_Le Trésor des Humbles_ is in some respects the most important, as it
is certainly the most purely beautiful, of Maeterlinck's works. Limiting
himself as he did in his plays to the rendering of certain sensations,
and to the rendering of these in the most disembodied way possible, he
did not permit himself to indulge either in the weight of wisdom or the
adornment of beauty, each of which would have seemed to him (perhaps
wrongly) as an intrusion. Those web-like plays, a very spider's work of
filminess, allowed you to divine behind them one who was after all a
philosopher rather than a playwright. The philosopher could but be
divined, he was never seen. In these essays he has dropped the disguise
of his many masks. Speaking without intermediary, he speaks more
directly, with a more absolute abandonment of every convention of human
reserve, except the reserve of an extreme fastidiousness in the choice
of words simple enough and sincere enough to convey exactly his meaning,
more spontaneously, it would seem, than any writer since Emerson. From
Emerson he has certainly learned much; he has found, for instance, the
precise form in which to say what he has to say, in little essays, not,
indeed, so disconnected as Emerson's, but with a like care to say
something very definite in every sentence, so that that sentence might
stand by itself, without its context, as something more than a mere part
of a paragraph. But his philosophical system, though it has its
essential links with the great mystical system, which has developed
itself through many manifestations, from Plotinus and Porphyry downward,
is very much his own, and owes little to anything but his own
meditation; and whether his subject is _La Beauté Intérieure_ or _Les
Femmes, Les Avertis_ or _Le Tragique Quotidien_, it is with the same
wisdom, certainty and beauty that he speaks. The book might well become
the favorite reading of those persons to whom beauty must come with a
certain dogmatism, if it is to be accepted for what it is. It reveals
the inner life, with a simplicity which would seem the most obvious if
it were not the rarest of qualities. It denies nothing, but it asserts
many things, and it asserts nothing which has not been really seen.
In the preface to the first volume of his _Théâtre_, Maeterlinck takes
us very simply into his confidence, and explains to us some of his
intentions and some of his methods. He sees in _La Princesse Maleine_
one quality, and one only: "_une certaine harmonie épouvantée et
sombre._" The other plays, up to _Aglavaine et Sélysette_,
"_présentent une humanité et des sentiments plus précis, en proie à
des forces aussi inconnues, mais un peu mieux dessinées._" These
unknown forces, "_au fond desquelles on trouve l'idée du Dieu
chrétien, mêlée à celle de la fatalité antique_," are realized, for
the most part, under the form of death. A fragile, suffering, ignorant
humanity is represented struggling through a brief existence under the
terror and apprehension of death. It is this conception of life which
gives these plays their atmosphere, indeed their chief value. For, as we
are rightly told, the primary element of poetry is
_l'idée que la poète se fait de l'inconnu dans lequel flottent
les êtres et les choses qu'il évoque, du mystère qui
les domine et les juge et qui préside à leurs destinées._
This idea it no longer seems to him possible to represent honestly by
the idea of death, and he asks: What is there to take its place?
_Pour mon humble part, après les petits drames que j'ai énumérés
plus haut, il m'a semblé loyal et sage d'écarter la mort de ce trône
auquel il n'est pas certain qu'elle ait droit. Déjà, dans le dernier,
que je n'ai pas nommé parmi les autres, dans "Aglavaine et Sélysette,"
j'aurais voulu qu'elle cédât à l'amour, à la sagesse ou au bonheur
une part de sa puissance. Elle ne m'a pas obéi, et j'attends, avec la
plupart des poètes de mon temps, qu'une autre force se révèle._
There is a fine and serious simplicity in these avowals, which show the
intellectual honesty of Maeterlinck's dramatic work, its basis in
philosophical thought. He is not merely a playwright who has found a
method, he is a thinker who has to express his own conception of the
universe, and therefore concerns literature. He finds that conception
changing, and, for the moment, he stands aside, waiting. "The man who
never alters his opinion," said Blake, "is like standing water, and
breeds reptiles of the mind."
_Aglavaine et Sélysette_ is the most beautiful play that Maeterlinck
has yet written; it is as beautiful as _Le Trésor des Humbles._
Hitherto, in his dramatic prose, he has deliberately refrained from that
explicit beauty of phrase which is to be found in almost every sentence
of the essays. Implicit beauty there has been from the first, a beauty
of reverie in which the close lips of his shadowy people seem afraid to
do more than whisper a few vague words, mere hints of whatever dreams
and thoughts had come to them out of the darkness. But of the elaborate
beauty of the essays, in which an extreme simplicity becomes more ornate
than any adornment, there has been, until now, almost nothing. In
_Aglavaine et Sélysette_ we have not merely beauty of conception and
atmosphere, but writing which is beautiful in itself, and in which
meditation achieves its own right to exist, not merely because it
carries out that conception, or forms that atmosphere. And at the same
time the very essence of the drama has been yet further spiritualized.
Maeterlinck has always realized, better than any one else, the
significance, in life and art, of mystery. He has realized how
unsearchable is the darkness out of which we have but just stepped, and
the darkness into which we are about to pass. And he has realized how
the thought and sense of that twofold darkness invade the little space
of light in which, for a moment, we move; the depth to which they shadow
our steps, even in that moment's partial escape. But in some of his
plays he would seem to have apprehended this mystery as a thing merely
or mainly terrifying--the actual physical darkness surrounding blind
men, the actual physical approach of death as a stealthy intruder into
our midst; he has shown us people huddled at a window, out of which they
almost feared to look, or beating at a door, the opening of which they
dreaded. Fear shivers through these plays, creeping across our nerves
like a damp mist coiling up out of a valley. And there is beauty
certainly in this "vague spiritual fear;" but certainly a lower kind of
beauty than that which gives its supreme pathos to _Aglavaine et
Sélysette._ Here is mystery which is also pure beauty, in these
delicate approaches of intellectual pathos, in which suffering and death
and error become transformed into something almost happy, so full is it
of strange light.
And, with this spiritualizing of the very substance of what had always
been so fully a drama of things unseen, there comes, as we have said, a
freer abandonment to the instinctive desire of the artist to write
beautifully. Having realized that one need not be afraid of beauty, he
is not afraid to let soul speak to soul in language worthy of both. And,
curiously, at the same time he becomes more familiar, more human.
Sélysette is quite the most natural character that Maeterlinck has ever
drawn, as Aglavaine is the most noble. Méléandre is, perhaps, more
shadowy than ever, but that is because he is deliberately subordinated
in the composition, which is concerned only with the action upon one
another of the two women. He suffers the action of these forces, does
not himself act; standing between them as man stands between the calling
of the intellectual and the emotional life, between the simplicity of
daily existence, in which he is good, affectionate, happy, and the
perhaps "immoral" heightening of that existence which is somewhat
disastrously possible in the achievement of his dreams. In this play,
which touches so beautifully and so profoundly on so many questions,
this eternal question is restated; of course, not answered. To answer it
would be to find the missing word in the great enigma; and to
Maeterlinck, who can believe in nothing which is not mystery, it is of
the essence of his philosophy not to answer his own question.