the world, and see, he is asleep!