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 Paul
Claudel, the poet, dramatist and essayist,
was the French Ambassador to Washington
at the time of Chesterton's second visit
to America in 1930-1931. Claudel wrote the
following address of welcome to Chesterton
when he visited Holy Cross College in Worcester,
Massachusetts:
I am delighted to bring
my salutations to the great poet and the
great Christian, G.K. Chesterton, during
his tour of the United States. His books,
for the past twenty years, have never failed
to bring me joy and refreshment: and this
feeling of regard is so tender and unusual
that approbation is linked with admiration.
During the past century,
Catholicism almost everywhere has had to
sustain an attitude of defense: it preferred
to take shelter in the past and in forms
of refuge, or, as one might say, in chapels
severely cloistered and ornamented with
rigid refinery. Chesterton thoroughly understands
that in our religion Mystery is wed with
Evidence, and our eternal responses with
the most pressing and present exigencies.
He is the man that threw the doors wide
open: and upon a world pallid and sick he
sent floods of poetry, of joyousness, of
noble sympathies, of radiant and thundering
humor, - all drawn from unfailing sources
of orthodoxy. His onward march is the verification
of that divine saying: 'The Truth will make
you free.'
If I were to state
his essential quality, I would say that
it is a sort of triumphant common sense
- that gaudium de veritate, of which philosophers
discourse; - a joyous acclaim towards the
splendor of the powers of the soul, those
faculties that were overburdened and numbed
by a century of false science, of pedantic
pessimism of counterfeit and contra-fact.
In the sparkling and irresistible manner
of a great poet, he keeps always bringing
us back to that promise of Christ: - And
I will refresh you: Et Ego reficiam.
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