It is a commonplace to say that the Twentieth Century is an age of deeds, not words, that the young generation (in France especially) are born not dreamers, but doers. Claudel himself is a traveller and a man of action. A native of Picardy (he was born in 1868 of a Vosgian stock,) he has lived of late years little in Paris and in the world of letters. A pupil of the Symbolists, Arthur Rimbaud and Mallarmé, he left France for America in his early youth, at four-and-twenty years of age, to make his way in the Consular service. It would be interesting to learn in what degree this aristocrat (by temperament at least), this Catholic, suffered the contact of the democratic prophet, Walt Whitman. There are points of similarity, not only in the form. A few years later we find him Consul at Tien-Tsin (one of the finest of his odes is dated from Pekin), and since then, Paul Claudel has become an authority and a specialist in the Chinese affairs of the French Foreign Office. In 1908 he returned to Europe in order to assume the duties of Consul at Prague, then at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and, at the present moment, he is Consul-General at Rio-Janeiro. The poet, therefore, is no idle singer of an empty day; and his heroes, too, are men of action--a general in _Tête d’Or_; a hydraulic engineer in _La Jeune Fille Violaine_; an American merchant in _L’Échange_; a Consul in _Partage de Midi_; a political agitator in _L’Otage_; an architect in _L’Annonce Faite à Marie_. And the sense of his plays, if we read them right, is that not poetic feeling, but effort, should be our daily bread; that mere sentiment is sterile and incoherent (the adventurous Louis Laine in _L’Échange_ is the slave of the sentiment of the hour); that activity, even when it is evil activity, may bring forth a better future (the murderous Mara in _L’Annonce_, the brutal Toussaint in _L’Otage_ are, no less, the begetters of to-morrow); but that while energy should inspire our life, yet none the less there is something infinitely better which comes not by taking pains, something better than all our work and labour, just as there is something infinitely better than Life, which may descend upon us, uplift us, carry us into a superior sphere: there is the Grace of God, there is Inspiration, there is ‘La Muse qui est la Grâce!’ For, at heart, this poet of airmen and soldiers is a sort of lay monk, reserving his palm of praise, not for the conqueror, but for the rapt ecstatic--the solitary, dying with half his labours unachieved, the hermit Violaine, the broken-hearted wife of Toussaint Turelure. And we might inscribe all his books, for an epigraph, with that line of the Vulgate, which Renan wrote in the monks’ ledger at Monte Cassino: ‘Unum est necessarium ... et Maria elegit optimam partem.’