Mystical Ambassador

The few Berliners who have dabbled seriously in modern French literature welcomed with a pleasure tempered by surprise the appointment of M. Paul Claudel as French Ambassador to Germany.

Is not M. Claudel chiefly famed as a poet of passionate Roman Catholic inspiration, a genius whose poems and dramas are often inspired, and at least equally often violent, rhetorical, extravagant and wilfully obscure? How, asked practical-minded Germans, can the French have been so mad as to send as their Ambassador this poet, moody, mystical, perverse? . . .

German diplomats who had never heard of Poet Claudel remembered the Paul Claudel who began his career in the French consular service more than a. generation and a half ago (as vice consul at New York) and has served as French Minister to Brazil and Denmark and French Ambassador to Japan. . . .

By comparing notes the German diplomats and dilettanti discovered that these two Paul Claudels are indeed one. As an Ambassador M. Claudel is diligent, experienced, indefatigable. It is only when the tasks of State are done that his soul soars on wings of triumph to a poetic and religious ecstasy. To date he has completed his cycle of dramas "L'Arbre (The Tree of Life), dealing with the soul's emergence from the mundane, and has topped this dramatic Comedie Humaine with his Hy nines and Cinque Grandes Odes, poems in which the muse of religious devotion seems at times to be raving in a delirium of joy.