‘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!