_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 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 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_.