It is safe to assert that the writer of these poems had read his
Verlaine, his Rimbaud, his Mallarmé, and his Baudelaire, and of
English-speaking poets Emerson, Poe, perhaps Rossetti, and above all
Whitman. But he is no disciple; and his essential originality, and the
keynote of his aesthetics, is a system of symbolism.
Now here at once we are on dangerous ground. When a poet makes use of
a symbol it is because that symbol enables him to say something that
he cannot say so well, or so beautifully, or perhaps at all, in plain
language. He is a rash man, therefore, who will attempt to elucidate
another's symbolism. However, I have already been rash, in venturing
to translate, not a few selected lyrics, but an entire volume of verse
from cover to cover, than which there is no more appalling task in
literature. But I am not, therefore, disposed to court disaster by
attempting any detailed or positive explanation. I could indeed have
asked M. Maeterlinck for such; but at the moment of writing his country
is being crucified by the powers of darkness, and he has other and
sterner matters to think of.
This machinery of hot-houses, bell-glasses, hospitals, and what
not--what are we to make of it? I do not think we shall go far wrong in
supposing the hot-house, the bell-glass, the diving-bell, the hospital,
to typify the isolation and insulation caused by a false civilization
and an unreal religion, so productive of hypocrisy, fear, and confusion
that each man is a prisoner within himself, unable to reach his fellow.
And the inmates of the hot-house--the strange growths, the fantastic
visions, the violent antitheses and incongruities--these, we may take
it, are the morbidities fostered by a life which protects us and them
from the agencies by which Nature makes her own children perfect in
strength and beauty and service. That is my reading of it; the reader
is perfectly free to differ from me, and will lose little by so doing
if I have succeeded in preserving a tithe of the original beauty of the
verse.
If here and there--more particularly in the unrhymed pieces--the
violent and intentional incongruities and antitheses seem startling
and incomprehensible, and a little apt to tickle the risibility of the
frivolous Anglo-Saxon, let us remember that to read a symbolic poem
literally is as foolish as to seek for a cipher in Shakespeare, or to
set about interpreting a melody in terms of its notation, in the hope
of spelling out a message.
One peculiarity of Maeterlinck's which may at first confuse the English
reader is only a simple convention. All poetry is full of similes; the
simile confuses no one. If a poet tells us that his heart is like a
singing-bird we do not seriously suppose him to mean that his heart
has feathers and two legs; but merely that it possesses some other
essential quality of a singing-bird. Now Maeterlinck constantly, in
his verse, uses what is merely a modification of the simile, which has
precisely the same significance, but which takes the form of a positive
assertion of identity. He would say: My heart _is_ a singing-bird
or a plant in a green-house, or anything else that seemed to be
illuminating; and this apparent literalness of statement, which is
carried very far, is, and must always be understood as, a mere variant
of the familiar simile.