(1862)
_Serres Chaudes,_ 1889; _La Princesse Maleine,_ 1890; _Les Aveugles
(L'Intruse, Les Aveugles),_ 1890; _L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,
de Ruysbroeck l'Admirable,_ 1891; _Les Sept Princesses,_ 1891; _Pelléas
et Mélisande,_ 1892; _Alladine et Palomides, Intérieur, La Mort de
Tintagiles,_ 1894; _Annabella, de John Ford,_ 1895; _Les Disciples à
Sais et les Fragments de Novalis,_ 1895; _Le Trésor des Humbles,_ 1896;
_Douze Chansons,_ 1896; _Aglavaine et Sélysette,_ 1896; _La Sagesse et
la Destinée,_ 1898; _Théâtre,_ 1901 (3 vols.); _La Vie des Abeilles,_
1901; _Monna Vanna,_ 1902; _Le Temple Enseveli,_ 1902; _Joyzelle,_
1903; _Le Double Jardin,_ 1904; _L'Intelligence des Fleurs,_ 1907.
M. Maeterlinck has had the good or bad fortune to be more promptly,
and more violently, praised at the beginning of his career than at all
events any other writer of whom I have spoken in this volume. His fame
in France was made by a flaming article of M. Octave Mirbeau in the
_Figaro_ of August 24, 1890. M. Mirbeau greeted him as the "Belgian
Shakepeare," and expressed his opinion of _La Princesse Maleine_ by
saying "M. Maeterlinck has given us the greatest work of genius that
has been produced in our time, and the most extraordinary and the most
naïve too, comparable (dare I say?) superior in beauty to what is
most beautiful in Shakespeare ... more tragic than _Macbeth,_ more
extraordinary in thought than _Hamlet."_ Mr. William Archer introduced
M. Maeterlinck to England in an article called "A Pessimist Playwright"
in the _Fortnightly Review,_ September, 1891. Less enthusiastic than
M. Mirbeau, he defined the author of _La Princesse Maleine_ as "a
Webster who had read Alfred de Musset." A freely adapted version of
_L'Intruse_ was given by Mr. Tree at the Haymarket Theatre, January
27, 1892, and since that time many of M. Maeterlinck's plays have been
acted, without cuts, or with but few cuts, at various London theatres.
Several of his books have also been translated into English: _The
Princesse Maleine_ (by Gerard Harry) and _The Intruder_ (by William
Wilson), 1892; _Pelléas and Mélisande_ and _The Sightless_ (by Laurence
Alma-Tadema), 1892; _Ruysbroeck and the Mystics_ (by J. T. Stoddart),
1894; _The Treasure of the Humble_ (by A. Sutro), 1897; _Aglavaine and
Sélysette_ (by A. Sutro), 1897; _Wisdom and Destiny_ (by A. Sutro),
1898; _Alladine and Palomides_ (by A. Sutro), _Interior_ (by William
Archer), and _The Death of Tintagiles_ (by A. Sutro), 1899.
I have spoken, in this volume, chiefly of Maeterlinck's essays, and
but little of his plays, and I have said all that I had to say without
special reference to the second volume of essays, _La Sagesse et la
Destinée._ Like _Le Trésor des Humbles,_ that book is a message, a
doctrine, even more than it is a piece of literature. It is a treatise
on wisdom and happiness, on the search for happiness because it is
wisdom, not for wisdom because it is happiness. It is a book of patient
and resigned philosophy, a very Flemish philosophy, more resigned than
even _Le Trésor des Humbles._ In a sense it seems to aim less high.
An ecstatic mysticism has given way to a kind of prudence. Is this
coming nearer to the earth really an intellectual ascent or descent?
At least it is a divergence, and it probably indicates a divergence in
art as well as in meditation. Yet, while it is quite possible to at
least indicate Maeterlinck's position as a philosopher, it seems to me
premature to attempt to define his position as a dramatist. Interesting
as his dramatic work has always been, there is, in the later dramas,
so singular an advance in all the qualities that go to make great
art, that I find it impossible at this stage of his development,
to treat his dramatic work as in any sense the final expression of
a personality. What the next stage of his development may be it is
impossible to say. He will not write more beautiful dramas than he has
written in _Aglavaine et Sélysette_ and in _Pelléas et Mêlisande._
But he may, and he probably will, write something which will move
the general world more profoundly, touching it more closely, in the
manner of the great writers, in whom beauty has not been more beautiful
than in writers less great, but has come to men with a more splendid
energy.