PAUL CLAUDEL

Itis not easy to account for the enthusiasm aroused in France, among the younger writers, by the works of Paul Claudel, unless we accept the explanation that, with all his faults, he is a great poet. He is a difficult author, often wilfully obscure and allusive; his dramas are lyrical symbols rather than plays and, whatever he write, ode or tragedy, he uses the same medium, a sort of rhythmical prose, sometimes like Walt Whitman’s dithyrambs, and sometimes like the Psalms.

Nothing is less familiar, less lifelike, more hieratic, than the manner of Claudel. In every detail of his art he innovates and experiments: style, language, conception, even the very names of his characters bear witness to a restless personality, starting off on a quest of his own, continuing no other writer, impatient of yoke or path. And though he lose himself and stumble in his search for an Ideal, be sure he will never turn back, never take the highroad, but just go on persistently, making a rule and a guide for himself out of the exigencies of his own peculiar temperament and creating a doctrine out of his fantasies.

He is often absurd, violent, rhetorical, extravagant; his plays are frequently no more than psychological dialogues between the dissociatedelements of his own personality. At other times he will suggest to us a Pindar disguised in the mantle of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He is often as unreal as Il Greco! And yet this incomplete and exasperating poet is, in truth, a great artist (or at least has the makings of one), and it is not out of pure perversity that a Francis Jammes has compared him to Pascal, that others have called himhaut comme Dante. They exaggerate; but there is in them more understanding than in the perplexed spectator ofL’ÉchangeorL’Otage, who is persuaded that M. Claudel only does it to annoy.

What is then the message that Paul Claudel is obscurely crying to his generation, faltering like the prophet, ‘â, â, Domine, nescio loqui?’

He brings to these young men, accustomed to the shifting relativities of Bergson, bathed since their boyhood in the perpetual flow of a stream whose onrush falls into no estuary, the vision of an absolute Unity. To Claudel, movement, life, are but a transient wave-and-wobble on the surface of Reality, un tremblement essentiel devant la face du Saint.’ Behind the streaming veil he discerns the Eternal Face within, ever serenely smiling. Behind Life there is that which Life is not: there is the living God. Hidden by the mists of our apparent disorder, he divines a crystal sphere—an indivisible, unalterable, absolute Existence—where right is always right, where wrong is always wrong, to all eternity. This religious idealism brings a sense of rest and peace to mindsunconsciously fatigued by Bergson’s theories of incessant evolution. And then, also, the principle of perpetual change is a solvent of energy; Faith is a school of energy; and energy is what France chiefly prizes among her many spiritual gifts:—

‘Tournons donc, comme la religieuse Chaldée, nos yeux vers le ciel absolu où les astres, en un inextricable chiffre, ont dressé notre acte de naissance et tiennent greffe de nos pactes et de nos serments.’ (Connaissance du Temps, p. 40.)

It is the prose writings and the Odes of Paul Claudel that give us a clue to the secret of his influence, but it is his plays that have made his reputation. Strange and dithyrambic as is their form, complicated and obscure as is their substance, they are the same inTête d’Or, composed in 1889 (when the poet was one-and-twenty years of age), and inL’Annonce Faite à Marie, played in Paris in 1912, of which a definitive version was published in 1914. The same carnal and violent imagination, the same heroic romance, are set to serve the same central theme: the insufficiency of worldly success.

It is a commonplace to say that the Twentieth Century is an age of deeds, not words, that the young generation (in France especially) are born not dreamers, but doers. Claudel himself is a traveller and a man of action. A native of Picardy (he was born in 1868 of a Vosgian stock,) he haslived of late years little in Paris and in the world of letters. A pupil of the Symbolists, Arthur Rimbaud and Mallarmé, he left France for America in his early youth, at four-and-twenty years of age, to make his way in the Consular service. It would be interesting to learn in what degree this aristocrat (by temperament at least), this Catholic, suffered the contact of the democratic prophet, Walt Whitman. There are points of similarity, not only in the form. A few years later we find him Consul at Tien-Tsin (one of the finest of his odes is dated from Pekin), and since then, Paul Claudel has become an authority and a specialist in the Chinese affairs of the French Foreign Office. In 1908 he returned to Europe in order to assume the duties of Consul at Prague, then at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and, at the present moment, he is Consul-General at Rio-Janeiro.

The poet, therefore, is no idle singer of an empty day; and his heroes, too, are men of action—a general inTête d’Or; a hydraulic engineer inLa Jeune Fille Violaine; an American merchant inL’Échange; a Consul inPartage de Midi; a political agitator inL’Otage; an architect inL’Annonce Faite à Marie. And the sense of his plays, if we read them right, is that not poetic feeling, but effort, should be our daily bread; that mere sentiment is sterile and incoherent (the adventurous Louis Laine inL’Échangeis the slave of the sentiment of the hour); that activity, even when it is evil activity, may bring forth a better future(the murderous Mara inL’Annonce, the brutal Toussaint inL’Otageare, no less, the begetters of to-morrow); but that while energy should inspire our life, yet none the less there is something infinitely better which comes not by taking pains, something better than all our work and labour, just as there is something infinitely better than Life, which may descend upon us, uplift us, carry us into a superior sphere: there is the Grace of God, there is Inspiration, there is ‘La Muse qui est la Grâce!’

For, at heart, this poet of airmen and soldiers is a sort of lay monk, reserving his palm of praise, not for the conqueror, but for the rapt ecstatic—the solitary, dying with half his labours unachieved, the hermit Violaine, the broken-hearted wife of Toussaint Turelure. And we might inscribe all his books, for an epigraph, with that line of the Vulgate, which Renan wrote in the monks’ ledger at Monte Cassino: ‘Unum est necessarium ... et Maria elegit optimam partem.’

From these plays—romantic, disconcerting, oversubtle—emerge (as Meredith’s women, wonderfully human, break through the tinsel veil of his artificialities) the most living and the most lovable of heroines. The Marthe ofL’Échangemay be a symbol, may mean the Church, as we have been told, or (as the poet himself has recently informed us) may incarnate one state of his own soul; she is certainly the most adorable of Frenchwomen—French and woman to the tips of her fingers,prudent and pure, silent and sage, wife-like and wise, full of well-planned economies and exquisite order:—a type our poet is never weary of reproducing.

The heroine ofL’Otagemight be her sister; the long, slim, silent, energetic girl, who is all conscience and courage, lifted just one degree higher; no heroine, no virgin merely, but a saint, stretched on the Cross to the extreme of human greatness. The one exception in M. Claudel’s gallery is the extraordinarily living portrait of an Englishwoman, or Irishwoman, inPartage de Midi: Ysé, with her fresh beauty and her yellow hair—Ysé, who is just woman, as Eve was woman; all passion, instinct, sex, all beauty, flower and grace: Ysé, whom we associate mysteriously with the Epode ofLa Muse qui est la Grâce, when the poet, overcome by memory, cries to the Grace of God:—

‘Va-t-en! Je me retourne désespérément vers la terre!Va-t-en! Tu ne m’ôteras pas ce froid goût de la terre.Cette obstination avec la terre qu’il y a dans la moelle de mes os et dans le caillou de ma substance, et dans le noir noyau de mes viscères!‘Qui a crié? J’entends un cri dans la nuit profonde!J’entends mon antique sœur des ténèbres qui remonte une autre fois vers moi,L’épouse nocturne qui revient une autre fois vers moi, sans mot dire,Une autre fois vers moi, avec son cœur, comme un repas qu’on se partage dans les ténèbres,Son cœur, comme un pain de douleur, et comme un vase plein de larmes.’

‘Va-t-en! Je me retourne désespérément vers la terre!

Va-t-en! Tu ne m’ôteras pas ce froid goût de la terre.

Cette obstination avec la terre qu’il y a dans la moelle de mes os et dans le caillou de ma substance, et dans le noir noyau de mes viscères!

‘Qui a crié? J’entends un cri dans la nuit profonde!

J’entends mon antique sœur des ténèbres qui remonte une autre fois vers moi,L’épouse nocturne qui revient une autre fois vers moi, sans mot dire,

Une autre fois vers moi, avec son cœur, comme un repas qu’on se partage dans les ténèbres,

Son cœur, comme un pain de douleur, et comme un vase plein de larmes.’

It is extraordinary that this great prose-poet, who is known at least to anélitein Italy, who, in the course of the year 1913, has been acted with success in Germany, at Strasburg, at Frankfort, and at Dresden; whose plays, in 1914, have twice excited enthusiasm on the Parisian stage, should have no public in our islands. Is there no translator brave enough to undertakeL’Otage, the most accessible of Claudel’s plays, orL’Annonce, so like the poems of our own pre-Raphaelites? The readers who enjoy Thomas Hardy’sDynasts, or Doughty’s plays of Britain, should not find them impossibly difficult, they might even welcome the fresh source of a singularly noble pleasure.

In order to encourage and enlighten this hypothetical translator, I will run through the plots of the principal of these dramas. It is not an easy task, for no sooner has Claudel accustomed his readers to a set of characters, than he is out with a second version of the same play; and lo! in the twinkling of an eye, all is changed. I do not advise my imaginary translator to begin with the first of these pieces,Tête d’Or, which is really intolerably prolix. Yet there is much that is fine and movingin the sombre, magnificent pictures which show us the folly of individualism. The hero staggers on the stage, like Lear burdened with the dead body of Cordelia, carrying the corpse of his young wife; he is young and strong, but he has not been able to save her; and under the beating rain in the open field, he digs her grave and lays her there:—

‘Va là, entre dans la terre crue! À même! Là où tu n’entends plus et ne vois plus, la bouche contre le sol.‘Comme quand, sur le ventre, empoignant les oreillers, nous nous ruons vers le sommeil!‘Et maintenant je te chargerai une charge de terre sur le dos!’

‘Va là, entre dans la terre crue! À même! Là où tu n’entends plus et ne vois plus, la bouche contre le sol.

‘Comme quand, sur le ventre, empoignant les oreillers, nous nous ruons vers le sommeil!

‘Et maintenant je te chargerai une charge de terre sur le dos!’

Simon is the man of action, the strong man, the soldier. He becomes a popular general, a sort of Bonaparte, whom his soldiers, on account of his touzled, yellow curls, call Goldilocks: Tête d’Or. And, in the second act, he returns from a brilliant victory having redeemed his country. But he finds his one friend dying. This poor lad implores the hero to save him—or, at least, to console him. And Goldilocks discovers the limits of his power! Finally he himself, though a king triumphant, perishes as miserably.

‘Que je grandisse dans mon unité,’ cried Goldilocks. But one man alone, however great, is little; and his last words are: ‘Je n’ai été rien.’

This play was written by the unregenerate Claudel; it shows a nature born to mysticism and religion, with as yet no active faith. A few years later, we find our poet the most convinced of Catholics. Like the poet, Cœuvre (in his play,La Ville), we leave him, at the end of the second act, a simple dilettante; and when next the curtain rises we find him resplendent in priestly vestments. Not that Claudel has ever actually taken orders, yet in his own way he is a priest and ordained to a ministry. He, too, has found in thought a second birth—‘dans la profondeur de l’étude, une seconde naissance.’

And now he writes to promulgate his certitude. Man does not live for man but for God; the happiness of self is an illusion; the soul alone exists; the only true order is based on sacrifice and association: such is the lesson that all his plays expound.

La Jeune Fille Violaineis an early study for Claudel’s masterpiece,L’Annonce faite à Marie. It is a modern play, a touching, romantic story, not unlike the work of the modern Irish school. The setting is a large farm near Soissons. The heroine, Violaine, is the elder of the two daughters of the house. Because she is so happy and he so miserable, the young girl bestows an innocent kiss on Pierre de Craon, the hydraulic engineer, who loves her and whom she cannot love; she embraces him ‘en tout bien et tout honneur;’ but, just as her fresh lips are on her lover’s cheek her jealous younger sister, Mara, opens the door and stealthilywitnesses their farewell; and Mara thinks that her sister is the man’s mistress.

Their father, Anne Vercors, the master of the farm, is forced to leave his home for America, where his brother has died, to go to the relief of two young nephews. Before setting out on so long a journey, he wishes to marry one of his daughters to a young neighbour, Jacques Hury, an active and honourable man, capable of managing the land. Violaine is the eldest; Violaine shall be the bride, and, having celebrated their betrothal, the farmer sets out consoled.

Violaine loves her promised husband. Alas, the treacherous Mara loves him too! She tells Jacques of her sister’s kiss, and suggests that Violaine’s love is given to Pierre de Craon. She confides her own desperate passion to her mother—vows she will hang herself in the woodshed on the wedding-day.

‘Tell Violaine,’ she says, ‘tell Violaine.’

And Violaine gives up her hope of happiness in order to save her sister.

Mara is not yet satisfied: Mara the practical, Mara the unanswerable,—

‘You cannot stay herenow,’ she says to the sad Violaine. ‘And I suppose you will hardly again think of marrying? Every one knew you were betrothed to Jacques.’‘No,’ says Violaine, ‘I do not think of marrying.’‘Then, in that case, you may as well give meyour half of the farm! What use would it be to you, if you do not live with us, and if you do not marry? Come, sign! Here is the pen!’

‘You cannot stay herenow,’ she says to the sad Violaine. ‘And I suppose you will hardly again think of marrying? Every one knew you were betrothed to Jacques.’

‘No,’ says Violaine, ‘I do not think of marrying.’

‘Then, in that case, you may as well give meyour half of the farm! What use would it be to you, if you do not live with us, and if you do not marry? Come, sign! Here is the pen!’

And then, while Violaine signs away her birthright, Mara seeks in the hearth a handful of wood ashes to pounce the signature, and having dried the writing, flings the remainder of the hot, stifling dust in her sister’s face. And she laughs, coarse and gay; but the ashes set up an inflammation that ends by blinding Violaine for life.

When the third act begins, several years have passed. Violaine, an outcast and a beggar, a sort of pious wise-woman, lives alone in a wood. The peasants revere her as a saint, and indeed her virtues are acceptable in the sight of Heaven, so that she performs many miracles. (This situation in a modern play appears less far-fetched than it would in England among the fields of France, where the wise-woman and the sorcerer, the ‘meije’ and the ‘rebouteux’ and the ‘jetteuse de sorts,’ with their herbs and their charms and their clever massage, still play so large a part in the life of the remoter villages.) The art of Violaine is much esteemed by the simple rustics that know neither her name nor her birthplace. And so one day, in order to consult the wise woman of the wood, Mara sets out with her first-born, blind from birth. She knows not whom she goes out in the wilderness to see, as she joins company with a poor woman bent on the same quest. They track the healerfor some while vainly, through a wood, in the snow:—

La Femme: Si c’est pas un malheur de courir les bois comme ça à mon âge! Pour sûr que ça me fera pas de bien!Mara: Alors on ne sait pas où elle gîte?La Femme: Un jour ici, l’autre ailleurs. Et puis des mois sans qu’on la voie. Faut la traquer comme une bête.Et comme ça, votre petit est aveugle?Mara: Oui.La Femme: Moi, j’ai mal dans le corps. (Silence. Il neige.)Mara: Alors c’est des miracles qu’elle fait?La Femme: Y a pas de miracles, que vous êtes simple! C’est ce qu’on appelle la ‘force,’ voilà!Y a pas de miracles. C’est seulement la ‘force’ vous comprenez? On m’a bien expliqué tout ça.

La Femme: Si c’est pas un malheur de courir les bois comme ça à mon âge! Pour sûr que ça me fera pas de bien!

Mara: Alors on ne sait pas où elle gîte?

La Femme: Un jour ici, l’autre ailleurs. Et puis des mois sans qu’on la voie. Faut la traquer comme une bête.

Et comme ça, votre petit est aveugle?

Mara: Oui.

La Femme: Moi, j’ai mal dans le corps. (Silence. Il neige.)

Mara: Alors c’est des miracles qu’elle fait?

La Femme: Y a pas de miracles, que vous êtes simple! C’est ce qu’on appelle la ‘force,’ voilà!

Y a pas de miracles. C’est seulement la ‘force’ vous comprenez? On m’a bien expliqué tout ça.

At last Mara finds the wise woman in a cavern, and blind Violaine gives to her sister’s child the gift of sight.

The fourth act brings us back to the farm. Mara, incurably jealous, has murdered Violaine, and left her for dead in a ditch. But Pierre de Craon has found her body, and brings her back to her old home, still breathing, though blind and bleeding. Jacques Hury opens to them and sees, all mangled, murdered, the broken form of thewoman whose fresh youth he had loved. Violaine tells him all. She dies forgiving, reconciling, everybody—even the murderous Mara who, in her dreadful, jealous, earthly way, had after all ‘loved much.’ Mara, not Violaine, was the mother of the child! And we divine that Mara is Profane Love, and Violaine that other Love.

‘L’Amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle.’

Quite recently, in 1912, Paul Claudel has made the symbol clearer in a new version of his playThe Angelus(L’Annonce faite à Marie), though it is at some expense of the fresh, primitive grace, the Celtic charm of the earlier conception. There is something artificial, stiff, consciously pre-Raphaelite inL’Annonce faite à Marie, but also a rare spiritual beauty.

In the second version, place and personages remain unchanged, but the time is altered; we are no longer modern but plunged in the early Middle Ages. Anne Vercors, the master of the farm, leaves his home not on an errand of charity to America, but in order to join the Crusade. Pierre de Craon, instead of canalising rivers, builds cathedrals: he is a great master-mason, so gifted that, by a special dispensation he is allowed at large, although a secret leper. And Violaine’s kiss of compassion infects her with his disease.

This seems to me a grave artistic error, since to some extent it exculpates the faithless Jacques,the cruel Mara, who follow but the fashion of their age in driving a leper from her home. But the end: the death of Violaine, stifled under a cartload of sand, from which the treacherous Mara has drawn the back panel; and the return of Anne Vercors; and the relative repentance of the obstinate Mara; and the great mystical wind that rises and uplifts us into a region where happiness and tragedy are lost in a peace beyond understanding—all this moves us deeply in the second rendering.

Each version has its beauties, and either makes us realise the Celtic base of France—at least, of the north of France. The French have ever Rome upon their lips, and their education has been strictly Latin since the time of the Gallo-Romans, but, by instinct and blood, they are Celts: no deep racial difference divides a Paul Claudel from a Synge, or a Barbey d’Aurevilly from a Walter Scott.

La Jeune fille Violainepresents no great difficulties to a reader broken in by a sufficient course of recent Irish literature.L’Échangeis simpler still—one of the most spontaneous and agreeable, as also one of the earliest of Claudel’s pieces. It is a little tragedy with four personages: Louis Laine, an adventurer, a libertine, a man incapable of discipline or of order—in fact, an Individualist, and, as such, abominable in the sight of Paul Claudel; his wife, the pure girl he has eloped with, a Frenchwoman of a type which Claudel is never weary of reproducing. Laine, an American, hascarried off his French bride to the New World, a land whose traditions and conditions are contrary to all her experience. Louis Laine incarnates the mercantile American spirit, but he knows nothing of its energy, its initiative; qualities swiftly apprehended by the self-possessed and diligent Marthe. She says to the Yankee, Laine’s employer, Thomas Pollock Nageoire (Finn):—

‘Thomas Pollock, il y a plusieurs choses que j’aime en vous.‘La première c’est que, croyant qu’une chose est bonne, vous ne doutez pas de faire tous vos efforts pour l’avoir.‘La seconde, comme vous le dites, c’est que vous connaissez la valeur des choses, selon qu’elles valent plus ou moins.‘Vous ne vous payez point de rêves, et vous ne vous contentez point d’apparences, et votre commerce est avec les choses réelles.‘Et par vous toute chose bonne ne demeure point inutile.‘Vous êtes hardi, actif, patient, rusé, opportun, persévérant; vous êtes calme, vous êtes prudent, et vous tenez un compte exact de tout ce que vous faites. Et vous ne vous fiez point en vous seul.‘Mais vous faites ce que vous pouvez, car vous ne disposez point des circonstances.‘Et vous êtes raisonnable, et vous savez soumettre votre désir, votre raison aussi.‘Et c’est pourquoi vous êtes grand et riche.’

‘Thomas Pollock, il y a plusieurs choses que j’aime en vous.

‘La première c’est que, croyant qu’une chose est bonne, vous ne doutez pas de faire tous vos efforts pour l’avoir.

‘La seconde, comme vous le dites, c’est que vous connaissez la valeur des choses, selon qu’elles valent plus ou moins.

‘Vous ne vous payez point de rêves, et vous ne vous contentez point d’apparences, et votre commerce est avec les choses réelles.

‘Et par vous toute chose bonne ne demeure point inutile.

‘Vous êtes hardi, actif, patient, rusé, opportun, persévérant; vous êtes calme, vous êtes prudent, et vous tenez un compte exact de tout ce que vous faites. Et vous ne vous fiez point en vous seul.

‘Mais vous faites ce que vous pouvez, car vous ne disposez point des circonstances.

‘Et vous êtes raisonnable, et vous savez soumettre votre désir, votre raison aussi.

‘Et c’est pourquoi vous êtes grand et riche.’

Thomas Pollock is the natural mate of Marthe; and he judges her ill-matched with her vagabond adventurer of a husband so much better suited to his own feckless mate, the dissolute actress, Letchy Elbernon. So he proposes an exchange. He will divorce anew (he is familiar with the process) and marry Marthe, endowing sufficiently Letchy to make it worth Laine’s while to espouse her. Ah, if Nature were all! But to the delicate Marthe, marriage is a sacrament, and only in marriage may she love entirely anything less than God. Unconsecrated love is but an ‘abjuration passionnée’—‘la seule vie qu’on puisse partager—le seul échange possible—c’est le marriage,’ as we have learned already inPartage de Midi.

So Thomas Pollock argues in vain:—

‘Où est le règle de la vieSi un homme ancien et éprouvé,Mûr, solide, avisé, capable, réfléchi, ne cherche pasÀ avoir une chose qu’il trouve bonne?Et si je suis plus riche et plus sage que lui, est-ce ma faute?J’ai été honnête avec lui....Je lui ai offert de l’argent et il est tombé d’accord avec moi.’

When the mad and vicious Letchy has murdered Laine and ruined her husband, Marthe still stands firm. Her love is with the dead adventurer; hisduty is to the gibbering Letchy. They two can pretend but to a perfect friendship. They stand there loveless, homeless, penniless, but there is in either an innate capacity which dreads no change of circumstance. The fortunes of the American will rise from the ashes like the Phœnix; and Marthe fears nothing, having that to offer which is always needed:—

‘I can earn my living by my needle—just finish the piece of sewing that lies across my knee.’

Here, despite the lyric disorder of our poet’s style, we have a fable perfectly clear, and four personages quite alive and characteristic. Yet Paul Claudel has set before us not a story, but a symbol.

As he explained in a recent letter to theFigaro, his personages mean more than meets the eye. Aware of the symbolism of our poet, mindful that he is essentially a pupil of Mallarmé, a subtle critic has already interpretedL’Échange: Marthe was the Catholic Church; Laine, her seducer, was the Romantic spirit; Thomas Pollock, the friend to whom in her distress she reaches her hand, was to stand for the spirit of social activity. Nothing could be neater than this gloss, so admirably typical of our times; and I think, for my part, that Paul Claudel would have been wise to leave his ingenious scholiast in possession of his commentary.

When a poet is so obscure that he needs a Browning Society or a Dante Society, or a Claudel clique, to discover his meaning, he should never turn on his interpreters, pointing-pole in hand; it is not playing the game. They have found out something—perhaps better than what he originally meant. M. Claudel, however, informs us of his real intention.

L’Échangewas written in 1893 and 1894, at New York and Boston, where the young poet was occupied in the Consular service, and this melodrama is in reality a lyric, an expression of his own feelings during those first years of administrative exile:—

‘I realised at last those old dreams of flight and travel to which my hero, Louis Laine, gives expression; and yet my heart was full of homesickness, of the sense of strangeness, of not belonging to my surroundings: my second personage, Marthe, expresses this regret of my native land.... From another point of view, the play, which is the drama of exile, is also that of a young man, a poet, obliged to choose between two vocations, apparently contradictory: on the one hand, free love, independent life, unfettered fancy, art; on the other hand, the obstinate, divine, conservative forces: conscience, family, religion, the Church, and a man’s sworn faith.’

But these symbolic forms of art should enjoythe divine liberty of music. Like Calverley’s lyric ‘the meaning is what you please’; or as Claudel himself puts it:—

‘L’intérêt d’un drame doit dépasser l’anecdote qu’il raconte; il veut dire quelquechose; quelquechose de général et qui n’est étranger à aucun des spectateurs.’

All Claudel’s dramas are symbols; all of them tend to the condition of music; and yet all of them are profoundly impregnate with his individual experience. They take place all over the globe, because Claudel, a pupil of the School of Political Sciences, has followed the consular career in many climates. He has visited India, Japan. He has spent years of his life in China, in Bohemia, at Frankfort, in Switzerland. He is almost as great a traveller as Loti. But the multiplicity of experience, the knowledge of many men and many ways of life, which in Loti’s case has increased an innate tendency to scepticism—deepening it to an intellectual nihilism—has sent Claudel off at a tangent back to the unquestioned certitudes of his childhood’s prayers: he dare not be less than the devoutest Catholic, for that way madness lies. Faith with him is an appetite, almost a carnal satisfaction.

The theme ofL’Échange—the incompatibility of Action and the Soul—is the subject of one of the most intense and original of Claudel’s plays,Partage de Midi, a play revered and cherished bythe poet’s esoteric admirers partly, no doubt, on its own considerable merits, but also because it is not to be bought. (It was published in an edition of a hundred and fifty copies for the benefit of a chosen few, admitted to this record of a private experience, so enveloped in symbolism that, of those hundred and fifty, perhaps, not fifteen could lift the veil.)

Here again four personages fill the stage: Ysé, who is just woman, as Eve was woman, all passion, instinct, sex, all beauty, freshness, grace, as devoid of a spiritual soul as any houri; her husband, De Ciz, a gentle, inefficient man of pottering mediocrity; Amalric, the man of action, the adventurer, the Empire-builder, the colonial à la Kipling; and Mesa, the mystic, the virgin, the visionary, the man for whom there is but one thing needful. And all these men belong to Ysé in turn.

The theme is double: first, the gradual conquest of Parseval by Kundry—of the imaginative and spiritual man by the instinctive woman. Neither has grasped the secret of love, but Ysé at least apprehends it:—

Ysé: L’amour même?... Ça, je ne sais ce que c’est.Mesa: Eh bien, ni moi non plus.... Cependant, je puis comprendre.Ysé: Il ne faut pas comprendre, mon pauvre Monsieur!Il faut perdre connaissance!

Ysé: L’amour même?... Ça, je ne sais ce que c’est.

Mesa: Eh bien, ni moi non plus.... Cependant, je puis comprendre.

Ysé: Il ne faut pas comprendre, mon pauvre Monsieur!

Il faut perdre connaissance!

And for the full space of a year Mesa loses, in the arms of Ysé, that consciousness of a fuller life, hidden behind the tattered screen of appearances, which had long been to him theUnum necessarium.

But Mesa has his revenge. We make acquaintance with these four persons on a ship sailing eastwards, just as they cross the line. De Ciz is an errant engineer, in search of employment: Amalric is a trader ruined yesterday, but sure of his million to-morrow; Mesa is, by his worldly situation, a sort of Sir Robert Hart, a great functionary, equally indispensable to the Europeans and the Chinese, but by temperament he is a mystic, meditating the full oblation, hesitating whether or no he shall embrace the life of a monk. Ysé is a new world to the visionary Mesa:—

‘Il fait bon près d’une femme!On est comme assis à l’ombre et j’aime à l’entendre parler avec une grande sagesse,Et me dire des choses dures, malignes,Pratiques, bassement vraies, comme les femmes savent en trouver. Cela me fait du bien.’

‘Il fait bon près d’une femme!

On est comme assis à l’ombre et j’aime à l’entendre parler avec une grande sagesse,

Et me dire des choses dures, malignes,

Pratiques, bassement vraies, comme les femmes savent en trouver. Cela me fait du bien.’

The second act is two long duets in the cemetery of the Hong Kong Happy Valley. The first between Ysé and her husband, who leaves her on an expedition to Siam; the second between Ysé and Mesa, who, like a greater mystic, has sent the husband to a place of danger in order that the fair Bathsheba may be his own.

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