MAJOR PROPHETS
OF TO-DAY
BY
EDWIN E. SLOSSON, M.S., PH.D.
LITERARY EDITOR OF "THE INDEPENDENT"
ASSOCIATE IN THE COLUMBIA SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
AUTHOR OF "GREAT AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES," ETC
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1916
TO MY WIFE
MAY PRESTON SLOSSON
WHO WAS THE COMPANION OF MY PILGRIMAGE
TO THE OLD WORLD
IN SEARCH OF NEW PROPHETS
THIS VOLUME
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
[Illustration: Maeterlinck]
PREFACE
Each age has its own prophets, men who bring to it distinctive messages
and present them in such effective form as to sway the currents of
contemporary thought. No age perhaps has had more diverse theories
of life and the meaning of things presented to it than our own, and
certainly none has ever given such an opportunity for the original
thinker to reach quickly a world-wide audience as he can now through
the medium of cheap books and free schools.
This volume originated in my own desire to find out what was being
said by certain persons who, I had reason to believe, were worth
attention. But unless one is abnormally selfish, he always wants to
introduce others to an interesting acquaintance. It is then simply as
introductions that I would wish the following chapters to be taken.
In one way or another such men are influencing the thought of all of
us, but since we mostly get their philosophy at second hand--or at
third, fourth, or nth hand--we fail to recognize its origin and are apt
to misconceive its intent. Ideas that reach us in fragmentary form,
and often after multiple translation through minds sometimes alien
or hostile, are not very useful. It is always safer to drink at the
source. I have endeavored to give some idea of the scope and character
of each man's work, so that the reader may judge for himself whether
it is profitable for him to follow up the acquaintance. If he does, he
will find at the end of the chapter directions how to proceed further.
We imagine we can understand a man better if we can see his face,
even his photograph. This may be a superstition, but, if so, it
is a superstition worth deferring to by one who aspires to be an
interpreter. So in the summer of 1910 I went to see the six men
included in this first volume in their homes, not with the hope of
getting any new and unpublished opinions, not with the expectation of
gaining a personal acquaintance that would give me any deeper insight
into their mental processes, but merely to convince myself that they
are flesh and blood, instead of paper and ink. If I can convince the
reader of this, my purpose will be accomplished.
In the choice of names to be included in the list, I was guided
primarily by the idea that I should be most likely to interest others
in the men who have most interested me. Since the object of the book
is to serve as an introduction to the works of the authors, not as a
substitute for them, the choice was limited to those who have given
expression to their philosophical views in a sufficiently popular form
to be attractive to the general reader. It was necessary to select
representatives of diverse types of thought, and it was not possible
to confine the choice to the philosophical profession, for in our day
philosophy has escaped from its classroom and often displays more
activity outside than in it. So I have included men of science and
letters as well as philosophers of the chair.
The group comprised in this volume includes: Maurice Maeterlinck,
dramatist and essayist, interpreter of the animate and inanimate world;
Henri Bergson, of the Collège de France, whose intuitive philosophy
has been introduced into America by the late William James; Henri
Poincaré, of the French Academy, mathematician and astronomer; Élie
Metchnikoff, director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, author
of studies in optimistic philosophy; Wilhelm Ostwald, of Leipzig
University, recipient of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909, founder
of the _Annals of Natural Philosophy_, and Ernst Haeckel, of Jena
University, veteran zoölogist, champion of Darwinism and Monism, author
of the "Riddle of the Universe."
In large part the chapters of this volume have appeared in the
_Independent_ during the last three years in a series under the general
title of "Twelve Major Prophets of To-day", which includes similar
articles on Rudolf Eucken, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton,
F. C. S. Schiller, and John Dewey, and I am indebted to that periodical
for the privilege of book publication.
EDWIN E. SLOSSON.
NEW YORK,
March 1, 1914.
CONTENTS
I. MAURICE MAETERLINCK
II. HENRI BERGSON
III. HENRI POINCARÉ
IV. ÉLIE METCHNIKOFF
V. WILHELM OSTWALD
VI. ERNST HAECKEL
LIST OF PORTRAITS
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
HENRI BERGSON
HENRI POINCARÉ
ÉLIE METCHNIKOFF
WILHELM OSTWALD
ERNST HAECKEL
MAJOR PROPHETS OF TO-DAY
CHAPTER I
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
Let us not forget that we live in pregnant and decisive
times. It is probable that our descendants will envy us the
dawn through which, without knowing it, we are passing, just
as we envy those who took part in the age of Pericles, in
the most glorious days of Roman greatness and in certain
hours of the Italian Renascence. The splendid dust that
clouds the great movements of men shines brightly in the
memory, but blinds those who raise it and breathe it,
hiding from them the direction of their road and, above
all, the thought, the necessity or the instinct that leads
them.--"The Double Garden."
It was half past seven in the morning of my last possible day in
Paris, when the maid brought on the tray with my chocolate, a blue
envelope addressed in the business-like writing of Maeterlinck; the
long expected and at last despaired of note confirming the invitation
received in America to visit him at the Abbey of St. Wandrille, and
setting five P.M. as the time. No chocolate for me that morning. The
concierge and I put our heads together over a French railway guide,
more baffling than Bullinger's, and we made up our minds that a train
started in that direction at nine, although where and when it made
connections we neither of us could make out. From Rouen on, I would
have to trust to luck, or to the Government railway service--much the
same thing.
The Gare St. Lazare is a long way from the Latin Quarter when one has
got to make a train, but the cabman said he would make it, and he did.
At Rouen, I discovered that in the course of the day one could get to
Barentin, and from Barentin, a deliberate and occasional train went
to St. Wandrille. But when I got to Barentin I found that the train
was not going till the following day. It was getting near tea time
and Maeterlinck seventeen miles away! Barentin would, under other
circumstances, have interested me on account of the incompatibility
of temper between the town and its environment, a cotton-spinning,
socialistic population in the midst of an ultra-Catholic agricultural
community. But as I strolled about, I took no interest in anything
until I came to a little automobile repair shop. Here I found a young
man who knew where he could find a machine and promised to get me to
St. Wandrille in time for tea, or burst a tire.
It was a joy ride certainly, in one sense of the word, and, I suspect,
in two. The road, such a road as we rarely see in this country, wound
around the hills overlooking the valley through which the Seine twisted
its way to the sea. The banks were flooded with the July rains, and
the poplars were up to their knees in water. We gradually left behind
us the smart brick houses of the new cotton aristocracy, and came into
the older stone age. Along the railroad, as I was sorry to see, the
meadows were beginning to grow the most noxious of American weeds, big
advertising signs, but we soon escaped them, and saw around us only the
grass and fields through the double row of trees that lined the road.
As we got away from town, my extemporized chauffeur made better time,
and under the stimulus of the acceleration, I recited passages of
Maeterlinck's dithyramb to "Speed", for he was the first to perceive
poetry in the automobile:
The pace grows faster and faster, the delirious wheels cry
aloud in their gladness. And at first the road comes moving
toward me, like a bride waving palms, rhythmically keeping
time to some joyous melody. But soon it grows frantic,
springs forward and throws itself madly upon me, rushing
under the car like a furious torrent whose foam lashes my
face.... Now the road drops sheer into the abyss, and the
magical carriage rushes ahead of it. The trees, that for so
many slow-moving years have serenely dwelt on its borders,
shrink back in dread of disaster. They seem to be hastening
one to the other, to approach their green heads, and in
startled groups to debate how to bar the way of the strange
apparition. But as this rushes onward they take panic, and
scatter and fly, each one quickly seeking its own habitual
place; and as I pass they bend tumultuously forward, and
their myriad leaves, quick to the mad joy of the force that
is chanting its hymn, murmur in my ears the voluble psalm of
space, acclaiming and greeting the enemy that hitherto has
always been conquered but now at last triumphs: Speed.
Afterward, when I recalled this essay to Maeterlinck, he laughed
heartily and said he had written it when he had only a three-horse
power automobile, one of the first kind made and altogether unreliable.
Now he has a big one; also a motor cycle with which he makes fifty
miles an hour, but I do not know that he is writing prose poems on the
motor cycle yet. He is likely to be the first to do it, though, unless
Rostand or Kipling get ahead of him, as they have in literary aviation:
Rostand with a sonnet on the biplane and Kipling with his "Night Mail",
wherein he invents and teaches a new technical vocabulary without
slackening speed. No wonder Kipling got the Nobel prize for idealistic
literature. Maeterlinck, who received the same prize in 1911, deserved
it on the same ground, for he, too, is entitled to write after his name
the degree of M. M., Master of Machinery.
With the help of the machine, I got to the little village of St.
Wandrille even before the appointed hour, so I had time to drop into
the queer old church. This is a favorite resort of pilgrims from all
over Normandy and not undeserving of its repute, if one may judge from
the crutches, canes, and votive tablets left behind by those who have
been cured or blessed. Ever since 684 a.d., when Wandregisilus left
the French court and founded this retreat in the forest by the Seine,
it has been noted for its relics. The ossuary department indeed makes
a fine display; skulls, thigh bones, vertebræ, and phalanges, all laid
out under glass and labeled neatly, as in a museum. Thirty saints I
counted, some familiar like St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Clotilde, St.
Genevieve, and St. Wulfranc. But most of those represented by relics
or wooden statues were quite outside the range of my hagiography--St.
Firmin, St. Mien, St. Vilmir, St. Wilgeforte, St. Pantoleon, and St.
Herbland.
The village church is too modern to interest any one but an American.
The old abbey, dating in part from the twelfth century, and belonging
now to Maeterlinck, is across the road. Ringing at the little arched
portal in the wall, I was shown into the cloister; very familiar it
seemed to me, for I had a photograph of it in my room at home, a
photograph showing three witches over a caldron, since it was taken
when Maeterlinck's version of "Macbeth" was played here. "The cloister
of St. Wandrille is without doubt one of the most magnificent monuments
of the kind that has escaped the vandalism of recent times", says
Langlois in the large volume he devoted to its architecture.[1] Until
recently the monastery was in the hands of the Benedictines, but they
were dispossessed by the French Government on the separation of Church
and State in 1907, and the property offered for sale. It was about
to be sold to a chemical syndicate for a factory, when Maeterlinck
intervened and purchased it, possibly more to please his wife than
himself, for he is indifferent to surroundings, while she takes a keen
delight in an artistic stage setting, not merely for the plays she
enacts, but for daily life. For thus saving the abbey from commercial
desecration, Maeterlinck received a parchment blessing from the Pope,
but his later use of it as a theater was quite as offensive to Catholic
sentiment.
Certainly no author has been housed more satisfactorily to his
admirers than Maeterlinck. He had, in fact, pictured it in his
youthful plays. It is a verification of his faith that a man creates
his own environment. The surrounding forest, the old house with its
long corridors, the garden where the broken pillars and arches of the
buried temple appear here and there among the vines and flowers, are
the familiar scenes of all his dramas. All that is lacking is the
sea, which is so often in his thoughts, and some dank, dark caves
and dungeons underneath. But Maeterlinck does not need nowadays such
subterranean accessories, for he has passed through his Reign of
Terror, and come up into the sunshine.
It is curious that a man who is so modernistic in mind and who has
shown so unique a power to idealize the prosaic details of the life
of to-day, should place all his dramas in the historical or legendary
past. But he always views the past as a poet, not as an archaeologist,
giving merely some beautiful names and a suggestion as to scene
setting, and leaving it to the imagination of the reader to do the
stage carpentering. Determinist though he is, no one, not even James
or Bergson, has been more bold in repudiating the right of the past to
control our actions:
In reality, if we think of it, the past belongs to us quite
as much as the present, and is far more malleable than the
future. Like the present, and to a much greater extent than
the future, its existence is all in our thoughts, and our
hand controls it; nor is this true only of our material
past, wherein there are ruins that we perhaps can restore,
but also of those regions that are closed to our tardy
desire for atonement, and, above all, of our moral past, and
of what we consider to be most irreparable there.
"The past is past", we say, and it is not true; the past is
always present. "We have to bear the burden of our past",
we sigh; and it is not true; the past bears our burden.
"Nothing can wipe out the past", and it is not true; the
least effort of will sends present and future traveling
over the past, to efface whatever we bid them efface. "The
indestructible, irreparable, immutable past!" And that is
no truer than the rest. In those who speak thus it is the
present that is immutable and knows not how to repair. "My
past is wicked, it is sorrowful, empty", we say again, "as
I look back I can see no moment of beauty, or happiness or
love; I see nothing but wretched ruins...." And that is not
true, for you behold precisely what you yourself place'
there at the moment your eyes rest upon it.[2]
While I was wandering in the cloister, puzzling over battered saints
and mossy gargoyles, any disposition I may have felt toward monastic
meditation was dissipated by the appearance of a woman, not merely a
woman, but a modern woman, one who has gained vitality and initiative
without losing the feminine graces, "the virile friend and equal
comrade", as Maeterlinck calls her. Her costume was not inharmonious
with the surroundings, for it was vaguely medieval in appearance--a
hooded robe of some heavy blue stuff, falling in long straight folds to
her feet.
It is not necessary to describe Madame Georgette Leblanc Maeterlinck,
for Maeterlinck himself has done that, sketching equally her virtues
and failings with a loving hand.[3] Her powerful influence over his
thought he gratefully acknowledges in the prefaces to his essays,
and shows it by the frequent references in them to her opinions and
personality. Monna Vanna, Joyzelle, and Mary Magdalene are rôles
written for her. We can tell when she came into Maeterlinck's life
by the appearance of "the new woman" in his dramas; Aglavaine, who
involuntarily overshadows and displaces the frail and timid Sélysette,
Ariane, the last wife of Blue Beard, who releases his other wives from
the secret chamber where they were confined, not killed as earlier
rumor had it. The imprisoned sisterhood, who are, by the way, the
anæmic heroines of Maeterlinck's earlier period, Sélysette, Mélisande,
Ygraine, Bellangère, and Alladine, refuse to follow Ariane to freedom;
they prefer to stay with Blue Beard, so she goes out alone. But she
does not slam the door like Nora in "The Doll's House." It is not
necessary nowadays to slam the door.
Madame Maeterlinck shows me the places she picked out for the scenes
of "Pelléas and Mélisande", for she is the inventor of a new form of
dramatic art based on the discovery that audiences are easier moved
about than castles, trees, and hills. Only the weather she cannot
control, and the pathetic drama was played appropriately though
inconveniently in a rainstorm.[4] The ancient refectory which she used
as the banquet hall in "Macbeth" was large enough to seat four hundred
Benedictine monks at table. It is roofed and paneled with carved wood
and lighted by a row of large pointed windows set with bits of very old
stained glass.
Here we are soon joined by M. Maeterlinck, a sturdy figure in Norfolk
jacket and knickerbockers, for he is just in from a tramp in the woods
with his dog. No, the dog was not his friend, Pelléas. Pelléas, as you
should have remembered, died years ago, very young.
Some say that Maeterlinck has a Flemish peasant face. Some say a
Flemish bourgeois face. Not being familiar with the physiognomy of
either the peasantry or the bourgeoisie of Flanders, I cannot decide
this delicate question. All I can say is that it is a face one could
trust, the face of a man one would like to have for a friend. The eyes,
wide open and wide apart, are clear and steady. His hair is getting
gray, and he has in recent years shaved off his mustache, showing his
straight, firm-set mouth and pleasant smile. His photographs do not do
him justice, for none of them show him smiling--neither do his books.
Early to bed and early to rise and much time spent in the open air have
given him an erect carriage and a vigorous step. He is fond of boxing
and has written an essay in praise of this sport.
From the window of his study upstairs he points out to me his woodland
stretching far up the hill, and he takes from his pocket the book
that has occupied his afternoon, a book of trout flies. But I am more
interested in other things, in the big work-table that occupies the
center of the study, littered with papers, a typewriter on the corner
of it. The wall opposite the window is lined with books, and as I
glance over them I see his own plays and essays translated into half
a dozen languages, Carlyle's works, Vaughan's "English Mystics", and
many volumes of natural science, poetry, and philosophy. M. Maeterlinck
divines what I want most to see and takes down his Emerson, an old
one-volume edition, in excruciatingly fine print, but manifestly well
read, with numerous underlinings and as much annotation as the narrow
margins would permit. It is curious that Emerson should have strongly
influenced two such unlike men as Nietzsche and Maeterlinck.[5] But
only the latter acquired his finest attribute, serenity of spirit.
Maeterlinck also resembles Thoreau in his love for nature, though he
makes no affectation of asceticism or hermitage.
He spends his summers only at the Abbaye de St. Wandrille. In the
winter he goes to the Riviera, to live with the bees and the flowers
whose language he speaks. His winter residence is at Les Quatre
Chemins, near Grasse, in the southeastern corner of the country. Here
he is even more secluded than at St. Wandrille. He prefers the country
to the city, not because he has any aversion to people in mass or to
the mechanism of modern life, but because he dislikes lionization and
publicity of all sorts. He would stifle in the atmosphere of a Parisian
salon. He belongs to none of the literary coteries combined for mutual
admiration and the reciprocal promotion of individual interests. He has
never been what Verlaine used to call a "Cymbalist."
As a mystic philosopher Maeterlinck finds a flower in a crannied wall
sufficient to give him a clew to the secrets of the universe. Modern
science, instead of killing mysticism, as was foreboded by despairing
poets of the last century, has brought about a revival of it. This
is quite natural, for mysticism is the verification of religion by
the experimental method, as ecclesiasticism is the verification of
religion by the historical method. The doctrine of evolution has given
an intellectual basis and a richer content to the sense of the unity
of nature, which is the force of mysticism. A weak poet, distrustful
of his vision or of his own powers, fears science and flees from it.
A great and courageous poet seizes science and turns it to his own
uses. Tennyson and Sully-Prudhomme were among the first to perceive
and to demonstrate the possibility of this. Maeterlinck, being of the
generation born since the dawn of the scientific era, entered upon the
inheritance of its wealth without having to pass through any storm and
stress period to acquire it. No traces of the fretful antagonisms of
the nineteenth century disturb the equanimity of his essays. He sees no
conflict between the scientific and poetic views of the world. He looks
upon it with both eyes open and the two visions fuse into one solid
reality.
Maeterlinck has been a leader in that characteristic movement of
the twentieth century which might be called the reanimation of the
universe. Time was, and was not so long ago but that most of us can
remember it, when, terrified by the advance of science, man did not
dare to call his soul his own. Naturally he denied a soul to the rest
of the world. Animals were automatons; plants, of course, unconscious;
and planets and machines out of the question. Nature was subjected to
a process succinctly to be described as deanthropomorphization. To
naturalists of the inanimate school an insect was not worth studying
until it had a pin through it. Animals were only interesting when
stuffed.
Nowadays naturalists are going back to nature. They are leaving the
laboratory for the woods. They have come to realize that studying
zoölogy in a museum is like studying sociology in a cemetery. They have
discovered that animals and plants possess not merely vitality, but
individuality, and since man's real interest in the world he looks down
upon has always been, though he has often denied it, because he hoped
to see himself there, a new school of fabulists has appeared who hold
the mirror of nature up to us as Esop and Pilpay did of old.
Among them there is no one, unless it be Kipling, who is the equal of
Maeterlinck. Like Tyltyl, he wears the fairy button on his cap which,
when touched, brings out the souls of things. And, as in "The Blue
Bird", the souls he has once released by the magic of his phrases from
their material prisons do not get back again. They remain visible to
us ever after; not merely the souls of the dog and the cat, but of the
bee, the oak, the bread, and the automobile. He shows us the cat as a
diminutive but undomesticated tiger to whom we are nothing more than an
overgrown and uneatable prey. We see through his eyes the cultivated
plants as our dumb slaves, for "the rose and the corn, had they wings,
would fly at our approach like the birds."
Maeterlinck has recently been testing the thinking horses of Eberfeld,
the successors of Kluge Hans, and convinced himself of their ability
to spell and cipher, even to extract the square root of big numbers, a
feat which Maeterlinck says he himself could never learn at school. He
does, however, draw the line at crediting the horses with telepathic
powers.[6]
"The Blue Bird" cannot escape comparison with its contemporary rival
on the stage, "Chantecler", but the similarity is superficial. They
are as unlike in their philosophy as in their style. Maeterlinck has
written a fairy story for children; Rostand a satire for grown people.
Maeterlinck conceals his depth of thought under a dialogue of simple
and artless prose. Rostand disguises his trivialities in elaborate and
artificial versification. "The Blue Bird" is really the offspring of
"The Little White Bird", Mendel to the contrary notwithstanding. But
Maeterlinck lacks the delicious humor with which Barrie had depicted
his Peter Pan.
Whether one who has read "The Blue Bird" will be disappointed when he
sees it depends upon the vividness of his imagination. He will probably
find that he has in reading it failed to appreciate the humor of the
grotesque characterization of the minor characters, such as the Bread,
Dog, Cat, and Sugar, but on the other hand he will find that he has
pictured to himself such scenes as the Palace of Night and the Kingdom
of the Future much more splendid and impressive than they appear on the
stage. The play as performed at the New Theater in New York was not
nearly so effective as at the Haymarket in London.
"The Blue Bird" would go best as an opera. I wish somebody would set
it to music. The very impressive song of the mothers welcoming their
children shows how much music might add to it. Debussy's dreamy and
formless harmonies suited "Pelléas and Mélisande", but the author of
the "Domestic Symphony" alone could do justice to this kitchen drama.
Only Strauss could fit Sugar and Milk with suitable motives, and give
the proper orchestration to the quarrels of Cat and Dog, and Fire and
Water.
With Maeterlinck, personification is not accomplished through
falsification. His "Life of the Bee" is based on his own observation
and wide reading, and is freer from error than many of the purely
scientific books written on the subject. Such mistakes in fact, as he
makes, are accidental and never due to distortion or invention for the
purpose of working in a poetic fancy or of pointing a moral. In fact,
he does not point a moral. His nature studies teach no lesson unless it
is the great lesson of kinship with nature. He does not, like Kipling,
write an animal story with the aim of amending the budget bill or
changing diplomatic relations. "The Life of the Bee" may be used as a
socialistic tract. It may also be used as an anti-socialistic tract.
"The spirit of the hive", as he interprets it, attracts some people and
repels others. Lord Avebury, who is the leading English authority on
ants and bees, is the head of the society for opposing socialism.
Maeterlinck is not one of those who set up animals on their hind legs
to act as schoolmasters to men. He finds nowhere outside of ourselves,
neither in the heavens above nor in the earth beneath, that justice in
which mankind instinctively and inevitably believes. He is as largely
pragmatic as Sumner in his derivation of morality:
Between the external world and our actions there exists only
the simple and essentially non-moral relations of cause and
effect.
In the course of adapting ourselves to the laws of life we
have naturally been led to credit with our moral ideas those
principles of causality that we encounter most frequently.
And we have in this fashion created a very plausible
semblance of effective justice, which rewards or punishes
most of our actions in the degree that they approach, or
deviate from, certain laws that are essential for the
preservation of the race.
Within us there is a spirit that weighs only intentions;
without us a power that only balances deeds.[7]
This reads like a twentieth century supplement to Huxley's Romanes
address.
Maeterlinck's sense of justice is more outraged by the calamities that
result from the carelessness and malevolence of man than the disasters
of earthquake and tempest. We are strange lovers of an ideal justice,
he says; we who condemn three fourths of mankind to the misery of
poverty and disease, and then complain of the injustice of impersonal
nature. And in reading a story of the "Arabian Nights", he is struck
by the fact that the women of the harem, creatures trained to vice and
condemned to slavery, give utterance to the highest moral precepts:
These women, who forever are pondering the loftiest,
grandest problems of justice, of the morality of men and of
nations, never throw one questioning glance on their own
fate, or for one instant suspect the abominable injustice
whereof they are victims. Nor do those suspect it either who
listen to them, and love and admire and understand them.
And we who marvel at this--we who also reflect on justice
and virtue, on pity and love--are we so sure that they who
come after us shall not some day find in our present social
condition a spectacle equally disconcerting and amazing.[8]
Maeterlinck stands quite aloof from politics, but not because he is out
of sympathy with the tendency of the times. He has faith in democracy
in spite of his clear perception of its faults and dangers:
In those problems in which all life's enigmas converge, the
crowd which is wrong is almost always justified as against
the wise man who is right. It refuses to believe him on his
word. It feels dimly that behind the most evident abstract
truths there are numberless living truths which no brain
can foresee, for they need time, reality and men's passions
to develop their work. That is why, whatever warning we may
give it, whatever prediction we may make to it, the crowd
insists before all that the experiment shall be tried. Can
we say that, in cases where the crowd has obtained the
experiment, it was wrong to insist upon it?[9]
It would surely have been highly dangerous to confide the
destinies of the species to Plato or Aristotle, Marcus
Aurelius, Shakespeare or Montesquieu. At the very worst
moments of the French Revolution the fate of the people was
in the hands of philosophers of no mean order.[10]
The thoroughgoing character of his democracy is emphasized by Professor
Dewey in his lecture on "Maeterlinck's Philosophy of Life" delivered at
Columbia University:
"Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Maeterlinck are thus far, perhaps, the only
men who have been habitually, and, as it were, instinctively, aware
that democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency,
but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience to nature;
among these Maeterlinck has at least the advantage of greater
illumination by the progress of natural science."
This democratic feeling seems to me to arise more from his mystical
sense of the continuity of life than from personal disposition or
political theory. In his earlier and more characteristic dramas,
the persons are hardly more than talking symbols. Their looks and
costumes are not described, either in the stage directions or in the
dialogue. Their names--if he takes the trouble to give them names--are
scarcely sufficient in some cases to indicate the sex. Their speech is
language reduced to its lowest elements, excessively simplified, in
fact, and full of the repetitions and incoherencies common to stupid
and uneducated people the world over. Maeterlinck himself calls them
"marionnettes", and says that they have the appearance of half deaf
somnambulists just awakening from a painful dream.
But these puppet people are divested of individuality for the purpose
of reducing them to the common denominator of humanity. They are
devoided of personal interest in order to prevent the attention of the
spectator from being fixed upon them. They are made transparent so that
we may look through them and perceive the external forces which control
them. The dramatic poet, he says in the preface to his early dramas,
"must show us in what way, in what form, in what conditions, according
to what laws, and to what end our destinies are controlled by the
superior powers, the unintelligible influences, the infinite principles
of which, in so far as he is a poet, he is persuaded that the universe
is full."
Great poetry he regards as composed of three principal elements:
First, verbal beauty, then the contemplation and passionate
depiction of what really exists around us and in ourselves,
that is to say, nature and feeling, and, finally, enveloping
the entire work and creating its own atmosphere, the idea
which the poet has of the unknown in which float the beings
and things he evokes, of the mystery which dominates them
and judges them and presides over their destinies.
The critics were not altogether wrong when they called the characters
of his earlier plays "mere shadows." But a shadow exists only when a
bright light is cast on a real object. Maeterlinck's purpose is to make
Plato's cave men aware of the drama that is being enacted behind their
backs. The real action of these plays is not that seen on the stage.
His dramas contain their message written in secret ink between the
lines, and it becomes visible only when warmed by the sympathy of the
reader.
The performance of "Macbeth" at Saint-Wandrille had a double interest.
It introduced a novel form of the drama, and it added another to the
many attempts to put Shakespeare into French. This select and household
entertainment might be called "chamber pageantry", because it bears
somewhat the same relation to the outdoor processionings now so popular
as chamber music does to orchestral. Most of the incongruities which
the critics pointed out[11] are not inherent in the plan, but due to the
fact that "Macbeth" is not adapted to such a setting any more than it
is to the modern theater. Conceivably something more effective could be
done in this line if a new play were written to fit the place and the
conditions of enactment, requirements certainly not more exigeant than
those of the Elizabethan stage. In this it would even be possible to
keep strictly to the three unities, and play the scenes appropriately
indoors and out, in daylight and dark.
Madame Georgette Leblanc-Maeterlinck has been, as wives are apt to be,
both a help and a hindrance to her husband.
She has inspired some of his best work and also embroiled him in
interminable controversies with theatrical managers. "Monna Vanna"
was written for her, so, very naturally, she wanted a monopoly of the
title rôle, and when Debussy set "Pelléas et Mélisande" to music as
unearthly as the play, she insisted upon singing Mélisande. But the
Parisian managers, either because they had _protégées_ of their own
or because they did not have a sufficiently high opinion of Madame
Leblanc's capabilities as an actress and a prima donna, declined to
take her, and M. Maeterlinck was not able to compel them to, or to
prevent the production of the play and opera with other leading ladies.
She did, however, finally sing the part both at home and in America,
though she lost the distinction of creating it.
But, at any rate, we owe to her assiduity a new translation of
"Macbeth", which the London _Times_ says "is the most conscientious
effort to preserve the atmosphere of a Shakespearean play which has
been attempted in French since M. Marcel Schwab's remarkable rendering
of 'Hamlet.'" The difficulty of translating poetical language, wherein
the sound and connotation of the words are as essential as their
literal meaning, is admirably stated by M. Maeterlinck:
The humble translators face to face with Shakespeare are
like painters seated in front of the same forest, the
same seas, on the same mountain. Each of them will make a
different picture. And a translation is almost as much an
_état d'âme_ as is a landscape. Above, below, and all round
the literal and literary sense of the primitive phrase
floats a secret life which is all but impossible to catch,
and which is, nevertheless, more important than the external
life of the words and of the images. It is that secret life
which it is important to understand and to reproduce as
well as one can. Extreme prudence is required, since the
slightest false note, the smallest error, may destroy the
illusion and destroy the beauty of the finest page. Such is
the ideal of the conscientious translator. It excuses in
advance every effort of the kind, even this one, which comes
after so many others, and contributes to the common work
merely the very modest aid of a few phrases which chance may
now and then have favored.
He illustrates these variant views of the same landscape by bringing
together all the different versions of a couplet, from Letourneur of
the eighteenth century to Duval, the latest translator of Shakespeare:
"Strange things I have in head that will to hand
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
"J'ai dans la tête d'étranges choses qui aboutiront
à ma main; et qu'il faut accomplir avant qu'on les
médite."--(Maeterlinck.)
"J'ai dans la tête d'étranges choses qui réclament
ma main et veulent être exécutés avant d'être
méditées."--(François-Victor Hugo.)
"Ma tête a des projets étranges qui réclament ma main;
achevons l'acte avant d'y réfléchir."--(Maurice Pottecher.)
"J'ai dans la tête d'étranges choses qui passeront dans mes
mains, des choses qu'il faut exécuter avant d'avoir le temps
de les examiner."--(Guizot.)
"J'ai dans ma tête d'étranges choses que ma main exécutera,
et qui veulent être accomplies sans me laisser le temps de
les peser."--(Montégut.)
"Ma tête a des projets qu'exécutera ma main; je veux les
accomplir de suite, sans me donner le temps de les examiner
de trop près."--(Benjamin Laroche.)
"J'ai d'étranges projets en tête qui veulent être exécutés
avant d'y réfléchir."--(Georges Duval.)
"J'ai dans la tête d'étranges projets, qui, de là,
passeront dans mes mains; et il faut les exécuter avant
qu'on puisse les pénétrer."--(Pierre Letourneur.)
This couplet is in itself an argument for more freedom of translation
than is customarily allowed. The choice of "scann'd" from among
other words that would have expressed the idea as well or better was
obviously dictated by the necessity of rhyming with "hand", and this in
turn was due to the desire to alliterate with "head." A translator, if
he is to make as good poetry as the original author, must have an equal
license. It is therefore not surprising to see that M. Maeterlinck has
been most successful in preserving the spirit of the original where
he has translated into rhyme instead of prose, for here the exactions
of the French verse have forced him to a greater freedom. Here are
fragments of the witches' songs:
Paddock crie, "Allez, allez."
Le laid est beau et le beau laid
Allons flotter dans la brume,
Allons faire le tour du monde,
Dans la brume et l'air immonde.
Trois fois le chat miaula
Le hérisson piaula.
Harpier crie, "Voilà! voilà!"
Double, double, puis redouble,
Le feu chante au chaudron trouble.
In order that the reader may judge for himself whether the Belgian poet
has succeeded in this effort to put Shakespeare into French, we quote a
few passages of especial difficulty. The complete text is published in
_Illustration_ of August 28, 1909.
Et, enfin, ce Duncan fut si doux sur son trône, si pur dans
sa puissance que ses vertues parleront comme d'angéliques
trompettes contre le crime damné de son assassinat. Et la
pitié, pareille à un nouveau-né chevauchant la tempête, ou
à un cherubin céleste qui monte les coursiers invisibles de
l'air, soufflerait l'acte horrible dans les yeux de tout
homme jusqu'à noyer le vent parmi les larmes.
"Tu ne dormiras! Macbeth a tué le sommeil!" L'innocent
sommeil, le sommeil qui dévide l'écheveau embrouillé des
soucis.
Tout l'océan du grand Neptune pourrait-il laver ce sang de
ma main? Non, c'est plutôt cette main qui empourprera les
vagues innombrables, faisant de la mer verte un océan rouge.
Maeterlinck has himself suffered many things of many translators.
Alfred Sutro has given us admirable versions of his philosophical
works, "Wisdom and Destiny", "The Treasure of the Humble", and "The
Life of the Bee", but his plays have not been so fortunate, for their
emotional effect is dependent upon the maintenance of a peculiar
atmosphere, so sensitive that a harsh breath will destroy it, leaving
ridiculous wooden puppets where the moment before we thought we
glimpsed beings of supernatural beauty. So even a reader whose French
is feeble will prefer the plays in the original, for their language
is of extreme simplicity and the effect may be even enhanced by the
additional veil that his partial incomprehension draws across the stage
picture. Then, too, Maeterlinck's trick of triple repetition which
offends our Anglo-Saxon ears ceases to annoy us in French, for in that
language even identical rhymes are permissible.
As an example of how a prosaic literalism may spoil the illusion, let
us take that exquisite passage which closes "Pelléas et Mélisande":
C'était un petit être si tranquille, si timide et si
silencieux. C'était un pauvre petit très mystérieux, comme
tout le monde. Elle est là, comme si elle était la grande
soeur de son enfant.
This is the way it is rendered by Laurence Alma Tadema, and the
libretto of the opera is still worse: "It was a little gentle being, so
quiet, so timid and so silent. It was a poor little mysterious being,
like all the world. She lies there as if she were her own child's big
sister."
The wise old man, who at Mélisande's death bed sums up her character
in the words, "_C'était un pauvre petit être mystérieux, comme tout
le monde_", gives at the same time the key to the philosophy of the
play.--"She was a poor little mysterious being like every one." "Like
every one"! The phrase throws back a level ray of light, as though it
were a setting sun, and illuminates the dark road we have traversed.
"Like every one", and all this while we had been thinking what an
unnatural and absurd creature this Mélisande was, this princess who did
not know where she came from or where she was going to, who was always
weeping without reason, who played so carelessly with her wedding ring
over the well's mouth, and whose words could never express what she
felt. "Like every one"? perhaps ... at any rate to be thought on, once
it has been suggested to us. And in this connection we may consider a
sentence in "Wisdom and Destiny":
Genius only throws into bolder relief all that can and
actually does take place in the lives of all men; otherwise
were it genius no longer but incoherence or madness.
What fun Francisque Sarcey did make of "Pelléas and Mélisande"
and of its admirers at its first representation in Paris in 1893.
According to the veteran critic of _Le Temps_,[12] the play contained
a triple symbolism; one part not understood by the profane, one part
not understood by the initiates, and one part not understood by the
author. Maeterlinck was only a passing craze, he thought, due to the
reprehensible fondness of the Parisians for anything foreign. Yet some
fifteen years after that he might have seen in New York blocks of
people standing for hours in the snow around the Manhattan Opera House
to get a chance to see, with the added charm of Debussy's music, this
same play that the critics called "Maeterlinck's Sedan."
Even Richard Hovey, who first introduced Maeterlinck's plays to
America in the days when the "Green Tree Library" flourished and bore
its strange fruit, feared that "his devotion to the wormy side of
things may prevent him from ever becoming popular." But he got over
his devotion to the wormy side of things and has grown into a more
wholesome philosophy and so into a greater popularity. The transition
point in his style and thought is marked by the preface to his dramas,
1901. He neither recants nor apologizes for his earlier work, still
less does he ridicule it, as Ruskin did his first writing, but he
frankly and gracefully indicates the changed attitude toward life which
shows itself in his later essays.
He ceases to use the word "destiny" exclusively in its evil sense, and
to represent it as a power inimical to man, watching in the shadow to
pounce upon us whenever we manifest a little joy. Fate in his later
work does not always mean fatality, and events are controlled by
character more than by external forces. Man by wisdom can overcome
destiny. But Maeterlinck would have us take care to keep a sane balance
of altruism and egoism:
You are told you should love your neighbor as yourself;
but if you love yourself meanly, childishly, timidly, even
so shall you love your neighbor. Learn, therefore, to love
yourself with a love that is wise and healthy, that is large
and complete.
It is a curious transformation by which this Belgian lawyer and
esoteric poet has become one of the widest known of French playwrights
and moralists. He was born in Ghent, August 29, 1862, of an old Flemish
family. The name, "measurer of grain", is derived from an ancestor who
was generous in a time of famine.
He was educated at the University of Ghent for law, in accordance with
the wishes of his family, though he would have preferred medicine. But
his dominant interest was always literature.
His experience at the bar was brief, a couple of criminal cases, and
then he deserted the law and went to Paris for a year, where he was
chiefly under the influence of the French symbolist, Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam. Then he returned home to devote himself in quiet to the
cultivation of his double garden of literature and science. He was
especially attracted by the freshness and richness of Shakespeare and
his contemporaries, and, as he says, drank long and thirstily from
the Elizabethan springs. In Shelley and Browning he was also deeply
interested.[13]
At the age of twenty-four he began to contribute to _La Pléiade_, the
organ of the "Young Belgians", a group of ambitious young writers,
impressionists, seekers after novel effects of style, chiefly attained
by means of transferring descriptive adjectives from one of the five
senses to the other four. In the third number of this short-lived
periodical was published Maeterlinck's first and apparently his last
story, "The Massacre of the Innocents", a biblical incident reset in
the times of the Spanish wars.[14] Here appeared some of the poems
republished in 1889 in the little volume entitled "Serres Chaudes"
("Hot-house Blooms").
The cross-fertilization of Elizabethan drama with French symbolism gave
rise to the "Princess Maleine", a new species if there ever was one,
Shakespearean in form and incident, most un-Shakespearean in everything
else. The first edition of this drama was an extremely limited one,
twenty copies, printed on a hand press with Maeterlinck turning the
crank.
It was the "Princess Maleine" which led to his "discovery" by Octave
Mirbeau, who proclaimed it "the greatest work of genius of the times",
and "superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in Shakespeare."[15]
This newspaper praise made Maeterlinck instantly famous everywhere
save in his own country. His neighbors in Ghent refused to take it
seriously, and thought it a pity that his family should encourage the
young man in his mania by paying for puffs like that.
To trace Maeterlinck's dramatic development is like watching a
materialization at a séance. His characters have become increasingly
solid and life-like, but they have lost the illusiveness and
allusiveness that made their charm in his earlier plays. Maeterlinck
has never been able to equal Ibsen--nor has anyone else--in the art of
making a perfectly individualized and natural character serve also as
a type or symbol, thus doubling our interest by combining the specific
and the general.
Maeterlinck's genius shows best in his own peculiar field of symbolism
and suggestion, that of his early dramas and of "The Blue Bird." His
plays of a more conventional type, "Monna Vanna" and "Mary Magdalene",
betray his deficiencies as a dramatic writer, his lack of the power of
plot construction and a sense of humor. "Mary Magdalene" is really as
much a one-act play as "The Interior", for the last act is the only
one that counts. Here the crowd has the star part, the crowd of the
lame, the halt and the blind, the sinners and the diseased, whom Jesus
has cured and who now desert him; and the real drama is enacted, not
in the upper chamber of the house of Joseph of Arimathea, but in the
street outside, leading to the Place of the Skull. The scene of the
woman taken in adultery is far less dramatic than in its biblical form,
because in the play she is really protected by Roman swords, not by the
awakened consciences of the mob.
The continuous development of Maeterlinck's philosophy of life is shown
as well in his plays as in his essays. Mary Magdalene, who would not
save her Savior by the sacrifice of her virtue, represents a higher
ethical ideal than Monna Vanna, who gives herself for the city. In his
earlier plays Maeterlinck tries to frighten us with the traditional
Terrors which in "The Blue Bird" are shown to be imprisoned and
harmless in the Palace of Night. Old Time with his scythe, who as "The
Intruder" of twenty years ago brought death into the household, appears
now in "The Blue Bird" under a kinder aspect, calling the Children of
the Future into life. In fact, "The Blue Bird" represents the highest
point of the philosophy of optimism, for it is based upon the most
daring of all the assumptions of science--that the secret of existence
is also the secret of happiness. "To be wise is above all to be happy",
says Maeterlinck. Truly, he has got a long way from Schopenhauer, the
object of his boyish admiration.
Maeterlinck has, in short, acquired a faith. I do not see exactly
whom or what he has faith in, but he has faith, and that, after all,
seems to be the main thing. The development of his thought has an
especial interest in that it shows how a spiritual interpretation of
the universe and a moral support can be built up on pure agnosticism.
From Christianity he has derived little except a vague symbolism and
certain ethical ideals. He looks back with bitterness upon his school
days in the Jesuit college at Ghent, but his writings show no trace of
the anticlerical animosity which is so conspicuous in Haeckel's. It was
his latest book, "Death", the most religious of them all, breathing a
spirit of unconquerable faith in immortality and future happiness, that
brought down upon Maeterlinck the condemnation of Rome, and in 1914 all
his books and plays were put upon the Index by the Sacred Congregation.
From the mystics he has derived much, especially from the German
Novalis and the Flemish Ruysbroek, whose works he has translated into
French. In his preface to the latter he says:
Mystical truths have this strange superiority over truths of
the ordinary kind, that they know neither age nor death....
They possess the immunity of Swedenborg's angels, who
progress continually toward the springtime of youth, so that
the eldest angels always appear the youngest.
But he undoubtedly owes his ethical and philosophical growth most of
all to the study of nature, not the vague contemplation of natural
objects which in the early Victorian era was thought proper pabulum for
poets, but the effort to understand nature through the use of modern
scientific methods. We are reminded of Sir Thomas Browne, who says:
"Those strange and mystical transmigrations that I have observed in
silkworms turned my philosophy into divinity."
The reason why many poets and imaginative writers of high ability
find themselves without influence in the modern world is, in my
opinion, because they are ignorant of science or inimical to it.
They, therefore, write for antiquity, which does not buy books, or
for posterity, which, it is safe to say, will never come back to the
position they hold. The people do not enjoy science, but their manner
of thought is molded by it, and they are unaffected or repelled by
music out of tune with it.
Maeterlinck, while thoroughly appreciating science, does not exaggerate
its power. He does not look to it for a complete explanation of the
world.
Rarely does a mystery disappear; ordinarily it only changes
its place. But it is often very important, very desirable,
that it manage to change its place. From a certain point of
view, all the progress of human thought reduces itself to
two or three changes of this kind--to have dislodged two or
three mysteries from the place where they did harm in order
to transport them where they become harmless, where they can
do good. Sometimes it is enough, without a mystery changing
its place, if we can succeed in giving it another name. That
which was called "the gods" is now called "life." And if
life is just as inexplicable as the gods, we have at least
gained this, that in the name of life no one has authority
to speak nor right to do harm.
Maeterlinck does not seem to me so much an original thinker as an
exquisitely sensitive personality who is able to catch the dominant
note of the times in which he lives, and to give it artistic
expression, as a musician upon a high tower might take as his key
the fundamental tone of the streets below, modulating his music as
the rhythm of the city changes, not to obtain applause, but because
his soul is in sympathy with the life around him. In Maeterlinck's
writings, various though they be in form and topic, may be continuously
traced the changing moods of the philosophy of the last twenty years,
for he has always retained his sincerity of thought and courage of
expression.
To look fearlessly upon life; to accept the laws of nature,
not with meek resignation, but as her sons, who dare to
search and question; to have peace and confidence within our
soul--these are the beliefs that make for happiness. But
to believe is not enough; all depends on how we believe. I
may believe that there is no God, that I am self-contained,
that my brief sojourn here serves no purpose; that in the
economy of this world without limit my existence counts for
as little as the evanescent hue of a flower--I may believe
all this, in a deeply religious spirit, with the infinite
throbbing within me; you may believe in one all-powerful
God, who cherishes and protects you, yet your belief may be
mean, and petty, and small. I shall be happier than you, and
calmer, if my doubt is greater, and nobler, and more earnest
than is your faith; if it has probed more deeply into my
soul, traversed wider horizons, if there are more things
it has loved. And if the thoughts and feelings on which
my doubt reposes have become vaster and purer than those
that support your faith, then shall the God of my disbelief
become mightier and of supremer comfort than the God to whom
you cling. For, indeed, belief and unbelief are mere empty
words; not so the loyalty, the greatness and profoundness of
the reasons wherefore we believe or do not believe.[16]
* * * * *
HOW TO READ MAETERLINCK
To those familiar with Maeterlinck, the following, and perhaps also
the foregoing, will be of no interest. But those who wish to make his
closer acquaintance may find some suggestions not impertinent.
Maeterlinck's essays are published in English by Dodd, Mead and
Company, in seven volumes: "The Treasure of the Humble"; "Wisdom and
Destiny"; "The Buried Temple"; "The Measure of the Hours"; "The Double
Garden"; "On Emerson and Other Essays" (Novalis and Ruysbroek); and
"Our Eternity." The order given is that of their publication in French.
Any one of them will give the reader an insight into the character of
his thought; "Wisdom and Destiny" is the most consecutive. If one has
time for but a single essay, he may read "The Leaf of Olive."
For his treatment of nature, see "The Life of the Bee" (Dodd, Mead and
Company), essays in "The Double Garden" and in "The Measure of the
Hodrs", and "The Insect's Homer" in _Forum_, September, 1910; also
"News of Spring and Other Nature Studies", illustrated by E. J. Detmold
(Dodd, Mead and Company).
Of his dramatic work the early mystical plays are most characteristic.
The timid reader should avoid reading them alone after dark. Yet
there is nothing supernatural in them--except the sense of the
supernatural that permeates them. Nothing happens that cannot be given
a rationalistic explanation--only the reader is not disposed at the
time to accept such an explanation. Select your co-readers with care
(all plays should, of course, be read aloud); avoiding particularly
the hysterical giggler, for the effect depends upon maintaining the
atmospheric pressure, and Maeterlinck treads close to the line that
separates the sublime from the ridiculous and, as he himself confesses,
he occasionally steps over. Read the original if you have any knowledge
whatever of French, for the language is of the simplest, and in these
veiled dramas a slight additional haziness does no harm. (The French
edition is published by Lacomblez, Brussels, in three volumes. Volume
I, "La Princesse Maleine", "L'lntruse", "Les Aveugles"; Volume II,
"Pelléas et Mélisande", "Alladine et Palomides", "Intérieur", "La
mort de Tintagiles"; Volume III, "Aglavaine et Sélysette", "Ariane
et Barbe-bleue", "Soeur Beatrice." Volumes I and II, translated by
Hovey, are sold by Dodd, Mead and Company in three volumes.) If you
are doubtful of your ability to read "the static drama", or of your
capacity to enjoy it, begin with "The Interior (The Home)." Here the
tragedy is enacted inside the house, while all the talking is done
outside. If you find a fascination in it, pass on to "The Intruder" and
"The Blind." This last affords unlimited scope to those who are fond of
running down symbols. The dead priest in the middle of the group will
stand for any form of ecclesiasticism you may have outgrown, and you
can give the blind people around him the names of all the philosophers
you know, according to the degree of their blindness and their reliance
upon rationalism, intuitionalism, child psychology, animal psychology,
etc., for a way out. But don't think you have to label them at all if
you don't like to.
To understand "The Blue Bird," all you have to do is to become a
child. Then after you grow up again you may find that you understand
it still better. It was first presented in Russia, where it was played
by fifty-two companies. London and New York saw it before Paris,
where it was put on the stage for the first time five years after it
appeared elsewhere, with Madame Georgette Leblanc in the rôle of Light.
(English version, Dodd, Mead and Company.) Maeterlinck has taken out
the forest conspiracy because it scared the children, and substituted a
new act containing one of his most original characters, the Happiness
of Running Barefoot in the Dew, who is apparently a daughter of Doctor
Kneipp. Madame Maeterlinck has prepared "The Blue Bird for Children" in
story form for schools (Silver, Burdett and Company).
"Mary Magdalene" is played by Olga Nethersole, but may be as well
read as seen. "Monna Vanna" was prohibited by the Censor in England
until 1914, but was played in this country by Bertha Kalich, without
offense. The only play by Maeterlinck that is at all "Frenchy" is one
he translated from the English of John Ford. (Dodd, Mead and Company
publish "Joyzelle" and "Monna Vanna", "Aglavaine and Sélysette",
"Mary Magdalene", "Pelléas and Mélisande", "Princess Maleine", "The
Intruder, and Other Plays", and "Sister Beatrice", and "Ariane and Blue
Beard." Harper publishes "Monna Vanna"; Crowell published "Pelléas
and Mélisande"; R. F. Seymour, Chicago, publishes "Twelve Songs of
Maeterlinck." Several of the plays can be found in back numbers of
_Poet Lore_ sold by R. G. Badger, Boston.)
A comprehensive bibliography will be found in the life of Maeterlinck
by Montrose J. Moses (Duffield). We have also in English brief
biographies by Gérard Harry (Allen and Sons) and J. Bithel (Scribner).
The sketch by William Sharp in the "Warner Library of the World's Best
Literature" is remarkable for its insight, and the reader may also
be referred to Hunneker's "Iconoclasts", Thorold's "Six Masters of
Disillusion", and the article on "Maeterlinck's Philosophy of Life",
by Professor John Dewey of Columbia in the _Hibbert Journal_, July,
1911. The lover of Maeterlinck, whose affection is capable of being
alienated, should beware of reading the very clever parody on his style
in Owen Sea-man's "Borrowed Plumes" (Holt).
[1] "L'Abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille." Paris. 1827.
[2] From "The Past", by Maurice Maeterlinck. _The Independent,_ March
6, 1902.
[3] "The Portrait of a Lady", in "The Double Garden."
[4] See her account of the performance in _Century Magazine_, January,
1911.
[5] For Maeterlinck on Emerson, see _Poet Lore_, Vol. 10, p. 76,
January, 1898, and _Arena_, Vol. 16, p. 563, March, 1896.
[6] _Metropolitan Magazine_, May, 1914.
[7] "The Mystery of Justice", in "The Double Garden."
[8] _The Independent_, January 3, 1901.
[9] "The Double Garden."
[10] "The Mystery of Justice."
[11] For a description of the performance see "A Realization of
Macbeth" by Alvan G. Sanborn in _The Independent_, September 15, 1909.
[12] See his "Quarante Ans de Théâtre."
[13] His admiration for Browning appears in his reply to Professor
William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, who had called attention to the close
similarity between an incident in Browning's "Luria" and Maeterlinck's
"Monna Vanna." Maeterlinck very frankly and courteously acknowledged
his indebtedness to Browning, whom, he said, he regarded, like
Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, as common sources of literary
inspiration. _The Independent_, March 5 and June 11, 1903.
[14] This is signed by his name in its original form, Mooris
Mäterlinck. A translation of this and other tales by Belgian writers by
Edith Wingate Rinder was published in 1897 in the "Green Tree Library"
of Stone & Kimball (now Duffield & Co.).
[15] _Figaro_, August 24, 1890. Octave Mirbeau later busied himself
in booming Marguerite Audoux, the Paris sempstress, who wrote
"Marie-Claire."
[16] "Wisdom and Destiny," § 79.