One is always meeting with curious literary and artistic affinities
where one least expects them. The human mind, of course, is really
homogeneous throughout. We have all to build up our inner and outer
universe out of very much the same kind of brain and sense organs:
so that it is hardly surprising if here and there one feels that
the work of this or that musician or artist is the counterpart of
the work of this or that poet or prose writer, or _vice versâ_. One
sees, for example, a good deal of Weber and the German Romanticists
in the stories of Hoffmann; of Lessing and Diderot in the work of
Gluck; of Tourgeniev and Dostoievski in the music of Tchaikovski;
of Berlioz's music--as Heine suggested--in the pictures of Martin.
This phenomenon is so frequent as to excite little wonder. What is
rather more curious is to find, here and there, that one of the main
spiritual principles of a certain artist is implicit in the æsthetic
system of another artist who works in an entirely different medium,
and whose whole work, at first sight, seems to be of a diametrically
opposite order. Between Wagner and Maeterlinck, for instance, who
would say that there is a fundamental sympathy of soul and a community
of artistic outlook--between the musician of stupendous passion and
restless activity and the quiet mystic who seems to be serenely
poised far above all activity and all passion, placing, in his lofty
philosophising, so little store by all the things that appeared so
vital, so real, to the musician? Nevertheless there is, as I shall try
to show, a curious similarity between the æsthetic systems of the two
men.[56] They share something of the same excellencies; they break down
or find their limitations almost at the same point. Let us cursorily
examine the two systems.
I
If we did not possess Maeterlinck's own dramas, we might be able to
judge from his essays what his position towards the drama and fiction
would be. Here we have revealed to us a manner of apprehending life
and of looking out upon the world that could find expression only
in some such novel dramatic form as Maeterlinck has adopted. The
dramatist himself, however, has given us, in his exquisite chapters on
"The Tragical in Daily Life" and "The Awakening of the Soul," in _The
Treasure of the Humble_, a statement, at once explicit and impassioned,
of his creed. He advances the theory that the ordinary tragedy of
startling incident is, or ought to be, a thing of the past, a concept
of barbaric ages, when men could be thrilled by the secret under forces
of life only by reaching towards them through crude and violent action.
In a more refined and subtle age like this, we should be able to trace
the hand of destiny even when it does not work through media so coarse
and palpable. It is not the primitive sensation of seeing one man act
the murder of another that is the essence of tragedy. It is the sense
of spiritual enlightenment that comes to us; the feeling that, somehow
or other, the murder itself, the passion and the events that led up
to it, the consequences that flow from it, are all subtly interwoven
threads of the great indwelling laws of things. Most of the action,
indeed, that is associated with our current notion of tragedy is, from
a higher point of view, both æsthetically superfluous and an evidence
of our earthiness. We should be capable of being moved to pity, of
feeling the most refined tragic sorrow, by a play that eliminates the
coarser and more obvious facts, and relies on gentler and more intimate
suggestions of universal truth. Our present age, he thinks, is capable,
or is becoming capable, of this. "In former days," he says in his essay
on "The Awakening of the Soul," "if there was question, for a moment,
of a presentiment, of the strange impressions produced by a chance
meeting or a look, of a decision that the unknown side of human reason
had governed, of an intervention or a force, inexplicable and yet
understood, of the sacred laws of sympathy and antipathy, of elective
and instinctive affinities, of the overwhelming influence of the thing
that had not been spoken--in former days these problems would have
been carelessly passed by; and, besides, it was but seldom that they
obtruded themselves upon the serenity of the thinker. They seemed to
come about by the merest chance. That they are ever pressing upon life,
unceasingly and with prodigious force--this was unsuspected of all; and
the philosopher hastened back to familiar studies of passion, and of
incident that floated on the surface."
This is clearly part of a philosophy of life and art in which the
cruder nervous strands are put aside, as useless for that spiritual
illumination which the thinker desires. They are too thick to be
sensitive to the finer currents that pass through them; only the
more delicate nerve-tracts, alive to every wave of feeling, can
be stimulated to philosophic light and heat. The essence of all
Maeterlinck's work, of course, is this supersensitiveness. He is
endowed with other senses than ours, other modes of apprehending the
universe. He is a mystic, and by reason of being a mystic he is at
the same time out of touch with many things that the normal man calls
real, and delicately sensitive to many currents in the spiritual
atmosphere of the universe of whose very existence the normal man is
all his life unaware. We have to remember that this world is after
all only what our own senses and intellect make it for each of us.
The little we can see and feel must be as nothing compared with the
immensities that we can neither see nor feel, but that always attend
our thoughts, our footsteps, our very breathing, like silent, invisible
spectators. Even the world of the animal is not our world, for the
animal is alive to many things that never penetrate our consciousness;
and there are exceptionally constituted human beings on whose nerves
the universe seems to write different messages from those that are
communicated to the ordinary soul. The mystic catches vibrations
in life to which duller natures are, except in moments of abnormal
exaltation, for the most part insensitive. When we find fault with
him for the apparent weakness of his hold upon reality, we need to
remember that his realities are not always ours. He frequently has
difficulty in expressing himself in our ordinary speech, for the reason
that this is mainly the instrument of normal cerebration, not of the
sub-normal or the super-normal. Hence Maeterlinck's theorem--which is
not half such a paradox as it looks--that the profounder vibrations
of the soul are more easily communicated by silence than by speech.
We are beset by intuitions that can never find adequate expression in
words. "How strangely," he says, "do we diminish a thing as soon as
we try to express it in words!" Speech hardly seems necessary to him
as a means of carrying on his thoughts, which, as they lie in deeper,
more obscure places than language has ever visited, must seek a more
immediate way of passage from his own brain to that of another. "A time
will come, perhaps, when our souls will know of each other without
the intermediary of the senses.... A spiritual epoch is perhaps upon
us...." Thus the favourite means of communication between the soul
of the spiritual elect is not speech, but silence--silence, which is
far more eloquent, far more illuminative of the profoundest depths of
being, than language can ever be. "It is idle," he writes, "to think
that by means of words any real communication can ever pass from one
man to another.... It is only when life is sluggish within us that
we speak." And just as the mystic despises words as instruments of
communication, so he looks down upon facts as guides to illumination.
As the inner life is too subtle to be expressed in ordinary language,
so its interests are too refined to be spent upon crude facts. These
are "nothing but the laggards, the spies and camp followers, of the
great forces we cannot see."[57]