Under the terrific atmospheric pressure
that has been torturing the civilization of
the entire world since the outbreak of the
greatest of wars, contemporary literature of the
major cast appears to have gone into decline.
Even the comparatively few writers recognized
as possessing talents of the first magnitude have
given way to that pressure and have shrunk to
minor size, so that it may be seriously questioned,
to say the least, whether during the past forty
months or so a single literary work of outstanding
and sustained grandeur has been achieved anywhere.
That the effect of the universal embattlement
upon the art of letters should be, in the
main, extremely depressing, is quite natural; but
the conspicuous loss of breadth and poise in writers
of the first order seems less in accordance
with necessity,—at least one might expect a very
superior author to rise above that necessity. In
any case it is very surprising that it should be a
Belgian whose literary personality is almost
unique in having remained exempt from the general
abridgment of spiritual stature.
It is true that Maurice Maeterlinck, the most
eminent literary figure in his sadly stricken country
and of unsurpassed standing among the contemporary
masters of French letters, has, since
the great catastrophe, won no new laurels as a
dramatist; and that in the other field cultivated
by him, that of the essay, his productiveness has
been anything but prolific. But in his case one is
inclined to interpret reticence as an eloquent proof
of a singularly heroic firmness of character at a
time when on both sides of the great divide which
now separates the peoples, the cosmopolitan trend
of human advance has come to a temporary halt,
and the nations have relapsed from their laboriously
attained degree of world-citizenship into
the homelier, but more immediately virtuous, state
of traditional patriotism.
It is a military necessity as well as a birthright
of human nature that at a time like the
present the patriot is excused from any pharisaical
profession of loving his enemy. Before the war,
Maeterlinck's writings were animated by humanitarian
sympathies of the broadest catholicity. He
even had a peculiar affection for the Germans, because
doubtless he perceived the existence of a
strong kinship between certain essential traits in
his spiritual composition and the fundamental tendencies
of German philosophy and art. But when
Belgium was lawlessly invaded, her ancient towns
heinously destroyed, her soil laid waste and
drenched with the blood of her people, Maeterlinck,
as a son of Belgium, learned to hate the
Germans to the utmost of a wise and temperate
man's capacity for hatred, and in his war papers
collected in Les Débris de la Guerre, (1916),(1)
which ring with the passionate impulse of the patriot,
his outraged sense of justice prevails over
the disciplined self-command of the stoic.
He refuses to acquiesce in the lenient discrimination
between the guilty Government of Germany
and her innocent population: “It is not true that
in this gigantic crime there are innocent and guilty,
or degrees of guilt. They stand on one level, all
those who have taken part in it…. It is, very
simply, the German, from one end of his country
to the other, who stands revealed as a beast of
prey which the firm will of our planet finally repudiates.
We have here no wretched slaves
dragged along by a tyrant king who alone is responsible.
Nations have the government which
they deserve, or rather, the government which
they have is truly no more than the magnified and
public projection of the private morality and mentality
of the nation…. No nation can be deceived
that does not wish to be deceived; and it
is not intelligence that Germany lacks…. No
nation permits herself to be coerced to the one
crime that man cannot pardon. It is of her own
accord that she hastens towards it; her chief has
no need to persuade, it is she who urges him on.”(2)
Such a condemnatory tirade against the despoilers
of his fair homeland was normally to be expected
from a man of Maeterlinck's depth of feeling.
The unexpected thing that happened not
long after was that the impulsive promptings of
justice and patriotism put themselves into harmony
with the guiding principles of his entire moral
evolution. The integrity of his philosophy of life,
the sterling honesty of his teachings, were thus
loyally sealed with the very blood of his heart.—“Before
closing this book,” he says in the Epilogue,(3)
“I wish to weigh for the last time in my
conscience the words of hatred and malediction
which it has made me speak in spite of myself.”
And then, true prophet that he is, he speaks forth
as a voice from the future, admonishing men to
prepare for the time when the war is over. What
saner advice could at this critical time be given
the stay-at-homes than that they should follow
the example of the men who return from the
trenches? “They detest the enemy,” says he, “but
they do not hate the man. They recognize in him
a brother in misfortune who, like themselves, is
submitting to duties and laws which, like themselves,
he too believes lofty and necessary.” On
the other hand, too, not many have sensed as
deeply as has Maeterlinck the grandeur to which
humanity has risen through the immeasurable
pathos of the war. “Setting aside the unpardonable
aggression and the inexpiable violation of the
treaties, this war, despite its insanity, has come
near to being a bloody but magnificent proof of
greatness, heroism, and the spirit of sacrifice.”
And from his profound anguish over the fate of
his beloved Belgium this consolation is wrung:
“If it be true, as I believe, that humanity is worth
just as much as the sum total of latent heroism
which it contains, then we may declare that humanity
was never stronger nor more exemplary
than now and that it is at this moment reaching
one of its highest points and capable of braving
everything and hoping everything. And it is for
this reason that, despite our present sadness, we
are entitled to congratulate ourselves and to rejoice.”
Altogether, Maeterlinck's thoughts and
actions throughout this yet unfinished mighty fate-drama
of history challenge the highest respect for
the clarity of his intellect and the profoundness of
his humanity.
The appalling disaster that has befallen the
Belgian people is sure to stamp their national character
with indelible marks; so that it is safe to
predict that never again will the type of civilization
which before the war reigned in the basins
of the Meuse and the Scheldt reëstablish itself in
its full peculiarity and distinctiveness which was
the result of a unique coagency of Germanic and
Romanic ingredients of culture. Yet in the amalgam
of the two heterogeneous elements a certain
competitive antithesis had survived, and manifested
itself, in the individual as in the national
life at large, in a number of unreconciled temperamental
contrasts, and in the fundamental unlikeness
exhibited in the material and the spiritual activities.
Witness the contrast between the bustling
aggressiveness in the province of practical affairs
and the metaphysical drift of modern Flemish art.
To any one familiar with the visible materialism
of the population in its external mode of living
it may have seemed strange to notice how sedulously
a numerous set among the younger artists
of the land were facing away from their concrete
environment, as though to their over-sensitive
nervous system it were irremediably offensive.
The vigorous solidity of Constantin Meunier, the
great plastic interpreter of the “Black Country”
of Belgium, found but few wholehearted imitators
among the sculptors, while among the painters
that robust terrestrialism of which the work of a
Rubens or Teniers and their countless disciples
was the artistic upshot, was almost totally relinquished,
and linear firmness and colorful vitality
yielded the day to pallid, discarnately decorative
artistry even, in a measure, in the “applied art”
products of a Henri van de Velde.
It is in the field of literature, naturally enough,
that the contrast is resolved and integrated into
a characteristic unity. Very recently Professor
A. J. Carnoy has definitely pointed out(4) the
striking commixture of the realistic and imaginative
elements in the work of the Flemish symbolists.
“The vision of the Flemings”—quoting from
his own précis of his paper—“is very concrete,
very exact in all details and gives a durable, real,
and almost corporeal presence to the creations of
the imagination. All these traits are exhibited in
the reveries of the Flemish mystics, ancient and
modern. One finds them also no less plainly in
the poetic work of Belgian writers of the last
generation: Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Rodenbach,
Van Lerberghe, Le Roy, Elskamp, etc.”
If we take into account this composite attitude
of the Flemish mind we shall be less surprised at
the remarkable evolution of a poet-philosopher
whose creations seem at first blush to bear no resemblance
to the outward complexion of his own
age; who seems as far removed temperamentally
from his locality and time as were his lineal spiritual
ancestors: the Dutchman Ruysbroeck, the
Scandinavian Swedenborg, the German Novalis,
and the American Emerson—and who in the
zenith of his career stands forth as an ardent advocate
of practical action while at the same time a
firm believer in the transcendental.
Maeterlinck's romantic antipathy towards the
main drift of the age was a phenomenon which at
the dawn of our century could be observed in a
great number of superior intelligences. Those
fugitives from the dun and sordid materialism of
the day were likely to choose between two avenues
of escape, according to their greater or lesser
inner ruggedness. The more aggressive type
would engage in multiform warfare for the reconstruction
of life on sounder principles; whereas
the more meditative professed a real or affected
indifference to practical things and eschewed any
participation in the world's struggle for progress.
And of the quiescent rather than the insurgent
variety of the romantic temper Maurice Maeterlinck
was the foremost exponent.
The “romantic longing” seems to have come
into the world in the company of the Christian religion
with which it shares its partly outspoken,
partly implied repugnance for the battle of life.
Romantic periods occur in the history of civilization
whenever a sufficiently influential set of artistically
minded persons have persuaded themselves
that, in quite a literal sense of the colloquial
phrase, they “have no use” for the world; a discovery
which would still be true were it stated
obversely. The romantic world-view, thus fundamentally
oriented by world-contempt, entails, at
least in theory, the repudiation of all earthly
joys—notably the joy of working—and the renouncement
of all worldly ambition; it scorns the
cooperative, social disposition, invites the soul to
a progressive withdrawal into the inner ego, and
ends in complete surrender to one sole aspiration:
the search of the higher vision, the vision, that is,
of things beyond their tangible reality. To such
mystical constructions of the inner eye a certain
group of German writers who flourished in the
beginning of the nineteenth century and were
known as the Romantics, darkly groped their way
out of the confining realities of their own time.
The most modern spell of romanticism, the one
through which our own generation was but yesterday
passing, measures its difference from any previous
romantic era by the difference between
earlier states of culture and our own. Life with
us is conspicuously more assertive and aggressive
in its social than in its individual expressions, which
was by no means always so, and unless the romantic
predisposition adapted itself to this important
change it could not relate itself at all intimately
to our interests. Our study of Maeterlinck
should help us, therefore, to discover possibly in
the new romantic tendency some practical and
vital bearings.
We find that in the new romanticism esthetic
and philosophical impulses are inextricably mixed.
Hence the new movement is also playing an indispensable
rôle in the modern re-foundation of art.
For while acting as a wholesome offset to the so-called
naturalism, in its firm refusal to limit inner
life to the superficial realities, it at the same time
combines with naturalism into a complete recoiling,
both of the intellect and the emotions, from
any commonplace, or pusillanimous, or mechanical
practices of artistry. This latter-day romanticism,
moreover, notwithstanding its sky-aspiring
outstretch, is akin to naturalism in that, after all,
it keeps its roots firmly grounded in the earth;
that is to say, it seeks for its ulterior sanctions not
in realms high beyond the self; rather it looks
within for the “blue flower” of contentedness. Already
to the romantics of old the mystic road to
happiness was not unknown. It is, for instance,
pointed by Novalis: “Inward leads the mysterious
way. Within us or nowhere lies eternity with
its worlds; within us or nowhere are the past and
the future.” Viewed separately from other elements
of romanticism, this passion for retreating
within the central ego is commonly referred to as
mysticism; it has a strong hold on many among the
moderns, and Maurice Maeterlinck to be properly
understood has to be understood as the poet par
excellence of modern mysticism. By virtue of this
special office he deals mainly in concepts of the
transcendental, which puzzles the ordinary person
accustomed to perceive only material and ephemeral
realities. Maeterlinck holds that nothing
matters that is not eternal and that what keeps us
from enjoying the treasures of the universe is the
hereditary resignation with which we tarry in the
gloomy prison of our senses. “In reality, we
live only from soul to soul, and we are gods who
do not know each other.”(5) It follows from this
metaphysical foundation of his art that instead of
the grosser terminology suitable to plain realities,
Maeterlinck must depend upon a code of subtle
messages in order to establish between himself
and his audience a line of spiritual communication.
This makes it somewhat difficult for people of
cruder endowment to appreciate his meaning, a
grievance from which in the beginning many of
them sought redress in facile scoffing. Obtuse
minds are prone to claim a right to fathom the
profound meanings of genius with the same ease
with which they expect to catch the meaning of
a bill of fare or the daily stock market report.
It must be confessed, however, that even those
to whom Maeterlinck's sphere of thought is not
so utterly sealed, enter it with a sense of mixed
perplexity and apprehension. They feel themselves
helplessly conducted through a world situated
beyond the confines of their normal consciousness,
and in this strange world everything that
comes to pass appears at first extremely impracticable
and unreal. The action seems “wholly dissevered
from common sense and ordinary uses;”
the figures behave otherwise than humans; the
dialogue is “poised on the edge of a precipice of
bathos.” It is clear that works so far out of the
common have to be approached from the poet's
own point of view. “Let the reader move his
standpoint one inch nearer the popular standpoint,”
thus we are warned by Mr. G. K. Chesterton,
“and his attitude towards the poet will be
harsh, hostile, unconquerable mirth.” There are
some works that can be appreciated for their
good story, even if we fail to realize the author's
moral attitude, let alone to grasp the deeper content
of his work. “But if we take a play by Maeterlinck
we shall find that unless we grasp the particular
fairy thread of thought the poet rather
lazily flings to us, we cannot grasp anything whatever.
Except from one extreme poetic point of
view, the thing is not a play; it is not a bad play,
it is a mass of clotted nonsense. One whole act
describes the lovers going to look for a ring in a
distant cave when they both know they have
dropped it down the well. Seen from some secret
window on some special side of the soul's turret,
this might convey a sense of faerie futility in our
human life. But it is quite obvious that unless it
called forth that one kind of sympathy, it would
call forth nothing but laughter. In the same play,
the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword,
the wife remarking at intervals, ‘I am not gay.’
Now there may really be an idea in this; the idea
of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon the
opportunism of innocence; that the lonely human
heart says, like a child at a party, ‘I am not enjoying
myself as I thought I should.’ But it is
plain that unless one thinks of this idea, and of
this idea only, the expression is not in the least
unsuccessful pathos,—it is very broad and highly
successful farce!”
And so the atmosphere of Maeterlinck's plays
is impregnated throughout with oppressive mysteries,
and until the key of these mysteries is found
there is very little meaning to the plays. Moreover,
these mysteries, be they never so stern and
awe-inspiring, are irresistibly alluring. The reason
is, they are our own mysteries that have somehow
escaped our grasp, and that we fain would
recapture, because there dwells in every human
breast a vague assent to the immortal truth of
Goethe's assertion: “The thrill of awe is man's
best heritage.”(6)
The imaginative equipment of Maeterlinck's
dramaturgy is rather limited and, on its face value,
trite. In particular are his dramatis personae
creatures by no means calculated to overawe by
some extraordinary weirdness or power. And yet
we feel ourselves touched by an elemental dread
and by an overwhelming sense of our human impotence
in the presence of these figures who, without
seeming supernatural, are certainly not of common
flesh and blood; they impress us as surpassingly
strange mainly because somehow they are instinct
with a life fundamentally more real than the superficial
reality we know. For they are the mediums
and oracles of the fateful powers that stir human
beings into action.
The poet of mysticism, then, delves into the
mystic sources of our deeds, and makes us stand
reverent with him before the unknowable forces
by which we are controlled. Naturally he is
obliged to shape his visions in dim outline. His
aim is to shadow forth that which no naked eye
can see, and it may be said in passing that he attains
this aim with a mastery and completeness
incomparably beyond the dubious skill displayed
more recently by the grotesque gropings of the so-called
futurist school. Perhaps one true secret of
the perturbing strangeness of Maeterlinck's figures
lies in the fact that the basic principle of their life,
the one thoroughly vital element in them, if it does
not sound too paradoxical to say so, is the idea of
death. Maeterlinck's mood and temper are fully
in keeping with the religious dogma that life is but
a short dream—with Goethe he believes that “all
things transitory but as symbols are sent,” and
apparently concurs in the creed voiced by one of
Arthur Schnitzler's characters,—that death is the
only subject in life worthy of being pondered by
the serious mind. “From our death onwards,”
so he puts it somewhere, “the adventure of the
universe becomes our own adventure.”
It will be useful to have a bit of personal information
concerning our author. He started his
active career as a barrister; not by any means auspiciously,
it seems, for already in his twenty-seventh
year he laid the toga aside. Experience
had convinced him that in the forum there were
no laurels for him to pluck. The specific qualities
that make for success at the bar were conspicuously
lacking in his make-up. Far from being eloquent,
he has at all times been noted for an unparalleled
proficiency in the art of self-defensive
silence. He shuns banal conversation and the
sterile distractions of promiscuous social intercourse,
dreads the hubbub of the city, and has an
intense dislike for travel, to which he resorts only
as a last means of escape from interviewers, reporters,
and admirers. Maeterlinck, it is seen, is
anything but multorum vir hominum. In order to
preserve intact his love of humanity, he finds it
expedient to live for the most part by himself,
away from the throng “whose very plaudits give
the heart a pang;” his fame has always been a
source of annoyance to him. The only company
he covets is that of the contemplative thinkers of
bygone days,—the mystics, gnostics, cabalists, neo-Platonists.
Swedenborg and Plotinus are perhaps
his greatest favorites. That the war has produced
a mighty agitation in the habitual calm of
the great Belgian poet-philosopher goes without
saying. His love of justice no less than his love of
his country aroused every red corpuscle in his
virile personality to violent resentment against the
invader. Since the war broke out, however, he
has published nothing besides a number of ringingly
eloquent and singularly pathetic articles and
appeals,—so that the character portrait derived
from the body of his work has not at this time
lost its application to his personality.
In cast of mind, Maeterlinck is sombrously
meditative, and he has been wise in framing his
outer existence so that it would accord with his
habitual detachment. The greater part of his
time used to be divided between his charming retreat
at Quatre Chemins, near Grasse, and the
grand old abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy,
which he managed to snatch in the very nick of
time from the tightening clutch of a manufacturing
concern. With the temperament of a hermit, he
has been, nevertheless, a keen observer of life,
though one preferring to watch the motley spectacle
from the aristocratic privacy of his box,
sheltered, as it were, from prying curiosity. Well
on in middle age, he is still an enthusiastic out-of-doors
man,—gardener, naturalist, pedestrian,
wheelman, and motorist, and commands an extraordinary
amount of special knowledge in a variety
of sports and sciences. In “The Double Garden”
he discusses the automobile with the authority
of an expert watt-man and mechanician. In
one of his other books he evinces an extraordinary
erudition in all matters pertaining to the higher
education of dogs; and his work on “The Life of
the Bee” passes him beyond question with high
rank among “thirty-third degree” apiculturists.
One of the characteristics that seem to separate
his books, especially those of the earlier period,
from the literary tendencies of his age, is their
surprising inattention to present social struggles.
His metaphysical bias makes him dwell almost exclusively,
and with great moral and logical consistency,
on aspects of life that are slightly considered
by the majority of men yet which he regards
as ulteriorly of sole importance.
When men like Maeterlinck are encountered in
the world of practical affairs, they are bound to
impress us as odd, because of this inversion of the
ordinary policies of behavior. But before classing
them as “cranks,” we might well ask ourselves
whether their appraisal of the component values
of life does not, after all, correspond better to
their true relativity than does our own habitual
evaluation. With the average social being, the
transcendental bearing of a proposition is synonymous
with its practical unimportance. But in his
essay on “The Invisible Goodness” Maeterlinck
quite properly raises the question: “Is visible life
alone of consequence, and are we made up only of
things that can be grasped and handled like pebbles
in the road?”
Throughout his career Maeterlinck reveals himself
in the double aspect of poet and philosopher.
In the first period his philosophy, as has already
been amply hinted, is characterized chiefly by aversion
from the externalities of life, and by that
tense introversion of the mind which forms the
mystic's main avenue to the goal of knowledge.
But if, in order to find the key to his tragedies and
puppet plays, we go to the thirteen essays representing
the earlier trend of his philosophy and issued
in 1896 under the collective title, “The
Treasure of the Humble,” we discover easily that
his cast of mysticism is very different from that of
his philosophic predecessors and teachers in the
fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular
from the devotional mysticism of the “Admirable”
John Ruysbroeck, and Friedrich von Hardenberg-Novalis.
Maeterlinck does not strive after the so-called
“spiritual espousals,” expounded by the
“doctor ecstaticus,” Ruysbroeck, in his celebrated
treatise where Christ is symbolized as the divine
groom and Human Nature as the bride glowing
with desire for union with God. Maeterlinck
feels too modernly to make use of that ancient
sensuous imagery. The main thesis of his mystical
belief is that there are divine forces dormant
in human nature; how to arouse and release them,
constitutes the paramount problem of human life.
His doctrine is that a life not thus energized by its
own latent divineness is, and must remain, humdrum
and worthless. It will at once be noticed
that such a doctrine harmonizes thoroughly with
the romantic aspiration. Both mystic and romantic
teach that, in the last resort, the battlefield
of our fate lies not out in the wide world but that
it is enclosed in the inner self, within the unknown
quantity which we designate as our soul. The visible
life, according to this modern prophet of mysticism,
obeys the invisible; happiness and unhappiness
flow exclusively from the inner sources.
Maeterlinck's speculations, despite their medieval
provenience, have a practical orientation. He
firmly believes that it is within the ability of mankind
to raise some of the veils that cover life's central
secret. In unison with some other charitable
students of society, he holds to the faith that a
more highly spiritualized era is dawning, and from
the observed indications he prognosticates a wider
awakening of the sleepbound soul of man. And
certainly some of the social manifestations that
appeared with cumulative force during the constructive
period before the war were calculated to
justify that faith. The revival of interest in the
metaphysical powers of man which expressed itself
almost epidemically through such widely divergent
cults as Theosophy and Christian Science,
was indubitable proof of spiritual yearnings in the
broader masses of the people. And it had a practical
counterpart in civic tendencies and reforms
that evidenced a great agitation of the social conscience.
And even to-day, when the great majority
feel that the universal embroilment has caused
civilized man to fall from his laboriously achieved
level, this sage in his lofty solitude feels the redeeming
spiritual connotation of our great calamity.
“Humanity was ready to rise above itself,
to surpass all that it had hitherto accomplished.
It has surpassed it…. Never before had nations
been seen that were able as a whole to understand
that the happiness of each of those who live
in this time of trial is of no consequence compared
with the honor of those who live no more or the
happiness of those who are not yet alive. We stand
on heights that had not been attained before.”
But even for those many who find themselves
unable to build very large hopes on the spiritual
uplift of mankind through disaster, Maeterlinck's
philosophy is a wholesome tonic. In the
essay on “The Life Profound” in “The Treasure
of the Humble,” we are told: “Every man must
find for himself in the low and unavoidable reality
of common life his special possibility of a higher
existence.” The injunction, trite though it sound,
articulates a moral very far from philistine. For
it urges the pursuit of the transcendental self
through those feelings which another very great
idealist, Friedrich Schiller, describes in magnificent
metaphor as
… “der dunklen Gefühle Gewalt,
die im Herzen wunderbar schliefen.”
In the labyrinth of the subliminal consciousness
there lurks, however, a great danger for the seeker
after the hidden treasures: the paralyzing effect
of fatalism upon the normal energies. Maeterlinck
was seriously threatened by this danger
during his earlier period. How he eventually
contrived his liberation from the clutch of fatalism
is not made entirely clear by the progress of
his thought. At all events, an era of greater intellectual
freedom, which ultimately was to create
him the undisputed captain of his soul and
master of his fate, was soon to arrive for him. It
is heralded by another book of essays: “Wisdom
and Destiny.” But, as has been stated, we may
in his case hardly hope to trace the precise route
traveled by the mind between the points of departure
and arrival.
So closely are the vital convictions in this truthful
writer linked with the artistic traits of his work
that without some grasp of his metaphysics even
the technical peculiarities of his plays cannot be
fully appreciated. To the mystic temper of mind,
all life is secretly pregnant with great meaning,
so that none of its phenomena can be deemed inconsequential.
Thus, while Maeterlinck is a poet
greatly preoccupied with spiritual matters yet
nothing to him is more wonderful and worthy of
attention than the bare facts and processes of
living. Real life, just like the theatre which
purports to represent it, manipulates a multiform
assortment of stage effects, now coarse and obvious
and claptrap, now refined and esoteric, to suit
the diversified taste and capacity of the patrons.
To the cultured esthetic sense the tragical tendency
carries more meaning than the catastrophic finale;
our author accordingly scorns, and perhaps inordinately,
whatsoever may appear as merely adventitious
in the action of plays. “What can be told,”
he exclaims, “by beings who are possessed of a
fixed idea and have no time to live because they
have to kill off a rival or a mistress?” The internalized
action in his plays is all of one piece with
the profound philosophical conviction that the
inner life alone matters; that consequently the
small and unnoticed events are more worthy of attention
than the sensational, cataclysmic moments.
“Why wait ye,” he asks in that wonderful rhapsody
on “Silence”(7) “for Heaven to open at the
strike of the thunderbolt? Ye should attend upon
the blessed hours when it silently opens—and it is
incessantly opening.”
His purpose, then, is to reveal the working of
hidden forces in their intricate and inseparable
connection with external events; and in order that
the vie intérieure might have the right of way,
drama in his practice emancipates itself very far
from the traditional realistic methods. “Poetry,”
he maintains, “has no other purpose than to keep
open the great roads that lead from the visible
to the invisible.” To be sure, this definition postulates,
rather audaciously, a widespread spiritual
susceptibility. But in Maeterlinck's optimistic
anthropology no human being is spiritually so
deadened as to be forever out of all communication
with the things that are divine and infinite.
He fully realizes, withal, that for the great mass
of men there exists no intellectual approach to
the truly significant problems of life. It is rather
through our emotional capacity that our spiritual
experience brings us into touch with the final verities.
Anyway, the poet of mysticism appeals from
the impasse of pure reasoning to the voice of the
inner oracles. But how to detect in the deepest
recesses of the soul the echoes of universal life
and give outward resonance to their faint reverberations?
That is the artistic, and largely technical,
side of the problem.
Obvious it is that if the beholder's collaboration
in the difficult enterprise is to be secured, his
imagination has to be stirred to a super-normal
degree. Once a dramatist has succeeded in stimulating
the imaginative activity, he can dispense
with a mass of descriptive detail. But he must
comply with two irremissible technical demands.
In the first place, the “vie intérieure” calls forth
a dialogue intérieur; an esoteric language, I would
say, contrived predominantly for the “expressional”
functions of speech, as differenced from its
“impressional” purposes. Under Swedenborg's
fanciful theory of “correspondences” the literal
meaning of a word is merely a sort of protective
husk for its secret spiritual kernel. It is this inner,
essential meaning that Maeterlinck's dialogue
attempts to set free. By a fairly simple and consistent
code of intimations the underlying meaning
of the colloquy is laid bare and a basis created
for a more fundamental understanding of the
dramatic transactions. Maeterlinck going, at first,
to undue lengths in this endeavor, exposed the diction
of his dramas to much cheap ridicule. The
extravagant use of repetition, in particular, made
him a mark for facile burlesque. The words of
the Queen in Princesse Maleine: “Mais ne répetez
pas toujours ce que l'on dit,” were sarcastically
turned against the poet himself.
As a result of the extreme simplicity of his dialogue,
Maeterlinck was reproached with having
invented the “monosyllabic theatre,” the “theatre
without words,” and with having perpetrated
a surrogate sort of drama, a hybrid between
libretto and pantomime.
The fact, however, is, his characters speak a
language which, far from being absurd, as it was
at first thought to be by many of his readers, is
instinct with life and quite true to life—to life,
that is, as made articulate in the intense privacy of
dreams, or hallucinations, or moments of excessive
emotional perturbation.
The other principal requisite for the attainment
of the inner dramatic vitalness in drama is a pervasive
atmospheric mood, a sustained Stimmung.
This, in the case of Maeterlinck, is brought about
by the combined employment of familiar and
original artistic devices.
The grave and melancholy mood that so deeply
impregnates the work of Maeterlinck is tinged in
the earlier stage, as has been pointed out, with the
sombre coloring of fatalism. In the first few
books, in particular, there hovers a brooding sense
of terror and an undefinable feeling of desolation.
Through Serres Chaudes (“Hot Houses”), his
first published book, (1889), there runs a tenor
of weariness, of ideal yearnings overshadowed by
the hopelessness of circumstances. Even in this
collection of poems, where so much less necessity
exists for a unity of mood than in the plays, Maeterlinck's
predilection for scenic effects suggestive
of weirdness and superstitious fear became apparent
in the recurrent choice of sombre scenic motifs:
oppressive nocturnal silence,—a stagnant sheet of
water,—moonlight filtered through green windows,
etc. The diction, too, through the incessant
use of terms like morne, las, pâle, désire,
ennui, tiède, indolent, malade, exhales as it were a
lazy resignation. Temporarily, then, the fatalistic
strain is uppermost both in the philosophy
and the poetry of the rising young author; and
to make matters worse, his is the fatalism of pessimistic
despair: Fate is forsworn against man.
The objective point of life is death. We constantly
receive warnings from within, but the
voices are not unequivocal and emphatic enough to
save us from ourselves.
Probing the abysses of his subliminal self, the
mystic may sense, along with the diviner promptings
of the heart, the lurking demons that undermine
happiness,—“the malignant powers,”—again
quoting Schiller—“whom no man's craft can make
familiar”—that element in human nature which
in truth makes man “his own worst enemy.” It
is a search which at this stage of his development
Maeterlinck, as a mystic, cannot bring himself to
relinquish, even though, pessimistically, he anticipates
that which he most dreads to find; in this
way, fatalism and pessimism act as insuperable
barriers against his artistic self-assertion. His
fixed frame of mind confines him to the representation
of but one elemental instinct, namely, that of
fear. The rustic in the German fairy tale who
sallied forth to learn how to shudder,—gruseln,—would
have mastered the art to his complete satisfaction
if favored with a performance or two of
such plays as “Princess Maleine,” “The Intruder,”
or “The Sightless.” Perhaps no other dramatist
has ever commanded a similarly well-equipped arsenal
of thrills and terrible foreshadowings. The
commonest objects are fraught with ominous forebodings:
a white gown lying on a prie-dieu, a curtain
suddenly set swaying by a puff of air, the melancholy
soughing of a clump of trees,—the simplest
articles of daily use are converted into awful
symbols that make us shiver by their whisperings
of impending doom.
Nor in the earlier products of Maeterlinck are
the cruder practices of melodrama scorned or
spared,—the crash and flash of thunder and lightning,
the clang of bells and clatter of chains, the
livid light and ghastly shadows, the howling hurricane,
the ominous croaking of ravens amid nocturnal
solitude, trees illumined by the fiery eyes of
owls, bats whirring portentously through the
gloom,—so many harbingers of dread and death.
And the prophetic import of these tokens and their
sort is reinforced by repeated assertions from the
persons in the action that never before has anything
like this been known to occur. To such a
fearsome state are we wrought up by all this uncanny
apparatus that at the critical moment a well
calculated knock at the door is sufficient to make
our flesh creep and our hair stand on end.
Thus, the vie intérieure would seem to prerequire
for its externalization a completely furnished
chamber of horrors. And when it is added that
the scene of the action is by preference a lonely
churchyard or a haunted old mansion, a crypt, a
cavern, a silent forest or a solitary tower, it is
easy to understand why plays like “Princess Maleine”
could be classed by superficial and unfriendly
critics with the gruesome ebullitions of that
fantastic quasi-literary occupation to which we
owe a well known variety of “water-front” drama
and, in fiction, the “shilling shocker.” Their immeasurably
greater psychological refinement could
not save them later on from condemnation at the
hands of their own maker. And yet they are not
without very great artistic merits. Octave Mirbeau,
in his habitual enthusiasm for the out-of-the-ordinary,
hailed Maeterlinck, on the strength of
“Princess Maleine,” as the Belgian Shakespeare,
evidently because Maeterlinck derived some of his
motifs from “Hamlet”: mainly the churchyard
scene, and Prince Hjalmar's defiance of the queen,
as well as his general want of decision. As a matter
of fact, Maeterlinck has profoundly studied,
not Shakespeare alone, but the minor Elizabethans
as well. He has made an admirable translation
of “Macbeth.” Early in his career he even
translated one of John Ford's Plays, “'Tis Pity
She's a Whore,” one of the coarsest works ever
written for the stage, but to which he was attracted
by the intrinsic human interest that far outweighs
its offensiveness. As for any real kinship
of Maeterlinck with Shakespeare, the resemblance
between the two is slight. They differ philosophically
in the fundamental frame of mind, ethically
in the outlook upon life, dramaturgically in the
value attached to external action, and humanly,—much
to the disadvantage of the Belgian,—in their
sense of humor. For unfortunately it has to be
confessed that this supreme gift of the gods has
been very sparingly dispensed to Maeterlinck. Altogether,
whether or no he is to be counted among
the disciples of Shakespeare, his works show no
great dependence on the master. With far better
reason might he be called a debtor to Germanic
folklore, especially in its fantastic elements.
A German fairy world it is to which we are
transported by Maeterlinck's first dramatic attempt,
“Princess Maleine,” (1889), a play refashioned
after Grimm's tale of the Maid Maleen;
only that in the play all the principals come to a
harrowing end and that in it an esoteric meaning
lies concealed underneath the primitive plot. The
action, symbolically interpreted, illustrates the fatalist's
doctrine that man is nothing but a toy in
the hands of dark and dangerous powers. Practical
wisdom does not help us to discern the working
of these powers until it is too late. Neither
can we divine their presence, for the prophetic apprehension
of the future resides not in the expert
and proficient, but rather in the helpless or decrepit,—the
blind, the feeble-minded, and the
stricken in years, or again in young children and in
dumb animals. Take the scene in “Princess Maleine”
where the murderers, having invaded the
chamber, lie there in wait, with bated breath. In
the corridor outside, people are unconcernedly
passing to and fro, while the only creatures who,
intuitively, sense the danger, are the little Prince
and a dog that keeps anxiously scraping at the
door.
In L'Intruse (“The Intruder”), (1890), a one-act
play on a theme which is collaterally developed
later on in Les Aveugles (“The Sightless”), and
in L'Intérieur (“Home”), the arriving disaster
that cannot be shut out by bolts or bars announces
itself only to the clairvoyant sense of a blind old
man. The household gathered around the table is
placidly waiting for the doctor. Only the blind
grandfather is anxious and heavy-laden because he
alone knows that Death is entering the house, he
alone can feel his daughter's life withering away
under the breath of the King of Terror: the sightless
have a keener sensitiveness than the seeing
for what is screened from the physical eye.
It would hardly be possible to name within the
whole range of dramatic literature another work
so thoroughly pervaded with the chilling horror
of approaching calamity. The talk at the table is
of the most commonplace,—that the door will not
shut properly, and they must send for the carpenter
to-morrow. But from the mechanism of
the environment there comes cumulative and incremental
warning that something extraordinary and
fatal is about to happen. The wind rises, the
trees shiver, the nightingales break off their singing,
the fishes in the pond grow restive, the dogs
cower in fear,—an unseen Presence walks through
the garden. Then the clanging of a scythe is
heard. A cold current of air rushes into the room.
Nearer and nearer come the steps. The grandfather
insists that a stranger has seated himself
in the midst of the family. The lamp goes out.
The bell strikes midnight. The old man is sure
that somebody is rising from the table. Then
suddenly the baby whose voice has never been
heard starts crying. Through an inner door steps
a deaconess silently crossing herself: the mother
of the house is dead.
These incidents in themselves are not necessarily
miraculous. There are none of them but
might be accounted for on perfectly natural
grounds. In fact, very plausible explanations do
offer themselves for the weirdest things that come
to pass. So, especially, it was a real, ordinary
mower that chanced to whet his scythe; yet the
apparition of the Old Reaper in person could not
cause the chilling consternation produced by this
trivial circumstance coming as it does as the climax
of a succession of commonplace happenings exaggerated
and distorted by a fear-haunted imagination.
To produce an effect like that upon
an audience whose credulity refuses to be put to
any undue strain is a victorious proof of prime
artistic ability.
Les Aveugles (“The Sightless”), (1891), is
pitched in the same psychological key. The atmosphere
is surcharged with unearthly apprehension.
A dreary twilight—in the midst of a
thick forest—on a lonely island; twelve blind
people fretting about the absence of their guardian.
He is gone to find a way out of the
woods—what can have become of him? From
moment to moment the deserted, helpless band
grows more fearstricken. The slightest sound becomes
the carrier of evil forebodings: the rustling
of the foliage, the flapping of a bird's wings,
the swelling roar of the nearby sea in its dash
against the shore. The bell strikes twelve—they
wonder is it noon or night? Then questions, eager
and calamitous, pass in whispers among them:
Has the leader lost his way? Will he never come
back? Has the dam burst apart and will they all
be swallowed by the ocean? The pathos is greatly
heightened by an extremely delicate yet sure individuation
of the figures, as when at the mention of
Heaven those not sightless from birth raise their
countenance to the sky. And where in the meanwhile
is the lost leader? He is seated right in their
midst, but smitten by death. They learn it at last
through the actions of the dog; besides whom—in
striking parallel to “Princess Maleine”—the only
other creature able to see is a little child. The horror-stricken
unfortunates realize that they can
never get home, and that they must perish in the
woods.
In Les Sept Princesses (“The Seven Princesses”),
(1891), although it is one of Maeterlinck's
minor achievements, some of the qualities
that are common to all his work become peculiarly
manifest. This is particularly true of the skill
shown in conveying the feeling of the story by
means of suitable scenic devices. Most of his
plays depend to a considerable degree for their
dark and heavy nimbus of unreality upon a studied
combination of paraphernalia in themselves
neither numerous nor far-sought. In fact, the resulting
scenic repertory, too, is markedly limited:
a weird forest, a deserted castle with marble staircase
and dreamy moonlit terrace, a tower with
vaulted dungeons, a dismal corridor flanked by impenetrable
chambers, a lighted interior viewed
from the garden, a landscape bodefully crêped
with twilight—the list nearly exhausts his store
of “sets.”
The works mentioned so far are hardly more
than able exercises preparatory for the ampler
and more finished products which were to succeed
them. Yet they represent signal steps in the evolution
of a new dramatic style, designed, as has
already been intimated, to give palpable form to
emotional data descried in moments anterior not
only to articulation but even to consciousness itself;
and for this reason, the plane of the dramatic
action lies deep below the surface of life, down in
the inner tabernacle where the mystic looks for the
hidden destinies. In his style, Maeterlinck had
gradually developed an unprecedented capacity for
bringing to light the secret agencies of fate. A
portion of the instructed public had already
learned to listen in his writings for the finer reverberations
that swing in the wake of the uttered
phrase, to heed the slightest hints and allusions in
the text, to overlook no glance or gesture that
might betray the mind of the acting characters.
It is true that art to be great must be plain, but
that does not mean that the sole test of great art
is the response of the simple and apathetic.
In Maeterlinck's first masterpiece, Pélléas et
Mélisande, (1892), the motives again are drawn
up from the lower regions of consciousness; once
more the plot is born of a gloomy fancy, and the
darkling mood hovering over scene and action
attests the persistence of fatalism in the poet. The
theory of old King Arkel, the spokesman of the
author's personal philosophy, is that one should
not seek to be active; one should ever wait on
the threshold of Fate. Even the younger people
in the play are infected by the morbid doctrine of
an inevitable necessity for all things that happen
to them: “We do not go where we would go.
We do not do that which we would do.” Perhaps,
however, these beliefs are here enounced for the
last time with the author's assent or acquiescence.
In artistic merit “Pélléas and Mélisande” marks
a nearer approach to mastery, once the integral
peculiarities of the form and method have been
granted. Despite a noticeable lack of force, directness,
and plasticity in the characterization, the
vie intérieure is most convincingly expressed. In
one of the finest scenes of the play we see the principals
at night gazing out upon a measureless expanse
of water dotted with scattered lights. The
atmosphere is permeated with a reticent yearning
of love. The two young creatures, gentle, shy,
their souls tinged with melancholy, are drawn towards
one another by an ineluctable mutual attraction.
Yet, though their hearts are filled to
overflowing, not a word of affection is uttered.
Their love reveals itself to us even as to themselves,
without a loud and jarring declaration,
through its very speechlessness, as it were. The
situation well bears out the roi sage in Alladine
et Palomides: “There is a moment when souls
touch one another and know everything without
a need of our opening the lips.” There are still
other scenes in this play so tense with emotion that
words would be intrusive and dissonant. There is
that lovely picture of Mélisande at the window;
Pélléas cannot reach up to her hand, but is satisfied
to feel her loosened hair about his face. It
is a question whether even that immortal love duet
in “Romeo and Juliet” casts a poetic spell more
enchanting than this. At another moment in the
drama, we behold the lovers in Maeterlinck's beloved
half-light, softly weeping as they stare with
speechless rapture into the flames. And not until
the final parting does any word of love pass their
lips. In another part of the play Goland, Mélisande's
aging husband, who suspects his young
stepbrother, Pélléas, of loving Mélisande, conducts
him to an underground chamber. We are
not told why he has brought him there, and why
he has led him to the brink of the pitfall from
which there mounts a smell of death. If it be a
heinous deed he is brooding, why does he pause in
its execution? His terrible struggle does not reveal
itself through speech, yet it is eloquently expressed
in the wildness of his looks, the trembling of his
voice, and the sudden anguished outcry: “Pélléas!
Pélléas!”
Evidently Maeterlinck completely achieves the
very purpose to which the so-called Futurists think
they must sacrifice all traditional conceptions of
Art; and achieves it without any brutal stripping
and skinning of the poetic subject, without the
hideous exhibition of its disjecta membra, and
above all, without that implied disqualification for
the higher artistic mission which alone could induce
a man to limit his service to the dishing-up of
chunks and collops, “cubic” or amorphous.
In recognition of a certain tendency towards
mannerism that lay in his technique, Maeterlinck,
in a spirit of self-persiflage, labeled the book of
one-act plays which he next published, (1894),
Trois Petits Drames pour Marionettes (“Three
Little Puppet Plays”). They are entitled, severally:
Alladine et Palomides, Intérieur, and La
Mort de Tintagiles. While in motifs and materials
as well as in the principal points of style
these playlets present a sort of epitome of his artistic
progression up to date, they also display some
new and significant qualities. Of the three the
first named is most replete with suggestive symbolism
and at the same time most remindful of
the older plays, especially of “Pélléas and Mélisande.”
King Ablamore is in character and demeanor
clearly a counterpart of King Arkel. To
be sure he makes a temporary stand against the
might of Fate, but his resistance is meek and futile,
and his wisdom culminates in the same old
fatalistic formula: “Je sais qu'on ne fait pas ce
que l'on voudrait faire.”
L'Intérieur (“Home”) handles a theme almost
identical with that of L'Intruse: Life and Death
separated only by a thin pane of glass,—the sudden
advent of affliction from a cloudless sky. In
this little tragedy a family scene, enacted in “dumb
show,” is watched from the outside. The play is
without suspense in the customary use of the term,
since after the first whispered conversation between
the bringers of the fateful tidings the audience
is fully aware of the whole story:—the
daughter of the house, for whose return the little
group is waiting, has been found dead in the river.
The quiescent mood is sustained to the end; no
great outburst of lamentation; the curtain drops
the instant the news has been conveyed. But the
poignancy of the tragic strain is only enhanced
by the repression of an exciting climax.
“The Death of Tintagiles” repeats in a still
more harrowing form the fearful predicament of
a helpless child treated with so much dramatic
tension in Maeterlinck's first tragedy. Again, as
in “Princess Maleine,” the action of this dramolet
attains its high point in a scene where murderous
treachery is about to spring the trap set for
an innocent young prince. Intuitively he senses
the approach of death, and in vain beats his little
fists against the door that imprisons him. The
situation is rendered more piteous even than in
the earlier treatment of the motif, because the
door which bars his escape also prevents his faithful
sister Ygraine from coming to the rescue.
We have observed in all the plays so far a
marked simplicity of construction. Aglavaine et
Selysette, (1896), denotes a still further simplification.
Here the scenic apparatus is reduced to the
very minimum, and the psychological premises are
correspondingly plain. The story presents a “triangular”
love entanglement strangely free from
the sensual ingredient; two women dream of sharing,
in all purity, one lover—and the dream ends
for one of them in heroic self-sacrifice brought to
secure the happiness of the rival. However, more
noteworthy than the structure of the plot is the
fact that the philosophic current flowing through it
has perceptibly altered its habitual direction. The
spiritual tendency is felt to be turning in its course,
and even though fatalism still holds the rule, with
slowly relaxing grip, yet a changed ethical outlook
is manifest. Also, this play for the first time
proclaims, though in no vociferous manner, the
duty of the individual toward himself, the duty so
emphatically proclaimed by two of Maeterlinck's
greatest teachers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henrik Ibsen.
The inner philosophic conflict was but of short
duration. In 1898 La Sagesse et La Destinée
(“Wisdom and Destiny”) saw the light. The
metaphor might be taken in a meaning higher and
more precise than the customary, for, coming to
this book from those that preceded is indeed like
emerging from some dark and dismal cave into
the warm and cheering light of the sun. “Wisdom
and Destiny” is a collection of essays and aphorisms
which stands to this second phase of Maeterlinck's
dramaturgy in a relation closely analogous
to that existing between “The Treasure of the
Humble” and the works heretofore surveyed.
Without amounting to a wholesale recantation of
the idea that is central in the earlier set of essays,
the message of the newer set is of a very different
kind. The author of “Wisdom and Destiny” has
not changed his view touching the superiority of
the intuitional function over the intellectual. The
significant difference between the old belief and
the new consists simply in this: the latent force of
life is no longer imagined as an antagonistic
agency; rather it is conceived as a benign energy
that makes for a serene acceptance of the world
that is. Of this turn in the outlook, the philosophic
affirmation of life and the consent of the
will to subserve the business of living are the salutary
concomitants. Wisdom, in expanding, has
burst the prison of fatalism and given freedom to
vision. The world, beheld in the light of this
emancipation, is not to be shunned by the wise
man. Let Fortune bring what she will, he can
strip his afflictions of their terrors by transmuting
them into higher knowledge. Therefore, pain
and suffering need not be feared and shirked; they
may even be hailed with satisfaction, for, as is
paradoxically suggested in Aglavaine et Selysette,
they help man “être heureux en devenant plus
triste,”—to be happy in becoming sadder. The
poet, who till now had clung to the conviction that
there can be no happy fate, that all our destinies
are guided by unlucky stars, now on the contrary
persuades us to consider how even calamity may
be refined in the medium of wisdom in such fashion
as to become an asset of life, and warns us
against recoiling in spirit from any reverse of
our fortunes. He holds that blows and sorrows
cannot undo the sage. Fate has no weapons save
those we supply, and “wise is he for whom even
the evil must feed the pyre of love.” In fine, Fate
obeys him who dares to command it. After all,
then, man has a right to appoint himself the captain
of his soul, the master of his fate.
Yet, for all that, the author of “Wisdom and
Destiny” should not be regarded as the partizan
and apologist of sadness for the sake of wisdom.
If sorrow be a rich mine of satisfaction, joy is by
far the richer mine. This new outlook becomes
more and more optimistic because of the increasing
faculty of such a philosophy to extract from
the mixed offerings of life a more near-at-hand
happiness than sufferings can possibly afford; not
perchance that perpetual grinning merriment over
the comicality of the passing spectacle which with
so many passes for a “sense of humor,” but rather
a calm and serious realization of what is lastingly
beautiful, good, and true. A person's attainment
of this beatitude imposes on him the clear duty of
helping others to rise to a similar exalted level of
existence. And this duty Maeterlinck seeks to discharge
by proclaiming in jubilant accents the concrete
reality of happiness. L'Oiseau Bleu (“The
Blue Bird”), above all other works, illustrates the
fact that human lives suffer not so much for the
lack of happiness as for the want of being clearly
conscious of the happiness they possess. It is seen
that the seed of optimism in “The Treasure of
the Humble” has sprouted and spread out, and at
last triumphantly shot forth through the overlaying
fatalism. The newly converted, hence all the
more thoroughgoing, optimist, believing that counsel
and consolation can come only from those who
trust in the regenerative power of hope, throws
himself into a mental attitude akin to that of the
Christian Scientist, and confidently proceeds to
cure the ills of human kind by a categorical denial
of their existence. Or perhaps it would be more
just to say of Maeterlinck's latter-day outlook, the
serenity of which even the frightful experience of
the present time has failed to destroy, that instead
of peremptorily negating evil, he merely denies
its supremacy. All about him he perceives in
the midst of the worst wrongs and evils many
fertile germs of righteousness; vice itself seems to
distil its own antitoxin.
Together with Maeterlinck's optimistic strain,
his individualism gains an unexpected emphasis.
“Before one exists for others, one must exist for
one's self. The egoism of a strong and clear-sighted
soul is of a more beneficent effect than all
the devotion of a blind and feeble soul.” Here we
have a promulgation identical in gist with Emerson's
unqualified declaration of moral independence
when he says: “Whoso would be a man must
be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal
palms must not be hindered by the name of
goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your
own mind. No law can be sacred to me but that
of my nature.”(8)
His attitude of countenancing the positive joys
of living causes Maeterlinck in his later career to
reverse his former judgment, and to inveigh, much
in the manner of Nietzsche, against the “parasitical
virtues.” “Certain notions about resignation
and self-sacrifice sap the finest moral forces of
mankind more thoroughly than do great vices and
even crimes. The alleged triumphs over the flesh
are in most cases only complete defeats of life.”
When to such rebellious sentiments is joined an explicit
warning against the seductions and intimidations
held out by the official religions—their sugar
plums and dog whips, as Maeterlinck puts it—one
can only wonder how his writings escaped as long
as they did the attention of the authorities that
swing the power of imprimatur and anathema.
Maeterlinck may not be classed unreservedly
as a radical individualist. For whereas a philosophy
like that of Nietzsche takes no account of the
“much-too-many,” who according to that great
fantasist do not interest anybody except the statistician
and the devil, Maeterlinck realizes the
supreme importance of the great mass as the ordained
transmitters of civilization. The gulf between
aristocratic subjectivism, devoted single-mindedly
to the ruthless enforcement of self-interest,
and, on the other hand, a self-forgetful social
enthusiasm, is bridged in Maeterlinck by an
extremely strong instinct for justice and, moreover,
by his firm belief—at least for the time being—that
the same strong instinct exists universally
as a specific trait of human nature. By such a
philosophy Justice, then, is discerned not as a
supra-natural function, but as a function of human
nature as distinguished from nature at large. The
restriction is made necessary by our knowledge of
the observable operations of nature. In particular
would the principle of heredity seem to argue
against the reign of justice in the administration
of human destinies, inasmuch as we find ourselves
quite unable to recognize in the apportionment of
pleasure and pain anything like a due ratio of
merit. And yet Maeterlinck realizes that perhaps
nature measures life with a larger standard
than the individual's short span of existence, and
warns us in his essay on “Justice” not to indulge
our self-conceit in a specious emulation of ways
that are utterly beyond our comprehension. After
all, then, our poet-philosopher succeeds foro conscientiæ
in reconciling his cult of self with devotion
to the common interest. Morality, in that
essay, is defined as the co-ordination of personal
desire to the task assigned by nature to the race.
And is it not true that a contrary, that is, ascetic
concept of morality reduces itself to absurdity
through its antagonism to that primal human instinct
that makes for the continuity of life?
From the compromise effected between two
fairly opposite ethical principles, there emerges
in the works of this period something akin to a
socialistic tendency. It is organically related to
the mystical prepossession of the author's manner
of thinking. Maeterlinck gratefully acknowledges
that by the search-light of science the uppermost
layers of darkness have been dispelled; but realizes
also that the deep-seated central enigma still
remains in darkness: as much as ever are the primordial
causes sealed against a glimpse of finite
knowledge. We have changed the names, not the
problems. Instead of God, Providence, or Fate,
we say Nature, Selection, and Heredity. But in
reality do we know more concerning Life than did
our ancestors?
What, then, questions the persevering pursuer
of the final verities, shall we do in order that we
may press nearer to Truth? May we not perchance
steep our souls in light that flows from
another source than science? And what purer
light is there to illumine us than the halo surrounding
a contented worker performing his task,
not under coercion, but from a voluntary, or it
may be instinctive, submission to the law of life?
If such subordination of self constitutes the basis
of rational living, we shall do well to study its
workings on a lowlier and less complicated plane
than the human; for instance, in the behavior of
the creature that is proverbial for its unflagging
industry. For this industry is not motivated by
immediate or selfish wants; it springs from instinctive
self-dedication to the common cause.
Some people expected from La Vie des Abeilles
(“The Life of the Bee”), (1901), much brand-new
information about matters of apiculture. But
in spite of his twenty-five years' experience, Maeterlinck
had no startling discoveries to convey to
his fellow-hivers. His book on bees is not primarily
the result of a specialist's investigations but
a poetical record of the observations made by a
mind at once romantic and philosophical and
strongly attracted to the study of this particular
form of community life, because by its organization
on a miniature scale it spreads before the
student of society a synoptic view of human affairs.
Of the great change that had by now taken
place in his conception of life, Maeterlinck was
fully cognizant, and made no concealment of it.
In the essay on “Justice” he says, with reference
to his earlier dramas: “The motive of these little
plays was the fear of the Unknown by which we
are constantly surrounded,” and passes on to describe
his religious temper as a sort of compound
of the Christian idea of God with the antique idea
of Fate, immersed in the profound gloom of hopeless
mystery. “The Unknown took chiefly the
aspect of a power, itself but blindly groping in
the dark, yet disposing with inexorable unfeelingness
of the fates of men.”
Evidently those same plays are passed once
more in self-critical review in Ardiane et Barbe-Bleue
(“Ardiane and Blue-Beard”), (1899), notwithstanding
the fact that the author disclaims
any philosophic purpose and presents his work as
a mere libretto. We cannot regard it as purely
accidental that of Blue-Beard's terror-stricken
wives, four,—Selysette, Mélisande, Ygraine, Alladine,—bear
the names of earlier heroines, and,
besides, that each of these retains with the name
also the character of her namesake. The symbolism
is too transparent. The child-wives of the cruel
knight, forever in a state of trembling fear, are
too passive to extricate themselves from their fate,
whereas Ardiane succeeds instantly in breaking
her captivity, because she has the spirit and
strength to shatter the window and let in the light
and air. The contrast between her resolute personality
and those five inert bundles of misery undoubtedly
connotes the difference between the author's
paralyzing fatalism in the past and his present
dynamic optimism.
A like contrast between dejection and resilience
would be brought to light by a comparison of the
twelve lyric poems, Douze Chansons, (1897),
with the Serres Chaudes. The mood is still greatly
subdued; the new poetry is by no means free
from sadness and a strain of resignation. But the
half-stifled despair that cries out from the older
book returns no dissonant echo in the new.
Even his dramatic technique comes under the
sway of Maeterlinck's altered view of the world.
The far freer use of exciting and eventful action
testifies to increased elasticity and force. This is
a marked feature of Sœur Beatrice (“Sister
Beatrice”), (1900), a miracle play founded on
the old story about the recreant nun who, broken
from sin and misery, returns to the cloister and
finds that during the many years of her absence
her part and person have been carried out by
the Holy Virgin herself.
Equally, the three other dramas of this epoch—Aglavaine
et Selysette, Monna Vanna, and Joyzelle—are
highly available for scenic enactment.
Of the three, Monna Vanna, (1902), in particular
is conspicuous for a wholly unexpected aptitude
of characterization, and for the unsurpassed
intensity of its situations, which in this isolated
case are not cast in a single mood as in the other
plays, but are individually distinct and full of
dramatic progress, whereas everywhere else the
action moves rather sluggishly.
“Monna Vanna” is one of the most brilliantly
actable plays of modern times, despite its improbability.
A certain incongruity between the
realistic and the romantic aspects in the behavior
of the principals is saved from offensiveness by
a disposition on the part of the spectator to refer
it, unhistorically, to the provenience of the story.
But as a matter of fact the actors are not fifteenth
century Renaissance men and women at all, but
mystics, modern mystics at that, both in their reasoning
and their morality. It is under a cryptical
soul-compulsion that Giovanna goes forth to the
unknown condottiere prepared to lay down her
honor for the salvation of her people, and that
her husband at last conquers his repugnance to her
going. Prinzivalle, Guido, Marco, are mystics
even to a higher degree than Vanna.
The poignant actualism of “Monna Vanna”
lies, however, in the author's frank sympathy with
a distinctively modern zest for freedom. The
situation between husband and wife is reminiscent
of “A Doll's House” in the greedily possessive
quality of Guido's affection, with which quality
his tyrannous unbelief in Prinzivalle's magnanimity
fully accords. But Maeterlinck here goes
a step beyond Ibsen. In her married life with
Guido, Vanna was meekly contented, “at least as
happy as one can be when one has renounced the
vague and extravagant dreams which seem beyond
human life.” When the crisis arrives she
realizes that “it is never too late for one who has
found a love that can fill a life.” Her final rebellion
is sanctioned by the author, who unmistakably
endorses the venerable Marco's profession
of faith that life is always in the right.
“Joyzelle,” (1903), inferior to “Monna Vanna”
dramaturgically, and in form the most distinctly
fantastic of all Maeterlinck's productions,
is still farther removed from the fatalistic atmosphere.
This play sounds, as the author himself
has stated, “the triumph of will and love over
destiny or fatality,” as against the converse lesson
of Monna Vanna. The idea is symbolically
expressed in the temptations of Lanceor and in
the liberation of Joyzelle and her lover from the
power of Merlin and his familiar, Arielle, who
impersonates the secret forces of the heart.
Aglavaine et Selysette, Monna Vanna, and
Joyzelle mark by still another sign the advent of
a new phase in Maeterlinck's evolution; namely,
by the characterization of the heroines. Previously,
the women in his plays were hardly individualized
and none of them can be said to
possess a physiognomy strictly her own. Maeterlinck
had returned with great partiality again
and again to the same type of woman: languid and
listless, without stamina and strength, yet at the
same time full of deep feeling, and capable of
unending devotion—pathetic incorporeal figures
feeling their way along without the light of self-consciousness,
like some pre-raphaelite species of
somnambulists. In the new plays, on the contrary,
women of a courageous and venturesome
spirit and with a self-possessive assurance are portrayed
by preference and with unmistakable approval.
As the technique in the more recent creations
of Maeterlinck, so the diction, too, accommodates
itself to altered tendencies. Whereas formerly
the colloquy was abrupt and fragmentary, it is
now couched in cadenced, flowing language, which,
nevertheless, preserves the old-time simplicity.
The poet himself has criticized his former dialogue.
He said it made those figures seem like
deaf people walking in their sleep, whom somebody
is endeavoring to arouse from a heavy
dream.
For the limited purpose of this sketch it is not
needful to enter into a detailed discussion of Maeterlinck's
latest productions, since such lines as
they add to his philosophical and artistic physiognomy
have been traced beforehand. His literary
output for the last dozen years or so is embodied
in six or seven volumes: about two years to a
book seems to be his normal ratio of achievement,
the same as was so regularly observed by
Henrik Ibsen, and one that seems rather suitable
for an author whose reserve, dictated by a profound
artistic and moral conscience, like his actual
performance, calls for admiration and gratitude.
During the war he has written, or at least
published, very little. It is fairly safe to assume
that the emotional experience of this harrowing
period will control his future philosophy as its
most potent factor; equally safe is it to predict,
on the strength of his published utterances, that
his comprehensive humanity, that has been put
to such a severe test, will pass unscathed through
the ordeal.
Of the last group of Maeterlinck's works only
two are dramas, namely, “The Blue Bird,”
(1909), and “Mary Magdalene,” (1910). The
baffling symbolism of “The Blue Bird” has not
stood in the way of a tremendous international
stage success; the fact is due much less to the
simple line of thought that runs through the
puzzle than to the exuberant fancy that gave rise
to it and its splendid scenical elaboration. Probably
Mr. Henry Rose is right, in his helpful analysis
of “The Blue Bird,” in venturing the assertion
that “by those who are familiar with Swedenborg's
teaching ‘The Blue Bird’ must be recognized
as to a very large extent written on lines
which are in accordance with what is known as
the Science of Correspondences—a very important
part of Swedenborg's teachings.” But the understanding
of this symbolism in its fullness offers
very great difficulties. That a definite and consistent
meaning underlies all its features will be
rather felt than comprehended by the great majority
who surely cannot be expected to go to the
trouble first of familiarizing themselves with Maeterlinck's
alleged code of symbols and then of
applying it meticulously to the interpretation of
his plays.
“Mary Magdalene,” judged from the dramatic
point of view, is a quite impressive tragedy, yet
a full and sufficient treatment of the very suggestive
scriptural legend it is not. The converted
courtezan is characterized too abstractly. Instead
of presenting herself as a woman consumed with
blazing sensuality but in whom the erotic fire is
transmuted into religious passion, she affects us
like an enacted commentary upon such a most
extraordinary experience.
Finally, there are several volumes of essays, to
some of which reference has already been made.(9)
Le Temple Enseveli (“The Buried Temple”),
(1902), consists of six disquisitions, all dealing
with metaphysical subjects: Justice, The Evolution
of Mystery, The Reign of Matter, The Past,
Chance, The Future. Le Double Jardin (“The
Double Garden”), (1904), is much more miscellaneous
in its makeup. These are its heterogeneous
subjects: The Death of a Little Dog, Monte
Carlo, A Ride in a Motor Car, Dueling, The
Angry Temper of the Bees, Universal Suffrage,
The Modern Drama, The Sources of Spring,
Death and the Crown (a discussion upon the fatal
illness of Edward VII), a View of Rome, Field
Flowers, Chrysanthemums, Old-fashioned Flowers,
Sincerity, The Portrait of Woman, and Olive
Branches (a survey of certain now, alas, obsolete
ethical movements of that day). L'Intelligence
des Fleurs (in the translation it is named “Life
and Flowers,” in an enlarged issue “The Measure
of the Hours,” both 1907), takes up, besides the
theme of the general caption, the manufacture of
perfumes, the various instruments for measuring
time, the psychology of accident, social duty, war,
prize-fighting, and “King Lear.” In 1912, three
essays on Emerson, Novalis, and Ruysbroeck appeared
collectively, in English, under the title “On
Emerson and Other Essays.” These originally
prefaced certain works of those writers translated
by Maeterlinck in his earlier years.
Maeterlinck's most recent publications are La
Mort (published in English in a considerably extended
collection under the title “Our Eternity”),
(1913), “The Unknown Guest,” (1914), and Les
Débris de la Guerre (“The Wrack of the
Storm”), (1916).(10) The two first named, having
for their central subject Death and the great concomitant
problem of the life beyond, show that the
author has become greatly interested in psychical
research; he even goes so far as to affirm his belief
in precognition. In these essays, Theosophy and
Spiritism and kindred occult theories are carefully
analyzed, yet ingenious as are the author's
speculations, they leave anything like a solution
of the perplexing riddles far afield. On the whole
he inclines to a telepathic explanation of the psychical
phenomena, yet thinks they may be due to the
strivings of the cosmic intelligence after fresh
outlets, and believes that a careful and persistent
investigation of these phenomena may open up
hitherto undreamt of realms of reality. In general,
we find him on many points less assertive
than he was in the beginning and inclined to a
general retrenchment of the dogmatic element in
his philosophic attitude. A significant passage in
“The Buried Treasure” teaches us not to deplore
the loss of fixed beliefs. “One should never look
back with regret to those hours when a great belief
abandons us. A faith that becomes extinct,
a means that fails, a dominant idea that no longer
dominates us because we think it is our turn to
dominate it—these things prove that we are living,
that we are progressing, that we are using up a
great many things because we are not standing
still.” Of the gloomy fatalism of his literary beginnings
hardly a trace is to be found in the Maeterlinck
of to-day. His war-book, “The Wrack
of the Storm,” breathes a calm optimism in the
face of untold disaster. The will of man is put
above the power of fate. “Is it possible that fatality—by
which I mean what perhaps for a moment
was the unacknowledged desire of the planet—shall
not regain the upper hand? At the stage
which man has reached, I hope and believe so….
Everything seems to tell us that man is approaching
the day whereon, seizing the most glorious
opportunity that has ever presented itself
since he acquired a consciousness, he will at last
learn that he is able, when he pleases, to control
his whole fate in this world.”(11) His faith in humanity
is built on the heroic virtues displayed in
this war. “To-day, not only do we know that
these virtues exist: we have taught the world that
they are always triumphant, that nothing is lost
while faith is left, while honor is intact, while love
continues, while the soul does not surrender.” …
Death itself is now threatened with extinction by
our heroic race: “The more it exercises its ravages,
the more it increases the intensity of that
which it cannot touch; the more it pursues its
phantom victories, the better does it prove to us
that man will end by conquering death.”
In the concluding chapter of “Our Eternity,”
the romantic modification of Maeterlinck's mysticism
is made patent in his confession regarding the
problem of Knowledge: “I have added nothing
to what was already known. I have simply tried
to separate what may be true from that which is
assuredly not true…. Perhaps through our
quest for that undiscoverable Truth we shall have
accustomed our eyes to pierce the terror of the
last hour by looking it full in the face…. We
need have no hope that any one will utter on this
earth the word that shall put an end to our uncertainties.
It is very probable, on the contrary,
that no one in this world, nor perhaps in the next,
will discover the great secret of the universe.
And … it is most fortunate that it should be so.
We have not only to resign ourselves to living in
the incomprehensible, but to rejoice that we cannot
get out of it. If there were no more insoluble
questions … infinity would not be infinite; and
then we should have forever to curse the fate
that placed us in a universe proportionate to our
intelligence. The unknown and the unknowable
are necessary and will perhaps always be necessary
to our happiness. In any case, I would not
wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a
thousandfold loftier and a thousandfold mightier
than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit
a world of which he had surprised an essential
secret….”(12)
So the final word of Maeterlinck's philosophy,
after a lifetime of ardent search, clears up none
of the tantalizing secrets of our existence. And
yet somehow it bears a message that is full of consolation.
The value of human life lies in the perpetual
movement towards a receding goal. Whoever
can identify himself with such a philosophy
and accept its great practical lesson, that we shall
never reach Knowledge but acquire wisdom in the
pursuit, should be able to envisage the veiled countenance
of Truth without despair, and even to face
with some courage the eternal problem of our
being, its reason and its destination.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
Mcmxviii