principally, a picture of physical anguish. That would be dramatic, and
therefore, in Maeterlinck's idea at the time he wrote the play, vulgar.
The play is rather based, like _The Sightless_, on the sensations of
fear we have when we awaken from the poisoned apathy, which is the
safeguard of the peace of mind of most people, in the stifling air of
the Valley of the Shadow of Death. (The Queen's Tower overshadows all
the rest of the castle.) Everything is plunged in darkness here....
Only the Queen's Tower is lit.... We know, but we do not understand....
TINTAGILES: What do you know, sister Ygraine?
YGRAINE: Very little, my child.... My sister and I, since we were
born, have trailed our existence here without daring to understand
anything of all that happens.... I have lived for a very long time
like a blind woman in this island; and everything seemed natural to
me.... I saw no other events here except a bird that was flying, a
leaf that was trembling, a rose that was opening.... Such a silence
reigned here that a ripe fruit falling in the park called faces to
the windows.... And nobody seemed to have any suspicions ... but
one night I found out that there must be something else.... I
wanted to run away and I couldn't....
We cannot flee from our exile; and "we have got to live while we wait
for the unexpected," as Aglovale says.
[1] Ablamore was not really wise, according to the theories propounded
in _Wisdom and Destiny_. A wise man is one who knows himself; but he is
not wise if he does not know himself in the future as well as in the
present and in the past. He knows a part of his future because he is
himself already a part of this future; and, since the events which will
happen to him will become assimilated to his own nature, he knows what
these events will become (Chapter VIII).
[2] Cf. in Strindberg's _Legends_, "The soul's irradiation and
dilatability": "The secret of a great actor lies in his inborn capacity
to let his soul ray out, and thereby enter into touch with his audience.
In great moments there is actually a radiance round a speaker who is
full of soul, and his face irradiates a light which is visible even to
those who do not believe." The idea is more or less of a commonplace.
[3] _Impressions de Théâtre_, huitième série, p. 153.
CHAPTER VIII
In 1895 Maeterlinck published _Annabella_, a translation of John Ford's
_'Tis Pity She's a Whore_. It had been acted at the Théâtre de
l'Œuvre on the 6th of November, 1894. The published play is preceded
by some entertaining gossip concerning Webster (whose _Duchess of Malfi_
Georges Eekhoud translated) and Cyril Tourneur, "les deux princes noirs
de l'horreur ... les deux tragiques mercuriels, compacts comme la
houille et infernalement vénéneux, dont le premier surtout a semé à
pleines mains des fleurs miraculeuses dans les poisons et les ténèbres";
concerning also "Jhon Fletcher" and "Jonson, le pachydermique, l'entêté
et puissant Ben Jonson, qui appartient à la famille de ces grands
monstres littéraires où rayonnent Diderot, Jean Paul et l'autre Jhonson,
le Jhonson de Boswel." Interesting, too, is the way Maeterlinck reads
his own theories into the Elizabethans. Ford, he finds, was a master of
"interior dialogue":
"Ford is profoundly discreet. Annabella, Calantha, Bianca, Penthea
do not cry out; and they speak very little. In the most tragical
moments, in those most charged with misery, they say two or three
very simple words; and it is, as it were, a thin coating of ice on
which we can rest an instant to see what there is in the abyss."
There are some quaint passages inspired by mysticism; as this, with
reference to the "great cyclone of poetry which burst over London
towards the end of the sixteenth century":
"You seem to be in the very midst of the human soul's miraculous
springtime. These were really days of marvellous promise. You would
have said that humanity was about to become something else.
Moreover, we do not know what influence these great poetic
phenomena have exercised on our life; and I have forgotten what
sage it was who said that if Plato or Swedenborg had not existed,
the soul of this peasant who is passing along the road and who has
never read anything would not be what it is to-day. Everything in
the spiritual regions is connected more closely than people
believe; and just as there is no malady which does not oppress all
humanity and does not invisibly affect the healthiest man, so the
most undeniable genius has not one thought which does not modify
something in the inmost soul of the most hopeless idiot in the
asylum."
It is in this style that Maeterlinck discusses mysticism in the
introduction to _Les Disciples à Saïs et les Fragments de Novalis_ (The
Disciples at Saïs and the Fragments of Novalis), published also in
1895.
"All that one can say," he discourses, "is nothing in itself. Place
in one side of a pair of scales all the words of the greatest
sages, and in the other side the unconscious wisdom of this child
who is passing, and you will see that what Plato, Marcus Aurelius,
Schopenhauer, and Pascal have revealed to us will not lift the
great treasures of unconsciousness by one ounce, for the child that
is silent is a thousand times wiser than Marcus Aurelius
speaking."[1]
Some of the things he says here prepare the way for his dramatic
theories:
"Open the deepest of ordinary moralists or psychologists, he will
speak to you of love, of hate, of pride, and of the other passions
of our heart; and these things may please us an instant, like
flowers taken from their stalk. But our real and invariable life
takes place a thousand leagues away from love and a hundred
thousand leagues away from pride. We possess an _I_ which is deeper
and more inexhaustible than the _I_ of passions or of pure reason.
It is not a matter of telling us what we feel when the woman we
love abandons us. She goes away to-day; our eyes weep, but our soul
does not weep. It may be that our soul hears of the event and
transforms it into light, for everything that falls into the soul
irradiates. It may be too that our soul knows not of it; and if
that be so what use is it to speak of it? We must leave these petty
things to those who do not feel that life is deep....
* * * * *
"I may commit a crime without the least breath inclining the
smallest flame of this fire" (the great central fire of our being);
"and, on the other hand, one look exchanged, one thought which
cannot unfold, one minute which passes without saying anything, may
stir it up in terrible whirlpools at the bottom of its retreats and
cause it to overflow on to my life. Our soul does not judge as we
do; it is a capricious, hidden thing. It may be reached by a breath
and it may be unaware of a tempest. We must seek what reaches it;
everything is there, for it is there that we are."
Maeterlinck has striking things to say concerning the German
romanticist. "He is the clock," he says, "that has marked several of the
most subtle hours of the human soul." In the following passage he shows
him to be a forerunner of the symbolists,[2] one of whose chief
doctrines is that things are bound together by mysterious
correspondences:
"Perhaps he is the man who has most deeply penetrated the intimate
and mystical nature and the secret unity of the universe.... 'He
sees nothing isolated,' and he is above all the amazed teacher of
the mysterious relations there are among all things. He is for ever
groping at the limits of this world, where the sun shines but
rarely, and, on every hand, he suspects and touches strange
coincidences and astonishing analogies, obscure, trembling,
fugitive, and shy, that fade before they are understood."
The fragmentary style of Novalis, though it provided Maeterlinck with
ideas, did not influence his prose as much as that of Emerson did. He
had written a preface for I. Will's translation of seven of Emerson's
essays which Paul Lacomblez brought out in Brussels in 1894. This
preface and the introductions to Ruysbroeck and Novalis are reprinted in
abridged form in _Le Trésor des Humbles_ (_The Treasure of the Humble_),
which the _Mercure de France_ issued in 1896. These essays are clearly
modelled on Emerson's. He calls Emerson "the good morning shepherd of
the pale green pastures of a new optimism." He came for many of us,
Maeterlinck thinks, just at the right time. This points forward already
to _Wisdom and Destiny_. The heroic hours which Carlyle glorified are
less apparent than they were:
"All that remains to us is our everyday existence, and yet we
cannot live without greatness.... You must live; all you who are
crossing days and years without actions, without thoughts, without
light, because your life after all is incomprehensible and
divine.... You must live because there are no hours without the
deepest miracles and the most unspeakable meanings.... Emerson came
to affirm the secret grandeur which is the same in every man's
life. He has surrounded us with silence and with admiration. He
has set a ray of light under the feet of the artisan coming from
the workshop.... He is the sage of ordinary days, and ordinary days
make up the substance of our being...."
Emerson's gospel of everyday life harmonises admirably with the theory
of the tragic advanced in another essay of the book, "_Le Tragique
Quotidien_" ("Everyday Tragedy").
"Is it really dangerous to assert," asks the essayist, "that the
veritable tragedy of life ... only begins the moment what are
called adventures, griefs, and dangers are passed?... Are there not
other moments when one hears more permanent and purer voices?...
Nearly all our writers of tragedies only perceive the life of olden
time; and one may assert that our whole theatre is an
anachronism.... I admire Othello, but he does not seem to me to
live the august, everyday life of a Hamlet, who has the time to
live because he does not act. Othello is admirably jealous. But may
it not be an ancient error to think that it is at the moments when
we are possessed by such a passion, or by others of equal violence,
that we really live? I have come to think that an old man sitting
in his arm-chair, simply waiting in the lamplight, listening
without knowing it to all the eternal laws which reign around his
house, interpreting, without understanding it, all that there is in
the silence of the doors and the windows and in the low voice of
the light, undergoing the presence of his soul and of his destiny,
inclining his head a little, without suspecting that all the powers
of this world intervene and hold watch in the room like attentive
servants, not knowing that the sun itself sustains the little table
on which he leans his elbows over the abyss, and that there is not
one star of the sky nor one power of the soul which is indifferent
to the movement of an eyelid that falls down or of a thought that
rises--I have come to think that this motionless old man is living,
in reality, with a deeper, more human, and more general life than
the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who wins a
victory, or 'the husband avenging his honour.'"
This eloquent passage has made many critics shake their heads. "Put a
vivisectional rabbit in the arm-chair," says one, "and all that is said
still holds good."
It is in Emerson's "spiritual brother," Carlyle, that Maeterlinck finds
his mainstay in the opening essay of the book, that on "Silence." This
chapter is perhaps the most famous of his essays; and it must be
understood if much in Maeterlinck's other work is not to remain obscure.
He distinguishes between active silence and passive silence. The latter
is only the reflex of sleep, death, or non-existence:
"It is silence sleeping; and while it is sleeping, it is less
redoubtable even than speech; but an unexpected circumstance may
awaken it of a sudden, and then its brother, the great active
silence, seats itself on the throne. Be on your guard. Two souls
are going to reach each other...."
What practical value such theories may have is seen from the dramas for
marionettes, in which something never before attempted has been done.
Maeterlinck has indeed used silence to make the soul speak. But it may
be questioned whether it is a doctrine solid enough to build with. It
might, logically, lead to Max Reinhardt's wordless plays; but the
latter, so far as they have yet been produced, have rather the reverse
effect to that which Maeterlinck aimed at--Reinhardt spreads a feast for
the eyes, and the silence of his pantomimes is only to enhance the
spectacular appeal. Be that as it may, there are many astonishing things
in Maeterlinck's mysticism, as there are in all mysticism. Many of them,
no doubt, could be explained by the philosopher's "doctrine of
identity."[3] From a practical point of view, however, Maeterlinck
might seem to be teaching that when we say "fine weather to-day," or
"pass me the salt" (these are common words, but what "interior dialogue"
may there not be behind them?) we are expressing our souls; but that
when we speak in the full heat of passion, or with that eloquence which
pours from us in the brighter moments of our brains, we are expressing
nothing. When the old King in _Princess Maleine_ asks whether there will
be salad for breakfast, he expresses admirably the state of a foundered
soul; when Golaud finds Pelleas playing with Melisanda's hair in the
dark, and, instead of bursting into a torrent of speech, says simply:
"You are children.... What children!... What children!" his taciturnity,
or, if you like, his active silence, renders to perfection his pained
surprise, the confused feelings which he is forcing himself to restrain
till he can be sure of his ground--but to pick out a few effective
instances like these only proves that the theory will stand examination,
not that it is universally valid. Golaud, for instance, is taciturn and
slow to believe, and therefore the few words he speaks in the scene
mentioned are well motived; but put a man in his place whose passions
are nearer the surface--a character of equal use to the dramatist,
though of course less profound--and a torrent of words would have been
more natural and equally effective.
If we cultivated silence more, we should perhaps discover, with
Maeterlinck, that the period we live in is one of the soul's awakening.
"The soul," he says in another of these essays, "is like a sleeper who,
under the weight of her dreams, is making immense efforts to move an arm
or lift an eyelid." The soul is becoming visible almost: it does not
shroud itself now in the same number of veils as it used to do. And "do
you know--it is a disquieting and strange truth--do you know that if you
are not good, it is more than probable that your presence proclaims it
to-day a hundred times more clearly than it would have done two or three
centuries ago." (If the essayist had added here that this is because our
sensibilities are more refined, it would have been an evident truth; but
he goes on to say: "Do you know that if you have made a single soul sad
this morning, the soul of the peasant you are going to exchange a few
words with about the storm or the rain was informed of it before his
hand had half opened the door....")
The soul's awakening is seen best in those whom he calls _Les Avertis_
(those who are forewarned), and in women. "The forewarned" are
precocious children, and those doomed to die young. As to women,
Maeterlinck sees in them what Tacitus saw in the women of the Germans,
something divinely prophetic. "It seems," he says, "that woman is more
subject than we are to destinies. She undergoes them with a much greater
simplicity. She never sincerely struggles against them. She is still
nearer to God, and she surrenders herself with less reserve to the pure
action of mystery." His description of woman's ennobling effect on man
(the main belief of the Minnesingers) is like the woman-worship in John
Masefield's poem _Imagination_:
"All the beauty seen by all the wise
Is but body to the soul seen by your eyes.
"Woman, if my quickened soul could win you,
Nestle to the living soul within you--,
Breathe the very breathing of your spirit,
Tremble with you at the things which stir it,
* * * * *
"I should know the blinding, quick, intense
Lightning of the soul's spring from the sense,
Touch the very gleam of life's division.
Earth should learn a new soul from the vision."
In the chapter headed "The Star" Maeterlinck discusses fatalism. His
conception of it, as might be expected from the dramas already
discussed, is identical with pessimism. "There is no destiny of joy," he
says, "there is no fortunate star." He explains the Scotch word "fey,"
and thinks it might be applied to all existences.
In the chapter on "La Morale Mystique"--one which has been sharply
criticised by Christians--Maeterlinck sunders the soul from the
conscious acts of the body.
"What would happen," he asks, "if our soul suddenly became visible
and had to advance in the midst of her assembled sisters, despoiled
of her veils, but charged with her most secret thoughts, and
trailing behind her the most mysterious acts of her life that
nothing could express? What would she blush for? What would she
wish to hide? Would she, like a modest woman, cast the long mantle
of her hair over the numberless sins of the flesh? She knew nothing
of them, and these sins have never reached her. They were committed
a thousand leagues away from her throne, and the soul of the
Sodomite even would pass through the midst of the crowd without
suspecting anything, and bearing in its eyes the transparent smile
of a child. It had taken no part in the sin, it was pursuing its
life on the side where light reigns, and it is this life alone that
it will remember."
This might comfort a criminal; but it is nothing more than a pure
worship of the spirit. Maeterlinck might reply to his Christian
traducers that they in their creed have forgotten the soul, or found it
hard to think of it as independent of the body; and that it might have
been better for them had they concentrated their worship on the Holy
Ghost (as he does, on the Holy _Spirit_), for their worship of Christ is
a species of idolatry, the worship of a graven image, an image graven in
flesh.
It is especially the "interior beauty," of which Maeterlinck treats in
the last essay in the collection, which fills the play _Aglavaine and
Selysette_, published in the same year. It is a competition between two
women for the greater beauty of soul, a competition in which simplicity
gains the victory over wisdom.
In a castle by the sea live Méléandre and his wife Selysette. They have
been married four years. They have been happy, though sometimes the
husband has asked himself whether they have lived near enough to each
other. Now they are joined by Aglavaine, the widow of Selysette's
brother, who has been unhappy in her marriage. Before she has been eight
days in the castle, Méléandre cannot imagine that they were not "born in
the same cradle" [_sic_].
Aglavaine on her part does not know whether he is her radiance or
whether she is becoming his light. Everything is so joined in their
beings that it is no longer possible to say where the one begins and
where the other ends. (Pure love, according to the essays, is "a furtive
but extremely penetrating recollection of the great primitive
unity."[4]) They think of loving each other like brother and sister; but
they know in their hearts that it will not be possible. (The senses are
beginning to intrude into Maeterlinck's writings.) Nor can they run away
from each other, or, at least, they make out they cannot: "A thing so
beautiful," says Méléandre, "was not born to die; and we have duties
towards ourselves." They kiss; a cry of pain is heard among the trees,
and Selysette is seen fleeing, disheveled, towards the castle.
This wounded wife has less control over her natural feelings than
Astolaine had in similar circumstances; but Aglavaine, in several pages
of parchment speech, shows herself so wise and strong a woman that
Selysette's jealousy of her is turned into love. Now all three dream of
a triangular love of equal magnitudes. "We will have no other cares,"
says Aglavaine, "save to become as beautiful as possible, so that all
the three of us may love one another the more.... We will put so much
beauty into ourselves and our surroundings that there will be no room
left for misfortune and sadness; and if these would enter in spite of
all they must perforce become beautiful too before they dare knock at
our door." They dream of a _unio mystica_ of souls: "It seems to me,"
says Méléandre to Aglavaine, "as though my soul and my whole being and
all they possess had changed their abode, as though I were embracing,
with tears, that part of myself which is not of this world, when I am
embracing you."
But Méléandre, though he loves Selysette's awakened soul more than in
old days he loved her girlish body, cannot help loving Aglavaine more.
"Is it not strange?" Aglavaine asks Selysette, "I love you, I love
Méléandre, Méléandre loves me, he loves you too, you love us both, and
yet we cannot be happy, because the hour has not yet come when human
beings can be united so."
It is clear that one of the two women must go. In spite of her duty to
herself Aglavaine, in a fit of generosity, decides to sacrifice herself;
but Selysette makes her promise not to go till she herself tells her she
may. She talks mysteriously to Aglavaine of a plan she has conceived for
putting things right; and it is the great weakness of the drama that the
wise woman, who can read souls so easily, cannot guess the truth in this
one instance. A fool would have known that Selysette was contemplating
suicide; but Aglavaine could not be allowed to wreck the tragedy....
There is an old abandoned lighthouse tower that the seagulls scream
round. It is crumbling away at the top. Méléandre had only climbed it
once, and then he was dizzy.... Here comes Selysette with her little
sister, Yssaline, for whom she has promised to catch a strange bird with
green wings that has been seen flying round the tower.... She thinks it
has built its nest in a hole in the wall just where she can lean
over.... She leans over to seize it, and the top of the wall gives way.
She is precipitated on to the sands below. She would be killed if it
were not for the fifth act; but she lives long enough to make out that
it was a pure accident, so that the two surviving lovers may be happy
ever after with a clear conscience.
In spite of great beauties, the play as a whole is disappointing. The
fourth act, indeed, is perfect. In the first four acts we have the
doctrine of silence, as well as various other doctrines, dinned into our
ears. Méléandre is a milksop; Aglavaine is a bore; but Selysette is a
beautiful creation--the only one of Maeterlinck's women, perhaps, who is
absolutely natural. She is "unconscious goodness," says a critic,
whereas Aglavaine is "conscious goodness"; and no doubt she does
represent an idea;[5] but she is nevertheless a real, created woman.
Méligrane, the spiteful old grandmother, is in the main the same idea
(wisdom is in babes and the very old) as the greybeards of other plays;
but there is not very much of her, and she must be remembered for saying
this (to her granddaughter, Selysette):
"And so it is thanks to you that I was a mother for the second
time, when I had ceased to be beautiful; and you will know some day
that women are never tired of being mothers, and that they would
rock death itself, if death came to sleep on their knees."
_Aglavaine and Selysette_ is at all events important as being a
turning-point in Maeterlinck's development. We have seen that he had
applauded Emerson's sturdy individualism. There is as much individualism
as fatalism in this play. It is true that love is fatal to Selysette,
but that is because Aglavaine is a monstrosity, not because love is a
_dark_ power--in this play it is distinctly painted as a _bright_ power.
Death is only called in as a saviour from an intolerable situation:
Selysette dies, but she dies with a clear mind, and with a smile.
_Aglavaine and Selysette_ is legendary in its setting only; and it is
not vague, but a clear handling of a problem which is a favourite with
contemporary dramatists--another notable example is Gerhart Hauptmann's
_Einsame Menschen_ ("Lonely Lives"). Hauptmann, like Maeterlinck,
simplifies the complexity by the suicide of the most sensitive member
of the group: both dramatists come to the conclusion that the time is
not yet ripe for reorganising cohabitation on a plural basis, and that
(to quote Dryden) one to one must still be cursedly confined. What
Maeterlinck has contributed to the problem is that he makes the two
women love each other as well as the man they sandwich....
There is nothing of this awakening courage to live in the collection of
poems modelled on folksong (the symbolists generally learned much from
folksong) which Maeterlinck published in this year of 1896. In _Douze
Chansons_ (Twelve Songs) which are now included in _Quinze Chansons_
(Fifteen Songs) at the end of _Serres Chaudes_, the poor human soul is
still groping in surrounding dark, and only catching rare glimpses of
the light. In one poem the soul has been wandering for thirty years,
seeking her saviour; he was everywhere, but she could not come near him.
Now, in the evening of her days, she bids her sister souls of sixteen
years take up her staff and seek him; they also, far away. Les _Filles
aux Yeux bandés_ and _Les sept Filles d'Orlamonde_[6] are sketches of a
motive which was worked out in _Ardiane and Bluebeard_.
The poems are so beautifully illustrated by Charles Doudelet's woodcuts
that it is hard to say whether the pictures illuminate the poem or the
poems the pictures. Maeterlinck's Tower is there, hauntingly desolate, a
nightmare, set against _The three blind sisters_. You know the meaning
of _She had three diadems of gold_ when you have seen the picture to it:
the love you bestow on a person is a net wherewith that person imprisons
you. The most desolating imprisonment of all is that in which a mother
is plunged by her children (for there is no love so _deep_ as hers):
Doudelet shows us a woman chained up in a hole whelmed with snow.
To dream over this rare volume for an after-noon, stretching out its
leaves before you like the wings of a bird, is to be borne into the
atmosphere of the soul. And when you come to the last picture and the
last poem "_You have lighted the lamps_"--
"The other days are wearisome,
The other days are also shy,
The other days will never come,
The other days shall also die,
We too shall die here by and bye"--
you would like to bury your head in your hands and sob like a
woman--without knowing why....
[1] See note, p. 88.
[2] One of the features which distinguish the poetry of the symbolists
is the mixing of _genres_. Cf. the following fragment (p. 103 in
Maeterlinck's translation): "One ought never to see a work of plastic
art without music, nor listen to a work of music anywhere save in
beautifully decorated halls."
[3] Cf. Dr van Dijk, _Maeterlinck_, pp. 26 ff.; "Now in order to find
the life interior you must be at the other end of all your agitations,
you must be behind your conscious thoughts, words, and deeds. Behind all
that makes you finite, keeps you finite, lies the infinite; the ocean of
the infinite flows round you there, and there lie the ice-fields of
mystery, the great treasures of the unconscious, there are the deeps of
the interior sea. _There_ is no longer that which has an end, a bound, a
limit, that which is shared and divided, that which is joined and
separated, _there_ is perfect identity of all things, _there_ is
everywhere and always identical mystery, _there_ God is. There it is,
too, says Maeterlinck, that we first understand each other, for subtle,
tender bonds are there between all souls.... When you now, with
Maeterlinck, turn your back on the conscious in every form, it follows
that even the best word will always be a more or less disturbing
wrinkle, a wrinkle that darkens the unmoving silent waters of the
unconscious. Think and put your thoughts into words, and you must move
further and further in the direction of the conscious; that is, in the
direction of that which is limited and the limiting." Cf. one of the
opening sentences of the essay "La Morale mystique": "As soon as we
express something, we diminish it strangely. We think we have dived to
the depth of the abysses, and when we reach the surface again the drop
of water glittering at the end of our pale fingers no longer resembles
the sea it came from."
[4] In _The Invisible Goodness_.
[5] According to Mieszner, Aglavaine is a "Mannweib," Selysette a
"Nurweib."
[6] Is the name from the German _Volkslied_ "Herzogin von Orlamünde"?
CHAPTER IX
Towards the end of 1896 Maeterlinck settled in Paris. His life here was
no less retired than it had been in Ghent. A new light had come into his
life. _The Treasure of the Humble_ had been dedicated to a Parisian
lady, Georgette Leblanc. To her also he dedicates _Sagesse et Destinée_
(Wisdom and Destiny), in 1898, in these words:
"To you I dedicate this book, which is, so to speak, your work.
There is a higher and a more real collaboration than that of the
pen--that of thought and example. I have not been constrained to
imagine painfully the resolutions and the actions of an ideal sage,
or to draw from my heart the moral of a beautiful dream perforce a
little vague. It has sufficed me to listen to your words. It has
sufficed me to let my eyes follow you attentively in your life;
they were then following the movements, the gestures, the habits of
wisdom itself."
The book was a great surprise for Maeterlinck's already world-wide
community. "By the side of _The Treasure of the Humble_," wrote van
Hamel, "it gives you the impression of a catechism by the side of a
breviary." Not the unconscious, but the conscious, occupies the first
place. The earlier philosophy is directly contradicted.[1] Whereas in
_The Treasure of the Humble_ we read of "the august, everyday life of a
Hamlet ... who has the time to live because he does not act," we now
hear of "the miserable blindness of Hamlet," who, though he had more
intelligence than all those around him, was no wise man, for he did not,
by exercising will-power, prevent the horrible tragedy. In the first
book of essays action hinders life; in the second, to act is to think
more rapidly and more completely than thought can do. To act is to think
with one's whole being, not with the brain alone.
"It is our death that guides our life, and our life has no other object
than death," Maeterlinck had said. Now he can write: "When shall we give
up the idea that death is more important than life, and that misfortune
is greater than happiness?... Who has told us that we ought to measure
life by the standard of death, and not death by the standard of
life?"[2]
That a great change had taken place in Maeterlinck's conception of the
universe would be clear to anyone who read his works consecutively. He
himself wrote to G. van Hamel, soon after the publication of _Sagesse et
Destinée_, to this effect. Van Hamel does not give the exact words, but
reports the gist of the letter as follows:
"The mysterious seems to have lost a great deal of its attraction
for him. Only the great, the 'metaphysical mystery,' 'the
unknowable essence of reality,' continues to chain him. But the
many mysteries which have dominated the mind and the life of men,
and which possess no sufficient reality, he would now banish from
art as well. Fate, divine justice, and all those other obsolete
ideas have no longer the power to dominate even the imagination.
Life, the life of the artist too, must be cleansed of all that is
unreal."
Maeterlinck added to the above (these words are quoted in French):
"I do not know whether I am doing better or worse; all I do know is
that I want to express things more and more simple, things more and
more human, less and less brilliant, more and more true."[3]
The change in Maeterlinck is generally ascribed to the inspiration of
Mme Georgette Leblanc. He has himself drawn her portrait in a chapter
of a later book, _Le double Jardin_. In 1904 she published a novel, _Le
Choix de la Vie_; it is full of the words "beauty" and "happiness."
Happiness is what humanity was made for, Maeterlinck teaches in _Wisdom
and Destiny_. Misery is an illness of humanity, just as illness is a
misery of man. We ought to have doctors for human misery, just as we
have doctors for illness. Because illness is common, it does not follow
that we ought never to talk of health; and the fact that we live in the
midst of misery is no reason why the moralist should not make happiness
his starting-point. To be wise is to learn to be happy.
To be happy is only to have freed our soul from the unrest of
unhappiness. To be happy we must learn to separate our exterior destiny
from our moral destiny. Nothing happens to men except what they will
shall happen to them. We have very little influence over a certain
number of exterior events; but we have a very powerful action on what
these events become in ourselves. It is what happens to most men that
darkens or lightens their life; but the interior life of good men itself
lightens all that happens to them. If you have been betrayed, it is not
the treason that matters; it is the forgiveness that has come of it in
your soul. Nothing happens which is not of the same nature as ourselves.
Climb the mountain or descend to the village, you will find none but
yourself on the highroads of chance.
In proportion as we become wise, we escape from some of our instinctive
destinies. Every man who is able to diminish the blind force of instinct
in himself, diminishes around him the force of destiny. Destiny has
remained a barbarian; it cannot reach souls that have grown nobler than
itself. That is why tragic poets rarely permit a sage to appear on the
scene; no drama ever happens among sages, and the presence of the sage
paralyses destiny. There is not a single tragedy in which fatality
reigns; what the hero combats in all of them is not destiny, but wisdom.
If predestination exists, it only exists in character; and character can
be modified. Fatality obeys those who dare give it orders, and therefore
there is no inevitable tragedy.
The shadow of destiny casts an enormous shadow over the valley it seems
to drown in darkness, and in this shadow we are born; but many men can
travel beyond it; and those who cannot may find happiness in wisdom
which no catastrophe can reach.
But what is wisdom? Consciousness of oneself; knowledge of oneself. It
is not reason: reason opens the door to wisdom. It is from the threshold
of reason that all sages set out; but they travel in different
directions. Reason gives birth to justice; wisdom gives birth to
goodness. There is no love in reason; there is much in wisdom. Not
reason, but love, must be the glass in which the flower of genuine
wisdom is cultivated. It is true that reason is found at the root of
wisdom; but wisdom is not the flower of reason. Wisdom is the light of
love; love, and you will be wise.
And does the sage never suffer? He suffers; and suffering is one of the
elements of his wisdom. It is not suffering we must avoid, but the
discouragement--it brings to those who receive it like a master. People
suffer little by suffering itself; they suffer enormously by the way
they accept it. Misfortune comes to us, but it only does what it is
ordered to do.
What is it that decides what suffering shall bring to us? Not reason,
but our anterior life, which has formed our soul. Nothing is more just
than grief; and our life waits till the hour strikes, as the mould
awaits the molten bronze, to pay us our wage.
What if it be true that the sage be punished instead of being rewarded!
What soul could be called good if it were sure of its reward? And who
shall measure the happiness or unhappiness of the sage? When we put
unhappiness in one side of the scales, each one of us lays down in the
other the idea he has of happiness. The savage will lay alcohol,
gunpowder, and feathers there; the civilised man gold and days of
intoxication; but the sage will lay down a thousand things that we do
not see, his whole soul perhaps, and even the unhappiness which he will
have purified.
Let us be loath to welcome the wisdom and the happiness which are
founded on the scorn of anything. Scorn, and renunciation, which is the
infirm child of scorn, open to us the asylum of the old and weak. We
should only have the right to scorn a joy when it would not even be
possible for us to know that we scorned it. Renunciation is a parasite
of virtue. As long as a man knows that he renounces, the happiness of
his renunciation is born of pride. The supreme end of wisdom is not to
renounce, but to find the fixed point of happiness in life. It is not by
renouncing joys that we shall become wise; but by becoming wise we shall
renounce, without knowing it, the joys that cannot rise to our level.
Certain ideas on renunciation,[4] resignation, and sacrifice exhaust the
noblest moral forces of humanity more than great vices and great crimes.
Infinitely too much importance, for instance, is attached to the triumph
of the spirit over the flesh;[5] and these alleged triumphs are most
often only total defeats of life. It is sad to die a virgin. But there
must be no satisfaction of base instincts. Not _I would like_, but _I
will_ must be the guiding star.
When the just is punished, we are troubled by the negation of a high
moral law; but from this very negation a higher moral law is born
immediately. With the suppression of punishment and reward is born the
necessity of doing good for the sake of good. So teaches the book.
There is still mysticism in the kernel of this philosophy: the identity
of the soul with the divine; but in its practical results it is a
positivist, a realist philosophy. "There is nothing to hope for," we are
told, "apart from truth. A soul that grows is a soul that comes nearer
to truth." Death and the other mysteries are now only the points where
our present knowledge ends; but we may hope that science will dispel our
ignorance. In the meantime if we seclude ourselves from reality to dream
of loveliness, the fair things we see will turn into ashes, like the
roses that Alladine and Palomides saw in the caverns, at the first
inrush of light. The most fatal of thoughts is that which cannot be
friend with reality.
The book is strongly anti-Christian in its rejection of what are called
parasitic virtues--arbitrary chastity, sterile self-sacrifice,
penitence, and others--which turn the waters of human morality from
their course and force them into a stagnant pool. The saints were
egotists, because they fled from life to shelter in a narrow cell; but
it is contact with men which teaches us how to love God.[6] It is
anti-ascetic too. Maeterlinck has the courage to say that a morbid
virtue may do more harm than a healthy vice.[7] In this connection one
might say of him what Stefan Zweig has said of Verhaeren:
"His whole evolution--which in this respect coincides with that of
the great German poets, with Nietzsche and Dehmel--tends, not to
the limitation of primordial instincts, but to their logical
development."[8]
Perhaps the most tangible doctrine in _Wisdom and Destiny_ is that of
salvation by love. Love is wisdom's nearest sister. Love feeds wisdom,
and wisdom feeds love; and the loving and the wise embrace in their own
light. "Ceux qui vivent d'amour vivent d'éternité," Maeterlinck might
have said with Verhaeren.[9] The main difference between Maeterlinck's
final philosophy and that of his great countryman is this: that whereas
Maeterlinck, like Goethe, brings his disciple to the shores of the sea
of serenity and leaves him in a state of calm, Verhaeren sees
spiritualising forces in passion, in exaltation, in paroxysm, and
teaches that to be calm is to diminish oneself.
_Wisdom and Destiny_ contains few of the apparent absurdities which
confuse the reader of _The Treasure of the Humble_; but whether all the
ideas will escape contradiction in independent minds may be questioned.
To give an instance: it is no doubt true that a man may fight destiny;
but if a man does fight destiny, it might be argued that it is only
because it is his destiny to fight destiny. Louis XVI. is given as an
example of a victim of destiny. He was the victim of destiny because of
his feebleness, blindness, and vanity. But why was he weak, blind, and
vain? According to the creed abandoned by Maeterlinck, it was his fate
to be weak, blind, and vain. In _Wisdom and Destiny_ the argument is: If
he had been _wise_ ... But how _can_ a weak, blind, and vain man be
wise? No wisdom on earth can make a fool anything but a fool. Character
can be modified, urges Maeterlinck; and we must be content with that.
Not a few of us, too, must feel that the stoic fortitude Maeterlinck
would have us show when our loved ones die will seem less divine than
the passionate despair once breathed into tearful numbers for lost
Mystes.
* * * * *
"The destinies of humanity are contained in epitome in the existence of
the humblest little animals," is a thought of Pascal which might well
have suggested Maeterlinck's _La Vie des Abeilles_ (The Life of the
Bee). It appeared in 1901. Maeterlinck had kept bees for years; and
continued to do so when he set up his abode at a villa in
Gruchet-Saint-Siméon in Normandy.
_The Life of the Bee_ is not a scientific treatise, though it is
scientifically correct; it does not claim to bring new material; it is a
simple account of the bees' short year from April to the last days of
September, told by one who loves and knows them to those who, he
assumes, have no intimate knowledge. His intention is to observe bees
and see if his observations can throw light on the destinies of
humanity.
To begin with, bees are incessantly working, each at a different trade.
Those that seem most idle, as you watch them in an observation hive,
have the most mysterious and fatiguing task of all, to secrete and form
the wax; just as there are some men (the thinkers) who appear useless,
but who alone make it possible for a certain number of men to be
useful.[10]
The bee is a creature of the crowd: isolate her and she will die of
loneliness. From the city she derives an aliment that is as necessary to
her as honey. (We remember that in _Wisdom and Destiny_ saints were
called egotists because they fled from their fellow-men.) In the hive
the individual is nothing. The bees are socialists, we shall find; they
are as united as the good thoughts that dwell in the same soul; they
have a collectivist policy. This was not always so; and even to-day
there are savage bees who live in lonely wretchedness. The hive of
to-day is perfect, though pitiless; it merges the individual in the
republic, and the republic itself is regularly sacrificed to the
abstract, immortal city of the future. The will of Nature clearly tends
to the improvement of the race, but she shows at the same time that she
cannot obtain this improvement except by sacrificing the liberty of the
individual to the general interest. First, the individual must renounce
his vices, which are acts of independence. Whereas the workers among the
humble-bees, a lower order, do not dream of renouncing love, our
domestic bee lives in perpetual chastity.
It is the "spirit of the hive" that rules the bees and all they do. It
decrees that when the hour comes they shall "swarm." This desertion of
the hive was previously thought to be an attack of fatal folly (we are
in the habit of ascribing things we do not understand to "fatality");
but science has discovered (what may not science discover?) that it is a
deliberate sacrifice of the present generation to the future generation.
The god of the bees is the future. To this future everything is
subordinated, with astonishing foresight, co-operation, and
inflexibility. It is clear that the bees have will-power. You may see
where this will-power, which is the "spirit of the hive," resides, if
you place the careworn head of a virgin worker under the microscope:
within this little head are the circumvolutions of the vastest and the
most ingenious brain of the hive, the most beautiful, the most
complicated brain which is in nature after that of man. Here again, as
everywhere else in the world, where the brain is there is authority, the
real strength, wisdom, and victory. Here again it is an almost invisible
atom of that mysterious substance that organises and subjugates matter,
and is able to create for itself a little triumphant and durable place
amid, the stupendous and inert powers of nothingness and death.
The description of the swarming is very beautiful. When the beekeeper
is collecting the bees from the bough they have settled on, he need not
fear them. They are inoffensive because they are happy, and they are
happy without knowing why: they are fulfilling the law. All creatures,
great and small, have such a moment of blind happiness when Nature
wishes to accomplish her ends. The bees are Nature's dupes; so are we.
Some observers, Lord Avebury for instance, do not estimate the
intelligence of the bee as highly as Maeterlinck does; but the
experiments on which they base their conclusions do not seem to
Maeterlinck to be more decisive than the spectacle of the ravages of
alcohol, or of a battlefield, would be to a superhuman observer trying
to fix the limits of human intelligence. And then, think of the
situation of the bee in the world: by the side of an extraordinary being
who is always upsetting the laws of its nature. How should we behave if
some Higher Being should foil our wisdom? And how do we know there is no
such Higher Being, or more than one, who might be to us as
indistinguishable as man, the great ape, and the bear are to the bee? It
is certain that there are within us and around us influences and powers
as dissimilar and as indistinguishable.
It is as interesting and as important to us to discover signs of
intellect outside ourselves as it was to Robinson Crusoe to find the
imprint of a human foot other than his own on the sandy beach of his
island. When we study the intelligence of bees we study what is most
precious in our own substance, an atom of that extraordinary matter
which has the property of transfiguring blind necessity, of organising
and multiplying life and making it more beautiful, of checking the
obstinate force of death and the great irresponsible wave that rolls
round in earth's diurnal course all eternally unconscious things.
This intelligence is the devouring force of the future. Do not say that
mankind is deteriorating. Alcohol and syphilis, for instance, are
accidents that the race will overcome; perhaps they are tests by which
some of our organs, the nervous organs for instance, will profit, for
life constantly profits by the ills it surmounts. A trifle may be
discovered to-morrow which will make them innocuous. Confidence in life
is the first of our duties. We have everything to hope from evolution.
It will lessen exertion, insecurity, and wretchedness; it will increase
comfort. To this end it will not hesitate to sacrifice the individual.
And let us note that progress recorded by nature is never lost. Life is
a constant progression, whither, we do not know.
The whole book is a powerful epic of brain force. It is easy,
Maeterlinck concludes his message, to discover the preordained duty of
any being. You can read it in the organ which distinguishes it, and to
which all its other organs are subordinated. Just as it is written on
the tongue, in the mouth, and in the stomach of the bee that its duty is
to produce honey, so it is written in our eyes, our ears, our marrow, in
every lobe of our head, in the whole nervous system of our body, that we
have been created to transform what we absorb from the things of the
earth into that strange fluid we call brain power. Everything has been
sacrificed to that. Our muscles, our health, the agility of our limbs,
bear the growing pain of its preponderance.
Now in this cult of the future and of the human brain which is to make
man God, Maeterlinck is not alone. By a different route he has reached
the same goal as Verhaeren. The "futurists" have based their manifesto
on what these two Flemings teach; and though the futurists go to
scandalous extremes they will do some good if they shock those good
people who feed on classic lore into a suspicion that new ideals have
sprung into being:
"Voici l'heure qui bout de sang et de jeunesse ...
* * * * *
Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu, déplace
L'équilibre ancien dont les âmes sont lasses;
La nature paraît sculpter
Un visage nouveau à son éternité."[11]
[1] Schrijver in his _Maeterlinck_, pp. 54 ff., collects passages in
_The Treasure_ which point forward to _Wisdom and Destiny_.
[2] _Sagesse et Destinée_, p. 122. Cf. Verhaeren, "Un Matin" (_Les
Forces Tumultueuses_):
"Il me semble jusqu'à ce jour n'avoir vécu
Que pour mourir et non pour vivre."
]
[3] _Het Letterkundig Leven van Frankrijk_, pp. 180-181. Cf. also
Chapter VII of "L'Evolution du Mystère" in _Le Temple Enseveli_.
[4] In the _Buried Temple_, Chapter XXI, Maeterlinck says: "Nature
rejects renunciation in all its forms, except that of maternal love."
[5] Cf. Chapter XXI of L'Inquiétude de notre Morale (in _L'Intelligence
des Fleurs_): "We are no longer chaste, now that we have recognised that
the work of the flesh, cursed during twenty centuries, is natural and
legitimate. We no longer go out in search of resignation, of
mortification, of sacrifice; we are no longer humble in heart nor poor
in spirit."
[6] "Man is created to live in harmony with others; it is in society and
not in solitude that he finds numerous opportunities of practising
Christian charity to his neighbours."--Swedenborg.
[7] In "Portrait de Femme" (_Le double Jardin_) Maeterlinck
distinguishes between virtue and vice: they are the same forces, he says
... a virtue is only a vice that rises instead of falling.
[8] _Verhaeren_, p. 298.
[9] _Les Heures d'après-midi_.
[10] _Wisdom and Destiny_, Chapter I.
[11] Verhaeren, "La Foule" (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
CHAPTER X
Of _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_ (Ardiane and Bluebeard) and _Sœur
Béatrice_ (Sister Beatrice) which are contained in the third volume of
_Théâtre_ (1901) Maeterlinck has said that they were written as libretti
for musicians who had asked for them, and that they contain no
philosophical or poetical _arrière-pensée_.[1] Critics, however, seem to
be agreed in reading considerable meaning into both plays. The fact that
of the six wives of Bluebeard five bear the names of Maeterlinck's
previous heroines--Melisanda, Alladine, Ygraine, Bellangère, and
Selysette--at once suggests a symbolic intention, which we are the more
inclined to suspect when we find that Ardiane, though a new name, is in
reality the same person, or the same idea, as both Astolaine and
Aglavaine.
The drama was written under the direct inspiration, and probably
collaboration, of Mme Leblanc, whose ideas, as expressed in _Le Choix
de la Vie_, are emphasised in the second act, which, apart from its
doctrine, is beautiful.
The five child-like wives have been thrust by Bluebeard into the
familiar dark caverns under his castle; and, since they are the passive
creatures of the former plays, they endure their incarceration without
the least attempt to effect an escape. They merely wait, praying,
singing, and weeping. They could not flee, they say; they have been
forbidden to.
They are joined by Ardiane, the strong, wise woman of Maeterlinck's
second period; and she delivers the poor little limp creatures. When
they have the monster at their mercy, however, they are more inclined to
fondle him than to harm him; and when Ardiane throws the door open,
announces her intention of returning to freedom, and invites them to
follow her, they remain at Bluebeard's side. The play has for its
sub-title _La Délivrance inutile_ (The Vain Deliverance); and it is to
be interpreted as meaning that women are in great need of
emancipation,[2] but that it is their nature to cling to the brute who
oppresses them.
An unmistakable motive of the play is that sanctification of the flesh
which emblazons the breviary of the second Maeterlinck. Ardiane bares
the arms and shoulders of the timid wives. "Really, my young sisters,"
she says, "I do not wonder that he did not love you as he ought to have
done, and that he wanted a hundred wives ... he had not one.... We shall
have nothing to fear if we are very beautiful."[3]
_Sister Beatrice_ is another work which is variously interpreted. To
Mieszner, Sister Beatrice represents "the human soul prisoned in
prejudice." To many who have read _The Treasure of the Humble_ it will
suggest itself that we have here a spectacle of the human soul remaining
pure while the body it dwells in is steeped in sin. To Anselma Heine,
the nun is "one who has been made richer, one who has lived"; and it may
indeed be the poet's intention to show us that the flesh is holy and is
not contaminated by fulfilling its functions. If the latter
interpretation is correct, Maeterlinck has not enforced his meaning so
convincingly as Gottfried Keller, the great Swiss writer, did in his
short story "Die Jungfrau und die Nonne" (one of his _Sieben Legenden_).
In Maeterlinck's play the nun flees from the convent, seeks love and
finds degradation, and returns, after twenty-five years, to find that
her duties have all the time been performed by the Virgin Mary. In
Gottfried Keller's story, Beatrice, the door-keeper of the monastery,
feels her heart turn sick with longing for the world outside. "When she
could no longer hold back her desire, she arose in a moonlit night of
July ... and said to the statue of the Virgin Mary: 'I have served You
many a long year, but now take the keys, for I cannot endure the heat in
my heart any longer.'"
She goes out, and rests till dawn in a dim glade in an oak-forest. When
the sun rises, a knight in armour comes riding along. He asks her
whither she is bound, and she can only tell him that she has fled from
the cloister "to see the world." He laughs at this, and offers, if she
will go with him, to put her on the way. He lifts her on to his saddle,
and merrily they gallop along; and when they come to his castle,
Beatrice lies with him and stills her longing, and after some time he
makes her his lawful wife, and she bears him eight sons.
But when the eldest son is eighteen, she arises one night from her
husband's side, goes to the beds of her sons, and kisses them gently one
after the other; she kisses her sleeping husband also; then she shears
the long hair that had once folded him in flame, dons the nun's gown in
which she had come to the castle so many years ago, and wanders in the
howling wind and through the whirling autumn leaves to the convent. Here
the statue of the Virgin tells her that She Herself has taken her place
all the time; she has only to take up her keys and resume her duties
where she had laid them down when she fled.
Ten years after her return the nuns make preparations for a great
festival, and agree together that each one shall bring an offering to
the Virgin. One of them embroiders a church banner, another an
altar-cloth. One composes a Latin hymn, and another sets it to music.
They who can do nothing else stitch a new shirt for the Christ-child,
and the sister who is cook bakes Him a dish of fritters. Beatrice alone
gets nothing ready: she is tired of life, and living more in the past
than in the present. But when the festive day arrives and the nuns begin
their chant, it happens that a grey-haired knight comes riding past the
convent door with his eight stalwart sons, all on their way to the
Emperor's wars. Hearing the service in the chapel, he bids his sons
dismount, and enters with them to offer up a prayer to the Virgin. In
the iron old man and the eight youths like so many angels in armour,
Beatrice recognises her husband and her sons, and runs to them in the
presence of all; and when she has confessed her story all agree that her
gift to the Virgin is the richest offered that day.
Gottfried Keller's story is a glorification of family life. His nun is a
healthy girl who needs children; and so does Heaven if the truth were
known. In his story Beatrice never "falls." Her only mistake is when,
driven by morbid superstition, she deserts her real duties to return to
her imaginary ones. We never lose our respect for her. Maeterlinck's
heroine, on the other hand, sinks lower than harlotry: when her body is
beyond buying she sells her hand. She is a depraved being. It would be
humbug to make out that the depravity of men forced her into such dirt.
If she had been good, she could have died; if she is not good, what
feelings is the drama to awaken in us? Feelings of pity perhaps, but not
of sympathy; and when we have no sympathy for the subject of a drama,
the drama is wasted. To glorify this woman's debasement, as
Maeterlinck's play might seem to do, would be to wallow in morbid
Christianity. But that would be a strange charge to bring against so
anti-Christian a writer; and it is no doubt preferable to interpret the
play by the theory of the soul's immunity from the body's pitch.
Maeterlinck's immediate source may have been a translation of the old
Dutch version of the legend by L. Simons and Laurence Housman, which
appeared in _The Pageant_ for 1896, the year in which this now extinct
magazine printed the poem _Et s'il revenait_ and Sutro's translation of
the _Death of Tintagiles_. Adelaide Anne Procter had made a poem out of
the legend; John Davidson's splendid ballad (worth all Maeterlinck's
play) is well known. The story was brought home to tens of thousands of
spectators in London in 1911-12 by Max Reinhardt's staging of Karl
Gustav Vollmoeller's wordless play _The Miracle_.
As a reading play _Sister Beatrice_ is ruined by the species of blank
verse in which it is said to be written. Typographically it is arranged
in prose form; but palpable verses of this kind madden the reader:
"Il est prudent et sage; et ses yeux sont plus doux Que les yeux
d'un enfant qui se met à genoux."
One of the things that Maeterlinck had treated in _Wisdom and Destiny_
was the principal of justice. In _Le Temple Enseveli_ (The Buried
Temple) he deals with the subject exhaustively. He asks whether there is
a justice other than that organised by men, and he finds it where he
found fate, in their own breast. He proves that there is no physical
justice coming from moral causes. Excess and imprudence have often a
cause which we call immoral; but excess and imprudence may have an
innocent or even heroic cause. Drunkards and debauchees are not
necessarily criminals; they may be drawn into excess because they are
weak and amiable (we all know very charming men who like drink; and
what excellent uncles city bachelors often make). You are imprudent if
you jump into the water in very cold weather to save somebody, and the
consequences, let us say consumption for yourself and your children, are
the same for you as for the villain who falls into the water while
trying to throw somebody in. There is the same ignorance of moral causes
in nature, the same indifference in heredity.[4] Why should the
offspring of amiable drunkards be punished while the children of
parricides and poisoners go scot-free? As to debauch, justice strikes
according as precautions are taken or not, and never takes account of
the victim's state of mind.
But we should be wrong to complain of the indifference of the universe.
We have no right to be astonished at an injustice in which we ourselves
take a very active part. Look at poverty, for instance--we class it with
ills that cannot be helped, such as pestilence and shipwreck, but it is
surely a result of the injustice of our social organisation. We shudder
from one end of the world to the other when a judicial error is
committed (Dreyfus affair); but the error which condemns the majority of
our fellowmen to wretchedness we attribute to some inaccessible,
implacable power. Again (this argument is in the section "La Chance,"
Chapter VII), look at animals. Compare the fate of the pampered
race-horse with that of the tortured cab-horse: for all your talk of
predestination, it is a case of injustice. But to the animals we work to
death we are as the powers behind Nature are to us. Should we then
expect more justice from Nature than we mete out to animals? Let us not
condone our culpability by any appeal to Nature: Nature is not concerned
with justice; her one aim, as was shown in _The Life of the Bee_, is to
maintain, renew, and multiply life. Nature is not just with regard to
us; but she may be just with regard to herself. When we say that Nature
is not just, it comes to the same thing as saying that she takes no
notice of our little virtues; it is our vanity, not our sense of
justice, that is wounded. But because our morality is not proportionate
to the immensity of the universe, it does not follow that we ought to
give it up; it is proportionate to our stature and to our restricted
destiny. Justice is identical with logic. It is in himself, not in
Nature, that man must find an approbation of justice.
The second part of the book, which has much in common with _The Life of
the Bee_, is devoted to the "reign of matter." Maeterlinck here (Chapter
V) takes the opportunity of praising vegetarianism, which he is said to
have tried. He says:
"It is not my intention to go deeply into the question of
vegetarianism, nor to meet the objections that can be made to it;
but it must be recognised that few of these objections withstand a
loyal and attentive examination; and it may be asserted that all
those who have tried this diet have recovered or fortified their
health, and felt their mind grow brighter and purer, as though they
had been freed from an immemorial, nauseating prison."
The admirers of Maeterlinck's mysticism were more astonished when, in
1902, _Monna Vanna_ appeared than they had been on reading those
worldly-wise essays in _Wisdom and Destiny_. Why here was a real play! A
play in the theatrical sense, with action, attempted murder, conflict,
tension, "honour," and all the rest of it. A play with characterisation
at least attempted; for, though Marco is that wise old man we know so
well by this time (the most awful version of him was in reserve for
_Mary Magdalene_), though Guido Colonna is Golaud _redivivus_;
Prinzivalle is at all events a passable shadow of Othello, and Monna
Vanna is a heroine who positively develops (let us admit that Selysette
had developed too). A play rhetorical in style; pictorial even--a city
lit up by fireworks, the Leaning Tower of Pisa all aflame "your
Hugo-flare against the night," (William Watson might have jeered). A
play with a situation which might have been written specially for that
dear old lady, Mrs Grundy; a situation which makes a licence for its
performance quite out of the question in Mrs Grundy's England.[5] And
when the play proves a great success in Paris and Germany, and more
especially when the great dramatist goes on tour with it and Mme
Leblanc,[6] who plays the title-rôle, Maeterlinck's old guard call him a
renegade to himself, to the Maeterlinck who had once held forth the
exciting prospect of a stage without actors and without action. But why
should a writer not change his views?
_Monna Vanna_ is written, partly, in the same kind of blank verse as
_Sister Beatrice_--very poor stuff considered as poetry, and very
troublesome to read as prose. From the point of view of style it is
quite impossible to consider it as a great work of art. Dramatically,
however, it is one of the most interesting plays produced so far in the
twentieth century.
This is the first of Maeterlinck's plays which has not some legendary
Weisznichtwo for its scene. These are not shapes seen vaguely through a
gloaming of romance; they move in the full light of reality. _Monna
Vanna_, in short, is a historical drama, a species of drama which, as
we shall see, Maeterlinck rejects in a chapter of _The Double Garden_.
Perhaps, however, those critics are right who deny to _Monna Vanna_ the
title of a genuine historical drama. It is at all events evident that
the chief interest lies in the soul's awakening in love of Monna and of
Prinzivalle. It is concerned, too, with truth: no marriage can be moral
in which either party doubts anything the other party says--if you love,
you must believe. Historically, the characters are untrue: Marco could
not have read Maeterlinck at the time he lived, and, not having read
Maeterlinck, he could not be so wise as he is; Monna Vanna could not
have read either Maeterlinck or Ibsen, and therefore she could not have
had such ideas as she has. But why should a modern play be truly
historical? Friedrich Hebbel, a far greater dramatist than Maeterlinck,
said something to the effect that a play may be historical if it keeps
fresh long enough for our descendants to see from it how we, at our
period of history, conceived the past.
However, when the curtain rises we find ourselves in Pisa at the end of
the fifteenth century. The town is being besieged by Prinzivalle, the
general of the army of Florence. The inhabitants are starving, and the
city can hold out no longer. Guido Colonna, the commandant of the
garrison, has sent his father, Marco, to Prinzivalle, and the envoy's
return is awaited. He comes with this message: Florence has decided to
annihilate Pisa. There is to be no question of a capitulation; the town
is to be taken by assault, and the citizens butchered. Florence is
pressing Prinzivalle to deliver the final assault; but he has
intercepted letters by which it appears that he is unjustly accused of
treachery. Death awaits him at Florence after his victory. He
undertakes, therefore, to introduce a huge convoy of munition and
provisions into the starving city, and to join the besieged army with
the pick of his mercenaries. His condition is this: Monna Vanna, Guido's
wife, shall come to his tent for the night, and she shall be naked under
her cloak.
Guido is furious; but Monna Vanna decides to go. She has it in her power
to save a whole city; and she thinks, as her father-in-law does, that
two people have no right, by considering themselves, to ensure the
destruction of so many thousands. There is no attempt on the dramatist's
part to belittle the sacrifice she is willing to make; she has, at the
time she makes up her mind, the time-honoured idea as to the importance
of the sexual act. But she is an altruist, like the bees: it is not she,
it is not her husband, it is the community that matters. Guido, however,
is an egotist of the old school; he clings to his "honour" to such an
extent that he thinks Pisa should be butchered to keep it intact. Monna
Vanna goes....
ACT II.--Prinzivalle's tent. Sumptuous disorder. Hangings of silk and
gold. Weapons, heaps of precious furs, huge coffers half open,
overflowing with jewels and gorgeous raiment. Interview with Trivulzio,
Commissary of the Republic of Florence; a copy of Cassius in _Julius
Cæsar_--the emaciated man of thought, "the clear, fine intellect, the
cold, acute, instructed mind"--"believes in Florence as the saint tied
to the wheel believes in God." Prinzivalle on the other hand is an utter
alien, a Basque or a Breton; but his victories have made him popular in
Florence, and he might make himself dictator; Trivulzio, therefore, has
denounced him to "the grey-headed, toothless, doting fools at home."
Prinzivalle unmasks Trivulzio, who attempts to stab him, but only
succeeds in gashing his face. Trivulzio very noble in his way; all for
Florence. Excitement of the audience: will Vanna come? She comes; is she
naked under her cloak? She has been wounded on the shoulder by a stray
shot; just a scratch, but enough to serve as an excuse for exciting the
audience. Prinzivalle tells her to show him the wound, and she half
opens her cloak. He asks her directly: "You are naked under your cloak?"
She answers "Yes," makes a movement to throw her cloak off (great
tension), but he "stops her with a gesture." Now follows the great
love-scene, in every way one of the finest things in modern drama. It
turns out that they had played together as boy and girl in Venice. He
has loved her ever since. He loves her now; and for that reason there is
no question of her removing her cloak. Love triumphs over luxury. She
goes back to Pisa, taking him with her, to save him from the
Commissaries of Florence.
ACT III.--Convoy arrived, Pisa rejoicing, Guido cursing. Vanna comes,
deliriously acclaimed. She has the great news for Guido that she returns
unscathed. He refuses to believe it. Everybody refuses to believe it
except Marco. She introduces Prinzivalle; and Guido persuades himself
that she has trapped the brute, and brought him for private butchery.
Since Guido will not credit the truth, she gives him the lie he asks
for: "Il m'a prise," she cries out. But she claims Prinzivalle as her
own prey, and has him conducted to the dungeons on the understanding
that she will end his life herself. The spectators, however, who have an
advantage over Guido in that they hear various asides, understand that
she will rescue the Florentine general and elope with him. Guido can
believe she could lie, therefore he does not love her--he only loves his
"honour"; therefore she cannot love him, Prinzivalle, on the other
hand, had been most undisguisedly frank in his private interview with
her. It is clear he loves her; and since she is no longer bound to love
her husband, she is free to love Prinzivalle. "It was an evil dream,"
she says; "the beautiful is going to begin...."
To some critics the weak point in the drama might seem to be this: Monna
Vanna goes out to Prinzivalle although she has no reliable information
as to what manner of man he is. There was the greatest likelihood, Guido
might have urged, that the man who makes such an infamous condition will
not dream of keeping his promise. But the dramatist makes the heroine
tell Prinzivalle that the one man who could have given her a favourable
account of his character (and who, as we know, had given a favourable
account of it to Guido) had told her nothing about him; possibly
Maeterlinck desired in this way to emphasise the motive that Monna Vanna
goes to sacrifice her honour _on the mere chance_ of saving the city.
The scene between Prinzivalle and Trivulzio in the second act has points
of similarity with the argument of Browning's _Luria_. This was pointed
out by Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale in an article in the _New
York Independent_ of the 5th March, 1903. Browning's play, too, is set
in the fifteenth century on the eve of a battle between Pisa and
Florence; and, like Prinzivalle, "Luria holds Pisa's fortunes in his
hand." Both Luria and Prinzivalle are "utter aliens "; and both are
modelled on Othello (Luria is a Moor; Prinzivalle is "a Basque or a
Breton," but he has served in Africa). The character of the two
Commissaries in the plays is identical. Maeterlinck wrote as follows to
Professor Phelps:
"You are quite right. There is a likeness between [Browning's play
and] the scene in the second act, in which Prinzivalle unmasks
Trivulzio. I am surprised nobody has noticed it before, the more so
as I made no attempt to conceal it, for I took exactly the same
hostile cities, the same period, and almost the same characters;
although of course it would have been very easy to alter the whole.
I admire Browning, who, in my opinion, is one of the greatest of
English poets. For that reason I regarded him as belonging to
classic and universal literature, and as a poet whom everybody
ought to know; and I thought I was entitled to borrow a situation,
or rather the fragment of a situation, from him, a thing which
occurs every day with Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. Such
borrowings take place _coram populo_, and are in the nature of a
public homage. I regard the scene as a passage which I have piously
dedicated to the poet who created in me the atmosphere in which
_Monna Vanna_ was written."
With this naïve and sincere letter Maeterlinck clears himself of any
charge of plagiarism. If he was a plagiarist in _Monna Vanna_, he was a
plagiarist, too, in _Joyzelle_ (1903), for in a postscript of his
letter to Professor Phelps he confesses that this play was written in
the atmosphere of Shakespeare's _Tempest_.
_Joyzelle_, another dramatised essay, is again written in the irritating
blank verse which Maeterlinck at this stage of his career seems to have
grown perversely fond of. To Merlin (Prosper rechristened) on his
enchanted island comes his long-lost son Lancéor. The first person the
newcomer meets is Joyzelle, who is destined to be his bride if she
stands the trials prepared for her. The young couple fall in love with
each other at first sight; but Merlin, who is attended by Arielle, his
disembodied genius (his interior force, the forgotten power that sleeps
in every soul), is also in love with Joyzelle.
Merlin, being a magician, is able to set traps for the lovers. He clouds
the brain of Lancéor, and delivers him up to instinct, so that he
compromises himself with Arielle, who for the purpose of playing the
tempter has become visible, has half opened the veils that invest her,
and unbound her long hair. (Men always fall into traps when their
instinct leads them, their frailties being necessary for the designs of
life.) Joyzelle discovers her lover in the act of embracing the supposed
lady; but, with that nobility above jealousy which distinguishes the
heroines of Maeterlinck after Astolaine, she continues to love him. She
reveals to Lancéor, in curious language, the depth of her affections:
"When one loves as I love thee, it is not what he says, it is not
what he does, it is not what he is that one loves in what one
loves; it is he, and nothing but him, and he remains the same,
through the years and misfortunes that pass.... It is he alone, it
is thou alone, and in thee nothing can change without making love
grow.... He who is all in thee; thou who art all in him, whom I
see, whom I hear, whom I listen to without pause, and whom I love
always.... We have to fight, we shall have to suffer; for this is a
world which seems full of traps.... We are only two, but we are all
love!..."
"Men are victimised by every beautiful woman," comments Mieszner, "and
only the woman to whom they surrender themselves blindly can educate
them to a higher love. This is the idea that clearly shines through the
action ... woman rescuing sensual man from his sensuality."
Merlin now instils a subtle poison into Lancéor's veins, confirms
Joyzelle's suspicions that her lover is on the point of death, but
offers to save his life if she will give herself to him. "You would not
need to tell him," the old swine suggests. "But I should have to tell
him, because I love him," she answers. (Moral again: love cannot lie.)
Joyzelle is not willing to do for one human being, though he is the
being she loves best on earth, what Monna Vanna was willing to do for
hundreds of strangers. She feigns consent, however, and promises to
come at night; but she makes Merlin restore Lancéor there and then. When
she comes to the old man's couch, it is with a dagger ready; she finds
him sleeping, and lifts the dagger, but Arielle prevents the blow. Her
trials are over; she has stood the last test. Merlin explains matters to
his son: "She might have yielded," he says, "might have sacrificed
herself, her love; she might have despaired--and then she would not have
been the one love craves." To Joyzelle he says that it was written that
she and those who resemble her should have a right to the love fate
shows them; and that this love (the one love in life) must break
injustice down. As to his own love for the girl, he bids Arielle kiss
her; it seems to her then that flowers she cannot gather are touching
her brow and caressing her lips, and Merlin tells her not to brush them
aside, they are sad and pure--a symbolisation, perhaps, of intellectual
love which renounces sensuality.
_Joyzelle_ was first performed, with Mme Leblanc in the title-rôle, at
the Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris on the 20th May, 1903. In the same year
Maeterlinck's comedy, _Le Miracle de St Antoine_ (The Miracle of St
Antony) was performed at Geneva and Brussels. It has been published in
German, but not yet in French or English.
[1] Preface to _Théâtre_, p. XVIII. The interpretation given on the
following page is his own, as given to a friend.
[2] Cf. _Le Temple Enseveli_, Chapters XXVI and XXVII.
[3] "Aus unseren Zierpuppen und aus unseren Blaustrümpfen werden erst
Vollmenschen, nachdem die Mädchen und Frauen ihre natürlichen Reize
entdeckt haben und sie selbst gebrauchen lernen."--Mieszner,
_Maeterlinck's Werke_, p. 48.
[4] Cf. also Chapters XXVIII and XXIX of _L'Evolution du Mystère_ in
this volume.
[5] It was performed in December, 1911, by the Players' Club in Dublin.
[6] The play (the symbol of the fates of the poet and Mme Leblanc,
according to Oppeln-Bronikowski, the German translator of Maeterlinck's
works--_Bühne und Welt_, November-Heft 2, 1902) had been specially
written for her. As Monna Vanna, she made her debut as an actress--she
had previously been an opera-singer.
CHAPTER XI
Maeterlinck's essays do not centre round himself. His vision is cosmic;
the subject of his essays is the universe. But _Le double Jardin_ (The
Double Garden), a collection of essays strung together and published in
1904, is more personal than his other books, though it is still
concerned with presenting a cosmic philosophy. Here he gives us glimpses
into his life; we see him as a lover of dogs and flowers; on his travels
in the south of Europe; as an automobilist; as an amateur of fencing.
The first essay is that famous one--"On the Death of a little Dog."
Those who fight shy of Maeterlinck because they credit the report,
sufficiently widespread, that he is a platitudinarian, might be advised
to sample him in this essay. If, when they have read it, they are unable
to admit his charm and originality, they may be considered cases of
obstinacy. It is not written with any ostentation of style; its style,
in these days of fine writing by intellectual acrobats, is not even
brilliant. It is written so simply that you would say it had been
written for children; and it is as touchingly beautiful and as full of
meaning as that other sublimely simple story about the ugly duckling.
It is the life-story of a little bull-dog that died of distemper when he
was six months old. He had a great bulging forehead, like Verlaine's. He
was as beautiful as a beautiful natural monster. Life was as full of
problems for him as it is for the burdened brains of the children of
men. He had to resign himself, like any other mystic, to the mystery of
closed doors; he had to admit that the essential bounties of existence,
generally imprisoned in pots and pans, are inaccessible. What a lot of
orders, prohibitions, and perils he had to class in his memory; and how
was he to conciliate them all with other more vast and imperious laws
implanted in him by instinct, laws which rise and grow from hour to
hour, which come from the beginning of time and of the race, which
invade the blood, the muscles, and the nerves, and of a sudden assert
themselves, more irresistible and more powerful than pain, and even than
the master's order and the pain of death? And then the stolen
joys--first and foremost the refuse-tin! He sees the cook cleaning a
fish--but he does not appear curious as to where those delicacies go; he
bides his time.
The only animal that has made a compact with man is the dog. To the dog
man is God--ideas soon to be made visible in _The Blue Bird_.
There is a beautiful essay on old-fashioned flowers--those which are
being ousted out of our modern gardens by such flowers as
tuberous-rooted begonias, with their red combs always crowing like so
many cocks; and one on chrysanthemums, a symbol of the onward march of
culture. (We know from _The Blue Bird_ that our descendants are to have
daisies as big as tables, grapes as big as pears, blue apples as big as
melons, and melons as big as pumpkins: all the beauty, all the bounties
of the future are only waiting for the intellect of man to awaken them.)
In "The Olive Boughs" the teaching of the volume is concentrated:
"Hitherto the pivot of the world seemed to us to be formed of
spiritual powers; to-day we are convinced that it is composed of
purely material energies."
It is by the study of concrete things--the mechanism of an automobile,
the adaptability of dogs to climate and occupation,[1] the evolution of
flowers--that we shall learn to solve the riddle of existence. This
teaching, like that of _The Life of the Bee_, is absolutely identical
with Verhaeren's.
An important essay is that on "The Modern Drama." Maeterlinck has some
hard things to say about historical dramas, "those necessarily
artificial poems which are born of an impossible marriage between the
past and the present." The passions and feelings that a modern poet
reads into a past age must of necessity be modern, and cannot live in an
alien atmosphere. The modern drama "unfolds itself in a modern house,
among men and women of to-day." The task of the modern dramatist is to
go deeper into consciousness than was the custom of old: the drama of
to-day cannot deck itself out in gaudy trappings, the ermines and sables
of regal pomp, the show of circumstance; it cannot appeal to divinity;
it cannot appeal to any fixed fatality; it must try to discover, in the
regions of psychology, and in those of moral life, the equivalent of
what it has lost in the exterior life of epic times. And the sovereign
law of the theatre will always be _action_. No matter how beautiful, no
matter how deep the language is, it is bound to weary us if it changes
nothing in the situation, if it does not lead to a decisive conflict, if
it does not hurry on to a final solution.
_L'Intelligence des Fleurs_ (English translation: Life and Flowers),
published in 1907, is another collection of essays twining "the
instinctive ideal" round the solid pillars of reality. Maeterlinck
describes the vehement, obstinate revolt of flowers against their
destiny. They have one aim: to escape from the fatality that fixes them
to the soil, to invent wings, as it were, so that they may soar above
the region that gave them birth, and there expand in the light which is
their blossoming. Flowers set us a prodigious example of
insubordination, of courage, of perseverance, and of cunning. It is the
genius of the earth which is acting in them--the earth-spirit,
Maeterlinck might have said with Goethe. "The ideal of the earth-spirit
is often confused, but you can distinguish in it a multitude of great
lines which rise aloft to a life more ardent, more complex, more
nervous, more spiritual." Insects and flowers bring gleams of the light
without into the dark cavern in which we are prisoners. They, too, have
something of the fluid which religions called divine--the fluid to which
man, of all things on earth, offers the least resistance. Their
evolution should make us feel that man is on the way to divinity.
The chapter called "L'Inquiétude de notre Morale" strides over dead
religions to hold out a hand of welcome to the religion of the future.
Two main rivers of contemporary thought, whose sources are Tolstoy and
Nietzsche, flow with high waves far from the bogs and shallow pools
where those who are poisoned by dead religions lie stifling. One of
these rivers is flowing violently backwards to an illusory past; the
other roars foam-flecked in its fury to an improbable future. Between
these two rivers lies the broad plateau of reality; and we who are
Maeterlinck's disciples may add that we build our homesteads round the
placid lake his teaching forms on this broad plateau between the two
dangerous rivers....
The chapter "In Praise of Boxing," is not a literary exercise on a fancy
subject. Maeterlinck is a boxer who needs some beating. We have all read
in all the newspapers in the year of grace 1912 that a public match in
the interests of charity had been arranged between him and the
middleweight champion of Europe, Georges Carpentier.
Another section, "Our Social Duty," tends towards Socialism. "Extreme
opinion," we read, "demands immediately an integral sharing, the
suppression of property, obligatory work, etc. We do not know yet how
these demands can be realised; but it is at this moment certain that
very simple circumstances will make them some day seem as natural as the
suppression of primogenitureship and the privileges of the nobility....
Truth here is situated less in reason, which is always turned towards
the past, than in imagination, which sees farther than the future....
Let us only listen to the experience which urges us forward; it is
always higher than that which restrains us or throws us backward. Let us
reject all the counsels of the past which are not turned towards the
future.... It is above all important to destroy. In all social progress,
the great work, the only difficult work, is the destruction of the past.
We do not need to be anxious about what we shall set up in place of the
ruins. The force of things and of life will undertake the work of
reconstruction."
_L'Oiseau bleu_ (The Blue Bird) is an epitome of these and other
Maeterlinckian ideas. But this is no dramatised essay. The characters,
it is true, are still ideas personified; but this time they are
galvanised into life by a saving quality--humour. The humour that made
the essay "On the Death of a Little Dog" so irresistible makes this
presentation of Maeterlinck's philosophy for children a thing of pure
delight. It is, moreover, as easy to understand, and as sparkling to the
eyes in its magic changes, as a Christmas pantomime. And a child who has
seen this fairy tale on the stage has not only enjoyed itself immensely,
and had an experience it will never forget, but it has also learned, it
cannot fail to have learned, lessons that should have an immediate and
lasting effect on its character and behaviour. Maeterlinck has many
jewels in her crown; but the brightest is that which came to him for
having brought happiness and taught goodness to children.
_The Blue Bird_ was first produced at the Théâtre des Arts in Moscow on
the 30th September, 1908. This theatre, which had been supported for
years by a group of rich amateurs, first paid its way when _The Blue
Bird_ drew thousands to its boards. In December, 1909, Mr Herbert Trench
staged it, with a poet's understanding of a poet at the Haymarket
Theatre in London; it ran till June, and was revived for Christmas,
1910.
_The Blue Bird_, like another modern pantomime for children, Richard
Dehmel's demoniac _Fitzebutze_, is as entertaining to read as it is
fascinating to see. The two children of a woodcutter, a boy, Tyltyl, and
a girl, Mytyl, are sent out by a fairy in quest of "the blue bird, that
is to say, the great secret of things and of happiness." They are
accompanied by Light (whom the fairy conjures out of the lamp in the
cottage), the Dog, the Cat (a very nasty cat--cats must be nasty because
dogs, the friends of man, don't like them), Sugar (who breaks off his
fingers for them to eat when they are hungry), Bread (who slices his
paunch to add substance to the sugar), Fire (a red-faced lout), Water
(whom Fire keeps at a respectful distance because she has not brought
her umbrella), and Milk (a very shy, impressionable youth--as one might
say, a milksop). First the children pay a visit to their dead
grandparents in the misty Land of Memory. They find the old couple
asleep on a bench in front of the same old cottage they occupied on
earth; they awaken at the children's approach, and we are taught that
the dead awaken every time the loved ones whom they left behind think of
them. Before they leave, the old people make them a present of a
blackbird which is quite blue; but when they have left the Land of
Memory they find it has turned black. (It was not real, it was a dream,
and could not bear the light of reality.)
Continuing their wanderings they come to the Palace of Night. The Cat
has hurried on in advance to tell Mother Night, with whom he is in
league, of the coming of their enemy, Man, who is guided by Light. Night
is very much upset: already, she complains, Man has captured a third of
her mysteries, all her Terrors are afraid and dare not leave the house,
her Ghosts have taken flight, the greater part of her Sicknesses are
ill. The children arrive, and in the end capture a number of blue birds
behind one of the doors to which Night holds the key. But as soon as the
company have escaped from the Palace of Night, the birds are seen to be
dead. Like the roses in the cavern in _Alladine and Palomides_, they
could not live in the light of day.
They reach the enchanted palaces where all men's joys, all men's
happinesses are gathered together in the charge of Fate. First they meet
the Luxuries of the Earth, bloated revellers whose banqueting-hall is
separated from the cavern of the Miseries only by a thin curtain. The
Blue Bird is not here. Next they interview the Happinesses (the
Happiness of Home, the Happiness of Being Well, etc.) and the Great Joys
(the Joy of Maternal Love, the Joy of Understanding, etc.). In the end
they arrive at the Kingdom of the Future, an Azure Palace pretty high up
in the clouds. Here all unborn children, enough to last to the end of
the world, more than thirty thousand, are awaiting the hour of their
birth. When the fathers and mothers want children, Father Time throws
back the opalescent doors which open upon the quays of the Dawn, and
ships the babies off in a galley with White and gold sails; then are
heard the sounds of the earth like a distant music, and the song of the
mothers coming out to meet their children. Gliding about among the
children are taller figures, "clad in a paler and more diaphanous azure,
figures of a sovereign and silent beauty"--the race which shall inhabit
the earth when man has made way for his offspring the superman. The
babes unborn are pondering, while they wait:
"some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from their dream of human life,"
the inventions they are to make, the happiness they are to confer, the
crimes they are to commit. Of a sudden Father Time discovers the
children, and comes towards them in a fury, asking them why they are not
blue; but Light tells the boy to turn the magic diamond which has
preserved them thus far, and she has just time to whisper that she has
got the blue bird, when down goes the curtain.
ACT VI. shows the children in their little cots, where they were when
the play opened; it has all been a dream.
For _The Blue Bird_ Maeterlinck was in 1912 awarded, for the third time
in succession, the Belgian "Triennial prize for dramatic literature."
In 1910 appeared his translation of _Macbeth_, and the English
translation of another play of his, _Mary Magdalene_. _Macbeth_ was
performed (a sensational event, and a triumph for Mme Maeterlinck) at
the Abbey of Saint Wandrille, the Benedictine cloister which Maeterlinck
saved from being turned into a chemical factory,[2] and which is now his
home. _Mary Magdalene_ was first performed at Leipsic and Hamburg; in
Great Britain it shares with _Monna Vanna_ the honour of being refused
an acting licence (because the voice of Jesus is heard in it!)
For _Mary Magdalene_ Maeterlinck borrowed two situations from a German
play, _Maria von Magdala_, by Paul Heyse--"namely, at the end of the
first act, the intervention of Christ, Who stops the crowd raging
against Mary Magdalene with these words, spoken behind the scenes: 'He
that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone'; and, in
the third, the dilemma in which the great sinner finds herself, of
saving or destroying the Son of God, according as she consents or
refuses to give herself to a Roman." Paul Heyse refused Maeterlinck his
authorisation to develop these two situations; whereupon Maeterlinck
decided that "the words of the gospel, quoted above, are common
property; and that the dilemma ... is one of those which occur pretty
frequently in dramatic literature." It was the very situation,
Maeterlinck claims, which he had himself imagined in the final trial of
Joyzelle.
The death of Christ is a tragedy which is waiting for a great dramatist
to master. Both Grillparzer and Hebbel pondered it. Maeterlinck has not
done what they left undone; he was not dramatist enough to do it.
Grillparzer would have spun his play round Judas as a type of an envious
man; Maeterlinck places Mary Magdalene in the centre, not the sinner,
but the convert--and this convert is the same character as Aglavaine, as
Monna Vanna--Maeterlinck's strong, wise woman. This tragedy is again in
the nature of a dramatised essay--another essay on wisdom. The idea is
that the wise, who are certain of their knowledge, cannot yield to what
is wrong. Joyzelle, we remember, would not sacrifice to save one man (it
is true she pretended to be willing to, but her pretence was foolish,
for she should have known it would be vain, seeing that Merlin was a
magician) what Monna Vanna was willing to sacrifice to save a multitude.
Mary Magdalene refuses to make the same sacrifice to save Christ: for
Christ has made her a wise and therefore a good woman, and she would be
untrue to Him in her if she were to rescue Him from Death--in other
words His teaching, the essence of His Soul, must not be soiled,
whatever torture be inflicted on His poor, human body. There would be
tense tragedy in the situation when she hears Him being led to
crucifixion, if we did not feel that she is no character but a wise
idea; and if, too, the Roman who has it in his power to save Christ were
not such a vulgar, melodramatic villain. Maeterlinck has been singularly
unsuccessful in this drama. As a courtesan Mary Magdalene is a bore; as
a convert she is still a bore.
It is not a human drama. If Jesus has the power to awaken the dead, and
to summon the living so that they walk as in sleep (Mary comes to Him in
this way), there is no human conflict. One might suspect sexual
attraction in Mary's conversion, but she gives one the impression of
being a sexless blue-stocking; we are forced to the conclusion that she
is mesmerised. Jesus is a mesmerist;[3] from a dramatic point of view.
He is no more convincing than Svengali. Maeterlinck's play is on a level
with those of Hall Caine; his Roman villain especially might have been
conceived by Hall Caine.
In 1911 appeared, in an English translation (the French original was not
published till 1913), another book of essays under the title of _Death_.
Maeterlinck takes up the thread of what he had said about death in his
previous writings, especially in the noble essay on Immortality in _Life
and Flowers_:
"For us, death is the one event that counts in our life or in our
universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes our vigilance
unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our thoughts
struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around it.
The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it battens
but on our fears lie who seeks to forget it burdens his memory with
it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But though we think
of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously without learning to
know death."
The book shocked many of its critics, who found one of Maeterlinck's
ideas repugnant--his plea that it is to no purpose to prolong the
agonies of the sick-bed.
"Why should the doctors," asks the essayist, "consider it their
duty to protract even the most excruciating convulsions of the most
hopeless agony? Who has not, at a bedside, twenty times wished and
not once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to
show mercy?... One day this prejudice will strike us as barbarian.
Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by
religions which have long since died out in the mind of men. That
is why the doctors act as though they were convinced that there is
no known torture but is preferable to those awaiting us in the
unknown.... The day will come when science will turn against this
error, and no longer hesitate to shorten our misfortunes."
Why should we fear death? It is not the nightmare which superstition has
made it out to be. It is not the arrival of death, but the departure of
life which is appalling.
"Here begins the open sea. Here begins the glorious adventure, the
only one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as
high as its highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard
death as a form of life which we do not yet understand; let us
learn to look upon it with the same eye that looks upon birth; and
soon our mind will be accompanied to the steps of the tomb with the
same glad expectation that greets a birth."
It may be doubted whether men will ever grow so wise that they will look
forward to death as they look forward to a birth; in the meantime, as Mr
Basil de Sélincourt pointed out in the _Manchester Guardian_, they will
be getting toothless, bald, and blind, and "the logic of the mystics may
wish to assure us that these are processes of life and not of death; we
shall continue to think such an assurance rather sophistical and
insipid.... The fear of the moment of death and a passionate protest of
the soul against the idea of its finality are probably as normal in the
highest types of men as in the lowest."[4] And there is another
consideration, subtly suggested by Charles Bernard in an article in _Le
Masque_, Série ii, Nos. 7 and 8: the fear of the physical agony of death
and the decomposition that follows it intensifies the raptures of
health, and even all the moments of pleasure an ageing man can snatch
from his decay.
But the importance of the book does not lie in this discussion of the
physical facts of death. It lies in its investigation of ideas
concerning the immortality of our soul. Whatever the soul be--whether it
be that mysterious thing which cannot be definitely located, but which
we carry about with us like a mirror in a world whose phenomena only
take shape in so far as they are reflected in it,[5] or whether it be
the sum total of our intellectual and moral qualities fortified by those
of instinct and sub-consciousness[6]--Maeterlinck's suggestions, in his
various essays, of a solution brings us to something which strengthens
the spiritual, or if you like the intellectual, part of our nature.
"Is it not possible" he asks, "that the enjoyment of art for its own
sake, the calm and full satisfaction we are plunged into by the
contemplation of a beautiful statue or of a perfect monument, things
that do not belong to us and that we shall never see again, which excite
no sensual desire, which can profit us nothing--is it not possible that
this satisfaction may be the pale gleam of a different consciousness
filtering through a fissure of that consciousness of ours which is built
up of memories?"[7]
_Death_ appeared almost simultaneously with the news that Maeterlinck
had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. The occasion was
celebrated by a public banquet offered to the poet by the City of
Brussels; official Belgium had at last awakened to the fact that its
poets were more honoured in the world than its rulers. As to the one
hundred and ninety thousand francs, he had no need of the money for
himself, and it was announced that his intention was to found a
"Maeterlinck prize with it," to be given every two years to the writer
of the most remarkable book published in that period in the French
language.
[1] He does not mention the soft mouth of the old English sheep-dog.
[2] The Abbé Dimnet, in an article in _The Nineteenth Century_ for
January, 1912, charges Maeterlinck with indelicacy for having occupied
the abbey so soon after its confiscation! The abbé does not mention the
chemical project.
[3]
LAZARUS: Come. The Master calls you.
[MAGDALENE _leaves the column against which she is leaning and
takes four or five steps towards_ LAZARUS _as though walking in her
sleep_.]
* * * * *
MAGDALENE: He fixed his eyes for but a moment on mine; and that
will be enough for the rest of my life.
--(p. 72).
[4] I have re-translated from the French in which Mr de Sélincourt's
article was reproduced in _Le Thyrse_ for January, 1912.
[5] "L'Immortalité" (in _L'Intelligence des Fleurs_) p. 282.
[6] _Ibid._, p. 295.
[7] _Ibid._, p. 307.
CHAPTER XII
I have reported little of the gossip concerning Maeterlinck. Everybody
knows that he smokes denicotinised tobacco; that he resides in the
summer at Saint Wandrille and in the winter at his house "Villa des
Abeilles" at Nice (having now left his villa aux Quatre Chemins, near
Grasse in the south of France); and so forth. One little picture I would
like to contribute; I have it from a friend and admirer of his, and it
concerns a visit to the Villa Dupont, the house in the Rue Pergolèse
where Maeterlinck lived when he first settled in Paris:
"His study was like a monk's cell, but very original in style. It
was simply lime-washed; and this lime-wash was of a hard, raw blue
in colour, approaching indigo. For furniture, a little
looking-glass, a table of rough wood, and three chairs. No books at
all. But the walls were covered with little white butterflies in
flight. These were _thoughts_, and every one was fastened to the
wall simply by a pin. The effect was singular, violently original
at all events, but with nothing that gave you the idea of a pose.
Maeterlinck at this period received no visitors, saw none of his
friends. He had installed himself in surroundings as bare as
possible, so that he might meditate; and to these surroundings he
had given the colour he desired.
"This room was empty when I was brought into it; and I beguiled the
tedium of waiting for Maeterlinck by reading some of the thoughts
on the slips of white paper pinned to the wall. Some of them were
nothing very particular; others were obscure or appeared rather
childish--isolated, as I read them;--but some were very beautiful.
Maeterlinck coming into the room and finding me thus occupied,
laughed heartily. But severely I pointed to the butterflies on the
wall, and inquired about the name of each species. The names, I was
told, were very great names indeed. I tried to guess one or two,
but luck was against me, and I felt it a puzzle to set the right
name to each bit of paper.
"Maeterlinck, reading with me, smiled as he saw me attack a new
battalion of thoughts. These were placed somewhat apart from the
others. 'Are they yours?' I asked. 'Yes,' he answered modestly;
'nothing more than studies for a book I am working at. But take
notice of this one, please, and of this one, and of this one too.
Are they not most beautiful?' Then, in a tone of jubilant
admiration, he pronounced the name of their author--the name of a
French lady who, some years afterwards, was to be Melisanda, Monna
Vanna, and Ardiane on the stage. Several of these thoughts, I must
say, seemed really worth attention; and I felt particularly
surprised that a woman should have been able to compress them into
three short lines, or even into five or six words."
As to Maeterlinck's personal appearance at the present time, the
following is the impression he made recently on Mr Frank Harris:
"Maeterlinck is easily described: a man of about five feet nine in
height, inclined to be stout; silver hair lends distinction to the
large round head and boyish fresh complexion; blue-grey eyes, now
thoughtful, now merry, and an unaffected off-hand manner. The
features are not cut, left rather "in the rough" as sculptors say,
even the heavy jaw and chin are drowned in fat; the forehead bulges
and the eyes lose colour in the light and seem hard; still, an
interesting and attractive personality."[1]
A few words must be devoted to the present position of Maeterlinck in
critical estimation. Since the award of the Nobel prize imposed him on
the public consciousness as one of the foremost of living writers,
voices have been raised in protest. The attack of the Abbé Dimnet in
_The Nineteenth Century and After_ for January, 1912, may be dismissed
as Jesuitical. Various opinions, mostly favourable, by celebrities, were
collected in the Brussels review _Le Thyrse_ for January, 1912, under
the heading, "Maeterlinck et le prix Nobel." One of these letters is
from Alfred Fouillée, who suggests that Maeterlinck's philosophy owes
much to that of Jean Marie Guyau. The old complaint that the dramas are
"childish" is rarely heard nowadays; but there is a vague feeling in the
air that the substance of the essays is a potpourri from earlier
writers. It is the easiest thing in the world to make such a charge; it
is far more difficult to substantiate it. Not one critic has given us
the exhaustive list of parallel passages which would be required to
shake our credit in Maeterlinck's essential originality. Typical is the
attitude of Mr Frank Harris in his too inaccurate and loosely written
but not negligible articles in the _Academy_: he finds nothing in the
essays which is not already contained in "Moralis" (does he mean
Novalis?) and the other somewhat recondite writers in whom he (Mr Frank
Harris) is obviously so deeply read. But even if it were proved that
Maeterlinck, like Molière, has taken his wealth where he found it, there
would be no more reason to think the less of him than there is to think
the less of any artist for melting old metal and re-casting it, or of
any thinker for sifting, rejecting, and re-stating old conclusions. It
is an effort of profound originality to take whatever is good from a
vast, and in some cases buried literature, and from this stock to polish
and set in currency ideas which have an immediate effect on the
spiritual or mental life of to-day, which fortify character, give us
confidence in the future, make us better men and force us to make our
children better men than we are ourselves.
By far the most scathing of Maeterlinck's detractors is a Belgian critic
born in Ghent, Louis Dumont-Wilden, a critic who, as he confesses, was
in his youth enchanted by the "morning charm" of _The Treasure of the
Humble_ with "its violent and sustained effort to soar to a kind of
philosophical lyrism," who has still a good word to say for the early
dramas, but who condemns "the adulterated æstheticism of _Monna Vanna_,
the cold allegory, the elementary philosophy of _Joyzelle_ and _The Blue
Bird_." Already in _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ for February, 1910,
Dumont-Wilden attempted to shatter the idol in the following terms: