The secret of things which is just beyond the most subtle words,
the secret of the expressive silences, has always been clearer to
Maeterlinck than to most people; and, in his plays, he has elaborated
an art of sensitive, taciturn, and at the same time highly ornamental
simplicity, which has come nearer than any other art to being the voice
of silence. To Maeterlinck the theatre has been, for the most part,
no more than one of the disguises by which he can express himself,
and with his book of meditations on the inner life, _Le Trésor des
Humbles,_ he may seem to have dropped his disguise.
All art hates the vague; not the mysterious, but the vague; two
opposites very commonly confused, as the secret with the obscure, the
infinite with the indefinite. And the artist who is also a mystic
hates the vague with a more profound hatred than any other artist.
Thus Maeterlinck, endeavouring to clothe mystical conceptions in
concrete form, has invented a drama so precise, so curt, so arbitrary
in its limits, that it can safely be confided to the masks and feigned
voices of marionettes. His theatre of artificial beings, who are at
once more ghostly and more mechanical than the living actors whom we
are accustomed to see, in so curious a parody of life, moving with a
certain freedom of action across the stage, may be taken as itself a
symbol of the aspect under which what we fantastically term "real life"
presents itself to the mystic. Are we not all puppets, in a theatre
of marionettes, in which the parts we play, the dresses we wear, the
very emotion whose dominance gives its express form to our faces, have
all been chosen for us; in which I, it may be, with curled hair and a
Spanish cloak, play the romantic lover, sorely against my will, while
you, a "fair penitent" for no repented sin, pass quietly under a nun's
habit? And as our parts have been chosen for us, cur motions controlled
from behind the curtain, so the words we seem to speak are but spoken
through us, and we do but utter fragments of some elaborate invention,
planned for larger ends than our personal display or convenience,
but to which, all the same, we are in a humble degree necessary.
This symbolical theatre, its very existence being a symbol, has
perplexed many minds, to some of whom it has seemed puerile, a child's
mystification of small words and repetitions, a thing of attitudes
and omissions; while others, yet more unwisely, have compared it with
the violent, rhetorical, most human drama of the Elizabethans, with
Shakespeare himself, to whom all the world was a stage, and the stage
all this world, certainly. A sentence, already famous, of the _Trésor
des Humbles,_ will tell you what it signifies to Maeterlinck himself.
"I have, come to believe," he writes, in _Le Tragique Quotidien,_ "that
an old man seated in his armchair, waiting quietly under the lamplight,
listening without knowing it to all the eternal laws which reign about
his house, interpreting without understanding it all that there is in
the silence of doors and windows, and in the little voice of light,
enduring the presence of his soul and of his destiny, bowing his head a
little, without suspecting that all the powers of the earth intervene
and stand on guard in the room like attentive servants, not knowing
that the sun itself suspends above the abyss the little table on which
he rests his elbow, and that there is not a star in the sky nor a force
in the soul which is indifferent to the motion of a falling eyelid or
a rising thought--I have come to believe that this motionless old man
lived really a more profound, human, and universal life than the lover
who strangles his mistress, the captain who gains a victory, or the
husband who 'avenges his honour.'"
That, it seems to me, says all there is to be said of the intention of
this drama which Maeterlinck has evoked; and, of its style, this other
sentence, which I take from the same essay: "It is only the words that
at first sight seem useless which really count in a work."
This drama, then, is a drama founded on philosophical ideas,
apprehended emotionally; on the sense of the mystery of the universe,
of the weakness of humanity, that sense which Pascal expressed when
he said: _Ce qui m'étonne le plus est de voir que tout le monde n'est
pas étonné de sa faiblesse;_ with an acute feeling of the pathetic
ignorance in which the souls nearest to one another look out upon
their neighbours. It is a drama in which the interest is concentrated
on vague people, who are little parts of the universal consciousness,
their strange names being but the pseudonyms of obscure passions,
intimate emotions. They have the fascination which we find in the eyes
of certain pictures, so much more real and disquieting, so much more
permanent with us, than living people. And they have the touching
simplicity of children; they are always children in their ignorance
of themselves, of one another, and of fate. And, because they are so
disembodied of the more trivial accidents of life, they give themselves
without limitation to whatever passionate instinct possesses them. I
do not know a more passionate love-scene than that scene in the wood
beside the fountain, where Pelléas and Mélisande confess the strange
burden which has come upon them. When the soul gives itself absolutely
to love, all the barriers of the world are burnt away, and all its
wisdom and subtlety are as incense poured on a flame. Morality, too,
is burnt away, no longer exists, any more than it does for children or
for God.
Maeterlinck has realised, better than any one else, the significance,
in life and art, of mystery. He has realised 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 realised 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 sur-rounding blind men,
the actual physical approach of death as the intruder; he has shown
us people huddled at a window, out of which they are almost afraid
to look, or beating at a door, the opening of which they dread. 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 a less obvious kind of beauty than
that which gives its profound pathos to _Aglavaine et Sélysette,_ the
one play written since the writing of the essays. 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 the aim of Maeterlinck, in his plays, is not only to render the
soul and the soul's atmosphere, but to reveal this strangeness, pity,
and beauty through beautiful pictures. No dramatist has ever been so
careful that his scenes should be in themselves beautiful, or has
made the actual space of forest, tower, or seashore so emotionally
significant. He has realised, after Wagner, that the art of the stage
is the art of pictorial beauty, of the correspondence in rhythm between
the speakers, their words, and their surroundings. He has seen how, in
this way, and in this way alone, the emotion, which it is but a part of
the poetic drama to express, can be at once intensified and purified.
It is only after hinting at many of the things which he had to say
in these plays, which have, after all, been a kind of subterfuge,
that Maeterlinck has cared, or been able, to speak with the direct
utterance of the essays. And what may seem curious is that this prose
of the essays, which is the prose of a doctrine, is incomparably more
beautiful than the prose of the plays, which was the prose of an art.
Holding on this point a different opinion from one who was, in many
senses, his master, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, he did not admit that
beauty of words, or even any expressed beauty of thoughts, had its
place in spoken dialogue, even though it was not two living actors
speaking to one another on the stage, but a soul speaking to a soul and
imagined speaking through the mouths of marionettes. But that beauty of
phrase which makes the profound and sometimes obscure pages of _Axël_
shine as with the crossing fire of jewels, rejoices us, though with
a softer, a more equable, radiance, in the pages of these essays, in
which every sentence has the in-dwelling beauty of an intellectual
emotion, preserved at the same height of tranquil ecstasy from first
page to last. There is a sort of religious calm in these deliberate
sentences, into which the writer has known how to introduce that divine
monotony which is one of the accomplishments of great style. Never has
simplicity been more ornate or a fine beauty more visible through its
self-concealment.
But, after all, the claim upon us of this book is not the claim of
a work of art, but of a doctrine, and more than that, of a system.
Belonging, as he does, to the eternal hierarchy, the unbroken
succession, of the mystics, Maeterlinck has apprehended what is
essential in the mystical doctrine with a more profound comprehension,
and thus more systematically, than any mystic of recent times. He
has many points of resemblance with Emerson, on whom he has written
an essay which is properly an exposition of his own personal ideas;
but Emerson, who proclaimed the supreme guidance of the inner light,
the supreme necessity of trusting instinct, of honouring emotion, did
but proclaim all this, not without a certain anti-mystical vagueness:
Maeterlinck has systematised it. A more profound mystic than Emerson,
he has greater command of that which comes to him unawares, is less at
the mercy of visiting angels.
Also, it may be said that he surrenders himself to them more
absolutely, with less reserve and discretion; and, as he has infinite
leisure, his contemplation being subject to no limits of time, he
is ready to follow them on unknown rounds, to any distance, in any
direction, ready also to rest in any wayside inn, without fearing that
he will have lost the road on the morrow.
This old gospel, of which Maeterlinck is the new voice, has been
quietly waiting until certain bankruptcies, the bankruptcy of
Science, of the Positive Philosophies, should allow it full credit.
Considering the length even of time, it has not had an unreasonable
space of waiting; and remember that it takes time but little into
account. We have seen many little gospels demanding of every emotion,
of every instinct, "its certificate at the hand of some respectable
authority." Without confidence in themselves or in things, and led by
Science, which is as if one were led by one's note-book, they demand a
reasonable explanation of every mystery. Not finding that explanation,
they reject the mystery; which is as if the fly on the wheel rejected
the wheel because it was hidden from his eyes by the dust of its own
raising.
The mystic is at once the proudest and the humblest of men. He is as
a child who resigns himself to the guidance of an unseen hand, the
hand of one walking by his side; he resigns himself with the child's
humility. And he has the pride of the humble, a pride manifesting
itself in the calm rejection of every accepted map of the roads, of
every offer of assistance, of every painted signpost pointing out the
smoothest ways on which to travel. He demands no authority for the
unseen hand whose fingers he feels upon his wrist. He conceives of
life, not, indeed, so much as a road on which one walks, very much at
one's own discretion, but as a blown and wandering ship, surrounded by
a sea from which there is no glimpse of land; and he conceives that to
the currents of that sea he may safely trust himself. Let his hand,
indeed, be on the rudder, there will be no miracle worked for him; it
is enough miracle that the sea should be there, and the ship, and he
himself. He will never know why his hand should turn the rudder this
way rather than that.
Jacob Boehme has said, very subtly, "that man does not perceive the
truth but God perceives the truth in man"; that is, that whatever
we perceive or do is not perceived or done consciously by us, but
unconsciously through us. Our business, then, is to tend that "inner
light" by which most mystics have symbolised that which at once
guides us in time and attaches us to eternity. This inner light is
no miraculous descent of the Holy Spirit, but the perfectly natural,
though it may finally be overcoming, ascent of the spirit within us.
The spirit, in all men, being but a ray of the universal fight, it can,
by careful tending, by the removal of all obstruction, the cleansing of
the vessel, the trimming of the wick, as it were, be increased, made
to burn with a steadier, a brighter flame. In the last rapture it may
become dazzling, may blind the watcher with excess of light, shutting
him in within the circle of transfiguration, whose extreme radiance
will leave all the rest of the world henceforth one darkness.
All mystics being concerned with what is divine in life, with the
laws which apply equally to time and eternity, it may happen to one to
concern himself chiefly with time seen under the aspect of eternity, to
another to concern himself rather with eternity seen under the aspect
of time. Thus many mystics have occupied themselves, very profitably,
with showing how natural, how explicable on their own terms, are
the mysteries of life; the whole aim of Maeterlinck is to show how
mysterious all life is, "what an astonishing thing it is, merely to
live." What he had pointed out to us, with certain solemn gestures,
in his plays, he sets himself now to affirm, slowly, fully, with that
"confidence in mystery" of which he speaks. Because "there is not an
hour without its familiar miracles and its ineffable suggestions," he
sets himself to show us these miracles and these meanings where others
have not always sought or found them, in women, in children, in the
theatre. He seems to touch, at one moment or another, whether he is
discussing _La Beauté Intérieure_ or _Le Tragique Quotidien,_ on all
of these hours, and there is no hour so dark that his touch does not
illuminate it.
And it is characteristic of him, of his "confidence in mystery,"
that he speaks always without raising his voice, without surprise or
triumph, or the air of having said anything more than the simplest
observation. He speaks, not as if he knew more than others, or had
sought out more elaborate secrets, but as if he had listened more
attentively.
Loving most those writers "whose works are nearest to silence,"
he begins his book, significantly, with an essay on Silence, an
essay which, like all these essays, has the reserve, the expressive
reticence, of those "active silences" of which he succeeds in revealing
a few of the secrets. "Souls," he tells us, "are weighed in silence,
as gold and silver are weighed in pure water, and the words which we
pronounce have no meaning except through the silence in which they are
bathed. We seek to know that we may learn not to know"; knowledge, that
which can be known by the pure reason, metaphysics, "indispensable"
on this side of the "frontiers," being after all precisely what is
least essential to us, since least essentially ourselves. "We possess
a self more profound and more boundless than the self of the passions
or of pure reason.... There comes a moment when the phenomena of our
customary consciousness, what we may call the consciousness of the
passions or of our normal relationships, no longer mean anything to
us, no longer touch our real life. I admit that this consciousness is
often interesting in its way, and that it is often necessary to know
it thoroughly. But it is a surface plant, and its roots fear the great
central fire of our being. I may commit a crime without the least
breath stirring the tiniest flame of this fire; and, on the other hand,
the crossing of a single glance, a thought which never comes into
being, a minute which passes without the utterance of a word, may rouse
it into terrible agitations in the depths of its retreat, and cause
it to overflow upon my life. Our soul does not judge as we judge; it
is a capricious and hidden thing. It can be reached by a breath and
unconscious of a tempest. Let us find out what reaches it; everything
is there, for it is there that we ourselves are."
And it is towards this point that all the words of this book tend.
Maeterlinck, unlike most men ("What is man but a God who is afraid?"),
is not "miserly of immortal things." He utters the most divine secrets
without fear, betraying certain hiding-places of the soul in those most
nearly inaccessible retreats which lie nearest to us. All that he says
we know already; we may deny it, but we know it. It is what we are not
often at leisure enough with ourselves, sincere enough with ourselves,
to realise; what we often dare not realise; but, when he says it, we
know that it is true, and our knowledge of it is his warrant for saying
it. He is what he is precisely because he tells us nothing which we do
not already know, or it may be, what we have known and forgotten. The
mystic, let it be remembered, has nothing in common with the moralist.
He speaks only to those who are already prepared to listen to him, and
he is indifferent to the "practical" effect which these or others may
draw from his words. A young and profound mystic of our day has figured
the influence of wise words upon the foolish and headstrong as "torches
thrown into a burning city." The mystic knows well that it is not
always the soul of the drunkard or the blasphemer which is farthest
from the eternal beauty. He is concerned only with that soul of the
soul, that life of life, with which the day's doings have so little to
do; itself a mystery, and at home only among those supreme mysteries
which surround it like an atmosphere. It is not always that he cares
that his message, or his vision, may be as clear to others as it is
to himself. But, because he is an artist, and not only a philosopher,
Maeterlinck has taken especial pains that not a word of his may go
astray, and there is not a word of this book which needs to be read
twice, in order that it may be understood, by the least trained of
attentive readers. It is, indeed, as he calls it, "The Treasure of the
Lowly."