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! * * * * * ‘Qui a crié? J’entends un cri dans la nuit profonde! J’entends mon antique sœur des ténèbres qui remonte une autre fois vers moi, L’épouse nocturne qui revient une autre fois vers moi, sans mot dire, Une autre fois vers moi, avec son cœur, comme un repas qu’on se partage dans les ténèbres, Son cœur, comme un pain de douleur, et comme un vase plein de larmes.’ It is extraordinary that this great prose-poet, who is known at least to an _élite_ in Italy, who, in the course of the year 1913, has been acted with success in Germany, at Strasburg, at Frankfort, and at Dresden; whose plays, in 1914, have twice excited enthusiasm on the Parisian stage, should have no public in our islands. Is there no translator brave enough to undertake _L’Otage_, the most accessible of Claudel’s plays, or _L’Annonce_, so like the poems of our own pre-Raphaelites? The readers who enjoy Thomas Hardy’s _Dynasts_, or Doughty’s plays of Britain, should not find them impossibly difficult, they might even welcome the fresh source of a singularly noble pleasure.