B 987,670
TAYLOR
MAURICE
MAETERLINCK
848
M190
T24
UNIVE
OF

ARTES
1817
SCIENTIA
LIBRARY
VERITAS
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN |
PLURIBUS UMUM
EXE PLURIBUS
TUEBOR
SI-QUÆRIS PENIN MŒNAM
CIRCUMSPICE
}
848
M190
T24

MAURICE
MAETERLINCK
A CRITICAL STUDY


BY
UNA TAYLOR
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1915
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BRENDON AND son, ltd.
PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND
PREFATORY NOTE
No critical analysis of the works of one of the
most elusive of contemporary authors can leave
unrecognised the excellence of the English
translations of Maurice Maeterlinck's writings
by Mr. Alfred Sutro and Mr. A. Teixeira de
Mattos-an excellence which none but those
conversant with the difficulties they have sur-
mounted can fully appreciate.
To Mr. Sutro in especial my personal thanks
are due for his help and kindness.
線
​CONTENTS
I. LYRICS
II. DRAMA
、
III. LOVE DRAMAS
4V. DEATH DRAMAS
V. MONNA VANNA
VI. LATER DRAMAS
VII. MYSTICISM.
VIII. THE ESSAYS
IX, NATURE
X. DEATH
PAGE
9
19
39
63
91
109
126
141
159
177
I
LYRICS
SOME twenty or more years ago, in 1889,
Maurice Maeterlinck entered upon his public
literary career with the small volume of lyrics
entitled Serres Chaudes and the drama of La
Princesse Maleine, to be followed by some
fifteen plays and dramatic scenes. Le Trésor
des Humbles, appearing in 1896, in like manner
preluded the series of volumes which com-
prise, up to the present day, the sum total of
his philosophical treatises, ethical essays, and
other prose writings. Poet-dramatist and
transcendental essayist, Maeterlinck has
elected to present his art and his thought in
the two distinct forms dictated by the trend
of his literary genius. But if it is inevitable
that a critical appreciation of his works should
deal separately with these diverse modes of
expression, it is also necessary to bear in mind
that the poet-dramatist never ceases to be a
philosophic moralist, that the transcendental
essayist never ceases to be a poet.
9
284769
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
It was in the fitness of things that Maeter-
linck's first drama, La Princesse Maleine,
should see the light almost simultaneously
with the series of lyric poems entitled Serres
Chaudes. Later years have added little to
their number-the edition of 1890 contains
but thirty-three poems in all-yet in the
closely woven web of the poet's æsthetic in-
dividuality they indicate, as the bending reeds
the river's current, the drift of mood and
emotion destined to dominate the earlier
phases of his art.
So far as the impulse of sentiment is con-
cerned, their paramount inspiration would
seem to be drawn from the besetting spiritual
maladies of human existence, in its phase of
despondent, enervated mournfulness. They
may stand for the lyric utterance of the temper
of mind and spirit induced by the sense of
apathetic lassitude and a hopeless acquiescence
in the irremediable workings of adverse fate :-
Mon âme est pâle d'impuissance
Et de blanches inactions.
Poem follows poem, the outcome of a melan-
choly as vaguely sterile as it is incurable;
of a grief as drowsy, void, and stifled as that
of Coleridge's "Dejection." From the first
stanzas to the close of the last page, the poet's
10
LYRICS
imagination dwells in a vision-world of sym-
bolic hallucination, tinged and dyed with the
iridescent colours, the dim translucencies, of
dream-dusks, of veiled dawns and sultry
noons. The sequence attains its unbroken
unity of impression, visual and pictorial,
spiritual and imaginative, bathed, saturated
in a vaporous atmosphere where the strings of
sensation are muted, where the pulses of life
are numbed, its fevers outworn; where the
vital tide is ever receding from its shores and
passion itself has fallen into the languor of
a mortal swoon.
Picture after picture rises. A hot-house in
the heart of a forest; exotic vegetations spring
and flourish beneath the damp and misted
glass, even as sins, sicknesses, and distresses
are nourished within the opaque enclosure of
that ultimate resort of human personality we
name the soul. We see filmy cupolas under
whose tinted domes narcotic blossoms spread
their petals to the moon; we watch windless
waters; marshes where swans hatch a raven
brood; plains where grey flocks browse the
waste grass; phantasmal figures of wax in
a summer forest; apparitions of princesses
dying in fields of hemlock. The scenes
shift. Irrelevant, unconnected mirages of be-
wildering panoramas succeed one to another
11
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
like the slides of the showman's magic-
lantern:
On dirait une femme évanouie un jour de moisson,
Il y a des postillons dans la cour de l'hospice ;
(Oh, rien n'y est à sa place.)
Un navire de guerre à pleines voiles sur un canal,
Des oiseaux de nuit sur des lys,
Un glas vers midi,
Là-bas sous ces cloches,
But while the scenes, the symbol-shapes
change their masked semblances, the same
note is sustained throughout. The sense of
stagnation, inertia, impotence, pervades every
stanza :
Végétation de symboles,
Nénufars mornes des plaisirs,
Palmes lentes de mes désirs,
Mousses froides, lianes molles.
Toujours la pluie à l'horizon.
Toujours la neige sur les grèves.
sentence after sentence accentuates the im-
pression of dolorous quiescence. Passion here
holds no sway; where there is nothing the king
has lost his rights. The exhausted hounds of
desire pursue a lost scent; the quarry, false-
hood's white hind, has fled into the trackless
12
LYRICS
night. Anger and hate, stricken beasts of prey,
languish, crouched motionless under a motion-
less moon in whose ashen light nothing save
shadows comes to birth. The maladive in-
fection of strangling creepers spreads poison,
the spiritual waters are tainted which encom-
pass the white blossom of the soul whose mystic
petition ascends to the blue vault above :-
Seul, un lys érige d'entre eux,
Pâle et rigidement débile,
Son ascension immobile
Sur les feuillages douloureux.
Et dans les lueurs qu'il épanche
Comme une lune, peu à peu,
Elève vers le cristal bleu,
Sa mystique prière blanche.
The circle of sadness, of the lethargy of sad-
ness, is complete. Everywhere sadness prevails,
and if there may be occasionally a cessation
of grief, there is no least possibility of joy :
"Toujours les mêmes heures sonnent." Ex-
pectancy scarcely lifts its eyes, awaiting only
the night which has no morrow. The sense of
silence is insistent, the impression of remoteness
absolute. Man is for ever the diver im-
prisoned within his bell:-"O plongeur à jamais
sous sa cloche."
13
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
Between the soul and the universe, wherein
the soul has her being, there rises eternally the
semi-transparency of that crystal dome. In
that irremediable isolation, wrapped in a
slumberous fever, the soul stirs in her sleep,
and with beseeching hands sends forth her
muffled cry to God:-
Je meurs sous votre rancune.
Seigneur, ayez pitié, Seigneur,-
and in her dreams, with half-drawn breath,
she formulates her prayer :-
Vous savez, Seigneur, ma misère.
Voyez ce que je vous apporte :
Des fleurs mauvaises de la terre,
Et du soleil sur une morte.
Voyez aussi ma lassitude,
La lune éteinte et l'aube noire;
Et fécondez ma solitude
En l'arrosant de votre gloire.
But prayer dies, as withered flowers in a vase,
and the procession of spectral visions resumes
its march.
No footfall of all the footfalls that pass
without; no voice of all the voices that sound
in the world of men, penetrate that silence; it
is the silence of a mortuary. The faces that
people the blankness are but reflections of a
14
LYRICS
""
funeral masquerade of shadows, seen as in
that glass of which the text inscribed upon the
first page speaks: "And in his hand a glass
that shows us many more. The poet has
severed his sadness from the sadnesses of his
fellows; he has even severed it from all the
accidents, the occasions and stimulants to
sadness, that belong to the exterior life of
humankind. It is in truth the essential
subjectivity of lyricism carried to the verge of
the possible. The circle of the self-soul is the
horizon-line, and there is nothing to tell of what
outer circumstances have fashioned and
wrought this nameless mournfulness within
those spiritual precincts. "Ich habe ein Recht
müde zu sein," Heine said, and indited his last
Lazarus " poems, the bitterest in their ironic
emotionalism ever penned by a dying hand.
But the heavy finger of physical anguish; the
life-long resentment of a heart's betrayal ;
the innate revolt of the death-sick Jew against
the world of Nazarenes are ever present
factors in his lyric confessional. Musset in his
"Nuits," in his incomparable "Tristesse,'
enumerates and specifies his losses; his tears
fall for youth which is departed, for joys which
are vanished, for hopes which lie in the dust,
for past friendships, for past passions. Edgar
Allan Poe, even in his moods of profoundest
66
33
15
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
1
introspection, never wholly detaches his misery
from the miseries of other actors and agents
in the "tragedy man." In Serres Chaudes grief
has no cause, the wound has no sword. All is
silence, a blank, nothingness. Sorrow has no
source as it has no anodyne. Two actualities
only emerge from the hazy transparencies, the
shifting semblances, the symbolic phantas-
magoria of dream-shapes-the Soul and God.
The means whereby the æsthetic atmosphere
is created and maintained are not far to seek.
Master of the resources of his art, Maeterlinck
has utilised his gift of language to the full in
the achievement of perfect concord between
the emotional sentiment and the sound-form
of his verse. The scale of the words employed
is singularly limited, but he possesses a super-
sensitive ear. His appreciation of the grada-
tions of significance imparted to one and the
same word by its position and rhythmical
emphasis in the construction of the phrase is
unrivalled. Hence no sense of repetition,
reiteration or recurrence obtrudes itself upon
the reader's consciousness. The limitation of
his vocabulary maintains the intentional mo-
notony of effect, while the predominant use of
laggard vowel-sounds in many of the stanzas
gives an additional note of languid obsession
to the melody of the verse. Few poets have
L
16
LYRICS
welded together more intimately the emotional
sense with the rhythmical cadence, the drag in
such lines as:
Moi, j'attends un peu de réveil,
Moi, j'attends que le sommeil passe,
Moi, j'attends un peu de soleil.
Sur mes mains que la lune glace.
the repetitions in :-
Mon âme en est triste à la fin ;
Elle est triste enfin d'être lasse,
Elle est lasse enfin d'être en vain,
Elle est triste et lasse à la fin ..
(examples of his rigid economy of words can be
multiplied) convey to the full, apart from the
literal meaning of the words, the vocal sug-
gestion of the indolent disquietude that per-
vades the soul's long trance of shadows.
Colour itself is used as an emotional cipher.
The colour epithets : "Les songes lilacs,"
"Les lys jaunes des lendemains,” "L'ennui
bleu dans le cœur," "Les serpents violets des
rêves,” “Les tiges rouges des haines," "Les
deuils verts de l'amour," are colour-abbrevia-
tions for the lengthier metaphors of senti-
mental meanings.
And finally if the appeal to the ear reinforces
the emotional effect, the pictorialism of the
poet's method (and there are few lines
B
17
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
which do not conjure up a visualised con-
ception) is never allowed to carry the mind's
eye beyond the bounds of strictly allegorical
suggestion. Analysed, it is a pictorialism
rather apparent than real. Pictorialism such
as that of Rossetti's or William Morris's early
poems, descriptive or narrative in purpose, has
no place in Maeterlinck's art.
In Morris's lines:-
There she stands and her yellow hair slantingly
Drifts the same way that the rain goes by-
the picture exists for its own sake, drawn by a
hand to which colour, line, movement, are ends
in themselves; it is a picture illustrative, not
representative, of the text and theme of the
poetic thought it incorporates. The pictorial
images of Serres Chaudes do not exist for
themselves; they are neither descriptive nor
narrative; they are merely the outcome of a
continuously symbolic exposition of thought
and feeling, and the symbol-shape, human or
vegetable, is no more than the exhalation
emanating from those thoughts and feelings,
cast and coloured in a transitive mould borrowed
from the semblance of things seen :-
Sous l'ennui morne des roseaux,
Seuls les reflets profonds des choses,
Des lys, des palmes et des roses,
Pleurent encore au fond des eaux.
18
II
DRAMA
To pass from the lyrics of Serres Chaudes to
the drama of La Princesse Maleine; from La
Princesse Maleine to the groups of Death and
Love dramas-Les Aveugles, 1890, L'Intruse,
1890, Intérieur, 1892, La Mort de Tintagiles,
1894, Pelléas et Mélisande, 1892, Alladine et
Palomides, 1892, Aglavaine et Selysette, 1896--
again, to pass from these to the later plays, is
to follow the development of Maeterlinck's out-
look on life signalised definitely in the ethical
essays. Nor is it possible, here or elsewhere,
to discuss the art of the playwright apart from
the consideration of his moral transcendent-
alism and of the ideas which would seem to
fashion the pattern and web of the special
formula in which he has clothed his concep-
tions.
"There are ideal sequences of events which
run on parallel planes with the real ones-
Il y a une série d'événements idéaux parallèles
19
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
à la réalité . . . ils coincident rarement”
Novalis's doctrine is a succinct statement of
the point of view common to those, like the
German mystic, who detect in the daily annals
of humanity the stage of the great morality
play of spiritual life. Teutonic mystics old
and new, genuine and spurious, have one and
all recognised and in some fashion attempted
to define, negatively or affirmatively, that
trinity of personality implied in the terms
body, sense-soul, and spirit-soul. "There is
、in the soul something which is above the soul,"
Eckhart affirms. And the conception of this
bi-parte" soul is in conformity with the
philosophy Maeterlinck's essays illuminate.
In this conception, further, lies the rational
source of much which at first sight appears
paradoxical and contradictory in his dramatic
delineation of life and character.
66
و,
For, while the lives of the body, the sense-
soul, and the spirit-soul are lived simultane-
ously are lived, as Novalis expresses the
conditions of existence, " on parallel planes
-the three thus intimately affiliated are not
fused one with another. The events that be-
fall them occur in different spheres, the his-
tories of each are always separable and some-
times incongruous. What is true of all as a
corporate unity may be false of either or any
20
LA PRINCESSE MALEINE
as self-subsistent. At times a correspondence
in will and sympathy may harmonise the
constituent elements and induce a transitory
unison. Oftener it happens that the two more
sympathetic members of the triumvirate go
their way as allies, severed from the divinely
illuminated inner principle. Dissociated from
its controlling influence, rebels against the
authority of that serene indweller of the last
fortress of self, sense-soul and body fall a prey
to every catastrophe of chance; fall captive
to the untoward calamities which lie in ambus-
cade for the unwary adventurer upon the high-
road of fate.
The persistent vision and presentment of
this super-plane of mortal being and of the
multiple lives of the various complexes that
go to build up the individual man, gives to
Maeterlinck's genius its most distinctive dra-
matic inspiration. The cross-currents that
filter from plane to plane, the discords that
result from interchanging impulses, the actions
that betray the contradiction between what
we are and what we would be, between the
self on the lower plane and its fellow upon the
super-plane, the dislocations of the soul who
says "I go" and the body that goes not,
these form the ground-themes of dramas
where love contends with wisdom, where man
21
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
and woman succumb, victims to the impersonal
force embodied in outward circumstances-a
force, as here conceived of, hostile to joy,
hostile to human peace- "la destinée ex-
térieure."
La Princesse Maleine exhibits, with an echo
of Elizabethan stage methods, the workings of
that fatality in its most sinister aspect. The
menace of destiny broods over every scene of
the romance-drama, a grim and complicated
version of the True-Bride stories dear to
Volksmärchen. Peasant tradition, it is true,
conducted its stories to a far different sequel.
The False Bride of village conte is invariably
at long last dispossessed of her bridegroom.
The True Bride, be she Yungfrau Maleen, or
the Princess of the Soaring Lark, or the maiden
who loved the Drummer Lad, or she, most
notably, whose wardrobe comprised the three
robes of fairy fame-the robe woven with
golden suns, the robe strewn with silver moons,
and that last of surpassing loveliness, the robe
of shining starlight-invariably retrieves, after
much labour and many distressful rebuffs,
the crown, the Prince, and the Prince's heart.
Irrationally secure in the optimistic confidence
that fortune proves in the end faithful, the
Märchen-makers went on their way. Their
creed, the happy belief of the poor in earthly
22
LA PRINCESSE MALEINE
goods that the future will pay all arrears of
joy to the Luck-child, is a birth-mark of the
genuine folk-tale.
It is a faith the poet-dramatist of Maleine
in no wise shared. From the first scene to the
last, the terror of fate holds imagination
hostage; terror is the all-pervading atmosphere.
-"La Princesse Maleine aura peur de l'avenir!”
says one of the guard of honour who stands
sentinel outside the castle. And from the
betrothal feast which gives the little Princess,
with her wax-white face and pale eyelashes,
to her bridegroom, while stars and moon and
the black heaven portend disaster to come,
the characters of the play breathe, move, and
speak as in a cloud of terror, until, with horror
piled upon horror, crime piled upon crime,
the curtain falls and the lights are extinguished.
The tragedies of blood in Elizabethan drama
left nothing to be invented in grim sensation
so far as the nature of their episodes was con-
cerned, and the translation of "Macbeth" and
of the deepest-dyed of John Ford's tragedies of
sin and slaughter, 2 no less than Maeterlinck's
study of "King Lear,” “la pièce architype du
théâtre humain," are conclusive evidence of
¹ La tragédie de Macbeth. Traduction nouvelle.
2 Annabella (""Tis pity she's a Whore"), drame en 5 actes de
J. Ford, traduit et adapté par Maurice Maeterlinck. Paris, 1895.
23
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
the rare extent to which Maeterlinck made
himself conversant with the spirit embodied in
the dramatic art of the Shakespearian epoch.
But he has known how to impart an individual
and specific quality to the scenes of horror he
elected to delineate.
There exist wide, if not clearly definable,
distinctions between the manifold forms of
fear, corporal and psychical, which beset the
path of humankind and lend to life cypress-
shadows deeper, it may be, than any cast by
the actual calamities fears anticipate. The
terror resulting from a shock to the senses,
communicated by sight, hearing, or touch,
is of one nature; the terror, insidious and
paralysing in its effects, engendered by the
morbid excitement of super-sensitive nerves,
is of a wholly different species. The Terrorists
of modern literature have worked both mines
in their search for sensational situation. They
have appealed to the instincts of physical
recoil, to the instincts of emotional and
spiritual repulsion, and to the revulsion of
the intuitive impulses of sanity confronted
by the disquieting portrayal of the abnormal
and the super-normal, moral or mental.
For the Elizabethan, terror was a simpler
thing. The terrors of life supernatural, the
terrors of material violences and cruelties
24
LA PRINCESSE MALEINE
lacked, to some measure, the imaginative im-
pressiveness more recent writers have known
how to impart to them. Violence, cruelty,
in elder days were more or less a part of the
surroundings, part and parcel of the condi-
tions, the heritage, medievalism bequeathed
to common existence. Supernatural fears no
less were of too common experience to evoke
that glamour of dread which demands that its
object should not be too accurately outlined.
The acute quality which the unusual, the un-
familiar, lends to the presentment of ideas or
facts was wanting. Accepted facts, familiar
ideas are not, outside the nursery, favourable
to an atmosphere such as that Maeterlinck in
Maleine, and, in a somewhat different fashion,
in La Mort de Tintagiles, triumphantly conjures
up. The ghost scene in "Hamlet," the ban-
quet scene in " Macbeth," the scene of despair at
the close of Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," where
the striking of the hours and half-hours, as
they expire, brings Faustus nearer and nearer
to the exactment of his dire compact, stand out,
it is true, as exceptions. Yet, looked at
closely, both in Hamlet's first dismay and in
Macbeth's frenzied consternation, the appeal
to the sense of fear is strenuously reinforced
by other emotional stimulants. Upon the
platform of the Elsinore castle the instinctive
25
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
recoil of the living from the non-living is
almost immediately supplemented by another
sentiment-the vehement desire of the son to
fathom the mystery of the spectral apparition:-
I'll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane: O answer me!
Macbeth, appalled at the spectacle of the
phantom shape in the banqueting - hall of
Forres palace, derives his dread far more
from his own consciousness of guilt than from
the phantasmal vision. Faustus's agonised ex-
pectancy, with its tinge of madness, resumes
in itself the remorse and despair of a lost soul
condemned to a medieval hell.
Poe's sentence-
Much of madness, and more of sin,
And horror, the soul of the plot—
applies with singular fitness to La Princesse
Maleine. The sense of terror, the special
quality of the terror, is not effected by the
crude violences, the criminal passions, which
serve for body to the play. Maeterlinck's terror
is a ghost who walks invisible. His fear has the
quality of the unseen, the uncertain, of that
abstract and sombre power of which the
shadow alone is perceptible. It is in truth
"the soul of the plot." Without recourse to
the supernatural of ordinary acceptation, he
26
LA PRINCESSE MALEINE
has enveloped his characters, he has plunged
the action of his play, into an atmosphere
charged with the menace of the invisible,
attaining, in the words of his preface to the
collected edition of his dramatic works, une
certaine harmonie épouvantée et sombre."
•
66
Maleine herself is of the all-pitiful race of
those child-women who, in the phrase of
Novalis, are "des enfants qui ne sont pas des
enfants." Maeterlinck has portrayed such
more than once, and Maleine has for sister
of her blood Mélisande, and, in less degree, both
Alladine and gentle Selysette are of one
kindred. In Maleine the type is at its initial
stage. Her childhood (throughout the play
her extreme youth is emphasised), has fallen
prey to a passion, a sudden irresponsible
obsession, of womanhood. The concentrated
emotions of maturity prematurely grafted
upon the fragile frame, have tainted the whole
being of the little princess. She retains the
frail dawn-delicacy of a typical Burne-Jones
figure, the attenuated grace, the pathetic
charm, but, as likewise in the artist's pictured
faces, it is a delicacy without freshness, a
charm blemished, a grace contaminated, by
the unhealthfulness of desires too soon de-
veloped, of instincts too early ripened. She
passes before our eyes like a child automaton,
27
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
possessed by an arbitrary idolatry, walking in
a world of nightmare dreams, the human focus
towards which all fears, all horrors converge.
66
Stars with trailing filaments :-" étoiles à
longue chevelure annoncent la mort des prin-
cesses," shower from the black skies of her
espousal night. Within the lighted windows of
King Marcellus's royal banquet-hall the feast
is spread where the aged King Hjalmar has
brought young Hjalmar to wed the pale child
Maleine. It is a revel of wine and drunken
quarrel, men shout and fight within the walls
amidst the glare of marriage torches. And
from their post without upon the terrace
the King's guards watch and wait the issue of
the uproar.
Then across the dusky garden
the small figure of a trembling, weeping child
flies from that fierce carousal. It is Maleine,
panic-stricken, who escapes.
Where will she
fly? "Où court-elle ?" the sentinel questions,
"elle pleure." The small figure vanishes into
the background, while surrounded by his
attendants and guards the old drunken toper
Hjalmar makes furious exit from the palace
door. Let King Marcellus keep his daughter
with her livid face and white lashes, Prince
Hjalmar shall wed elsewhere, and soon all the
ravens of Holland shall flock hither to a funeral
feast.
66
28
LA PRINCESSE MALEINE
Between the ferocities of the rival monarchs,
between Hjalmar, foaming maledictions and
Marcellus's outraged pride, Maleine's destiny
shapes the undoing of a child passion-struck
for her once-seen bridegroom. Does she love
the girl-faced boy? Marcellus demands next
day. Yes! Still does she love him? Yes! And
still? Exasperated by the frightened mono-
syllables, Marcellus rages, but rages in vain.
Princess Maleine will not renounce young
Hjalmar, rather a prison in the dark tower—
rather death itself, maybe. She does not
reason; she has no words in which to speak
of her passion, to utter that which is passing
in her soul. She is a puppet in a dumb-show,
a semi-conscious puppet in the grip of fate. . ..
The scene shifts. War has laid its red hand
on the state of Harlingen. Town and palace
smoulder to ashes. Marcellus is slain, the
land is a land of unburied dead. Hjalmar has
kept his oath and the ravens' feast is spread
around the royal palace; and the Prince will
wed he False Bride, Uglyane, the Princess
from over the sea, with her scullion's soul and
petty vanities. For in old Hjalmar's castle
of Ysselmonde, Anne, her mother, rules all
things to her liking.
But the True Bride, escaped from her in-
29
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
carceration in the dark tower, has likewise
escaped from the scene of slaughter. With the
inevitable nurse of renaissance novelle she
strays, lost in the forest, seeking always-
there is no truce to her obsession-the path to
Ysselmonde and to the Prince. The wood is
dark, and fear, like a shadow, walks ever at her
side. It is long since she has seen the sunlight,
for through the barred window of her prison
cell no ray might pierce. Her face is waxen
and blanched and starved. Her peasant cloak
hides the gold fringe of her gown as she walks
trembling amongst the tree-stems. Brutish,
sinister figures of vagrant beggars haunt the
forest paths. And in the dusk wood Maleine's
voice echoes in ces répétitions étonnées qui
donnent aux personnages l'apparence de som-
nambules un peu sourds, constamment ar-
rachés à un songe pénible." The vagabonds
answer the nurse's interrogations. Are the
King and Queen dead?
66
PREMIER PAUVRE. Oui, je crois qu'ils sont morts.
MALEINE. Ils sont morts?
Prince Hjalmar is to be wedded.
UN PAUVRE. Il va se marier.”
MALEINE. Il va se marier ?
The nurse will take refuge with the hermit
at the cross-roads of Judas.
30
LA PRINCESSE MALEINE
UN PAUVRE. Ne criez pas ce nom dans l'obscurité !
and on that ominous word the scene closes.
The last acts pass at Ysselmonde. Maleine
has reached the township of old Hjalmar's
kingdom, with its gloomy castle, its windmill,
its canal, its grey church, its cemetery. On
one side stretch the vaporous marshes, on
the other lies the fog-bound sea where great
vessels, the sombre warships of the past, sail
by. Inns it has also where the little Princess
may lodge, where brutal peasants drink and
fight, coarse, gross, and malignant, poisoned
by the hot exhalations of noisome swamps and
the chill mists of the autumn nights. Within
the castle decrepitude steals on the hoary-
headed King, frenzied by his adulterous pas-
sion for his evil guest, La Reine Anne. The
atmosphere is charged with crimes passed and
crimes to come, and shadows of sins lurk in
every corner of the palace. There the False
Bride, Uglyane, awaits her nuptials. There the
Queen dogs the steps of the young Prince :-
LA REINE ANNE, mère d'Uglyane (to Prince
Hjalmar). Vous êtes presque mon fils, et je vous
aime comme une mère, peut-être plus qu'une mère.
There young Hjalmar suffers, in paralysed
inaction, her caresses:-
PRINCE HJALMAR. J'ai peur de comprendre!
31
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
And from the burying-ground the Dies ira
echoes for ever through the castle windows.
The story follows its traditional course.
Maleine becomes waiting-maid to Uglyane.
By fraud, the pale automaton of passion, she
steals, cloaked and hooded, the place of the
False Bride at the tryst young Hjalmar
has bidden Uglyane keep. It is night in the
gardens of the castle by the fountain where
the high trees grow. The Prince awaits his
bride's coming. Will, he wonders, the silence
of the place penetrate Uglyane's torpid vanity?
Will she consent to renounce their marriage
and avert the catastrophes that overhang their
bridal? "Est-ce qu'elle aurait un peu de
silence dans le cœur ? "
The owls hoot, the willow leaves fall on his
head from the autumn boughs. He throws a
clod of earth to scare the birds, and the mould
clings to his hand. . . . She is coming. Who?
A hooded figure, a white face, eyes like clear
water. Surely, surely, Uglyane is beautiful,
never before did he look on her as now, never
before see her thus:-
MALEINE. J'ai peur !
Let her come nearer, lean her face to the
moon. And he kisses the lips that are
shadowed.
32
LA PRINCESSE MALEINE
MALEINE. J'ai peur!
Some one weeps there at hand. It is the
fountain weeps in the wind, and the wind
blows the drops upon their faces. "J'ai peur!"
reiterates the child-voice in the darkness.
Some one watches with great eyes! It is the
owl, sitting in the branches, and Hjalmar again
casts clods to scare him hence. "J'ai
peur ! "
The earth has fallen back upon her covered
head. Fear! a mole is tunnelling the ground
beneath her feet. Fear! Fear! it comes
through the shut gates, the high walls.
HJALMAR. Uglyane, regardez-moi
songez vous ?
MALEINE. Je songe à la Princesse Maleine.
à quoi
Silence. She is thinking of Maleine, La
Princesse Maleine. Then "I am La Princesse
Maleine." Four times she repeats the words.
But Maleine is dead, the Prince replies. No, I
am she. Then how came she hither?" Je ne
sais pas." Conviction breaks on the Prince.
HJALMAR. Maleine! Maleine! qu'allons nous
faire ?
The fountain sobs, then suddenly is still.
TOUS DEUX. Oh !
MALEINE. Qu'est-ce qu'il y a, qu'est-ce qu'il y a
maintenant ?
C
33
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
HJALMAR. Ne pleurez pas; n'ayez pas peur..
MALEINE. Qu'est-ce qui arrive ici? Qu'est-ce qui
va arriver? Je veux m'en aller. Je veux m'en
aller.
}
But whether La Princesse Maleine, whether
young Hjalmar go or stay, fate has entered
the garden and with them she abides.
""
On the plane of "les événements idéaux,
fate has decreed that Maleine must die. On
the plane of real events Anne has set herself
to compass the same end. Act III deepens
the gloom of intrigue. The reason of the grey
King is undermined. "I think death has begun
to knock at my door," his loud voice breaks
harshly upon the ear of the dancers in the hall.
The music ceases, the dance is arrested. "On
frappe à la petite porte." In white robe of
betrothal the True Bride enters, and the old
King swoons as the small white figure ap-
proaches. The net of death is closing round
more than one victim.
Weakly pitiful, the King resists in vain the
demands of Anne. Between the unwelcome
revenant, between Maleine, who should have
died amongst the slain at Harlingen, and the
adulterous partner of his crimes, he must
choose. Step by step he cedes to the stronger
will. Maleine sickens. Outside the castle
the members of the royal group talk with one
34
LA PRINCESSE MALEINE
another, the Prince and Maleine, the little Allan,
the Queen, the King. There is a strange
pestilence in the town; there are many new
graves in the earth, many dead in the burying-
ground; the Fool blesses himself as one who
signs the cross in the presence of death as he
passes where with half-closed eyes the Princess
sits. The sails of the windmill, the black mill,
stop. Horror possesses the soul of the King.
Something dark traverses the cemetery :-
MALEINE. Il y a quelque chose de noir qui arrive ?
Whence? From the graveyard in the mist.
It is only the seven Béguines; they come to
spin for the wedding of Maleine. The third-
what does she carry? Linen, linen for the
wedding-sheet" for you, Princess Maleine."
The old King's horror grows.
"Ce poison,
mon Dieu, dans ce pauvre petit corps blanc ! "
LE PETIT ALLAN. Pourquoi Ma-aleine ferme les
yeux? . . . Ou-ouvrez les yeux, Ma-aleine!
..
ANNE. Va jouer, va jouer.
LE ROI. Il y a là un cyprès qui me fait des signes.
ANNE. Vous vous êtes endormi? est-ce que vous
rêvez? . . . mais faites attention à ce que vous
dites! Vous effrayez tout le monde !
The dialogue proceeds, charged to excess with
the words which are not uttered. It proceeds in
35
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
broken sentences, like the sentences let fall
in some half-stifled delirium. The evening
darkens. Again "On frappe étrangement à la
porte."
ANNE. On frappe ?
PRINCE HJALMAR. Qui est-ce qui frappe à cette
heure? . . . On n'ouvre plus. Révenez demain ! . . .
ANNE. Mais avec quoi frappe-t-il ? . . .
HJALMAR. Je vais voir (il ouvre la porte).
ANNE. Entrez !
MALEINE. J'ai froid!
HJALMAR. Il n'y a personne. . . .
The end approaches. Isolated within locked
doors from every living being, from the Prince,
from the nurse, from all human aid, the little
Princess lies on her bed in the solitary chamber
of the grim castle. The tempest rages without
and the blaze of lightnings crimsons the dark-
ness. Fear has closed her grip on the heart
of the child. Fear of the dark, fear of the
light, fear of the shadows, of sounds and of
"Mon
silences, of the living and the dead.
Dieu, je crois que mon cœur va mourir !"
Death, a death of hideous savage cruelty, waits
in the corridor with the senile King and the
evil Queen upon the threshold of the silent
chamber.
In the murder scene which follows it is
36
LA PRINCESSE MALEINE
inevitable perhaps that the appeal to effects
of protracted physical violence should impair
the impression, sustained up to that point, of
an atmosphere exhaling the apprehension of the
invisible, the impalpable, the unseen. Possi-
bilities are infinite, actuality brings with it a
boundary, and in the final outrage upon life,
the life of a child, perpetrated by the two royal
assassins, the scene loses something of the
dramatist's peculiar touch, something of im-
aginative reticence, something of suggestive
power; it becomes to a certain extent a
reverberation of the old crude tragedies of
blood.
Nor in the crowded antechamber of the
chapel, where the Court awaits the coming of
the King, does the sense of horror, of that
horror which is of the soul, not the body,
regain its force. The infection of fear has, it
is true, spread from its centre and possesses
every man and woman of the expectant throng.
It has paralysed the brain of the King; Anne
herself is stricken by it. It is a horror of storm
and tempest; of the dismay of panic-stricken
animals who crouch upon the tombs in the
graveyard, of the portent of a moon's eclipse,
of ominous birds, of howling dogs. It is fear
exteriorised in all its forms and shapes, it is an
orgy of fear. But the climax is too prolonged,
37
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
too long suspended with confused accumulation
of detail. Moreover it lacks its first harrowing
accent; for although the King raves out his
confession of guilt and young Hjalmar sends
the soul of the Queen to seek its own place,
the small white figure of the child, in whose
heart fear was focussed, is cold and still. The
ut eyelids hide from our imagination the
nightmare vision of those eyes, the vision they
nirrored of the invisible. And over
over her
sleep the chant of the seven Béguines rises and
the storm without sinks and the nightingales
resume their love-song, and in the dusk of
the new day "On entend les rossignols au
dehors. Un coq saute sur l'appui de la fenêtre
et chante."

38
III
LOVE DRAMAS
THE dramas, dramatic scenes, and dialogues
which from 1890 to 1896 followed on the
publication of La Princesse Maleine, admit of
two broad divisions. Les-Aveugles, L'Intruse,
1890, Intérieur, 1892, La Mort de Tintagiles,
1894, are dramatic scenes where death and the
reflection of death upon the glass life inces-
santly holds up to the invisible, constitute the
central theme. The appeal in these, and most
notably in La Mort de Tintagiles, is mainly to
the nerves. Pelléas et Mélisande, Alladine et
Palomides, 1892, Aglavaine et Selysette, 1896,
are romance dramas, where love, emotional
rather than sensual, is the determining factor
and the active agent. Les Sept Princesses, 1891,
stands rather as a vaguely pictorial fantasy
than as a drama of idea, emotion, or action.
The symbolic pictorialism of the Serres
Chaudes is replaced in these dramas by a
somewhat kindred method in dramatic pre-
sentment and dialogue.
39
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
For the mystic, from time immemorial, the
symbol has served two distinct and converse
purposes. It has been the language of the
secret-keeper; it has also, and in modern days
more frequently than of old, been the language
of the secret-teller. As a veil of the taber-
nacle of divine mysteries it has been the
tribute paid by religious reverence to the sanc-
tuaries of thought. As an exposition, a dis-
closure, as the withdrawal of the veil, it has
served as the only vocabulary available for the
utterance of those mysteries, for the convey-
ance to human intelligence of truths, which are
untranslatable into the speech of common
usage. Revelation, or the attempt at revela-
tion, has insistently clothed itself in apocalyp-
tical allegory and metaphor.
Maeterlinck has employed the symbol with
both intentions. In his lyrics pictorial sym-
bolism is almost exclusively the method and
medium of exposition; it is the hieroglyphic
script of the ideas; it is the appeal to the
understanding through the channel of imagina-
tive vision; it is his formula for the dis-
closure of thoughts and sensations which elude
expression in conventional idiom. In the
dramas it serves other ends no less essen-
tial to his purpose. With regard to those
things pertaining to the region of transcen-
40
LOVE DRAMAS
dental vision, his imagery is, or would seem
to be, a continued attempt to withdraw the
screen, to raise the curtain, which holds the
unseen realm of the spirit from view. But
conversely, with regard to things tangible,
visible, substantial, to what dogmatic ma-
terialism is pleased to denominate the real,
Maeterlinck utilises the symbol as a mask.
66
Keeping in mind the original conception of
a dual train of events-the "série d'événe-
ments idéaux paralléles à la réalité "-which
it is never possible to dissociate wholly from
his earlier works-he joins the company of the
secret-tellers in so far as the symbol in his
hands is the only possible language into which
he can translate the unknown tongue of the
au delà." It is a cipher he employs, ade-
quately or inadequately, to indicate facts and
suggest occurrences passing upon spiritual
planes, incapable of direct verbal transcrip-
tion. On the other hand, he equally applies
a symbolic process for the registration of
occurrences that take place upon the earth-
plane of action and passion; he invests the
levels of human existence with a disguise;
men wear the aspect of similitudes; their
deeds and words are clothed with allegoric
significance, they act in parables. The æsthetic
outcome of the process is unity of tone. Under
41
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
1
the symbol actuality is transcendentalised
into harmony with what is above actuality,
reality figures as an emblematic representa-
tion; under the symbol things spiritual are
incarnated, and the invisible takes shape
until in a drifting mist the horizon-line between
heaven and earth is obliterated, and the
symbol which embodies the unseen things of
the soul walks hand in hand with the symbol
which dematerialises the things of sense.
Further, an illusion of distance, of remote-
ness, is induced, a sense, to adopt Maeter-
linck's own image, of the semi-opaqueness of
misted glass, interposed between our sight
and the workings of human existence :-
ARKEL. Je suis très vieux, et cependant je n'ai pas
encore vu clair un instant en moi-même; comment
voulez-vous que je juge ce que d'autres ont fait ?
This veiled, or rather masked, element in
human life as in human relationships is in-
sistently present. It is indeed an essential
feature of all these dramas where the two great
crises of life, love and death, constitute the
leading motives; love and death, be it always
understood, acting in subordination to that
overruling force, Destiny, which borrows their
shapes and wears their features. "Souvent,
Novalis wrote, speaking of romance, “il
""
42
LOVE DRAMAS
contient les événements d'une mascarade
un événement masqué entre personnes
masquées." It is a felicitous definition of the
peculiar impression produced by the Maeter-
linck stage. Life in his plays is a symbol
within a symbol. His characters stand in
relation to actuality, not so much as types,
but as counterfeit presentments of single in-
dividualities in whose somewhat blank per-
sonality a phase of emotion, for the hour, finds
its vivid embodiment. His incidents, often
violent to the brink of extravaganza, are but
the incidents of a pageantry of shadows, and
the pageant itself is no more than a framework
within whose bounds emotions perform their
mystery play. Episodes, incidents, the living
human beings, of his stage, are alike mere
threads upon whose tenuous mortal web pas-
sion's rosary is momentarily strung, while
much of the dialogue is of the nature of that
Maeterlinck analyses in his study of "The Master
Builder" as the dialogue of the "second:
degree. It is not in the actions," Maeter-
linck writes, in his essay on The Tragical in
Daily Life, speaking more especially of the
drama of Sophocles, "but in the words that
are found the beauty and greatness of
tragedies that are truly beautiful and great, and
this not solely in the words that accompany
""
66
43
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
X
and explain the action, for there must perforce
be another dialogue besides the one which is
superficially necessary. And indeed the only
words that count in the play are those which
at first sight seemed useless, for it is therein
that the essence lies. Side by side with the
necessary dialogue will you almost always
find another dialogue that seems superfluous
it is the quality and the scope of this
unnecessary dialogue that determine the quality
and the immeasurable range of the work ..
it is just those words that are spoken by the
side of the rigid, apparent truth, that con-
stitute the mysterious beauty of the most
beautiful tragedies, inasmuch as these are
words that conform to a deeper truth. .
Le Trésor des Humbles.
In Pelléas et Mélisande, in Alladine et Palo-
mides, in Aglavaine et Selysette, emotion is
virtually both plot and episode. So far as
the method of these three love-dramas admits
of a rough critical analysis, the scheme varies
but little. We are usually confronted with
a small company of personages, who, by a
first touch significantly indicative of a primary
remove from familiar realities, are mostly
relegated to the ranks of the indeterminate
royalty prevailing in the world of Volks-
märchen. Amongst the groups the distinctive
44
LOVE DRAMAS
grades of life in its temporal aspect are gener-
ally introduced. Old age (Arkel, Ablamore,
Méligrane); manhood and womanhood in
ripe maturity, yet, almost as we watch, leaning
towards the downward incline, treading the
road that descends the hill (Goland, Agla-
vaine, Méléandre). Childhood is presented,
childhood absolute-(le petit Yniold, la petite
Yssaline) with, to recur to a distinctive feature
of these plays, the immature womanhood of
elder children whose childhood is over, whose
playtime is past, Selysette, " la pauvre petite,"
Mélisande, "une petite fille dans le forêt ";
Pelléas, too, the boy lover, no less a child:
"Vous êtes des enfants," is Goland's cry as he
surprises the two when the doves take flight
from Mélisande's tower; Alladine, une âme
d'enfant, d'un pauvre enfant sans force."
66
Thus life passes in review before us, severed
into those great divisions defined, with an in-
tuitive accuracy which rejects the fallible
measuring line of years, youth-when the
future, age-when the past, is the weight that
turns the balance of existence.
Having evoked this representative group-
man and woman, child and youth-we are
made aware of the links that bind one to the
other and each to all. They are bonds belong-
ing now to one, now to another, of the two
45
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
planes, the ideal and the real. They are
founded sometimes upon the true fellowship
of souls:
MÉLÉANDRE (to AGLAVAINE). Tu me parais anté-
rieure à tout ce que je sais, je sens ton âme mieux que
je ne sens la mienne, tu est plus près de moi que tout
moi-même.
AGLAVAINE (to MÉLÉANDRE). Je ne suis réelle que
lorsque tu es là. . . . Je ne sais déjà plus si tu es
ma clarté ou si je deviens ta lumière déjà nos
deux âmes se parlent bien avant que notre bouche
s'ouvre.
More often the fellowship is soldered by the
hands of passion at the forge of fate :-
Un hasard est venu
et j'ai
PALOMIDES.
reconnu qu'il devait y avoir une chose plus incom-
préhensible que la beauté de l'âme la plus belle ou du
visage le plus beau, et plus puissante aussi, puisqu'il
faut bien que je lui obéisse.
•
Behind the scenes of events that pass by,
the central figures stand subjected to the in-
exorable coercion of vast impersonal factors
in whose hands the helm of the earth-ship lies,
those three "unsent-for things" of Gaelic
proverb―love, jealousy, and fear. Likewise
we see them subjected to the influence of
other passions, emanations from the soul-
46
LOVE DRAMAS
pity, the self-vision where all other men's
sins find pardon, and, as in Selysette, as in
Astolaine, the love whose pulse is sacrifice.
And each man, each woman, draws to him-
self or to herself that special catastrophe,
emotional or actual, ideal or real, which is in
affinity with his or her individual temperament
or with the decree of that inscrutable person-
ality, the soul within the soul, that lies be-
neath and beyond temperament. Some are
endowed with the faculty by which events are
atrophied :-
ABLAMORE. Il y a des hommes qui semblent
détourner les événements. J'avais des amis
dont la présence semblait attirer toutes les aventures;
mais les jours où je sortais avec eux à la rencontre
des joies ou des douleurs, ils s'en revenaient les
mains vides. Je crois que j'ai paralysé la
destinée.
Or, in Palomides' words: "Un hasard est
venu-ou c'est peut-être moi qui suis venu..."
Others, contrariwise, call events to them.
The aged King, stretching with tremulous
hands his arms to the vast horizons, sum-
moned calamities from the realms of destiny
which overwhelmed his reason and devas-
tated his house: "Il appelait autour de
Π
nous les événements qui se cachaient depuis
66
47
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
longtemps à l'horizon. Ils sont venus, hélas!
plus tôt et plus nombreux qu'il ne s'y atten-
dait, et quelque jours ont suffi pour qu'ils
régnent à sa place."
Thus and for ever where wisdom, "l'âme
intérieure,” leaves the entrances of life un-
guarded, where the rash warden of the keys
challenges the attack of predatory spiritual
nomads, love, hate, suffering, and death ap-
proach what must in most instances be re-
garded as their unresisting victim, and the
master passion of the hour, possessed of its
prey, henceforth dominates all the issues of
life. Virtues themselves have power to ravish
joy.
AGLAVAINE. J'étais venue ici plus sage qu'il ne
faut l'être ... mais maintenant j'ai reconnu qu'il
ne faut pas que la bonté soit sage. Ah! c'est
d'avoir si peu de chose que d'avoir raison! [and three
lives are wrecked by her coming].
•
But whatever may be the specific emotional
force, it flashes momentarily its dyed limelight
upon the face of girl or woman, man or youth;
and those faces that hitherto moved before us in
the apathetic neutrality of a human puppet-
show are stirred from their cataleptic repose.
For a brief instant the voices ring clear and
resonant, as the voices of sleepers awakened,
48
LOVE DRAMAS
and some vivid vitality seems to kindle until
in the eclipse of joy the light fails and life
makes surrender to the eternal silences. The
mist of that twilight which lies like a grey
haze between us and all the actors in Maeter-
linck's dramas floats back, enclosing all;
the colours are lost in it, the strings of life are
muted almost before they are touched, the feet
of men and women fall muffled as footsteps on
the snow. The curtain drops on figures faintly
seen as shadows in the dusk, on words that
sound as echoes, intermingled and confused,
while the consistent incoherency of the sentences
would seem alternately related to les événe-
ments idéaux and to the train of parallel
actualities. And as phrases belonging to two
severed existences, they express the contra-
dictions resulting from the interaction of soul
and body, contributing not a little to the
apparently intentional obscurity of outline
which conduces to the atmospheric effect of
Maeterlinck's art.
As regards theme, in two out of the three
early love dramas, in Pelléas et Mélisande
and Alladine et Palomides, the issues depend
upon the workings of an involuntary, semi-
conscious and wholly emotional passion, an
ambushed calamity of adverse destiny. In
both love gives what is not its own to give,
D
49
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
!
and love takes what belongs in honour to
another. For the nature of the passion
depicted Maeterlinck has created a special
type. His conception is peculiarly his own.
Between the theoretical ideas of love as
wholly spiritual or wholly material there lie
for most of us the idea of innumerable inter-
mediate loves, loves of as many grades as the
flame of burning salt-wood has colours, where
body and soul, in infinitely differing propor-
tions, play each its generating part.
"Not
soul helps body more than flesh helps soul,"
was a doctrine Novalis embodied in his one
mystic romance. Love born of both receives
of each its own element of perfectness which,
in mortal spheres, either without the other
cannot attain. For Novalis, according to the
simplest interpretation of what is rather an
atmosphere than a dogma of his transcendental
mysticism, the body supplies corporeal form,
it incarnates the spirit of love. The soul
endows matter, "the shadow of the inward
image," with spiritual vitality, with infinity,
with immortality. Conjointly and in the union
of the two, the fire that scorches and con-
sumes becomes the flame that illuminates and
aspires, and Love's strength, in a new sense,
is "centred in his wings." The form fades,
but the only thing love can truly love is love,
50
LOVE DRAMAS
and love, redeemed of earth's envelope, is no
longer of time but of eternity. "Was mich
so unzertrennlich zu dir zieht ist nicht aus
dieser Zeit." The hero-lover of the Ofterdingen
romance proclaims Novalis's own creed. The
vision-stream, the rushing death-river, which
divides for an hour the lovers who love upon
earth, becomes, as the dream progresses, the
blue firmament over their heads in the land
where the divided meet. One fragmentary
sentence, which a half-drawn breath of per-
sonal passion sets apart, epitomises his faith:
"A union riveted also for death is a marriage
which gives to us a companion for the
night. . . ."
66
Neither body nor soul can claim sole, or can
indeed be held to share, responsibility for the
love depicted by Maeterlinck. In love, as in
life, the dualities of existence are emphasised.
The love of the soul within, "l'amour qui
ignore les petites choses de l'amour," love,
"l'amour prédestiné et véritable," whose
fountain-head, to quote from the prose works,
is in "les grandes villes spirituelles où nous
vivons sans le savoir," is of one essence.
Love of the sense-soul, whose auxiliaries are
physical instincts, is of another. It is some-
times "définitif dans les premiers cercles de
l'homme," but penetrates no further, and is
51
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
an exile for ever from the sacred precincts
where true wisdom abides. Over its disasters,
griefs, losses, nos yeux pleurent mais notre
âme ne pleure pas."
66
Such is the love Mélisande bears to Pelléas,
Alladine to Palomides, such likewise was the
love of Maleine for Hjalmar, which seeking,
with defect of truth, what was its own, would,
we may divine, equally have sought what was
by right another's. In fact, in these three
central feminine figures of Maeterlinck's crea-
tion, the love and the fashion of loving scarcely
admits of any distinction. Moreover, in the
two later plays it is love in antagonism to all
loyalties, truths, and generosities of the heart.
It obliterates for man and woman every affec-
tion which controverts the egoism of passion.
Alladine loves Palomides in defiance of every
bond of gratitude that binds the Arcadian
child to the aged King in whose brain pain and
jealousy unhinge reason. Palomides loves
Alladine in spite of his troth-giving to the
clear-eyed, white-souled Astolaine. So loving
he sacrifices the faith in which he dimly dis-
cerns his frustrated soul's true destiny
PALOMIDES (to ASTOLAINE). En vous rencontrant
... il m'a semblé que je trouvais enfin ce que
j'avais cherché durant un grand nombre d'années.
On eut dit que j'avais vécu jusqu'alors dans
52
LOVE DRAMAS
une chambre fermée, que vous aviez ouverte; et
j'ai su tout à coup ce que devait être l'âme des
autres hommes et ce que la mienne aurait pu
devenir.
But Alladine, the slave from Arcady, frail,
childish, truthless, her hands full of flowers,
her white-fleeced lamb at her side, has
come, and Palomides abandons Astolaine with
the avowal, "Je t'aime aussi . . . plus que
celle que j'aime." Mélisande, succoured,
shielded, cherished by her husband, under the
shelter of his tenderness and trust, carrying
his unborn child at her heart, keeps lover's
tryst with Pelléas, supplementing untruth of
deed with untruth of tongue. "As-tu .
avez-vous été coupables?" asks Goland, claim-
ing the truth, that he may absolve the sin :-
MÉLISANDE. Non, non, nous n'avons pas été
coupables.
Pelléas, despite his soul's faint protest,
despite the futile, whispering remorse of a
nobler manhood, signs a truce with disloyalty
and betrays his brother with tame self-
acquittal :-
PELLÉAS. Nous ne faisons ce que nous voulons.
A different phase of passion characterises
Aglavaine et Selysette. The mental outlook
is changed. The soul takes its part in the
53
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
loves of both the women there represented.
It burdens Selysette's fresh gaiety with a
consecrating touch; it fires their hearts with
an altar-flame of sacrifice; each contends
against her rival for the divine prerogative,
for the monopoly of suffering. Nevertheless
the ways of the soul are the ways of the soul,
and the way of the heart, the heart of woman
and man, is still the way of the heart. And
thus it falls out that whether or no the soul
participate in the action, the actors must
expiate in sorrow and death a creed too high
for earth's holding :-
AGLAVAINE (to SELYSETTE). J'aime, j'aime
Méléandre, Méléandre m'aime, il t'aime aussi, tu
nous aimes l'un et l'autre, et cependant nous ne
pourrions pas vivre heureux parce que l'heure n'est
pas encore venue où les êtres humains peuvent s'unir
ainsi.
It follows that one and all these plays are
tragedies; love allowed no less than love dis-
allowed comes only to end in adversity. We
catch, it is true, glimpses of that fashion of
loving which is the sun inconscient of exist-
ence, but for the most part love in its ordinary
meaning as the "reciprocal action of two
individual lovers," the specialised attraction
of man for woman, woman for man, appears
54
LOVE DRAMAS
mainly as a very death-lure to human hearts,
to their probity as to their joy.
Love romance of all times since Cressida
forsook Troilus, Francesca loved Paolo, Iseult
Tristram, has familiarised us with results, no
less destructive to happiness, of the supremacy
of passion over will. And it is not in the
effects, but in the nature and essence of love
portrayed by Maeterlinck, that his romance
dramas stand thrice removed from the lovers'
tales of the days of Gottfried von Strassburg,
Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their fellows.
This graft of emotional passion, upspring-
ing in some morally neutral region of a human
personality, a graft usually generated, accord-
ing to the text, in some outer borderland of
self, a germ precipitated into being by "la
destinée extérieure," is a thing alien to the
conceptions of older poets. So too is the
accentuated, reiterated doctrine that the soul,
holding itself silent and remote, is no factor in
the tragedy. Fate, hazard, are the sole agents.
"Je croyais que tu avais agi comme nous
agissons presque tous sans que rien de notre
âme intervienne," the old King tells Alladine.
In the contradictions of the dialogue between
Pelléas and Mélisande, in Mélisande's reiterated
denials of guilt in the death-chamber scene, the
same idea prevails.
55
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
!
PELLÉAS. Depuis quand m'aimes-tu ?
MÉLISANDE. Depuis toujours. . . . Depuis que je
t'ai vu.
PELLÉAS. Je ne t'aimais pas la première fois que
je t'ai vu.
MÉLISANDE. Moi non plus.
But if the soul, exempt from every blame,
uncontaminated by every wrong-doing, re-
mains unaffected within its citadel of wisdom,
if it has no part nor lot in emotions which are
neither blameless nor white-handed, neither
can we feel that the impulses let loose by "le
hasard noir" have the merits of normal
instincts. We are not in the presence of those
healthful earth-bred senses, "the superior
animals" of Novalis's creed, the senses, im-
pulses, and instincts of the material man,
which for good or ill governed the lives of
earlier love heroines. From that kindred of
the wild sprang the passions of unspiritual-
ised natures, of Cleopatra, of Brünhild, and all
their sisterhood. Fierce, jealous, carnal, lead-
ing to evil, maybe, they still retain the primi-
tive virtues of their guilt. They are passions
of instinct, but not of depraved and ignoble
instincts, passions of sense but of undegraded
senses, passions of natures which have, even
in their fever, some racial wholesomeness,
and they possess every strength of man- and
56
LOVE DRAMAS
womanhood save the climax and concentra-
tion of strength-self-control. That they lack
somewhat in their materialism is doubtless
true. In passion, as in all else, spirit is the
extension of matter. That extension they
have not. Spirit is, to quote Novalis's meta-
phor, “as the vowel to the consonant." That
prolongation is not theirs. Yet if the soul has
denied to them that mixture of spirit which,
surmounting all barriers of clay, possesses
the horizonless infinite, they need but that
gift alone and, as genius has painted them,
touch the outmost boundary of mortality.
"Even in the poor perverted reason of Gio-
vanni and Annabella " (so runs Charles Lamb's
commentary on the play Maeterlinck has
translated and adapted from John Ford's
drama) we discern traces of that fiery
particle, which in the irregular starting from
out the road of beaten action, discovers some-
thing of a right line, even in obliquity, and
shows hints of an improvable greatness in the
lowest descents and degradations of our
nature.
وو
66
Mortal or infinite, whatsoever may be their
quality, no such primitive storm-winds sweep
across the misted seas or shake the dim forest
recesses in Maeterlinck's dramas. In them
the senses are summoned only to a semi-
{
57
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
conscious, automatic co-operation with the
emotions. The will, the brain, all faculties of
action, succumb, as if blunted under a spell.
They become spellbound as the will, as the
thoughts and deeds of a trance. The passive-
ness of sleep underlies the utmost violence of
word and movement. Moreover, reproducing
the type of the Princesse Maleine, from—
possibly a desire to emphasise the incor-
poreal origin of the emotional passion with
Mélisande, with Alladine, we are still in the
land where the emotions of womanhood are
transplanted into the hearts of children;
where their action is that of parasites of senti-
ment which, like the strangling creepers with
close - leaved tendrils and heavy scented
-
blossoms of tropical growths, enfold their
prey, bringing sickness of heart and body,
chill languors, fever, contagion, and death.
Euphrasia, who plays the time-honoured
part of the girl - page, in Beaumont and
Fletcher's "Philaster," perhaps comes nearest
in English dramatic romance to Maeterlinck's
type of l'enfant-femme. But the points of
likeness do little more than enhance the sense
of dissimilitude between the elder and later
playwrights. Euphrasia loves Philaster with
an equally rash devotion and a more complete
self-oblivion than Mélisande Pelléas or Alladine
58
LOVE DRAMAS
Palomides.
Yet Euphrasia's passion frames
no pleas of ignorance; it is no blind uncon-
scious movement of the heart coming no
whence and, so far as the conscious will is
concerned, tending no whither. It is love,
sharply defined, a child's wholly imaginative
worship springing from a child's preconceived
ideal. That ideal she sees embodied in Phil-
aster, the prince and hero of her dreams, in
whose royalty her life is crowned :-"Sir, you
did take me up when I was nothing; and only
yet am something by being yours." Her
passion asks for and receives no recompense
of love, demands no response, claims nothing
save the inalienable right to give. No note of
jarring prematurity taints the dew, the fresh-
ness, the freedom of that slight figure in the
gay attire" she deprecates, and no words in
all the play ring truer than her own appraise-
ment of the life she is eager to surrender :
“'Tis not a life, 'tis but a piece of childhood
thrown away,"-a piece of childhood of which
are the kingdoms of loyalty, truth, and
honour.
66
The world has aged, the images Maeterlinck
evokes are of its later clay. They show the
fragile childhood of a fragile child with the
hands, voice, eyes, feet, lips of an unawakened
life, while far within a silent soul sleeps un-
R
59
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
troubled upon a distant throne. The emotional
obsession which lodges itself in the heart pene-
trates neither soul nor body. It is barely more
than a vaporous, noxious ferment, distilling
itself within the vase of life; it blurs the
crystal surface, it films the clear glass. The
frame of childhood dissolves, childhood itself
withers to death. Maleine sickened of a name-
less malady, although the poisoned draught
commanded by La Reine Anne was innocuous.
She would, one may divine, have died even
had the Queen drawn no silken cord round
the small throat of her victim:-
. et
MALEINE. Mon Dieu! mon Dieu ! comme je suis
malade ! Et je ne sais pas ce que j'ai .
personne ne sait pas ce que j'ai, le médecin ne sait
pas ce que j'ai, ma nourrice ne sait pas ce que j'ai. . . .
Alladine and Palomides, rescued from the
death awaiting them in the subterranean
grotto of their last love scene, die though the
peril of the water-pools is overpast:-
LE MÉDECIN. Ils souffrent tous les deux du même
mal, et c'est un mal que je ne connais pas.
Mélisande, wounded with a wound of which
"a little bird could not have died," dies, as
she was born, for no reason-" sans raison."
For Selysette, who has taken her life into her
60
LOVE DRAMAS
66
own inexperienced hands, who has stolen the
key from the grasp of the angel of death,
on ne lui voit aucune blessure et son pauvre
petit corps semble intact." Nevertheless, the
little thread of blood stains her lips and life
ebbs apace.
Reading a symbol into such death scenes, it
may appear to some amongst us that it is not
Maleine, Mélisande, Alladine, but childhood
itself which there expires, stricken to a here-
afterless death by emotions whose association
with childhood is in itself a disease, a malady
of nerve, a distortion of imagination. Such
emotions, rooted in their fitting soil, set in
their proper groundwork of completed woman-
hood, transpierced with the love of a mature
woman's soul, and welded with the earth-born
love of a woman's natural instincts, no less
God-given because more overtly human, are
the vitality of life. Severed from their true
conditions of health by a morbid prematurity
of development, unbalanced by the accumu-
lated distractions of a ripened heart and brain,
they illustrate the vitality of disease, moral,
physical, and mental. Childhood has come
too recently from the freedom of the infinite
to bear the narrow yoke of passion's servitude
unharmed. At the fret of the chain it languishes
for the wide horizons of its prenatal homeland
61
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
IM
стр
لود
-the land of parable in The Blue Bird-the
Kingdom of the Unborn. And though in
cases out of number life survives that in-
articulate nostalgia, the woman in all the
years to be bears with her (and the mark abides)
the burden of the childhood slain too soon and
lost for ever. It takes the genius of Maeter-
linck to make that all-pitiful type acceptable
even to the æsthetic taste. It will also take
more than his genius, with all the accessory
obscurities, suggestions and unrealities of sym-
bolic drama, to reconcile us to the sincerity
of a conception which presents the spectacle
of an innocence unimpaired by untruth of
word and untruth of deed. "Innocence is a
moral instinct," Novalis affirms. And setting
aside the question of purity of heart and clean-
handedness of body, it is an instinct which
recognises, even if it has not the strength to
fulfil, the spiritual laws. Lies are not truth,
deception is not honour, and betrayal of trust
is not loyalty; and although in "la morale
mystique," as here set in action, the im-
maculate soul of every forlorn little sinner may
carry "dans ses yeux le sourire transparent de
l'enfant," the tears of Mélisande's last hour
may be truly, as the old King watching her
proclaims, the tears of "son âme qui pleure."
62
IV
DEATH DRAMAS
As in recent essays death has occupied a very
considerable place in the meditations of the
philosopher-moralist, so, even more, in the
works of the poet-dramatist, death played, it
might almost be said, the title-rôle. Maeter-
linck has himself defined the fundamental
belief underlying his first presentments of
human life, sentiment and action: "a belief
in immense powers, invisible and fatalistic, of
which no man may know the purpose, but whose
intentions the spirit of the dramas assumes to
be malevolent." These forces take cognisance
of all our actions, are hostile to life, peace,
happiness, exercising a jurisdiction of in-
justice, whose penalties are, maybe, only a
manifestation of the caprice of fate. A dual
idea, the idea of the God of Christianity
merged with that of the Destiny of ancient
faiths, underlies the issues of events. A God
and a Destiny lurking in the impenetrable
63
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
obscurity of night and nature, as a Force un-
known, which Force takes upon it, more often
than any other shape, the form and semblance
of death. "Du reste, c'est une mort indiffer-
ente et inexorable, aveugle, tâtonnant à peu
près au hasard, emportant de préférence les
plus jeunes et les moins malheureux, simple-
ment parce qu'ils se tiennent moins tranquilles
que les plus misérables et que tout mouve-
ment trop brusque dans la nuit attire son
attention."1
From every vital belief, formulated during
those mental and emotional crises in the spiritual
history of humanity when men are won to a
magnetised acceptance of new or resuscitated
ideas, there radiate effluences, which effluences,
starting from one axis and centre of thought,
diverge, as the spokes of a wheel, farther and
farther the one from the other, as they pene-
trate the spaces of futurity. The idea of death
promulgated in the first eras of Christianity
was not slow to follow the law attending the
diffusion of primary apostolic conceptions inci-
dent to the new faith. With indomitable
courage and confidence Christianity had laid
its axe to the root of fear. It had proclaimed
a spiritual interpretation of that most rigid of
all physical facts, it had pronounced the grave
1 Preface to Théâtre, Vol. I.
64
DEATH DRAMAS
a delusion of the senses and asserted the
victory of life over corruption. From the
ordeal, ordained as the penalty of sin alone
(for "death is unnatural to the body "1), the
ordeal of the market-place where all roads meet,
the dread was lifted, and the darkness of dis-
solution, to the eye of faith, became but the
shadowy arch of the gateway leading to the
land of eternal light. And if Christian doctrine
had in some measure substituted the terror of
immortality for the exorcised terror of the
tomb, it was still logically the substitution of
an avoidable, a preventable ill for an inevitable
doom. It transferred the venue of fear from
the sphere of a material certainty, patent to
every man's senses, to the sphere of an unseen
moral possibility, patent only to faith, and
placed the determining power of the issues of
eternity, happiness or misery, in the will of
man himself.
Fathers of the Church summed up the new
death doctrines: "An awful thing is death
and full of terror, but not to those who have
learnt the true wisdom which is above. . . .
He that knows nothing concerning things to
come . with reason is afraid. . . But we
deem this action to be a departure to another
place." Death was the tremendous crisis of
1 Cyril of Alexandria.
E
65
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
transition, where the faint spark of man's vital
torch is consumed in that all-embracing flame
of infinity, whose comparative radiance is as
the effulgence of the noonday sun to a taper's
flickering light.
The personification of death was strictly
negatived. True, images and metaphors
abound. Death is the reaper of the harvest ;
he is the rider of the pale horse of the Apoca-
lypse. To St. Augustin's vision the dead flock as
sheep to their fold: "Death is their shepherd."
In the Gospel of Nicodemus Death is identified
with the Prince of Hell, the keeper of the
under-world. Nevertheless, behind all these
figures the image is overtly an image and no
more; behind reaper, rider, shepherd there is
nothing but an abstraction; the death they
symbolise is within, not without a man, the
emblems are but masks thought puts on-
they are, in the true sense of apocryphal
allegorists, "similitudes." Is death either
some thing or some power?" asks Augustin,
anticipating misapprehension. He confutes
the proposition in terms that prohibit the pos-
sibility of any literal interpretation of ecclesi-
astical symbolism. "Death is the separation
of soul and body," a separation terminable
at the day of resurrection. This death doctrine
the rites of the Church, the daily orisons of the
""
66
66
DEATH DRAMAS
faithful, perpetuated. Death, in the memento
of the Mass, was recorded under the gentlest
of its synonyms-sleep. The dead were those
who "dormiunt in somno pacis." The ap-
proach of death was heralded by the sacrament
tendered to the Church's dying children, of
which the very name is fraught with signifi-
cance, it is the viaticum for the soul's way-
faring, the spiritual sustenance provided for
the soul as it sets forth upon the pilgrimage of
eternity.
From that initial conception the new creed
of death was launched upon the current of
thought. The culture worlds of theology, the
culture worlds of lay philosophy, remoulded
the idea each according to its own bias.
Mysticism took up the word.
"We pass
from one life to another," wrote a fourteenth-
century saint, "and each life in turn calls that
passing death." Transcendentalism, incarnate
in Novalis, translated it into the language of
the illuminated cloudland where his imagina-
tion wandered. Death, for him, is the great
physical deception.
deception. It is
It is the triumphant
emancipation, not the subjugation, of life;
it is the gallant exit of the spirit from its long
earthly exile. His mystic optimism was epit-
omised in one brief faith. Life was good, life
was desirable, and death was life. Nor were
67
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
his doctrines concerning that most formidable
of earth's catastrophes a fabric merely wrought
from impersonal imaginations. The figure of
death had confronted him at every turn of the
road during the twenty-eight years of his
short life. Not only Sophie von Kühn, his
fifteen-year-old betrothed, but Erasmus, his
twin spirit and best-loved brother,
"with
whom he shared his brain and heart," had
died in their days of joy and youth. His
sister, likewise, and the younger brother (the
tidings of whose death precipitated his own)
had fallen victims to the fatal malady by which
he too was stricken. But while deaths crowded
upon deaths, the sentences in his letters,
diaries, and poems, recording one by one the
overwhelming sorrow, the agony of losses as
deeply felt as they were courageously en-
dured, ring, with only transitory lapses of
despair, in true unison with his professed
belief, with the inveterate hopefulness which
was his crown. "Sei getröst. Erasmus hat
überwunden," so ran his announcement of
his brother's death. "Für Sophien kann ich
nicht klagen," for death was her home-going.
His dying sister is "die Siegerin." The
separation of the grave only served as a trans-
ference of the incompleteness of life to the
regions of eternal fulfilment. The dead are
68
DEATH DRAMAS
the living, and souls still detained in their
mortal tenement, detaching themselves from
earthly preoccupations, may enter in spirit
that homeland beyond the tomb by faith,
love, and hope.
Nor, when the silent feet of the great
messenger approached his own threshold with
beckoning hand, did the accent of good
cheer change. He will die gaily, as a young
poet dies: "Ich will fröhlich sterben wie
ein junger Dichter. . . In heiterer Ruh will
ich den Augenblick erwarten."
Even more,
his dying shall be the willing expression of his
aspirations : "Mein Tod soll Beweis meiner
Gefühle für das Höchste sein; ächte Aufop-
ferung, nicht Nothmittel.”
To pass from the death doctrines of Chris-
tian Fathers, from the conception of the new
faith in its simplest aspect; from the
death which was viewed neither as a force
nor a person, but as the cessation of that
earthly condition of existence we call the
life of man, to the mental attitude of lay
mysticism represented by Novalis, is to follow
the idea from its fountain-head to where
a tributary current of thought reclothed a
religious doctrine in the novel formulas of
imaginative romanticism. To pass from that
rest-house of mystic enchantments to the specu-
69
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
lative transcendentalism of Maeterlinck's philo-
sophic essays is again to arrive at a further
cross-road where religious doctrine is sup-
planted, not rehabilitated, by an acquiescence
he would render hopefully serene, in the present
inadequacy of reason, science, or faith to pene-
trate the secrecies d'outre-tombe.
In later prose meditations, in the austere
calm of his final treatise La Mort, in the
mystery play of The Blue Bird, Maeter-
linck brought a message of courage, if not of
hope. In the Garden of the Dead he sought
to rob the graveyard of its sleepers :-
MYTYL (looking in the grass). Where are the dead?
TYLTYL (looking also). There are no dead. . . .
In the early death dramas, where his genius as
artist and poet found perhaps its culminating
triumph, he pursued a wholly different and
alien trend of thought.
It was a reversion, a retrograde movement
of imagination, to more primitive, more in-
stinctive apprehensions of the significance of
mortality. Peasant superstitions, surviving
amongst the unlettered villagers, folk-tale and
folk-legend, had discarded the intellectualised
death doctrine which refused personality to
death. "Is Death some thing or some power?"
St. Augustin's question, answered in the nega-
70
DEATH DRAMAS
A
tive by the authoritative voice of the Christian
Church, was answered in the affirmative by the
death legends of the people, by their clandes-
tine practices and inarticulate beliefs. True,
for generation after generation in Western
Europe, the peasant had listened with docile,
unquestioning assent to the articles of Chris-
tian faith; he had assisted, as piety dictated,
at the offices of the dying and the ceremonials
of the dead. But listening, assenting, praying,
he went straightway forth from church and
altar, to formulate at his own hearth, with
sublime unconsciousness, a creed, bred in his
own heart, of human nature's devising, not
only supplemental, but at many points inde-
pendent of his professed and formal faith.
Christianity had had its say, but the mind of
the peasant eluded its catechism. With the
inveterate tendency to personification dis-
played in all ages by unintellectualised human-
ity, he dismissed the abstract idea presented
by theologian and philosopher. Death to him
was not a law; it was not a force of nature, not
a part of the divine ordinance of fallen creation.
The death myth of the people embodied an
active, personal reality. "Votre vie aura une
fin," God said to Adam-so runs an oral
tradition of the Vosges districts-" et la Mort
fut créée."
71
MAURICE MAUR
MAETERLINCK
99
Two out of Maeterlinck's four death
dramas suggest a trend of imagination which
treads the very path of peasant lore.
Expressed or unexpressed, the idea of death
in these dramatic scenes, even if not directly
embodied is systematically exteriorised. "On
ne l'a pas vue mais on l'a entendue passer,
another Vosges folk-tale affirms of that
dreaded visitant, and the note of prosaic
accuracy gives a curious reality to the
assertion. In Mélisande's death-chamber the
exclamation of the old King, incredulous
that death could enter his presence unrecog-
nised, “je n'ai rien vu, je n'ai rien entendu,
comes as an echo from the same world where,
though not always visible, death's passing is so
surely detected.
99
And all Maeterlinck's figures of romance,
kings, queens, men, women, children, fade
into phantoms, to ghosts who walk in dreams,
beside the reality he has known how to confer
upon that imageless personality who in L'In-
truse enters the long avenue by the cypress
wood, where the nightingales hush their song
and the swans seek the farther shore of the
moonlit water. Step by step, with feet that
leave no print upon the ground, the advent of
the unbidden guest announces its gradual
approach to the house where the sick woman
72
DEATH DRAMAS
lies. For here as in conte after conte death
sends his warning, the intersigne of Breton
tradition, to herald his coming. Many are the
portents known to folk-lore. A chill breath
of wind in a windless night, the sound of tears
that fall where no man weeps, the whisper of
voices where no voices are, the splash of oars
where no boat nears the shore, a lighted taper
barring a twilight road. Signs patent to the
seer, but sealed to those whose spiritual
senses are shut to them.
Maeterlinck's genius has translated the very
atmosphere of Celtic folk-legend into art,
as the six watchers, who occupy the stage in
his play, carry on their broken dialogue after
the manner of companions worn with long
suspense, and but half released from their
worst fears. The group, according to his
custom, comprehends three generations-the
old, the mature, the young: L'Aïeul, Le Père,
Les trois Filles. In an inner chamber the sick
woman and a new-born child sleep. The crisis
is over, the watchers may, if they will, repose;
they may même rire un peu " as they await
the coming of the réligieuse for whose presence?
the patient craves. Yet disquietude deepens
as the dusk throws its shadows around. The
three daughters go upon an errand; they hold
each other by the hand. The touch is signifi-
66
73
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
"
14
cant; it is the action of children afraid. The
old man speaks the thought of all :-
L'AÏEUL. Je ne sais pas ce que j'ai; je ne suis pas
tranquille... Je voudrais que cette soirée fût passée !
one.
66
From the window where she waits the eldest
sister gazes into the gathering night. Does
she see anything, anyone? No-nothing-no
"Un peu de vent s'élève dans l'avenue."
And the nightingales have ceased their song.
"Je crois que quelqu'un est entré dans le
jardin, grand-père." The swans have taken
¡! fright. "Tu ne vois
Per-
personne ?”
sonne, mon père." The minutes go by; in
the country, in all the country round, there is
"un silence de mort." It grows late. To the
old man it seems that the chamber becomes
suddenly chill" le froid entre "-and the
strained ears catch the grinding of a scythe:—
L'AÏEUL (tressaillant). Oh! . . .
LE PÈRE. C'est le jardinier qui va faucher. . .
Il fauche pendant la nuit ? . . . Il fauche autour de
la maison ?
("Death, thou art a mower, too!")
L'AÏEUL. Moi, je l'entends comme s'il fauchait
dans la maison.
and the lamp glimmers dim:-
L'AÏEUL. Il n'y a personne à la porte vitrée ? . . .
Je croyait que quelqu'un attendait. . . .
.. J'ai entendu
74
DEATH DRAMAS
marcher lentement. . . . J'entends (to the father)
les pas de votre sœur !
At the little door is a sound of knocking.
The servant is without? Is it she who weeps?
Is it she who opened the outer door?
LA SERVANTE. C'est moi qui ai fermée la porte.
LE PÈRE. Elle était ouverte ?
LA SERVANTE. Oui. . .
Death has mounted the stair. A seventh
watcher sits at the table:-
L'AÏEUL. Vous êtes tous autour de la table?
LA FILLE. Oui, grand-père.
Each in turn replies as the old blind man
calls them by name: "Mais qui est-ce qui
est assis là ? "
LA FILLE. Où donc, grand-père? Il n'y a per-
sonne.
L'AIEUL. Pourquoi tremblez-vous toutes les trois,
mes filles ?
And then the dialogue, punctuated with
silences, dies away and the moon casts wander-
ing lights upon the pale faces of the frightened
sisters. Death is waiting here, as in many a
Celtic story, for her whose hour is so soon to
arrive. For he is patient. "Je vis un homme
qui allait et venait, les bras derrière le dos, du
pas nonchalant de quelqu'un qui attend," so
a Breton conte tells its tale.
75
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
$2
And for some half-hour or more the shadow of
that figure passes and repasses the window of
the Breton kitchen, where in his lit clos old
Marco Hamon waits the end. Thus, too, in the
play Death neither retards nor precipitates
the hour; he is as punctual as he is patient.
"Minuit sonne et, au dernier coup, il semble
qu'on entende, très vaguement, un bruit
comme de quelqu'un qui se lèverait en toute
hâte," is the stage direction which precedes
the exclamation of the blind watcher:
L'AÏEUL. Qui est-ce qui s'est lèvé? . . . Il y a
quelqu'un qui s'est lèvé de table!
Upon the threshold of the inner chamber
the door has opened, and the nurse "s'in-
cline en faisant le signe de la croix pour an-
noncer la mort de la femme.
""
"Tous les jours vont à la mort; le dernier
y arrive," was the dictum of old Michel
Montaigne. Here it is reversed. It is death
who seeks out man. He waits for the clock to
strike its passing bell, for the sand of the
hour-glass to run out. "Où est-il l'homme
dont l'heure arrive?" said a voice by the
river-side, where a chance passer-by, wonder-
ing like the unconverted apostle, hearing
a voice and seeing no man, tarried awhile
to see what might befall. Twice was the
76
DEATH DRAMAS
I
summons repeated. Then came a man running,
speechless with haste, and the runner forded
the river, and he fell, and the water took him,
and the bubbles rose over him and he died.
For every man comes in time for death to find
him.
So death passed in L'Intruse to "la chambre
mortuaire," and it may be said that no artist
has outrivalled Maeterlinck in his power of
making that passing felt, outrivalled his power
of surrounding that invisible presence with an
atmosphere which is not merely an effect, as it
were, but an emanation.
And he has lent the whole force of his art,
and here it excels itself, to enhance the terror
of that exteriorised, personified force, to
enhance the impression of an ineradicable
instinct of dread, the blind animal dread
of humankind, "les Aveugles," at the neigh,
bourhood of death. His appeal is to the
involuntary sensation of fear which Mon-
taigne's essay on death combated with philo-
sophic reasoning, denouncing with resolute
manhood every artificial environment that
might serve to unhinge men's nerve at the
approach of what "est moins à craindre que
rien." "Les enfants," he wrote in the same
vein, using an unwontedly imaginative phrase-
ology, "ont peur de leurs amis mesmes quand
、
77
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
ils les voyent masquez," therefore from the
face of death, “il faut oster le masque." This
is precisely what Maeterlinck has refrained
from doing, nor is it ever the face of a friend
which the mask, for him, covers. Never has
the shrouded cruelty of death been more ruth-
lessly delineated than in the sinister horror of
La Mort de Tintagiles. There death-or that
destiny which deals death forth-is throned
behind a curtain as inscrutable, as impene-
trable, as the "grande porte de fer" behind
which the sombre figure of the mysterious
Queen is divined, whose murderous hands are
without pity for the frail child whom love
wards in vain from the stroke of fate. She is
savage, monstrous, always unseen :-
YGRAINE. Ceux qui l'ont vue n'osent plus en parler.
Mais qui sait s'ils l'ont vue? Elle a une puis-
sance que l'on ne comprend pas; et nous vivons ici
avec un grand poids sans merci sur notre âme.
Thus the pale sister, Ygraine, forewarns the
little new-comer, the doomed child brought
back, by device of that unknown power, to
the castle shadowed by the Tower of Dread.
And in the last scene when the torn hands of
Ygraine beat helplessly against the iron barrier
behind which the child cries for succour in the
dark vault below the tower, Maeterlinck has
78
DEATH DRAMAS
66
drawn death indeed as un événement
masqué," and the mask is one of limitless
terror, and the infinite darkness is unillu-
minated by any ray of hope, and the mask and
the wearer of the mask are one and the same,
and beyond the darkness there is-night.
With the single exception of the child in
La Mort de Tintagiles, it is noticeable that in
the four death dramas our interest in death's
victims as living personalities is minimised.
Our attention is riveted upon that imperson-
ated force divorced and apart from its human
association. We never see the face of the
dying woman in L'Intruse; the drowned girl,
"l'étrange petite âme," of Intérieur remains
from first to last unseen, unnamed. Of the
dead priest in Les Aveugles we know scarcely
more than that he is dead. Death, not the
priest, is the leading actor around whom blind
age, blind man- and womanhood, blind youth
and infancy grope forlorn in the double
darkness of eyes that see not and of night
which falls.
So far as Les Aveugles is to be regarded as a
death drama, the action is over before the
play begins. Conjecturally-for whether the
reading be right or wrong none but the author
can decide-Les Aveugles presents, if not an
allegory, at least a scene where the spiritual
79
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
parallel is all-important; where if Maeter-
linck has drawn death, albeit symbolically,
from life, he has drawn it simultaneously from
the wider standpoint indicated by a signifi-
cant phrase of the essay "L'Immortalité,"
where speaking of "un peuple d'aveugles-nés,"
he justifies the analogy as "la comparaison qui
résume le mieux notre situation parmi
la nuit des mondes." In the drama we are
face to face with the same image, the image of
a blind humanity clamouring, guideless, in
the night for one to guide them.
It is a play of, which it is impossible to give
any adequate second-hand appreciation to
readers who are not conversant with the text.
All the personages of the drama are anony-
mous, the scene never shifts, the same persons
always occupy it, there is not a single entrance
or exit. And these figures are of six men and
six women, of whom one, l'Aveugle-Folle,
holds a sleeping infant upon her knee. The
men on one side, the women on the other, are
grouped under the shadows, the "faithful
shadows of willow and cypress trees. Between
the two groups the dead priest, who has led
them thus far from the distant asylum which
harbours their distress, is propped against
the grey trunk of a decaying oak. Old and
weary, he has fallen asleep, wrapped in his
80
DEATH DRAMAS
dark cloak, and death has taken him in slumber
unaware.
The little flock he has shepherded have no
cognisance of that dumb and motionless pres-
ence :-
TROISIÈME AVEUGLE-NÉ. . . . Causons un peu en
attendant le retour du prêtre.
DEUXIÈME AVEUGLE-NÉ. Savez vous où est allé le
prêtre ?
TROISIÈME. Il me semble qu'il nous abandonne
trop longtemps.
He has left them perhaps to seek the right
path? Maybe to bring food and water? But
whither is he gone, and why does he stay so
long? Do the women know aught? Do the
men? Has he gone there where a lighthouse
stands of which they have heard tell?
Only to the youngest, La plus jeune Aveugle,
with her shining hair, had he spoken before
he went from them :-
LA PLUS JEUNE AVEUGLE. Il lui faudrait aller très
loin. .
To the rest he had but said a simple, " bonne
nuit, en s'en allant. . . . Il a dit deux ou trois
fois, 'bonne nuit,' en s'en allant, comme s'il
allait dormir," yet she had not heard his steps
when he went.
And while they talk the sea murmurs
F
81
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
against the cliff and three of the women, who
are old, pray.
So the scene opens, a tragedy of the vast
game of Hoodman Blind Death plays with
mankind. It is a tragedy of listening, of
sounds to which the hearers hold no key of
sight. It is a guess-work tragedy of vague
surmising. The sound of waves-where? The
sound of murmured prayers-who prays?
The sound of falling leaves-what falls? The
sound of rising wind, of night-birds' wings,
the flight of migratory flocks? Question on
question, none to answer. Doubt on doubt,
and none to resolve those riddles, none to
interpret. And the groping hands stretch
out, the fingers are spread wide. And they
touch the hard rock or are pierced by thorns.
The senses take fright in that world of sight-
less disquiet, where each finds himself en-
veloped as it were in a bleak solitude of self:
"Voilà des années que nous sommes ensemble,
et nous ne nous sommes jamais aperçus. On
dirait que nous sommes toujours seuls."
Fear grows apace in that obscure isolation,
the dull fears of uncomprehended perils. From
the avenues of sense yet open come betoken-
ings of unknown import. The scent of trodden
asphodels, the scent of the damp earth, and of
the sodden and sere leaves, drift and cling in
82
DEATH DRAMAS
the air. And the waves' murmur grows
louder and a tempest gathers. Then comes the
sound of hurrying steps, someone approaches
66
وو
“à petits pas, comme un petit enfant." Whose
are the steps? It is "le chien de l'hospice!'
and a cry of hope goes up :-
PREMIER AVEUGLE-NÉ. Il vient nous delivrer.
il a suivi nos traces
ici! viens ici !
voulons aller.
..
il nous conduira. . . . Viens
Il nous conduira partout où nous
Il m'entraîne.
Suivez-moi!
. . . Attendez ! Qu'y a-t-il ? Ah! J'ai touché
quelque chose très froid. . .
The dog has led him to where the dead
priest lies; the blind hand touches the cold
face, and the swift human instinct detects,
even in the darkness of sightless eyes, the
touch of death. Il y a un mort entre nous.
66
""
The prayers of the women are suspended.
Who is dead amongst them? Who is it that
does not answer to the roll-call of their names?
La Folle? But her neighbour answers for her,
"Je l'entends vivre." All they yet live.
•
PREMIER AVEUGLE. Je crois je crois que c'est
le prêtre ! Venez.
And they come, his blind flock, feeling their
way to his side; they crowd round him who
had been as their eyes to the blind. And the
women fall on their knees weeping, and the
83
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
cold increases, and the frost crisps the dead
leaves, and the earth hardens, and the cluster
of men and women tremble in the silence and
chill of the night:
LA JEUNE AVEUGLE. Je crois que quelqu'un vient
vers nous.
TROISIÈME AVEUGLE-NÉ. Il ne viendra personne.
LA JEUNE AVEUGLE. J'entends marcher dans le
lointain.
It is but the dead leaves that stir.
LA JEUNE AVEUGLE. J'entends marcher très loin
de nous.
It is but the north wind rising.
LA JEUNE AVEUGLE. Je vous dis que quelqu'un
vient vers nous.
To her alone amongst the blind that slow tread
is audible—“ un bruit de pas très lents." It is
the step that comes towards all humanity. The
snow has begun to fall, great laggard flakes
floating through the frozen air. Sleep weighs on
the limbs of men and women, the sleep of the
snow. The steps draw nearer and nearer yet,
and then they stop. "Ils sont ici. . . . Ils
sont au milieu de nous ! .
Whose are
""
those footsteps? Wherefore do they halt ?
Who is it has sought them in the night and in
the snow? A deliverer? A guide?
84
DEATH DRAMAS
LA JEUNE AVEUGLE. Qui êtes vous? (Silence.)
LA PLUS VIEILLE. Ayez pitié de nous ! . . .
(Silence.)
And in the silence the wailing of the infant,
the child of La Folle.
""
From Les Aveugles to the last of the death
dramas, Intérieur, is a transition of very
marked character. It is a passing from what
is primarily an inspiration of terror to what is
essentially an art of compassion. “L'événe-
ment masqué is a death of which we are
made aware by report alone. The theme of the
play has, so to speak, unloosed itself, has dis-
joined itself, from the action and attaches
itself solely to the emotional results. Nor is
Maeterlinck here content to leave the persons
most directly concerned with the unseen catas-
trophe anonymous. The Father, the Mother,
the Sisters of the drowned girl, are likewise
personnages muets." They only appear
seen through the three unshuttered garden-
windows as they sit in the lighted chamber
within. To that garden, shadowed by willow
and cypress, come the sorrowful bearers of ill
tidings, tidings which will shatter at one stroke
all the serenity, the gentle happiness, of that
tranquil home. "Je n'avais jamais vu de
maison plus heureuse," the old friend who is
66
}
85
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
deputed to break the shock tells the passer-by,
the death-witness, who reluctantly has accom-
panied him upon his errand. They two the
first, others are to follow, each bringing the
same message. Old age, manhood, youth,
they collect together without, surveying, dis-
mayed, that calm interior. And regarding the
repose of hearts as yet unstricken, for whom
the shaft of sorrow is already sped, the courage
of those news-bringers fails:
LE VIEILLARD. Il faut prendre de grandes pré-
cautions-le père est vieux et maladif . . . la mère
aussi. . . . Et tous l'aimaient.
L'ÉTRANGER. Pourquoi faut-il que je vous accom-
pagne? Allez seul. . . . Je ne suis qu'un passant....
But, alone or accompanied, the old man
shrinks from the task. "Je ne sais pas pour-
quoi j'ai perdu tout courage.
And, like
an old man, his thoughts stray to vague
reminiscences of the dead. He had met her
that morning, that very morning; she had
smiled as they smile who have no mind to
speak what is in their heart; and her eyes
were dim. . . . And one does not know
what does one know? She was perhaps of
those who will not speak, and every man
carries within him more than one reason for
not living.
So, with many words, he
86
DEATH DRAMAS
postpones the inevitable. Nevertheless the
blow must fall. There had been many
peasants in the river-meadows; they had
come from the village, when the bad news
spread; they were preparing a bier of branches;
they will lay her on it; they will carry her
hither. Marie and Marthe, the old man's
grandchildren, had stayed beside the little dead
girl, they will bring word when the funeral
procession starts on its homeward way. Is
it not best to wait? ..
66
""
Marie enters : Ils viennent, grandpère.
They are coming, all the village has mustered to
accompany the bearers; but they pray under
their breath and the tapers are extinguished,
lest the lights should advertise the catas-
trophe too soon. But-" Vous l'avez dit,
grandpère ?"
LE VIEILLARD. Vous voyez bien que nous n'avons
rien dit. . . . Regardez, mon enfant, regardez ! . .
and Marie, too, gazes upon that Intérieur-so
quiet that it would seem as though "those
within listened to their souls' speech.
وو
MARIE. Grandpère, ne le dites pas ce soir !
LE VIEILLARD. Vous voyez que vous perdez
courage aussi. . . . Ils sont si sûrs de leur petite vie,
et ils ne doute pas que moi, pauvre vieux, je
tiens ici, à deux pas de leur porte, tout leur petit
87
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
bonheur entre mes vieilles mains que je n'ose pas
ouvrir.
With hushed voices and muffled footfall,
groups of peasants steal into the enclosure,
for they who bear the bier are even now close
at hand. Marthe has come with them, she it
has been who has bethought her of all that
pity can do. She has laid the dead, as if
asleep, upon the bier, has strewn it with
daisies, has spread out the wet hair. And now
her part is done; has grandpère done his?
Is all ready, are they within forewarned?
Her eyes search the lighted window. Perplexed
she interrogates the old man: "Ils ne pleurent
ils .
Conviction dawns upon
pas
her
66
""
66
vous ne l'avez pas dit?" Then
as silence answers her question, she sets
emotion aside with the impatience of youth.
"C'est moi qui vais le dire." Yet she too
delays ... she looks again. Alas, for the
sadness of it! .. Grandpère, je suis si
malheureuse que je ne vous voit pas !
Moi-même, je ne sais plus que faire. .
And at long last it is he who enters
the door while the two sisters, sobbing
softly in the darkness, draw nearer to the
window.
L'ÉTRANGER. Il l'a dit. . . .
!.
88
DEATH DRAMAS
In L'Intruse, in Les Aveugles, in Intérieur,
the romantic element, with its symbolical
royalties, has faded from sight. The play-
wright's use for crowns would appear to be
over when man has set forth, to employ a
Gaelic image, on the Journey of Truth. In
Intérieur the village simplicities of life are
before us-life and the pity of it, death
and the shadow of death, not the horror, as in
La Mort de Tintagiles, not the terror of death,
as in L'Intruse and Les Aveugles, but the sor-
row of it. And added to the theme is
the insistent suggestion of that laggard
unconsciousness of brain and sense-soul in
prevision of those great events which the
spirit-soul, by swift foreshadowings, does in
some sort anticipate: "toutes choses arrivent
en nous bien avant qu'elles aient lieu."
It is to this background of thought and
idea that Intérieur, perhaps the most perfectly
finished of Maeterlinck's dramatic scenes, owes
a breadth of effect the later and longer plays
are somewhat lacking in. It would seem as
if here Maeterlinck had solved the great
æsthetic problem of the fusion of the real
with the imaginative. His divination of the
invisible has not precluded, though it has
modified, his perception of actual events, and
the material facts are used as the starting-
89
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
point whence thought radiates into wider
spheres from the finite to the infinite. His
imagination serves for the extension of those
facts by their transposition into realms where
they act as factors in the conception of
spiritually relative ideas, whose formation is
determined, legitimately, by emotional and
physical influences. In so doing he supplies
an illustration and an example of the true
imaginative genius which includes a dual
vision, which sees indeed the sleeper, but sees
likewise the dream.
Moreover, the emotional effect is never
severed, as sometimes, from the source and
root of emotion; and in making those upon
whom the descent of sorrow is suspended
"les personnages muets," he has by the most
delicate of structural devices expressed some-
thing of the elemental silence of the "deepest
griefs, which cut the heart-strings" but leave
the lips dumb.
90
1
V
MONNA VANNA
RETURNING once more to the prefatory notes
Maeterlinck has appended to the three volumes
of his Théâtre, it is apparent that these may
be taken in some sort as the sage's apologia
for an æsthetic presentment of life where
Maeterlinck as artist betrayed the cause of
Maeterlinck as moralist. And undoubtedly
for those of us whose faith allows that earth
has her joys, instincts their health, hearts their
not irrational gaiety, nature its healings, the
senses their blameless pleasures, time its
manifold mercies, hope its (incomplete) fulfil-
ments; for those who see that green mosses
overgrow every ruin, that even the blanks of
life-those blanks which tell of joys lost,
those more dimly outlined vacancies which
tell of joys never possessed-are in due season
obliterated and that years inevitably effect
that gradual transformation whereby pain is
atrophied into the memory of pain, the earlier
of Maeterlinck's plays will always suggest the
91
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
reflection that if there may be such a place as
a fool's paradise, there is no less certainly a
corresponding locality-a wise man's hell.
And in his preface the apostle of emotional
morality, awakened to the call of a conscience
never wholly dumb in his works, with
characteristic candour deprecates the mono-
tonous, despondent pessimism of dramas
where man appears only as a feeble puppet, a
helpless prey to the hostility of vast adverse
forces surrounding the frail oasis of human
existence.
It is true that, even from the first, sympathy,
as a creed of morals, with the assertion and the
re-assertion of the supremacy of things spiritual
over things material both in power and im-
portance, are to be found in pages which
portray "cette faiblesse immense et inutile."
True that side by side with the poignant repre-
sentation of hearts and lives predoomed to
misery and death, he evokes, with an almost
wistful anxiety, the spectacle of "quelques
gestes de grâce et de tendresse, quelques paroles
de douceur, d'espérance fragile, de pitié et
d'amour," which those plays chronicle. But
these occasional chequers of light proved in-
sufficient to satisfy the demands for a less
sombre outlook: 'aujourd'hui cela ne me
paraît plus suffisant." In the later plays he
66
92
MONNA VANNA
has endeavoured, after a fashion of his own
invention, to reconcile the claims of art and
those claims of spiritual wisdom we may name
-distinguishing it from the formalities of
conventional and social decalogues-ethical
morality: "Je ne crois pas qu'un poème
doive sacrifier sa beauté à un enseignement
moral, mais si, tout en ne perdant rien de ce
que l'orne au dedans comme au dehors, il nous
mène à des vérités aussi admissibles mais plus
encourageantes que la vérité qui mène à rien,
il aura l'avantage d'accomplir un double devoir
incertain. Essayons . . . de varier l'ap-
parence de l'inconnue qui nous entoure et d'y
découvrir une raison nouvelle de vivre et de
persévérer," so that regarding facts with a
sober appreciation of the uncertainties of
sorrow no less than of the insecurities of joy,
we may at least learn somewhat:
nous y
gagnerons du moins d'alterner nos tristesses
en les mélant d'espoirs qui s'éteignent et se
rallument.'
66
Here, as elsewhere, Maeterlinck is not afraid
to allow that if his words have power to incline
men towards the "invisible goodness" which,
according to his later creed, underlies the out-
ward ill, to dispose them to a gentler tolerance
of human defects and to a wiser acquiescence
in the secret issues of earth-existence, it is not
93
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
a matter of indifference to him. Never does he
repudiate, even from the æsthetic standpoint,
the responsibility of his calling. Genius is, for
him, the keeper to whose charge the lesser
spirits of his brethren are committed, and his
genius has the courage of its acknowledged
task.
Further, he has clearly defined the obligations
of the dramatist, as he conceives of them, with
the limitations incident to the playwright's
art. The lyric poet may remain in some sort a
theorist of the unknown. The lyrist may dwell,
if it please him, in the realms of abstract ideas;
he is not compelled to apply them to practical
conclusions. So long as he conveys to us the
sentiment and impression of the infinite
mysteries that surround our little star-dust
life, he will have attained the emotional effect
lyric art in its highest aspirations achieves.
"The dramatist cannot limit himself to such
generalisations." He is compelled to transpose
into real life, into the life lived day by day, the
idea he has fashioned for himself of the un-
known: "il est obligé de faire descendre dans
la vie réelle, dans la vie de tous les jours, l'idée
qu'il se fait de l'inconnue."
In this final phrase he would seem to indicate
with exactitude the source of the personal
stamp which his individuality of outlook, his
!
94
MONNA VANNA
idiosyncrasies of temperament, have printed
upon one and all of his productions, and it is
the continuous attempt to embody his own
finite idea of the immense and infinite un-
known that colours and dyes the pages where
he depicts the daily, or the undaily, life of the
men and women of his stage.
Read with this key to the artist's deliberate
intention, the later plays are closely linked with
the essays whose publication they followed,
where the medium of exposition is that
cadenced prose which it is the despair of even
his most accomplished translators to reproduce.
Monna Vanna [1902] is a milestone evidenc-
ing how far already the dramatist of Maleine
has travelled upon the road trodden by the
moralist of La Sagesse et la Destinée.
The change is radical in every respect.
Personalities with distinct characterisation sup-
plant the type figures of his early dramas.
The atmosphere has lost its haze, the grey-
tinted mist has lifted its veil. The filmy
glass cupolas of Serres Chaudes are shattered.
We have emerged from the world of symbols,
from a world where shadows cast their simili-
tudes of substance upon the air. Events have
divested themselves of their masks, so far as
events which have for arena of action the
human heart and soul can discard their
95
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
inevitable disguises. Further, those events no
longer, or in far lesser measure, are suggestive
of "les événements idéaux," passing, cor-
relatively, upon the parallel spiritual planes
of Novalis's doctrine of the duality of existences.
And a yet more fundamental alteration of
mental attitude is witnessed to by the sub-
stitution of will for destiny. Fate has retired
more or less behind the scenes where men's
wills and men's actions appear in its stead as
determining forces upon whose clash and con-
flict the dramatic situations depend. Heroes
and heroines, in such measure as may be,
subordinate doom to volition, fatality is no
longer invincible, and, in Novalis's words,
character becomes destiny.
In accordance with this new ethical scheme
youth no longer occupies the forefront in
his art. Childhood disappears. For the type
of l'enfant-femme, of the child-automaton,
moved hither and thither by the wind
of destiny, the child-serf of passion who
worships but one god and him only serves, is
substituted the figure of a woman whose
actions are premeditated, voluntary, deliber-
ate, of a woman who has entered into her own
kingdom of ideas, the violence of whose
primitive instincts is appeased, whose heart
recognises other lordships than love and the
96
MONNA VANNA
sovereignty of other claims than the impulses
of passion.
Taken in the abstract, the theme of Monna
Vanna-a story of which the outline might
belong to a sixteenth-century novelle under
Maeterlinck's treatment becomes in substance
a duel of rival idealisms. The incidents of the
play, as they affect the fortunes of the main
personages, are the legitimate issues, the direct
results, of two practically antagonistic ideals
carried to their logical consequences in actual
life-the life lived day by day-of Maeter-
linck's æsthetic formula.
The plot is structurally simple. Florentine
mercenaries are besieging Pisa. The resources
of the beleaguered city are exhausted, the
inhabitants are reduced to their last straits.
When the scene opens the city is about to
become the helpless prey of its assailants.
Guido Colonna commands the Pisan garrison.
Prinzivalle, a Venetian adventurer, is the
condottieri captain of the Florentine forces.
Marco Colonna, father to Guido, old, wise,
and prudent, has been deputed to treat with
the enemy for the surrender of the city, and,
if so it were possible, to save its citizens from
the indiscriminate massacre threatened. Marco
has brought back to Guido the astounding
proposition made to him by the hostile com-
G
97
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
mander. Florence, Prinzivalle had stated,
had secretly resolved upon the disgrace of her
too successful captain. Possessed of the know-
ledge of his impending ruin, Prinzivalle con-
ceives himself at liberty to renounce his
obligation to Florence and to act upon his own
initiative. He is ready to avert the sanguinary
destruction of the city. While the report of
his disgrace is still unrumoured in the camp,
his authority over his soldiery is absolute.
He volunteers that the lives of these 30,000
Pisans shall be secured from death and outrage,
that the starving town shall be reprovisioned
before cock-crow. But he imposes a condition,
a solitary condition. Monna Vanna, the wife
of the Pisan commander, must consent, of her
own free assent, to pass the night alone with
him in his tent without the city ramparts.
Thus stated by Marco to Guido Colonna,
the situation works itself out in details which
add little to its interest. For the intrinsic
interest lies, not in any or all of the details and
developments, but in the contest, at once pre-
sented to the reader, during the dialogue
between Marco the philosopher and Guido the
soldier, of two ideals of right, of two standards
of duty. It is a combat to the death.
For Marco, champion of a transcendental
morality, it is expedient that one woman
98
MONNA VANNA
should sacrifice herself and that a whole city
should be saved. It is expedient that Vanna,
and with her Guido, and himself, Marco, to
whose old age she is the beloved daughter,
should suffer sorrow and shame, and that Pisa
should be preserved from slaughter and ravish-
ment. To Marco's conscience the sacrifice
demanded is the higher heroism, the super-
saintship of supreme virtue: "l'acte le plus
héroique est l'acte le plus pénible," is his axiom.
Such is the moral standard espoused by the
idealist, who, we conjecture, expresses more or
less the personal sentiments of the dramatist.
But Guido Colonna is likewise an idealist.
He is a fanatic who upholds another flag, nor
is he less rooted in his faith than Marco; he
sees but one path and in it he walks. For him,
the man of simpler clay, the chivalrous soldier
whose instincts, prejudices, convictions, are
moulded by the traditional codes of less
complex creeds, it is better that a whole
universe of cities, such as Pisa, perish by force
of arms, than that, of deliberate consent, one
woman should for one hour sell that which it
is for love alone to give as it is for love alone to
receive. The immensity of the gain, the over-
whelming tribulation to be averted, by the
payment of that one hour's surrender, does not
for one moment weigh in the balance of his
99
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
choice. The soldier's uncompromising repudia-
tion of the sordid bargain is absolute and un-
swerving.
He stands alone, one against all. Each and
every man, the advocates of that contrary
ideal, muster to bear witness to the blindness
of his folly. Marco first, with his doctrines of
mystic illumination: "des clartés plus grandes,"
promulgated with the authority of spiritual
initiation into the mysteries of the soul. He
has learnt secrets that Guido, the devotee of
outward honour, ignores. These secrets Marco
has not hitherto imparted even to his well-loved
son, who now misapprehends his action and
his thoughts, based as they are upon that inner
science of "la morale mystique." "Lorsque
la vieillesse est venue, je ne vous fit point part
de ce qu'elle m'apprenait chaque jour sur la
vie, sur l'amour, sur la douleur et le bonheur
des hommes Si je vous avais dit plus tôt
tout ce qui changeait en mon cœur, toutes les
vanités qui s'en détachaient, toutes les réalités
qui s'ouvraient à leur place, je ne me trouverais
pas aujourd'hui devant vous comme un mal-
heureux inconnu que vous êtes sur le point de
haïr...
و,
In vain that tardy exposition of interior
wisdom. Its arguments fall upon deaf ears.
After Marco, the upholders of his cause and of
100
MONNA VANNA
their own, comes the massed opinion of the
world of the rich, of the seigneurie of Pisa ;
men of mark, men of noble birth and honour-
able repute. They acclaim with one voice the
sanctity of the ransom by which the many are
redeemed. Guido's scorn scarcely debases
itself to the level of their merchant-thoughts.
With the seigneurie the citizens, the world of
the poor, the starving crowd of hungry men.
and famine-stricken women. They, too, with
the instinct of classic legend, which chained
Andromeda to the rock and delivered Sabra
to the dragon, see in the deed the holiness of a
sacrifice which brings bread to the lips of their
children and wards their little necessitous
existences from the scourge of war. For pity
of their distress willingly would Guido have
resigned wealth, life itself. But save them he
may not, for the price of their salvation is an
ideal. Dimly, for he at least is no man of
words and reasons, dimly he apprehends that
principles are greater things than life, that
ideas are of more worth than cities, that to
relinquish a standard of honour were a worse
loss to the human race than to yield ten score
of Pisas to the enemy. No glorification of
sacrifice, no persuasion howsoever disinterested
and impassioned, can stir him in his decision,
can shake his faith in the chivalries of past
101
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
centuries which counts the world well lost so
Vanna-so, we may believe, the least beggar
wife of the market-place-keep undesecrated
her wife- and womanhood.
Arrayed against him Marco, the seigneurie,
the populace and-Vanna. She comes, the
white Madonna of Guido's life and love and
faith. With the incredulity of love he hears
her resolve:-
VANNA. J'irai ce soir au camp de Prinzivalle.
GUIDO. Pour te donner à lui comme il l'a de-
mandé ?
VANNA. Oui.
She goes. By force he will not, by entreaty
he cannot, deter her. And she passes from his
sight, she goes upon her way to give what is not
hers to give, to violate the old human sanctities
of sacramental promise, to-the ancient fallacy
repeats itself to do evil that good may
ensue. On these foundations Vanna has
created her new ideal with the calm abnegation
of a consecrated victim.
So the first act develops its world-wide
tragedy, the tragedy that pursues not the
wrongdoers who sin against their conscious-
ness of good,
of good, but the rightdoers whose
consciences uplift hostile standards.
Pisa is saved.
Moreover, in the Venetian
102
MONNA VANNA
mercenary Vanna has found her old adoring
playmate of childish days, and while the
waggons laden with provisions are dispatched
to succour the citizens, Vanna remains within
Prinzivalle's tent secure in the reverent wor-
ship of a passion whose generosities are infinite.
But already the emissaries of Florence seek
him. He must fly-his life is forfeit. Whither
can he fly? Where find a refuge? All Tuscany
is on the watch, spies are stationed at every
turn-Vedio has come to warn his master of
the menacing peril. Then Vanna speaks.
VANNA (to PRINZIVALLE). . . . Tu viens de sauver
Pise; il est juste qu'elle te sauve. Tu y viens
sous ma garde et je reponds de toi.
And as from his tent she views the joy-fires
that flame upon Pisa's dome, proclaiming
Pisa's deliverance, Vanna too gives utterance
to her joy:
Ah, je suis trop heureuse et deux fois trop heureuse
en face de ce bonheur que je dois à celui qui m'a le
mieux aimé. . . . Viens, mon Gianello (lui donnant
un baiser sur le front). Voici le seul baiser que je
puisse te donner.
The third and last acts show how Monna
Vanna's unconsummated sacrifice has resolved
itself into new obligations. She returns un-
scathed from Prinzivalle's hands. Prinzivalle
103
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
remains guiltless of offence. Nevertheless, a
price which neither Vanna nor Marco contem-
plated must be paid.
As the dawn rises over the saved city,
Guido, unmoved in his fierce repudiation of
the sacrilege of honour, awaits Vanna's return.
He has withheld his hand, has allowed Vanna
the liberty of her choice, has suffered the city
to profit by the bargain she has sealed with her
sacrifice. Now the night is over, the profanation
of all that life holds holy has been presumably
accomplished. It is his again to order the
course of events, to retrieve what may be
retrieved of the irreparable infamy imposed
upon him. Marco's fluent wisdom, as before,
is impotent :-
GUIDO..
Attendre, patienter, accepter, oublier,
pardonner et pleurer!
Not so. That which he, the soldier, has to
do is simple :-
GUIDO. Un homme a pris Vanna. Vanna n'est
plus à moi tant que cet homme existe.
Pisa has eaten and drunken of the loaves
and the wine she has purchased at so dear a
price. For Guido there is but one thing remain-
ing-revenge.
As from the first, Guido stands alone, the
tragic fool of honour. Below, a city, frenzied
104
MONNA VANN A
with joy, greets the return of its deliverer.
Her progress is a triumph; radiant, "elle
éclaire la foule qui l'acclame," as she passes
through the streets. She mounts the flight of
steps that lead to what was once her home.
The stairs are strewn with flowers beneath her
feet. She falls in Marco's arms:-
MARCO. Monte, monte, Vanna, plus belle que
Judith, et plus pure que Lucrèce.
VANNA. Mon père, je suis heureuse.
MARCO. . . . Te voici plus radieuse que si tu
revenais des sources de ce ciel qui chante ton
retour.
Guido, cries the sage, will surely pardon “ ta
magnifique faute.
""
Guido is face to face with his fallen Madonna.
The radiance of her joy lightens no shadow of
his darkness:-
GUIDO (to the crowd). Laissez-nous.
VANNA. Non, non, attendez tous. . . .. Guido, tu
ne sais pas.
Je veux le dire, je veux bien dire
à tous. . . . Guido, je reviens pure.
In vain she asseverates her innocence. No
least shaft of hope can penetrate Guido's
anguished heart. Fiercely he bids the crowd,
the astonished crowd, withdraw, and they fall
back, all save one-the stranger who with hidden
face stands by Vanna's side. Let him go hence,
105
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
this stranger who thrusts himself into Guido's
presence. Vanna throws herself between the
two men. Her confused sentences make clear
to Guido that his enemy, Prinzivalle himself,
confronts him. To his maddened brain one only
explanation attaches itself to her words. She
has decoyed Prinzivalle, ensnared him with her
beauty, as Judith Holofernes; she has lured
her ravisher hither with her caresses to receive
at Guido's hands the just recompense of his
crime. If this be so, now indeed can Guido
pardon her, now indeed may he take her back
to his arms, and the stain shall be washed away
and the past blotted out in the blood of the
offender :-
VANNA.
. . Il ne m'a pas touchée . . . je sors
de sa tente comme je serais sortie de la maison d'un
frère.
GUIDO. Pourquoi ?
VANNA. Parce qu'il m'aime.
Then the pent-up volcano of Guido's incredu-
lous rage discharges itself. Let all the crowd
approach. Let all who will hear. Does this
woman speak truth? who can believe? The
silence of the crowd replies. Now it is Vanna
who stands alone; save for one soul whose
faith is great:-
MARCO. Je le crois.
106
MONNA VANNA
He, he only, believes her word, for the in-
visible goodness of man does not lie for him
outside the region of the possible.
But it is the crowd whom Guido calls to the
seat of judgment :-
GUIDO. Vous voyez cette femme et vous voyez
cet homme ? . . . Il est certain qu'ils s'aiment. . .
Ils sortiront d'ici . . sans outrage, sans subir aucun
mal
pourvu que cette femme me dise la vérité,
qui est la seule possible et qui est la seule chose que
j'aime encore en elle.
•
VANNA. J'ai dit la vérité. . . . Il ne m'a pas
touchée.
GUIDO. C'est bien, vous l'avez dit-vous l'avez
condamné.
To save Pisa Vanna was prepared to pay
the price of sacramental unfaith. To save
Prinzivalle she is willing to pay the price of
perjury. The final scene is one of bewildered
violence and conflict. If her innocence cannot
avail, let her guilt--the guilt which is not hers
-buy Prinzivalle's life. She claims him as
her prisoner she accepts the imputation of
her stain-she clamours for vengeance-a
vengeance her own hand shall exact. She
heaps falsehood on falsehood. Guido is con-
vinced; where he discredited truth, he be-
lieves a lie. Truth had challenged disbelief,
107
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
falsehood wins triumphantly the day. We see
Prinzivalle led hence to a prison of which
Guido confides the key to Vanna. The end of
the story we are left to divine. We hear
Guido's words of absolution and trust:-
GUIDO. Ma Vanna. . . . Je n'ai jamais douté.
. . Maintenant c'est fini, et tout va s'oublier dans
la bonne vengeance. .
VANNA.
de sa prison.
. . Mais donnez moi la clé . . . la clé
We hear Marco's murmur :
MARCO. J'ai compris, Vanna. . . . J'ai compris ton
mensonge. . . . Tu as fait l'impossible. . . . C'est juste
et très injuste, comme tout ce que l'on fait. Et la
vie a raison. Il faut mentir encore, puisqu'on
ne nous croit pas.
And we seem, listening to the sage's acquies-
cence in falsehood, to catch an echo of the
moralist's assertion-inscribed elsewhere-that
it is not in heroic deflections from the path,
but in obedience to the humble simplicities
of duty, that for the most part the highest
idealism may find its earthly fulfilment.
108
VI
LATER DRAMAS
WITH Joyzelle [1903] the chronological order
seems to contradict the phases of literary de-
velopment unless it be regarded as a temporary
regression to earlier methods. For in its imagi-
native aspect, if not in the characterisation of
the personages of the romance, it occupies
a middle place and to some extent bridges
over the abrupt transition from the twilight
atmosphere of fantastic symbolism to that of
the open daylight of unsymbolic action.
Shakespearean influences here revive, mingled
with reminiscences of medieval legend. The
scene, as in "The Tempest," is an island of
enchanted seas and shores. There abides the
lord of the island, the melancholy wizard
sage, Merlin, less sagacious than Prospero in
worldly counsel, wiser than Prospero in
spiritual and divine illumination, Prospero's
equal in the exercise of magic spells. He is a
Merlin overshadowed by the doom which
awaits him, if so be that no purer love of
109
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
woman shield his heart from the Vivienne
snare in the far forest glade of Broceliarde.
The purpose of Merlin, no less than that of
Prospero-to pursue an analogy which is in no
wise a plagiarism-is the union of two pre-
destined lovers. We have, on the one hand,
Prospero effecting the meeting of Miranda, his
daughter, with Ferdinand, the shipwrecked
Prince, on the other Merlin supervising the loves
of Lanceor, his son, with Joyzelle, the ship-
wrecked heroine. Both parental enchanters
subject the lovers to trials designed to test
the strength and purity of their passion. Both
evoke the aid of phantasmal illusions, and in
the practice of the necromancer's art evoke,
waking, the phantasmagorias of which dreams
are made. Further, the spirit, here feminised,
in whom Merlin's super-normal foresight, his
super-normal powers, are enphantomed, and
who fulfils with surplusage of love and devo-
tion the offices of Prospero's light-hearted
servitor, is christened after the very name of
her Shakespearean brother, Arielle.
Thus far and no farther is the gay fantasy
of "The Tempest" echoed in the painful little
drama where Merlin, seeing in Joyzelle the
possibility of a love which could alone inoculate
him from the poison-working passion that lies
ambushed for his future undoing, renounces
110
JOYZELLE
his hope of redemption. That Lanceor may
live, love and be loved, Merlin forfeits, for
ever, the deliverance that might be his.
No undercurrent of mirth, no grotesques of
men or monsters, break the thread of the story.
Arielle herself is an Arielle of a world grown old,
she is no longer a capricious fairy sprite,
captive to a master-will. She is the ethereal
form of Merlin's spiritual power: "ma force
intérieure, la puissance oubliée qui sommeille
en toute âme." She is the indwelling soul that
the soul of each human being enshrines, ex-
teriorised; she is his foreknowledge, she is the
diviner whose vision pierces, though incom-
pletely, the veil of the future. It is she to whose
prescience is revealed that Lanceor's life is
at stake should Joyzelle's love fail in the
coming ordeal :-
ARIELLE. Si la flamme n'atteint pas les limites de
la flamme. . . c'est la mort qui l'emporte.
Nevertheless, Arielle is also the tempter.
Let Merlin consider well the long suffering of
the living death that awaits him in the years to
be. Still there is time to avert it; in winning
Joyzelle the burthen of his doom will be lifted.
He will keep his power, his wisdom, his vital
force :-
ARIELLE. Maître, je t'en supplie, et pour toi et
111
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
7
pour moi qui aime tant la lumière et la perds avec
toi. . . . Choisis, choisis la vie!
MERLIN. Va-t'en, va-t'en, te dis-je.
And alone, bending above the sleeping Joy-
zelle, he renounces love, renounces peace.
MERLIN. Ah! quand on tient ainsi dans les mains
son bonheur et celui d'un autre homme .. c'est alors
que la vie pousse un cri surhumain pour se faire
écouter et défendre ses droits. . . . Mais c'est alors
aussi qu'il faut prêter l'oreille à l'autre voix qui
parle, qui n'a rien à nous dire de précis ni de sûr, qui
n'a rien à promettre . . . de la petite voix qui n'a
rien à me dire mais qui seule a raison.
So the lovers' ordeals are prepared. Love
must pass over the red-hot ploughshares with
naked feet. We are confronted, as it were,
with a destiny which has thrown down its
glove to a human heart. If that human heart
flinch, destiny will exact the uttermost farthing.
And it is on the working out of the challenge
that the action of the play hinges.
In his endeavour to persuade the reader of
some element of uncertainty in the result
Maeterlinck diverges from the pure fatalism of
his previous dramas. Merlin awaits the issue
of events with anxious suspense. But the
effort to infect us with any kindred doubts
proves ineffective.
Never, for one single
112
JOYZELLE
moment, can we conceive of Joyzelle as other
than the Bayard heroine, sans peur et sans
reproche. The temptations that beset the
path of the lovers are the temptations of
deception and illusion-St. Anthony visions of
ill. They rise from without, there are no traitors
within the citadel of the soul to conspire with
them for love's betrayal. Lanceor's unfaith is
but the snare laid of an hallucination; he is a
puppet whose dormant will is momentarily
swayed by a resistless power. And the interest
of the situations that arise concentrates itself
upon the fluctuating emotional currents that
carry Merlin, the mournful arbiter of their
happiness, with all his human weaknesses,
towards his ultimate goal.
For it would almost seem as if unconsciously
the dramatist has fallen under the spell of the
haunting quality with which Celtic imagination
invested the figure of that child of the devil,
born of the royal nun, born in the dusk of
shame and sadness, to stand forever aloof
from his fellows:-
MERLIN. Je suis le génie qu'il faut fuir.
An alien figure amid Arthurian chivalries
of lustihead and hardihood, amid men of good
courage and simple hearts, of primitive pas-
sions unsubdued, if half consecrated, by mystic
H
113
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
·
ideals; men of vigorous physical vitality un-
consciously engaged in single combat with an
ascetic creed, Merlin passes with melancholy
laughter and seeing eyes. Under the semblance
of a seven-years' child counselling Vortigern to
the destruction of the red dragon or the white,
or riding at Arthur's side as friend with friend,
in the stature of a man, the past, the present,
and the future alike weigh on the seer's
shoulders with the triple burthen of experience,
insight, and foresight. In a world where
Arthur and Guenever and Launcelot go Maying
and the greenwood is merry with the hunts-
man's horn, in a world where the Grail vision
pierces Launcelot's heart with its divine
anguish, where the youth-time of human
nature found its playground and its cemetery
-there Merlin watches, by the feasting and
the grave, the lonely wizard of age and of
disillusion.
""
And in echoes, in reflections, Merlin has
traversed the literature of Europe. In French
literature his romance is written in the "Roman
de Merlin.' In folk-lore he wanders, seek-
ing the red egg of the sea snake, l'herbe d'or,
the bitter hyssop of the hedge, the green
cress in the stream, and the pearl-berried
mistletoe in the forest. Geoffrey of Mon-
mouth portrays him occupied in the transport
114
JOYZELLE
66
of the Devil's Dana stones from Killaraus,
a mountain in Ireland," to Salisbury plain.
He is the "savio mago
savio mago" of
of Ariosto, en-
tombed with dead body and living spirit;
he is the master-enchanter of Spenser. But
wheresoever he walks, and howsoever he is
portrayed, always, always he vanishes from
our sight under the grey hawthorn of betrayal,
laying his sleeping life in the hands of her
whom he has loved. For Vivienne is always
there.
ARIELLE. Maître, je la vois
elle t'enlace de
ses bras qui parodient l'amour, elle te prend ta
puissance, ta raison, ta sagesse; elle t'arrache enfin
le secret de ta force; et comme un vieillard ivre tu
tombe sur le sol. . . . Alors elle te dépouille, te
raille, se redresse et referme sur nous la caverne
mortelle qui ne s'ouvrira plus.
Of Maeterlinck's lesser dramatic works there
followed the fantastic comedy of Ardiane,
where the Bluebeard legend reappears in a
novel guise, and that other legend-romance of
Sœur Béatrice, the story which in ballads and
plays, as in Davidson's "Ballade of a Nun,” as
in "The Miracle" of Humperdinck's music, has
won a curious popularity. Including these in
the collected edition of his dramas Maeterlinck
115
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
has also defined the place he would assign to
them as examples of his art :—
Quant au deux petites pièces qui suivent
Ardiane et Barbe-Bleue, ou la délivrance inutile, et
Sœur Béatrice, je voudrais qu'il n'y eût aucun mal
entendu à leur endroit. . . . Ce sont à proprement
parler, de petits jeux de scène, de courts poèmes du
genre assez malheureusement appelé "opéra-
comique" destinés à fournir aux musiciens qui les
avaient demandés, un thème convenable à des
développements lyriques. Ils ne prétendent à rien
davantage.
They are, in truth, absolutely devoid of
serious effort, æsthetic, doctrinal, or moral.
Their interest and their merits are the interest
and the merit which must always be attached
even to compositions of minor importance
when they come spontaneously from the pen
of a master of literary art.
Perhaps something of the same criticism
might be offered of a work whose extreme popu-
larity has been one of those freaks of en-
thusiasm to which the world of theatre-goers is
subject. The Blue Bird [1909] is one of those
imaginative works whose birth seems timed
to coincide with certain corresponding currents
of feeling and sympathy, works that supply
utterance to what was inarticulate and illus-
trate in vivid images the semi-conscious thought
116
MARIE MADELEINE
whose kinship is rather with the human
emotions than with the human intelligence.
The apparent spontaneity, the almost, it
would appear, haphazard construction of what
is, all in one, a fairy tale, a morality and a
mystery play, written with a lightness of touch
and conceived with a lightness of fancy none
other of Maeterlinck's dramas possess, capti-
vated its audience, as it were, by surprise. It
touched with a wand of charm the childhood
that lies at the heart of age and bade it re-
quicken. It touched youth with a dream where
gleams of mystic doctrine, shot with quick
heart-beats of human sympathy, bade youth
extend its short visions of life and look on
either side beyond the barriers. And in scenes
of drifting loveliness, where fantastic grotesques
give their note of pantomime to the stage, the
gentle fairyland of dreams the conjurer has
evoked becomes one with the land of the soul's
vision evoked by the sage.
It is more difficult to speak critically of the
last published of Maeterlinck's dramas, Marie
Madeleine.
Sometimes it would seem as if themes
founded on Gospel narrative carried in them-
selves an element of literary failure, unless, as
in folk-lore renderings, in Noëls and Weihnachts-
117
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
lieder, the consecrated story is translated by
an un-selfconscious impulse of a naïf religious
sentiment.
The cause of failure does not lend itself
easily to analysis. It may be that the auto-
cratic tendency of religious tradition to fix a
consistent, permanent, and definite type, to
crystallise its imaginative visualisation of past
scenes, bars the way to any reframing of the
picture, to any recasting of gesture or feature.
may be that gesture and feature have been
so insistently stereotyped by centuries that no
new handling can at will efface the long
inheritance of impressions stamped upon the
subconscious vision, without, however reverent
the intention, however skilful the execution,
inducing an effect of studied artificiality fatal
to æsthetic excellence.
It
The
There may be, possibly, a more emotional
obstacle for the artist to contend with.
world, like the individual human unit, lives
many simultaneous lives. There is the life
material, the life sensual, the spiritual, the
rational life. And not less potent than the
material, sensual, rational, or spiritual, because
often submerged, the world lives collectively
what we name, in its non-ecclesiastical sense,
the religious life. And by the religious life is
signified (to confine the term to its exact limits)
118
MARIE MADELEINE
that minor portion of the interior and spiritual
life which has attached itself, with affections
made up of a whole medley of associated joys,
hopes, sins and repentances, to certain beliefs.
These beliefs include the all-supreme master-
faith in man's personal relationship with
divine personalities.
For the Western world that religious life,
whether active or dormant, conscious and
confessed, or relegated to the regions of lost
faiths and discarded superstitions, has been
for nineteen centuries permeated by visualised
conceptions of the Christian creed, conceptions
emphasised both by pictorial art and by the
semi-dramatic ceremonies of the Christian
Church. Intellectually, and in the life of the
world material and rational, men may have
liberated reason from the bonds of doctrine.
Reason confronts reason, and where one suc-
cumbs the other triumphs. The reason of
faith fights on the same plane as the reason of
unfaith, the quixote in armour of yesterday
gives place to the philosopher armed with
science of to-day. But reason covers little
space in the broad field of human existence.
There are influences entrenched within a citadel
where the foot of reason cannot tread, and
unfaith still, in the memorable image of Ernest
Renan, hears the sound of the sanctus bells
119
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
which ring in the city under the sea. To those
forces belong the emotional instincts in-
separable from the religious life, the unrational
affections that, throughout even the most
rational of existences, follow the leading of
some unknown guidance, affections that are
drawn by invisible magnets, here to the pursuit
of an ignis-fatuus, there to the beacon of a
secure haven.
These affections survive in large measure
for many a generation the decay of in-
tellectual assent to traditional authority. It
is, to judge from appearances, a lighter task
for the brain of the world to set aside the
Christ who loved the world than for the heart
of the world to set aside the Christ it had
loved, for it is not the lover but the loved, it
is not the gift received but the gift rendered,
that prints its brand upon the emotional life
of both the individual and humankind. More-
over, no evolution of knowledge, no progress
of science, enters the fastness where the heart
guards its own. "The heart has reasons that
the reason knows not of," and for the emotional
instincts centuries pass in vain. They are the
bird-songs of the earth; as men grieved, hoped,
despaired, loved, so, too, they love, sorrow,
hope, despair to-day. And this being so,
handed down from generation to generation
120
MARIE MADELEINE
the religious life, which in old time absorbed
into itself so many of those affections (and those
the most intimate) has assimilated with them
some of their emotional qualities. It has
acquired the tenacity of their deep-rooted hold
upon human nature, the quickening vitality
that manifests itself in sudden irresponsible
enthusiasms of fanatic and devotee. Above
all it has absorbed a quality essentially allied,
with affections-the jealousy that resents the
entrance even of the unsandalled foot within
the threshold of its shrine. And this, albeit
the rational life, the reason of the world, may
pronounce that the altar is bare and the taber-
nacle vacant.
And that shrine which the heart of the
Western world has consecrated is peopled
with many figures. Cross and Crèche hold each
their mystery of birth and death made sacred
in the Divine adoption of them. The walls
are a shifting scenery of vineyard and cedar
grove, of olive gardens and cornfields and of
those blue Galilean waters where, as Renan,
many a saddened pilgrim of these later days,
following the life-narrative of Him in whose
name the land was christened "holy," has
Tracked His footsteps on the shore
To lose them on the sea.
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MAURICE MAETERLINCK
But whether those footsteps be lost or un-
lost that emotional jealousy still stands sentinel
at the door, and it behoves the artist to ask
himself if the password is known to him before
he would penetrate the sanctuary.
And amongst the shifting figures frescoed
upon the stones of that temple of the heart,
stand the figures of those whose names are
inscribed in the list of Maeterlinck's dramatis
personæ, the Maries, Lazarus, Joseph of Arima-
thea, Nicodemus. Each name is charged with
reminiscences and associations, and one and
all rise up prepared to challenge, like the spirit
of the dead prophet, the evocation which
troubles their rest. And the voice-upon
whose utterances the action and events of the
drama turn, albeit the speaker remains always
invisible to the outward eye-speaks in words
and sentences which centuries have listened
to upon their knees.
As M. Rostand before him in "La Samari-
taine," Maeterlinck has undertaken to expand
and develop realistically imagined incidents
and possibilities of a nature that, had such
incidents existed, the authors of the old narra-
tive, with their reticence, their serene indiffer-
ence to side issues, would have passed by
unchronicled.
In this expansion and addition of detail, in
122
MARIE MADELEINE
the amplification of episode and dialogue, we
seem to lose the wider significance-the uni-
versality-of those broken, fragmentary sen-
tences of gospel story which have echoed down
the years with a more vivid reality than any
art can impart, sentences possessed of a reality,
a force, a brevity and concentration, that
would seem to prohibit paraphrase. Above
all, and Maeterlinck more than most should
appraise the greatness of the loss, we lose the
silences of those pages, sealed by time with a
stone no resurrection angel can roll away from
the dumb sepulchre of the past.
Maeterlinck has adopted the wholly arbi-
trary tradition which identifies Mary of Mag-
dala with the penitent sinner who loved much.
But no dramatic violence of uttered passion
will bear import so fraught with emotional
feeling as the brief record of broken alabaster,
of the mute tears that fell upon the feet of the
Divine Wanderer, of the mute anguish of her
who stood at noon beholding the Cross and
who at dawn was early at the grave. Nor can
any enumeration, name by name, of those sad
souls whose courage failed them in the hour of
peril, do otherwise than contract and restrict
the infinitely tragic suggestion with which
the anonymity of
of one short sentence is
weighted" they all "-and all we surely
123
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
with them, whose hearts have ever swerved
from the Call of the Divine-" they all" forsook
Him and fled.
For the rest, the crisis of the drama lies
outside both gospel, legend, and tradition. It
repeats the crisis of Joyzelle's ordeal; it is
likewise a repetition of the situation constitut-
ing the leading motive in Monna Vanna. To
ransom a city-30,000 lives-Vanna is pre-
pared (and justified in the esteem of the
idealist) to offer the sacrifice Prinzivalle de-
mands. Joyzelle, to save one single life-the
life of her lover-refuses the alternative Merlin,
for the testing of her love, proffers. The
Magdalen of the drama rejects a like tempta-
tion, albeit the life to save is Christ's.
In these three women of varied characterisa-
tion, Vanna, the spotless wife, set in the frame
of an Italian renaissance novelle; Joyzelle,
the blameless virgin, associated with the Merlin
figure of medieval romance; Magdalen, the
penitent of sacred classic; on whose several
acceptances or rejections of the overtures fate
makes, on whose choice and volition, rest the
emotional catastrophes of the situations destiny
presents, we may be supposed to read an inter-
pretation of the individualised heroine-hood
with which Maeterlinck has replaced the type
figures, the Maleines, the Mélisandes, of earlier
124
MARIE MADELEINE
date. The maladive charm of l'enfant-femme
has departed, and with it the haunting,
pitiful grace of those pale children of emotion
whose presence upon his stage gave to his
art an almost unique æsthetic value. Has-
the question arises of necessity-has his art
gained or lost in the substitution of maturity
for youth, of volition for destiny, of the
womanhood of action and will for the sleep-
walking childhood of passion-ruled marionettes?
And with the transition from the mist-veiled
atmosphere of those dramas of more purely
imaginative texture, with the withdrawal of
these illusive, fragile type-figures who traversed
a gauze-filmed stage with silent feet, have we
not lost the special note of individuality in
Maeterlinck's genius for which the clearer
characterisation of personages, the clearer
realisations of the "life lived day by day "
offers no wholly adequate compensations?
125
VII
MYSTICISM
To some amongst us it would seem that not a
few of the advance guard of ethical writers
are occupied mainly with the rediscovery of
certain moral principles of which the stereo-
typed acceptance by an official conventional
morality has obscured the divine and human
truth.
The eye, by too long looking upon an object,
diminishes its perceptive vision; emotion too
long concentrated blunts its edge; sensations
too acutely stimulated at one point are atro-
phied, and what Pater, in one of his happiest
phrases, called "the veil of the familiar " falls
between man and his affections, his delights,
his joys. So, too, a veil falls between humanity
and its great ideals, its creeds and worships.
Religions recognised, in the sphere of things
divine, this insidious dulling by habit and
custom of the soul's impulses. To relax without
diverting the spirit from the contemplation of
God was the aim of ritual observances, of
126
MYSTICISM
ritual ceremonies. These distracted the
thoughts and senses from their spiritual centre
only to reconduct them, refreshed and re-
invigorated, back to religion's inmost shrine.
Like carrier pigeons they bore the impress of
the divine into the regions of the world of sense
and sight; like carrier pigeons they homed
their way back to the unseen throne, freighted
with the response of things visible, temporal,
and sensible, to the divine evocation.
But with the passing of years, rites and
ceremonies themselves lost, by that same law
of familiarity, their power. The process may
be retarded, it is never obviated, and no drag-
chain anchors the wheel of time. The great
ideas which in their first mintage, by this or
that religious movement, focussed the atten-
tion of the soul, demand, it would seem almost
of necessity, a reissue, and with the reissue
new formulas, new accessories, come into
requisition.
Then it is that interpreters arise to interpret
anew the old mysteries discarded faiths em-
bodied : "il est bien rare qu'un mystère
disparaisse ; d'ordinaire il ne fait que changer
de place." The transference exacts perforce
restatements, and a readjustment of mental
position. Moreover, if there are to be no
plagiarisms of dead centuries which, striving
127
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
artificially to restore the spiritual fabric of the
past, obliterate it, that shifting of the mystery
necessitates a revival of the searching, questing
spirit which of old drove humanity forth into
the desert to see if it were but a reed shaken
by a wind.
It is perhaps by virtue of that spirit, whose
presence asserts itself imperatively in Maeter-
linck's essays, that they have found wide
acceptance even by an English audience, to
whom the doctrines and sentiments of his
forbears-Ruysbroeck l'Admirable, and Fried-
rich von Hardenberg (Novalis)—are alien
both as modes of thought and as modes of
feeling.
By virtue of another element in his works
Maeterlinck as essayist has been the accredited
exponent of what is, somewhat too compre-
hensively, denominated modern mysticism.
Possibly to define mysticism is a work of
supererogation; the term expands or con-
tracts according to the intention of the user of
it. Nor have many abstract terms been
employed with wider elasticity of meaning to
cover more diverse qualities. On the one hand
mysticism has been identified with the crudest
supernaturalism, old and new. In another
aspect it has been ascribed to symbolism in
its most indiscriminate methods. But the
128
MYSTICISM
supernatural is not inherently mystical, and
symbolism is often little more than the exposi-
tion of wholly non-mystic conceptions by the
arbitrary selection of a metaphorical cipher.
Supernaturalism, whether of the miracle-worker,
the necromancer, or the modern spiritualist,
depends upon the intervention of preter-
natural, extraneous agencies. Mysticism has
no need, no use, for such. Nature to the mystic
works its own miracles, and while supernatural-
ism has frequently gone hand in hand with
mystic doctrine, it is of another, almost a
contrary, nature and essence.
""
The distinction was recognised and defined
in older days. As the supernatural vision of
the saints "by bodily sight" was distinguished
from the mystic vision "by ghostly sight
(to borrow the phrase of the mystic seeress,
Juliana of Norwich), so all kindred gifts of
supernaturalism admit of the same discrimina-
tive classification : "Visions," said Serenus
de Cressy," which were more pure and withal
more certayne were wrought by a divine
illapse into the spiritual [as distinct from the
sensual] part of the soul." And in that divine
illapse," whether into vision or aught else,
of supernatural experiences, lies the intrinsic
element which is the hall-mark of the mystic.
What to the supernaturalist pure and simple
66
I
129
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
lay without, to the mystic lay emphatically
within.
The identification of the mystic with the
symbolist implies an equal confusion of idea.
As to have seen a vision, to have achieved
some abnormal or occult feat, is not to have
become a mystic, so the use of a figurative
phraseology, of a vague imagery, in the
expression of obscure conceptions concerning
matters of sense and matters of soul, does not
predicate more than an æsthetic and literary
inclination. Between mystic and symbolist
there is identity of language, yet that identity
in no wise bridges the dividing gulf. Though
each may use the same similitude, the attitude
of mind of the one bears no kinship to the
mental outlook of the other.
To the æsthetic symbolist, the inter-con-
nection of the emblem with that which it
conveys or represents to the understanding is
accidental, temporal, a matter of images asso-
ciated artificially with thought. To the mystic
a symbol is far more. For him it possesses
(again we have the "illapse" into the spirit-
vitality of things substantial and material)
some radical affinity with the thing symbolised.
Some fundamental, permanent, essential corre-
spondence of life with life must exist between the
conception which emanates from man's spirit
130
MYSTICISM
and the image of it which emanates from nature
animate or inanimate. And the link binding
the one to the other is not a conception fabri-
cated by the fancy of man, but a relationship
immanent in nature.
In truth this pervading assumption of under-
currents in life, of lives within lives, forms an
elementary characteristic of the mystic's creed,
and while, broadly speaking, the tendency of
the supernaturalist has been to materialise
spirit, that of the mystic has, however uncon-
sciously, led him to spiritualise matter.
The continual recognition of such under-
currents, the insistent recognition of the dor-
mant energies that act as motive forces upon
the outward course of events, places Le Trésor
des Humbles, with other of Maeterlinck's tran-
scendental essays, amongst the works of mystic
literature where the religious and devotional
writings of Catholic ascetics-Ruysbroeck, Suso,
Juan de la Cruz-stand side by side with the
writings of secular mysticism—the writings of
a Jacob Böhme and a Novalis-the spiritual
philosophers of the sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries.
The past annals of mysticism, viewed from
its human side, showed two distinct phases;
the ascetic, and what, for want of a positive
term, must be called the non-ascetic. And
131
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
although in the spirit of mysticism there is nor
Jew nor Gentile, nor bond nor free, the ascetic,
whose sole aim was the divine communion,
conformed most frequently to the cloistral
ideal of Catholicism. He sought God in God.
For the non-ascetic the search not seldom
resolved itself into a Christianised Pantheism
which reconciled earth with heaven. He sought
God in nature. And while Catholicism cradled
the one, the upspringing of the romantic school
of thought in Germany gave typical expression
and stimulus to the other, not only amongst
men enfranchised from the usurpations of
doctrinal authority, but also amongst those less
tentative thinkers who adhered to the ancient
faith.
Each school displayed its own leading char-
acteristics.
The mystic ascetic of Catholicism-albeit
from age to age the Church regarded the mystic
devotee with a suspicion which endorsed the
dictum that "if the mystic of the East is
always a slave, the mystic of the West is usually
a rebel ”—regarded life, the human and earth
existence, from the point of view inculcated
by the dogma of the fall of man. His acceptance
of the doctrine of intuitive certitudes of divine
truth was closely bound up with the principles
of ascetic abnegation resulting from the con-
132
MYSTICISM
ception of a creation contaminated by sin. It
was in the practice of obedience, humility, and
renunciation: "l'abnégation stérile, la pudeur,
la chastété arbitraire, le renoncement aveugle,
la soumission obscure, l'esprit de pénitence,"
and the other "parasite virtues," included in
Maeterlinck's catalogue, that he sought illu-
mination. Life bore for him one sole aspect, it
was a probation, a pilgrimage, its only object,
to be pursued at all hazards by the knight-
errants of faith, the greater glory of God. Man
was an exile—exules filii Hevo-earth was his
place of banishment. The body was a hin-
drance if not an enemy, unregenerated human
nature an inheritance of certain perdition.
Such was the Catholic creed. True, the
captive in this vale of tears held in secure
hands the key of his mortal prison-house.
True, the hostage whom life held might pur-
chase his release. But, born before the days of
cheap merchandise, his ransom was literally
a dear bargain of hunger and thirst, of tears
and blood-shedding. Whatever had been their
primeval innocence, the fall, even mystically
interpreted, had radically corrupted the natural
and physical instincts of humanity; and steeped
in the heroic traditions of monastic ideals, the
ascetic repudiated not only those criminal
indulgences prohibited by Christian morality,
133
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
but likewise the most blameless of earthly
affections and secular joys. He repressed
with fierce and jealous endeavour every
craving, every attachment of manhood and
womanhood of which God might not be
claimed as the source, the centre and the goal.
Religious theosophy in Germany, retaining
an equally austere sense of the obligations
imposed by the moral code of Christian creeds,
made a first descent from the cloistral ideal of
the ascetic life. As the free spirit of romanti-
cism, secular and religious, gained supremacy,
German mysticism, discarding the purely
religious garb, entered upon a more varied and
a more widely human stage. The Catholic poet,
Johann Scheffler, the Lutheran hymn-writer,
Paul Gerhardt, had led the way to a religious
appreciation of the mystic aspects of nature.
With Jacob Böhme, writing one century later,
more especially with Novalis,¹ writing two cen-
turies later, the search after God in nature as-
sumed a singularly winning character. A typical
exponent of an attitude of mind at once keenly
metaphysical and temperamentally emotional,
the love of earth had set its indelible mark upon
that wandering son of sombre Moravian parent-
age. A certain sunny friendliness is the general
¹ Les Disciples à Saïs et les Fragments de Novalis, traduits par
Maeterlinck, 1895.
134
MYSTICISM
characteristic of all Novalis's references to the
earth-life he was so soon to quit. The Catholic's
place of exile is to him a well-loved home.
Nature, a nature no fall could corrupt or defile,
was sacred to him in her unfathomable
mysteries; it was dear to him as healing and
solace for body and soul; it was the vast
green-floored, blue-ceilinged nursery, whose
doors for ever stand wide open for all who
will to enter and find rest. Men, like spoilt
children, fearing their father, may turn to her
cradle and seek un réfuge près de leur
mère."
66
The love of earth, already associated with
mystical religion in the beautiful sixteenth-
century hymns of Scheffler and Gerhardt,
was secularised in Novalis's heart. In the half-
fantastic language of his romance, "Heinrich
von Ofterdingen," he made his old gardener-
sage the spokesman of that nature-love which
is so clear a feature in art when present in
unpremeditated sincerity, and shows so poor a
countenance when forced and counterfeit. He
made himself earth's interpreter. For him,
life, in the old sentence, sleeps in the stones,
dreams in the plants, and wakens in man.
Plants are the direct speech of the earth; each
new leaf, each marvellous blossom, is some
secret upspringing, which, as it cannot trans-
135
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
mute itself to love and desire, becomes a mute
tranquil plant
If in some solitary place one finds such a flower, is
it not as if it illuminated all around? And is it not
there where the small winged voices most willingly
abide? Well might he that sees weep for joy and,
severed from the world, set hands and feet in the earth
to strike root there and never more abandon that
happy companionship.
This eternal abiding joy is the hidden spell
which the earth's surface holds for the feet of
men; "it solves the riddle of life and men hence-
forth divine whence the road comes and whither
""
it goes. . . And if to Novalis himself the
riddle of the whence and the whither, the ques-
tion of the before and after, comes as an un-
certainty, it is an uncertainty undarkened by
fears and tinted with all the rainbow colours
of his inveterately hopeful moods.
It is difficult not to believe that in spite of
all its reverses, life, in his own phrase, was for
him "le commencement d'un roman sans fin,"
and death, to revert to the Christian definition,
but a passage of life to life. "Life is death, life
is life, death is life"-as another mystic of the
same period defined the three phases of thought
under which existence may be regarded in the
ascending scale of truth.
136
MYSTICISM
Is it not possible, Novalis asks, that some
nativities are but the dyings of the pre-
existent spirit? "N'y aurait-il pas aussi une
mort de l'autre côté, dont le résultat serait
la naissance terrestre ?" Birth he conceived
of as "un choix primitif," and, once terres-
trialised, life, with its winged desires, is "not
a dream but may become one." Here and
there truly passages recur bearing the im-
press of lapses into cloudier thoughts, but the
simple childlike openheartedness with which,
in depths of personal grief and personal
loss, he accepts, eagerly, consolation, gives its
distinguishing note of true optimism to his
philosophy. If more than once he allows that
“life is a malady," he is in the same breath
eager to demonstrate that disease is itself a
very important factor in existence of which
we know but imperfectly the utility- were
I to become its prophet!" adds the would-be
apostle on whom, in very truth, sickness had
laid its heaviest hand.
'
After some such fragmentary, disjointed, and
discursive fashion, Novalis, profound thinker
as he was, thinks those thoughts which left so
clear a mark upon his literary successors. And
he thinks them, not as a teacher severed from
the herd, but as the member of a well-loved
fraternity of trees and four-footed beasts and
137
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
men, whose affections cling to the very soil
beneath his feet :-
Over the white dry land the green coverlet of love
is outspread . . . and its strange inscription is read
only by the beloved ever he reads and is not
satiated with reading, and daily beholds therein new
revelations.
Almost in his human passion for earth we
catch a faint echo of that sublime passion of
the recluse for God: "I saw Him and I sought
Him, I had Him and I wanted Him."
Moreover, the pervading sentiment of that
kindly brotherhood embraces humanity itself.
Affections, purified of their dross, are to him
levers of the spiritual life. "The true measure
of a thing is its utmost compass," and the span
of earthly love is the measure of infinity. Love
is the knowledge of immortality, it is more :
"Was ist die Religion als ein unendliches
Einverständniss, eine ewige Vereinigung lie-
bender Herzen." And as Novalis wrote, he,
notwithstanding the weakened copy man
achieves of his ideals, according to his capacity,
lived; joys, great and small, of earth rein-
stated purified of dross; affections of earth
reconsecrated as the deepest educational ex-
periences of the soul which aspires, and his own
love, however exaggerated in its emotional
138
MYSTICISM
sentiment for the child-betrothed who was to
the young poet-romantic as Beatrice to Dante,
confessed as the ennobling influence of a youth
dedicated soul and spirit-" les deux lignes
partent de l'homme et finissent en Dieu "-to
some attainment of the highest.
Maeterlinck's mysticism differs necessarily
from the ascetic mysticism of cloistral Catholi-
cism. He has translated it to another clime
from the world where Ruysbroeck, Suso,
Juliana, and their fellows prayed and fasted,
saw hard-won visions with eyes shut to all
earth's pleasures, and learnt the secrets of God
in lives of abstinence, mortification and seclu-
sion. The search for God in God is not his.
From the non-ascetic mysticism of the
romantic secularist, in its phase of religious
pantheism, he diverges equally. He is at no
pains, with Novalis, to lose himself in nature
that he may become one with God. He has
no faith in the saving beatitudes of a creation
animated and instinct with the spirit of its
divine indwelling. The search for God in
nature is not his. For him the hidden God,
the divine principle, is to be sought in man-
66 il
y a sur cette terre autant de dieux cachés
que de cœurs qui palpitent."
Thus the circle revolves, the circle of the
possibilities open to the seeker, and thus it
139
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
closes God in God-God in Nature-God in
Man. So far no other seeking-places have
presented themselves to the soul of mankind
in its spiritual quest for the divine. Maeter-
linck embodies the results of his search in the
first three volumes of his prose works.
140
VIII
THE ESSAYS
IN Le Trésor des Humbles, in Le Temple Enseveli
[1896], in La Sagesse et la Destinée [1898],
Maeterlinck to a considerable extent popu-
larised a theory-to undergo both future
modification and extension-of metaphysical
idealism coloured by an imaginative intel-
lectuality and an æsthetic emotionalism, a
theory too vague to be named a system, too
restrictedly personal, perhaps, to impose itself
as a doctrine. In his plays it expressed itself
as the sentiment of an emotional morality in
action; in his prose it takes upon itself the
semblance of an intuitive morality in repose.
It is a theory dealt with mainly in its applica-
tion to the " day-by-day" life of the world,
and that day-by-day life is presented as a
spiritual earth-existence exteriorly cast in the
mould of an outward destiny, dominated by
its great crises of love and death; interiorly
cast in a mould of a far different fashioning,
wrought after a far different pattern by the
working of that inner principle, "la destinée
141
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
intime," whose agent is the ultimate and
essential soul within the soul of man. And
within that soul resides the "Invisible Good-
ness, "the equity, the aspiration, the ideal, of
the individual and of the race. It is there
that we may find Le Temple Enseveli of "la
justice"; it is there that we, who are at once
the criminals and the judges in its final court
of appeal, "sommes demeurés justes dans
l'injustice même."
From the solitary watch-tower of mystic
philosophy Maeterlinck surveys the panorama
of events, emotional events, material events,
that encompass and invade this territory of
the soul. He views them, in essays which pre-
lude wider outlooks, mainly from the stand-
point of their mortal limitations, of their
mortal span.
For the hour, at least, he defers
the consideration of the three great dark-
nesses of the questioning spirit-the whence,
the wherefore, and the whither-which occupy
his later works. And speaking from that same
watch-tower of the initiate, he sets forth how
man, having attained by intuition (the voice
of the inmost shrine of silence), by introspection
(the vision of the shut eyes, the "dark night
of the soul to whose depth the seer must trust
himself), to some true perception of the in-
trinsic and divine nature of life ("ce qui
وو
142
THE ESSAYS
s'appelait les dieux,' aujourd'hui on l'appelle
'la vie '" .), may recast, remould, recreate
life's attendant outward circumstances after
the spiritual design revealed to the illuminated
idealist.
And whether the hypotheses, the ideas and
ideals, with their application to the conduct
and practice of daily human existence, be
acceptable or not to his readers, one and all
of those who are conversant with his works
will pay homage to the spirit of reverence and
sympathy permeating an ethical philosophy
founded, if not upon an authoritative revela-
tion, upon a spiritual and always elevated
interpretation of the daily mystery and miracle
of human life.
It is impossible to formulate rigidly inten-
tions, points of view, principles of interpreta-
tion, and abstract propositions left, maybe
purposely, maybe of necessity, undefined.
Many of the ideas dealt with or propounded
belong to a region of remote thought and
feeling for which language, with all its re-
sources and metaphysical idioms, affords, by
the confession of those who best employ it,
but an imperfect and often purely symbolic
equivalent : Many thoughts are too delicate
to be thought, many more are too delicate to
be spoken," Novalis, who of all men, perhaps,
66
143
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
came nearest to the expression of the impossible,
avowed candidly. Maeterlinck re-echoes the
assertion :-
Il n'est pas possible de parler clairement de ces
choses. Qu'est-ce enfin que cette sagesse dont nous
parlons ainsi ? N'essayons pas de le définir trop
strictement, car ce sera l'emprisonner; "le mot sage,"
observes Joubert, "le mot sage dit à un enfant est un
mot qu'il comprend toujours et qu'on ne lui explique
jamais.'
Yet, leaving on one side those hypothetical
theories appertaining to attitudes of mind or
conditions of consciousness foreign to the
general experience of mankind-hypotheses
which, as Novalis claims, may serve as nets to
catch truth, but which more often, it may be
conjectured, are too wide-meshed to bring
their catch to land; leaving also on one side
theories so vague that they neither challenge
nor admit of analysis, Maeterlinck's applica-
tion of the doctrines of elder mysticism to
conditions of modern life, modern thought,
and human conduct has an aspect neither
vague nor indefinable.
Words may be inadequate to portray the
operations, inspirations, and spiritual pro-
cesses ascribed to l'âme intime of the chosen
few, but it is open to all to trace the concrete
influence or the defect of influence of elder
144
THE ESSAYS
doctrines transposed into new keys. In-
corporated in Maeterlinck's judgments, his
valuations and appraisements of the emotions
suffered by the many, and of the incidents
which befall the elect and the unelect alike of
the human race and the undistinguished multi-
tude, mystical theory translates itself into the
vulgar tongue of character and conduct. It
becomes "la morale mystique" of his ethical
writings. If, to put it otherwise, the inacces-
sible and secret wisdom, transcending reason
and understanding and coming only as a special
revelation to the inner group of the illuminate,
eludes verbal formulas, we may still investigate
what growths there be, healthful or poisonous,
good or evil, which germinate in the atmosphere
of light surrounding the disciples of mysticism.
If we cannot aspire to see the feet of the fore-
runners of transcendental thought-the feet of
messengers that pass in the night-we may still
track the footprints left upon earth and snow
and sand, and divine in their direction a goal.
And whether or not such an investigation in-
cline the student to descry in Maeterlinck the
apostle of a future creed of emotional morality,
it will be readily conceded that as an apostle
of a new, or a revivalist of an old, gospel of
philosophic mysticism he is, amongst contem-
porary writers, its foremost literary exponent.
K
145
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
His earlier essays present Maeterlinck, both
as artist and thinker, in a restricted phase.
In them his window opens with a narrow
aperture upon the outside world, and although
the vistas that lie open to his gaze stretch into
the infinite they are straitly bound to right
and to left. With Novalis, history, science,
art, all served their turn as bases and stimu-
lants to thought, each had the power of awaking
or arresting his sympathetic attention, and of
kindling the fantastic fires of his imaginative
faculties. Maeterlinck concentrated his interest
upon the moods of humanity alone, his sym-
pathies are totally absorbed in the contempla-
tion of men's emotions, griefs and desires.
Moreover, these are surveyed, almost exclu-
sively, in relation, on the one hand, to that
remote dweller within the threshold of the
soul, to whom he awards the distinction of
l'âme intime, in relation, on the other hand,
to those external events, the results of chance
or law, which, allied with the instincts of the
sense-soul, l'âme extérieure, fashion, if un-
thwarted, the mortal destiny of each individual
personality, and both are regarded in relation
to that search after the hidden God in which
the soul of man, consciously or unaware of its
higher instinct, is perpetually engaged.
The veiled soul of the soul, equally (and
146
THE ESSAYS
immeasurably) distant from the outer, the
sense-soul, of the body, and from the body
itself, constitutes the background of every
thought and idea expressed. It is this soul of
the soul, royally seated within a fortress im-
pregnable to the assault of evil, a fortress of
which the co-tenant is that "goodly will that
never assenteth unto sin, ne never shall,”
known to the mystic optimist, Juliana of
Norwich, which may say to the sins, the
crimes, red-handed, of the rebel senses, “I
know you not " "ils ont été commis à mille
lieues de son trône.
و,
Whatever may be the exact nature of the
abstract fundamental doctrines lying at the
root of Maeterlinck's philosophy of life spiritual
and of life material, the position he persistently
occupies is far more characteristic of an evan-
gelist of ideals than of a doctor of a theoretic
and dogmatic transcendentalism. His essays
give as clear and definite an exposition as is
possible of these ideals and of the modes of
feeling they induce. From his essays we may
gather a lucid appreciation of the standpoint
from which he views the life of earth, existence
as a whole, as a universal condition of being
governed by remote general forces, subject to
inevitable and eternally conflicting influences,
predestined to live the dual life of a spiritual
147
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
ideal perpetually outraged by actualities of
living, and outstretched between two im-
penetrably obscure infinities.
Sometimes it is difficult to dissociate the
uniformly mournful impression produced by
the perusal of Maeterlinck's meditations from
the actual drift of his evangel of peace and
tranquillity. Even when his mental attitude
admits of no strict analysis, it conveys the
sentiment of a profound, passive, unresentful
melancholy. He deals at length and in detail
with many of the tangled problems, the be-
setting questions of existence abstract and
actual. And though the reply rendered by
individual beliefs to the enigmas of the twin
eternities of past and future, although the
answer to that yet more inscrutable "why,"
might seem to be factors of paramount im-
portance in the formation of "la vie intérieure”
which absorbs his attention, he still, post-
poning their consideration, elected to pass
them by in premeditated and almost unbroken
silence.
66
Life, as he would seem here to interpret it,
lies between two abysses, la destinée intérieure
and la destinée exteriéure, which, lorsqu'il
est libre ne veut guère que le mal.' Allied
with our instincts, it becomes "la fatalité
noire,” the adversary, the devastator of happi-
148
THE ESSAYS
ness. Wisdom alone, the wisdom of the
secret recesses of the soul, may direct the
currents, if it cannot change the inflowing, of
outward happenings. "En élargissant, en
développant notre activité nous nous trans-
formerons en fatalité," is Novalis's succinct
statement of the doctrine to which Maeter-
linck gives reiterated and reinforced expression:
Si Judas sort ce soir il ira vers Judas et aura
l'occasion de trahir, mais si Socrate ouvre sa porte, il
trouvera Socrate endormi sur le seuil et aura l'occasion
d'être sage. Nos aventures errent autour de nous
comme les abeilles sur le point d'essaimer errent
autour de la ruche. Elles attendent que l'idée-mère
sorte enfin de notre âme. . . . Mentez, et les men-
songes accourront; aimez, et la grappe d'aventures
frisonnera d'amour. Il semble que tout n'attende
qu'un signal intérieur. . . . Il n'arrive jamais de
grands événements intérieurs à ceux qui n'ont rien
fait pour les appeler à eux.
The life of man is a beleaguered city; every
rampart, every antechamber, unoccupied by
the force of the soul, is mastered by antagon-
istic and overwhelming powers: "Tout vide
dans le cœur ou dans l'intelligence devient le
réservoir d'influences fatales " ; is assailed by
powers that turn the guns they have captured
against the walls in the "provisional darkness"
of this sphere. Misery and happiness hang sus-
149
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
66
pended upon the issues of the siege, while
nos aventures errent autour de nous,
" that
which is within drawing to itself its outward
counterpart and similitude.
As concerns the balance of joy and grief,
there can be little question as to which way it
tends. The scale is weighted. True, Maeter-
linck starts with an initial assumption that
man is made for happiness as the body is
made for health: "l'humanité est faite pour
être heureuse. . . Nevertheless the inten-
tion has hitherto proved abortive. For the
moment:
""
La misère est une maladie de l'humanité comme
la maladie est une misère de l'homme. . . Le
malheur est sorti de l'enfance depuis des centaines
de siècles ... le bonheur dort encore dans les
langes.
66
And when, passing from his considerations
of " sagesse, "destiny, calamity, and mis-
fortune, he treats of the nature of happiness,
in spite of his unfailing felicity of expression
he cannot convince us that he is at home with
his subject. Happiness, although its fountain-
head may indeed lie in the deepest recesses of
wisdom, must, by the test of universal experi-
ence, find its daily aliment in little things, in
the innumerable trivialities, transitory and
150
THE ESSAYS
evanescent, that, like floating atoms, catch the
sunlight of flitting moments. Maeterlinck's
conception of happiness takes but small
cognisance of these irrational joys. It lacks
their buoyancy, their freshness, their youth.
“Être heureux, c'est d'avoir dépassé l'in-
quiétude du bonheur." For him it is resigna-
tion, it is quietude, it is consolation, it is the
negation of sadness and unrest, it is the
anodyne that annuls the pain of disillusion, it
is the tranquillity of the storm-beaten wreck
cast up upon the sand, of "the quiet sleep
that fears no foul weather
""
Le plus heureux des hommes est celui qui connait
le mieux son bonheur; et celui qui le connait le
mieux est celui qui sait le plus profondement que le
bonheur n'est separé de la détresse que par une idée
haute, infatigable, humaine et courageuse.
"Be
But who amongst us of the unmystic laity
would call this heroic transfiguration of the
actual by the ideal, happiness, or, if happiness,
well may it be said "la joie fait peur.”
gay, my daughter, be gay," was Ruysbroeck's
counsel to his spiritual daughter in her life of
devotion to the sick and dying. The mysticism
of to-day would seem to have no use for such
gaiety. It has no playtime, no light-hearted-
ness, no vitality, no youth, and no promise.
151
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
It is the very twilight of gladness; it may indeed
be the fruit of eternity, but it is in no sort the
flower of time. It is a happiness almost in-
compatible with gaiety. As in Hazlitt's phrase
man must choose between it and joy. "Too
gay to be happy or too happy to be gay
sums up the conditions of his alternatives.
And all the while, neither glad nor sorry—
for nothing can cast a shadow where the light
burns from within the all-wise soul, immacu-
late as snow, sits in the silence which is her
voice, while the tortured tides of life, loves,
hates, sins, hopes, desires, and despairs surge
round her throne. And soul with soul holds
communion in those hours "où les âmes se
touchent et savent tout sans qu'on ait besoin
de remuer les lèvres." And each soul, from
amongst all souls, chooses with close-shut lips
its elect fellow. The hands of man and woman
touch, their voices speak one with another,
their hearts beat in accord, the contract of
earth is sealed and signed, but beneath and be-
yond, the hands of the soul are outstretched to
accept, to ratify, or to reject, according to far
other rules and in fulfilment of far other
decrees. It holds no council, it seeks no
confidant in the bodily senses and affections,
the pleasures and pains of the body are,
again to cite Novalis, merely the sensations of
152
THE ESSAYS
the soul's dreams. Men live with but a dim
apprehension of its loves, its gifts, its ideals,
its moralities, its "justice." Arbitrary and
absolute, it cherishes what man refuses and
knits its own bonds in regions where the heart,
the reason, and the senses alike tread only as
alien guests, where the stained mantle of guilt
drops from the sinner's shoulders in the
commonwealth of the spirit, and the soul of
the outcast communes in silence with the soul
of the virgin: "l'âme d'un forçat viendra se
taire divinement avec l'âme d'une vierge."
So the two destinies, of which life embodies
the action and counter-action, are brought
into juxtaposition-the one whose abode is
silence, the other which dwells in the realm of
sound. And life sways for ever between that
silence and that sound-a silence where all
things infinite are made known, a sound
where all things infinite are forgotten.
It is perhaps inevitable that sadness should
pervade a philosophy resting upon so un-
equivocal a recognition of ideals unrealised and
aspirations unattained. Nevertheless, Maeter-
linck himself has formulated the lesson-sad-
ness, even the greatest sadnesses do not
mould the strong man, but are moulded by
him. Sadness is as clay to the potter, out of it
he fashions the wings or the weights of life.
153
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
r
And if at times Maeterlinck's shield of life is a
field sable, if its flag floats for ever at half-mast
high, if the escutcheon of love is a twilight em-
blazoned with dying flames, if death is imaged
as a gateway into a mist and the record of time
marked, as the hours of the dial, only by the
shadow that passes until the shadow itself is lost
in the night, there is still a current of thought
underlying the sadness, tending towards a
more hopeful appreciation of the uncertainties
of unsolved enigmas, a happier confidence in
the power of the hands behind the screen
that determine life's issues.
The doctrine propounded by the sage in Le
Trésor des Humbles, who, walking by the sea-
shore, discoursed of the secret recesses of the
heart where abides the principle of beauty,
truth, and righteousness, opens to view vistas
where the sorrow of living is illuminated by
the radiance of a star. The doctrine of the
hidden conscience of humanity which re-
judges the verdict of the world opens the way
to a more optimistic appreciation of human
equity, and predicates a more Utopian future
for the race. "Il y a en nous un esprit qui ne
pèse que les intentions," face to face with that
brutal material force qui ne pèse que les
faits." This spirit, discerning truth, redis-
tributes praise and dispraise, measures with
+
154
THE ESSAYS
true measures, acquits and condemns, clothed
in the white ermine of incorruptible, inviolate
majesty. It is a spirit of justice which at
the very moment "où nous croyons qu'il
n'est plus, voici qu'il reparaît et se redresse au
fond de notre cœur." "Il est certain qu'au
fond de la vie morale de chacun de nous se
trouve une image de cette justice invisible et
incorruptible."
This justice of the soul comprehends in itself
all human and mortal virtues, it ennobles and
gives to them the right to penetrate within the
threshold of our moral life.
On la retrouve ainsi au centre de tout idéal. Elle
est au milieu de l'amour de la beauté. Elle est
également la bonté, la pitié, la générosité et l'héroisme,
car ils sont les actes de justice de celui qui s'est élevé
assez haut pour ne plus voir uniquement le juste et
l'injuste à ses pieds et dans le cercle étroit des obliga-
tions que le hasard lui impose, mais par delà les
années et les destinées voisines, par delà ce qu'il doit,
par delà ce qu'il aime, par delà ce qu'il rencontre, par
delà ce qu'il cherche par delà ce qu'il espère et
ce qu'il redoute, par delà les torts et les crimes mêmes
de ses frères, les hommes.
And in the supremacy of the ruling of this
inner principle, should it ever attain to that
supremacy, lies the promise of the world's
salvation.
155
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
Following the course of Maeterlinck's essays
from the earlier to the more recent, following
the path of "la morale mystique" in its wide
application and discursive studies, we have
travelled far from the starting-point both of
the ascetic's self-annihilation in the divine com-
munion, and of the non-ascetic's absorption of
self in the communion of nature.
For Maeterlinck to add to the consciousness
of our inner life, to the realisation of self in
self, to aspire "to be what we are," to enter
into the hidden kingdom-the Buried Temple—
which is within us, which is the kingdom of the
soul, is the primary purpose-it is also the final
destination of the pilgrim march of humanity.
That march continues from time out of mind
in the strange, troubled, confused annals of
action and thought constituting the history of
humanity, and nothing is stranger than the spec-
tacle it presents of the duality of human aim. On
the one side is the fierce competitive search
after the conquest of material and physical
good, the possession of the kingdoms of the
earth and the glory and sensual pleasure
thereof; on the other the assurance that under-
neath all the violence, injustice, wrong-doing of
the dusty arenas of time, where each combatant
strives for self, humanity is ever pursuing by
devious roads another goal; is pursuing what
156
THE ESSAYS
we call in its broadest sense, the search after
God.
Speculations of philosophers, hypotheses of
metaphysicians, dogmas of theologians, have
immemorially met without answering that
universal impulse and instinct of a faith which
seeks, however crudely, to define its vague
aspiration and reduce it to the definition of a
symbol. And from time immemorial those
seekers for the Divine Presence have trodden
roads which might appear rather to circle
round the labyrinth of a maze than to advance
upon any given track. The Unknown is still
hidden in the known, the Unseen still veiled
in the seen, the Uncreated is still shrouded
under the envelopment of the created. More-
over during that march of man through the
ages, in Maeterlinck's words,
"les dieux qui
l'accompagnent grandissent mais s'éloign-
ent."
Nevertheless man has not abandoned the
adventure. And the quest is so persistent,
and the finding in any real sense for the great
majority of searchers is so far removed from
success that we are almost converted to the
belief that man in the searching, not in the
finding, fulfils what up to this present is
the purpose of his spiritual existence—that the
quest, and not the attainment of the quest, is
157
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
the condition of development for that inner
principle of self we name the soul.
Thus Maeterlinck's philosophy closes the
ring of the mystic search-the search for God
in God, by a path arduous and sublime of
worship and adoration; the search for God in
Nature, by a path of humility and love; the
search for God in Man, under whose beggar
rags Maeterlinck descries the gleaming of the
divine raiment.
>
158
IX
NATURE
Of that other section of creation, of the earth-
life of tree and plant, of beast and bird, by
which human existence is environed, the
philosophic essays of Maeterlinck's first three
volumes take curiously little account. The
slide of nature had here, as it were, slipped
from his thought.
The verses of Serres Chaudes contain their
imagery of rank hothouse growths—“la végéta-
tion de symboles." Amid desert forests,
through the moist verdure, upspring, beneath
those blurred, nebulous cupolas, a whole flora
of blossoms, yellow, red, and white, an exotic,
healthless flora, the mirage blossomings of a
wizard's incantation.
His early dramas, after a similar guise,
utilise nature as the mirror upon whose surface
humanity casts the reflections of its own
emotions, moods, and instincts; while in the
mirror humanity holds to nature he portrays
only man's moods, emotions, and instincts in
159
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
refracted images. The malady of humanity
infects the very atmosphere of all that surrounds
and encompasses man, and the passing of the
human soul leaves a shadowy film upon the
clear air.
The elaborate stage directions, the references
of the dramatic dialogue to the scenes and en-
vironments where persons and events meet, de-
note a background which is merely a symbolic
décor de théâtre, an assortment of images used
to lay an extra weight of emphasis upon the
thought and action of the piece. The lives of
heroes and heroines are spent in solitary
castles with interminable corridors, sepulchral
vaults, and many-windowed chambers. Sunken
crypts, passages leading none know whither,
perforate the ground beneath, stagnant moats
encompass the walls, or slow-watered canals
bound the palace precincts. Fountains of
fathomless depth play in thin jets of spray
above their stone basins in dank willow-shaded
gardens. Beyond are enclosing forests, or it
may be endless swamps, malarial marshes
exuding pestilences. Near at hand stretch
sullen, low-voiced seas. Somewhere are moun-
tains, and always there are mists, mists that
brood and hover over sea and land, mists that
drift and float, mists that are stationary,
motionless; vapours that come and go with
160
NATURE
poison of fever and poison of chill in their
breath, mists that are like persons of the play
with their exits and entrances. There are
sudden winds that fall into sudden silences,
shadows that outline the narrow spaces of
hazy moonlights, dull heats that trail evil after
them, and water whose profound slumber may
be heard by the bending ear.
All these things belong to the transformation
scenes of symbolic semblances. Change the
foreground of human emotion and nature is
transfigured. To Merlin's desolate garden,
weed-stifled and desert, where leaves are sere
and blossoms dwarfed and withering, the spring
comes, drunken with joy, and invades the close,
where death had reigned, as the two lovers kiss.
Like the legendary tree Eve, exiled from Eden,
planted, white-leaved in her virginity, green-
leaved in her bridal sleep, red-fruited when
the first blood flowed upon earth, so here
nature makes her instantaneous response to
passion, and the shrivelled foliage, the faded
petals, revive, transformed to splendour and
profusion of palpitating colour; wide-cupped
convolvulus, purple scabious, and rose-pink
oleanders make a new wilderness; birds sing,
bees swarm, butterflies flutter, fruits ripen,
and the gold rays of sunlight scintillate in
floods of radiance:-
L
161
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
JOYZELLE. Il n'y a plus ici que les fleurs et la vie.
Here and everywhere in Maeterlinck's poetic
and dramatic work there is no evasion, no
escape for nature from the all-pervading atmo-
sphere of human sentiment. Flowers, trees,
grass, herbs, storm and calm, sea and forest,
are saturated, are steeped in it. The order of
creation is reversed, man is the initial letter
as he is the last syllable of nature's alphabet.
Every phenomenon, every denizen, animal or
vegetable, of earth exists only for its human
double entende, its emotional counterpart,
its use in interpreting or accenting a sensation,
a catastrophe, befalling man or woman. Over
Maleine's espousal feast meteors, like the tears
of stars, seem to asperge the skies with blood.
The heavens are palled in black and the moon
is masked in redness; willows strew brown
leaves upon the hands and heads of lovers
predestined to die; the wind-shaken drops of
the fountain's jet baptise their brows for the
grave.
Though in other dramas the melodrama of
the scenery is indicated with more reticence,
nature and her children are still strictly within
the range of theatrical symbolism. The blood-
streaked swan floating on the surface of the
moat beneath the window of the chamber
where the little princess lies murdered;
162
NATURE
66
l'agneau familier" of Alladine, who at the
approach of temptation, at the coming of the
lover whose love will stain, escapes from her
hold to drown in the swirl of the turbulent
stream; the doves of Mélisande, flying white
fugitives from the tower when Pelléas, repeat-
ing the wooing scene in the fairy tale of Rapun-
zel, sends his kisses to her lips by the luminous
ladder of her hair, all these belong to the ark
of allegory. They are earth-children who have
caught the contagion of man's fevered life;
it is nature blemished with the leprosy of his
sickness, contaminated by his sins, loves,
deaths. The flowers are artificial growths, the
beasts are only beast-masks and belong to the
region of tragic pantomime. They exist only
in and for man, they exist only to give a last
tint of colour to the atmospheric effects at
which Maeterlinck's art aimed.
The transition is radical from the emblematic
suggestion of nature in Maeterlinck's dramatic
pictorialism to his descriptive presentment of
it in his prose works.
"Man stands in as many and in as im-
measurably different relationships to nature
as to mankind," Novalis wrote, speaking of
past races. To some nature wore the coun-
tenance of a deity. Others thought of her only
in the light of a host-earth their inn-at
66
163
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
whose table they might freely seat themselves."
Others, discerning in her neither a temple nor
yet a mere banquet-hall, have been content to
accept her for herself and "out of a wide earth
to recreate a gentle Eden." Of these last
Maeterlinck is a kinsman in spirit. His
apotheosis of his garden commonwealth, his
patient, closely studied annals of the queen-
doms of his hives, his loving observation of the
flowers that pasture the bees no less than of
the bees who, in exchange for the rifled treasure
of honey, carry, with shining wings outspread,
the fertilising pollen to the tiny flower-chambers
of birth, betoken that in more recent years, if
not in earlier days, he has entered into friendly,
fraternal relationship with earth and found in
her what Novalis named the quality of social
domesticity.
He has not, it is true, trodden in the foot-
prints of medieval ascetics, saints who in
no spirit of childish fantasy, but in sober,
if gay, earnest, called on all the works of the
Lord to praise His name and gave practical
and individual meaning to their faith in the
worship by the life-created of the life-creator;
who acknowledging a community of obedience,
love, and adoration, demanded no equivocal
testimony from their spiritual kinsmen of their
devotion; who preached with Francis to
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NATURE
"miei sirocchie," the birds, or undertook with
zest the conversion of such four-footed felons
as the "ferocissimo lupo d' Agobio."
Nor, turning from ascetic tradition, does he
award any specific attention to the beliefs of
secular mysticism in the multitudinous souls
that are immanent in creation, that possess the
elements-the earth, the air, the water, the flame.
The fantastic problems that prompted many
a picturesque phrase in Novalis's fragmentary
speculations, spontaneous offshoots of his tran-
scendental musings, have little or no place in
Maeterlinck's interpretations of nature's opera-
tions. To Novalis nature, with all its varying
forms and shapes of living things, formed a
constant text-book for hazardously imagina-
tive divinations. If at times his intellect
wandered into more barren heights of purely
metaphysical enquiry, to his heart nature was
ever present. He was of her household, of her
fellowship. Inanimate to his eyes nature could
not be. Life is migratory, ever shifting its
energies. Stones to his fancy die into plants,
plants in their turn die into animals. "Plants
are language to the earth's thoughts." Human-
kind is but the elder brother, spirit endowed,
of one vast earth-born family. Are not, he
asks, the herbs the daughters, the beasts sons,
of earth, our mother? Do they not also touch
165
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
unseen horizons? As Maeterlinck has rendered
the beauty of his sentence: "Le monde des
fleurs est un infini lointain. . . . Il y a maintes
fleurs en ce
ce monde qui ne sont d'origine
supraterrestre." And is not the flower-world
the sleeping-place of the sleepless, the rest of
unrest ? "La sieste du royaume spirituel est
le monde floral.'
""
With no less beauty and grace has Maeter-
linck clothed the thoughts nature has suggested
and inspired, and he stands indeed upon a
vantage-ground of closer study, of clearer
appreciation, of a more accurate understanding
of the laws elucidated by modern science.
Nevertheless to most of us the appeal lies
almost more in the human charm of these
pages, in the sympathy which lends to his
descriptions of blossom and leaf and stem the
vividness of a personal touch, than in the grave
endeavour to detect evidences in the workings,
the movements, the contrivances and the
organism of his garden companions of "l'intelli-
gence universelle "-described as une sorte
de fluide universel qui pénétre diversement,
selon qu'ils sont bons ou mauvais conducteurs
de l'esprit, les organismes qu'il rencontre."
66
Many years ago the learned Erasmus Darwin,
in ponderous folios, "enlisted Imagination
under the Banner of Science," and published
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NATURE
his twin Botanic Poems, taking for theme
"The Economy of the Plants":-
Lo, here a Camera Obscura is presented to thy
view [so runs the preface in its old-world rhetoric],
in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited
canvas and magnified into apparent life . . . if thou
art at leisure, walk in and view the wonders of my
Enchanted Garden. . . . As Ovid, the necromancer,
did of poetic art transmute Men, Women, yea, Gods
also, into Trees and Flowers, so will he, the chronicler
of the Loves of the Plants, restore Trees and Flowers
to their Original, disclosing them as gods, as lovers,
as brides.
Brides such as she who in her hymeneal
union greets her bridegroom "with silken
curtains withdrawn," lovers like to him who
Gives to her hand the honeyed cup,
Loves out his hour and leaves his life in air.
Past is the day of the elder Darwin's prolix
embroideries of fanciful allegory, encrusted
with allusions to classic deities, to Rosicrucian
Sylphids and Salamanders. The new age
asks to see what is presented to it of nature
unornamented in her own forms and sem-
blances. Maeterlinck has chosen his part
with the generation of to-day. In La Vie des
Abeilles, in L'Intelligence des Fleurs, and in all
other scattered essays that deal with the lives
and loves of those two miniatures of creation,
167
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
the Bee and the Flower, he has scarcely in-
scribed a sentence that the most unlearned of
his readers cannot follow with ease: "I wish,"
so he defines his aims, "to speak of the Bees
very simply as one speaks of a subject one
knows and loves to those who know it not.
I myself have now for a long time ceased to
look for anything more beautiful in this world
or more interesting than truth. .
وو
And if truth forces his hand, if nature
demands the eye of the artist for its colours,
the word of the poet for its sounds, the sense
of the dramatist for its manifestations, and the
soul of the mystic to divine its impulses, these
and all his gifts Maeterlinck uses only so far as
they fulfil the requisitions of truth.
With descriptive veracity, however, he is
not content. It is in the last resort, un-
obtrusively no doubt, but with full intention
and conscious purpose, as a philosopher that
Maeterlinck walks in his garden, full of those
blossoms without whose loveliness his earth
would rest forlorn :-
Savons-nous ce que serait une humanité qui ne
connaîtrait pas la fleur? Si celle-ci n'existait pas, si
elle avait toujours été cachée à nos regards
notre caractère, notre morale, notre aptitude à la
beauté, au bonheur, seraient-ils bien les mêmes?
Suns, stars, moonlight, skies, clouds, seas,
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NATURE
dawns and twilights, the mountains, the plain,
the forests, rivers, trees, would any of these
things fill the place of those myriad, many-
hued blossoms which have given to imagina-
tion its fairest images, to memories their
lingering savour of perfume, to language its
beauty, to the eye its loveliest vision, to
emotion, to our joys as to our sorrows, a
treasure of garnered associations?
And it is as a philosopher, as a human intelli-
gence in relation with the "intelligence" of
Water-lily and Mimosa, of Balsam and Geranium
and Rue, and Love-in-a-Mist and "la bonne
Sauge" and the golden Broom and the great
Orchid race, that he approaches, in garden beds
or sunny road-banks or shaded woodland, the
objects of his study.
As a human intelligence, as a philosopher,
no less he approaches the wonderland of Bees.
There is a certain likeness to the frame of mind
characteristic of all Thoreau's nature studies
in the mental attitude Maeterlinck betrays in
the passage where he tells of his earliest
acquaintanceship with "twelve domes of straw,
some painted a bright pink, some a clear
yellow, but most of all a soft blue," set in an
angle of the wall, where, in an old sage's green-
shuttered Dutch home, he first visited the
cities of the Hive. To that garden fair,
169
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
peopled with stocks and larkspur, snapdragon,
columbine, carnation, and many another old-
world blossom, sweet with the scents of
springtime and summer,
one came to the school of the Bees to be taught the
preoccupations of all-powerful nature . . . the inde-
fatigable organisation of life, the lesson of ardent and
disinterested work; and another lesson too, with a
moral as good, that these heroic workers taught there
and emphasised, as it were, with the fiery darts of
their myriad wings, was to appreciate the somewhat
vague savour of leisure, to enjoy the almost un-
speakable delights of those immaculate days that
revolved on themselves in the fields of space, forming
merely a transparent globe, as void of memory as the
happiness without alloy.
And so throughout his essays. Whether
the bees fly hither and thither, with the gleam
and incandescence of swift wings, whether it
be the secret of the flower-lives, of the perfume
which is the soul of the flower, of the colours
which are as its voice:-"l'appel des couleurs
harmonieuses et éclatantes," which he would
fain surprise, never for very long does he let
nature draw him, with the net of the senses,
wholly to herself, never for very long can he
suspend thought, and rest with unlabouring
brain in the slumberous languor of passive
170
NATURE
enjoyment. He answers her caresses with
questionings, for the doom of the questioning
spirit has fallen upon him. What can she tell
him? What can he read upon the margin of
her picture-book? Flowers erect their stems
to open their petals to the sun-for him they
"concentrate the effort of vegetable life to-
wards life and spirit": "fleurs où se concentre
l'effort de la vie végétable vers la lumière et
vers l'esprit."
The "sieste florale " of Novalis becomes a
world, not of sleep, not of resignation and
obedience, but of revolt against a destiny that
shackles its desires :-
L'organe essentiel, l'organe nourricier de la plante,
sa racine, l'attache indissolublement au sol. S'il est
difficile de découvrir parmi les grands lois qui nous
accablent, celle qui pèse le plus lourdement à nos
épaules, pour la plante, il n'y a pas de doute; c'est
la loi qui la condamne à l'immobilité depuis sa
naissance jusqu'à sa mort.
Against this law
l'énergie de son idée fixe . . . se tend tout entière.
dans un même dessein: échapper par le haut à la
fatalité du bas.
The flower must summon to its aid all the
resources nature provides, and still to live, to
perpetuate its race, it must seek allies from
171
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
alien spheres: interlopers, birds and winds,
must carry her seed, her offspring, beyond the
threshold of her home-prison; bees and
butterflies, the winged thieves of the free air,
must bring to her heart the kiss of the far-off,
invisible lover, motionless himself, a captive
in his isolation.
And as Maeterlinck reads the story of the
flowers, so he made himself the amanuensis of
earth in his records, the day-by-day annals, of
those domesticated communities, whose small,
assiduously industrious, inveterately self-sacri-
ficing members " possess of all the inhabitants
of the globe the highest degree of intellect after
that of man."
66
It may come to some amongst us as a surprise
that it has been chiefly of these miniatures of
nature-life that he has elected to treat, that he
has pictured, almost exclusively, the forms of
nature that lie more or less, as it were, in the
very hand and grasp of man, a life of nature
that derives its destinies-with the limitations
that the inviolably inherent freedom of nature
imposes-in great measure from the care, the
forethought, the tending of man. For flowers
and bees, if they are earth's offspring, are man's
foster-children. The poet has broken the opaque
roof of his hothouse glass, but his is not the re-
actionary craving of the over-civilised man for the
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NATURE
primitive home-places of his race, for the giant
forests, the wide plain, and the wild mountain.
Nor has the love of the untamed, untamable
beast world with furtive padded footfall and
swift ivory-hoofed feet, the world of free rush-
ing winds and fierce liberties, set its seal upon
his nature lore. And possibly in his choice of
theme there may be detected some remnant of
his elder vision, which, as once it dwelt mainly
upon nature in its symbolised connection with
the humanity pictured in his art, so now, in a
new phase, dwells upon nature's sons and
daughters chiefly in their intimate connection
with the humanities of daily life. Nor is
it pure fancy if we read in his tenderness of
gardener and bee-keeper the source of the
partisan antagonism betrayed in the forest
scene of The Blue Bird, when beasts and trees
-Lanier, the mystic rapturist's, "brotherly,
sisterly, sweetheart trees "-conspire in sombre
hostility to slay the human child wandering
alone amongst his earth-enemies.
Howsoever this may be, he has written the
summer day-book of the Bees, told the story of
the swarm, of the thousand nativities that take
place, daily, within the waxen birth-chambers,
as spring hours pass by, of the mighty mother-
hood of that strangest of nature's inventions,
the Queen-herself the slave no less than is
173
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
the meanest of her subjects-of "the masked
power that for the moment we will term the
spirit of the hive.” To the telling he has
brought the poet's mind and the artist's im-
pulse to reproduce and translate into art the
knowledge acquired by scientific observation.
Most memorably of all, he has related with
unrivalled eloquence the brilliant tragedy of
the nuptial flight, has related as never again will
it be told by any dramatist the doom of those
luminous, golden sons of the hive on whom
falls the yearly madness, which, preluding
their wholesale massacre, possesses the horde
of idle males at the sight of that soaring
royalty.
With the whole wide heaven of morning for
stage the imperial bride, who consummating her
espousal in the depths of heaven's blue, must
return to the dark shelter of her Queendom and
the close chamber of motherhood, makes her
hymeneal exit:-
Immediately crowds collect and follow her into
the sea of gladness, whose limpid boundaries ever
recede. She, drunk with her wings, obeying the
magnificent law of the race that chooses her lover
and enacts that the strongest alone shall attain her
in the solitude of the ether, rises still; and, for the
first time in her life, the blue morning air rushes into
her stigmata, singing its song, like the blood of heaven,
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NATURE
in the myriad tubes of the tracheal sacs, nourished on
space, that fill the centre of her body. She rises still.
A region must be found unhaunted by birds, that
else might profane the mystery. She rises still; and
already the ill-assorted troop below are dwindling
and falling asunder. The feeble, infirm, the aged,
unwelcome, ill-fed, who have flown from inactive or
impoverished cities-these renounce the pursuit and
disappear in the void. Only a small, indefatigable
cluster remain, suspended in infinite opal. She
summons her wings for one final effort; and now the
chosen of incomprehensible forces has reached her,
has seized her, and, bounding aloft with united
impetus, the ascending spiral of their intertwined
flight whirls for one second in the hostile madness of
love.
And all the while, throughout the telling of the
story, the philosopher stands beside the poet,
attentive to every least evidence of the under-
currents that sway earth, that sway nature, by
laws and purposes unseen, watching with
sentinel eyes every movement that may chance
to betray the why and the wherefore, feeling
with sensitive finger-tips the screen that veils
her secrets, hoping always that in this place or
in that the tissue of the web, tenuous as gos-
samer, impervious as steel, may yield beneath
his hand.
The nuptials of the Queen in the heights are
175
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
if we did
ruled by a physiological necessity in the
provident economy of nature. But is this
scientific truth the only aspect of truth? he asks.
If we did not seek, no matter where, in uncer-
tainties, often far greater than the one this
little explanation has solved . . .
not seek in the mysteries of earth
something beyond the current explanation, something
that should prolong it and conduct us to the beauty
and grandeur that repose in the unknown, I would
almost venture to assert that we should pass our
existence further away from the truth than those
even who, in this case, wilfully shut their eyes to all
save the poetic and wholly imaginary interpretation
of these marvellous nuptials.
We may not see truth, we may not find it-
this one may almost take as the first and the
last article of a creed which includes much else
-but we fail for one reason alone. Howsoever
nobly men conceive of truth, howsoever greatly
men estimate its worth, "look as high as they
will.. (they can never look too high) . .
truth ever rises as they draw nearer.'
وو
And this, for Maeterlinck, is the conclusion
of the matter.
176
X
DEATH
IN the last prose work Maeterlinck has
placed before his readers (which incorporates
the essential pages of the essay "L'Immor-
talité "¹ previously published), he has shown
the instinct of his art in discarding it.
Face to face with riddles of life, face to face
with enigmas of nature, face to face with
problems of human emotions, the philosopher
had never disowned the artist, the transcen-
dentalist had never renounced the poet. Face
to face with the unsolved mystery which, so
far, has lain like an iron bar across the road of
experimental science, he has used words, of
which he is a master, after another method.
His thoughts clothe themselves in clearly
outlined phrases, knitted one with another
in logical sequences. Language becomes in
his hands a tool, used with the carefully
weighed precision of a metaphysician. With
his great gift of emotional utterance, equally
1 L'Intelligence des Fleurs, 1907.
M
177
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
gifted with the touch which epitomises and
visualises by a transient image the drift,
sentimental or intellectual, of some side issue
of thought whose direct statement would
over-accentuate importance, in this last essay
he seems of set purpose to deny himself, as
thinker, the use of the natural endowments
of his genius as artist.
Rejecting the creeds of religious beliefs, as
he interprets them, the allegoric figures under
whose cypher faith acknowledged the inade-
quacy of words to define the most silent of all
mysteries, vanish from the page. The departure
of the soul upon its long journey, the sleep of
the soul in the death cradle of eternity, the
sojourn of the soul in the eternal light, with all
those familiar golden countries portrayed by
Bernard of Cluny, in the centos of his "Hora
Novissima," whose impassioned symbolism tells
of the spirit's nostalgia for its immortal dwelling,
all these and all other kindred pictorialisms
of speech, where the symbol presents, if not
the interior apprehension of the mind, at least
the emotional sentiment associated with the
mental conception, Maeterlinck has discarded.
Death, we may conjecture, is a matter, in his
estimation, where reason alone avails, and he
has divested his diction of all that might
appeal to the imagination, of all that might
178
DEATH
lend itself to emotional effect.
The lilies of
the cemetery scene of The Blue Bird fantasy
are forgotten. On the ship that sinks drowning
men ask not if an artist but if a pilot is on
board.
Like Montaigne, he enters the lists to com-
bat the attitude of mind common to men
with regard to life's final scene: "Je suis un
enfant éperdu devant la mort," is the typical
phrase quoted in his prefatory page. And
primarily he seeks, in what are the first as
they are the last words of the volume, to
substitute for that note of troubled dismay, to
substitute for the vague instinct of fear that
underlies and shadows the lives even of those
who hold at their heart the certificate, stamped
with divine promise, of immortality, the quiet
assurance of a reasonable hope.
Other secularist writers in earlier ages of
less intellectualised imaginations encompassed
death with ideals of courage, fortitude and
dignity. The death
death scenes of
scenes of the great
epoch of Elizabethan tragedy present con-
tinually the conception of death in itself, as
distinct from the evils which are its attendant
circumstances, as distinct also from associated
anticipations of future punishment, under
aspects that preclude the possibility of
terror.
179
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
'Tis less than to be born, a lasting sleep,
A quiet resting from all jealousy,
A thing we all pursue. I know besides
It is but giving over of a game
That must be lost.
•
,,
Ford's Calantha in "The Broken Heart
dies with the ring of bridal triumph beside
the body of the beloved lover. The tortured
heart of the Duchess of Malfy expires in the
utter fearlessness of her unshaken dignity :
Come, violent death,
Serve for mandragora to make me sleep!
"Dost thou lie still?" Cleopatra asks of
Iras, who has cheated her great mistress of
due precedence in the death scene which
keeps above all others its halo of imperial
scorn
If thus thou vanishest, thou tell'st the world
It is not worth leave-taking.
And one and all amongst these personages
of dramatic tradition, whatsoever the sur-
roundings of horror, pain, and disaster, go to
the encounter of that invisible presence-
death itself-with full concurrence of the will
and the equable calm befitting, in Montaigne's
words, "les âmes bien nées.”
Notwithstanding this ideal of courage,
which, to apply Maeterlinck's doctrine of the
1
180
DEATH
invisible wisdom, may be said to lie within the
universal soul-l'âme intime-of the race
(so that, to paraphrase his sentence, as we are
just in the midst of our injustice we are brave
in the midst of our cowardice), it remains
more or less true, Maeterlinck does not over-
state the fact in his opening pages, that the
majority of men, in act and practice if not in
theory, view death as an almost unmitigated
ill, to be held at arm's length whatever suffer-
ing the postponement may entail, and to be
resisted at any cost of physical distress, how-
soever inevitable the eventual issue. "La
mort est une pièce de la vie du monde "-
and yet in all the protracted centuries of
creation, life would appear never to have
adapted itself to its dying, and even in the
brief span of individual existence we seem to
contract so inveterate a habit of living that
the breaking of the habit still comes, not as
the simple sequence of nature-spring, summer,
autumn, winter-but as the shock of a totally
abnormal catastrophe.
To alleviate and appease such terrors,
terrors lurking beneath the surface of daily
existence, radically to readjust men's concep-
tion of that formidable and unrehearsable
ordeal, is the task Maeterlinck has here
deliberately undertaken, and although he may
181
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
not be of those who can descry in the darkness
of the grave the overfolding of the wings of
God-" God's wings close over us and we call
that darkness death "-nevertheless his tran-
quil appraisement of what death is not, more
perhaps than his acceptation of what death
may be, has a value it is difficult to over-
estimate. Landmarks may differ for this
thinker and for that, but the wide horizons his
thoughts explore before they reach the boun-
dary lines where, for most of us, human
thought as an actuality becomes undecipher-
able or extinct, may, if his treatise serves no
other purpose, aid men's vision to penetrate
distances, accustom it to soar to heights, until,
from some summit, the eye, habituated to far
spaces, may detect undizzied some aperture
yet undiscovered and penetrate, if it be only
a hair's-breadth, into the unknown.
66
Four centuries and more ago Montaigne, in
his essay
Que philosopher est apprendre à
mourir" had made his endeavour to re-
educate men's minds and imaginations in
respect of death. Himself the most human of
philosophers, he proposed to turn his philosophy
to its most human account. He would teach
men to wait booted and spurred for the
messenger's summons, to exercise themselves
in creating as it were a natural aptitude for
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DEATH
the quitting of their mortal tenement, and in
paragraph after paragraph he adduces his own
personal experiences in the course of the mental
discipline he commends.
A strain of classic stoicism pervades the de-
sultory, discursive pages where the least mystic
of thinkers proffers his counsel to his fellows.
The old ideal of the contempt of death is incul-
cated and its attainment is to be the award of
virtue. Every step of life that leads onward
is beset with fever of heart for those who fear
to die, for "tous les jours vont à la mort; le
dernier y arrive." Fools avert their gaze from the
inevitable, the wise go on their way open-eyed,
alert, vigilant; for death "il y faut pourvoir."
That man who is taken unaware and by sur-
prise is taken at a disadvantage, he has not
served his apprenticeship to the master. To
deprive death of that vantage-ground ostons
luy l'estrangeté practiquons le, accous-
tumons le, n'ayons rien si souvent en la tête
que la mort.
•
""
•
66
Besides this hardening of the imagination,
this blunting of sensation by custom, let men
summon their intellectual faculties to aid in
creating a new understanding of the nature of
death : "La préméditation de la mort est la
préméditation de la liberté." He who has
learnt to die has mastered the lesson of en-
183
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
franchisement. There remains no ill in life
for him who comprehends that there is no ill
in the leaving of it. Life, of itself, is neither
good nor ill-"ny bien, ny mal, c'est la place
du bien et du mal." And death is less to be
feared than nothing, "moins à craindre que
rien,” if there be anything less than nothing.
It concerns a man neither when he is alive nor
when he has ceased living. Alive, it concerns
him not because of what he is, dead, because
of what he is not.
With some such thread of reasoning Mon-
taigne strove to unmask the effigy of terror
that guarded in his day and generation the
harvest-fields of eternal life. Maeterlinck's
essay covers far wider ground.
Like Montaigne, he too deprecates the ob-
scurity, the uncertainty of men's ideas of
what should be the most perfect and luminous
of conceptions
Une première vérité, en en attendant d'autres que
l'avenir dévoilera sans doute, c'est qu'en ces ques-
tions de vie ou de mort notre imagination est demeurée
bien enfantine. Presque partout ailleurs elle précède
la raison; mais ici elle s'attarde encore aux jeux des
premiers âges. . . . Elle demande des choses im-
possibles parce qu'elles sont trop petites.
To what extent he has fulfilled his purpose
of refashioning ideas moulded by tradition,
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DEATH
instinct and prejudice, how far, by his re-
statement of probabilities, his investigation of
evidence concerning the survival of conscious-
ness in the infinities of a future life, he has
succeeded in reconstructing, so to say, the
values of death, each individual reader will
determine according to the bent of his own
opinions and beliefs.
It was perhaps unavoidable that in prosecuting
his enquiry Maeterlinck should pass in review
the solutions to the problem of man's survival
offered on the one hand by theosophists in
their revival of the ancient doctrines of the
reincarnation and transmigration of souls, on
the other hand by the disciples of modern
spiritualism in its more scientific moods of
research and experiment.
Thus he examines, not without sympathy, the
reaffirmations by neo-theosophy of the theory
"old as man," of re-incarnation, with its sugges-
tion of disembodied spirits reclaiming their lost
shell of matter with an insistence which to the
unconverted might seem displaced in souls
released from the bondage of earth. And for
this unseen world-
world-a mendicant populace
of wandering vagrants, whose first departure
from their mortal habitation is but a first
step in the long process of what may be called
the dying of the dead-Maeterlinck finds no
185
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
tenable argument save that of sentiment,
"le grand, le principal, et pour tout dire, le
seul argument qu'ils invoquent n'est qu'un
argument sentimental."
Passing hence to the arguments, the evidence
adduced, and the conclusions proffered by
neo-spiritism, he has devoted a large section
of his essay to a review of the labours of
psychical experts. What new assurance of
perpetuated personality have they attained
to during the thirty years more
or less
of recent activity in experimental inves-
tigations?
What first-hand witness do the attested
apparitions, the "direct manifestations " bear
to convince us that the Unknown has opened
its door and that the barrier erected between
life and that which lies beyond life has been
surmounted? What second-hand witness do
those indirect manifestations, obtained by
mediumistic agencies and intervention, bring
to attest the reality of existence behind the
veil of death?
As recorded, and Maeterlinck in no wise
denies the apparent actuality of such appari-
tions, the answer is still-Nothing. What
answer do these, the dead whose presence they
invoke, return to the recurrent question that
salutes each reawakened Lazarus ? None.
186
DEATH
Ces morts d'aujourd'hui qu'ont-ils à nous dire ?
Ces phantasmes plus ou moins tourmentés de
soucis insignifiants, bien qu'ils viennent d'un autre
monde, ne nous ont jamais apporté, sur ce monde
dont ils ont franchi le seuil prodigieux, une seule
révélation topique.
•
They, these dead of to-day, keep their
secret no less closely than did the dead of
old :
Where wert thou, brother, those four days? . . .
There lives no record of reply. . .
He told it not, or something sealed
The lips of that evangelist.
Reading, indeed, the citations of attested
evidence in the reports of séances and psychic
experiments, a sense of vacant sadness pene-
trates and possesses the lay mind. The
perusal of the records so patiently and hope-
fully preserved of scenes where the invisible
spirits of those who have passed across the
stage of sound to enter into the great silence
are summoned to profane that silence by
puerile trivialities of "
" and
message
munication" comes as a breach of that world-
wide instinct we call reverence, comes almost
as a sense of personal outrage committed in
the name of those whose impotence is defence-
66
com-
187
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
less.
J
We seem in truth, in the chapters
Maeterlinck has dedicated to the results of such
researches, to have sunk to another region,
another level of thought, to have passed
from the realm of mysticism to enter the do-
main of a somewhat ignoble supernaturalism,
to have lost from view the mystic who
spiritualised matter, to find ourselves con-
fronted by the supernaturalist-the necro-
mancer-who materialises spirit; to have
exchanged the unseen forces of the indwelling
soul for the activities of external agencies.
And in so doing, in this barter of the Within
for the Without, we have crossed a chasm,
intellectual and spiritual.
Maeterlinck suspends his judgment :—
Il n'est pas l'heure de conclure. Ne perdons pas de
vue qu'il s'agit d'une science née d'hier et qui cherche
à tâtons ses outils, ses sentiers, ses méthodes et son
but dans une nuit plus obscure que celle de la terre.
Ce n'est pas en trente ans que se bâtit le pont le plus
hardi qu'on ait entrepris de jeter sur le fleuve de la
mort.
But, suspending his judgment upon the re-
sults of scientific experiment, he has demon-
strated that
that the spirits' "impuissance à
dépasser de quelques années la vie d'outre-
tombe," that the limitation of time apparently
188
DEATH
prevailing when communications with the dead
are established, diminishes greatly the value
and interest of experiments and revelations :-
Ce n'est, au mieux, qu'un peu de temps gagné, et
nulment dans ces jeux sur le seuil que se fixe notre
sort. Je passe volontiers sur ce qui m'adviendra dans
le petit intervalle que ces révélations occupent, comme
je passe déjà sur ce qui m'advint dans la vie; là n'est
point mon destin ni mon port.
To turn from Maeterlinck's exposition of
other men's theories to the setting forth of his
own.
Even here some disappointment may await
the laity of thought who look in his last
writings for the gentle simplicity-let it be
said frankly the same winning, human
emotionalism that, in spite of some obscurities,
made its direct appeal felt on every page of his
earlier essays. Wandering flocks who seek
not a goal but a fold may ask, "Are there not
also lost shepherds upon the mountains who,
wrapt in some dream of the stars, have for-
gotten the lowlier labours of the pasture?"
and to some will come a sense of bleak effort
as they climb with their guide the austere
heights of metaphysical enquiry.
The enigma of which he leaves the riddle
unsolved is the oldest question of humanity's
189
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
childhood, as it will be, so far as we may
forecast it, the last of humanity's age. Men
died, the very gods of the youth of the world
died, and in the dying of the Immortals man's
creed confessed death's universality. And
the souls of dead men and gods peopled the
Underworld. But beyond the earth-world
above and the Underworld below, infinity
still lies untrodden.
"Y serons nous malheureux ? Qu'y
deviendrons nous ?" Is death the annulling
of all consciousness? Is it the union, the
fusion, of the individual consciousness, the
individual principle of intelligence, in the
universal ?
For thee, Cloud,
Fly east or west, be made
Snow, hail, rain, wind, grass, rose, light, shade,
What matters it to thee? There is no thee."
ઃઃ
What guarantee does mortality hold for
what may be its lot in the infinite?
Maeterlinck conveys his estimate of the
possible, his suppositions of the probable.
The intellectual and metaphysical content of
his essay he has himself epitomised in the
concluding chapter. Setting aside, for reasons
given, the solutions proffered by religions,
setting aside equally the idea of annihilation,
190
DEATH
the three alternate hypotheses remain. The
hypothesis of the survival of a disincarnated
self, conscious of its own identity. The hypo-
thesis of a self merged in the "universal con-
sciousness." Or lastly that of a self possessed
of "la conscience modifiée." Of these, which
may most credibly be anticipated?
His reply is dictated by the idea he accepts
of the universe, the infinity in which man
lives. May man anticipate or not that, with
death, "the illusion of movement and pro-
gress which we detect at the core of this life
will vanish abruptly"? If so, annihilation,
absorption into the universal consciousness
is inevitable. If, contrariwise, death reveals
that the illusion lies, not in our sense-percep-
tion, but in our reason, and that, in the
world to come, there is a continued move-
ment, a perpetual evolution, the theory of a
modified and progressive consciousness is
tenable. Both aspects, Maeterlinck allows,
are equally unintelligible, but "s'accordent
sur un point, à savoir, que la douleur sans
terme et le malheur sans espérance en sont
également et à jamais exclus."
Within this modified consciousness, the little
earth-consciousness may survive, as theo-
sophists and spiritists hold. If it may be
allowed to speak of "vraisemblance quand
191
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
notre seule vérité est que nous ne voyons pas
la vérité," this hypothesis, Maeterlinck adds,
is of all hypotheses that which bears most
likeness to truth. And in this idea of a
triumphal progress of accumulating vitalities
in a
vast super-celestial eternity
"tout
semble permis, dans ce grand songe, hormis
ce qui pourrait en arrêter l'essor." Neverthe-
less, even such evolution finds a term, the
emigrant soul has not, it would seem, even
then found a home. To open the door into a
thousand successive chambers is only to have
indefinitely postponed the opening of the
door into unchambered space :-
Ou nous croyons que notre évolution s'arrêtera un
jour; et c'est une fin incomprehensible et une sorte
de mort inconcevable; ou nous admettons qu'elle
n'aura pas de terme et dès lors, étant infinie, elle
prend tous les caractères de l'infini, et doit se perdre
et se confondre en lui. C'est, du reste, a quoi aboutisse
la théosophie, le spiritisme, et toutes les religions où
l'homme dans son bonheur suprême, est absorbé par
Dieu. Et c'est encore une fin incomprehensible,
mais du moins c'est la vie.
It is a life, notwithstanding, that leaves
still before us the mystery of "la conscience
universelle." If this exist under a form con-
ceivable to man:
192
DEATH
s'il y a conscience en quelque lieu ou quelque chose
qui remplace la conscience nous serons dans cette
conscience. Et cette conscience, ou cette chose où
nous nous trouverons, ne pouvant être malheureuse,
puisqu'il est impossible que l'infini n'existe que pour
son malheur, nous n'y serons pas malheureux non
plus. Enfin, si l'infini où nous serons lancés n'a
aucune espèce de conscience ni rien qui en tienne lieu,
c'est que la conscience ou ce qui la pourrait remplacer
n'est pas indispensable au bonheur éternel.
So far, and no further, does Maeterlinck
attempt to sound the abyss with the plummet
of human reason. He makes no claim to have
added to our knowledge, his endeavour has
been to sift what may be truth from the vague
mass of what, with appreciable certainty, may
be said to be without truth. And as the con-
clusion to his conclusion he can but reiterate
the final truth of all, can but repeat, that the
universe keeps its own secret, secula seculorum,
the vast secret in which our own small lives
are so strangely implicated.
Thus Maeterlinck, passing from phase to
phase, as poet, dramatist, essayist, has given
to the world of his best.
As poet, the mournful and languid beauty
of his lyrics; as dramatist, the almost unre-
lieved tragedy of his Love and Death dramas,
N
193
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
the charm and grace of his fantasies. His love
of the great Elizabethans found vent in his
translations of John Ford and Shakespeare.
He has brought the thoughts of Novalis near
to us in a poet's translation of a poet's prose;
he has made accessible the rapturous medita-
tions of the Belgian mystic.
As essayist, moral, transcendental and philo-
sophical, he has raised the standard of the
Unseen, he has given to his image of the in-
dwelling spiritual life of man a vitality, an
actuality, beside which the sensual, material
body of humanity shrinks into a mere Doppel-
gänger of the soul. He has faithfully inter-
preted the mysteries of life human and life
vegetable-the life of men, bees and flowers-
according to the principle where insight is love:
"l'interprétation la plus haute est toujours
la plus vraie." He has championed the cause
of the ideal : "Avant tout, à mesure que
s'écoulent nos années gardons nous des leçons
basses de l'expérience." And above all he has
vindicated the supremacy of the Invisible
Wisdom from which those ideals spring. In-
justice may misrule the world and reason may
proclaim the right of wrong, but if "notre
raison a peut-être raison, ce qui a bien profonde-
ment raison
c'est notre idéal qui pro-
clame qu'elle a tort. . . ."
""
194
DEATH
And happily in the interpretation of the
mystery of life his work is not yet ended.
Meanwhile for many of us who have followed
his thoughts one clear impression remains.
Our eyes have followed a bird's ascending
flight, and the bird's flight has carried our gaze
far beyond where our eyes followed it.
195
ÉDITIONS FRANÇAISES
DRAMES ET POÉSIES
Serres Chaudes. 1re éd., in-8° carré. Gaud et Paris,
1889.
nouv. éd., in-12. Bruxelles, 1890.
suivies de quinze chansons, in-12. Bruxelles,
1900.
Princesse Maleine, petit in-4°. Gaud, 1889.
in- carré. Gaud, 1890.
in-12. Bruxelles, 1890.
Les Aveugles-L'Intruse. 1re éd., petit in-32. 150
expl. lors des débuts de l'auteur.
in-24 carré.
in-16. Bruxelles, 1890.
Sept Princesses, in-12. Bruxelles, 1891.
Pelléas et Mélisande, in-12. Bruxelles, 1892.
Alladine et Palomides-L'Intérieur-La Mort de
Tintagiles, in-16. Bruxelles, 1894.
Aglavaine et Selysette, in-12. Paris, 1896.
Douze Chansons, in 4° oblong. Paris. Gaud, 1896.
Monna Vanna, in-16. Paris, 1902.
Joyzelle. Pièce in 5 actes, in-18. Paris, 1903.
L'Oiseau Bleu.
Marie Madeleine, drame philosophique.
༡
로
​t
197
ÉDITIONS FRANÇAISES
Théâtre. Tome I.
Tome I.
1901: La Princesse Maleine-
L'Intruse-Les Aveugles.
Tome II. 1902: Pelléas et Mélisande-Alladine
et Palomides-Intérieur-La Mort de Tintagiles.
Tome III. 1901: Aglavaine et Selysette-
Ardiane et Barbe-Bleue.-Soeur Béatrice.
avec une préface inédite de l'auteur. 3 vols.
Bruxelles, 1902.
PROSE
Le Trésor des Humbles, in-12. Paris, 1896.
Le Temple Enseveli, in-12. Paris, 1896.
La Sagesse et la Destinée, in-12. Paris, 1898.
La Vie des Abeilles, in-18. Paris, 1900.
Le Double Jardin, in-12. Bruxelles, 1904.
L'Intelligence des Fleurs, in-12. Paris, 1907.
Préface à Sept Essais d'Emerson. Bruxelles, 1894.
La Mort, in-12. Paris, 1913.
TRADUCTIONS
L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, de Ruysbroeck
l'Admirable. Traduit du flamand et accom-
pagné d'une Introduction, in-12. Bruxelles,
1891.
1900.
Les Disciples à Saïs et les Fragments de Novalis.
Traduits de l'Allemand et précédés d'une Intro-
duction, in-12. Bruxelles, 1895.
198
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS
Annabella ('Tis Pity She's a Whore), drame en 5 actes,
de J. Ford. Traduit et adapté, in-18. Paris,
1895.
Macbeth. Traduction.
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS
The Treasure of the Humble.
Wisdom and Destiny.
The Buried Temple.
The Life of the Bee.
Aglavaine and Selysette.
Monna Vanna.
(Translated by Alfred Sutro. Published by Messrs.
G. Allen & Co.)
The Double Garden,
Life and Flowers.
Joyzelle.
The Blue Bird.
Our Eternity.
(Translated by A. Teixeira de Mattos. Published by
Messrs. G. Allen & Co.)
Princess Maleine.
(Translated by Gerard Harry. Published by Mr.
William Heinemann.)
Pelléas and Mélisande.
(Translated by L. Alma Tadema. Published by
Mr. William Heinemann.)
199
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS
Three Little Plays.
Published by Messrs. Duckworth & Co.)
Beatrice.
(Translated by Bernard Miall. Published by Messrs.
G. Allen & Co.)
Ardiane.
(Translated by Bernard Miall. Published by Messrs.
G. Allen & Co.)
OCT 18 1915
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
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TWO WEEK BOOK

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