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! Il faut perdre connaissance! And for the full space of a year Mesa loses, in the arms of Ysé, that consciousness of a fuller life, hidden behind the tattered screen of appearances, which had long been to him the _Unum necessarium_.