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PROPHETS OF DISSENT
BOOKS BY OTTO HELLER
HENRIK IBSEN: PLAYS AND PROBLEMS
STUDIES IN MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE
LESSING'S "MINNA VON BARNHELM"
in English
Prophets of Dissent: Essays
on Maeterlinck, Strindberg,
Nietzsche and Tolstoy
by
Otto Heller
Professor of Modern European Literature
in Washington University (St. Louis)
Is there a thing in this world that can be separated from
the inconceivable?
Maeterlinck, "Our Eternity"
New York
Mcmxviii
Alfred A Knopf
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF
PRINTED IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To
HELLEN SEARS
staunchest of friends
Preface
The collocation of authors so widely at variance in their moral and
artistic aims as are those assembled in this little book may be defended
by the safe and simple argument that all of these authors have exerted,
each in his own way, an influence of singular range and potency. By
fairly general consent they are the foremost literary expositors of
important modern tendencies. It is, therefore, of no consequence whether
or not their ways of thinking fit into our particular frame of mind;
what really matters is that in this small group of writers more clearly
perhaps than in any other similarly restricted group the basic issues of
the modern struggle for social transformation appear to be clearly and
sharply joined. That in viewing them as indicators of contrarious ideal
currents due allowance must be made for peculiarities of temperament,
both individual and racial, and, correspondingly, for the purely
"personal equation" in their spiritual attitudes, does not detract to
any material degree from their generic significance.
In any case, there are those of us who in the vortical change of the
social order through which we are whirling, feel a desire to orient
ourselves through an objective interest in letters among the embattled
purposes and policies which are now gripped in a final test of strength.
In a crisis that makes the very foundations of civilization quake, and
at a moment when the salvation of human liberty seems to depend upon the
success of a united stand of all the modern forces of life against the
destructive impact of the most primitive and savage of all the
instincts, would it not be absurdly pedantic for a critical student of
literature to resort to any artificial selection and co-ordination of
his material in order to please the prudes and the pedagogues? And is it
not natural to seek that material among the largest literary apparitions
of the age?
It is my opinion, then, that the four great authors discussed in the
following pages stand, respectively, for the determining strains in a
great upsetting movement, and that in the aggregate they bring to view
the composite mental and moral impulsion of the times. Through such
forceful articulations of current movements the more percipient class of
readers have for a long time been enabled to foresense, in a manner, the
colossal reconstruction of society which needs must follow this
monstrous, but presumably final, clash between the irreconcilable
elements in the contrasted principles of right and might, the masses and
the monarchs.
However, the gathering together of Maeterlinck, Nietzsche, Strindberg,
and Tolstoy under the hospitality of a common book-cover permits of a
supplementary explanation on the ground of a certain fundamental
likeness far stronger than their only too obvious diversities. They are,
one and all, radicals in thought, and, with differing strength of
intention, reformers of society, inasmuch as their speculations and
aspirations are relevant to practical problems of living. And yet what
gives them such a durable hold on our attention is not their particular
apostolate, but the fact that their artistic impulses ascend from the
subliminal regions of the inner life, and that their work somehow brings
one into touch with the hidden springs of human action and human fate.
This means, in effect, that all of them are mystics by original cast of
mind and that notwithstanding any difference, however apparently
violent, of views and theories, they follow the same introspective path
towards the recognition and interpretation of the law of life. From
widely separated ethical premises they thus arrive at an essentially
uniform appraisal of personal happiness as a function of living.
To those readers who are not disposed to grant the validity of the
explanations I have offered, perhaps equality of rank in artistic
importance may seem a sufficient criterion for the association of
authors, and, apart from all sociologic and philosophic considerations,
they may be willing to accept my somewhat arbitrary selection on this
single count.
O. H.
April, 1918.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I Maurice Maeterlinck: a study in Mysticism 3
II August Strindberg: a study in Eccentricity 71
III Friedrich Nietzsche: a study in Exaltation 109
IV Leo Tolstoy: a study in Revivalism 161
I
THE MYSTICISM OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK
Under the terrific atmospheric pressure that has been torturing the
civilization of the entire world since the outbreak of the greatest of
wars, contemporary literature of the major cast appears to have gone
into decline. Even the comparatively few writers recognized as
possessing talents of the first magnitude have given way to that
pressure and have shrunk to minor size, so that it may be seriously
questioned, to say the least, whether during the past forty months or so
a single literary work of outstanding and sustained grandeur has been
achieved anywhere. That the effect of the universal embattlement upon
the art of letters should be, in the main, extremely depressing, is
quite natural; but the conspicuous loss of breadth and poise in writers
of the first order seems less in accordance with necessity,--at least
one might expect a very superior author to rise above that necessity. In
any case it is very surprising that it should be a Belgian whose
literary personality is almost unique in having remained exempt from the
general abridgment of spiritual stature.
It is true that Maurice Maeterlinck, the most eminent literary figure in
his sadly stricken country and of unsurpassed standing among the
contemporary masters of French letters, has, since the great
catastrophe, won no new laurels as a dramatist; and that in the other
field cultivated by him, that of the essay, his productiveness has been
anything but prolific. But in his case one is inclined to interpret
reticence as an eloquent proof of a singularly heroic firmness of
character at a time when on both sides of the great divide which now
separates the peoples, the cosmopolitan trend of human advance has come
to a temporary halt, and the nations have relapsed from their
laboriously attained degree of world-citizenship into the homelier, but
more immediately virtuous, state of traditional patriotism.
It is a military necessity as well as a birthright of human nature that
at a time like the present the patriot is excused from any pharisaical
profession of loving his enemy. Before the war, Maeterlinck's writings
were animated by humanitarian sympathies of the broadest catholicity. He
even had a peculiar affection for the Germans, because doubtless he
perceived the existence of a strong kinship between certain essential
traits in his spiritual composition and the fundamental tendencies of
German philosophy and art. But when Belgium was lawlessly invaded, her
ancient towns heinously destroyed, her soil laid waste and drenched with
the blood of her people, Maeterlinck, as a son of Belgium, learned to
hate the Germans to the utmost of a wise and temperate man's capacity
for hatred, and in his war papers collected in _Les Débris de la
Guerre_, (1916),(1) which ring with the passionate impulse of the
patriot, his outraged sense of justice prevails over the disciplined
self-command of the stoic.
(1) "The Wrack of the Storm," 1916.
He refuses to acquiesce in the lenient discrimination between the guilty
Government of Germany and her innocent population: "It is not true that
in this gigantic crime there are innocent and guilty, or degrees of
guilt. They stand on one level, all those who have taken part in it....
It is, very simply, the German, from one end of his country to the
other, who stands revealed as a beast of prey which the firm will of our
planet finally repudiates. We have here no wretched slaves dragged along
by a tyrant king who alone is responsible. Nations have the government
which they deserve, or rather, the government which they have is truly
no more than the magnified and public projection of the private morality
and mentality of the nation.... No nation can be deceived that does not
wish to be deceived; and it is not intelligence that Germany lacks....
No nation permits herself to be coerced to the one crime that man cannot
pardon. It is of her own accord that she hastens towards it; her chief
has no need to persuade, it is she who urges him on."(2)
(2) "The Wrack of the Storm," pp. 16-18.
Such a condemnatory tirade against the despoilers of his fair homeland
was normally to be expected from a man of Maeterlinck's depth of
feeling. The unexpected thing that happened not long after was that the
impulsive promptings of justice and patriotism put themselves into
harmony with the guiding principles of his entire moral evolution. The
integrity of his philosophy of life, the sterling honesty of his
teachings, were thus loyally sealed with the very blood of his
heart.--"Before closing this book," he says in the Epilogue,(3) "I wish
to weigh for the last time in my conscience the words of hatred and
malediction which it has made me speak in spite of myself." And then,
true prophet that he is, he speaks forth as a voice from the future,
admonishing men to prepare for the time when the war is over. What saner
advice could at this critical time be given the stay-at-homes than that
they should follow the example of the men who return from the trenches?
"They detest the enemy," says he, "but they do not hate the man. They
recognize in him a brother in misfortune who, like themselves, is
submitting to duties and laws which, like themselves, he too believes
lofty and necessary." On the other hand, too, not many have sensed as
deeply as has Maeterlinck the grandeur to which humanity has risen
through the immeasurable pathos of the war. "Setting aside the
unpardonable aggression and the inexpiable violation of the treaties,
this war, despite its insanity, has come near to being a bloody but
magnificent proof of greatness, heroism, and the spirit of sacrifice."
And from his profound anguish over the fate of his beloved Belgium this
consolation is wrung: "If it be true, as I believe, that humanity is
worth just as much as the sum total of latent heroism which it contains,
then we may declare that humanity was never stronger nor more exemplary
than now and that it is at this moment reaching one of its highest
points and capable of braving everything and hoping everything. And it
is for this reason that, despite our present sadness, we are entitled to
congratulate ourselves and to rejoice." Altogether, Maeterlinck's
thoughts and actions throughout this yet unfinished mighty fate-drama of
history challenge the highest respect for the clarity of his intellect
and the profoundness of his humanity.
(3) In the English translation this is the chapter preceding the last
one and is headed "When the War Is Over," p. 293 ff.; it is separately
published in _The Forum_ for July, 1916.
The appalling disaster that has befallen the Belgian people is sure to
stamp their national character with indelible marks; so that it is safe
to predict that never again will the type of civilization which before
the war reigned in the basins of the Meuse and the Scheldt reëstablish
itself in its full peculiarity and distinctiveness which was the result
of a unique coagency of Germanic and Romanic ingredients of culture. Yet
in the amalgam of the two heterogeneous elements a certain competitive
antithesis had survived, and manifested itself, in the individual as in
the national life at large, in a number of unreconciled temperamental
contrasts, and in the fundamental unlikeness exhibited in the material
and the spiritual activities. Witness the contrast between the bustling
aggressiveness in the province of practical affairs and the metaphysical
drift of modern Flemish art. To any one familiar with the visible
materialism of the population in its external mode of living it may have
seemed strange to notice how sedulously a numerous set among the younger
artists of the land were facing away from their concrete environment, as
though to their over-sensitive nervous system it were irremediably
offensive. The vigorous solidity of Constantin Meunier, the great
plastic interpreter of the "Black Country" of Belgium, found but few
wholehearted imitators among the sculptors, while among the painters
that robust terrestrialism of which the work of a Rubens or Teniers and
their countless disciples was the artistic upshot, was almost totally
relinquished, and linear firmness and colorful vitality yielded the day
to pallid, discarnately decorative artistry even, in a measure, in the
"applied art" products of a Henri van de Velde.
It is in the field of literature, naturally enough, that the contrast is
resolved and integrated into a characteristic unity. Very recently
Professor A. J. Carnoy has definitely pointed out(4) the striking
commixture of the realistic and imaginative elements in the work of the
Flemish symbolists. "The vision of the Flemings"--quoting from his own
_précis_ of his paper--"is very concrete, very exact in all details and
gives a durable, real, and almost corporeal presence to the creations of
the imagination. All these traits are exhibited in the reveries of the
Flemish mystics, ancient and modern. One finds them also no less plainly
in the poetic work of Belgian writers of the last generation:
Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Van Lerberghe, Le Roy, Elskamp, etc."
(4) In a paper read by title before the Modern Language Association of
America at Yale University, December 29, 1917.
If we take into account this composite attitude of the Flemish mind we
shall be less surprised at the remarkable evolution of a
poet-philosopher whose creations seem at first blush to bear no
resemblance to the outward complexion of his own age; who seems as far
removed temperamentally from his locality and time as were his lineal
spiritual ancestors: the Dutchman Ruysbroeck, the Scandinavian
Swedenborg, the German Novalis, and the American Emerson--and who in the
zenith of his career stands forth as an ardent advocate of practical
action while at the same time a firm believer in the transcendental.
Maeterlinck's romantic antipathy towards the main drift of the age was a
phenomenon which at the dawn of our century could be observed in a great
number of superior intelligences. Those fugitives from the dun and
sordid materialism of the day were likely to choose between two avenues
of escape, according to their greater or lesser inner ruggedness. The
more aggressive type would engage in multiform warfare for the
reconstruction of life on sounder principles; whereas the more
meditative professed a real or affected indifference to practical things
and eschewed any participation in the world's struggle for progress. And
of the quiescent rather than the insurgent variety of the romantic
temper Maurice Maeterlinck was the foremost exponent.
The "romantic longing" seems to have come into the world in the company
of the Christian religion with which it shares its partly outspoken,
partly implied repugnance for the battle of life. Romantic periods occur
in the history of civilization whenever a sufficiently influential set
of artistically minded persons have persuaded themselves that, in quite
a literal sense of the colloquial phrase, they "have no use" for the
world; a discovery which would still be true were it stated obversely.
The romantic world-view, thus fundamentally oriented by world-contempt,
entails, at least in theory, the repudiation of all earthly
joys--notably the joy of working--and the renouncement of all worldly
ambition; it scorns the cooperative, social disposition, invites the
soul to a progressive withdrawal into the inner ego, and ends in
complete surrender to one sole aspiration: the search of the higher
vision, the vision, that is, of things beyond their tangible reality. To
such mystical constructions of the inner eye a certain group of German
writers who flourished in the beginning of the nineteenth century and
were known as the Romantics, darkly groped their way out of the
confining realities of their own time. The most modern spell of
romanticism, the one through which our own generation was but yesterday
passing, measures its difference from any previous romantic era by the
difference between earlier states of culture and our own. Life with us
is conspicuously more assertive and aggressive in its social than in its
individual expressions, which was by no means always so, and unless the
romantic predisposition adapted itself to this important change it could
not relate itself at all intimately to our interests. Our study of
Maeterlinck should help us, therefore, to discover possibly in the new
romantic tendency some practical and vital bearings.
We find that in the new romanticism esthetic and philosophical impulses
are inextricably mixed. Hence the new movement is also playing an
indispensable rôle in the modern re-foundation of art. For while acting
as a wholesome offset to the so-called naturalism, in its firm refusal
to limit inner life to the superficial realities, it at the same time
combines with naturalism into a complete recoiling, both of the
intellect and the emotions, from any commonplace, or pusillanimous, or
mechanical practices of artistry. This latter-day romanticism, moreover,
notwithstanding its sky-aspiring outstretch, is akin to naturalism in
that, after all, it keeps its roots firmly grounded in the earth; that
is to say, it seeks for its ulterior sanctions not in realms high beyond
the self; rather it looks within for the "blue flower" of contentedness.
Already to the romantics of old the mystic road to happiness was not
unknown. It is, for instance, pointed by Novalis: "Inward leads the
mysterious way. Within us or nowhere lies eternity with its worlds;
within us or nowhere are the past and the future." Viewed separately
from other elements of romanticism, this passion for retreating within
the central ego is commonly referred to as mysticism; it has a strong
hold on many among the moderns, and Maurice Maeterlinck to be properly
understood has to be understood as the poet _par excellence_ of modern
mysticism. By virtue of this special office he deals mainly in concepts
of the transcendental, which puzzles the ordinary person accustomed to
perceive only material and ephemeral realities. Maeterlinck holds that
nothing matters that is not eternal and that what keeps us from enjoying
the treasures of the universe is the hereditary resignation with which
we tarry in the gloomy prison of our senses. "In reality, we live only
from soul to soul, and we are gods who do not know each other."(5) It
follows from this metaphysical foundation of his art that instead of the
grosser terminology suitable to plain realities, Maeterlinck must depend
upon a code of subtle messages in order to establish between himself and
his audience a line of spiritual communication. This makes it somewhat
difficult for people of cruder endowment to appreciate his meaning, a
grievance from which in the beginning many of them sought redress in
facile scoffing. Obtuse minds are prone to claim a right to fathom the
profound meanings of genius with the same ease with which they expect to
catch the meaning of a bill of fare or the daily stock market report.
(5) Maeterlinck, "On Emerson."
* * * * *
It must be confessed, however, that even those to whom Maeterlinck's
sphere of thought is not so utterly sealed, enter it with a sense of
mixed perplexity and apprehension. They feel themselves helplessly
conducted through a world situated beyond the confines of their normal
consciousness, and in this strange world everything that comes to pass
appears at first extremely impracticable and unreal. The action seems
"wholly dissevered from common sense and ordinary uses;" the figures
behave otherwise than humans; the dialogue is "poised on the edge of a
precipice of bathos." It is clear that works so far out of the common
have to be approached from the poet's own point of view. "Let the reader
move his standpoint one inch nearer the popular standpoint," thus we are
warned by Mr. G. K. Chesterton, "and his attitude towards the poet will
be harsh, hostile, unconquerable mirth." There are some works that can
be appreciated for their good story, even if we fail to realize the
author's moral attitude, let alone to grasp the deeper content of his
work. "But if we take a play by Maeterlinck we shall find that unless we
grasp the particular fairy thread of thought the poet rather lazily
flings to us, we cannot grasp anything whatever. Except from one extreme
poetic point of view, the thing is not a play; it is not a bad play, it
is a mass of clotted nonsense. One whole act describes the lovers going
to look for a ring in a distant cave when they both know they have
dropped it down the well. Seen from some secret window on some special
side of the soul's turret, this might convey a sense of faerie futility
in our human life. But it is quite obvious that unless it called forth
that one kind of sympathy, it would call forth nothing but laughter. In
the same play, the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword, the wife
remarking at intervals, 'I am not gay.' Now there may really be an idea
in this; the idea of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon the
opportunism of innocence; that the lonely human heart says, like a child
at a party, 'I am not enjoying myself as I thought I should.' But it is
plain that unless one thinks of this idea, and of this idea only, the
expression is not in the least unsuccessful pathos,--it is very broad
and highly successful farce!"
And so the atmosphere of Maeterlinck's plays is impregnated throughout
with oppressive mysteries, and until the key of these mysteries is found
there is very little meaning to the plays. Moreover, these mysteries, be
they never so stern and awe-inspiring, are irresistibly alluring. The
reason is, they are our own mysteries that have somehow escaped our
grasp, and that we fain would recapture, because there dwells in every
human breast a vague assent to the immortal truth of Goethe's assertion:
"The thrill of awe is man's best heritage."(6)
(6) "_Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil._"
The imaginative equipment of Maeterlinck's dramaturgy is rather limited
and, on its face value, trite. In particular are his dramatis personae
creatures by no means calculated to overawe by some extraordinary
weirdness or power. And yet we feel ourselves touched by an elemental
dread and by an overwhelming sense of our human impotence in the
presence of these figures who, without seeming supernatural, are
certainly not of common flesh and blood; they impress us as surpassingly
strange mainly because somehow they are instinct with a life
fundamentally more real than the superficial reality we know. For they
are the mediums and oracles of the fateful powers that stir human beings
into action.
The poet of mysticism, then, delves into the mystic sources of our
deeds, and makes us stand reverent with him before the unknowable forces
by which we are controlled. Naturally he is obliged to shape his visions
in dim outline. His aim is to shadow forth that which no naked eye can
see, and it may be said in passing that he attains this aim with a
mastery and completeness incomparably beyond the dubious skill displayed
more recently by the grotesque gropings of the so-called futurist
school. Perhaps one true secret of the perturbing strangeness of
Maeterlinck's figures lies in the fact that the basic principle of their
life, the one thoroughly vital element in them, if it does not sound too
paradoxical to say so, is the idea of death. Maeterlinck's mood and
temper are fully in keeping with the religious dogma that life is but a
short dream--with Goethe he believes that "all things transitory but as
symbols are sent," and apparently concurs in the creed voiced by one of
Arthur Schnitzler's characters,--that death is the only subject in life
worthy of being pondered by the serious mind. "From our death onwards,"
so he puts it somewhere, "the adventure of the universe becomes our own
adventure."
* * * * *
It will be useful to have a bit of personal information concerning our
author. He started his active career as a barrister; not by any means
auspiciously, it seems, for already in his twenty-seventh year he laid
the toga aside. Experience had convinced him that in the forum there
were no laurels for him to pluck. The specific qualities that make for
success at the bar were conspicuously lacking in his make-up. Far from
being eloquent, he has at all times been noted for an unparalleled
proficiency in the art of self-defensive silence. He shuns banal
conversation and the sterile distractions of promiscuous social
intercourse, dreads the hubbub of the city, and has an intense dislike
for travel, to which he resorts only as a last means of escape from
interviewers, reporters, and admirers. Maeterlinck, it is seen, is
anything but _multorum vir hominum_. In order to preserve intact his
love of humanity, he finds it expedient to live for the most part by
himself, away from the throng "whose very plaudits give the heart a
pang;" his fame has always been a source of annoyance to him. The only
company he covets is that of the contemplative thinkers of bygone
days,--the mystics, gnostics, cabalists, neo-Platonists. Swedenborg and
Plotinus are perhaps his greatest favorites. That the war has produced a
mighty agitation in the habitual calm of the great Belgian
poet-philosopher goes without saying. His love of justice no less than
his love of his country aroused every red corpuscle in his virile
personality to violent resentment against the invader. Since the war
broke out, however, he has published nothing besides a number of
ringingly eloquent and singularly pathetic articles and appeals,--so
that the character portrait derived from the body of his work has not at
this time lost its application to his personality.
In cast of mind, Maeterlinck is sombrously meditative, and he has been
wise in framing his outer existence so that it would accord with his
habitual detachment. The greater part of his time used to be divided
between his charming retreat at _Quatre Chemins_, near Grasse, and the
grand old abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy, which he managed to snatch
in the very nick of time from the tightening clutch of a manufacturing
concern. With the temperament of a hermit, he has been, nevertheless, a
keen observer of life, though one preferring to watch the motley
spectacle from the aristocratic privacy of his box, sheltered, as it
were, from prying curiosity. Well on in middle age, he is still an
enthusiastic out-of-doors man,--gardener, naturalist, pedestrian,
wheelman, and motorist, and commands an extraordinary amount of special
knowledge in a variety of sports and sciences. In "The Double Garden" he
discusses the automobile with the authority of an expert watt-man and
mechanician. In one of his other books he evinces an extraordinary
erudition in all matters pertaining to the higher education of dogs; and
his work on "The Life of the Bee" passes him beyond question with high
rank among "thirty-third degree" apiculturists.
One of the characteristics that seem to separate his books, especially
those of the earlier period, from the literary tendencies of his age, is
their surprising inattention to present social struggles. His
metaphysical bias makes him dwell almost exclusively, and with great
moral and logical consistency, on aspects of life that are slightly
considered by the majority of men yet which he regards as ulteriorly of
sole importance.
When men like Maeterlinck are encountered in the world of practical
affairs, they are bound to impress us as odd, because of this inversion
of the ordinary policies of behavior. But before classing them as
"cranks," we might well ask ourselves whether their appraisal of the
component values of life does not, after all, correspond better to their
true relativity than does our own habitual evaluation. With the average
social being, the transcendental bearing of a proposition is synonymous
with its practical unimportance. But in his essay on "The Invisible
Goodness" Maeterlinck quite properly raises the question: "Is visible
life alone of consequence, and are we made up only of things that can be
grasped and handled like pebbles in the road?"
Throughout his career Maeterlinck reveals himself in the double aspect
of poet and philosopher. In the first period his philosophy, as has
already been amply hinted, is characterized chiefly by aversion from the
externalities of life, and by that tense introversion of the mind which
forms the mystic's main avenue to the goal of knowledge. But if, in
order to find the key to his tragedies and puppet plays, we go to the
thirteen essays representing the earlier trend of his philosophy and
issued in 1896 under the collective title, "The Treasure of the Humble,"
we discover easily that his cast of mysticism is very different from
that of his philosophic predecessors and teachers in the fourteenth and
nineteenth centuries, in particular from the devotional mysticism of the
"Admirable" John Ruysbroeck, and Friedrich von Hardenberg-Novalis.
Maeterlinck does not strive after the so-called "spiritual espousals,"
expounded by the "doctor ecstaticus," Ruysbroeck, in his celebrated
treatise where Christ is symbolized as the divine groom and Human Nature
as the bride glowing with desire for union with God. Maeterlinck feels
too modernly to make use of that ancient sensuous imagery. The main
thesis of his mystical belief is that there are divine forces dormant in
human nature; how to arouse and release them, constitutes the paramount
problem of human life. His doctrine is that a life not thus energized by
its own latent divineness is, and must remain, humdrum and worthless. It
will at once be noticed that such a doctrine harmonizes thoroughly with
the romantic aspiration. Both mystic and romantic teach that, in the
last resort, the battlefield of our fate lies not out in the wide world
but that it is enclosed in the inner self, within the unknown quantity
which we designate as our soul. The visible life, according to this
modern prophet of mysticism, obeys the invisible; happiness and
unhappiness flow exclusively from the inner sources.
Maeterlinck's speculations, despite their medieval provenience, have a
practical orientation. He firmly believes that it is within the ability
of mankind to raise some of the veils that cover life's central secret.
In unison with some other charitable students of society, he holds to
the faith that a more highly spiritualized era is dawning, and from the
observed indications he prognosticates a wider awakening of the
sleepbound soul of man. And certainly some of the social manifestations
that appeared with cumulative force during the constructive period
before the war were calculated to justify that faith. The revival of
interest in the metaphysical powers of man which expressed itself almost
epidemically through such widely divergent cults as Theosophy and
Christian Science, was indubitable proof of spiritual yearnings in the
broader masses of the people. And it had a practical counterpart in
civic tendencies and reforms that evidenced a great agitation of the
social conscience. And even to-day, when the great majority feel that
the universal embroilment has caused civilized man to fall from his
laboriously achieved level, this sage in his lofty solitude feels the
redeeming spiritual connotation of our great calamity. "Humanity was
ready to rise above itself, to surpass all that it had hitherto
accomplished. It has surpassed it.... Never before had nations been seen
that were able as a whole to understand that the happiness of each of
those who live in this time of trial is of no consequence compared with
the honor of those who live no more or the happiness of those who are
not yet alive. We stand on heights that had not been attained before."
But even for those many who find themselves unable to build very large
hopes on the spiritual uplift of mankind through disaster, Maeterlinck's
philosophy is a wholesome tonic. In the essay on "The Life Profound" in
"The Treasure of the Humble," we are told: "Every man must find for
himself in the low and unavoidable reality of common life his special
possibility of a higher existence." The injunction, trite though it
sound, articulates a moral very far from philistine. For it urges the
pursuit of the transcendental self through those feelings which another
very great idealist, Friedrich Schiller, describes in magnificent
metaphor as
... "der dunklen Gefühle Gewalt,
die im Herzen wunderbar schliefen."
In the labyrinth of the subliminal consciousness there lurks, however, a
great danger for the seeker after the hidden treasures: the paralyzing
effect of fatalism upon the normal energies. Maeterlinck was seriously
threatened by this danger during his earlier period. How he eventually
contrived his liberation from the clutch of fatalism is not made
entirely clear by the progress of his thought. At all events, an era of
greater intellectual freedom, which ultimately was to create him the
undisputed captain of his soul and master of his fate, was soon to
arrive for him. It is heralded by another book of essays: "Wisdom and
Destiny." But, as has been stated, we may in his case hardly hope to
trace the precise route traveled by the mind between the points of
departure and arrival.
* * * * *
So closely are the vital convictions in this truthful writer linked with
the artistic traits of his work that without some grasp of his
metaphysics even the technical peculiarities of his plays cannot be
fully appreciated. To the mystic temper of mind, all life is secretly
pregnant with great meaning, so that none of its phenomena can be deemed
inconsequential. Thus, while Maeterlinck is a poet greatly preoccupied
with spiritual matters yet nothing to him is more wonderful and worthy
of attention than the bare facts and processes of living. Real life,
just like the theatre which purports to represent it, manipulates a
multiform assortment of stage effects, now coarse and obvious and
claptrap, now refined and esoteric, to suit the diversified taste and
capacity of the patrons. To the cultured esthetic sense the tragical
tendency carries more meaning than the catastrophic finale; our author
accordingly scorns, and perhaps inordinately, whatsoever may appear as
merely adventitious in the action of plays. "What can be told," he
exclaims, "by beings who are possessed of a fixed idea and have no time
to live because they have to kill off a rival or a mistress?" The
internalized action in his plays is all of one piece with the profound
philosophical conviction that the inner life alone matters; that
consequently the small and unnoticed events are more worthy of attention
than the sensational, cataclysmic moments. "Why wait ye," he asks in
that wonderful rhapsody on "Silence"(7) "for Heaven to open at the
strike of the thunderbolt? Ye should attend upon the blessed hours when
it silently opens--and it is incessantly opening."
(7) "The Treasure of the Humble."
His purpose, then, is to reveal the working of hidden forces in their
intricate and inseparable connection with external events; and in order
that the _vie intérieure_ might have the right of way, drama in his
practice emancipates itself very far from the traditional realistic
methods. "Poetry," he maintains, "has no other purpose than to keep open
the great roads that lead from the visible to the invisible." To be
sure, this definition postulates, rather audaciously, a widespread
spiritual susceptibility. But in Maeterlinck's optimistic anthropology
no human being is spiritually so deadened as to be forever out of all
communication with the things that are divine and infinite. He fully
realizes, withal, that for the great mass of men there exists no
intellectual approach to the truly significant problems of life. It is
rather through our emotional capacity that our spiritual experience
brings us into touch with the final verities. Anyway, the poet of
mysticism appeals from the _impasse_ of pure reasoning to the voice of
the inner oracles. But how to detect in the deepest recesses of the soul
the echoes of universal life and give outward resonance to their faint
reverberations? That is the artistic, and largely technical, side of the
problem.
Obvious it is that if the beholder's collaboration in the difficult
enterprise is to be secured, his imagination has to be stirred to a
super-normal degree. Once a dramatist has succeeded in stimulating the
imaginative activity, he can dispense with a mass of descriptive detail.
But he must comply with two irremissible technical demands. In the first
place, the "_vie intérieure_" calls forth a _dialogue intérieur_; an
esoteric language, I would say, contrived predominantly for the
"expressional" functions of speech, as differenced from its
"impressional" purposes. Under Swedenborg's fanciful theory of
"correspondences" the literal meaning of a word is merely a sort of
protective husk for its secret spiritual kernel. It is this inner,
essential meaning that Maeterlinck's dialogue attempts to set free. By a
fairly simple and consistent code of intimations the underlying meaning
of the colloquy is laid bare and a basis created for a more fundamental
understanding of the dramatic transactions. Maeterlinck going, at first,
to undue lengths in this endeavor, exposed the diction of his dramas to
much cheap ridicule. The extravagant use of repetition, in particular,
made him a mark for facile burlesque. The words of the Queen in
_Princesse Maleine_: "_Mais ne répetez pas toujours ce que l'on dit_,"
were sarcastically turned against the poet himself.
As a result of the extreme simplicity of his dialogue, Maeterlinck was
reproached with having invented the "monosyllabic theatre," the "theatre
without words," and with having perpetrated a surrogate sort of drama, a
hybrid between libretto and pantomime.
The fact, however, is, his characters speak a language which, far from
being absurd, as it was at first thought to be by many of his readers,
is instinct with life and quite true to life--to life, that is, as made
articulate in the intense privacy of dreams, or hallucinations, or
moments of excessive emotional perturbation.
The other principal requisite for the attainment of the inner dramatic
vitalness in drama is a pervasive atmospheric mood, a sustained
_Stimmung_. This, in the case of Maeterlinck, is brought about by the
combined employment of familiar and original artistic devices.
The grave and melancholy mood that so deeply impregnates the work of
Maeterlinck is tinged in the earlier stage, as has been pointed out,
with the sombre coloring of fatalism. In the first few books, in
particular, there hovers a brooding sense of terror and an undefinable
feeling of desolation. Through _Serres Chaudes_ ("Hot Houses"), his
first published book, (1889), there runs a tenor of weariness, of ideal
yearnings overshadowed by the hopelessness of circumstances. Even in
this collection of poems, where so much less necessity exists for a
unity of mood than in the plays, Maeterlinck's predilection for scenic
effects suggestive of weirdness and superstitious fear became apparent
in the recurrent choice of sombre scenic motifs: oppressive nocturnal
silence,--a stagnant sheet of water,--moonlight filtered through green
windows, etc. The diction, too, through the incessant use of terms like
_morne_, _las_, _pâle_, _désire_, _ennui_, _tiède_, _indolent_,
_malade_, exhales as it were a lazy resignation. Temporarily, then, the
fatalistic strain is uppermost both in the philosophy and the poetry of
the rising young author; and to make matters worse, his is the fatalism
of pessimistic despair: Fate is forsworn against man. The objective
point of life is death. We constantly receive warnings from within, but
the voices are not unequivocal and emphatic enough to save us from
ourselves.
Probing the abysses of his subliminal self, the mystic may sense, along
with the diviner promptings of the heart, the lurking demons that
undermine happiness,--"the malignant powers,"--again quoting
Schiller--"whom no man's craft can make familiar"--that element in human
nature which in truth makes man "his own worst enemy." It is a search
which at this stage of his development Maeterlinck, as a mystic, cannot
bring himself to relinquish, even though, pessimistically, he
anticipates that which he most dreads to find; in this way, fatalism and
pessimism act as insuperable barriers against his artistic
self-assertion. His fixed frame of mind confines him to the
representation of but one elemental instinct, namely, that of fear. The
rustic in the German fairy tale who sallied forth to learn how to
shudder,--_gruseln_,--would have mastered the art to his complete
satisfaction if favored with a performance or two of such plays as
"Princess Maleine," "The Intruder," or "The Sightless." Perhaps no other
dramatist has ever commanded a similarly well-equipped arsenal of
thrills and terrible foreshadowings. The commonest objects are fraught
with ominous forebodings: a white gown lying on a _prie-dieu_, a curtain
suddenly set swaying by a puff of air, the melancholy soughing of a
clump of trees,--the simplest articles of daily use are converted into
awful symbols that make us shiver by their whisperings of impending
doom.
Nor in the earlier products of Maeterlinck are the cruder practices of
melodrama scorned or spared,--the crash and flash of thunder and
lightning, the clang of bells and clatter of chains, the livid light and
ghastly shadows, the howling hurricane, the ominous croaking of ravens
amid nocturnal solitude, trees illumined by the fiery eyes of owls, bats
whirring portentously through the gloom,--so many harbingers of dread
and death. And the prophetic import of these tokens and their sort is
reinforced by repeated assertions from the persons in the action that
never before has anything like this been known to occur. To such a
fearsome state are we wrought up by all this uncanny apparatus that at
the critical moment a well calculated knock at the door is sufficient to
make our flesh creep and our hair stand on end.
Thus, the _vie intérieure_ would seem to prerequire for its
externalization a completely furnished chamber of horrors. And when it
is added that the scene of the action is by preference a lonely
churchyard or a haunted old mansion, a crypt, a cavern, a silent forest
or a solitary tower, it is easy to understand why plays like "Princess
Maleine" could be classed by superficial and unfriendly critics with the
gruesome ebullitions of that fantastic quasi-literary occupation to
which we owe a well known variety of "water-front" drama and, in
fiction, the "shilling shocker." Their immeasurably greater
psychological refinement could not save them later on from condemnation
at the hands of their own maker. And yet they are not without very great
artistic merits. Octave Mirbeau, in his habitual enthusiasm for the
out-of-the-ordinary, hailed Maeterlinck, on the strength of "Princess
Maleine," as the Belgian Shakespeare, evidently because Maeterlinck
derived some of his motifs from "Hamlet": mainly the churchyard scene,
and Prince Hjalmar's defiance of the queen, as well as his general want
of decision. As a matter of fact, Maeterlinck has profoundly studied,
not Shakespeare alone, but the minor Elizabethans as well. He has made
an admirable translation of "Macbeth." Early in his career he even
translated one of John Ford's Plays, "'Tis Pity She's a Whore," one of
the coarsest works ever written for the stage, but to which he was
attracted by the intrinsic human interest that far outweighs its
offensiveness. As for any real kinship of Maeterlinck with Shakespeare,
the resemblance between the two is slight. They differ philosophically
in the fundamental frame of mind, ethically in the outlook upon life,
dramaturgically in the value attached to external action, and
humanly,--much to the disadvantage of the Belgian,--in their sense of
humor. For unfortunately it has to be confessed that this supreme gift
of the gods has been very sparingly dispensed to Maeterlinck.
Altogether, whether or no he is to be counted among the disciples of
Shakespeare, his works show no great dependence on the master. With far
better reason might he be called a debtor to Germanic folklore,
especially in its fantastic elements.
A German fairy world it is to which we are transported by Maeterlinck's
first dramatic attempt, "Princess Maleine," (1889), a play refashioned
after Grimm's tale of the Maid Maleen; only that in the play all the
principals come to a harrowing end and that in it an esoteric meaning
lies concealed underneath the primitive plot. The action, symbolically
interpreted, illustrates the fatalist's doctrine that man is nothing but
a toy in the hands of dark and dangerous powers. Practical wisdom does
not help us to discern the working of these powers until it is too late.
Neither can we divine their presence, for the prophetic apprehension of
the future resides not in the expert and proficient, but rather in the
helpless or decrepit,--the blind, the feeble-minded, and the stricken in
years, or again in young children and in dumb animals. Take the scene in
"Princess Maleine" where the murderers, having invaded the chamber, lie
there in wait, with bated breath. In the corridor outside, people are
unconcernedly passing to and fro, while the only creatures who,
intuitively, sense the danger, are the little Prince and a dog that
keeps anxiously scraping at the door.
In _L'Intruse_ ("The Intruder"), (1890), a one-act play on a theme which
is collaterally developed later on in _Les Aveugles_ ("The Sightless"),
and in _L'Intérieur_ ("Home"), the arriving disaster that cannot be shut
out by bolts or bars announces itself only to the clairvoyant sense of a
blind old man. The household gathered around the table is placidly
waiting for the doctor. Only the blind grandfather is anxious and
heavy-laden because he alone knows that Death is entering the house, he
alone can feel his daughter's life withering away under the breath of
the King of Terror: the sightless have a keener sensitiveness than the
seeing for what is screened from the physical eye.