Elsewhere a deeper note is sounded. It is not for nothing that Jeanne
d'Arc is the saint of French Catholic democracy, or that Péguy, her
poet, calls the Incarnation the 'sublime adventure of God's Son'. That
last adventure of the Dantesque Ulysses beyond the sunset thrills us
to-day more than the Odyssean tale of his triumphant home-return, and
D'Annunzio, greatly daring, takes it as the symbol of his own
adventurous life. Francis Thompson's most famous poem, too, represents
the divine effort to save the erring soul under the image of the hound's
eager chase of a quarry which may escape; while Yeats hears God 'blowing
his lonely horn' along the moonlit faery glades of Erin. And Meredith,
who so often profoundly voiced the spirit of the time in which only his
ripe old age was passed, struck this note in his sublime verses on
revolutionary France--

'soaring France
That divinely shook the dead
From living man; that stretched ahead
Her resolute forefinger straight
And marched toward the gloomy gate
Of Earth's Untried.'

It is needless to dwell upon the affinity between this temper of
adventure in poetry and the teaching of Bergson. That the link is not
wholly fortuitous is shown by the interesting _Art Poétique_ (1903) of
his quondam pupil, Claudel, a little treatise pervaded by the idea of
Creative-evolution.

It was natural in such a time to assume that any living art of poetry
must itself be new, and in fact the years immediately before and after
the turn of the century are crowded with announcements of 'new'