literature another work so thoroughly pervaded with the chilling horror
of approaching calamity. The talk at the table is of the most
commonplace,--that the door will not shut properly, and they must send
for the carpenter to-morrow. But from the mechanism of the environment
there comes cumulative and incremental warning that something
extraordinary and fatal is about to happen. The wind rises, the trees
shiver, the nightingales break off their singing, the fishes in the pond
grow restive, the dogs cower in fear,--an unseen Presence walks through
the garden. Then the clanging of a scythe is heard. A cold current of
air rushes into the room. Nearer and nearer come the steps. The
grandfather insists that a stranger has seated himself in the midst of
the family. The lamp goes out. The bell strikes midnight. The old man is
sure that somebody is rising from the table. Then suddenly the baby
whose voice has never been heard starts crying. Through an inner door
steps a deaconess silently crossing herself: the mother of the house is
dead.
These incidents in themselves are not necessarily miraculous. There are
none of them but might be accounted for on perfectly natural grounds. In
fact, very plausible explanations do offer themselves for the weirdest
things that come to pass. So, especially, it was a real, ordinary mower
that chanced to whet his scythe; yet the apparition of the Old Reaper in
person could not cause the chilling consternation produced by this
trivial circumstance coming as it does as the climax of a succession of
commonplace happenings exaggerated and distorted by a fear-haunted
imagination. To produce an effect like that upon an audience whose
credulity refuses to be put to any undue strain is a victorious proof of
prime artistic ability.
_Les Aveugles_ ("The Sightless"), (1891), is pitched in the same
psychological key. The atmosphere is surcharged with unearthly
apprehension. A dreary twilight--in the midst of a thick forest--on a
lonely island; twelve blind people fretting about the absence of their
guardian. He is gone to find a way out of the woods--what can have
become of him? From moment to moment the deserted, helpless band grows
more fearstricken. The slightest sound becomes the carrier of evil
forebodings: the rustling of the foliage, the flapping of a bird's
wings, the swelling roar of the nearby sea in its dash against the
shore. The bell strikes twelve--they wonder is it noon or night? Then
questions, eager and calamitous, pass in whispers among them: Has the
leader lost his way? Will he never come back? Has the dam burst apart
and will they all be swallowed by the ocean? The pathos is greatly
heightened by an extremely delicate yet sure individuation of the
figures, as when at the mention of Heaven those not sightless from birth
raise their countenance to the sky. And where in the meanwhile is the
lost leader? He is seated right in their midst, but smitten by death.
They learn it at last through the actions of the dog; besides whom--in
striking parallel to "Princess Maleine"--the only other creature able to
see is a little child. The horror-stricken unfortunates realize that
they can never get home, and that they must perish in the woods.
In _Les Sept Princesses_ ("The Seven Princesses"), (1891), although it
is one of Maeterlinck's minor achievements, some of the qualities that
are common to all his work become peculiarly manifest. This is
particularly true of the skill shown in conveying the feeling of the
story by means of suitable scenic devices. Most of his plays depend to a
considerable degree for their dark and heavy nimbus of unreality upon a
studied combination of paraphernalia in themselves neither numerous nor
far-sought. In fact, the resulting scenic repertory, too, is markedly
limited: a weird forest, a deserted castle with marble staircase and
dreamy moonlit terrace, a tower with vaulted dungeons, a dismal corridor
flanked by impenetrable chambers, a lighted interior viewed from the
garden, a landscape bodefully crêped with twilight--the list nearly
exhausts his store of "sets."
The works mentioned so far are hardly more than able exercises
preparatory for the ampler and more finished products which were to
succeed them. Yet they represent signal steps in the evolution of a new
dramatic style, designed, as has already been intimated, to give
palpable form to emotional data descried in moments anterior not only to
articulation but even to consciousness itself; and for this reason, the
plane of the dramatic action lies deep below the surface of life, down
in the inner tabernacle where the mystic looks for the hidden destinies.
In his style, Maeterlinck had gradually developed an unprecedented
capacity for bringing to light the secret agencies of fate. A portion of
the instructed public had already learned to listen in his writings for
the finer reverberations that swing in the wake of the uttered phrase,
to heed the slightest hints and allusions in the text, to overlook no
glance or gesture that might betray the mind of the acting characters.
It is true that art to be great must be plain, but that does not mean
that the sole test of great art is the response of the simple and
apathetic.
In Maeterlinck's first masterpiece, _Pélléas et Mélisande_, (1892), the
motives again are drawn up from the lower regions of consciousness; once
more the plot is born of a gloomy fancy, and the darkling mood hovering
over scene and action attests the persistence of fatalism in the poet.
The theory of old King Arkel, the spokesman of the author's personal
philosophy, is that one should not seek to be active; one should ever
wait on the threshold of Fate. Even the younger people in the play are
infected by the morbid doctrine of an inevitable necessity for all
things that happen to them: "We do not go where we would go. We do not
do that which we would do." Perhaps, however, these beliefs are here
enounced for the last time with the author's assent or acquiescence.
In artistic merit "Pélléas and Mélisande" marks a nearer approach to
mastery, once the integral peculiarities of the form and method have
been granted. Despite a noticeable lack of force, directness, and
plasticity in the characterization, the _vie intérieure_ is most
convincingly expressed. In one of the finest scenes of the play we see
the principals at night gazing out upon a measureless expanse of water
dotted with scattered lights. The atmosphere is permeated with a
reticent yearning of love. The two young creatures, gentle, shy, their
souls tinged with melancholy, are drawn towards one another by an
ineluctable mutual attraction. Yet, though their hearts are filled to
overflowing, not a word of affection is uttered. Their love reveals
itself to us even as to themselves, without a loud and jarring
declaration, through its very speechlessness, as it were. The situation
well bears out the _roi sage_ in _Alladine et Palomides_: "There is a
moment when souls touch one another and know everything without a need
of our opening the lips." There are still other scenes in this play so
tense with emotion that words would be intrusive and dissonant. There is
that lovely picture of Mélisande at the window; Pélléas cannot reach up
to her hand, but is satisfied to feel her loosened hair about his face.
It is a question whether even that immortal love duet in "Romeo and
Juliet" casts a poetic spell more enchanting than this. At another
moment in the drama, we behold the lovers in Maeterlinck's beloved
half-light, softly weeping as they stare with speechless rapture into
the flames. And not until the final parting does any word of love pass
their lips. In another part of the play Goland, Mélisande's aging
husband, who suspects his young stepbrother, Pélléas, of loving
Mélisande, conducts him to an underground chamber. We are not told why
he has brought him there, and why he has led him to the brink of the
pitfall from which there mounts a smell of death. If it be a heinous
deed he is brooding, why does he pause in its execution? His terrible
struggle does not reveal itself through speech, yet it is eloquently
expressed in the wildness of his looks, the trembling of his voice, and
the sudden anguished outcry: "Pélléas! Pélléas!"
Evidently Maeterlinck completely achieves the very purpose to which the
so-called Futurists think they must sacrifice all traditional
conceptions of Art; and achieves it without any brutal stripping and
skinning of the poetic subject, without the hideous exhibition of its
_disjecta membra_, and above all, without that implied disqualification
for the higher artistic mission which alone could induce a man to limit
his service to the dishing-up of chunks and collops, "cubic" or
amorphous.
In recognition of a certain tendency towards mannerism that lay in his
technique, Maeterlinck, in a spirit of self-persiflage, labeled the book
of one-act plays which he next published, (1894), _Trois Petits Drames
pour Marionettes_ ("Three Little Puppet Plays"). They are entitled,
severally: _Alladine et Palomides_, _Intérieur_, and _La Mort de
Tintagiles_. While in motifs and materials as well as in the principal
points of style these playlets present a sort of epitome of his artistic
progression up to date, they also display some new and significant
qualities. Of the three the first named is most replete with suggestive
symbolism and at the same time most remindful of the older plays,
especially of "Pélléas and Mélisande." King Ablamore is in character and
demeanor clearly a counterpart of King Arkel. To be sure he makes a
temporary stand against the might of Fate, but his resistance is meek
and futile, and his wisdom culminates in the same old fatalistic
formula: "_Je sais qu'on ne fait pas ce que l'on voudrait faire._"
_L'Intérieur_ ("Home") handles a theme almost identical with that of
_L'Intruse_: Life and Death separated only by a thin pane of glass,--the
sudden advent of affliction from a cloudless sky. In this little tragedy
a family scene, enacted in "dumb show," is watched from the outside. The
play is without suspense in the customary use of the term, since after
the first whispered conversation between the bringers of the fateful
tidings the audience is fully aware of the whole story:--the daughter of
the house, for whose return the little group is waiting, has been found
dead in the river. The quiescent mood is sustained to the end; no great
outburst of lamentation; the curtain drops the instant the news has been
conveyed. But the poignancy of the tragic strain is only enhanced by the
repression of an exciting climax.
"The Death of Tintagiles" repeats in a still more harrowing form the
fearful predicament of a helpless child treated with so much dramatic
tension in Maeterlinck's first tragedy. Again, as in "Princess Maleine,"
the action of this dramolet attains its high point in a scene where
murderous treachery is about to spring the trap set for an innocent
young prince. Intuitively he senses the approach of death, and in vain
beats his little fists against the door that imprisons him. The
situation is rendered more piteous even than in the earlier treatment of
the motif, because the door which bars his escape also prevents his
faithful sister Ygraine from coming to the rescue.
We have observed in all the plays so far a marked simplicity of
construction. _Aglavaine et Selysette_, (1896), denotes a still further
simplification. Here the scenic apparatus is reduced to the very
minimum, and the psychological premises are correspondingly plain. The
story presents a "triangular" love entanglement strangely free from the
sensual ingredient; two women dream of sharing, in all purity, one
lover--and the dream ends for one of them in heroic self-sacrifice
brought to secure the happiness of the rival. However, more noteworthy
than the structure of the plot is the fact that the philosophic current
flowing through it has perceptibly altered its habitual direction. The
spiritual tendency is felt to be turning in its course, and even though
fatalism still holds the rule, with slowly relaxing grip, yet a changed
ethical outlook is manifest. Also, this play for the first time
proclaims, though in no vociferous manner, the duty of the individual
toward himself, the duty so emphatically proclaimed by two of
Maeterlinck's greatest teachers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henrik Ibsen.
* * * * *
The inner philosophic conflict was but of short duration. In 1898 _La
Sagesse et La Destinée_ ("Wisdom and Destiny") saw the light. The
metaphor might be taken in a meaning higher and more precise than the
customary, for, coming to this book from those that preceded is indeed
like emerging from some dark and dismal cave into the warm and cheering
light of the sun. "Wisdom and Destiny" is a collection of essays and
aphorisms which stands to this second phase of Maeterlinck's dramaturgy
in a relation closely analogous to that existing between "The Treasure
of the Humble" and the works heretofore surveyed. Without amounting to a
wholesale recantation of the idea that is central in the earlier set of
essays, the message of the newer set is of a very different kind. The
author of "Wisdom and Destiny" has not changed his view touching the
superiority of the intuitional function over the intellectual. The
significant difference between the old belief and the new consists
simply in this: the latent force of life is no longer imagined as an
antagonistic agency; rather it is conceived as a benign energy that
makes for a serene acceptance of the world that is. Of this turn in the
outlook, the philosophic affirmation of life and the consent of the will
to subserve the business of living are the salutary concomitants.
Wisdom, in expanding, has burst the prison of fatalism and given freedom
to vision. The world, beheld in the light of this emancipation, is not
to be shunned by the wise man. Let Fortune bring what she will, he can
strip his afflictions of their terrors by transmuting them into higher
knowledge. Therefore, pain and suffering need not be feared and shirked;
they may even be hailed with satisfaction, for, as is paradoxically
suggested in _Aglavaine et Selysette_, they help man "_être heureux en
devenant plus triste_,"--to be happy in becoming sadder. The poet, who
till now had clung to the conviction that there can be no happy fate,
that all our destinies are guided by unlucky stars, now on the contrary
persuades us to consider how even calamity may be refined in the medium
of wisdom in such fashion as to become an asset of life, and warns us
against recoiling in spirit from any reverse of our fortunes. He holds
that blows and sorrows cannot undo the sage. Fate has no weapons save
those we supply, and "wise is he for whom even the evil must feed the
pyre of love." In fine, Fate obeys him who dares to command it. After
all, then, man has a right to appoint himself the captain of his soul,
the master of his fate.
Yet, for all that, the author of "Wisdom and Destiny" should not be
regarded as the partizan and apologist of sadness for the sake of
wisdom. If sorrow be a rich mine of satisfaction, joy is by far the
richer mine. This new outlook becomes more and more optimistic because
of the increasing faculty of such a philosophy to extract from the mixed
offerings of life a more near-at-hand happiness than sufferings can
possibly afford; not perchance that perpetual grinning merriment over
the comicality of the passing spectacle which with so many passes for a
"sense of humor," but rather a calm and serious realization of what is
lastingly beautiful, good, and true. A person's attainment of this
beatitude imposes on him the clear duty of helping others to rise to a
similar exalted level of existence. And this duty Maeterlinck seeks to
discharge by proclaiming in jubilant accents the concrete reality of
happiness. _L'Oiseau Bleu_ ("The Blue Bird"), above all other works,
illustrates the fact that human lives suffer not so much for the lack of
happiness as for the want of being clearly conscious of the happiness
they possess. It is seen that the seed of optimism in "The Treasure of
the Humble" has sprouted and spread out, and at last triumphantly shot
forth through the overlaying fatalism. The newly converted, hence all
the more thoroughgoing, optimist, believing that counsel and consolation
can come only from those who trust in the regenerative power of hope,
throws himself into a mental attitude akin to that of the Christian
Scientist, and confidently proceeds to cure the ills of human kind by a
categorical denial of their existence. Or perhaps it would be more just
to say of Maeterlinck's latter-day outlook, the serenity of which even
the frightful experience of the present time has failed to destroy, that
instead of peremptorily negating evil, he merely denies its supremacy.
All about him he perceives in the midst of the worst wrongs and evils
many fertile germs of righteousness; vice itself seems to distil its own
antitoxin.
Together with Maeterlinck's optimistic strain, his individualism gains
an unexpected emphasis. "Before one exists for others, one must exist
for one's self. The egoism of a strong and clear-sighted soul is of a
more beneficent effect than all the devotion of a blind and feeble
soul." Here we have a promulgation identical in gist with Emerson's
unqualified declaration of moral independence when he says: "Whoso would
be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms
must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be
goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature."(8)
(8) "Self-Reliance."
His attitude of countenancing the positive joys of living causes
Maeterlinck in his later career to reverse his former judgment, and to
inveigh, much in the manner of Nietzsche, against the "parasitical
virtues." "Certain notions about resignation and self-sacrifice sap the
finest moral forces of mankind more thoroughly than do great vices and
even crimes. The alleged triumphs over the flesh are in most cases only
complete defeats of life." When to such rebellious sentiments is joined
an explicit warning against the seductions and intimidations held out by
the official religions--their sugar plums and dog whips, as Maeterlinck
puts it--one can only wonder how his writings escaped as long as they
did the attention of the authorities that swing the power of imprimatur
and anathema.
Maeterlinck may not be classed unreservedly as a radical individualist.
For whereas a philosophy like that of Nietzsche takes no account of the
"much-too-many," who according to that great fantasist do not interest
anybody except the statistician and the devil, Maeterlinck realizes the
supreme importance of the great mass as the ordained transmitters of
civilization. The gulf between aristocratic subjectivism, devoted
single-mindedly to the ruthless enforcement of self-interest, and, on
the other hand, a self-forgetful social enthusiasm, is bridged in
Maeterlinck by an extremely strong instinct for justice and, moreover,
by his firm belief--at least for the time being--that the same strong
instinct exists universally as a specific trait of human nature. By such
a philosophy Justice, then, is discerned not as a supra-natural
function, but as a function of human nature as distinguished from nature
at large. The restriction is made necessary by our knowledge of the
observable operations of nature. In particular would the principle of
heredity seem to argue against the reign of justice in the
administration of human destinies, inasmuch as we find ourselves quite
unable to recognize in the apportionment of pleasure and pain anything
like a due ratio of merit. And yet Maeterlinck realizes that perhaps
nature measures life with a larger standard than the individual's short
span of existence, and warns us in his essay on "Justice" not to indulge
our self-conceit in a specious emulation of ways that are utterly beyond
our comprehension. After all, then, our poet-philosopher succeeds _foro
conscientiæ_ in reconciling his cult of self with devotion to the common
interest. Morality, in that essay, is defined as the co-ordination of
personal desire to the task assigned by nature to the race. And is it
not true that a contrary, that is, ascetic concept of morality reduces
itself to absurdity through its antagonism to that primal human instinct
that makes for the continuity of life?
* * * * *
From the compromise effected between two fairly opposite ethical
principles, there emerges in the works of this period something akin to
a socialistic tendency. It is organically related to the mystical
prepossession of the author's manner of thinking. Maeterlinck gratefully
acknowledges that by the search-light of science the uppermost layers of
darkness have been dispelled; but realizes also that the deep-seated
central enigma still remains in darkness: as much as ever are the
primordial causes sealed against a glimpse of finite knowledge. We have
changed the names, not the problems. Instead of God, Providence, or
Fate, we say Nature, Selection, and Heredity. But in reality do we know
more concerning Life than did our ancestors?
What, then, questions the persevering pursuer of the final verities,
shall we do in order that we may press nearer to Truth? May we not
perchance steep our souls in light that flows from another source than
science? And what purer light is there to illumine us than the halo
surrounding a contented worker performing his task, not under coercion,
but from a voluntary, or it may be instinctive, submission to the law of
life? If such subordination of self constitutes the basis of rational
living, we shall do well to study its workings on a lowlier and less
complicated plane than the human; for instance, in the behavior of the
creature that is proverbial for its unflagging industry. For this
industry is not motivated by immediate or selfish wants; it springs from
instinctive self-dedication to the common cause. Some people expected
from _La Vie des Abeilles_ ("The Life of the Bee"), (1901), much
brand-new information about matters of apiculture. But in spite of his
twenty-five years' experience, Maeterlinck had no startling discoveries
to convey to his fellow-hivers. His book on bees is not primarily the
result of a specialist's investigations but a poetical record of the
observations made by a mind at once romantic and philosophical and
strongly attracted to the study of this particular form of community
life, because by its organization on a miniature scale it spreads before
the student of society a synoptic view of human affairs.
Of the great change that had by now taken place in his conception of
life, Maeterlinck was fully cognizant, and made no concealment of it. In
the essay on "Justice" he says, with reference to his earlier dramas:
"The motive of these little plays was the fear of the Unknown by which
we are constantly surrounded," and passes on to describe his religious
temper as a sort of compound of the Christian idea of God with the
antique idea of Fate, immersed in the profound gloom of hopeless
mystery. "The Unknown took chiefly the aspect of a power, itself but
blindly groping in the dark, yet disposing with inexorable unfeelingness
of the fates of men."