THE EAST I KNOW

BY

PAUL CLAUDEL

“Look East, where whole new thousands are!”

BROWNING

TRANSLATED BY

TERESA FRANCES AND WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT

NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS MDCCCCXIV

COPYRIGHT, 1914 First printed one thousand copies October, 1914

Yale University Press:

... I should be most happy and honored if my works could be brought to the attention of the American public under the shelter and patronage of the illustrious University of which you are a part.

Paul Claudel

March 28, 1914

CONTENTS

[Pg vii]

PAUL CLAUDEL

BY PIERRE CHAVANNES

Reprinted from “The New Statesman,” London, by the courtesy of the Editor

Claudel worked for more than twenty years in silence in an almost complete obscurity. Nobody ever mentioned him save a few very independent artists—Mirbeau, Barrès, Schwob, Gide, Jammes, Mauclair—who talked about him amongst themselves and sometimes even dared to speak about him in public, without awakening an echo.

Moreover, Claudel was usually far from France, Consul in various towns of the Far East; he published his earlier works anonymously, lest their Catholic character should damage his career, and for a long time his work was only to be seen in the small literary reviews and in special editions, of which a very small number of copies were printed; and he never attempted to advertise himself. But in time he was saddened by this great solitude. “One grows tired,” he wrote, “of speaking, as it were, in impenetrable cotton-wool.”

These latter days Claudel’s glory, which had so long been obscured, has suddenly blazed forth, if not to the great public, at least to the public which reads and is interested in literature. The Théâtre de l’Œuvre has played one of his dramas—L’Annonce faite à Marie; the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier is about to play another—L’Échange. The ordinary newspaper critics have begun talking about Claudel; generally [Pg viii] speaking, they refer to him with admiration, often with astonishment and that kind of reserve which marks men who are not sure that they understand, and, fearing that they are deceiving themselves, do not wish completely to commit themselves. But in many young reviews admiration is carried to a pitch of enthusiasm and almost of worship; and today writers who are by no means young rank Claudel with the small company of the very great: Æschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe.

Reading Claudel, one can understand this long silence, this admiration, and also this reserve. Claudel is not an easy poet: when one penetrates his work one is transported as though into a foreign country. He has a speech peculiar to himself; he has invented a form which is neither prose, nor regular verse, nor ordinary vers libre; his work, created by a solitary man, is not bound up with our troubles and our daily life; to love Claudel one must be initiated.

He is a poet, in itself a thing rare in our time; but he is also, and some would say primarily, a thinker. He has brought his dramatic work together under the general title of L’Arbre, just as Balzac assembled his immense work under the title of La Comédie Humaine. By this title Claudel wants to indicate that his work has the sort of natural profound living unity of the tree, which thrusts its roots deep into the nourishing earth, and draws from it the sap which rises in the branches to feed the remotest sunlit boughs. Each of his dramas also is a drama of thought; they raise the greatest problems and often suggest solutions. Tête d’Or is the chief, the commander of men, the conqueror, who is driven to great deeds by an immense desire—as it were, a[Pg ix] predestination. The weak, whom Cébès symbolizes, the people, give themselves to him; he carries them in his train until the day when, undertaking an enterprise beyond mortal strength, he loses his power and dies a new Prometheus on a high mountain. La Ville presents contemporary society and the struggles that

rend it, and the great attitudes of the spirit confronting life: Isidore de Besme, the engineer, the savant, is the realist, who has a knowledge of natural forces and uses them to satisfy the needs of men. He dominates the town, but he is unaware of the mystic quality of things; he wrongly estimates the soul, and his science leads only to death. Lambert is the man who seeks the end of life in the play of ideas and the love of woman. Cœuvre, finally, is the poet who enters the inmost shrine of truth by intuition and love, but is condemned to solitude by that knowledge. Le Repos du Septième Jour is an ideologic drama: a Chinese Emperor goes down into hell, and the roots of the moral world are laid bare in a Dantesque vision, a kind of summary of good and evil. L’Échange and La Jeune Fille Violaine are dramas of sentiment. In L’Échange four characters are set against the brutal, realistic, material background of America. There is Louis Laine, an adventurous, but feeble, person who had stifled in the too rigid enclosure of the old European

society; there is his wife, the gentle Marthe, the wife faithful through everything, who keeps close in her heart the traditional virtues of the old Christian world; there is Lechy, the violent woman who is the incarnation of disorder, and spreads it around her and death with it; and there is Sir Pollock, the man of affairs, who only lives for gold, convinced that anything can be bought[Pg x] with it, and demands Louis Laine’s wife from him for a fistful of money. La Jeune Fille Violaine is the sublime poem of a holy soul which enriches itself by stripping itself, and arrives through suffering and renunciation to peace and the joy of an angelic death. In L’Otage, we have the eternal story of a conflict between that which remains and that which passes.

It is impossible in a brief space to analyze dramas so laden with ideas, but one can indicate the size and the unity of the work. The tree that Claudel wants to show us is the tree of life. The roots are in Le Repos du Septième Jour; the sap, the desire, in Tête d’Or; the double-branching—the ideas of the mind in La Ville, and sentiment in L’Échange, La Jeune Fille Violaine, and L’Otage. Claudel himself has formulated the theory and doctrine of his art in three treatises brought together in his Art Poetique.

It might be imagined that Claudel was a mere man of books, a thinker in the abstract. He is nothing of the sort. This thinker is at the same time the most concrete of poets. His thought is, as it were, swollen with essential sap. And he expresses it in a flow of images taken directly from things and exhibiting them in their reality. Claudel’s originality lies in this double aspect: the unique blend of the highest intellectuality with the richest realism. The man who meditates over the greatest problems and expounds a profound logical doctrine to justify his work is at the same time a primitive who works with his fresh and eager eyes fixed on Nature. His dramas never lose touch with the earth where men live, love, and suffer. His characters are greater than Nature, and they express themselves quite naturally with a biblical amplitude; but they never ring false[Pg xi] and they often move us deeply. For they are powerfully real types which exist and which one often remembers. These two elements do not always mingle in a perfect harmony; Claudel’s art is powerful, but it is not easy:

it is like the obscure and painful work of germination. His admirers themselves say that Claudel’s works are like symphonies that one must hear several times before grasping their meaning and their beauties, and that his plays are beyond the capacity of the present-day public.

Claudel is, finally, one must admit, a great religious poet, and it is in that fact that the deepest unity of his work must be sought. His work, it has been said, is a long pilgrimage towards God; and the road has not been without its grievous strugglings, since the day when in his youth he was suddenly converted and flung himself towards God, but without winning light for his reason. “O my God,” he cries years after:

I remember the darkness where we two were face to face, those gloomy winter afternoons in Notre-Dame.

I, all alone below there, lit up the face of the great bronze Christ with a twopenny-halfpenny taper.

All men were then against us, science and reason; and I replied nothing.

Only the faith was in me, and I looked at You in silence like a man who prefers his friend.

I went down into Your sepulcher with You.

Claudel’s whole life has been a struggle for the faith, for he is one of those men for whom there is no life save in God, and who see nothing outside faith in Him save despair, death, and annihilation. A somber sadness burdens those first dramas which tell of man’s great struggle to dispense with God and his check; but this gives way to joy in proportion as Claudel’s faith[Pg xii] strengthens and grow bright. That pilgrimage towards God is also a pilgrimage towards joy; and that joy breaks into great song, now austere, now delirious, in Claudel’s properly lyrical work—the Hymnes and the Cinq Grandes Odes. Here one hears only the most distant echoes of the great struggle; here are only cries of joy and certitude.

Blessed be Thou, my God, Who hast delivered me from death.... ... He who believes not in God, believes not in Being, and he Who hates being, hates his own existence. Lord, I have found Thee. Who finds Thee has no more tolerance of death.

A strange phenomenon, this Christian poet, passionately, uncompromisingly, almost fanatically Catholic, in the country where Anatole France, the bantering and disillusioned master, holds sway, where Renan and Voltaire reigned, and with them hard reason, distrustful of the supernatural.

France, as Kipling has justly said, is the country most faithful to old things and most wildly enthusiastic about new ones. The present fashion for Roman Catholicism counts for something in Claudel’s sudden vogue, just as Claudel has done something to bring about the fashion. Various writers, tired of wandering far from safe harbors, have “been converted” by Claudel’s appeal; and the young men who reproached France for withering life up, and for lacking the “sense of the divine” have found in Claudel one of their masters. It is the perpetual oscillation of the human spirit from pure reason to exalted sentiment. Claudel stands head and shoulders above the little crowd which surrounds him, and he will outlast them and their ways of thought. Most of us must say to him, in the words of[Pg xiii] one of his own characters, “I cannot give you my soul.” But we love the poet in him and admire the passionate believer who compels us to question ourselves in the inner silence, the man who made for himself this prayer:

Make me as one who sows solitude, and may he who hears my speech Return home troubled and heavy.

1895-1900

[Pg 1]

THE EAST I KNOW

THE COCOA PALM

Our trees stand upright like men, but motionless; thrusting their roots deep in earth, they flourish with outstretched arms. But here the sacred banyan does not rise as a single stem; for the pendent threads, through which it returns seeking the fruitful soil, make it seem a marvelous temple self-created.

Observe only the cocoa palm. It has no branches. At the apex of the trunk it raises a tuft of fronds.

Palm! The insignia of triumph. Aerial in the light, consummate bloom of the crest, it soars, expands, rejoices,—and sinks beneath the weight of its freedom.

Through the warm day and the long noon the cocoa palm expands. In an ecstasy it spreads its happy leaves. Like infant heads the cocoanuts appear, the great green fruit of the tree.

Thus does the cocoa palm gesture, revealing its heart; for the lower leaves, unfolding from out their depth, reach[Pg 2] pendulent to the earth; and the leaves in the midst spread far on every side; and the leaves above, uplifted like the hands of an awkward man or like one who signals his complete submission, slowly wave and sign.

The trunk is nowhere rigid, but ringed; and like to the blades of the grass, it is supple and long. It is swayed by the moods of the earth, whether it strains toward the sun or bends its spreading plumes over swift and turbid rivers, or between the sea and the sky.

One night, returning along the shore of the sea assaulted with turbulent foam by the whole deep-thundering weight of the leonine Indian Ocean beneath the south-western monsoon,—as I followed the shore far-strewn with palms like the skeleton wrecks of boats and of lesser and living things, I saw them upon my left! As I walked by that forest empty beneath its dense-woven ceiling, the palms seemed enormous spiders crawling obliquely across the peaceful twilight heaven!

Venus, like a moon drowned in divinest light, flickered a wide reflection in the waters. And a palm-tree bent over the sea and the mirrored planet, and its gesture offered its heart to the heavenly fire.

[Pg 3]

I shall often remember that night when, afar, I yearn to return! I saw the leafage hanging in heavy tresses, and across the high fane of the forest, that sky where the storm, setting its feet on the sea, loomed up like a mountain; and how low on the dark horizon the pale pearl of the ocean gleamed!

Oh Ceylon, shall I ever forget thee,—thy fruits and thy flowers, and thy people with melting eyes, naked beside those highways that are hued like the mango’s flesh; and my rickshaw-man’s gift of nodding rosy flowers which he placed on my knees when, with tears in my eyes, crushed down by sorrow—but nibbling a leaf of cinnamon—I left thee at last beneath thy rainy skies.

[Pg 4]

THE PAGODA

I descend from my carriage, and the sight of a hideous beggar marks the beginning of my journey. With one bloodshot eye he leers at me, and with a leprous lip reveals to their roots teeth bone-yellow and as long as those of a rabbit. The rest of his face is eaten away.

Rows of other wretches are ranged on both sides of the highway, which is thronged at this outlet of the city with pedestrians, messengers, and wheelbarrows bearing women and their bundles. The oldest and grossest of the men is called the King of the Beggars. They say that, crazed by the death of his mother, he carries her head about with him concealed in his clothes. The last that I notice, two very old women, wrapped in swathings of rags, their faces black from the dust of the roads where they prostrate themselves at times, sing one of those plaints broken with long sighs and hiccoughs, which are the professional expressions of despair among these outcasts. I can see the pagoda afar off between thickets of bamboo; and, crossing the fields, I take a short cut toward it.

[Pg 5]

The country is a vast cemetery. Everywhere there are coffins; on hillocks covered with withered reeds, and in the dry grass, are rows of little stone posts, mitered statues, or lions of stone, marking the ancient sepulchers. Individual wealth or burial associations have built these tombs surrounded by trees and hedges. I pass between a place for animals and a pit filled with the skeletons of little girls whose parents wished to be rid of them. They have choked it to the mouth. It will soon be necessary to dig another.

The day is warm, the sky clear, I walk in the light of December.

The dogs see me, bark, and run away; I reach and pass the villages with their black roofs; I cross the fields of cotton and beans; I cross the rivulets by the old worn bridges, and, leaving on my right the great empty buildings of a deserted powder-mill, I arrive at my goal. I hear a noise of bells and a drum.

Before me is a tower of seven stories. An Indian with a golden turban, and a Parsee wearing a plum-colored one twisted like a stovepipe, are entering it. Two other figures move about on the highest balcony.

I must speak first of the pagoda itself.

[Pg 6]

It is composed of three courts and three temples, flanked by accessory chapels and lesser buildings. Religion here does not, as in Europe, barricade and segregate in loneliness the mystery of a faith walled about by dogma. Its function is not to defend the absolute against exterior aspects. It establishes a certain atmosphere; and, as though suspended from heaven, the structure gathers all nature into the offering that it constitutes. Multifold, all upon one level, it expresses Space by the relations of height and distance between the three arches of triumph or the temples which are consecrated to them; and Buddha, Prince of Peace, inhabits it with all the gods.

Chinese architecture, as it were, suppresses the walls. It amplifies and multiplies the roofs; and their exaggerated corners, lifting themselves with an exquisite resilience, return toward the sky in flowing curves. They remain suspended in air! The wider and heavier the fabric of the roof, the more, by that very weight, does it give an impression of lightness through every deep shadow projected below. Hence the use of black tiles, that form deep grooves and strong copings with high openings between them, makes the highest ridges[Pg 7] detached and distinct. Clear though intricate of outline, their frieze is lifted through the lucid air. The temple is seen as a portico, a canopy, or a tent, of which the uplifted corners are attached to the clouds; and in its shade are installed the idols of the earth.

A fat, gilded fellow lives under the first portico. His right foot, drawn beneath him, indicates the third attitude of meditation, where consciousness still exists. His eyes are closed, but under his golden skin can be seen the red lips of a distended mouth whose long rounded opening stretches at the corners into the shape of an eight. He laughs, and the laugh is that of a face asleep. At what does this obese ascetic laugh? What does he see with those closed eyes?

On each side of the hall, two at the right and two at the left, the four painted and varnished colossi, with short legs and enormous torsos, are the demons who guard the four shores of Heaven. Beardless as children, one brandishes serpents, one plays the viol, and one shakes a cylindrical engine like a closed parasol or a firecracker.

I penetrate into the second court. A great brass incense-burner covered with inscriptions is in the middle. I stand before[Pg 8] the principal pavilion. On the ridges of the roof little painted groups of figures seem as though they were passing from one side to the other, or ascending while engaged in conversation. At the angles of the coping hang two pink fish, their long feelers curving tremulously, their tails in the air; in the center two dragons are fighting for the mystic jewel. I hear songs and the beating of bells, and through the open door I see the evolutions of the bonzes.

The hall is high and spacious. Four or five colossal gilded statues dominate the background. The largest is seated on a throne in the middle. His eyes and mouth are closed, his feet drawn under him, and one hand, held in the “gesture of witness,” points to the earth. Thus, under the sacred tree, the perfect Buddha conceived himself. Escaped from the wheel of life, he participates in his own Nirvana. Others perched above him, with downcast eyes, contemplate their navels. These are the Heavenly Buddhas seated on lotus flowers. They are Avalokhita, Amitabha, the Buddha of the Light without Measure and the Buddha of the Paradise of the West. At their feet the bonzes pursue their rites. They have gray robes; large, somewhat rust-colored mantles attached to the[Pg 9] shoulder like togas; leggings of white linen; and, some of them, a sort of mortar-board on their heads. Others bare their scalps, where the white marks of moxas show the number of their vows. One by one, murmuring, they file past. The last who passes is a boy of twelve years. By a side

hall I reach the third court and see a third temple.