Claudel's Play of Paradox

...More recently M. Claudel has carried the story into still another generation, giving us, in Le P/~re Humili6, a tense study of Rome during the fall of the temporal power...

...Does it exist, Orian...

...It is decided: and even Pens~e seems to have accepted the decree, since she is the acknowledged fiancee of Orso when we next meet~ the brothers out among the ruins of the Palatine in that fateful September of t87 o. The papal forces have been vanquished...

...And the Jewess triumphs, like Shaw's symbolic Ann, by a moment of seeming weakness...

...For he dreams of himself as a modern Parsifal, a virgin knight of the Papacy in its hour of need, daring to sacrifice the human joy of love for the superhuman joy of light...

...neither, with splendid youthful insouciance, is in the least deterred by her Jewish and revolutionary blood (not, it would seem, entirely tempered by baptisml) nor by her blindness, nor by her wealth, nor by any wise generality of the wise old Pope...

...October 9, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 58x CLAUDEL'S PLAY OF PARADOX By KATHERINE BR/~GY ASTERFUL at once and conciliating as M. Claudel has proved in his diplomatic intercourse, he has as an artist been singularly uncompromising...

...It is I who gave him that incurable wound--because of me he is dead," she cries in her anguish...

...And when she listens to the further command of the dead, that she live on for the sake of their expected child, she answers simply, "Shall I, who create life, not have the courage to accept it...

...It is not only the duel of conservative and radical between them, it is the duel of the man who doubts and the woman who is certain of their destiny...

...And the play opens with a scene in which Sichel discovers the love of their daughter Pens6e--radiant but blind mfor Orian, nephew of Plus IX...

...Gilbert Chesterton...

...Suddenly comes her revelation to Orian, whose own eyes are at last open--"/am blindl" The second act, taking place in an ancient monastery outside of Rome, opens with a highly paradoxical and Claudelian scene between the aged Pope and the youthful Franciscan confessor who has just given him absolution, and who would lift the heavy burden of grief and responsibility from His Holiness by the leaven of simple spiritual joy and seemingly impractical indifference...

...So presently they are together again, arguing as usual...

...So the blind girl sits dreaming now of the promised motherhood which is her heritage from that past hour...

...There, of course, the hostage given and never redeemed is a woman: Sygne de Coufontaine offered up to martyrdom by way of marriage--not a new situation, but boldly and pitilessly revealedmthat other people may be comfortable...

...More complex than Orso, he fears the union for a double reason: knowing that he loves too much (also, as the far-seeing Pope prophesies pitifully, it is too little l) and that this love will absorb his whole life into itself--that instead of bringing his light to Pens~e he wiU sink into her darkness...

...Pens~e and her mother are together in their Roman palace, listening to the Angelus bells which the girl loves better than the voices of men and women...

...both brothers are going out to face other battles, in one of which Orian foresees his own mortal wound...

...They would have none of his wisdom, but they have achieved their own through destiny and through love...

...Pens~e, whose veiled eyes seem to have foreseen the tragedy, kneels down with agonized abandon to embrace all that remains of her beloved: for how, she asks, shall death bring any horror of Orian her husband...

...her shy but unshakable certainty that while the man has as yet shown no sign, he "will come to think of her...

...Then she is in his arms--and he, with death so close, can no longer deny the love which is closer still...

...he whispers...

...but also, as vision leaps beyond--"That liberty which he loved more than life, it is his at last...

...But he is determined not to take this strange prize from his brother...

...It is a unique scene, with the girl's ecstatic reverie upon the world's manifold voices revealed to her through touch, through smell, through hearing, known "by heart rather than by sight...

...Through all that sublime yet passionately human colloquy she is almost grateful to the stalking shadow of mortality which has brought him back to her and to reality...

...So, it is solved--the tangled problem of these proud children of the humbled Pope...

...asks Pens~e of this starlike and ethereal ideal...

...Not in the least can the venerable Pontiff understand why his sons have risen up to cast him out--why they will have none of the peace he would llve or die to give them--why the old paternal order in Italy must so violently change...

...And I know what You have endured upon the Cross and in Your Heart, if You have loved each one of us--terribly--as I have loved this woman...

...There is no one in all the world prouder than I am myself l" Presently Orso the soldier enters, strangely...

...the young crusader with the proud sophistrles_ he fancies are self.sacrifice, the blind girl w~th her simple, surpassing need of him...

...The dramamstill untranslated and curiously little known to English readers~shows the surviving Louis, Count of Coufontaine, now a professional diplomat serving as French ambassador in the Eternal City during the momentous I87O's...

...That light toward which he reached, he has attained 9 . . that Father Whose son he wasl" Little by little Paul Claudel is clothing this creature of passion with the heroism of which his women have so often walked as symbols...

...Are you ashamed of me...

...while he, idealist and egoist too, looks forward to the eternity which alone seems great enough to contain his love...

...Nothing in life is, after all, more interesting than its contrasts, its seeming contradictionsPin a word, its paradox9 "As easy as lying, because it is lying," declares somewhere its past master, Mr...

...her final avowal that without him she must walk as one forever lost through the universe...

...Her union with the low-born revolutionist Turelure means the blending of exquisiteness with brutality, of devotion with infidelity, but also of the old with the new, of civilization with vulgarity...

...she demands, facing intrepidly the paradox of her life...

...Sichel, the subtle, knows ways of secrecy, and would hide the child from a world in which it has no place...

...But the supreme test is in Orian's final message, that for the sake of this child she shall marry Orso in his place...

...The final scene of the drama, five months later, is short and swift and shaken by a terrible beauty...

...And when Plus reminds them that marriage is "not pleasure but rather the sacrifice of pleasure," that it calls for as much reflection as the founding of a city, Orso, the man of action, replies brusquely that 582 THE COMMONWEAL October 9, I929 if one stopped long to reflect there would be few marriages and few cities in the world l He is not even discouraged by the fact that the girl obviously does not love him, since he believes one may win all things "by patience and gentleness and sympathy and a little authority and tact...

...looking into a future ominous, indeed, since no word in all these months has come from her lover...

...As if poor Pens~e has ever remembered anything else l And her own cry is the perennial one of all waiting hearts: "He loves meal believe in God...

...A reception is in progress at the home of a Polish prince resident in Rome, and it is just after a duel of wits in which all the seething currents which crossed during these fateful months play before us, that the lovers are brought together in the old moonlit garden...

...Orlan, who does not yet know of Pens6e's blindness, has promised to plead the cause of his brother Orso--his success being the traditional one of John Alden, or for that matter of Tristram l Not easily does he capitulate to the bewitching girl who candidly betrays her own capitulation of heart if not of head...

...But Pens~e is far truer to a race whose women have immemorially found their meaning in motherhood...

...His very subject-matter has been from the first a challenge...

...It is not merely that he has never humored his age--that he has contrived, in the paradox of his word and thought, to be both "modernist" and "fundamentalist," or (which may be another way of saying the same thing) both realist and idealist...

...To him, the wounded Mercutio, personal pleasure and preference his own or Pens~e'sPhave no longer any meaning...

...For there has been one last desperate and vertiginous meeting before Orian set out for the wars --and he, strong enough to forswear marriage, has not been strong enough to forswear love...

...Quite evidently M. Claudel was fascinated by the unsolved and perhaps humanly insoluble problem of these people, for he followed it in Le Pain Dur through the troubled story of the son in whom the worst of both strains seems to prevail---Louis, the time-serving aristocrat and nominal Catholic, who sells the historic crucifix of his mother, who compasses his father's death, and in the end, to insure his patrimony, weds that father's mistress, the Jewess Sichel...

...Nowhere, perhaps, in recent literature have the sheer depths and heights of human passion been plumbed more poignantly than in another of the Claudel dramas, where the dying Mesa of Partage de Midi cries out to his God: "I know now what love is...

...the Piedmontese have entered Rome...

...And Orian, for his part, is determined to forswear it...

...But Orso warns her that it is no longer through any avenue of sense she may reach out to him...

...Pens~e is groping toward the same revelation when we leave her musing: "It is hard for one who loves to do all that love demands...

...And the hopes of centuries are summed up in his wistful reply: "Must it not exist, since I seek it even before you.~" Pens6e is skilful in pleading the cause which is all of life to her--the cause of youth, and of the heart, and of the freedom for which she has seen fighting ever since she came into the world...

...She has her own secret now, too bitter and too sweet for words...

...Each admits his utter devotion to the blind girl...

...And on this note M. Claudel closes his tragic trilogy...

...It is because of this premonition that he consents to the farewell for which Pens~e has pleaded-and which he, with the fear and the cruelty of love denied, has up to now refused...

...He will wed, but Orian's wife shall be as his sister...

...Do you remember what I promised you, so long ago that I cannot tell when, that secret which was between us before our birth...

...and then reveals with halting heartbreak his brother's death in battle9 He brings Orian's dying plea to Pens~e for pardon: and concealed in a huge basketful of flowers, he has brought the youth's poor severed head for burial...

...Not in the least can the friar comprehend why he does not rejoice that Saint Francis has obtained once again the gifts of poverty and banishment for the Vicar of Christ l But as the stricken Pope--le Pare Humili6 in all truth listens to the counsel of the young ex-shepherd, his nephews Orso and Orian draw near...

...The two brothers, who are as different as Mercutio and Hamlet, adore each other, and each has come to beseech His Holiness that the other be commanded to wed Pens& de Coufontaine...

...But what if it should be as difficult as truth-telling~just because it is the truth...

...So it is decided that Orso, to whose work romance will be no hindrance, shall wed the girl, while Orian shall consecrate himself more and more intensely to the Pope's mission of restoring faith--"joy," they both call it--to a ravaged world...

...And nowhere is it more controversial than in that heart-searching drama of post-revolutionary France, L'H6tage...