But the third act is a surprise. The scene opens in the great first-floor living-room of a European factory or store in Southern China. It is evening; all is peace within; Ysé is alone in her white tea-gown, her yellow hair loosely plaited for the night; a babe sleeps in its cradle; but without rages the thunder of cannon with the shrieks of a pillaged city, sacked by fanatics. The Boxers in revolt are ravaging the Concession; this sole building, the strongest, still holds out against them.
But the third act is a surprise. The scene opens in the great first-floor living-room of a European factory or store in Southern China. It is evening; all is peace within; Ysé is alone in her white tea-gown, her yellow hair loosely plaited for the night; a babe sleeps in its cradle; but without rages the thunder of cannon with the shrieks of a pillaged city, sacked by fanatics. The Boxers in revolt are ravaging the Concession; this sole building, the strongest, still holds out against them.
To Ysé, anxiously watching, enters her protector; and, oh, most dramatic surprise!—it is not Mesa; it is Amalric! And yet we learn the child is Mesa’s. The man of action has carried off the love and the son of the dreamer: all the profits of life are for him. This night the lovers are to die. As club after convent, store after villa, fall into the hands of the screaming insurgents, Amalric (ever the man of action, and even in this tragic hour cheerful, limited, master of his fate) neatly adjusts the mechanism of an infernal machine which, before the Chinese can break down the gates and bolts of the great factory, will blow the house, its inhabitants, and its assailants high in the air, shattered to dust in the twinkling of an eye:—
Ysé: Et cependant il est terrible d’être morte.(Elle se trouble et lui prend la main.)... Et, Amalric, est ce que vraiment il n’y a point de Dieu?Amalric: Pourquoi faire? S’il y en avait un, je te l’aurais dit.
Ysé: Et cependant il est terrible d’être morte.
(Elle se trouble et lui prend la main.)
... Et, Amalric, est ce que vraiment il n’y a point de Dieu?
Amalric: Pourquoi faire? S’il y en avait un, je te l’aurais dit.
But here comes Mesa; he has a pass from the insurgents which permits him to go where he will; he comes to save Ysé. Amalric furious at the sight of his rival, leaps at him with one bound, wrestles with him, flings him off, broken, unconscious, his shoulder out of joint. And he takes from Mesa the talisman which will save their lives, as he has already taken his love and his child. Then, leaving Mesa still in his deep swoon, he carries Ysé down to the harbour, where a ship is waiting, just under the walls.
While Mesa still stirs and murmurs in his swoon, Ysé returns; Amalric thinks her safe in her cabin. But let Amalric live, let Amalric prosper! She will choose rather to die with Mesa in voluntary expiation. Like Gretchen, in Gœthe’sFaust, Ysé forgoes her chance of life; she will risk the great adventure of Eternity: ‘L’esprit vainqueur dans la transfiguration de Midi.’ And these last words explain the enigmatic title: Midi, Noon, is earthly passion which must be purified by suffering and sacrifice before it content the soul.
The Sharing of Noon,Le Partage de Midi, would make an admirable opera for the music of a Claude Debussy.
To my mind, the most interesting of Claudel’s plays, isL’Otage(The Hostage), an historical piece in the sense that our poet has captured the atmosphere and character of the period he revives. Though, as for the facts, he invents them at his pleasure. This is the more startling that the timeis 1814, and among the personages are Louis XVIII. and Pope Pius, whose ghosts must be surprised to learn some of their adventures.
We are at the end of the First Empire; Napoleon has the Pope safe in his keeping, a prisoner; so far so good. But here Claudel parts company with History. He imagines that a Royalist conspirator, the Vicomte de Coûfontaine, carries off the Pope by a deed of derring-do, and conveys him by night to a half-ruined abbey hidden in the woods of Picardy—all that is left of his family estate. Coûfontaine is an émigré, a dangerous exile, with a price set on his head, and the abbey is inhabited by a young girl, his cousin, Mademoiselle Sygne de Coûfontaine, who lives there in great retirement, striving by endless patience, tireless economy, to piece again together the tattered fragments of the family fortunes—not for herself, but for the little children of that exiled cousin whom, half-unwittingly she adores.
The opening scene is exquisite: its delicate yet homely poetry recalls Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula asleep. But Sygne keeps vigil. She is alone by night in the library of her abbey. The books of the exiled monks line the walls; on the one side left bare, a Christ of bronze is nailed to a huge blackened cross made of the charred beams of the Château de Coûfontaine, burned under the Revolution. The tall shuttered windows have no curtains. There is no carpet on the speckless floor, where the very nails are burnished. Greatsolemn chairs are ranged against the wall. In one corner, on a wicker hurdle, the harvest of plums is laid out to dry. In another corner of the huge bare place the young mistress of the abbey has established her abode; over her head, sole ornament, is hung a torn fragment of tapestry, snatched from the burning, blazoned with the arms of Coûfontaine. In front of her, a pretty old-fashioned bureau is covered with ledgers and files of papers neatly tied. Close by a little table is spread with bread and wine and the cold meat for a frugal supper, as though some belated visitor might be expected.
Coûfontaine arrives in the dead of night; he brings with him an old nameless priest for Sygne to house and hide; the girl does not guess it is the Pope. She greets her cousin with quiet joy, and with a girlish pride shows him her filed accounts, her savings, all the store accumulated for the two exiled children whose miniatures stand on her writing-table. But both little ones are dead; the scarlet fever has killed them over in England. And their mother is dead too, their mother who had betrayed hearth and home, their mother who had been the Dauphin’s mistress. Coûfontaine is a desolate man, beset with bitter memories. What future is there for the race of Coûfontaine? The scene closes on a betrothal. But (as in Corneille’sPolyeucte) the hearth of plighted love is destined to be shattered by the stroke of Grace, and the act of God.
The second act rises on the same background, but it is afternoon. The sun streams in at the uncurtained windows and illuminates the bare room; and the delicate beauty of Sygne, and the figure of ruse and power in front of her. This is her foster-brother, the son of the village sorcerer and of her old nurse; Toussaint Turelure is now a person of importance, one of Napoleon’s barons, and Prefect of the Marne. Toussaint Turelure is a vigorous portrait: the vulgarity, the unmannerliness, the ostentation, the parvenu quality of the First Empire are manifest in him; but also its real capacity and power, its grasp of life and men. Toussaint is an Amalric under other circumstances. He loves his delicate and fearless foster-sister even as Napoleon was attracted by the aristocratic Josephine. But so far he has had no hold over her. A woman who asks for nothing and dreads nothing, and cares for nothing, is difficult to terrorise or to seduce. Now Toussaint has surprised her secret: he knows that she has in her keeping the life of Coûfontaine—and that her hostage is the Pope!
So he puts the bargain to her: her hand or their heads! He gives her two hours to decide on all their fates. And the English readers of Claudel remember William Morris and the ‘Haystack in the Floods’—more than once Claudel will remind us of the pre-Raphaelites of yesterday.
The natural woman in Sygne decides for death and freedom. But her parish priest comes to herand (in a heartrending scene) points out to her the path of sacrifice. No law, no obligation, compels a human being to immolate his happiness to the welfare of the community. Should Sygne, in the interest of her personal honour, give up the Pope, no priest dare refuse her absolution: she is within her rights. But there are rights and duties superior to our human rights. Man does not live for man, but for God; and Sygne hears the voice that, in the midst of his reasoning, surprised the philosopher of Königsburg—the voice that whispers: ‘Du kannst, denn du sollst!’
The third scene rises on the Château de Pantin. Toussaint Turelure is Prefect of the Seine; he holds in his hands the destinies of France. A bevy of Napoleon’s officers are drinking the health of his first-born, whose bells of baptism are ringing loud and clear—for France has re-entered the fold of the Church. But the mother is not present at the festival: the Baronne Toussaint Turelure is a shattered invalid. Her head, half-palsied, moves continually from side to side, slowly from right to left, and again from right to left, in the weariest gesture of denegation and denial. She is the wreck of Sygne de Coûfontaine.
While Toussaint drinks and sings with the Imperial captains, he leaves his sick wife to draw up a secret treaty with an emissary of the lawful king of France—for he meditates a timely treason, à la Talleyrand. Need I say that King Louis’s envoy is the Vicomte de Coûfontaine? Need Iadd that their negotiations are varied by the cruel reproaches of Coûfontaine, by the broken-hearted disculpations of Sygne. ‘Is there anything higher than Love?’ says he; ‘is there anything deeper than one’s Race? You have been a traitor to your heart and your blood.’ ‘There is God,’ says Sygne,—
‘J’ai sauvé le Prêtre éternel.’
But Coûfontaine will not be convinced. At least he will wreak his vengeance on the usurper. So, having signed the papers which bring the king to his own, having carried them off, he takes, through the open French window, a parting shot at Toussaint Turelure, which Sygne intercepts, receiving it in her heart, while Turelure, with a shot of his pistol, kills the aggressor. Thus the two cousins perish; their kingdom is not of this world; yet they leave an heir: a child of the body of Sygne, an heir to the name and the titles of Coûfontaine by an act of legal substitution. Like Violaine, like Mesa, Coûfontaine can leave no child: the hateful Mara, the brutal Toussaint—brief the children of Action—can make the fruits of the spirit flourish and multiply, and they alone.
Why does Sygne save the life of the husband she never forgives? Is it an act of sacrifice? A homage to the sacrament? No, for she dies unshriven because unforgiving. It is because Death is better than Life: ‘une chose trop bonne pourque je la lui eusse laissée.’ This heartrending last act ofL’Otageis especially moving in the last version, that acted in Paris during the summer of 1914, in which, mute, dying, relentless, Sygne opposes only silence to the blatant triumph of her odious master. It is, indeed, the dialogue of Life and Death.
What will be the ultimate position of Claudel? It is yet too soon to say. His influence on the writers of our time is a fact. He is still young; he is incontestably original; he is no doubt obscure. But many of the greatest writers were and remain obscure—Dante, for instance, and Pascal.
In our own times, Carlyle, Browning, Whitman, Ibsen, Nietzsche, are often mysterious. And none the less, from the date of their appearance, they have been read with eagerness, and they continue to be read (a little less eagerly), and, indeed, to be revered, as the bearers of a message, by an undaunted band of followers. Like all these, Claudel aspires to be a conductor of souls. And in the things of the spirit a certain obscurity is no disadvantage, if there be a real message behind it. We fill out the author’s adumbrated meaning, as we read an intention into a fine musical phrase, and his sentence gains by all the priceless bulk of our accumulated interpretations.
There are passages of Shakespeare, there arePenséesof Pascal, which we contemplate, as it were, in an atmosphere of moral beauty, a halo, a luminous aura, through which they shinetransfigured and augmented. They certainly mean more to us than to the most admiring of their contemporaries: their words have been messages to so many passionate and earnest souls! This phenomenon of accretion is the reward of the obscure: they only, like the saints of Afghanistan, continue to grow in their graves. An Addison, a Voltaire, however great, means what he has always meant. But your obscure genius, in time to come, will be either a gospel or a Gongorism; there’s no third state for him.