I
Often, mostly at night, a wheel of memory seems to turn in my head like
a kaleidoscope, flashing out the pictures and the visions of my own that
I keep there. The same wheel turned in my head when I was in Dieppe with
Charles Conder, and it turned into these verses:
There's a tune burns, bums in my head,
And I hear it beat to the sound of my feet,
For that was the tune we used to walk to
In the days that are over and dead.
Another tune turns under and over.
And it turns in my brain as I think again
Of the days that are dead, and the ways she walks now,
To the self-same tune, with her lover.
I see, for instance, Mallarmé, with his exquisite manner of welcome, as
he opens the door to me on the fourth floor of the Rue de Rome; I hear
Jean Moréas thunder out some verses of his own to a waitress in a
Bouillon Duval, whose name was Celimène, who pretended to understand
them; Stuart Mérill at the Rue Ballier, Henri de Regnier silent under
his eye-glass in one of the rooms of the _Mercerie de France_; Maurice
Maeterlinck in all the hurry of a departure, between two portmanteaux.
That was, I suppose, one of the most surprising meetings I ever had;
for, as a matter of fact, one night in Fountain Court, it was in 1894--I
was equally surprised when I opened his _Alladine et Palamides_ which he
had sent me with a dedication. After that time I saw him, during several
years, fairly often in Paris and once in Rome, in 1903, when one
performance was given of his _Joyzelle_--the most unsatisfactory
performance I ever saw, and of certainly an unsatisfactory play. Nervous
as he always was--he used, for one thing, to keep a loaded revolver
always beside him in his bedroom--he shirked the occasion and went to
Naples. I have never forgotten the afternoon when he read to me in his
house in Paris whole pages of _Monna Vanna._ After I had left the house,
I said to a certain lady who was with me: "Rhetoric, nothing but
rhetoric! It may be obviously dramatic; but the worst of it is, all the
magic and mystery of his earlier plays had vanished: there is logic
rather than life."
It is very unfortunate for a man to be compared to Shakespeare even by
his enemies, when he is only twenty-seven and has time before him. That
is what has happened to Maurice Maeterlinck. Two years ago the poet of
_Serres Chaudes_ was known to only a small circle of amateurs of the
new; he was known as a young Belgian of curious talent who had published
a small volume of vague poems in monotone. On the appearance of _La
Princesse maleine_, in the early part of 1890, Maeterlinck had an
unexpected "greatness thrust upon him" by a flaming article of Octave
Mirbeau, the author of that striking novel _Sébastian Roch_ in the
_Figaro_ of August 24th. "Maurice Maeterlinck," said this uncompromising
enthusiast,
"_nous a donné l'oeuvre la plus géniale de ce temps, et la plus
extraordinaire et la plus naive aussi, comparable--et oserai-je le
dire?--supérieure en beauté à ce qu'il y a de plus beau dans
Shakespeare.... plus tragique que 'Macbeth,' plus extraordinaire de
pensée que 'Hamlet._'"
In short, there was no Shakespearean merit in which _La Princesse
Maleine_ was lacking, and it followed that the author of _La Princesse
Maleine_ was the Shakespeare of our age--the Belgian Shakespeare. The
merits of Maeterlinck were widely discussed in France and Belgium, and
it was not long before the five-act drama was followed by two pieces,
each in one act, called _L'Intruse_ and _Les Aveugles._ In May, 1891,
_L'Intruse_ was given by the Théâtre d'Art at the Vaudeville on the
occasion of the benefit of Paul Verlaine and Paul Gauguin.
He is not entirely the initiator of this impressionistic drama; first in
order of talent, he is second in order of time to another Belgian,
Charles van Lerberghe, to whom _Les Aveugles_ is dedicated. It was Van
Lerberghe (in _Les Flaireurs_, for example) who discovered the effect
which might be obtained on the stage by certain appeals to the sense of
hearing and of sight, newly directed and with new intentions. But what
is crude and even distracting in _Les Flaireurs_ becomes an exquisite
subtlety in _L'Intruse._ In _La Princesse Maleine_, in _L'Intruse_, in
_Les Aveugles_, in _Les Sept Princesses_, Maeterlinck has but one note,
that of fear--the "vague spiritual fear" of imaginative childhood, of
excited nerves, of morbid apprehension. In _La Princesse Maleine_ there
is a certain amount of action--action which is certainly meant to
reinvest the terrors of Macbeth and of Lear. In _L'Intruse_ and _Les
Aveugles_ the scene is stationary, the action but reflected upon the
stage, as if from some other plane. In _Les Sept Princesses_ the action,
such as it is, is "such stuff as dreams are made of," and is literally,
in great part, seen through a window. From first to last it is not the
play, but the atmosphere of the play, that is "the thing." In the
creation of this atmosphere Maeterlinck shows his particular skill; it
is here that he communicates to us the nouveau frisson, here that he
does what no one has done before.
_La Princesse Maleine_, it is said, was written for a theater of
marionettes, and it is, certainly, with the effect of marionettes that
these sudden, exclamatory people come and go. Maleine, Hjalmar,
Uglyane--these are no characters, these are no realizable persons; they
are a mask of shadows, a dance of silhouettes behind the white sheet of
the "Chat Noir," and they have the fantastic charm of these enigmatical
semblances--"luminous, gem-like, ghost-like"--with, also, their somewhat
mechanical eeriness. Maeterlinck has recorded his intellectual debt to
Villiers de l'Isle Adam, but it was not from the author of _Axel_ that
he learned his method. The personages of Maeterlinck--are only too
eloquent, too volubly poetical. In their mystical aim Villiers and
Maeterlinck are at one; in their method there is all the difference in
the world. This is how Sara, in _Axel_, speaks:--
_Songe! Des coeurs condamnés à ce supplice de pas m'aimer! ne sont-ils
pas assez infortunés d'être d'une telle nature?_