CHAPTER VI

Few men entirely outgrow the influences of their education: the mind is made by what it is fed on while it is growing just as much as the body is. Carlyle was always more or less of a Scotch preacher threatening the world with hell. Gerhart Hauptmann (who, by the way, was born in the same year as Maeterlinck) never got over his Moravian upbringing. Maeterlinck came to hate the Jesuits; but his monastic training lingered in his love of the mystics. Mysticism is in any case a Flemish _trait_; and it is one of the outstanding features of Flemish literature as it is of Flemish painting. It is not astonishing, then, that Maeterlinck should have felt drawn to the most famous of Flemish mystics. He published, in 1891, _L'Ornement des Noces spirituelles_, a translation, illuminated by a preface, of Jan van Ruysbroeck's _Die Chierheit der gheesteleker Brulocht_. The "doctor ecstaticus" was born in 1274 at the little village of Ruysbroeck, near Brussels. He was a curate in the Church of Sainte Gudule in Brussels; but in his old days he with several friends founded the Monastery of Groenendal (Green Dale) in the Forêt de Soignes, two miles from Brussels. The fame of his piety attracted many pilgrims to his retreat, among others the German mystic, Johannes Tauler, and the Dutch scholar who founded the Brotherhood of the Common Life, Geert Groote. He died in 1381. His contemporaries called him "the Admirable."

Maeterlinck warns us in his preface to _The Ornamentation of the Nuptials of the Spirit_, the subject of which is the _unio mystica_, the mystic union of the soul with God, that we must not expect a literary work; "you will perceive nothing," he says, "save the convulsive flight of a drunken eagle, blind and bleeding, over snowy summits." He only made the translation for the benefit of a few Platonists. But, apart from the translation itself, the preface is of value as showing how deeply read in the mystics Maeterlinck already was at this time, and the importance he attached to their teaching. "All certainty is in them alone," he says, paradoxically. Their ecstasies are only the beginning of the complete discovery of ourselves; their writings are the purest diamonds in the prodigious treasure of humanity; and their thoughts have the immunity of Swedenborg's angels who advance continually towards the springtide of their youth, so that the oldest angels seem the youngest. Embedded in the preface are gems from Ruysbroeck's other writings. Here is one of them:

"And they (the doves) will tarry near the rivers and over the clear waters, so that if any bird should come from on high, which might seize or injure them, they may know it by its image in the water, and avoid it. This clear water is Holy Writ, the life of the Saints, and the mercy of God. We will look upon our image therein whenever we are tempted; and in this way none shall have power to harm us. These doves have an ardent disposition, and young doves are often born of them, for every time that to the honour of God and our own beatitude we consider sin with hatred and scorn, we bring young doves into the world, that is to say new virtues."

The translation of the mystic was followed, in 1891, by a playlet in one act, _Les Sept Princesses_ (The Seven Princesses). It is "the angel" among Maeterlinck's productions, a weakling which no fostering can save. Few critics have a good word for it. "A girl's unpleasant dream," interprets Mieszner. "An indecipherable enigma," says Adolphe Brisson. "The piece is something _seen_, purely pictorial," says Anselma Heine, "a transposition of paintings by Burne-Jones." "Can only claim the rank of an intermezzo," says Monty Jacobs, "an unfinished sketch." "We must not seek a literal signification," says Beaunier, "its signification is in its very strangeness." "Perhaps the weakest thing in Maeterlinck," says Oppeln von Bronikowski, "a sketch, or a testing of mystico-symbolic apparatus." "_Passons_," says Adolphe van Bever. The Princesses have, however, found a friend in a Dutch critic, Dr Is. van Dijk, whose book on Maeterlinck is suggestive. His analysis and interpretation of the play runs somewhat as follows:

"In a spacious marble hall, decorated with laurel bushes, lavender plants, and lilies in porcelain vases, is a white marble staircase with seven steps, on which seven white-robed princesses are lying, one on each step, sleeping on cushions of pale silk. Fearing lest they should awaken in the dark, they have lit a silver lamp, which casts its light over them. The lovely princesses sleep on and on; they must not be wakened, they are so weak! It is their weakness that has sent them to sleep. They have been so listless and weary since they came here; it is so cold and dreamy in this Castle in the North. They came hither from warm lands; and here they are always watching for the sun, but there is hardly any sun, and no sweet heaven over this level waste of fens, over these green ponds black with the shadows of forests of oaks and pines, over this willow-hung canal that runs to the rounded grey of the horizon. It is home-sickness that has sunk them in sleep. They sleep forlorn. Everything around them is so very old. Their life is so dreary with their long, long waiting; they are aweary, aweary.... They are waiting for the comrade of their youth; always they are looking for his ship on the canal between the willows; but, 'He cometh not,' they say. Now at last he is come while they are sleeping, and they have bolted the door from the inside. They cannot be wakened. With sick longing the Prince gazes at the seven through the thick window-panes. His eyes rest longest on the loveliest, Ursula, with whom he had loved best to play when he was a boy. Seven years she has looked for his coming, seven years, by day and by night. He sees them lying with linked hands, as though they were afraid of losing each other.... And yet they must have moved in their sleep, for the two sisters on the steps above and below Ursula have let go her hand; she is holding her hands so strangely.... At last the Prince makes his way into the room by an underground passage, past the tombs of the dead. The noise of his entrance awakens six of the Princesses, but not Ursula. The six cry: 'The Prince has come!' But she lies motionless, stiff.... She has died of her long, long waiting, of the deep, unfulfilled longing of her soul...."

Dr van Dijk is indignant at the criticism of René Doumic, who, in an article on Maeterlinck, dismisses _Les Sept Princesses_ with these few words: "As for _The Seven Princesses_, the devout themselves confess they can find no appreciable sense in the play. All that I can say of it, now that I have read it, is that it is a thin volume published in Brussels, by Lacomblez."[1] "Let me have this French critic in my tuition six months," continues Dr van Dijk. "My curriculum would then be as follows: The first month he should learn by heart, in Greek and French, Plato's myth concerning _The Chariot of the Soul_, with the obligation of course to ponder on it. The following month he should learn by heart, in Greek and French, Plato's myth of _The Cave_, with the obligation of course to ponder on it. Then he should impress the well-known fable of _Amor and Psyche_ on his mind, so as to accustom himself to the atmosphere of fables. Then he should ponder for a month on the sovereign freedom of a poet to remould a fable wholly or in part. Another month he should spend in reflecting over the fact that in order to understand a whole one does not need to know all the parts. And the last month he should be left to himself to try and find whether there was anything in his own soul which in any way could be said to resemble unfulfilled longing."

Another plausible interpretation is that of another Dutch critic, G. Hulsman, in his _Karakters en Ideeën_. He quotes the following poem from Paul Bourget's _Espoir d'aimer_:

"Notre âme est le palais des légendes, où dort Une jeune princesse en robe nuptiale, Immobile et si calme!... On dirait que la Mort A touché son visage pâle.

Elle dort, elle rêve et soupire en rêvant; Une larme a roulé lentement sur sa joue. Elle se rêve errante en barque au gré du vent Sur l'Océan, qui gronde et joue.

"Elle ne le voit pas, le beau Prince Charmant Qui chevauche, parmi les plaines éloignées Et s'en vient éveiller sa belle au bois dormant De son sommeil de cent années"--

and continues:

"Our heart is this palace, and in this palace lies our soul, a beautiful sleeper. It sleeps, and dreams, and waits for the coming of the ideal hero, who shall awaken it out of its slumber and cherish it with the warmth of his love. And these seven princesses are the different qualities of the human soul."

Hulsman thinks that Maeterlinck must have thought of the Buddhistic idea, according to which the human soul consists of: the breath of God, the word, the thought, Psyche, the power of living, appearance, and the body.

"Ursula, the middle sister, is Psyche, that is, the real self, the deepest, the essential in our being. This real self is unconscious and unknowable. Let the ideal come, no ideal can unveil the deepest. It is dead to us."

Maeterlinck's imagination has been compared "to a lake with desolate and stagnant waters, unceasingly reflecting the same black landscapes, on whose banks the same suffering personages for ever come to sit." The same old castle, the same subterranean caverns, the same dark forests, another old tower, are the scenes of _Pelléas et Mélisande_ (Pelleas and Melisanda) which was published at Brussels in 1892, and performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in Paris on the 16th May, 1893. The scene is the same; but there is a difference between this play and those which preceded it--here for the first time we have characters almost of flesh and blood; "the asphodelic shadows and marionettes begin to colour themselves with blood-warm humanity."[2] We have personages who represent the same ideas as those of the previous plays--Melisanda is again the soul--but here the puppets are moved by Love, not Death. In _Princess Maleine_ love is one of the means by which Fate moves the puppets to death; in Pelleas and Melisanda death is the bourne to which Love drives his sheep. The sheep do not know whither they are being driven; when they come to cross-roads they do not know which to take; but they do feel, dimly, that they are not on the road to the fold. Hence the tragedy of their emotions; and it is the state of the soul filled with love, as tragic and as mystical a consciousness or subconsciousness as that of the soul in the clutch of fate or in the shadow of death, that Maeterlinck projects into _Pelleas and Melisanda_ as into _Alladine and Palomides_ and _Aglavaine and Selysette_.

We have nothing to do here with morality or the laws which regulate marriage. The soul knows nothing of such things; is unconscious even of the sins of the body.[3] The soul is subject only to such laws as are inherent in itself: "the secret laws of antipathy or of sympathy, elective or instinctive affinities."[4] The soul, remembering the fair sunny clime from which it came, pining in the cold air of the marshlands, groping about helplessly in the dark, always meeting closed doors, always gazing through glass at the unattainable, is an eternal searcher for the light; and if it meets a comrade who has the key to the closed door of its happiness, or who holds the lamp to light its path, it will follow the gleam blindly. It must do, for that is the law of its being. The tragedy lies in this: that it follows the gleam blindly, and the gleam leads it--at all events at present, because alien souls come athwart the path it is following--into the abyss of night.

Civic laws were made to fetter the body; but the soul has no consciousness of the body, of the senses, and cannot therefore be fettered by civic laws. So long as you hold that love is a function of the soul, and not of the senses, you cannot call Francesca da Rimini or Melisanda faithless wives. In your philosophy they are not on the road to adultery, but to the happiness for which their soul cries out, and to which it has inalienable right.

The story of _Pelleas and Melisanda_ is as old as love: it is the story of Francesca da Rimini; it is Sudermann's _Geschichte der stillen Mühle_. Golaud,[5] a prince of blood and iron, whose hair and beard are turning grey, losing his way while hunting in a forest, comes upon a lovely being whose dress, though torn by brambles, is princely. She is weeping by the side of a spring, into which her crown (the symbol of her royal birth; all souls are royal) has fallen. Somebody has hurt her--who? All of them, all of them. She has fled away, she is lost ... she was born far away. Golaud marries her, and takes her to the Castle, where his grandfather, King Arkel, holds rule over a famine-stricken land by a desolate sea. Here dwells also Pelleas, his young brother.

Pelleas is very anxious to depart on a long journey to see a friend who is dying. If he had done so, the tragedy might have been, if not prevented, at all events retarded. But his father is lying dangerously ill in the Castle (the only use for this father in the economy of the play is to be ill); filial duty chains him there. This is in the nature of an accident; and by the canons of dramaturgy accidents must not precipitate tragedy, but Maeterlinck's plays proudly ignore the canons of dramaturgy. (Maeterlinck would say the accident was arranged by Fate.) Pelleas and Melisanda meet on a high place overlooking the sea. They watch a great ship--the ship that has brought Melisanda--sailing across the strip of light cast by the lighthouse, sailing out into the great open spaces where the soul is at home. A few words of common speech tell us what perilous life is awakening in these two sister souls that till now had not lived:

PELLEAS: Let us descend here. Will you give me your hand?

MELISANDA: You see I have my hands full of flowers and leaves....

PELLEAS: I will hold you by the arm, the path is steep, and it is very dark here.... I am going away to-morrow perhaps....

MELISANDA: O, why are you going away?

We find them again under an old lime-tree in the dense, discreet forest, at the "Fountain of the Blind." (They are the blind.) Melisanda would like to plunge her two hands into the water ... it seems to her that her hands are ill. Her hair, which is longer than her body (what poetry Maeterlinck has dreamed into hair and hands!) falls down, and touches the water (a Burne-Jones). She tosses her wedding-ring into the air (as the Princess at the fountain under the lime-tree in the dark forest near the King's castle in _The Frog Prince_[6] tosses a golden ball), and just as noon is striking it falls into the water. She had cast it too high towards the sunlight.... We hear soon that at the twelfth stroke of noon Golaud's horse, taking fright in the forest, had dashed against a tree, and seriously injured its rider. While Melisanda is at her husband's bedside, he notices that her ring is gone. She lies to him; she has lost it in a cave, she says. Does she lie? Her union with Golaud is an external bond; but her soul knows nothing of things external, her soul is innocent of whatever her mouth may say to a man who is a stranger to her soul. He sends her to the cave to look for the ring, in the dark--with Pelleas. She is frightened by the noise of the cave--is it the noise of the night or the noise of silence? Later on Pelleas finds Melisanda combing her hair at the casement of a tower. She leans over; he holds her hand; her golden hair falls down and inundates him (another Burne-Jones):

PELLEAS: O! O! what is this?... Your hair, your hair comes down to me!... All your hair, Melisanda, all your hair has fallen from the tower! I am holding it in my hands, I am touching it with my lips.... I am holding it in my arms, I am putting it round my neck.... I shall not open my hands again this night....

Doves (the doves of the body's chastity, perhaps) come out of the tower and fly around them. Golaud surprises the pair, and tells them they are children. What he suspects, however, we know from a scene in the caverns under the Castle, when he is on the point of pushing his brother over a ledge of rock into a stagnant pool that stinks of death. But his jealousy has not yet grown sufficiently to force him to murder, and he contents himself with warning Pelleas. There follows a scene which brings the house down whenever the play is acted: Golaud questions his little son by a former marriage as to how the pair behave when they are alone; and lifts the little boy up so that he may peep in at the window of the tower and tell him what they are doing in the room. Golaud in his anguish digs his nails into the child's flesh, but he finds nothing to justify his suspicions; nevertheless in a following scene he loses his self-control, and, in the presence of his grandfather, ill-treats Melisanda. In the meantime the father is declared to be out of danger (Fate needs the father's recovery now to precipitate the tragedy); Pelleas is free to go away, and he asks Melisanda for a last meeting, by night, in the forest. She leaves her husband asleep, and the lovers meet in the moonlight. "How great our shadows are this evening!" says Melisanda. "They enlace each other to the back of the garden," replies Pelleas. "O! how they kiss each other far from us." Here Melisanda sees Golaud behind a tree, where their shadows end. They know they cannot escape; they fall into each other's arms and exchange their first guilty kiss. Golaud kills Pelleas, wounds Melisanda, and stabs himself. But Melisanda, ere she dies (of a wound which would not kill a pigeon) gives birth to a daughter, "a little girl that a beggar woman would be ashamed to bring into the world." On her death-bed Golaud implores her to tell him the truth--has she loved Pelleas with a guilty love? But she can only whisper vague words.

The child-wife dies; and King Arkel, the wise old man of the play, closes it by a few fatalistic sentences:

"She was so tranquil, so timid, and so silent a little being.... She was a mysterious little being like everybody else.... She lies there as though she were the big sister of her child.... Come away, come away.... My God! My God!... I shall not be able to understand anything any more.... Don't let us stay here.--Come away; the child must not stay in this room.... It must live now, in its turn.... It's the poor little one's turn now...."

[1] _Les Jeunes_, p. 230.

[2] Johannes Schlaf's _Maeterlinck_, p. 32.

[3] See chapter "La Morale mystique" in _Le Trésor des Humbles_. This is the doctrine for which quietism was condemned. I find the following definition of the soul quoted in _La Wallonie_ for February to March, 1889; "Qu'est-ce donc que l'âme? Une _possibilité idéale_ qui réside en nous comme la substance réelle de nous-mêmes, que les erreurs et les tâches de la vie ne peuvent entamer, que ses découragements ne peuvent abattre et qui les contemple avec sérénité dans l'extériorité réelle, et séparés, pour ainsi dire de sa propre essence."--JOHNSON.

[4] "Le Réveil de L'Ame" (in _Le Trésor des Humbles_), p. 38.

[5] Perhaps a Gallicised form of Golo, the lover of Genoveva. The name of Golaud's mother is Geneviève.

[6] M.G.M. Rodrigue, of _Le Thyrse_ tells me (and Grégoire Le Roy told him) that Maeterlinck at the time he wrote his early dramas drew inspiration from Walter Crane's picture-books. _The Frog Prince_ was one of them. Perhaps Maeterlinck had Grimm's _Household Stories_, done into pictures by Walter Crane (Macmillan, 1882).