‘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.’
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 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!