Giovanni's suspicions. This is easily accomplished by Malatestino, the
wicked younger brother. Jealous of Paolo, he shocks Francesca with his
hints, his hot advances, and the hideous cruelty he exhibits in cutting
off the head of a prisoner. He drags on the stage the head, enveloped
in a bag. It is heavy, he remarks. Oddly enough, D'Annunzio manages
matters so that we sympathize with the deceived husband--rather an
un-Latin proceeding.
In the final act D'Annunzio, we feel, has Shakespeare before him. The
scene of Othello is evoked at once, not in incident, but because of
the spiritual, tragic atmosphere. Francesca is asleep; she moans, for
she dreams. Her maidens are sent away. Her slave is called, but comes
not. Tricked by this plotted absence, Paolo enters. The lovers are soon
caught and slain by Giovanni, who breaks his sword across his knee.
Every detail is admirably managed.
Not the least potent factor is the absence of all remorse shown by
Francesca. The victim of deceit, she does not hesitate to deceive
in return. In her love passages, Duse was truthful to a degree. She
invested Francesca with just the proper poise, dignity, and suppressed
melancholy.
Francesca da Rimini is the first of D'Annunzio's dramatic efforts that
attracted popular favour. It is an interesting rather than a great
play, though full of inspiring poetry. It was first given, December 9,
1901, at Teatro Costanzi, Rome, by the Duse Company, with the exception
that Gustavo Salvini was the Paolo on that occasion.
IV
Compared to La Gioconda, The Dead City is a highly polished specimen
of the static drama; there is little that is dynamic until the
scene before the last. And the theme, thunder-charged as it is with
symbolism, is fitter for reading than for publication before the
footlights. The play is literature first, drama afterward. Sarah
Bernhardt produced it in Paris.
Incest as a subject for dramatic treatment is no new thing. The
Greeks employed it as a leit-motive of horror, and in the Œdipus
of Sophocles, the Hippolytus of Euripides--we recall with grateful
memories Bernhardt's puissant Phèdre in Racine's paraphrase of the
Greek dramatist--and in the Bible itself this dire theme may be
encountered, though no modern has had the courage to set the episode
of Tamar and Amnon in the Book of Samuel. Later, in the flush of
the seventeenth-century dramatic renascence, John Ford wrote his
masterpiece, The Brother and Sister.
In that play, admired of Charles Lamb, is set forth with a wealth of
realism undreamed of by D'Annunzio and the Greeks the details of a
lamentable passion, and so cunning is the art of Ford that we find
ourselves pitying the unhappy pair, Giovanni and Annabella, poor
play-things of the gods. Of Wagner's Die Walküre it is unnecessary to
speak. Music, as Henry James remarks, is a great solvent.
But mark the handling of the young Italian poet. Obsessed by the
Greeks, he has constructed his tragedy on antique lines. Crime is
hinted at; we even see an adulterous love--for evil passions hunt in
couples throughout this dream-like story--in development; almost is a
catastrophe precipitated. The incest, however, is potential. It is
only an idea. It scourges the two men like whips in the hands of the
avenging Furies. And it finally dooms an innocent creature, hopelessly
involving at the same time the happiness of three survivors.
It is then a crime contemplated, not accomplished, this love of a
brother for a sister. A critic might show that the Italian poet's form
is a replica of the Greek with several variations; there is a breach of
unity of place in the last act, and no "false catastrophe" is hinted
at in the fourth act. This W. F. Apthorp has pointed out. It is not
the sole departure. Instead of presenting us with a frozen imitation
of Grecian tragedy, like most writers who have attempted to cope with
the classics, D'Annunzio frankly filled the antique mould with modern
feeling.
His men and women are modern; they are of to-day, neurotic, morbid,
febrile souls. And this modern atmosphere is a jangling dissonance to
them that prefer their tragedy unadulterated. Without an ounce of John
Ford's lusty Elizabethan animalism, D'Annunzio so contrives his play of
character and shock of incident that we are disquieted, dismayed, not
so much by the theme as by its insidious music.
With his customary audacity he places his action in Greece, on the
plain of Argolis; archæology is the background. Four friends are
engaged in excavating the dead city of Mycenæ, where Schliemann
discovered, or thought he discovered, the tombs and dusty bones of the
Homeric heroes. From these tainted remains is exhaled the moral malaria
that sets in action D'Annunzio's piece. It is a genuinely original and
morbid idea.
The house of the men of Atreus is dug up, and from it comes spiritual
pollution. Like a master of string-quartet writing the author has
manipulated his four characters so skilfully that the melody worked is
ever mysterious, ever melancholy. Anna is blind; she is the wife of
Alessandro, a poet and scholar. Alessandro is morally blind, for he
loves the younger Bianca, the sister of his friend Leonardo. Leonardo,
the successful explorer and rifler of Homeric tombs, loves his own
sister,--that ancient poison working in his veins,--and with this
uncanny combination D'Annunzio plays his sinister tunes, evokes his
strange harmonies.
There is no necessity of disputing the daring of this scheme, and
just as inutile would be a discussion of its ethics. It seems that
in his three plays, La Gioconda, La Citta Morta, and Francesca da
Rimini, D'Annunzio has tried his 'prentice hand at modern realism,
ancient tragedy, and historical melodrama. They are all three largely
experimental, and, it must not be forgotten, the works of a beginner.
It is the externals of the drama with which we are more concerned. Of
five acts three were placed in the _loggia_ of Leonardo's house; Act II
is the interior of the same house; Act V a fountain not far away. It
is then a soul tragedy that is enacted, and one cannot quite escape
the feeling that much study of Maeterlinck has been responsible for
the sullen, depressing atmosphere. There is in the dialogue, with its
haunting repetitions, the same electric apprehension sensed in the
Belgian's poems. Gestures, movements, the music of sonorous speech,
slow glances, and pauses--the pause is a big factor in Maeterlinck--are
woven into a sort of incomprehensible symphony.
Seemingly subordinate, Eleonora Duse is the real protagonist. Blind,
though not from birth, because of her exquisite tactile sensibility
she understands the love of her husband for her friend. An exalted
sentiment of renunciation prompts her to probe this secret passion,
and when she discovers that Bianca is languishing, too, her mind is
made up. She will efface herself. She will slay her useless life, So
that two souls may thrive in happiness. More than this, she tempts her
husband with the ripe beauty of Bianca. Here is an un-Greek idea at
once. It is altruism gone mad. From Anna is mercifully kept the unholy
love of the brother; nor is it revealed to Bianca. Therein lies another
deviation from antique models. A story in classical literature is never
told obliquely.
Duse, who has extraordinary powers of intuition, the logic of her
temperament, impersonated Anna with unvarying truth and veiled
sweetness, indicating by shades almost too fine for the frame of the
theatre her mental attitudes toward her companions. There are few
climaxes for her, the part being a passive one, the action being buried
in the text. But she has opportunities. Her cry for "Light!" is one;
and almost at the drop of the last curtain she finds her way to the
fountain where, lured by the brother Alessandro, Bianca, his hapless
victim, is murdered by being drowned in the murmuring waters which the
pair have so often watched.
Anna utters the names in the terrified accents of the lost blind. She
seeks, too, her husband. All the day she anticipated tragedy. It hung
over her soul like a smoky pall. She feels her way to the fountain and
there touching with her feet the body of the dead girl she distractedly
searches for signs of life. It is a dramatic moment. Then arising with
a shudder she shouts, joyfully:--
"Vedo! Vedo!" ("I see! I see!"). Her physical sight is restored and
her own hold on life becomes at once intensified; her unselfishness
is shed. And it is at this hopeless moment that the dramatist unseals
her vision and closes his play, leaving the wretched woman to face the
loss of Bianca and possibly the lunacy of her husband and his friend.
If they do not go mad it is because their nerves have become dulled
to the hideousness of life. They are abnormal; every one in the play,
excepting the girl Bianca, is abnormal. Even the nurse does not escape
the taint. She is a figure out of Maeterlinck, and doubtless knows the
madness that lurks in moon-haunted corridors!
That Duse triumphed was to be expected. She awed rather than astonished
us, her skill taking on new meanings, new colours. All together, her
art was a unique something that closely bordered on the clairvoyant.
Her helpless silences were actually terrifying; her poses most
pathetic. Bianca Maria was admirably played by Signorina Civani, the
Sirenetta of La Gioconda. She noted most fluently the loving, healthy
nature of the girl who falls a victim to the shafts of Eros. It is with
Sophocles's Antigone that the action begins; it is with a motto from
Antigone, Eros, unconquered in strife, that the play is overshadowed.
V
D'Annunzio's new play, The Daughter of Jorio, has achieved some success
in Italy, despite the absence of Eleonora Duse from the cast, and
despite the reaction against the enthusiasm of its _première_. When the
drama was produced at Milan it was put on for a "run," or the European
equivalent of one. There was severe criticism, but the consensus seems
to be that in his latest work that extraordinary creature, D'Annunzio,
has outshone his earlier dramatic efforts.
The chief quality that impresses itself upon the reader of La Figlia di
Jorio is its superior dramatic movement as compared, for example, with
The Dead City or Francesca da Rimini by the same writer. The first act
is full of vitality, its characterization excellent; the cuts in Acts
II and III made by D'Annunzio for the first performance greatly benefit
the somewhat sluggish _tempi_ of these scenes. The old rhetorician
and lover of beautiful phrases has not been killed in the Italian
poet, merely "scotched." For one thing, he has struck that theatrical
vein of gold, a new background, new methods of speech, new costumes,
new ideas--or, rather, most ancient ones, though novel to the stage.
Travelling with his friend, the painter Michetti, one summer in the
savage mountainous country of the Abruzzi, D'Annunzio saturated himself
with his accustomed receptivity to a strange people and environment,
which has resulted in a powerful tragedy. Like Verga's discovery of the
Sicilian peasant in Cavalleria Rusticana--a veritable treasure-trove
for that poet and also for Mascagni--D'Annunzio in his encounter with
the curious customs and pagan personalities of the hardy, superstitious
Abruzzi, was enabled to lay up a stock of images for his new work. I
doubt, however, if he has succeeded as well as Verga in getting close
to the skin and soil of this peasantry. There is more than one awkward
hiatus in The Daughter of Jorio, and an almost epileptic intensity in
the development of the witch girl's character.
The first act is the best, because the simplest and most sincere.
It shows us a living room in a rustic house. The background and
"properties" are said to be wonderfully realistic. Aligi, the shepherd,
is to marry. His bride's name is Vienda. He does not love her, for she
was chosen by his parents--and in this old Italian land the father's
command is law. The betrothal ceremonies are beginning. The groom's
sisters are near by. He is ill at ease, for he has been dreaming
strange dreams. Vienda spills the broken bread of betrothal from her
lap upon the floor. It is a maleficent sign. Suddenly there comes a
noise of shouting and music. The harvesters, crazy with drink and
the torrid heat of the sun, rush in. They have come to celebrate.
They are also chasing a human being, a miserable hunted girl of bad
repute, the daughter of Jorio, the magician. Hunted down, she claims
sanctuary in the household. Although she is of ill-fame, although
Aligi's father, Lazaro, has been wounded in a squabble about this girl,
Mila di Codra, she is sheltered by the woman. Aligi is for turning
her away; her coming spells more bad luck; the infuriated mob without
demand admittance. Enraged, the shepherd raises his staff to strike the
unhappy fugitive. As he does this he is overtaken by fresh visions;
he thinks he sees Mila guarded by a weeping angel. He falls at her
feet begging her pardon. A cross is laid over the threshold, a litany
sung by his sisters, and the angry reapers are hypnotized. They enter
singly, kiss the cross, and dissolve homeward. Lazaro enters with his
head in a bandage and Mila escapes. Another ill omen--the father and
son both love the same woman.
The second act discovers Aligi and Mila in a mountainous cave where
they have lived for six months--in a state of innocence. Here the
credulity of the spectator is taxed, and the lyric ecstasy of the poet
waxes. It is nevertheless an idyllic episode. One kiss is exchanged,
the first and the last, for Lazaro eventually finds his now disgraced
son, and with a pair of sturdy rustics comes to carry away the witch.
In the conflict that ensues the son murders the father. Act III brings
us back to the old home of Aligi. His father's corpse lies in the
garden, according to custom. The son is condemned to the awful death
of the parricide--after his offending hand is cut off he is to be tied
in a sack with a fierce dog and then thrown into the river. The end
may be surmised. One consolation is not denied him--a cup of drink to
induce forgetfulness. As the preparations are about completed Mila
bursts upon the crowded scene--an impressive one, according to printed
reports--and takes upon herself the blame of the affair. She it was,
she declares, who murdered Lazaro. Aligi curses her in his delirium,
as she is dragged away to be burnt alive, she the witch, the daughter
of Jorio. Her triumphant voice is heard to the last, while for a
background there is the chanting of the requiem and the triumphant
yelling and imprecations of the shepherds, the Abruzzi lusting for a
human sacrifice. Then the curtain falls. Several critics discern in
all this the triumph of religion over the senses--a solution that does
their ingenuity credit, though far from convincing.
It may be seen that there is real dramatic worth in the play, love
and sacrifice being its very pith. Better still, the poet has become
less self-absorbed and consequently more objective. The human note
predominates in this wild and highly coloured music. In his plays and
novels and verse he has himself been the artistic and sterile hero--as
Eleonora Duse, in the plays and one novel, their heroine. A German
critic declares that Mila is only a sister of the crazy woman in A
Spring Morning's Dream--as she, Duse, also is related to Silvia in
Gioconda, to the blind wife in The Dead City, and Francesca, as well as
La Foscarina in Fuoco, Duse, Eleonora Duse, always Duse. Lucky, thrice
happy poet, to have been inspired by such a model! To have had the
opportunity of studying such a sublime, unhappy soul as is Duse's!
A German critic speaks slightingly of Das Geklingel der schönen
Phrasen--the jingling of dulcet phrases--as a drawback to the action.
Doubtless this is true. Often we cannot hear the play because of the
words. The chief thing to be remarked, however, is the improvement
in dramatic spirit and rhythm and the gratifying supremacy of the
dramatic over the lyric and literary qualities--the latter hitherto
anti-dramatic elements in the plays of D'Annunzio.
The poet is now working on a new three-act tragedy, The Ship,--in which
Duse is to appear at La Scala this spring. The theme is Venetian--that
Venice which both Duse and D'Annunzio love so well; and also on a
modern drama entitled, The Light Under the Bushel.
XI
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM
"In life," said Barbey d'Aurevilly, "we are strangled between two
doors, of which the one is labelled _Too Soon_ and the other _Too
Late."_ The brilliant Beau Brummel of French literature who uttered
this fatidical speech was a contemporary of the unhappy, impulsive man
of genius, poet, mystic, and dramatist, who set Paris agog with his
novels, short stories, plays, his half-crazy conduct, his epigrams, his
fantastic litigations, and his cruel death--Villiers de l'Isle Adam.
The bosom friend of Charles Baudelaire and Richard Wagner, petted at
Bayreuth, feted in Paris, nevertheless he died in want, was buried by
his friends, and was proud, lonely, aristocratic to the very end--a
death from cancer.
His life furnishes material for one of his ironic, bitter, disturbing
tales. Born in Brittany, November 28, 1838, he died at Paris in
a religious hospital, August 19, 1889. A fierce, even militant,
Roman Catholic--he dedicated a book to the Pope--he shocked his
co-religionists by the confusing mixture of fanatical piety and
fantastic blasphemy which winds through his bizarre works. He is best
known to Americans by the story in his Contes Cruels, entitled, The
Torture by Hope, which recalls Poe at his best, the Poe of The Pit and
the Pendulum. His little play, The Revolt, was translated and first
appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_, December, 1897. Arthur Symons has
translated a poem, Aveu, and Vance Thompson, in the defunct pages of
_Mlle. New York_, wrote often of the celebrated Frenchman.
The critical bibliography of Villiers de l'Isle Adam is not a vast one.
There is, besides his principal works, only his life by his cousin
Vicomte Robert du Pontavice de Heussey; Rémy de Gourmont's brief,
sympathetic notice in his inimitable Le Livre des Masques; Anatole
France in La Vie Littéraire has dealt with the poet most subtly, as is
his wont; Arthur Symons's study; Mallarmé's lecture; a few caricatures
and a sketch by Paul Verlaine; a historic consideration by Alexis von
Kraemer, translated from the Finnish; a charming and extended étude
by Gustave Kahn; short essays by the lamented Hennequin, by J. K.
Huysmans, in A Rebours, by Sarcey, Gustave Guiches, Henry Bordeaux,
Teodor de Wyzewa, Georges Rodenbach, Catulle Mendès; and fragmentary
accounts in the ever valuable _Mercure de France_--and there the list
is snuffed out.
Not precisely dissolute, rather disorganized, the life of Adam
could be transformed into an object sermon by the wily educator and
moral-monger. But that would be a poor way of viewing it. Born without
average will power, except the will to imagine beautiful and strange
things, Villiers, as he is generally called, all his years fought the
contending impulses of his dual nature; fought bravely sometimes in
the open air with the blue sky smiling down on him; fought as if facing
an ambuscade at dark, and under the lowering clouds when all the powers
of evil were abroad and at his elbow. Then, he was what Bayard Taylor
called Edgar Poe--a bird of the night; a prowling noctambulist; a
feverish being, whose violent gestures, burning eyes, and irresolute
somnambulistic gait told the tale, the damnable and thrice-told tale,
of wasted genius.
Poe is the literary ancestor of nearly all the Parnassian and Diabolic
groups--ah, this mania for schools and groups and movements in
Paris! Poe begat Baudelaire and Baudelaire begat Barbey d'Aurevilly
and Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and the last-named begat Verlaine and
Huysmans--and a long chain of other gifted men can claim these two as
parents, even to Mallarmé, De Maupassant, and Henri de Régnier (who has
read the Horla of Guy de Maupassant will feel that therein the unhappy
disciple of Flaubert has raised to a terrifying degree the methods
of Poe; nor must Régnier's La Canne de Jaspe be forgotten). But they
all come from Poe; Poe, who influenced Swinburne through Baudelaire;
Poe, who nearly swept the young Maeterlinck from his moorings in the
stagnant fens and under the morose sky of his lowlands. If we have no
great school of literature in America, we can at least point to Poe as
the progenitor of a half-dozen continental literatures.
Villiers can be traced to Poe on one side, just as Chateaubriand is
another of his ancestors. M. de Gourmont deplores the criticism which
would detach Villiers from his time and isolate him as a species of
intellectual monster. There is much that is fantastic, even bizarre,
in his work, and he never escaped the besetting sin of his associates,
headed by Baudelaire, the childish desire to _épater le bourgeois_,
to shock conventional morality and manners by eccentric behaviour,
outrageous speech, and paradoxical writings. This legacy of the
romantic movement of 1830 really came across the water in Byron's
poses of wickedness and heroic mystifications. It was, in reality, the
Byronic attitude transposed to the Paris boulevards. Gautier wore a
pink doublet (not scarlet, he says), and it was elevated to a symbol.
Let us be scarlet, said these wild, young fellows, let our sins be
splendid! And then the crew would wander abroad, making the night
resound with their lyric outbursts, happy if a respectable citizen were
scandalized, and in their pockets, a world too wide for their money,
hardly the price of a bottle!
It was glorious, and it was art. But who cared, who knew? If a man of
Baudelaire's intellectual powers, a profound critic, genius, and poet,
could dye his hair green, simply to attract attention in the cafés
why should not men of lesser abilities follow suit and commit all
manner of extravagant pranks? Leconte de Lisle, impeccable poet and
a prim sort of person, impatiently exclaimed: "Oh, ces jeunes gens!
Tous fumistes!" And Thiers allowed to escape him the one _mot_ of his
complacent life worth remembering, "The Romanticists--that's the
Commune!" Perhaps the pink doublets and strange oaths of Ernani and
1830 were transformed into the grim figures of that later lurid epoch.
Villiers was in the very core of this artistic Paris. He slept all
day--or dreamed. At nightfall he stepped across the sill of his door,
and when he had friends, money, glory, he dined at Brébant's; when
he was shabby, he remained on the exterior boulevard. There, in some
modest café, seated at a table surrounded by disciples eager for his
ideas, his poetry, his scintillating wit,--eager to steal it and sell
it as their own,--the Master spoke, his vague blue eyes gleaming, his
long white hand waving aloft like a flag of revolt. What dreams, what
eloquence, what a soul, went under on this ignoble battle-field! What
slain ideals and poetry wasted in the very utterance, and what inroads
on a nervous, sickly constitution! But Villiers lived the life he had
elected. He was poor, always poor, and poverty makes extraordinary
bedfellows. But--his room-mates were the most intellectual spirits of
modern France. If Baudelaire could not drop in on him at his dusty
lodgings, Richard Wagner would. And so there was talk--such talk--and
there was that feeling of expansion, of liberation, which comes when a
man like Turgenev could say to Flaubert: "Cheer up, old fellow! After
all you are _Flaubert!_"
Villiers never forgot that he was Villiers. His pride, like his piety,
was Luciferian. Nobly descended, he almost fought a duel with a distant
cousin who doubted his birth. He claimed to spring from the ten times
blue blood of a Grand Master of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem,
who defended Rhodes against the Turks in the time of Charles V. With
this thought he often wandered into a café and had his absinthe charged
on the slate of the ideal, the reckoning of which no true poet listeth.
A mystic among mystics, yet his linen was not always impeccable.
Verlaine, another son of the stars and sewers, wrote, "I am far from
sure that the philosophy of Villiers will not one day become the
formula of our century." "Know, once and for all, that there is for
thee no other universe than that conception which is reflected at the
bottom of thy thoughts"--this utterance of Villiers is the keystone
of his system. In Elën (1864), his greatest drama, another idea comes
to the surface in the dialogue of Samuel and Goetze. Samuel speaks:
"Science will not suffice. Sooner or later you will end by coming to
your knees." Goetze: "Before what?" Samuel: "Before the darkness."
His life long, Villiers traversed the darkness which encompasses with
the sure, swift step of a nyctalops, one who can pierce with his
glance the deepest obscurity. So it is that in his plays and stories
we are conscious of the great mystery of life and death hemming us
about. Sometimes this atmosphere is morbidly oppressive, sometimes
it is relieved by gay, maniacal bursts of laughter. Again it lifts
and reveals the mild heavens streaked with menacing irony. There is a
lugubrious undercurrent in the buffooneries of Villiers. Philip Hale
has translated the cruel story of the swans massacred by fear. This
poet slew his soul by his evocation of terror.
He is a mystic, a spiritual romantic, and only a realist in his
sardonic pictures of Paris life, tiny cabinet pictures, etchings,
bitten out with the _aqua fortis_ of his ghastly irony. There is the
irony, a mask behind which pity, sympathy, lurk; Shakespeare wore this
mask at times. And there is the irony that withers, that blasts. This
is Villiers.
Axel is both difficult and illuminative reading. It is in four acts
with nine scenes. Each act or part is respectively entitled: The
Religious World, The Tragic World, The Occult World, The Passional
World. The poet had not known Wagner and his Tetralogy for naught. Sara
is a superb creation--but not on the boards, in the disillusioning,
depoetizing, troubled, and malarial air of the stage! It was a mistake
to play Axël in Paris. Its solemn act of rejection of life al the
moment "when life becomes ideal" is hardly fitting for the theatre. A
drama to be played by poets before a parterre of poets! Arthur Symons
has noticed with his accustomed acuity that "the modern drama under the
democratic influence of Ibsen, the positive influence of Dumas _fils_,
has limited itself to the expression of temperaments in the one case,
of theoretic intelligences in the other, in as nearly as possible the
words which the average man would use for the statement of his emotions
and ideas. The form, that is, is degraded below the level of the
characters whom it attempts to express."
It is a point well taken, though I feel inclined to rebel at the
pinning down of form to language alone. Ibsen's terseness--and remember
we only see him in the cold light of Mr. Archer's translations--is one
of his merits; but his form, his dramatic form, is not alone in his
text, but in the serene and ordered procession of his dramatic action.
Villiers is more poetically eloquent than the Ibsen of the prose
dramas. But as logical or as dramatic--!
Mr. Symons adds, "La Révolte, which seems to anticipate A Doll's
House, shows us an aristocratic Ibsen, touching reality with a certain
disdain, certainly with far less skill, certainly with far more
beauty." For me in a play of character the beauty that appeals is not
purely verbal. It is the beauty of character _quâ_ character, and the
beauty of events marshalled like a great sequence of mysterious music,
humming with the indefinable harmonies of life. Ibsen makes this music;
so does Gerhart Hauptmann. Axël is noble drama, despite its formal
shortcoming, its dream-like quality. Many went begging to Villiers,
and few came away empty-handed. Prodigal in genius, he was prodigal in
giving.
This poet, like most poets, loathed mediocrity. He sought the
exceptional, the complex soul. "A chacun son infini," he said; and
in Axel he cries: "As for living, our servants will do that for us!
As at the play in a central stall, one sits out so as not to disturb
one's neighbours--out of courtesy, in a word--some play written in a
wearisome style of which one does not like the subject, so I lived,
out of politeness." Here is the gauge cast disdainfully to those who
forever pelt us with sweet phrases about loving our neighbour, about
altruism, sympathy, and social obligations--all the self-illuding,
socialistic cant, in a word, that rankles in the breast of the solitary
proud man and poisons the mind of the weak. Villiers is the exorcist of
the real, the bearer of the ideal, wrote De Gourmont, himself a poetic
individualist. And he sums up, "Villiers knew all forms of intellectual
intoxication."
Villiers associated much with Richard Wagner, and with Baudelaire was
an ardent upholder of the new music during the troubled times of the
Tannhäuser _fiasco_. He played the piano, knew the Ring by heart--no
mean feat--and set Baudelaire's poems to music, anticipating Charles
Martin Loeffler by nearly a half-century. Of one of them the music is
said to be still extant. It is the poem with this couplet:--
Our beds shall be scented with sweetest perfume, Our divans be as cool
and dark as the tomb.
Probably the most lifelike, verbal portrait of Wagner is that of
Villiers's. In a memorable passage, which I commend to Mr. Finck
as testimony with which to snub recalcitrant clergymen and others,
Villiers notes Wagner's violent disclaimer that his Parsifal was
merely the work of the artist and not of the believing Christian.
"Why, if I did not feel in my inmost soul the living light and love of
that Christian faith, my works ... would be the works of a liar and
an ape. My art is my prayer." Thus Villiers reports Wagner--Wagner,
whose marvellous soul changed colour every moment, like one of those
exquisite flying fishes which paint the air and waters of the tropics.
In 1861, at Baudelaire's home, Villiers met Richard Wagner. It was at
a period of great depression for that master. Villiers speaks of the
interview as the most memorable of his life. "Wagner, with his high,
remarkable forehead, almost terrifying in its development; his deep
blue eyes, with their slow, steady, magnetic glance; his thin, strongly
marked features, changing from one shade of pallor to another; his
imperious hooked nose; his delicate, thin-lipped, unsatisfied, ironic
mouth; his exceedingly strong, projecting, and pointed chin--seemed to
Villiers like the archangel of celestial combat." A rare little band,
composed of Wagner, Villiers, Baudelaire, and Catulle Mendès, often
walked the town after midnight. Once they were down along a dreary
street which ends at the Quai Saint-Eustache, and there Wagner pointed
out to them the window of a garret at the top of a very high house.
In it he said he almost starved, despaired, even meditated suicide.
Villiers was a Wagnerian among Wagnerians. He paraphrased in words his
impressions of the German's music, and some of these were published in
Catulle Mendès's _Revue Fantaisiste_. He visited Wagner at Triebchen,
near Lucerne, in Switzerland, although he was so poor that he had to
walk part of the distance.
One of Villiers's characters was Triboulat Bonhomet. This was the man
who was so avid of new sensations in music that he cruelly slew swans.
During the autumn of 1879 Villiers was at Bayreuth in company with
Judith Gautier and Catulle Mendès, and gave a reading from his works
before a lot of crowned heads, Wagner and Liszt included. He read some
of the curious adventures of Bonhomet, and was surprised to hear his
audience laugh, at first quietly, at last unrestrainedly. At last the
tempest of laughter rose so high that the reader ceased and cast a
glance full of vague suspicion round his, audience. The Grand Duke
of Saxe-Weimar, who sat beside him, touched his shoulder and pointed
to a person sitting just opposite them. Villiers, with a little sharp
cry, dropped the manuscript from his trembling fingers and gave evident
signs of lively terror. There in front of him, surrounded by a bevy of
beautiful women, gazing at him with shining eyes, his enormous mouth
opened in stentorian laughter, his huge hands leading applause, was Dr.
Triboulat Bonhomet himself, flesh and bone. It was Franz Liszt!
From the very first line of the manuscript, in which Villiers had
minutely described the doctor, the whole audience had been struck by
the resemblance between the great pianist and Triboulat Bonhomet, and
as the description went on the likeness increased--dress, gestures,
habits, all bore a striking similarity. One person alone did not
perceive the identity, and he laughed louder than the rest--Liszt
himself. Finally the reading had to be stopped on account of the
general hilarity, but Liszt was never told of the joke.
The most curious episode in the life of Villiers was when he won a
prize with his five-act play, The New World. A dramatic competition was
announced by the theatrical press of Paris. A medal of honour and ten
thousand francs were offered to the French dramatic author who would
"most powerfully recall in a work of four or five acts the episode
of the proclamation of the independence of the United States, the
hundredth anniversary of which fell on July 4, 1876. The two examining
juries were composed as follows: the first, of the principal critics
of the French theatrical press; the second, of Victor Hugo, honorary
president; Emile Augier, Octave Feuillet, and Ernest Legouvé, members
of the French Academy; Mr. Grenville Murray, representing the New York
_Herald_, and M. Perrin, administrator-general of the Théâtre Français."
Villiers's play conquered. His New World was passed by both juries. But
through some sort of official devilry he received neither money nor
medal; nor was his play produced. He had the mortification of seeing a
second-rate piece by Armand d'Artois given while his own work collected
dust in the manuscript box of the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre. Naturally
he raised a hubbub. He bearded the venerable Hugo at his home and there
insulted not only the poet, but also the aged Legouvé. Conflict was
the very breath of this visionary's nostrils. Did he not institute a
ridiculous lawsuit against the author of a play because it vilified,
so he claimed, a very remote ancestor? After interminable processes he
was non-suited. And The New World was his favourite drama! Villiers had
long dreamed of becoming the Richard Wagner of the drama.
His cousin says: "His idea was that the characteristics of the nation,
or of the event which was to be portrayed, should be imported into
the framework of some personal intrigue, in which each individual of
the _dramatis personæ_ should personify in his language, attitude, or
actions some one of the numerous elements produced by the friction
of the incidents of the play." Here is the leading motive idea of
Wagner--a dangerous idea in the drama, where the pattern must not be
too regular or too persistent. Villiers dreamed of a symphonic drama
with a densely woven web. Poets seldom realize the bigness of that
hollow frame, the theatre, on the background of which they must paint
in bold, splashing colours, or else pay the penalty of not being seen
at all. It is scene, not miniature, painting which is the real art of
the drama.
In sooth, The New World is a play that would puzzle the most sanguine
manager. It has been called "one of the best constructed, deepest, and
most passionate dramas of the present day," by a prejudiced witness,
the cousin of the poet. Against the wishes of his true friends,
Villiers allowed a representation, with dire results. Sarcey fairly
peppered it with his wit; so bad were the actors and actresses that the
author himself hissed furiously at every performance. This was at the
Théâtre des Nations, 1883. There were six representations. And such
an America as this poet depicts! It is as illusory, in another way,
as Victor Hugo's England. Villiers had evidently read Chateaubriand's
Atala--Chateaubriand, who cajoled his countrymen men into the belief
that he lived for years in Louisiana!--and so we are given some odd
characters, odd happenings, odder history. Mistress Andrews, the
heroine, is a sort of an American Melusina. Can any one in his most
exalted mood picture an American Melusina?
And so this "hybrid, complex, contradictory being, by turns mysterious,
terrible, cynical, innocent, loving, tragic, grotesque" poet, rolled
down the hill of life. Is it not Pascal who says: "The last act is
always tragedy, whatever fine comedy there may have been in the rest
of life. We must all die alone"? Villiers was lonely and dying from
his youth. Death was his intimate companion, sometimes a boon one, but
oftener a consoling friend. The death's-head adorns his wassail time.
Yet this poet actually went into politics, was a candidate at the
elections of the _Conseil Général_, and was, luckily enough, defeated.
One trembles at the idea of this aristocratic anarch among the bleating
law-makers. It is characteristic of him that he accepted his defeat
calmly because his opponent was De Hérédia the poet. _Noblesse oblige!_
Villiers, like most European poets, had formed a mighty ideal
of America and the Americans. He believed this country and its
institutions to be what Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and a few other
genuine patriots hoped it would be. He entertained for Thomas Edison
the deepest admiration. His novel, a grotesque book, The Eve of the
Future, contains a fanciful account of Menlo Park and its "terrifying
proprietor." When Edison went to the Paris exhibition in 1889 he
became acquainted with Villiers's novel. He read it at a sitting and
expressed himself thus: "That man is greater than I. I can only invent.
He creates." He did not meet the author, who was mortally ill, though
an attempt was made to bring the Frenchman and American together.
The leading motive of The Eve of the Future, pushed to an ingenuity
bordering on insanity, is the construction of an artificial woman which
when wound up imitates in every respect the daily life of a cultivated
lady!
J. K. Huysmans became known to Villiers, and his critical recognition
of his genius, tardy though it was, was one of the few consolations
accorded this unhappy man by fate. Huysmans it was who gently persuaded
Villiers to make a deathbed marriage and legitimize his son. His agony
was intensified by the fact that his wife could not sign her name to
the marriage contract, she could only make a cross. The artist in this
dying man persisted to the last. Huysmans with his omnivorous eye has
noted the sigh that escaped from the semi-moribund poet.
Thus he lived, thus he died, a stranger in a strange world. His plays
may be better appreciated some day. If Ibsen profited by The Revolt,
then the seed of Villiers has not been sown in vain. Nothing reveals
Ibsen's mastery of the dramatic form so completely as his treatment
of the woman who revolts and leaves her home, when compared to
Villiers's handling of the same idea. Elizabeth goes away in despair,
but to return. Nora departs, and the curtain quickly severs us from
her future, her "miracle" speech being a faint prophecy that may be
expanded some day into a fulfilment. Villiers was perhaps the pioneer;
though revolting women abound in Dumas, abound in the Bible, for that
matter; but the specific woman who puts up the shutters of the shop,
and declares the dissolution of the matrimonial firm, is the creation
of Villiers. Ibsen developed the idea, and, great artist that he is,
made of it a formal drama of beauty and dramatic significance--which
The Revolt is not. There are many loose psychologic ends left untied by
the Frenchman, and his conclusion is dramatically ineffectual.
What is the value of such a life, what its meanings? may be asked
by the curious impertinents. Why select for study the character
and career of a half-mad mystic? Simply because Villiers is a poet
and not a politician. It is because Villiers is Villiers that he
interests the student of literature and humanity. And the bravery,
the incomparable bravery, of the man who like Childe Roland blew his
slug-horn, dauntless to the last! In his Azrael he uses as a motto
Hassan-ben-Sabbah's "O Death! those who are about to live, salute
thee." All the soul of Villiers de l'Isle Adam is in that magnificently
defiant challenge!
XII
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
I
The dramatical evolution of Maurice Maeterlinck.
When this Belgian poet, dramatist, mystic, became known in America, his
plays, avowedly written for marionettes, were received with open-eyed
wonder or prolonged laughter. Any idea that he be taken seriously was
scouted by serious critics, and the usual fate befell them-well-meaning
amateurs seized them as legitimate prey. There is no denying the
fact that at one time Maeterlinck meant for most people a crazy crow
masquerading in tail feathers plucked from the Swan of Avon.
But caricature and critical malignity did not retard the growth of this
very remarkable young man--he was born in 1862--and presently we heard
more of him. After we had finished The Treasure of the Lowly, Wisdom
and Destiny, The Buried Temple, and The Double Garden, it was conceded
that a mistake had been made just as in Browning's case. A mystic--yes,
and one who had adjusted his very sensitive scheme of thought to the
practical work-a-day work. A Belgian Emerson, rather than a Belgian
Shakespeare; but an Emerson who had in him much of Edgar Allan Poe.
_Toujours_ Poe, in any consideration of modern continental poets.
Maeterlinck began with a volume of poems entitled Serres Chaudes,
often compared to the unrhymed, loose rhythmic prose of Walt Whitman.
They do bear a certain superficial resemblance to Whitman's effusions,
though not in idea. It is rather a cataloguing, aimless apparently, of
widely disparate subjects. But the substance derives more from that
extraordinary book of an extraordinary poet, Les Illuminations by
Arthur Rimbaud, than from the ragged, epical lines of Whitman. Take,
for example, the following specimen of Maeterlinck's _âme_ in Serres
Chaudes:--
"One day there was a poor little festival in the suburbs of my soul.
They mowed the hemlock there one Sunday morning, and all the convent
virgins saw the ships pass by on the canal one sunny fast day, while
the swans suffered under a poisonous bridge. The trees were lopped
about the prison; medicines were brought one afternoon in June and
meals for the patients were spread over the whole horizon."
Now read Rimbaud, translated admirably by Aline Gorren: "As soon as
the Idea of the Deluge had sunk back into its place, a rabbit halted
amid the sainfoin and the small swinging bells and said its prayers
to the rainbow, through the spider's web.... The caravans started. And
the splendid hotel was erected upon the chaos of ice and night at the
Pole.... In hours of bitterness I imagine balls of sapphire, of metal.
I am master of the silence. Why should the semblance of a vent-hole
seem to pale up there at the corner of a vault?"
Both these hallucinations illustrate what Rémy de Gourmont would call
disassociation of ideas.
Maeterlinck fervently studied the English dramatic classics. The result
was wild ferment. In 1889 he published Princess Maleine, and such an
impression did its whirling words create that Octave Mirbeau wrote his
famous article in the Paris _Figaro_, August 24, 1890, in the course
of which he made this statement, "M. Maurice Maeterlinck nous a donné
l'œuvre la plus géniale de ce temps, et la plus extraordinaire et
la plus naïve 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 en pensée que Hamlet."
Either M. Mirbeau, who has often played the rôle of poet-anarchist, had
not read Shakespeare reasonably, or else he was indulging in a pleasing
mystification. Ah, that fatal _plus_, the uncritical overplus, how it
does jump up from the page smiting the optics with rude humour! As a
matter of sheer fact, Princess Maleine is an undigested compound of
Macbeth, Hamlet, Leaf, and, as Arthur Symons sagely remarks, with more
of the Elizabethan violence we find in Webster and Tourneur than in
Shakespeare. And its author was only a youth in his twenties.
However, with all its crudities, its imitations, its impossible
_mélange_ of blood, lust, tears, terror, there are several elements in
the crazy play that indicate latent gifts of a high order. The range,
is narrow and Poe-like. Fear is the theme, and a strange repetition
the method of expression. There is a young prince, a Hamlet, who has
fed on the art of the modern decadents. He is a spiritual half-brother
to Laforgue's Hamlet, shorn of that ironist's humour. Never could
Prince Hjalmar of the Maeterlinck tragedy utter such a sublimely ironic
soliloquy as Laforgue's, more Shakespearian than Shakespeare.
"Alas! poor Yorick! As one seems to hear, in one little shell, all the
multitudinous roar of the ocean, so I here seem to perceive the whole
quenchless symphony of the universal soul, of whose echoes this box was
as the cross-roads. And do you imagine a human race that would look
no farther, that would abide by this vaguely, immortal sound, which
one hears in a hollow skull, by way of explanation of death, by way of
religion?... They also had their time, all these small folk of history;
learning to read, paring their nails, illuminating the unsavoury
lamp, loving every night, gormandizing, vain, crazy for compliments,
kisses.... But yet--no longer to be, no longer to be in it, no longer
to be of it! Not even to be able to strain against one's human heart,
any afternoon in the week, the melancholy of centuries compressed into
one little chord upon the piano!..."
Maeterlinck's hero, too, is oppressed by the mystery of life.
Throughout the drama the Fate of ancient tragedy marches remorselessly
through the doomed palace of the king. Thanks to Maeterlinck, this
Fate takes on a new countenance. A disquieting attack is made upon the
nerves by the repercussive repetitions, the dense pall of melancholy
hanging over the place. A madhouse is a cheerful place by comparison.
One king has slain another and made a beggar outcast of the Princess
royal, Maleine. She is loved by and loves Prince Hjalmar--an odd
transposition of the sunny passions of Romeo and Juliet. The beggar
girl becomes maid in the palace of her father's murderer. It is not a
happy habitation. The old King is senile and debauched by Anne, Queen
of Jutland. This mis-creant, a hideous combination of Lady Macbeth,
Messaline, and Phædra, has a daughter bearing the pretty name of
Uglyane. Poor Uglyane! She is beautiful, unloved. The one assignation
of her life is defeated by Maleine, who plays a cruel trick upon her.
Going to the fountain--later we shall find that fountains assume
important rôles in these plays--Maleine meets Hjalmar. Then we get the
true Maeterlinck atmosphere. And this is where it may come from:--
I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house
and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the
bleak walls, upon the vacant, eye-like windows, upon a
few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed
trees.... I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a
black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the
dwelling and gazed down.... About the whole mansion and
domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves
and their immediate vicinity; an atmosphere which had no
affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up
from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent
tarn; a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish,
faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
Pestilent and mystic is the atmosphere of Princess Maleine. The
quotation is from The Fall of the House of Usher. There is much of
Poe's dark tarn, of Auber, and the misty mid-region of Weir in the
early Maeterlinck.
The dénouement is horrible. Maleine is strangled by the Queen, who
also loves Hjalmar, and to the accompaniment of a lunar eclipse,
thunderbolts, a cyclone, meteors that explode, wounded swans that fall
from stormy skies, this night of strange portents comes to an end after
the prince avenges Maleine by stabbing the queen and killing himself.
There is a dog that sniffs, scratches, and howls at the locked door
of the murdered princess. Its name is Pluto. There are chanting and
spectral nuns, lewd beggars, an old Shakespearian nurse, a freakish
boy, and the usual scared courtiers. The scenes do not hang together
at all--there is no sequence of action, only of moods; or rather the
same mood persists throughout. Yet the lines bite at times, and there
are great fissures of silence, pauses as deep and as sinister as murky
midnight pools.
These pauses are always pregnant,--like the pauses in strange pages of
Schumann or those mysterious empty bars at the beginning of a Chopin
tragedy in tone,--empty, forbidding vestibules to woful edifices.
"There is a little kitchen maid's soul at the bottom of her green
eyes;" "I am sick to die of it one of those twenty thousand nights we
have to live;" "How dark? how dark? Is a forest lit up like a ball
room?" "The poor never know anything;" "Will she not have a little
silence in her heart?" "She is as cold as an earthworm;" "Oh! look,
look at their eyes. They will leap out upon me like frogs;" "My God!
My God! She is waiting now on the wharves of hell;" "How unhappy the
dead look!" These and many more, with gasps and ejaculations, make up a
dialogue that is at least original, though bizarre. Naturally it is all
the fruit of green, immature genius.
The ideas, hysterical and few as they are, begin to assume some
coherence if compared with the emotional and disconnected experiments
of the poems.
Maeterlinck has defined his æsthetic in his prose essays. He played
queer pranks upon the nerves with these shadows, these spiritual
marionettes, which are pure abstractions typifying various qualities
of the temperament. The iteration of his speech is like the dripping
of water upon the heads of the condemned. It finally stuns the
consciousness, and then, like a performer upon some fantastic
instrument with one string, this virtuoso executes variations boasting
a solitary theme--the fear of Fear.
Speech, says Maeterlinck, is never the medium of communication of real
and inmost thoughts. Silence alone can transmit them from soul to soul.
We talk to fill up the blanks of life. Silence is so truth-telling,
so illuminative, that few have the courage to face it. Mankind fears
silence more than the dark. (Poe again; Silence.) The most illuminating
silence of all, the most irresistible, is the Silence of Death. It is
the unspoken word that reveals our inner self. "We do not know each
other; we have not yet dared to be silent together." Modern thought
and literature lack this mystic element, lack the atmosphere of the
spiritual, perfect as is its technic and its intellectual equipment.
The Russians have it in their fiction--a fiction of epilepsy and
burning spiritual crises. The Middle Ages had it. Men stood nearer
to nature, to God. They understood children, women, animals, plants,
inanimate objects, with greater tenderness and greater depth. "The
statues and paintings they have left us may not be perfect, but a
mysterious power and secret charm that I cannot define are imprisoned
within them, and bestow upon them perpetual youth. Hamlet, King Lear,
Macbeth, are filled with the mysterious chant of the infinite, the
threatening silence of souls and of gods, eternity thundering on the
horizon, fate and fatality perceived interiorly without any one being
able to say by what signs they have been recognized."
Here we recognize the true mystic, the feeder upon the writings of
Emerson, Novalis, the Admirable Ruysbroeck; Plato, Plotinus, St.
Bernard, Jacob Boehme, and Coleridge. And while he achieves astonishing
flights into the blue, he always returns to mother earth. There
is spiritual lift in his words,--lift and ofttimes intoxication.
Generations of Flemish ancestors have dowered this young thinker with
solid nerves and a saner intellectual apparatus than his early critics
imagined. And he never exhibits what old Chaucer called "the spiced
conscience." Neither hell's flames nor the joys of heaven appear in his
pages. He preaches only of man and the soul of man.
Without the mystery of life, life is not worth the living. The static
opposed to the dynamic theatre is his ideal mood, not action; the
immaterial, not the obvious. Hamlet is not awake--at every moment
does he advance to the very brink of awakening. The mysterious chant
of the Infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the
murmur of Eternity on the horizon, the destiny or fatality that we are
conscious within us, though by what tokens none may tell--do not all
these underlie King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet? Are there not elements of
deeper gravity and stability in happiness in a single moment of repose
than in the whirlwind of passion? Does the soul only flower on nights
of storm? "But to the tragic author, as to the mediocre painter who
still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of
the anecdote that appeals ... whereas it is far away from bloodshed,
battle-cry, and sword thrust that the lives of most of us flow on, and
men's tears are silent to-day, and invisible, and almost spiritual."
Maeterlinck goes to the modern theatre and feels as if he had spent
a few hours with his ancestors, who conceived life as something that
was primitive, arid, and brutal. He sees murder, hears of deceived
husbands and wives instead of being shown some act of life "traced
back to its sources and to its mystery by connecting links." He yearns
for one of the strange moments of a higher life that flit unperceived
through his dreariest hours. "Othello does not appear to live the
august daily life of Hamlet, who has the time to live, inasmuch as he
does not act. Othello is admirably jealous. But is it not perhaps an
ancient error to imagine that it is at the moment when this passion,
or others of equal violence, possess us that we live our truest lives?
I have grown to believe that an old man, seated in his arm-chair,
waiting patiently with his lamp beside him; giving unconscious ear to
all the eternal laws that reign about the house, interpreting, without
comprehending, the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice
of light, submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and
his destiny--an old man, who conceives not that all the powers of this
world, like so many heedful servants, are mingling and keeping vigil
in his room, who suspects not that the very sun is supporting in space
the little table against which he leans or that every star in heaven
and every fibre of the soul are directly concerned in the movement
of an eyelid that closes, or a thought that springs to birth--I have
grown to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in reality
a deeper, more human, and more universal life than the lover who
strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the
husband who avenges his honour."
This excerpt (translated by Alfred Sutro) shows the real Maeterlinck,
the man whose mind is imbued by the strangeness of common life, the
mystic correspondences, the star in the grain of wheat. The philosophy
is akin to certain passages executed in the allegoric pictures of
Albrecht Dürer, William Blake, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones.
Each century, he argues, has its own near sorrow. It is well that we
should sally forth in search of our sorrows--the value of ourselves is
but the value of our melancholy and disquiets. The tragic masterpieces
of the past are inferior in the quality of their sorrow compared to
the sorrows of to-day. To-day it is fatality that we challenge; and
this is perhaps the distinguishing note of the new theatre. It is
no longer the effects of disaster that arrest our attention; it is
disaster itself; and we are eager to know its essence and its laws. It
is the rallying point of the most recent dramas, the centre of light
with strange flames gleaming, about which revolve the souls of women
and men. And a step has been taken toward the mystery so that life's
mysteries may be looked in the face. Between past and future man ("What
is man but a god who is afraid?") stands trembling on the tiny oasis of
the present. It is the disaster of our existence that we fear our soul;
did we but allow it to smile frankly in its silence and its radiance,
we should be already living an eternal life. O for those "reservoirs
of certitudes" on the other side of night, "whither the silent herd of
souls flock every morning to slake their thirst."
"To every man there come noble thoughts that pass his heart like great
white birds." Then is recalled Browning and his similitude of the
meanest soul that has its better side to show its love. "In life there
is no creature so degraded but knows full well which is the noble and
beautiful thing he must do." A life perceived is a life transformed.
To love one's self is to love thy neighbour in thyself! Maeterlinck's
attitude toward woman--the true touchstone of philosopher, poet,
priest, and artist--is beautiful. "I have never met a single woman who
did not bring to me something that was great."
The spiritual renascence may be at hand. It is the theatre that last
feels its approach. Poetry, painting, sculpture, music, all have met
it halfway; only the stage lags in the rear. Plot, action, trickeries,
cheap illusions, must be swept away into the limbo of things used up.
Atmosphere, the atmosphere of unuttered emotions, arrested attitudes,
ideas of the spiritual subconscious, are to usurp the mechanical
formulas of to-day. The ideal is music--music, the archetype of the
arts. (Walter Pater preached this platonic doctrine.) "It is only
the words that at first sight seem useless that really count in a
work." But to realize, to exteriorize the mystery, the significance of
the soul life, what a strange and symbolic web must be woven by the
poet-dramatist! He must break with the conventions of the past and
create something that is not quite painting, not quite drama, something
that is more than poetry, less than music--full of ecstasies, silent
joys, luminous pauses, and the burning fever of the soul that sometimes
slays.
It is very beautiful, very ideal--bard, poet, mystic, moralist, and
playwright, that Maeterlinck dared to become. He practised _before_ he
preached--unlike most men; and he had the slow fortitude of the brave.
We know now that artistically he springs from the loins of Poe and
Hoffmann; that Villiers de l'Isle Adam was his spiritual godfather;
that by the Belgian's artful scale of words he evoked images in our
mind which recall the harmonies of unheard music; that the union of
mysticism and freedom of thinking lends to his work peculiar eloquence;
that his device is "Within me there is more," a mediæval inscription
borrowed from an old doorway in Bruges. He is more revolutionary than
Ibsen in the matter of technic. Maeterlinck writes a play about an
open door, a closed window, or the vague and disheartening twilights
of cloudy gardens. That he is quite sane in his early work we must not
assert--since when shall art and sanity be driven in easy harness?
In giving a bare abstract of Maeterlinck's theories, spiritual and
æsthetic, their beauty and nobility, we but clear the way for a better,
because wider, appreciation of the plays. Let us consider them all from
The Intruder to Monna Vanna and Joyzelle.
II
"By mysticism we mean, not the extravagance of an erring fancy, but the
concentration of reason in feeling, the enthusiastic love of the good,
the true, the one, the sense of the infinity of knowledge, and of the
marvel of the human faculties. When feeding upon such thoughts the
'wing of the soul is renewed and gains strength, she is raised above
the manikins of earth' and their opinions, waiting in wonder to know
and working with reverence to find out what God in this or in another
life may reveal to her."
This is not from Maurice Maeterlinck; it was written by a hard-headed
man and lovable teacher, the late Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master
of Balliol. Not intended as a text, but merely to show that the lift
of spirit, which is the sign manual of mysticism, does not prelude the
practical. It is a fresh visual angle from which are viewed the things
of heaven and earthly things.
In his youth, possibly to escape the sterilities of the code--for he
was an advocate by profession---Maeterlinck took up the mystic writers
though the drama pulled him hard, as it ever does with the preëlected.
Little danger of this ardent young man weighing, as do many, the
theatre in the scales of commerce. As with Ibsen, the stage was an
escape for Maeterlinck; it liberated ideas, poetic, dramatic, mystic,
which had become intolerable, ideas which turned his brain. That art
of which Pinero so eloquently writes, "The great, the fascinating,
and most difficult art,... compression of life without falsification,"
could never have signified a gold mine for Maeterlinck as it did for
Robert Louis Stevenson. To the Belgian it was not a speculation, but
a consecration. To it he brought that "concentration of thought and
sustained intensity" which Pinero deems imperative in the curriculum
of a dramatic artist.
Upon the anvil of his youthful dreams did Maeterlinck forge his little
plays for marionettes. Shadowy they are, brief transcripts of emotion,
but valuable in illustrating unity of purpose, of mood, of _tone_.
Herein lies their superiority to Browning's more elaborate structures.
Before he ventured into the maze of plotting, Maeterlinck was content
with simple types of construction. The lyric musician in this poet,
the lover of beauty, led him to make his formula a musical one. The
dialogue of the first plays seems like new species of musical notation.
If there is not rhyme there is rhythm, interior rhythm, and an alluring
assonance. Hence we get pages burdened with repetitions and also the
"crossing fire" of jewelled words. Apart from their spirit the lines of
this poet are sonorously beautiful. In the "purple" mists of his early
manner a weaker man might have perished. Not so Maeterlinck. He is
first the thinker--a thinker of strange thoughts independent of their
verbal settings. He soon escaped preciosity in diction; it was monotony
of mood that chained him to his many experimentings.
And therein the old ghost of the Romantics comes to life asserting its
"claims of the ideal," as Ibsen has the phrase. Crushed to dust by the
hammers of the realists, sneered at in the bitter-sweet epigrams of
Heine, Romance returns to us wearing a new mask. We name this mask
Symbolism; but joyous, incarnate behind its shifting shapes, marches
Romance, the Romance of 1830, the Romance of--Before the Deluge.
The earth-men, the Troglodytes, who went delving into moral sewers
and backyards of humanity, ruled for a decade and a day; then the
vanquished reconquered. In this cycle of art it is Romance that comes
to us more often, remains longer when it does come.