Maeterlinck at the Villa Dupont; his personal appearance; the present
position of Maeterlinck in critical estimation; the question of his
originality; his public; Maeterlinck a futurist; compared by Louis
Dumont-Wilden with Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; compared with Goethe;
Maeterlinck a poet
Index
Bibliography
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
CHAPTER I
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck[1] was born at Ghent on the
29th of August, 1862. It is known that his family was settled at Renaix
in East Flanders as early as the fourteenth century; and the
Maeterlincks are mentioned as burghers of Ghent in the annals of
Flanders. The name is said to be derived from the Flemish word "maet"
(Dutch "maat"), "measure," and is interpreted as "the man who measures
out: distributor." In harmony with this interpretation the story goes
that one of the poet's ancestors was mayor of his village during a year
of famine, and that he in that capacity distributed corn among the poor.
Maeterlinck's father was a notary by profession; being in comfortable
circumstances, however, he did not practise, but lived in a country
villa at Oostacker, near Ghent, on the banks of the broad canal which
joins Ghent to the Scheldt at the Dutch town of Terneuzen.[2] Here
through the paternal garden the sea-going ships seemed to glide,
"spreading their majestic shadows over the avenues filled with roses and
bees."[3]
Those bees and flowers in his father's garden stand for much in the
healthy work of his second period. Over the fatalistic work of his first
period lies, it may be, the shadow of the town he was born in.
Maeterlinck was never absorbed by Ghent, as Rodenbach was by Bruges; but
he was, as a young man, oppressed by some of its moods. Casual visitors
to Ghent and Bruges may see nothing of the melancholy that poets and
painters have woven into them; they may see in them thriving commercial
towns; but poets and painters have loved their legendary gloom. "Black,
suspicious watch-towers," this is Ghent seen by an artist's eyes, "dark
canals on whose weary waters swans are swimming, mediaeval gateways,
convents hidden by walls, churches in whose dusk women in wide, dark
cloaks and ruche caps cower on the floor like a flight of frightened
winter birds. Little streets as narrow as your hand, with bowed-down
ancient houses all awry, roofs with three-cornered windows which look
like sleepy eyes. Hospitals, gloomy old castles. And over all a dull,
septentrional heaven."[4] That hospital on the canal bank which starts a
poem in _Serres Chaudes_[5] may be one he knew from childhood; the old
citadel of Ghent with its dungeons may be the prototype of the castles
of his dramas.
One part of his life in Ghent is still a bitter memory to our poet.
"Maeterlinck will never forgive the Jesuit fathers of the Collège de
Sainte-Barbe[6] their narrow tyranny.... I have often heard him say that
he would not begin life again if he had to pay for it by his seven years
at school. There is, he is accustomed to say, only one crime which is
beyond pardon, the crime which poisons the pleasures and kills the
smile of a child."[7]
Out of twenty pupils in the highest class at Sainte-Barbe fourteen were
intended to be Jesuits or priests. Such a school was not likely to be a
good training-place for poets. Indeed, though Latin verses were allowed,
it forbade the practice of vernacular poetry.[8] And yet this very
school has turned out not less than five poets of international
reputation. Emile Verhaeren (who may be called the national poet of
Flanders, the most international of French poets after Victor Hugo) and
Georges Rodenbach had been schoolboys together at Sainte-Barbe; and on
its benches three other poets, Maeterlinck, Grégoire Le Roy, and Charles
van Lerberghe, formed friendships for life. These three boys put their
small cash together and subscribed to _La Jeune Belgique_, the clarion
journal which, under the editorship of Max Waller, was calling Belgian
literature into life; they devoured its pages clandestinely, as other
schoolboys smoke their first cigarettes;[9] and Maeterlinck even sent in
a poem which was accepted and printed. This was in 1883.
The fact that Maeterlinck was reading _La Jeune Belgique_ shows that he
was already spoilt for a priest. But he was essentially religious; and
his career has proved that he was one of those poets Verhaeren sings of,
who have arrived too late in history to be priests, but who are
constrained by the force of their convictions to preach a new gospel. It
was the religion inborn in him, as well as his monastic training, which
made him a reader and interpreter of such mystics as Ruysbroeck, Jakob
Boehme, and Swedenborg. As a schoolboy he did not feel attracted to
poetry alone; he had a great liking for science, and his great wish was
to study medicine.[10] Some time ago he wrote to a French medical
journal as follows:
"I never commenced the study of medicine. I did my duty in
conforming with the family tradition, which ordains that the eldest
son shall be an _avocat_. I shall regret to my last day that I
obeyed that tradition, and consecrated my most precious years to
the vainest of the sciences. All my instincts, all my inclinations,
attached me to the study of medicine, which I am more than
convinced is the most beautiful of the keys that give access to the
great realities of life."
It was in 1885 that he entered the University of Ghent as a student of
law. Like Lessing and Goethe, he had no respect for his professors. He
was again a fellow-student of van Lerberghe and Le Roy; they also were
students of jurisprudence. He was twenty-four when, according to his
parents' wish, he settled in Ghent as an _avocat_; to lose, as Gérard
Harry puts it, "with triumphant facility the first and last causes which
were confided to him." His shyness and the thin, squeaking voice in his
robust peasant's frame were against him in a profession which in any
case he hated. He practised for a year or so, and then--"il a jeté la
toque et la robe aux orties."
In 1886 he set out for Paris, ostensibly with the object of completing
his legal education there. Grégoire Le Roy accompanied him; and each
stayed about seven months. They had lodgings at 22 Rue de Seine.
Grégoire Le Roy scamped painting at the Ecole St Luc and the Atelier
Gervex et Humbert; and the pair of them spent a great deal of time in
the museums. But the important thing in their stay in Paris was that
they came into contact with men of letters. In the Brasserie Pousset at
the heart of the Quartier Latin they heard Villiers de L'Isle-Adam,
"that evangelist of dream and irony," reciting his short stories before
writing them down. "I saw Villiers de L'Isle-Adam very often during the
seven months I spent at Paris," Maeterlinck told Huret. "All I have done
I owe to Villiers, to his conversation more than to his works, though I
admire the latter exceedingly." Villiers was twenty-two years older
than Maeterlinck, having been born in 1840; but his masterpieces had not
long been published, and it was only in the later 'eighties that the
young poets who were to be known as symbolists began to gather round
him, as they gathered round Mallarmé and Verlaine.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam died in Paris in 1889. In the same year died,
also in Paris, another writer who might be proved to have influenced
Maeterlinck,[11] even if the latter had not placed on record his high
admiration of him. This was Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (born 1808).
Maeterlinck, after the banquet offered to him by the city of Brussels on
the occasion of his receiving the Nobel prize, wrote despondently,
expressing the good omen, seeing that men of real genius like Villiers
de L'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly had died in obscurity and poverty.
Both men, indeed, had been hostile to cheap popularity. Barbey lived, to
quote Paul Bourget, "in a state of permanent revolt and continued
protest." He had written scathing attacks on the Parnassians. Both poets
were idealists among the naturalists; their idealism is a bridge
spanning naturalism and joining the romanticists with the symbolists or
neo-romanticists.
Villiers was a king in exile on whom the young squires attended. But
they themselves had their spurs to win; and it was the greatest good
fortune for Maeterlinck that he was able to join their company and take
part in their campaign. Several of them, Jean Ajalbert, Ephraïm Mikhaël,
Pierre Quillard, had already been contributing to _La Basoche_, a review
published at Brussels. There was Rodolphe Darzens, who, two years later,
was to anticipate Maeterlinck in writing a play on Mary Magdalene. There
was Paul Roux, who, as time went on, blossomed into "Saint-Pol-Roux le
Magnifique"--he who founded "le Magnificisme," the school of poetry
which had for its programme "a mystical _magnificat_ to eternal nature."
It was in Pierre Quillard's rooms one evening that Grégoire Le Roy read
to this circle of friends a short story by Maeterlinck: _Le Massacre des
Innocents_. On the day following he introduced the author of the tale.
On the 1st March, 1886, these young writers founded _La Pléiade_,[12] a
short-lived review--six numbers appeared--which nevertheless played an
important part. Beside the authors mentioned, it published contributions
from René Ghil. It had the glory of printing the first verses of Charles
van Lerberghe, and, in addition to several poems which were to appear in
_Serres Chaudes_, Maeterlinck's _Massacre des Innocents_ (May, 1886).
_Le Massacre des Innocents_ was signed "Mooris Maeterlinck." The author
discarded it; but it was reprinted in Gérard Harry's monograph (1909). A
translation by Edith Wingate Rinder appeared at Chicago in 1895.[13]
It is a story which reproduces the delightful quaintness of early Dutch
and Flemish painting:
"There were thirty horsemen or thereabouts, covered with armour,
round an old man with a white beard. On the croup of their horses
rode red or yellow lansquenets, who dismounted and ran across the
snow to stretch their limbs, while several soldiers clad in iron
dismounted also, and pissed against the trees they had tied their
horses to.
"Then they made for the Golden Sun Inn, and knocked at the door,
which was opened reluctantly, and they went and warmed themselves
by the fire while beer was served to them.
"Then they went out of the inn, with pots and pitchers and loaves
of wheaten bread for their companions who had stayed round the man
with the white beard, he who was waiting amid the lances.
"The street being still deserted, the captain sent horsemen behind
the houses, in order to keep a hold on the hamlet from the side of
the fields, and ordered the lansquenets to bring before him all
infants of two years old or over, that they might be massacred,
even as it is written in the Gospel of Saint Matthew."
Maeterlinck in this story has simply turned an old picture, or perhaps
several pictures, into words. The cruelty of the massacre does not
affect us in the least; the style is such that anyone who has seen the
Breughels' paintings understands at once that a series of fantastic
pictures, which have no relation whatever to fact, or logic, or history,
are being drawn; not dream-pictures, but scenes drawn with the greatest
clearness, and figures standing out boldly in flesh and blood:
"But he replied in terror that the Spaniards had arrived, that they
had set fire to the farm, hanged his mother in the willow-trees,
and tied his nine little sisters to the trunk of a great tree."
(You are to _see_ the woman hanging in the willow-trees, the deep green
and any other colours you like.... Never mind about the pain the little
girls must be suffering.)
"They came near a mill, on the skirts of the forest, and saw the
farm burning in the midst of the stars." (This is a flat canvas,
remember.) "Here they took their station, before a pond covered
with ice, under enormous oaks....
"There was a great massacre on the pond, in the midst of huddling
sheep, and cows that looked on the battle and the moon."
This transposition of the mood (_Stimming_) of old paintings (not by any
means word-painting or descriptive writing) is the secret of much of the
verse of two other Flemings--Elskamp and Verhaeren. It is an immense
pity that Maeterlinck did not write more in this fashion; many of us
would have given some of his essays for this pure artistry. Not that he
threw his gift of seeing pictures away; he made good use of it even when
he had' given up the direct painting of moods for the indirect
suggestion of them (or, in other words, when from a realist he had
become a symbolist).
Maeterlinck, at the time he wrote _The Massacre of the Innocents_, must
have been trying his hand at various forms of literature. Adolphe van
Bever in his little book publishes a letter from Charles van Lerberghe
to himself which shows that the two young poets corrected each other's
efforts. The letter, too, draws a portrait of Maeterlinck as he appeared
at this time:
"Maeterlinck sent me verses, sonnets principally in Heredia's
manner, but Flemish in colour, short stories something like
Maupassant's, a comedy full of humour and ironical observation,
and other attempts. It is characteristic that he never sent me any
tragedy or epic poem, never anything bombastic or declamatory,
never anything languorous or sentimental either. Neither the
rhetorical nor the elegiac had any hold on him. He was a fine
handsome young fellow, always riding his bicycle or rowing, the
kind of student you would expect to see at Yale or Harvard. But he
was a poet besides being an athlete, and his robust exterior
concealed a temperament of extreme sensitiveness...."
It was certainly van Lerberghe's own idea that it was he who had trained
Maeterlinck; and Maeterlinck would certainly admit it. It was van
Lerberghe, too, more than any other, who won Maeterlinck over to
symbolism. But Maeterlinck met Mallarmé personally during his stay in
Paris; in short, various influences worked upon him to turn him from
Heredia's and Maupassant's manner to that of Mallarmé's disciples.
The tide was flowing in that direction. Verhaeren was soon to desert the
Parnassian camp.[14] Henri de Régnier was on the point of doing so.[15]
Two years before Jean Moréas had published his first book: _Les Syrtes_
(December 1884). In 1885 René Ghil's _Légendes d'âmes et de sangs_ and
Jules Laforgue's _Les Complaintes_ came out; in 1886, René Ghil's _Le
Traité du Verbe_, Jean Moréas's _Les Cantilènes_, Rimbaud's _Les
Illuminations_, Vielé-Griffin's _Cueille d'Avril_. In the pages of _La
Vogue_, launched on the 11th of April, 1886, were appearing some of the
poems which Gustave Khan was to publish in 1887, as _Les Palais
Nomades_. All these books are landmarks in the onward path of
symbolism;[16] not because they are all, technically, symbolistic, but
because each is in a new manner.
Closely associated with the birth and growth of symbolism is the
question of the origin of _vers libres_. French authorities differ: some
credit Jules Laforgue with its invention; others a Polish Jewess, Marie
Kryzinska, who seems to have attempted to write French poetry; and two
of the French poets who were the first to use the medium, Francis
Vielé-Griffin and Gustave Kahn, might dispute the glory of being its
originators. As to Francis Vielé-Griffin, he is said to have introduced
it by translations of Walt Whitman;[17] or, in other words, the French
_vers libre_ is an imitation of Whitman's lawless line. Now this is a
matter which, as we shall see, directly concerns Maeterlinck; so it will
not be extraneous to our subject to discuss here the question of the
origin of _vers libres_.
Marie Kryzinska may be ruled out to begin with. Her poetry was laughed
at; nobody took her seriously--at the most she served as an engine of
war against Gustave Kahn, who was then anything but popular. As to Jules
Laforgue, he was very much admired, and his influence is beyond
question; but what he attempted in his verses was something quite
different to what the _verslibristes_ proper attempted: it was rather a
manner of compressing his ideas than of expressing them musically. As
for Walt Whitman and Vielé-Griffin, it is true that translations had
appeared, but they had not attracted the least notice, and no one
betrayed the slightest interest for the technique of the American poet.
As a matter of fact, few people knew anything about Whitman, beside the
two poets of American birth, Francis Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill;
and both at that time, although of course their manner was new, were
writing, as far as _form_ is concerned, _regular_ verses. Another of the
first poets to write free verses, the Walloon poet, Albert Mockel, was
not unacquainted with Whitman; he had read _American Poems selected by
William M. Rossetti_. Now Mockel, as editor of _La Wallonie_, which he
had founded to defend the new style, was connected with the whole group
of symbolists and _verslibristes_, all of whom, practically, were
regular contributors to the review. And _La Wallonie_ was hardy: it
lasted seven years; a great rallying ground of the young fighters before
the advent of the _Mercure de France_, the second series of _La Vogue_,
and _La Plume_. But, as it happened, Mockel was not in the least
inspired by the selections from Whitman in Rossetti's collection; they
made the impression on him of being Bible verses rather than real
verses. One poet Whitman's lawless line did directly influence; and this
was Maeterlinck, whose rhymeless verse in _Serres Chaudes_ was written
under the inspiration of _Leaves of Grass_. But _Serres Chaudes_ did not
appear till 1889, and even then the majority of the poems in the volume
were rhymed and regular; so that it could hardly be claimed that
Maeterlinck was the originator of the _vers libre_.[18]
It would seem that Gustave Kahn has the greatest claim to priority. But
it was Vielé-Griffin who popularised the new medium. Albert Mockel, too,
must be mentioned. Kahn's _Palais Nomades_ appeared in April, 1887;
Mockel's first _vers libres_ appeared in _La Wallonie_ in July, 1887.
But these poems of Mockel had been written earlier, tentative verse by a
young man not so confident in himself as Kahn, and who was only induced
to publish by Kahn's audacious book.
Mallarmé's attitude should be decisive. He studied the question, and
reflected for a long time when he was invited to preside at a banquet
offered to Gustave Kahn, in honour of the latter's book, _La Pluie et le
beau Temps_. But, having weighed the arguments for and against, Mallarmé
not only agreed to preside at the banquet, but actually to bear witness
in favour of Kahn as the innovator of the _vers libre_--which he did in
a toast reproduced in _La Revue blanche_.
Catulle Mendès, in his half-serious manner, suggested that the first
advocacy of the _vers libre_ was to be found in a book called _Poésie
nouvelle_, which Lemerre brought out in 1880. The author, a certain
Della Rocca de Vergalo, was a Peruvian exile living in Paris; his ideas
were that lines of poetry should begin with small letters, and that the
alternance of masculine and feminine rhymes should be discarded. But the
founders of the _vers libre_, I am told, had never heard of this book.
Mallarmé, it is true, had been interested in finding a publisher for it;
but merely because he wished to help the author to earn money enough to
take him back to Peru.
These questions of symbolism and free verse must have been discussed in
the _cénacle_ which Maeterlinck joined. Not one of the group adopted the
_vers libre_ at this time; more than one, though all had the greatest
regard for Mallarmé, may be said to have remained tolerably faithful to
the Parnassian prosody in after years. The symbolist element among them
was represented really by Saint-Pol-Roux and Maeterlinck.
[1] The Flemish pronunciation is Màh-ter-lee-nk; but Frenchmen pronounce
it as though it were a French name.
[2] It was by this canal, no doubt, that Maeterlinck as a young man
would skate "into Holland." See Huret's _Enquête_. And it inspired the
scenery of _The Seven Princesses_.
[3] Mme Georgette Leblanc, _Morceaux choisis_, Introduction.
[4] Anselma Heine, _Maeterlinck_, pp. 7-8.
[5] _Serres Chaudes_, "Hôpital."
[6] "The literary history of modern Belgium, by the freaks of chance,
was born in one single house. In Ghent, the favourite city of the
Emperor Charles V., in the old Flemish city heavy with fortifications,
rises remote, far from noisy streets, Sainte-Barbe, the grey-walled
Jesuit monastery. Its thick, defensive walls, its silent corridors and
refectories, remind one somewhat of Oxford's beautiful colleges; here,
however, there is no ivy softening the walls, there are no flowers to
lay their variegated carpet over the green courts."--Stefan Zweig,
_Emile Verhaeren_ (_Mercure de France_, 1910), pp. 39-40.
[7] Mme Georgette Leblanc, _Morceaux choisis_, Introduction.
[8] Anselma Heine, _Maeterlinck_, p. 9. But cf. Léon Bazalgette, _Emile
Verhaeren_, p. 14.
[9] Gérard Harry, _Maeterlinck_, p. 9, note.
[10] Gérard Harry, _Maeterlinck_, p. 26; Heine, _Maeterlinck_, p. 9.
[11] Cf., for instance, Barbey's "Réfléchir sur son bonheur n'est-ce pas
le doubler?" with the opening chapters of _Sagesse et Destinée_.
[12] The review of the same name which was published at Brussels, by
Lacomblez, beginning three years later, and in which Maeterlinck's
criticism of Iwan Gilkin's _Damnation de l'Artiste_ appeared, was a
third-rate periodical.
[13] _The Massacre of the Innocents and other Tales by Belgian Writers._
[14] Verhaeren's first _vers libres_ appeared in book form in January,
1891 (printed in December, 1890) in _Les Flambeaux noirs_. But in May,
1890, he had published, in _La Wallonie_, a poem in _vers libres_; and
this is dated 1889.
[15] _Poèmes anciens et romanesques_, his first book of acknowledged
symbolism, did not appear till 1890, but the poems which compose it were
written between 1887 and 1888.
[16] It was in 1886, too, that Gustave Kahn with the collaboration of
Jean Moréas and Paul Adam, founded the review _Le Symboliste_.
[17] A translation of Whitman's _Enfants d'Adam_, by Jules Laforgue,
appeared in _La Vogue_ in 1886. Stuart Merrill personally handed this
translation to Whitman, who was delighted. (See _Le Masque_, Série ii,
Nos. 9 and 10, 1912). Vielé-Griffin's first translation of Whitman
appeared in November, 1888, in. _La Revue indépendante_; another
translation of his appeared afterwards in _La Cravache_. A translation
of Whitman had appeared in the _Revue des deux Mondes_ in the reign of
Napoleon III.
[18] He himself told Huret that _La Princesse Maleine_ was written in
_vers libres_ concealed typographically as prose.
CHAPTER II
On his return to Belgium, Maeterlinck spent his winters in Ghent, in the
house of his parents; his summers in the family villa at the village of
Oostacker.
He now (1887) became, acquainted with Georges Rodenbach, who introduced
him to the directors of _La Jeune Belgique_. He was in no hurry to
write, however; in three years the magazine only published three poems,
still in regular verse, from his pen. These were included later in
_Serres Chaudes_, as also were the few poems in regular verse which
appeared in the anthology of Belgian verse, _Le Parnasse de la Jeune
Belgique_, published in 1887 under the auspices of _La Jeune Belgique_.
The fact that by 1887 it was possible to compile such an anthology is
remarkable; for before 1880 Belgium, from the point of view of
literature, was a desert. But in 1879 certain noisy students at the
University of Louvain (Verhaeren, Gilkin, Giraud, Ernest van Dyck,[1]
Edmond Deman,[2] and others) put their heads together and founded a
bantam magazine, _La Semaine des Etudiants_.[3] This magazine was the
beginning of the modern movement in Belgian literature. In October of
the "following year, another student, who, when his identity was
disclosed, turned out to be Max Waller, brought out a hostile magazine,
_Le Type_; and the fight between the rivals became so merciless that the
University authorities suppressed them both. Max Waller, however,
nothing daunted, went to Brussels, and acquired _La Jeune Belgique_, a
review that had been founded by students of Brussels University, made
friends with his antagonists of _La Semaine_, and associated them with
himself in the editing of his review. Georges Eekhoud, Georges
Rodenbach, and other writers joined them; and _La Jeune Belgique_ went
on with its task of fighting the Philistine. Max Waller died in 1889;
and when Gilkin became editor in 1891, it became the organ of the
Parnassians in Belgium, while the symbolists (French as well as Belgian)
enriched the pages of La Wallonie, which Albert Mockel had founded in
Liège in 1886.
We have seen, from Charles van Lerberghe's letter to Adolphe van Bever,
that Maeterlinck began by writing "short stories something like
Maupassant's." _The Massacre of the Innocents_ is realistic. Verhaeren,
too, had discovered himself when, a student at Louvain, he read
Maupassant's poems. His first book, _Les Flamandes_, made a critic say
that the poet had burst on the world like an abcess. And the Belgians
had in Camille Lemonnier a realist whose novels are as uncompromising as
those of Zola. At the time when Maeterlinck began to write Lemonnier
was, as they called him, the field-marshal of Belgian literature. In the
spring of 1883, the jury whose duty it was to award a prize for the best
work published during the last five years decided that no book had been
published which was sufficiently meritorious. It was felt that this was
an official insult to Belgian letters, and particularly to Camille
Lemonnier, who had published various works of striking merit in the five
years concerned. _A banquet de guerre_ to Lemonnier was arranged by _La
Jeune Belgique_, and there were two hundred and twelve subscribers. The
banquet took place on the 27th May, 1883, and this event may be said to
mark, not only the triumph of naturalism in Belgium, but also the fact
that the élite of the Belgians were now conscious of the renaissance of
their literature.[4] It will be Maeterlinck's task, after his return to
Belgium, to react against this naturalism, and to write works which
precipitate the decay of naturalism, not in Belgium only, but in the
whole world; he and other Belgians, until Belgian literature becomes, as
it was in the time of chivalry, "when the muse was the august sister of
the sword, and stanzas were like bright staircases climbed, in pomp and
epic fires, by verses casqued with silver like knights,"[5] the most
discussed, the most suggestive literature in Europe.[6]
In this reaction against naturalism in Belgium, Maeterlinck's work was
hardly more effective than the dreamy poetry of Georges Rodenbach. It
was not till 1887 that Rodenbach definitely left Belgium for Paris, and
by that time he was a force in Belgian literature. No doubt he
influenced Maeterlinck;[7] he too was a mystic and a poet of silence.
Rodenbach compares his soul with half-transparent water, with the water
shut up in an aquarium: "he stands in silent fear before the riddle of
this 'âme sous-marine,' surmising a deep and mysterious abyss, at the
bottom of which a priceless treasure of dreams is lying buried, under
the shimmering surface that quietly reflects images of the world. He
complains that the poor immensurable soul knows itself so little, knows
no more of its life than the water-lily knows of the surface it floats
on:
"'Ah! ce que l'âme sait d'elle-même est si peu
Devant l'immensité de sa vie inconnue!'
"Then he would fain descend into this unknown world, seek through the
dark deeps, dive for the treasures which slumber there perhaps.... But
it remains a longing, a wish, a dream:
"'Je rêve de plonger jusqu'au fond de mon âme
Où des rêves sombres ont perdu leur trésor."
"And so Rodenbach remains standing on the surface, staring at the deeps,
but without seeing anything in them other than the trembling reflection
of the things around him."[8]
Maeterlinck, as we shall see, is also the poet of the soul; he sees it
under a bell-jar as Rodenbach saw it in an aquarium; but Maeterlinck
does not stand gazing at the unknown waters: he dives into the deeps,
and brings back the treasures which Rodenbach surmised.
[1] The famous Wagner tenor.
[2] The Brussels publisher.
[3] The first number is dated Saturday, the 18th October, 1879, and
begins with "rimes d'avant poste" by "Rodolphe" (=Verhaeren).
[4] Iwan Gilkin, _Quinze années de littérature_.
[5] Albert Giraud, _Hors du Siècle_.
[6] In the thirteenth century in Germany, "Fleming" was synonymous with
"verray parfit, gentil knight." The Bavarian Sir Neidhart von Reuental,
for instance, refers to himself as a "Fleming."
[7] Cf. Rodenbach's;
"Je vis comme si mon âme avait été
De la lune et de l'eau qu'on aurait mis sous verre"
with Maeterlinck's:
"On en a mis plusieurs sur d'anciens clairs de lune."
--_Serres Chaudes_, "Cloches de verre."
[8] G. van Hamel, _Het Letterkundige Leven van Frankrijk_, pp. 127-8.
CHAPTER III
In 1889 Maeterlinck published his first book: _Serres Chaudes_
(Hot-houses). We have seen that several of the poems which compose it
had already appeared in _La Pléiade_ and in _Le Parnasse de la Jeune
Belgique_.
The subject of this collection of verse, as, indeed, of the dramas and
the essays which were to follow, is _the soul_. Rodenbach, we remember,
saw the soul prisoned in an aquarium, "at the bottom of the ponds of
dream," reflected in the glass of mirrors; Maeterlinck sees it languid,
and moist, and oppressed, and helplessly inactive[1] in a hot-house
whose doors are closed for ever. The tropical atmosphere is created by
pictures (seen through the deep green windows of the hot-house) as of
lions drowned in sunshine, or of mighty forests lying with not a leaf
stirring over the roses of passion by night. But of a sudden (for it is
all a dream) we may find ourselves in the reek of the "strange
exhalations" of fever-patients in some dark hospital glooming a clogged
canal in Ghent.... Evidently not a book for the normal Philistine. In
Ghent it made people look askance at Maeterlinck. It branded him as a
decadent.
And that was a dreadful thing in Belgium. Nay, in that country, at that
time, and for long after, even to be a poet was a disgrace. It is only
by remembering this fact that one can understand the brutality of the
fight waged by the reviews, and by the poets in their books; and it is
perhaps owing to the hostility of the public that such a great mass of
good poetry was written. Year after year Charles van Lerberghe renewed
his futile application to the Government for a poor post as secondary
teacher, and on account of his first writings[2] Maeterlinck was refused
some modest public office for which he applied.
The contempt of the Belgians for young poets may be condoned to a
certain extent when one appreciates the absurdities in which some of
them indulged. It was not the _gaminerie_ of such poets as Théodore
Hannon and Max Waller which shocked the honest burghers; they were
rather horrified at the absurdities of the new style. Rodenbach, who was
a real poet, wrote crazy things; as, for instance, when he compared a
muslin curtain to a communicant partaking of the moon.[3] Even when the
absurdity is an application of the theories of the symbolists it is
often apt to raise a laugh, e.g., when Théodore Hannon, extending the
doctrine that perfumes sing, makes a perfume blare:
"Opoponax! nom très bizarre
Et parfum plus bizarre encor!
Opoponax, le son du cor
Est pâle auprès de ta fanfare!"
A goodly list of absurdities could be collected from _Serres Chaudes_
also, if the collector detached odd passages from their context:
"Perhaps there is a tramp on a throne,
You have the idea that corsars are waiting on a pond,
And that antediluvian beings are going to invade towns."
And a scientist of Lombroso's type could easily, by culling choice
quotations, draw an appalling picture of a degenerate:
"Pity my absence on
The threshold of my will!
My soul is helpless, wan,
With white inaction ill."
So incoherent and strange have these poems[4] appeared to some people
who are ardent Maeterlinckians that they assume he may, for a period,
have been mentally ill.[5] If he had been, it would have been
historically significant. Verhaeren went through such a period of mental
illness. It might be asserted that the modern man must be mad. The life
of to-day, especially in cities, with its whipped hurry, its dust and
noises, is too complex to be lived with the nerves of a Victorian. But
the human organism is capable of infinite assimilation; and the period
we live in is busy creating a new type of man.[6] It is the glory of
Verhaeren to have sung the advent of this new man; it is the glory of
Maeterlinck, as we shall see, to have proved that a species forcibly
adjusts itself to existing conditions.
To a Victorian the poems in _Serres Chaudes_ must of necessity seem
diseased; just as the greater part of Tennyson's poetry must of
necessity seem ordinary to us. How many "Dickhäuter" have called
Hoffmansthal's poetry diseased? If it is, so is Yeats's. Turn from
Robert Bridges's poems of outdoor life--the noble old English style--to
Yeats's dim visions, or to Arthur Symons's harpsichord dreaming through
the room, and you have the difference between yesterday and to-day.
At all events _Serres Chaudes_, whether mad or not, is bathed in the
same atmosphere as the dramas soon to follow. As to the relative value
of the book from the point of view of art, opinion differs. Some good
critics who are not prone to praise think highly of it; but the general
impression seems to be that these poems are chiefly of interest as
marking a stage in the author's development. If Maeterlinck had written
nothing more he would have been quite forgotten, or only remembered
because, for instance, Charles van Lerberghe wrote some poetry in the
form of a criticism of the book. Compared with other Belgian lyric
verse, Verhaeren's, or Charles van Lerberghe's, or Max Elskamp's, it is
inferior work. Not that there are no good poems; some of them, indeed,
are excellent, and not seldom the poet is on the track of something
fine:
"Attention! the shadow of great sailing-ships passes
over the dahlias of submarine forests;
And I am for a moment in the shadow of whales
going to the pole!"
Whatever value the book may have as poetry, the rhymeless poems in it
have, as we have seen, considerable importance as being attempts to
reproduce Walt Whitman's manner. They are interesting, too, because they
attempt to create a mood by the use of successive images.[7] Perhaps,
elsewhere (Tancrède de Visan suggests the Song of Solomon) this method
has been applied successfully. The poems in _Serres Chaudes_ are
experiments.
[1] Cf. Rodenbach, _Le Règne du Silence_, p. 1:
"Mais les choses pourtant entre le cadre d'or
Ont un air de souffrir de leur vie inactive;
Le miroir qui les aime a borné leur essor
En un recul de vie exigüe et captive..."
]
[2] Gérard Harry, p. 19. _Le Masque_, Série ii, No. 5: "jeune encore, il
avait sollicité les fonctions de juge de paix, mais le gouvernement
belge, prévoyant son destin de poète, les lui avait généreusement
refusées, et pour reconnaître ce service, Maeterlinck ne lui rend que
mépris et dédain et refuse même les distinctions honorifiques les plus
hautes, celles qu'on n'accorde généralement qu'aux très grands
industriels ou aux très vieux militaires ou politiciens."
[3]
"Chambres pleines de songe! Elles vivent vraiment
En des rêves plus beaux que la vie ambiante,
Grandissant toute chose au Symbole, voyant
Dans chaque rideau pâle une Communiante
Aux falbalas de mousseline s'éployant
Qui communie au bord des vitres, de la Lune!"
--_Le Règne du Silence_, p. 4.
[4] They make one think of what Novalis wrote: "poems unconnected, yet
with associations, like dreams; poems, melodious merely and full of
beautiful words, but absolutely without sense or connection--at most
individual sentences intelligible--nothing but fragments, so to speak,
of the most varied things."
[5] See Schlaf's _Maeterlinck_, p. 12; _ibid._, p. 30; and Monty Jacobs'
_Maeterlinck_, p. 39. But Maeterlinck's brain was always as healthy as
his body. At the time he wrote _Serres Chaudes_ disease was fashionable,
that is all; and, beside the main influence of Baudelaire, there was the
fear of death instilled by the Jesuits.
[6] Verhaeren, in his monograph on Rembrandt (1905), has suggested that
the man of genius may, "in specially favourable conditions, create a new
race, thanks to the happy deformation of his brain fixing itself first,
by a propitious crossing, in his direct descendants, to be transmitted
afterwards to a whole posterity."
[7] See Tancrède de Visan's interpretation in _L'Attitude du Lyrisme
contemporain_, pp. 119 ff.
CHAPTER IV
Some of the most eminent symbolists were strongly influenced by the
pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer[1] and Eduard von Hartmann. Their
outlook on the world is not a whit more rosy than that of the
naturalists. Vielé-Griffin did, it is true, preach the doctrine that the
principle of all things is activity; and that, since every "function in
exercise" implies a pleasure, there cannot be activity without joy, even
grief being good, for grief, too, is a spending of energy. Albert
Mockel's doctrine of aspiration, moreover--his theory that the soul,
constantly changing like a river, runs like a river to some far ocean of
the future--is elevating and consoling; and is a step onward to the
complete victory won over pessimism by Verhaeren and Maeterlinck. But
when we read the first plays of Maeterlinck we must not forget that he
is still a prisoner in the dark cave, with his back to the full light
of the real which he was to turn round to later.
The first of these plays out of the darkness, _La Princesse Maleine_
(The Princess Maleine), a drama in five acts, came out in 1889 in a
first edition of thirty copies which Maeterlinck himself, with the help
of a friend, had printed for private circulation on a small hand-press.
Iwan Gilkin, to whose _Damnation de l'Artiste_, published in 1890,
Maeterlinck was to dedicate his first critique, was the first to analyse
it in _La Jeune Belgique_; and he was not wrong when he called it "an
important work which marks a date in the history of the contemporary
theatre." But it was Octave Mirbeau's famous article in _Figaro_ which
made Maeterlinck. Literally, he awoke and found himself famous. The
trumpet-blast that awoke the world and frightened Maeterlinck into
deeper shyness, was this:
"I know nothing of M. Maurice Maeterlinck. I know not whence he is
nor how he is. Whether he is old or young, rich or poor, I know
not. I only know that no man is more unknown than he; and I know
also that he has created a masterpiece, not a masterpiece labelled
masterpiece in advance, such as our young masters publish every
day, sung to all the notes of the squeaking lyre--or rather of the
squeaking flute of our day; but an admirable and a pure eternal
masterpiece, a masterpiece which is sufficient to immortalise a
name, and to make all those who are an-hungered for the beautiful
and the great rise up and call this name blessèd; a masterpiece
such as honest and tormented artists have, sometimes, in their
hours of enthusiasm, dreamed of writing, and such as up to the
present not one of them has written. In short, M. Maurice
Maeterlinck has given us the greatest work of genius of our time,
and the most extraordinary and the most simple also, comparable,
and--shall I dare to say it--superior in beauty to whatever is most
beautiful in Shakespeare. This work is called _La Princesse
Maleine_. Are there in all the world twenty persons who know it? I
doubt it."[2]
The Pre-Raphaelite atmosphere of the play will escape no one. At the
time he wrote it Maeterlinck had covered the walls of his study with
pictures taken from Walter Crane's books for children; and he had
enhanced their effect by framing them under green-tinted glass. He found
his source in the English translation of one of Grimm's fairy-tales,
that which tells of the fair maid Maleen.[3] He has changed the Low
German atmosphere of the tale to one suggested vaguely by Dutch,
Scandinavian, and English names. He has imported, as the instigator of
all the evil, a copy of Queen Gertrude in Hamlet. This is Anne, the
dethroned Queen of Jutland, who has taken refuge at the Court of King
Hjalmar at Ysselmonde. She soon has the old king in her power; and at
the same time she lays traps for his son, Prince Hjalmar. The latter is
betrothed to Princess Maleine, the daughter of King Marcellus; but at
the banquet to celebrate the betrothal a fierce quarrel between the two
kings breaks out, the consequence of which is a war in which King
Hjalmar kills Marcellus and lays his realm waste. Before the outbreak of
the war, however, Marcellus had immured Maleine, because she would not
forget Prince Hjalmar, together with her nurse, in an old tower from
which the two women, loosening the stones with their finger-nails,
escape. They go wandering until they arrive at the Castle of Ysselmonde;
and here Maleine becomes serving-woman to Princess Uglyane, the daughter
of Queen Anne. Uglyane is about to be married to Prince Hjalmar; but
Maleine makes herself known to him, and he is so happy that he believes
he is "up to the heart in Heaven." At a Court festival a door opens and
Princess Maleine is seen in white bridal garments; the queen pretends to
be kind to her, makes an attempt to poison her which is only half
successful, and finally strangles her. Prince Hjalmar finds the corpse,
and stabs the queen and himself; and the old king asks whether there
will be salad for breakfast.
It is not astonishing that Octave Mirbeau thought the play was in the
Shakespearian style. The resemblance is striking. Hjalmar is clearly
modelled on Hamlet. The nurse is a mere copy of the nurse in _Romeo and
Juliet_. There is a clown. There is the same changing of scenes as in
Shakespeare. Dire portents accompany the action: there is a comet
shedding blood over the castle, there is a rain of stars; there is the
same eclipse of the moon as heralded the fall of Cæsar; and if the
graves are not tenantless, as they were in Rome, someone says they are
going to be. It would be easy to draw up a list of apparent
reminiscences. Notwithstanding this René Doumic is quite wrong when he
talks of the drama being made with rags of Shakespeare. Maeterlinck has
simply taken his requisites from Shakespeare. There are two things in
which Maeterlinck is quite original: the dialogue, and the æsthetic
intention.
Shakespeare flows along in lyrical and rhetorical sentences.
Maeterlinck's sentences are short, often unfinished, leaving much to be
guessed at; and they are the common speech of everyday life, containing
no archaic or poetic diction. It is no doubt quite true that French
people do not talk in this style; but, as van Hamel points out, it is
the language of the taciturn Flemish peasants among whom the poet was
living when he wrote the play. Maeterlinck has himself[4] criticised
"the astonished repeating of words which gives the personages the
appearance of rather deaf somnambulists for ever being shocked out of a
painful dream."...
"However," he continues, "this want of promptitude in hearing and
replying is intimately connected with their psychology and the somewhat
haggard idea they have of the universe." It is already that _interior
dialogue_ of which he showed such a mastery in his next plays: the
characters grope for words and stammer fragments, but we know by what
they do not say what is happening in their souls. "It is closely
connected with what Maeterlinck has written about Silence.[5] This
second, unspoken dialogue, which, as a matter of fact, for our poet is
the real one, is made possible by various expedients: by pauses,
gestures, and by other indirect means of this nature. Most of all,
however, by the spoken word itself, and by a dialogue which in the whole
course of dramatic development hitherto has been employed for the first
time by Maeterlinck and, beside him, by Ibsen. It is a dialogue marked
by an unheard-of triviality and banality of the flattest everyday
speech, which, however, in the midst of this second, inner dialogue, is
invested with an indefinable magic."[6]
If the dialogue points forward to the theories propounded in _The
Treasure of the Humble_, the melodrama of some of the scenes and the
bloody catastrophe to which they tend is directly opposed to these
theories. Too transparently throughout the play the intention of the
poet is to horrify. Apart from the comets and other phenomena which
portend ruin, he is constantly heightening the mystery by something
eerie, all of it, no doubt, on close inspection, attributable to natural
causes, but, if the truth must be told, perilously near the ridiculous.
The weeping willows, and the owls, and the bats, and the fearsome swans,
and the croaking ravens, and the seven _béguines_, and the cemetery, and
the sheep among the tombs, and the peacocks in the cypresses, and the
marshes, and the will-o'-the-wisps are an excessive agglomeration. But
the atmosphere is finely suggested:
MALEINE: I am afraid!...
HJALMAR: But we are in the park....
MALEINE: Are there walls round the park?
HJALMAR: Of course; there are walls and moats round the park.
MALEINE: And nobody can get in?
HJALMAR: No;--but there are plenty of unknown things that get in
all the same.
In the murder scene[7] the falling of the lily in the vase, the
scratching of the dog at the door, are some of the things that are
effective. And if Webster's manner is worth all the praise it has had,
surely the murder in this play is tense tragedy.
This scene is only by its bourgeois language different from the accepted
Shakespearian conception of tragedy. But, as we have said, Maeterlinck's
intention differs from that of Shakespeare, from whom he has borrowed
most: Shakespeare's intention, in his tragedies, was to move his
audience by the spectacle of human beings acting under the mastery of
various passions; Maeterlinck's intention is to suggest the helplessness
of human beings, and the impossibility of their resistance in the hands
of Fate. Maleine--who is no heavier than a bird--who cannot hold a
flower in her hand--is the poor human soul, the prey of Fate. The King
and Hjalmar also are the prey of Fate; Queen Anne not less so, for
crime, like love, is one of the strings by which Fate works her puppets.
Each is helpless; they feel, dimly, that something which they do not
understand is moving them: hence their groping speech.
And the essential tragedy is this: the perverse and the wicked and the
good and the pure alike are moved to disaster, as though they were
dreaming and wished to awaken but could not, by unseen powers. Life is
a nightmare. In Grimm's tale the wicked princess had her head chopped
off; but the fairy-tale was a dream dreamt in the infancy of the soul;
now the soul is awakening to the consciousness of its destiny; and we
are beginning to feel that there is no retribution and no reward, that
there is only Fate. And it is the young and the happy and the good and
pure that Fate takes first, simply because they are not so passive as
the unhappy and the wicked.[8]
Given the intentions of the dramatist, one should not ask for
characterisation in the accepted sense. Characters!--Maeterlinck himself
told Huret that his intention was to write "a play in Shakespeare's
manner for a marionette theatre." That is to say, the real actors are
behind the scenes, the forces that move the marionettes. In a Punch and
Judy show, of course, you can guess at the character of the showman by
the voice he imputes to the dolls; but when the showman is Death, or
Fate, or God, or something for which we have no name, there is no
possibility of characterisation--we can only judge by what the showman
makes the dolls do whether he is a good or an evil being. The fact that
Hjalmar is modelled on Hamlet, and Queen Anne on Queen Gertrude only
proves that the dramatist is not yet full master of his own powers; and,
if we look closely, we shall find that the unconscious puppets resemble
their living patterns only as shadows resemble the shapes that cast
them. We need not expect from characters that shadow forth states of
mind--feelings of helplessness, terror, uneasiness, "blank
misgivings..." sadness--the deliberate or headlong action we are
accustomed to in beings of flesh and blood. What action there seems to
be is illusory--if Maleine escapes from the tower, it is only to fall
deeper into the power of her evil destiny; if, by a move as though a
hand were put forth in the dark, a faint stirring of her passivity, she
wins back her lover, it is only to lose him and herself the more. We
shall see that Maeterlinck in some of his next dramas dispenses with
seen action altogether: in _The Intruder_, for instance, the only
action, the death of the mother, takes place behind the scenes; in _The
Interior_ the action, the daughter's suicide, has taken place when the
play opens.
There is, however, some rudimentary characterisation in _Princess
Maleine_. The doting old king is not an original creation; but the
drivelling of his terror-stricken conscience should be effective (as
melodrama) on the stage. "Look at their eyes!" he says, pointing to the
corpses which strew the stage, "they are going to leap on me like
frogs." And his longing for salad is probably immortal....
[1] Maeterlinck told Huret that he had been influenced by Schopenhauer
"qui arrive jusqu'à vous consoler de la mort."
[2] Figaro, 24th August, 1890.
[3] Pronounced in German like the French _Maleine_.
[4] Preface to _Théâtre_, p. 2.
[5] In Swedenborg's mysticism, the literal meanings of words are only
protecting veils which hide their inner meanings. See "Le Tragique
Quotidien" (in _Le Trésor des Humbles_) pp. 173-4. That Maeterlinck was
meditating the famous chapter on "Silence" in _The Treasure of the
Humble_ when he wrote _Princess Maleine_ may be inferred from Act ii.
sc. 6: "I want to see her at last in presence of the evening.... I want
to see if the night will make her think. May it not be that there is a
little silence in her heart?"
[6] Schlaf's _Maeterlinck_, p. 31.
[7] Suggested, perhaps, by the strangling of Little Snow-white in
Grimm's story.
[8] Preface to _Théâtre_, pp. 4-5.
CHAPTER V
According to the accepted dramatic canons, a play is a tragedy when
death allays the excitement aroused in us by the action, the whole
course of which moves onward to this inevitable end. In such tragedies
death is a relief from the stormy happenings which bring it; it is not
in itself represented as profoundly interesting--it is not an aim, but a
result, "it is our death that guides our life," says Maeterlinck, "and
life has no other aim than our death."[1] Not only the careers, crowded
with events, of the great, but also the simple, quiet lives of lowly
people are raised into high significance by this common bourne. Death is
not so much a catastrophe as a mystery. It casts its shadow over the
whole of our finite existence; and beyond it lies infinity.
Death, however, is only one of the mighty mysteries, the unknown powers,
"the presences which are not to be put by," which rule our destinies.
Love is another. To these two cosmic forces are devoted a series of
dramas which were in 1901-2 collected by Maeterlinck in three volumes
under the title of _Théâtre_. In the preface[2] to the collection
Maeterlinck has himself interpreted the plays with a clearness and
fullness which leaves the reader in no doubt as to his aims.
"In these plays," he says, "faith is held in enormous powers,
invisible and fatal. No one knows their intentions, but the spirit
of the drama assumes they are malevolent, attentive to all our
actions, hostile to smiles, to life, to peace, to happiness.
Destinies which are innocent but involuntarily hostile are here
joined, and parted to the ruin of all, under the saddened eyes of
the wisest, who foresee the future but can change nothing in the
cruel and inflexible games which Love and Death practise among the
living. And Love and Death and the other powers here exercise a
sort of sly injustice, the penalties of which--for this injustice
awards no compensation--are perhaps nothing but the whims of
fate....
"This Unknown takes on, most frequently, the form of Death. The
infinite presence of death, gloomy, hypocritically active, fills
all the interstices of the poem. To the problem of existence no
reply is made except by the riddle of its annihilation."
There is another thing to be remembered (this is a repetition, but it is
necessary) in reading Maeterlinck's early plays. Behind the scene which
he chooses with varying degrees of clearness, lies Plato's famous
image--the image of a cavern on whose walls enigmatic shadows are
reflected.[3] In this cavern man gropes about in exile, with his back to
the light he is seeking.
The mysterious coming of death is the theme of _The Intruder_, a play by
Maeterlinck which was published in 1890. It appeared as the first of two
plays in a volume called _Les Aveugles_ (The Sightless). This is the
name of the second play in the book; but the grandfather in _The
Intruder_ too is blind, and through both plays runs the idea that we are
blind beings groping in the dark (in Plato's cavern), and that those who
see least see most.
The subject of _The Intruder_ can be told in a few words. In a dark room
in an old castle are sitting the blind grandfather, the father, the
uncle, and the three daughters. In the adjoining room lies the mother
who has recently been confined. She has been at death's door; but at
last the doctors say the danger is over, and all but the grandfather are
confident. He thinks she is not doing well.... he has heard her voice.
They think he is querulous. The uncle is more anxious about the child:
he has scarcely stirred since he was born, he has not cried once, he is
like a wax baby. The sister is expected to arrive at any minute. The
eldest daughter watches for her from the window. It is moonlight, and
she can see the avenue as far as the grove of cypresses. She hears the
nightingales. A gentle breeze stirs in the avenue; the trees tremble a
little. The grandfather remarks that he can no longer hear the
nightingales, and the daughter is afraid someone has entered the garden.
She sees no one, but somebody must be passing near the pond, for the
swans are afraid, and all the fish dive suddenly. The dogs do not bark;
she can see the house-dog crouching at the back of his kennel. The
nightingales continue silent--there is a silence of death--it must be a
stranger frightening them, says the grandfather. The roses shed their
leaves. The grandfather feels cold; but the glass door on to the terrace
will not shut--the joiner is to come to-morrow, he will put it right.
Suddenly the sharpening of a scythe is heard outside--it must be the
gardener preparing to mow the grass. The lamp does not burn well. A
noise is heard as of someone entering the house, but no one comes up the
stairs. They ring for the servant. They hear her steps, and the
grandfather thinks she is not alone. The father opens the door; she
remains on the landing. She is alone. She says no one has entered the
house, but she has closed the door below, which she had found open. The
father tells her not to push the door to; she denies that she is doing
so. The grandfather, who, though he is blind, is conscious of light,
thinks they are putting the lamp out. He asks whether the servant, who
has gone downstairs, is in the room: it had seemed to him that she was
sitting at the table. He cannot believe that no one has entered. He asks
why they have put the light out. He is filled with an unendurable desire
to see his daughter, but they will not let him--she is sleeping. The
lamp goes out. They sit in the darkness. Midnight strikes, and at the
last stroke of the clock they seem to hear a noise as of someone rising
hastily. The grandfather maintains that someone has risen from, his
chair. Suddenly the child is heard crying, crying in terror. Hurried
steps are heard in the sick woman's chamber. The door of it is opened,
the light from it pours into the room, and on the threshold appears a
Sister of Charity, who makes the sign of the Cross to announce the
mother's death.
Already in _The Princess Maleine_ the miraculous happenings could all be
explained by natural causes. Still more so in _The Intruder_. It was not
the reaper Death who was sharpening his scythe, but the gardener. If the
lamp goes out, it is because there is no oil in it. Accompanying the
naturalness of the atmosphere (the atmosphere that is natural when a
patient is in danger of dying), there is the naturalness of the
dialogue. The family is worn out with anxious watching: how natural
then is the sleepy tone of the talking, which is only quickened somewhat
by the apparent irritability of the grandfather:
THE FATHER: He is nearly eighty.
THE UNCLE: No wonder he's eccentric.
THE FATHER: He's like all blind people.
THE UNCLE: They think too much.
THE FATHER: They've too much time on their hands.
THE UNCLE: They've nothing else to do.
THE FATHER: It's their only way of passing the time.
THE UNCLE: It must be terrible.
THE FATHER: I suppose you get used to it.
THE UNCLE: I dare say.
THE FATHER: They are certainly to be pitied.
In this play, as also in _The Sightless_, and later on in _The Life of
the Bees_, Maeterlinck shows himself a master of irony. The passage just
quoted is an example.
To Maeterlinck, with reference to _The Intruder_, has been applied what
Victor Hugo said to Baudelaire after he had read _The Flowers of Evil_:
"You have created a new shudder." Certainly, the new _frisson_ is there;
but was it Maeterlinck who created it? It will be well to go into this
question; for Maeterlinck, in connection with _The Intruder_, has been
charged with plagiarism.
The Intruder first appeared in _La Wallonie_ for January, 1890. In the
same periodical for January, 1889, that is, exactly a year before, had
appeared _Les Flaireurs_, a drama in three acts by Maeterlinck's friend,
Charles van Lerberghe. It is dedicated "to the poet Maurice
Maeterlinck." The title is annotated: "Légende originale et drame en 3
actes pour le théâtre des fantoches." Here, to begin with, we have a
"drama for marionettes." Maeterlinck seems to have first used the word
"marionette" in connection with his plays when undergoing
cross-examination by Jules Huret, whose _Enquête_ was published in 1891:
when writing _Princess Maleine_, he said, he had wanted to write "a play
in Shakespeare's manner for marionettes." Maeterlinck and van Lerberghe
were seeing each other nearly every day at the time _Les Flaireurs_ was
being written; and there is nothing to show that they did not discuss
their theories of the drama; it is only certain that with regard to the
idea, superb irony, of a theatre for marionettes, the _published_
priority rests with van Lerberghe. Van Lerberghe, however, was charged
with having imitated Maeterlinck; and it was only when Maeterlinck
himself proclaimed the priority of _Les Flaireurs_[4] that the charge of
plagiarism was turned against him. Now the fact is that Maeterlinck, to
a certain extent, collaborated in _Les Flaireurs_.
The subject of the two plays is identical; both symbolise the coming of
death to a woman. But each is entirely independent. In _Les Flaireurs_
death is expected; in _The Intruder_ it is not expected. In van
Lerberghe's play resistance is offered to visible personifications of
death; in Maeterlinck's play resistance is impossible, because death is
invisible. The first play is full of brawling noise, and peasant slang,
and the action is violent: the second is only a succession of whispers
tearing the web of silence;[5] nothing visible happens, there is only
expectancy. In short, one play is for the senses; the other is for the
soul. The charge of plagiarism is absolutely unfounded: it is only a
case of friendly rivalry in the working out of an idea--the tale indeed
goes that the idea occurred to the two friends simultaneously. If it
really was a game of skill, it would be hard to say who was victor: each
play is a masterpiece.
The scene of _Les Flaireurs_ is laid in a very poor cottage. It is a
stormy night; the rain whips the windows, the wind howls, and a dog is
barking in the distance. The room is lit by two candles. Loud knocking
at the door. A girl jumps out of the bed with gestures of terror. She is
in her night-shirt; her fair hair is unbound. She asks: "Who is there?"
and "The Voice," after some beating about the bush, answers: "I'm the
man with the water." The voice of the mother, who thinks it is Jesus
Christ, is heard from the bed urging the daughter to let Him in. She
refuses, and the man answers that he will wait. Ten o'clock sounds, and
the daughter puts the two candles out. ACT II. Knocking at the door
again. The two candles are relit, and the daughter is seen standing
against the bed, at watch, with her face turned towards the door. A
voice is heard demanding admittance. "You said you would wait," says the
girl. "Why, I've only just come!" answers the voice. She asks who he is,
and he replies, "The man with the linen." The mother again urges her to
open the door--she thinks it is the Virgin Mary. The daughter is
obstinate, and the voice cries, "All right, I'll wait." ACT III. Louder
knocks, and a voice again. This time it is "The man with the ...
thingumbob." The mother still thinks it is the Virgin Mary. She bids her
daughter raise the curtain: and the shadow of the hearse is projected on
the wall. The mother asks what the shadow is; the daughter drops the
curtain. The voice now answers brutally: "I'm the man with the coffin,
that's what _I_ am." The neighing of horses is heard. The girl dashes
herself against the door, but it is beaten in. An arm is seen putting a
bucket into the room. Midnight strikes. The old woman utters a hoarse
cry; the daughter, who had been holding the door back, rushes to the
bed; the door falls with a mighty din, and extinguishes the two candles.
It will be seen that whereas in _The Intruder_ there is nothing which
cannot be explained by natural causes, the symbolism of _Les Flaireurs_
is untrue--death does _not_ come with bucket, linen, and coffin. Death
does _not_ break the door in. This only amounts to saying that
Maeterlinck's method is less romantic than that of his friend.
Maeterlinck's close realism, however, does give him certain
advantages--the helplessness of the grandfather, for instance, is far
more pathetic than the spectacle of the girl dashing herself against the
door, though it does not move us so directly.
_The Intruder_ was first acted in French at Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art in
Paris, on the 20th May, 1891, at a historic performance of this and
other playlets for the benefit of Paul Verlaine and the painter, Paul
Gauguin.
In the second play of the 1890 volume, _The Sightless_, which was first
acted on the 7th December, 1891, at the Théâtre d'Art, we have again
the mystery of death; but the main theme would seem to be the mystery of
human life--"this earthly existence is conceived as a deep, impenetrable
night of ignorance and uncertainty."[6] The fable is this:
In a very ancient forest in the north, under a sky profoundly starred,
is sitting a very agèd priest, wrapped in an ample black cloak. He is
leaning his head and the upper part of his body against the bole of a
huge, cavernous oak. His motionless face has the lividity of wax; his
lips are violet and half open. His eyes seem bleeding under a multitude
of immemorial griefs and tears. His white hair falls in rigid and scanty
locks over a face more illumined and more weary than all that surrounds
him in the attentive silence of the desolate forest. His emaciated hands
are rigidly joined on his thighs. To the right of him six blind old men
are sitting on stones, stumps of trees, and dead leaves. To the left,
separated from them by an unrooted tree and split boulders, six women
who are likewise blind sit facing the old men. Three of these women are
praying and moaning uninterruptedly. A fourth is extremely old; the
fifth, in an attitude of speechless madness, holds a sleeping baby on
her knees. The sixth is young and radiantly beautiful, and her hair
floods her whole being. Most of them sit waiting, with their elbows on
their knees, and their faces in their hands. Great funereal trees, yews,
weeping willows, cypresses, cover them with faithful shadows. A cluster
of tall and sickly asphodel are in blossom near the priest. The darkness
is extraordinary, in spite of the moonlight which, here and there,
glints through the darkness of the foliage.
The blind people are waiting for their priest to return. He is getting
too old, the men murmur; they suspect that he has not been blest with
the Best of sight himself of late. They are sure he has lost his way and
is looking for it. They have walked a long time; they must be far from
the asylum. He only talks to the women now; they ask them where he has
gone to. The women do not know. He had told them he wanted to see the
island for the last time before the sunless winter. He was uneasy
because the storms had flooded the river, and because all the dikes
seemed ready to burst. He has gone in the direction of the sea, which is
so near that when they are silent they can hear it thudding on the
rocks. Where are they? None of them know. When did they come to the
island? They do not know, they were all blind when they came. They were
not born here, they came from beyond the sea. They hear the asylum clock
strike twelve; they do not know whether it is noon or midnight. They are
frightened at noises which they cannot understand. Suddenly the wind
rises in the forest, and the sea is heard bellowing against the cliffs.
The sea seems very near; they are afraid it will reach them. They are
about to rise and try to go away when they hear a noise of hasty feet in
the dead leaves. It is the dog of the asylum. It puts its muzzle on the
knees of one of the blind men. Feeling it pull, he rises, and it leads
him to the motionless priest. He touches the priest's cold face ... and
they know that their guide is dead. The dog will not move away from the
corpse. A squall whirls the dead leaves round. It begins to snow. They
think they hear footsteps ... The footsteps seem to stop in their
midst....
_The Sightless_ is a notable example of clear symbolism. The dead priest
is religion. Religion is dead now in the midst of us; and we are without
a guide and groping in the dark. "There is something which moves above
our heads, but we cannot reach it." We are prisoners in a little finite
space washed round by the Ocean of Infinity, whose mighty waters we can
hear in our calm seasons. Above the dense forest somewhere rises a
lighthouse (Wisdom). We have strayed from the asylum (that goodness
which religion instilled in us when it was alive). The baby alone can
see; but it cannot speak yet (the future will reveal).
The virtues and failings of humanity are hinted at with gentle irony.
One blind man, when he goes out in the sunshine, suspects the great
radiances; another prefers to stay near the good coal fire in the
refectory.... The oldest blind woman dreams sometimes that she sees; the
oldest blind man only sees when he dreams.... The young beauty smells
the scent of flowers around them (the promptings of sense guide us; and
the beautiful are the sensuous); one who was born blind only smells the
scent of the earth (Philistines).... Heaven is mentioned, and all raise
their heads towards the sky, except the three who were born blind--they
keep their faces bent earthwards....
Lessing thought no man could write a good tragedy till he was thirty.
Here are two written by a man of twenty-eight.
[1] "Les Avertis" (in _Le Trésor des Humbles_), p. 53.
[2] Cf. also "L'Evolution du Mystère" (in _Le Temple Enseveli_) Chapters
V., XXI., and XXII.
[3] See Chapter XXVIII. of _L'Intelligence des Fleurs_.
[4] In a letter inserted in the programme when _Les Flaireurs_ was
staged by Paul Fort at the Théâtre d'Art (after _The Intruder_ had gone
over the same boards). This statement of Maeterlinck's is a noble
defence of his friend, and, as such, not to be trusted.
[5] But Death, in _The Intruder_, is understood to have made some noise
while coming upstairs.
[6] Is. van Dijk, _Maurice Maeterlinck_, pp. 81-82.
CHAPTER VI
Few men entirely outgrow the influences of their education: the mind is
made by what it is fed on while it is growing just as much as the body
is. Carlyle was always more or less of a Scotch preacher threatening the
world with hell. Gerhart Hauptmann (who, by the way, was born in the
same year as Maeterlinck) never got over his Moravian upbringing.
Maeterlinck came to hate the Jesuits; but his monastic training lingered
in his love of the mystics. Mysticism is in any case a Flemish _trait_;
and it is one of the outstanding features of Flemish literature as it is
of Flemish painting. It is not astonishing, then, that Maeterlinck
should have felt drawn to the most famous of Flemish mystics. He
published, in 1891, _L'Ornement des Noces spirituelles_, a translation,
illuminated by a preface, of Jan van Ruysbroeck's _Die Chierheit der
gheesteleker Brulocht_. The "doctor ecstaticus" was born in 1274 at the
little village of Ruysbroeck, near Brussels. He was a curate in the
Church of Sainte Gudule in Brussels; but in his old days he with
several friends founded the Monastery of Groenendal (Green Dale) in the
Forêt de Soignes, two miles from Brussels. The fame of his piety
attracted many pilgrims to his retreat, among others the German mystic,
Johannes Tauler, and the Dutch scholar who founded the Brotherhood of
the Common Life, Geert Groote. He died in 1381. His contemporaries
called him "the Admirable."
Maeterlinck warns us in his preface to _The Ornamentation of the
Nuptials of the Spirit_, the subject of which is the _unio mystica_, the
mystic union of the soul with God, that we must not expect a literary
work; "you will perceive nothing," he says, "save the convulsive flight
of a drunken eagle, blind and bleeding, over snowy summits." He only
made the translation for the benefit of a few Platonists. But, apart
from the translation itself, the preface is of value as showing how
deeply read in the mystics Maeterlinck already was at this time, and the
importance he attached to their teaching. "All certainty is in them
alone," he says, paradoxically. Their ecstasies are only the beginning
of the complete discovery of ourselves; their writings are the purest
diamonds in the prodigious treasure of humanity; and their thoughts have
the immunity of Swedenborg's angels who advance continually towards the
springtide of their youth, so that the oldest angels seem the youngest.
Embedded in the preface are gems from Ruysbroeck's other writings. Here
is one of them:
"And they (the doves) will tarry near the rivers and over the clear
waters, so that if any bird should come from on high, which might
seize or injure them, they may know it by its image in the water,
and avoid it. This clear water is Holy Writ, the life of the
Saints, and the mercy of God. We will look upon our image therein
whenever we are tempted; and in this way none shall have power to
harm us. These doves have an ardent disposition, and young doves
are often born of them, for every time that to the honour of God
and our own beatitude we consider sin with hatred and scorn, we
bring young doves into the world, that is to say new virtues."
The translation of the mystic was followed, in 1891, by a playlet in one
act, _Les Sept Princesses_ (The Seven Princesses). It is "the angel"
among Maeterlinck's productions, a weakling which no fostering can save.
Few critics have a good word for it. "A girl's unpleasant dream,"
interprets Mieszner. "An indecipherable enigma," says Adolphe Brisson.
"The piece is something _seen_, purely pictorial," says Anselma Heine,
"a transposition of paintings by Burne-Jones." "Can only claim the rank
of an intermezzo," says Monty Jacobs, "an unfinished sketch." "We must
not seek a literal signification," says Beaunier, "its signification is
in its very strangeness." "Perhaps the weakest thing in Maeterlinck,"
says Oppeln von Bronikowski, "a sketch, or a testing of mystico-symbolic
apparatus." "_Passons_," says Adolphe van Bever. The Princesses have,
however, found a friend in a Dutch critic, Dr Is. van Dijk, whose book
on Maeterlinck is suggestive. His analysis and interpretation of the
play runs somewhat as follows:
"In a spacious marble hall, decorated with laurel bushes, lavender
plants, and lilies in porcelain vases, is a white marble staircase
with seven steps, on which seven white-robed princesses are lying,
one on each step, sleeping on cushions of pale silk. Fearing lest
they should awaken in the dark, they have lit a silver lamp, which
casts its light over them. The lovely princesses sleep on and on;
they must not be wakened, they are so weak! It is their weakness
that has sent them to sleep. They have been so listless and weary
since they came here; it is so cold and dreamy in this Castle in
the North. They came hither from warm lands; and here they are
always watching for the sun, but there is hardly any sun, and no
sweet heaven over this level waste of fens, over these green ponds
black with the shadows of forests of oaks and pines, over this
willow-hung canal that runs to the rounded grey of the horizon. It
is home-sickness that has sunk them in sleep. They sleep forlorn.
Everything around them is so very old. Their life is so dreary with
their long, long waiting; they are aweary, aweary.... They are
waiting for the comrade of their youth; always they are looking for
his ship on the canal between the willows; but, 'He cometh not,'
they say. Now at last he is come while they are sleeping, and they
have bolted the door from the inside. They cannot be wakened. With
sick longing the Prince gazes at the seven through the thick
window-panes. His eyes rest longest on the loveliest, Ursula, with
whom he had loved best to play when he was a boy. Seven years she
has looked for his coming, seven years, by day and by night. He
sees them lying with linked hands, as though they were afraid of
losing each other.... And yet they must have moved in their sleep,
for the two sisters on the steps above and below Ursula have let go
her hand; she is holding her hands so strangely.... At last the
Prince makes his way into the room by an underground passage, past
the tombs of the dead. The noise of his entrance awakens six of the
Princesses, but not Ursula. The six cry: 'The Prince has come!' But
she lies motionless, stiff.... She has died of her long, long
waiting, of the deep, unfulfilled longing of her soul...."
Dr van Dijk is indignant at the criticism of René Doumic, who, in an
article on Maeterlinck, dismisses _Les Sept Princesses_ with these few
words: "As for _The Seven Princesses_, the devout themselves confess
they can find no appreciable sense in the play. All that I can say of
it, now that I have read it, is that it is a thin volume published in
Brussels, by Lacomblez."[1] "Let me have this French critic in my
tuition six months," continues Dr van Dijk. "My curriculum would then be
as follows: The first month he should learn by heart, in Greek and
French, Plato's myth concerning _The Chariot of the Soul_, with the
obligation of course to ponder on it. The following month he should
learn by heart, in Greek and French, Plato's myth of _The Cave_, with
the obligation of course to ponder on it. Then he should impress the
well-known fable of _Amor and Psyche_ on his mind, so as to accustom
himself to the atmosphere of fables. Then he should ponder for a month
on the sovereign freedom of a poet to remould a fable wholly or in part.
Another month he should spend in reflecting over the fact that in order
to understand a whole one does not need to know all the parts. And the
last month he should be left to himself to try and find whether there
was anything in his own soul which in any way could be said to resemble
unfulfilled longing."
Another plausible interpretation is that of another Dutch critic, G.
Hulsman, in his _Karakters en Ideeën_. He quotes the following poem from
Paul Bourget's _Espoir d'aimer_:
"Notre âme est le palais des légendes, où dort
Une jeune princesse en robe nuptiale,
Immobile et si calme!... On dirait que la Mort
A touché son visage pâle.
Elle dort, elle rêve et soupire en rêvant;
Une larme a roulé lentement sur sa joue.
Elle se rêve errante en barque au gré du vent
Sur l'Océan, qui gronde et joue.
"Elle ne le voit pas, le beau Prince Charmant
Qui chevauche, parmi les plaines éloignées
Et s'en vient éveiller sa belle au bois dormant
De son sommeil de cent années"--
and continues:
"Our heart is this palace, and in this palace lies our soul, a
beautiful sleeper. It sleeps, and dreams, and waits for the coming
of the ideal hero, who shall awaken it out of its slumber and
cherish it with the warmth of his love. And these seven princesses
are the different qualities of the human soul."
Hulsman thinks that Maeterlinck must have thought of the Buddhistic
idea, according to which the human soul consists of: the breath of God,
the word, the thought, Psyche, the power of living, appearance, and the
body.
"Ursula, the middle sister, is Psyche, that is, the real self, the
deepest, the essential in our being. This real self is unconscious
and unknowable. Let the ideal come, no ideal can unveil the
deepest. It is dead to us."
Maeterlinck's imagination has been compared "to a lake with desolate and
stagnant waters, unceasingly reflecting the same black landscapes, on
whose banks the same suffering personages for ever come to sit." The
same old castle, the same subterranean caverns, the same dark forests,
another old tower, are the scenes of _Pelléas et Mélisande_ (Pelleas and
Melisanda) which was published at Brussels in 1892, and performed at
the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in Paris on the 16th May, 1893. The
scene is the same; but there is a difference between this play and those
which preceded it--here for the first time we have characters almost of
flesh and blood; "the asphodelic shadows and marionettes begin to colour
themselves with blood-warm humanity."[2] We have personages who
represent the same ideas as those of the previous plays--Melisanda is
again the soul--but here the puppets are moved by Love, not Death. In
_Princess Maleine_ love is one of the means by which Fate moves the
puppets to death; in Pelleas and Melisanda death is the bourne to which
Love drives his sheep. The sheep do not know whither they are being
driven; when they come to cross-roads they do not know which to take;
but they do feel, dimly, that they are not on the road to the fold.
Hence the tragedy of their emotions; and it is the state of the soul
filled with love, as tragic and as mystical a consciousness or
subconsciousness as that of the soul in the clutch of fate or in the
shadow of death, that Maeterlinck projects into _Pelleas and Melisanda_
as into _Alladine and Palomides_ and _Aglavaine and Selysette_.
We have nothing to do here with morality or the laws which regulate
marriage. The soul knows nothing of such things; is unconscious even of
the sins of the body.[3] The soul is subject only to such laws as are
inherent in itself: "the secret laws of antipathy or of sympathy,
elective or instinctive affinities."[4] The soul, remembering the fair
sunny clime from which it came, pining in the cold air of the
marshlands, groping about helplessly in the dark, always meeting closed
doors, always gazing through glass at the unattainable, is an eternal
searcher for the light; and if it meets a comrade who has the key to the
closed door of its happiness, or who holds the lamp to light its path,
it will follow the gleam blindly. It must do, for that is the law of its
being. The tragedy lies in this: that it follows the gleam blindly, and
the gleam leads it--at all events at present, because alien souls come
athwart the path it is following--into the abyss of night.
Civic laws were made to fetter the body; but the soul has no
consciousness of the body, of the senses, and cannot therefore be
fettered by civic laws. So long as you hold that love is a function of
the soul, and not of the senses, you cannot call Francesca da Rimini or
Melisanda faithless wives. In your philosophy they are not on the road
to adultery, but to the happiness for which their soul cries out, and to
which it has inalienable right.
The story of _Pelleas and Melisanda_ is as old as love: it is the story
of Francesca da Rimini; it is Sudermann's _Geschichte der stillen
Mühle_. Golaud,[5] a prince of blood and iron, whose hair and beard are
turning grey, losing his way while hunting in a forest, comes upon a
lovely being whose dress, though torn by brambles, is princely. She is
weeping by the side of a spring, into which her crown (the symbol of her
royal birth; all souls are royal) has fallen. Somebody has hurt
her--who? All of them, all of them. She has fled away, she is lost ...
she was born far away. Golaud marries her, and takes her to the Castle,
where his grandfather, King Arkel, holds rule over a famine-stricken
land by a desolate sea. Here dwells also Pelleas, his young brother.
Pelleas is very anxious to depart on a long journey to see a friend who
is dying. If he had done so, the tragedy might have been, if not
prevented, at all events retarded. But his father is lying dangerously
ill in the Castle (the only use for this father in the economy of the
play is to be ill); filial duty chains him there. This is in the nature
of an accident; and by the canons of dramaturgy accidents must not
precipitate tragedy, but Maeterlinck's plays proudly ignore the canons
of dramaturgy. (Maeterlinck would say the accident was arranged by
Fate.) Pelleas and Melisanda meet on a high place overlooking the sea.
They watch a great ship--the ship that has brought Melisanda--sailing
across the strip of light cast by the lighthouse, sailing out into the
great open spaces where the soul is at home. A few words of common
speech tell us what perilous life is awakening in these two sister souls
that till now had not lived:
PELLEAS: Let us descend here. Will you give me your hand?
MELISANDA: You see I have my hands full of flowers and leaves....
PELLEAS: I will hold you by the arm, the path is steep, and it is
very dark here.... I am going away to-morrow perhaps....
MELISANDA: O, why are you going away?
We find them again under an old lime-tree in the dense, discreet forest,
at the "Fountain of the Blind." (They are the blind.) Melisanda would
like to plunge her two hands into the water ... it seems to her that her
hands are ill. Her hair, which is longer than her body (what poetry
Maeterlinck has dreamed into hair and hands!) falls down, and touches
the water (a Burne-Jones). She tosses her wedding-ring into the air (as
the Princess at the fountain under the lime-tree in the dark forest near
the King's castle in _The Frog Prince_[6] tosses a golden ball), and
just as noon is striking it falls into the water. She had cast it too
high towards the sunlight.... We hear soon that at the twelfth stroke of
noon Golaud's horse, taking fright in the forest, had dashed against a
tree, and seriously injured its rider. While Melisanda is at her
husband's bedside, he notices that her ring is gone. She lies to him;
she has lost it in a cave, she says. Does she lie? Her union with Golaud
is an external bond; but her soul knows nothing of things external, her
soul is innocent of whatever her mouth may say to a man who is a
stranger to her soul. He sends her to the cave to look for the ring, in
the dark--with Pelleas. She is frightened by the noise of the cave--is
it the noise of the night or the noise of silence? Later on Pelleas
finds Melisanda combing her hair at the casement of a tower. She leans
over; he holds her hand; her golden hair falls down and inundates him
(another Burne-Jones):
PELLEAS: O! O! what is this?... Your hair, your hair comes down to
me!... All your hair, Melisanda, all your hair has fallen from the
tower! I am holding it in my hands, I am touching it with my
lips.... I am holding it in my arms, I am putting it round my
neck.... I shall not open my hands again this night....
Doves (the doves of the body's chastity, perhaps) come out of the tower
and fly around them. Golaud surprises the pair, and tells them they are
children. What he suspects, however, we know from a scene in the caverns
under the Castle, when he is on the point of pushing his brother over a
ledge of rock into a stagnant pool that stinks of death. But his
jealousy has not yet grown sufficiently to force him to murder, and he
contents himself with warning Pelleas. There follows a scene which
brings the house down whenever the play is acted: Golaud questions his
little son by a former marriage as to how the pair behave when they are
alone; and lifts the little boy up so that he may peep in at the window
of the tower and tell him what they are doing in the room. Golaud in his
anguish digs his nails into the child's flesh, but he finds nothing to
justify his suspicions; nevertheless in a following scene he loses his
self-control, and, in the presence of his grandfather, ill-treats
Melisanda. In the meantime the father is declared to be out of danger
(Fate needs the father's recovery now to precipitate the tragedy);
Pelleas is free to go away, and he asks Melisanda for a last meeting, by
night, in the forest. She leaves her husband asleep, and the lovers meet
in the moonlight. "How great our shadows are this evening!" says
Melisanda. "They enlace each other to the back of the garden," replies
Pelleas. "O! how they kiss each other far from us." Here Melisanda sees
Golaud behind a tree, where their shadows end. They know they cannot
escape; they fall into each other's arms and exchange their first guilty
kiss. Golaud kills Pelleas, wounds Melisanda, and stabs himself. But
Melisanda, ere she dies (of a wound which would not kill a pigeon) gives
birth to a daughter, "a little girl that a beggar woman would be ashamed
to bring into the world." On her death-bed Golaud implores her to tell
him the truth--has she loved Pelleas with a guilty love? But she can
only whisper vague words.
The child-wife dies; and King Arkel, the wise old man of the play,
closes it by a few fatalistic sentences:
"She was so tranquil, so timid, and so silent a little being....
She was a mysterious little being like everybody else.... She lies
there as though she were the big sister of her child.... Come away,
come away.... My God! My God!... I shall not be able to understand
anything any more.... Don't let us stay here.--Come away; the child
must not stay in this room.... It must live now, in its turn....
It's the poor little one's turn now...."
[1] _Les Jeunes_, p. 230.
[2] Johannes Schlaf's _Maeterlinck_, p. 32.
[3] See chapter "La Morale mystique" in _Le Trésor des Humbles_. This is
the doctrine for which quietism was condemned. I find the following
definition of the soul quoted in _La Wallonie_ for February to March,
1889; "Qu'est-ce donc que l'âme? Une _possibilité idéale_ qui réside en
nous comme la substance réelle de nous-mêmes, que les erreurs et les
tâches de la vie ne peuvent entamer, que ses découragements ne peuvent
abattre et qui les contemple avec sérénité dans l'extériorité réelle, et
séparés, pour ainsi dire de sa propre essence."--JOHNSON.
[4] "Le Réveil de L'Ame" (in _Le Trésor des Humbles_), p. 38.
[5] Perhaps a Gallicised form of Golo, the lover of Genoveva. The name
of Golaud's mother is Geneviève.
[6] M.G.M. Rodrigue, of _Le Thyrse_ tells me (and Grégoire Le Roy told
him) that Maeterlinck at the time he wrote his early dramas drew
inspiration from Walter Crane's picture-books. _The Frog Prince_ was one
of them. Perhaps Maeterlinck had Grimm's _Household Stories_, done into
pictures by Walter Crane (Macmillan, 1882).
CHAPTER VII
It is natural that an artist should wish to recreate something he has
attempted and not completed to his satisfaction, or which, when his mind
is more mature, he thinks he could do better. The three plays which
Maeterlinck published together in 1894 are such attempts at
reconstruction. _Alladine and Palomides_ is a love story which has much
in common with _Pelleas and Melisanda_: "both dramas are dominated by
the idea of the enigmatic in our deeds" (van Hamel), and in both the
love that is given is taken from its lawful owner. _Interior_ is clearly
a version of _The Intruder_. In _The Death of Tintagiles_ we have again,
but more concentrated, the physical anguish of _The Princess Maleine_.
The three plays had for their secondary title "trois petits drames pour
marionettes" (three little dramas for marionettes). But we have seen
that Maeterlinck had described his very first play as a drama for a
marionette theatre; and the three 1894 plays are not a whit less adapted
for the ordinary stage than those which preceded them. Perhaps in
deliberately ticketing his plays with this ironic label Maeterlinck
wished to indicate that they were unsuited for the garish light and the
artificial voices of the present-day tragedy style on the stage. It is
more probable, however, that he would not have dreamt of suggesting a
slight on his actor friends. The characters are described as
marionettes, it is likely, because the scene is spiritualised by
distance. We look down on the movements of the puppets as from a higher
world--we are richer by an idea than they are: we see what Player is
pulling the strings, the strings of which they are only half conscious.
Our position in all these plays is the same as that of the greybeard,
the stranger, the two girls, and the crowd in _The Interior_, and the
acting of the family in this play is an example of the "active silence"
which Maeterlinck in his essay, "Everyday Tragedy," was to suggest for
the theatre when the actor is become an automaton through which the soul
speaks more than words can say.
In _Alladine and Palomides_ there is more than one scene in which
silence is the principal speaker; so, for instance, when Alladine and
Palomides meet on the bridge over the castle moat, and the girl's pet
lamb escapes from her hands, slips, and rolls into the water:
ALLADINE: What has he done? Where is he?
PALOMIDES: He has slipped! He is struggling in the middle of the
whirlpool. Don't look at him; there is nothing we can do....
ALLADINE: You are going to save him?
PALOMIDES: Save him? Why, look at him; he is already in the suck of
the whirlpool. In another minute he will be under the vaults; and
God himself will not see him again....
ALLADINE: Go away! Go away!
PALOMIDES: What is the matter?
ALLADINE: Go away! I don't want to see you any more!...
[_Enter_ ABLAMORE _precipitately; he seizes_ ALLADINE _and drags
her away roughly without saying a word_.]
Perhaps such a scene as this, with its prattling as of children, would
be better in perfect than active silence, that is, as pantomime. (That
pantomime may fascinate a modern audience has been proved by Max
Reinhardt.) But to relate our story: Alladine's pet lamb, a symbol of
her peace of mind or maiden apathy, had been frightened by Palomides'
charger when the two first met. He had come to the castle (gloomy, etc.)
of King Ablamore, to wed the latter's daughter Astolaine. Here he finds
Alladine, who has come from Arcady.
Ablamore has been surnamed "The Wise";[1] he was wise because nothing
had happened to him, because hitherto he had lived
"In apathy of life unrealised,
And days to Lethe floating unenjoyed."
But now he stands on his turrets and summons the events which had
avoided him. They come--and they overpower him. It is love that brings
the events. "How beautiful she is," he says, bending over Alladine while
she is asleep. "I will kiss her without her knowing it, holding back my
poor white beard." He would fain make her his queen; but she returns the
love which Palomides, untrue to Astolaine, conceives for her. Astolaine
discovers the truth; but she, the first of Maeterlinck's strong,
emancipated women, feels no jealousy. Her behaviour is similar to that
of Selysette in a later play; but her character is identical with
Aglavaine's in that play: the rôles of the women in _Aglavaine and
Selysette_ are reversed. It is Aglavaine's beautiful soul for the sake
of which Méléandre is untrue to Selysette. Palomides recognises, when
his love turns from the woman to the child, "that there must be
something more incomprehensible than the beauty of the most beautiful
soul or the most beautiful face"; and something more powerful too, for
he cannot help obeying it. Palomides is quite aware that Astolaine is a
type superior to Alladine. He loves her even when he is faithless. "I
love you," he says to her, "more than her I love." (The situation is the
same in Grillparzer's _Sappho_: Phaon prefers Melitta, also a little
Greek slave, to the renowned and noble poetess.) "She has a soul,"
Palomides says of Astolaine, "that you can see round her, that takes you
in its arms as though you were a suffering child, and which, without
speaking, consoles you for everything...." This doctrine of the soul's
fluidity appears in the scene in which Astolaine tells her father that
she has ceased to love Palomides:
ABLAMORE: Come hither, Astolaine. It is not so that you were
accustomed to speak to your father. You are waiting there, on the
threshold of a door that is hardly open, as though you were ready
to run away; and with your hand on the key, as though you wished to
close the secret of your heart on me for ever. You know well that I
have not understood what you have just said, and that words have no
meaning when souls are not within reach of each other. Come nearer,
and speak no more. (ASTOLAINE _comes slowly nearer_.) There is a
moment when souls touch and know everything without there being any
need of moving the lips. Come nearer.... Our souls do not reach
each other yet, and their ray[2] is so dim around us!...
(ASTOLAINE _holds still_.) You dare not?--You know then how far one
can go? Very well then, I will come to you.... (_With slow steps he
comes near_ ASTOLAINE, _then stops, and looks at her long_.) I see
you, Astolaine....
ASTOLAINE: My father!... (_She sobs and embraces the old man_.)
ABLAMORE: You see that it was useless ...
Palomides promises Alladine that he will take her away from this cold
clime where the sky is like the vault of a cave to a land where Heaven
is sweet, where the trees are not a wilderness of boughs blackening the
steep hill-sides like carrion ribs, but a wind-waved sea of rustling
shade.... They are both poor little wandering souls aweary in exile.
While they are preparing their flight, the events Ablamore has summoned
drive him mad; and now, with golden keys in his hand (gold glinting
against white walls, no doubt, another Pre-Raphaelite picture), he
"Wanders along the marble corridors
That interlace their soundless floors around
And to the centre of his royal home,"
singing a dirge with a refrain which is Maeterlinck's best lyric line:
_Allez où vos yeux vous mènent_. He thwarts the lovers' plans by
shutting them up, blindfolded and pinioned, in the vast caverns under
the castle. "These caverns," comments Mieszner, "are the place we all
dream in, the place where our longing for the light leads us astray into
strange, contradictory deeds." The symbolism of the play is concentrated
in these scenes below the ground: the thought that life is sublimated in
moments of enchantment which pitiless light soon dispels. The prisoners
break their bonds. When their eyes get used to the light, it seems to
them that they are in a great blue hall, whose vault, drunken with
jewels, is held aloft by pillars wreathed by innumerable roses. They see
below them a lake so blue that the sky might have flowed thither.... It
is full of strange and stirless flowers.... They think they are
embracing in the vestibules of Heaven.... But suddenly they hear the din
of iron ringing on the rock above them.... Stones fall from the roof;
and as the light pours in through the opening, "it reveals to them
little by little the wretchedness of the cave they had deemed wonderful;
the miraculous lake grows dull and sinister; the jewels lose their
light; and the glowing roses are seen to be the stains of rubbish
phosphorescent with decay."
Ablamore has fled raving into the land; and the good Astolaine (this
woman of Maeterlinck we love) has come to rescue the forsaken lovers.
She comes too late--they have been poisoned by the deadly reek of the
unreal in the caverns they dreamed in; and they die moaning piteously to
each other across the corridor that parts their beds:
ALLADINE'S VOICE: They were not jewels....
PALOMIDES' VOICE: And the flowers were not real....
The passion of love may break the bonds of custom, and for a swift space
the world may seem lit by a magic light; but the awakening comes, and
the poison works, and in the cold wretchedness of reality even love will
die. Love (sensual love) is a short dream of fair things that fade....
_Interior_, which was performed at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in March,
1895, is better than _The Intruder_ in so far as the coming of death is
not indicated by suspicious signs (which turn out to be from natural
causes) and dim forebodings (which might possibly be the drivelling of
old age). Here everything is taken absolutely from life. _Interior_,
too, shows a great mastery of "active silence": some of the scenes in
_Alladine and Palomides_ approach pantomime; in _Interior_ we have
actual pantomime--the family whom the tragedy befalls are seen sitting
in the lamplit room of their house, mute characters, and the spectators,
together with the speaking characters, see them, through the three
windows, resting from their day's toil. There are three daughters in the
family, as in _The Intruder_; but one of them has drowned herself.
"She was perhaps one of those who won't say anything, and everybody
has in his mind more than one; reason for ending his life.... You
can't see into the soul as you see into that room. They are all the
same.... They only say the usual things; and nobody suspects
anything.... They look like dolls that don't move, and such a lot
of things are happening in their souls.... They don't know
themselves what they are.... No doubt she lived as the others
live.... No doubt she went on saying to the day of her death: 'It's
going to rain to-day'; or, it may be: 'The fruit isn't ripe yet.'
They talk with a smile of flowers that have withered, and in the
dark they cry...."
"The Stranger" has waded into the river, and brought the body to the
shore; and now he, with "The Greybeard," a friend of the family, is in
the old garden planted with willows. The Greybeard is to tell the bad
news before the crowd arrives with the corpse. But while he looks at the
peaceful idyll in the lamplight--the mother with the baby sleeping on
her left shoulder, not moving lest it should awake, the sisters
embroidering, the father by the fire--his courage sinks, and it is only
when the crowd with the body arrive that he enters the house. We see the
father rising to greet the visitor, and one of the girls offering him a
chair. By his gestures we know he is speaking. Suddenly the mother
starts and rises. She questions the Greybeard. The whole family rush out
at the door. The room is left empty, except for the baby, which sleeps
on in the arm-chair where the mother has put it down.
_Interior_ needs no interpretation. It is one of the simplest, as it is
one of the most terrible, masterpieces in all literature. Some critics
consider it the best thing Maeterlinck has written.
In _The Death of Tintagiles_ the tragedy takes place behind a closed
door. ("Victor Hugo said that nothing is more interesting than a wall
behind which something is happening," Jules Lemaître reminds us.[3]
"This tragic wall is in all M. Maeterlinck's poems," he continues; "and
when it is not a wall, it is a door; and when it is not a door, it is a
window veiled with curtains.") Behind the closed door, in an enormous
tower which still withstands the ravages of time when the rest of the
castle is crumbling to pieces, dwells the Queen (Death). The castle is
stifled by poplars. It is sunk deep down in a girdle of darkness. They
might have built it on the top of the mountains that take all the air
from it.... One might have breathed there, and seen the sea all round
the island. The Queen never comes down from her tower, and all the doors
of it are closed night and day. But she has servants who move with
noiseless feet. The Queen has a power that none can fathom; "and we live
here with a great pitiless weight on our soul." "She is there on our
soul like a tombstone, and none dares stretch out his arm." Ygraine
explains this to her little brother Tintagiles, whom the Queen has sent
for from over the sea. There is some talk of the boy's golden crown, as
there was of Melisanda's; every soul is royal, and comes from far away,
you remember. Bellangère, the boy's other sister, has heard the Queen's
servants whispering. They know that the Queen has sent for the boy to
kill him. The only friend the two sisters and the boy have is Aglovale,
a greybeard, who, like Arkel, has long since renounced the vanity of
resisting fate and having a will of his own. "All is useless," he says;
but now he is willing to defend the boy, since they hope. He sits down
on the threshold with his sword across his knees. The Queen's servants
come with stealthy feet, and Aglovale's sword snaps when he tries to
prevent them from opening the door. But this time the servants, meeting
resistance, withdraw, only to return when Aglovale and the sisters are
asleep. Tintagiles is sleeping too, between the sisters, with his arms
round their necks; and their arms are round him. His hands are plunged
deep into their hair; he holds a golden curl tight between his teeth.
The servants cut the sisters' hair, and remove the boy, still sleeping,
with his little hands full of golden curls. At the end of the corridor
he screams; Ygraine awakes, and rushes in pursuit. Bellangère falls in a
dead faint on the threshold. The fifth act is a picture of unendurable
anguish. "A great iron door under very dark vaults." Ygraine enters with
a lamp in her hand. Faint knocking is heard on the other side of the
door; then the voice of Tintagiles. Ygraine scratches her finger-nails
out on the iron door, and smashes her lamp on it. The boy cries out that
hands are at his throat. "The fall of a little body is heard behind the
iron door." Ygraine implores, curses, sinks down exhausted.