And just as we pass from music to poetry to reach certain emotions
that are not to be found in the more generalised art, so we pass
from Maeterlinck's æsthetic world to that of the cruder realist, in
the search for certain further artistic satisfactions. Mysticism has
this in common with music--that it gives voice to the broader, more
generalised feelings of mankind, and hesitates to come into contact
with the less ecstatic faculties that are exercised upon the harder
facts of life. Maeterlinck, like Wagner, tries to lay hold upon the
universal in art; but he does so simply because, again like Wagner,
he is comparatively insensitive to other stimuli. And as Wagner's
æsthetic holds good for the most part only of those who, like him,
apprehend the world through music, so Maeterlinck's theory of drama
is completely valid only for those who share his general attitude
toward life and knowledge. If it is really the mystics who have the
key to the knowledge of things; if, as Maeterlinck himself says in
his introduction to Ruysbroeck's _L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles_,
"toute certitude est en eux seuls," and that "les vérités mystiques
ont sur les vérités ordinaires un privilège étrange--elles ne peuvent
ni vieillir ni mourir"; if in the hypnotic semi-swoon of the faculties
before the abyss of the universal we come closest to the real secret
of things, then is there nothing to be added to or taken from
Maeterlinck's statement of the essence of drama. If, on the other hand,
the evolution of the more acutely specialised perceptions in us points
to man's need of a mental system that shall embrace ever more and more
of the phenomena of the world, then must we have an art that can shape
these perceptions too into a beauty of their own. Did we all apprehend
the universe as Maeterlinck and the mystics do--through a kind of
sixth sense that is an instantaneous blend of the ordinary five; could
we all arrive at his serenely philosophical outlook, and be content
with so much understanding of the world as came to us in immediate
intuitions--we should then see in his kind of art a mode of expression
co-extensive with all that we could know or feel. But since we do not
all look at life with the semi-Oriental fatalism of Maeterlinck, in
whose soul the passive elements seem to outweigh the active, we have
to turn to other types of dramatic art for the satisfaction of our
cravings. "The poet," he says in one place, "adds to ordinary life
something--I know not what--which is the poet's secret: and there comes
to us a sudden revelation of life in its stupendous grandeur, in its
submissiveness to the unknown powers, in its endless affinities, in its
awe-inspiring misery." Well, for a great many of us there are moments
when "submissiveness to the unknown powers" does not express the be-all
and the end-all of life--more vivid moments of revolt, of struggle
with uncertainties, of passionate assertions of personality, that have
little kinship with the grey resignation of the mystic. If life is
ugly and bitter, there is an art that can interest us deeply in this
bitterness and ugliness, because it ministers to that deep-seated need
of ours to leave no corner of life and nature unexplored. This art of
the mercilessly real may not be so "philosophical" as Maeterlinck's;
it may not speak to us so clearly of the "mysterious chant of the
infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of
Eternity on the horizon," for these voices can make themselves heard
only in a wider, serener, less turbid space than ours. But just as the
poet foregoes some of the formal perfection of the musician, finding
his compensation in his power to touch a wider range of things, so the
realist finds in the bracing, ever-interesting contact with the cruder
facts of life something that compensates him for missing the broader
peace of the mystic--a sense of energetic personality, of struggle with
and dominion over inimical forces, that the languor of mysticism cannot
provide. "No human reason," says Maeterlinck, in our actions, "no human
reason; nothing but destiny." Well, thought and action, to the mystic,
may be only the children of illusion; but may there not be as much
illusion in passivity, in the ecstatic collapse of the intellect under
the pressure of an incomprehensible world? In the Maeterlinck drama,
beautiful as it is, we cannot all of us find complete satisfaction.
To quote the words that he himself has used in another context: "Here
we are no longer in the well-known valleys of human and psychic life.
We find ourselves at the door of the third enclosure--that of the
divine life of the mystics. We have to grope timidly, and make sure
of every footstep, as we cross the threshold." And when we _have_
crossed the threshold, we find ourselves hungering and thirsting for
the more troubled but at any rate broader life we have left behind us;
just as the Wagnerian drama, mighty as it is, brings home to us the
fact that there are needs of our nature that music cannot satisfy.
Formal perfection, absolute homogeneity, are obtainable in an art only
when we abstract it from outer incident and long reflection. Music
comes before poetry in this respect, poetry before the drama, the
drama before fiction. Take, from a master of reticence, an example of
apparent dissipation of artistic force that Wagner would have held
to prove his own theories. It is the scene in _Madame Bovary_ where
Léon, expecting to see Emma, is detained at dinner by Homais. "At two
o'clock they were still at table, opposite each other. The large room
was emptying; the stovepipe, in the shape of a palm tree, spread its
gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the window,
in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white basin,
where, in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid lobsters
stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in a pile on their
sides." "Watercress! asparagus! quails! three torpid lobsters!" Wagner
would have said, "what have these to do with art? Music's manner of
describing the impatience of two separated lovers is that of the mad
prelude to the duet in _Tristan_. Here we have all the essential
soul-states, without the admixture of crude external realities." Yet
there is something in Léon's impatience that music cannot express--the
dreary boredom inflicted by his companion, the helpless wandering of
the mind over the insignificant uglinesses of his surroundings. This
also is part of human psychology, and a part that can find expression
only in words. In consideration of the wider sweep of the artistic net,
we gladly abate our demands for perfection of quality in the yield;
for the phenomena of the extensive and the intensive are meant to be
compensatory, the one taking the burden upon itself where the strength
of the other fails. Wagner erred in thinking that the union of all
the arts in music-drama could render each separate art superfluous;
Maeterlinck errs in thinking that the mystic, in his withdrawal to the
centre of consciousness, can tell us all we desire to know of the outer
circle.[58]