Of the life lived by sad beings who stir in the mystery of a night.
They know nothing save to smile, to suffer, to love; when they wish to
understand, the effort of their disquietude grows to anguish, their
revolt vanishes in sobbings. To mount, forever to mount the mournful
steps of Calvary and beat the brow against an iron door: so mounts
Sister Ygraine, so mounts and beats against the cruel iron gate each of
the poor creatures whose simple and pure tragedies Maeterlinck reveals
to us.
In other times the meaning of life was known; then men were not
ignorant of the essential; since they knew the end of their journey,
and in what last inn they would find the bed of repose. When, by
science itself, this elementary science had been taken from them, some
rejoiced, believing themselves delivered of a burden; others grieved,
feeling clearly that above all the other burdens on their shoulders,
one had been thrown, itself heavier than all the rest: the burden of
Doubt.
A whole literature has been begotten of this sensation, a literature
of grief, revolt against the burden, blasphemies against the mute
God. But, after the fury of their cries and interrogations, there was
a remission, and this was the literature of sadness, uneasiness and
anguish; revolt has been declared useless and imprecation puerile.
Made wise by vain struggles, humanity slowly resigns itself to
knowing nothing, comprehending nothing, fearing nothing, hoping for
nothing--except the very remote.
There is an island somewhere in the mists, and in the island is a
château, and in the château is a great room lit by a little lamp, and
in the great room people are waiting. What do they await? They know
not. They are expecting someone to knock at the door, they expect the
lamp to go out, they expect Death. They converse; yes, they speak words
which for an instant trouble the silence. Then they listen again,
leaving their phrases unended and their gestures interrupted. They
listen, they wait. She will perhaps not come? Oh! she will come. She
always comes. It is late, she will perhaps not come till the morrow.
And the people gathered in the great room beneath the little lamp begin
to laugh and go on hoping. Someone knocks. And that is all; it is a
whole life; it is the whole of life.
In this sense, Maeterlinck's dramas, so deliciously unreal, are deeply
alive and true; his characters, with the appearance of phantoms, are
steeped with life, like those seemingly inert balls, which, when
charged with electricity, grow fulgent at the contact of a point; they
are not abstractions but syntheses; they are states of soul or, better
still, states of humanity, moments, minutes which shall be eternal. In
short, they are real, by dint of their unreality.
A like kind of art was formerly practiced, after the _Roman de la
Rose_, by the pious romancers who, in little books of pretentious
clumsiness, made symbols and abstractions revolve. Bunyan's _Pilgrim's
Progress, Le Voyage Spirituel_, by the Spaniard Palafox, _le Palais de
l'Amour divin_, by an unknown person, are not altogether contemptible
works, but things there are truly too explicit and the characters bear
names that are truly too evident. Does one, in any free theater, see
a drama played by beings called Courage, Hate, Joy, Silence, Care,
Longing, Fear, Anger, and Shame? The hour of such amusement has passed
or has not returned: do not re-read _le Palais de l'Amour divin_; read
_la Mort de Tintagiles_, for it is of the new work that we must ask
for these aesthetic pleasures, if we desire them complete, poignant
and enveloping. Maeterlinck, truly, takes, pierces and entwines us in
Octupi formed of the delicate hair of young sleeping princesses, and
in the midst of them the troubled sleep of the little child, "sad as
a young king". He entwines and bears us where he pleases, to the very
depths of the abyss where whirls "the decomposed corpse of Alladin's
lamb", and farther, to the pure dark regions where lovers say: "Kiss
me gravely. Close not the eyes when I kiss you so. I want to see the
kisses that tremble in your heart; and the dew that mounts from your
soul.... We shall not find more kisses like these....--Evermore,
evermore!...--No, no: one does not kiss twice on the heart of death."
Before such delicate sighings, all objection grows mute; one is silent
at having felt a new way of loving and expressing love. New, truly.
Maeterlinck is very much himself, and to remain entirely personal he
can be a monochord; but he has sown, steeped and scutched the hemp for
this one cord, and it sings gently, sadly, uniquely under his drooping
hands. He has achieved a true work; he has found an unheard muffled
cry, a kind of lamentation, coldly mystical.
The word mysticism during these last years has taken such diverse and
even divergent meanings that it must be clearly and newly defined each
time one writes it. Certain persons give it a significance which would
draw it to that other word which seems clear, individualism. It is
certain that it touches the other, since mysticism may be called the
state in which a soul, abandoning the physical world and scornful of
its shocks and accidents, gives its mind only to relations and direct
intimacies with the infinite. But, if the infinite is changeless
and one, souls are changing and many. A soul has not the same
communications with God as has his sister, and God, though changeless
and one, is modified by the desire of each of his creatures and does
not tell one what he has told another. Liberty is the privilege of the
soul raised to mysticism. The body itself is but a neighbor to whom the
soul scarcely gives the friendly counsel of silence, but if the body
speaks, she hears it only as through a wall, and if the body acts, she
sees it act through a mask. Another name has been historically given
to such a state of life: quietism. This sentence of Maeterlinck is
altogether that of a quietist who shows us God smiling "at our most
serious faults as one smiles at the play of little dogs on a rug". This
is serious but true if we think how tiny a thing a fact is, how a fact
is caused, how we all are led by the endless chain of action, and how
little we really participate in our most decisive and best considered
acts. Such an ethics, leaving the care of useless judgments to wretched
human laws, snatches from life its very essence and transports it to
the upper regions where it blossoms, sheltered from contingencies and
from the humiliations which social contingencies are. Mystic morality
ignores everything not marked at the same time with the double seal of
the human and divine. Wherefore, it was always feared by clergy and
magistrates, for in denying every hierarchy of appearance, it denies,
to the point of abstention, all social order. A mystic can consent to
all bondages, except that of being a citizen. Maeterlinck sees the time
drawing near when men will understand each other, soul to soul, in the
same way that the mystic's soul communes with God. Is it true? Will
men one day be men, proud, free beings who admit no other judgments
than God's judgments? Maeterlinck perceives this dawn, because he
gazes within himself and is himself a dawn, but if he watched external
humanity, he would only see the impure, socialistic appetite of troughs
and stables. The humble, for whom he has divinely written, will not
read his book, and if they did read it they would see in it but a
mockery, for they have learned that the ideal is a manger, and they
know that their masters would flog them if they lifted their eyes to
God.
So _le Trésor des Humbles_, that book of liberation and love, makes me
think bitterly of the unhappy condition of man today--and doubtless in
all possible times,
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n'avoir pas chanté la region où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.
(Tr. 1)