frequently no more than psychological dialogues between the dissociated
elements 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 him _haut comme Dante_.
They exaggerate; but there is in them more understanding than in the
perplexed spectator of _L’Échange_ or _L’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 minds unconsciously 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 in _Tête d’Or_,
composed in 1889 (when the poet was one-and-twenty years of age), and
in _L’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 has lived 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 in _Tête d’Or_; a hydraulic
engineer in _La Jeune Fille Violaine_; an American merchant in
_L’Échange_; a Consul in _Partage de Midi_; a political agitator in
_L’Otage_; an architect in _L’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 in _L’Échange_ is 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
in _L’Annonce_, the brutal Toussaint in _L’Otage_ are, 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 of _L’Échange_ may 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 of _L’Otage_ might 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, in _Partage 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 of _La 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.’
It is extraordinary that this great prose-poet, who is known at least
to an _élite_ in 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 undertake _L’Otage_, the most accessible
of Claudel’s plays, or _L’Annonce_, so like the poems of our own
pre-Raphaelites? The readers who enjoy Thomas Hardy’s _Dynasts_, 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 moving in 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!’
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 Violaine_ is 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 stealthily witnesses 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 here _now_,’ 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 me your 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 healer
for 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.
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 the woman 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 play _The 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 in _L’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 Violaine_ presents no great difficulties to a
reader broken in by a sufficient course of recent Irish literature.
_L’Échange_ is 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,
has carried 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 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 in _Partage de Midi_.
So Thomas Pollock argues in vain:--
‘Où est le règle de la vie
Si un homme ancien et éprouvé,
Mûr, solide, avisé, capable, réfléchi, ne cherche pas
À 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; his duty 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 the _Figaro_, 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 interpreted _L’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’Échange_ was 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 enjoy the 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.’