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 of _L’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 by
the 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!
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 the _Unum 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.’
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.
_Photo: Dornac_ _To face p. 88_
[Illustration: =Paul Claudel=]
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.
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’s _Faust_, 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, is _L’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 time is 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. Great solemn 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’s _Polyeucte_) 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 her and (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
I add 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 pour que je la lui eusse laissée.’ This
heartrending last act of _L’Otage_ is 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 are _Pensées_ of Pascal,
which we contemplate, as it were, in an atmosphere of moral beauty,
a halo, a luminous aura, through which they shine transfigured 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.
FRANCIS JAMMES
Francis Jammes is a Faun who has turned Franciscan Friar. As we read
his early poems, his delicious rustic prose, we seem to see him sitting
prick-eared, in some green circle of the Pyrenees, with brown hands
holding to his mouth a boxwood flute, from which he draws a brief,
sweet music, as pure as the long-drawn note of the musical frog, as
shrill as the plaintive cry of some mountain bird who feels above its
nest the shadow of the falcon.
And then he met Paul Claudel and was converted.
After all, little was changed, for his innocent paganism had been
tinged with natural piety, and in his religion he might say, like the
Almighty, in the _Roman de Lièvre_,--
‘J’aime la terre d’un profond amour. J’aime la terre des hommes,
des bêtes, des plantes et des pierres.’
Only henceforth we see him, in our imagination, like Saint Francis,
with a monk’s hood drawn over his brow, sandals on his feet, his brown
gown cinctured with a knotted cord, a couple of doves hovering over his
shoulders, and, at his side, fawning and faithful, a converted wolf....
I met M. Jammes at Madame Daudet’s house one winter, and, in fact, his
appearance was not wholly unlike this fancy portrait. The gown was a
brown woollen suit, but just the Franciscan colour. Above the ruddy,
jocund, rustic face, a crown of grizzling curls, behind which Nature
had provided the tonsure. Neither dove nor wolf, but, in their stead,
all the young Catholic poets of Paris, pressed in serried ranks to
meet the Master who, for a few days, had consented to quit his beloved
solitude of Orthez.
We can remember a different Francis Jammes. The poet has said of
himself, ‘My soul is half the soul of a Faun, and half the soul of a
young girl.’ But let me quote an admirable strophe from his _Le Poète
et sa Femme_:--
‘Il est de ceux qui voient les parfums et il sent
Les couleurs. Et il s’intéresse
Au scarabée cornu, au hérisson piquant,
Et aux plantes des doctoresses.
Mais le voici, avec sa figure camuse
Et son sourire de Sylvain,
Fatigué par l’amour bien plus que par les muses
Qui aiment son cœur incertain ...
Lui-même est un Silène, on le voit au jardin
Veiller au légume, à la treille....’
This gentle Francis Jammes recalls sometimes the charming La Fontaine,
and also Verlaine. A La Fontaine bereft of his philosophy, his deep
knowledge of human nature; a Verlaine from whom the taint of corruption
has been washed and therewith his terrible sincerity. And if we can
imagine these two great poets mulcted so utterly in their essential
substance, the residue in them, too, might remind us of a Faun and a
young girl--a mischievous, experienced rustic maid, yet holding in her
arms a bunch of lilies. The first prose study of our poet--which still
remains one of his most exquisite pages--is the story of a young girl,
_Clara d’Ellébeuse_. What a delightful book! It is the sort of little
story one can read a dozen times in a dozen years, and find it as
affecting the last time as the first.
If any attentive student should feel inclined, having read these
pages, to fill a shelf with some selected volumes of these modern
French writers--with _Colette Baudoche_, for example, from among the
novels of Barrès, and _Antoinette_ from Romain Rolland; with _La
Jeune Fille Violaine_ from Paul Claudel; with _La Porte Étroite_ from
André Gide; to which he might add _La Jeune Fille Bien Élevée_ from
the works of René Boylesve; _L’Ombre de l’Amour_ by Madame Tinayre;
_Marie-Claire_ by Marguerite Audoux; and the young girls of Francis
Jammes, especially _Clara d’Ellébeuse_,--what an idea, what an
admirable, unconventional idea such a reader would get of the young
French girl! What a gift, at once instructive and delightful, he
could make to some young English girl on, say, her five-and-twentieth
birthday!
Francis Jammes has spent nearly all his life in or near that little
town of Orthez (in the department of the Lower Pyrenees), where he was
born about 1869. In that part of France, almost as much as in Ireland,
Protestants and Catholics divide society pretty equally. Our poet was
born and baptized a Catholic, but many of his nearest relations were
Huguenots, and, seeing so much of both sides, he does not seem to have
taken either very seriously. He showed no particular precocity and,
though he began to write poetry, like most people, in his twentieth
year, he made his real debut only in 1898, with a volume called _De
l’Angelus de l’Aube, à l’Angelus du soir_.
A certain languor mixed with fervour ran in his blood. He had inherited
Creole traditions. His grandfather, the doctor, and his grand-uncle had
emigrated from Béarn to Guadeloupe, and had settled there, had died
there; his father was sent back to France to be educated at seven years
of age; his dim memories of the Antilles, his stories of the cousins in
Martinique, and the little chair in rare colonial wood that the child
had used on the passage, were, a generation later, to set a-dreaming
another child, our poet, whose first heroine will belong, like him, to
a family dispersed among the Atlantic Islands and the Pyrenees.
I suppose that a doctor would describe Clara d’Ellébeuse as a victim
of the _maladie du scrupule_. She is a girl of sixteen; a dear little
old-fashioned girl, living in a dear little old-fashioned manor,
sheltered among the foothills of the Pyrenees, towards 1848. She has
that dread of sin, of impurity, as a sort of quagmire into which
one may fall unawares and be lost for ever, which the practice of
confession may exaggerate, or palliate, according to the wisdom of the
confessor. (Our poet Cowper was no Catholic.) Poor Clara d’Ellébeuse,
because one day the young poet she secretly adored had wiped away her
nervous tears and laid upon her bowed nape a pitiful, respectful hand,
imagines that she has fallen into the sin of unchastity and that she is
with child! (And we think of Renan who, in his twelfth year, I think,
accused himself in confession of ‘the sin of simony.’)
The mischief with Clara is that she does not confess; she tells no kind
elder of her secret fear; she lets concealment feed, like a worm in the
bud, upon her damask cheek. And we know how that ends. Clara does not
pine away. One day in March, overcome by horror and remorse for her
imaginary crime, she drinks a dose of laudanum and quits this unkind
world.
In telling the pathetic history of Clara d’Ellébeuse, Francis Jammes
left unhampered that half of his soul which is that of a young
girl; but in narrating the fate of _Almaïde d’Etremont, jeune fille
passionnée_, that other half (which belongs to a Faun) shows the cloven
foot. More tenderly does he commemorate the sad life of _Pomme d’anis,
jeune fille infirme_.
But it is not to be supposed that a poet who, by his own showing,
partakes so largely of the nature of Silenus and his Sylvans, should
frequent exclusively the society of virgins. Some of his earlier
poems betray an ardent sensuality. One cannot read either these or
the _Notes_ printed in the volume called _Le Roman du Lièvre_ (or
even, perhaps, that most touching idyll of a play: _La Brebis Égarée_)
without feeling that the poet’s experience has lain also among the lost
sheep ... among the lost sheep, and perhaps among the swine; for there
was a moment when he was even as the Prodigal Son!
In 1913, making a general confession of those past errors (oddly
enough) to a reporter of _Le Temps_, Francis Jammes recalled their
bitterness. Nothing except a love story is so interesting as the true
history of a conversion--I give this one therefore without apology,
though it appeared for the first time in a newspaper (November 3, 1913).
‘Je me suis converti le 7 juillet, 1905, commence M. Francis Jammes
lorsque je lui demande s’il n’est pas indiscret que je cherche à
savoir comment sa pensée évolua de l’indifférence à la ferveur.’
‘Vous n’étiez pas catholique?’
‘De baptême? Si. Mais pas davantage, avec des sympathies pour
les beaux motifs littéraires du catholicisme, avec beaucoup de
dédain pour ce que j’appelais, pour ce que je n’appelle plus le
catholicisme des vieilles femmes. J’étais un païen, un véritable
faune. Les fleurs, les bois, les femmes! J’avais la passion de tout
ce qui existait; il n’y avait pas dans toute la nature de gamin
plus déchaîné; j’aimais tellement la vie que la seule pensée de la
quitter un jour me paraissait un épouvantable blasphème.’
‘Et vous ne l’aimez plus?’
‘Plus de la même manière.’
‘Ce fut un coup de la grâce?’
‘Non. Avant la grâce, il y eut les épreuves et il y eut Claudel....
Claudel, dont, par l’intermédiaire d’un de ses anciens camarades de
classe, Marcel Schwob, je devins l’ami à l’époque faunesque où je
battais les buissons....
‘Claudel! Le poète prononce ce nom avec une émotion et une
admiration touchantes.