an immigrant certificate for admission here, provided that the quota has not been exhausted. However, the certificate does not exempt the immigrant from a final inspection and medical examination at the port of entry. The immigrant is subject to deportation if he or she fails to measure up to the Act of 1917.

The law provides that not more than ten per cent. of the total number of certificates allotted to each country may be issued in any one month, and a certificate is void four months after the date of issuance. The counting of these certificates is made abroad. A no more constructive provision could be imagined than this, for it eliminates the racing of steamships into the ports of entry on the first day of each month, it eliminates the necessity of immigrants being forced to return to Europe due to exhausted quotas, and at the same time it gives our consuls the power to prevent obviously undesirable aliens from coming to America.

The provision in the law abrogating the gentlemen's agreement with Japan, and excluding all Japanese laborers from the United States because of their ineligibility for citizenship, has been the subject of world discussion. Under this gentlemen's agreement Japan, not the United States, determined what and how many Japanese laborers could come to America. It was inevitable that this arrangement should be ended and Congress was within its rights in ending it, although it might have accomplished it in a more diplomatic manner.

It has been my purpose to explain briefly those provisions of the new law which have been subject to the most discussion in order to make clear that each provision is but a logical step forward in our traditional policy of increasing restriction of immigration in a more humane, scientific and constructive manner. The Secretary of Labor, Mr. Davis, said in a recent address, "There should be some immigration of the right kind, but we, not Europe, will say who shall come or we will not let any come." Certainly in the Act of 1924 we have taken important steps forward in the right direction toward permanent legislation worthy of the name. ROY L. GARIS.

PAUL CLAUDEL

BY BRIAN W. DOWNS

I

It will be an interesting task for the literary historian of some future epoch to assess in an impartial manner impossible today the nature, amount and value of the specifically Christian element in literature since Christianity became the official religion of Europe. Will he add any name to the short list of writers at once truly great and truly Christian, who stand immortal and unchallenged? It may be doubted. For, to confess a truth, however large the coöperation of dogmatic religion with art of all kinds may bulk in the vocal aspirations of moralists and divines, it is not an aim which producers and lovers of good literature have often had deeply at heart. Though from time to time there have been sincerely religious men, who, like Tolstoi, have wished to harness their artistic powers to the juggernaut of their creed; though there have arisen literary dictators, like the brothers Schlegel, who have wished to impose their faith on the literary movement of their time; yet when it has come to practice, posterity recognizes that those works in which these very prophets have put the best of themselves are those in which they have most resolutely waived their religious and ethical preoccupations. And where an ambition like theirs has been most fully realized, there the creative passion of the artist has shown itself feeblest. Richardson was as devout a man as Dean Farrar; but Eric, or Little by Little puts up a poor show against Clarissa.

The last of the many attempts to "bring religion into literature", as some of its advocates proudly style the process,―that of the French Symbolists, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans and their like, with prayers on their lips (and in their hearts, they said) but blasphemy in their books, may be blotted somewhat contemptuously from this roll of honor. One, however, among their con

geners and their immediate disciples has never varnished his eikons with dung or wavered appreciably in his desire to spread by precept and example the Christian Gospel in the world of the imagination. "Who would suspect," he once exclaimed, in the accents of one gazing down upon Jerusalem, "who would suspect while reading Rabelais, Montaigne, Racine, Molière, Victor Hugo, that a God has died for us on the Cross? This sort of thing must absolutely stop."

The daring zealot who uttered such words is not, as one might hazard, a pastor of one of the surviving Huguenot congregations; though his reading is all in Aquinas, he is not some zealous Dominican mindful of a time when all self-expression paid service of lip, and more than lip, to the Christian God in his church; but Paul Louis Charles Claudel, now, after long service in the consular and diplomatic services, the French Republic's Ambassador accredited to his Imperial Majesty of Japan. At the same time he takes his place, in the opinion of some, as junior fellow in the noble brotherhood of Dante, Herbert, Milton, Vondel, Calderon and Klopstock. It will be our prime concern to discover whether such a magnificent claim can be established with justice.

II

M. Claudel made his fame, and still preserves it among all but the smallest circle of fanatics, with a series of plays. At the time of writing this, twelve such stand to his credit, many in a bewildering variety of successive redactions. Two of the number, the musical comedy of Proteus and a dismally flaccid puppet play called The Bear and the Moon (1919), stand quite apart from the others and need not concern us, at any rate for the moment. But the common peculiarities of the remainder clearly deserve some present attention.

The typical Claudel play strikes as decidedly singular even an age habituated to the Muses' latter-day vagaries. The modern work that perhaps comes closest to it is M. Maeterlinck's. This is comprehensible enough, since both these poets, then young lions in their twenties, were launched into the arena precisely at the time (1890) that the Count Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, recently dead, stood at the apogee of his undeserved glory as a playwright;

and they studied their art mostly in the leaves of his last production, Axel, a confused melodrama culminating in the suicide of its two protagonists, a young German earl with leanings towards Rosicrucianism and a lady of incomparable pallor and a pretty taste in practical jokes. From Axel Messrs. Maeterlinck and Claudel learnt-what the new philosophies hastened to corroborate that human Intellect is naught in value and practical effect over against the urgings of the Will, and that human speech is a mere tattered veil, through whose rents a white gleam of meaning occasionally appears, but which for the most part serves to cover and obscure the messages no less of the Will than of the disprized Intellect. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam employed dialogue primarily to create "atmosphere", and, though differing in their own application of the general law, it was on this freak that they later seized with the greatest eagerness.

M. Claudel agrees too with M. Maeterlinck in moving the time of action in his most characteristic plays from the precise 1828 of Axel to a mythical, conventionalized Middle Age, and in utterly rejecting the Byronic disillusion which culminated in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's most celebrated sentence: "Live? Our servants shall do that for us!"

After that they part company. M. Claudel never permits himself that abuse of the pathetic fallacy which M. Maeterlinck took over from their common inspirer, and, very notably, he differs from him in his dramatic treatment of Roman Catholicism. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, devout believer as he was (rather after the strange manner of the latter Huysmans and of Baudelaire), had utilized certain externalities of Roman ritual for creating stage effect and enhancing that "atmosphere" of mystery and exaltation towards the all-important creation of which his energies were chiefly bent, and here M. Maeterlinck is content to follow him. But with M. Claudel a stage device, a mere accessory, comes to assume an importance nothing less than essential. For all M. Claudel's plays (with the exceptions made) may justly be called modern miracle-cum-morality plays, the nearest equivalent we have to the Digby Mary Magdalen or Everyman. They exist for the sake of some strange occurrence, imputed to the direct intervention of God; and that fixes a great gulf between

them and the puerile "Rosicrucianism" of Axel or the prowling beguines of The Princess Maleine-the elimination of which would merely affect atmosphere and not structure. Of two plays, which exhibit respectively M. Claudel's dramatic talent at its strongest and feeblest, we can say that the entire interest centres in supernatural happenings. In The Seventh Day's Rest (1901)1, a powerful melodrama with many effective situations, an Emperor of China descends into the realms of Death and the Devil for the succor of his subjects afflicted by an inroad of ghosts, and on his return to earth his sceptre miraculously turns into a cross. In Christmas Eve 1914 (1915) the murdered innocents from the Eastern Marches of France meet behind the lines in solemn glorifications of their Lord and their country, which the enemy's artillery tactfully punctuates with salvos precisely where the music requires them. Of M. Claudel's most celebrated piece, The Tidings Brought to Mary (1912), which the French Academy "crowned" and which has found its way on to the boards of most civilized countries, the interest, though not actually absorbed by the marvellous, as it is in the two plays just mentioned, certainly culminates in a genuine miracle: a dead child is brought to life and suckled by a virgin.

So one might go through the list. The two plays in which the plain spectator would detect perhaps least of the supernatural are nevertheless exceedingly instructive in this respect: The Humiliated Father (1920) (which exhibits another semi-pathological miracle) depends for its dramatic complication on the disregard of a foolish piece of advice bestowed by Pius IX, that pontiff who had himself declared infallible and became "Jesus Christ on earth"; the rationale of Hard Bread (1918) consists in the overt working out of the scriptural adage touching the Sins of the Fathers an elaboration, by the way, practised also in The Humiliated Father. These plays, in brief, like Mary Magdalen and Everyman', serve primarily as object-lessons, to assert Eternal Providence, and justify the ways of God to men. Their author avows it when he says of one of them, The Exchange (1901), that its theme is the incompatibility of Action and the Soul.

Again, like Mary Magdalen and Everyman, they suffer from an 1 The dates given are those of publication, not of composition.

VOL. CCXX.-NO. 824