Part 2

The imaginative equipment of Maeterlinck's dramaturgy is rather limited and, on its face value, trite. In particular are his dramatis personae creatures by no means calculated to overawe by some extraordinary weirdness or power. And yet we feel ourselves touched by an elemental dread and by an overwhelming sense of our human impotence in the presence of these figures who, without seeming supernatural, are certainly not of common flesh and blood; they impress us as surpassingly strange mainly because somehow they are instinct with a life fundamentally more real than the superficial reality we know. For they are the mediums and oracles of the fateful powers that stir human beings into action.

The poet of mysticism, then, delves into the mystic sources of our deeds, and makes us stand reverent with him before the unknowable forces by which we are controlled. Naturally he is obliged to shape his visions in dim outline. His aim is to shadow forth that which no naked eye can see, and it may be said in passing that he attains this aim with a mastery and completeness incomparably beyond the dubious skill displayed more recently by the grotesque gropings of the so-called futurist school. Perhaps one true secret of the perturbing strangeness of Maeterlinck's figures lies in the fact that the basic principle of their life, the one thoroughly vital element in them, if it does not sound too paradoxical to say so, is the idea of death. Maeterlinck's mood and temper are fully in keeping with the religious dogma that life is but a short dream--with Goethe he believes that "all things transitory but as symbols are sent," and apparently concurs in the creed voiced by one of Arthur Schnitzler's characters,--that death is the only subject in life worthy of being pondered by the serious mind. "From our death onwards," so he puts it somewhere, "the adventure of the universe becomes our own adventure."

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It will be useful to have a bit of personal information concerning our author. He started his active career as a barrister; not by any means auspiciously, it seems, for already in his twenty-seventh year he laid the toga aside. Experience had convinced him that in the forum there were no laurels for him to pluck. The specific qualities that make for success at the bar were conspicuously lacking in his make-up. Far from being eloquent, he has at all times been noted for an unparalleled proficiency in the art of self-defensive silence. He shuns banal conversation and the sterile distractions of promiscuous social intercourse, dreads the hubbub of the city, and has an intense dislike for travel, to which he resorts only as a last means of escape from interviewers, reporters, and admirers. Maeterlinck, it is seen, is anything but _multorum vir hominum_. In order to preserve intact his love of humanity, he finds it expedient to live for the most part by himself, away from the throng "whose very plaudits give the heart a pang;" his fame has always been a source of annoyance to him. The only company he covets is that of the contemplative thinkers of bygone days,--the mystics, gnostics, cabalists, neo-Platonists. Swedenborg and Plotinus are perhaps his greatest favorites. That the war has produced a mighty agitation in the habitual calm of the great Belgian poet-philosopher goes without saying. His love of justice no less than his love of his country aroused every red corpuscle in his virile personality to violent resentment against the invader. Since the war broke out, however, he has published nothing besides a number of ringingly eloquent and singularly pathetic articles and appeals,--so that the character portrait derived from the body of his work has not at this time lost its application to his personality.

In cast of mind, Maeterlinck is sombrously meditative, and he has been wise in framing his outer existence so that it would accord with his habitual detachment. The greater part of his time used to be divided between his charming retreat at _Quatre Chemins_, near Grasse, and the grand old abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy, which he managed to snatch in the very nick of time from the tightening clutch of a manufacturing concern. With the temperament of a hermit, he has been, nevertheless, a keen observer of life, though one preferring to watch the motley spectacle from the aristocratic privacy of his box, sheltered, as it were, from prying curiosity. Well on in middle age, he is still an enthusiastic out-of-doors man,--gardener, naturalist, pedestrian, wheelman, and motorist, and commands an extraordinary amount of special knowledge in a variety of sports and sciences. In "The Double Garden" he discusses the automobile with the authority of an expert watt-man and mechanician. In one of his other books he evinces an extraordinary erudition in all matters pertaining to the higher education of dogs; and his work on "The Life of the Bee" passes him beyond question with high rank among "thirty-third degree" apiculturists.

One of the characteristics that seem to separate his books, especially those of the earlier period, from the literary tendencies of his age, is their surprising inattention to present social struggles. His metaphysical bias makes him dwell almost exclusively, and with great moral and logical consistency, on aspects of life that are slightly considered by the majority of men yet which he regards as ulteriorly of sole importance.

When men like Maeterlinck are encountered in the world of practical affairs, they are bound to impress us as odd, because of this inversion of the ordinary policies of behavior. But before classing them as "cranks," we might well ask ourselves whether their appraisal of the component values of life does not, after all, correspond better to their true relativity than does our own habitual evaluation. With the average social being, the transcendental bearing of a proposition is synonymous with its practical unimportance. But in his essay on "The Invisible Goodness" Maeterlinck quite properly raises the question: "Is visible life alone of consequence, and are we made up only of things that can be grasped and handled like pebbles in the road?"

Throughout his career Maeterlinck reveals himself in the double aspect of poet and philosopher. In the first period his philosophy, as has already been amply hinted, is characterized chiefly by aversion from the externalities of life, and by that tense introversion of the mind which forms the mystic's main avenue to the goal of knowledge. But if, in order to find the key to his tragedies and puppet plays, we go to the thirteen essays representing the earlier trend of his philosophy and issued in 1896 under the collective title, "The Treasure of the Humble," we discover easily that his cast of mysticism is very different from that of his philosophic predecessors and teachers in the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular from the devotional mysticism of the "Admirable" John Ruysbroeck, and Friedrich von Hardenberg-Novalis. Maeterlinck does not strive after the so-called "spiritual espousals," expounded by the "doctor ecstaticus," Ruysbroeck, in his celebrated treatise where Christ is symbolized as the divine groom and Human Nature as the bride glowing with desire for union with God. Maeterlinck feels too modernly to make use of that ancient sensuous imagery. The main thesis of his mystical belief is that there are divine forces dormant in human nature; how to arouse and release them, constitutes the paramount problem of human life. His doctrine is that a life not thus energized by its own latent divineness is, and must remain, humdrum and worthless. It will at once be noticed that such a doctrine harmonizes thoroughly with the romantic aspiration. Both mystic and romantic teach that, in the last resort, the battlefield of our fate lies not out in the wide world but that it is enclosed in the inner self, within the unknown quantity which we designate as our soul. The visible life, according to this modern prophet of mysticism, obeys the invisible; happiness and unhappiness flow exclusively from the inner sources.

Maeterlinck's speculations, despite their medieval provenience, have a practical orientation. He firmly believes that it is within the ability of mankind to raise some of the veils that cover life's central secret. In unison with some other charitable students of society, he holds to the faith that a more highly spiritualized era is dawning, and from the observed indications he prognosticates a wider awakening of the sleepbound soul of man. And certainly some of the social manifestations that appeared with cumulative force during the constructive period before the war were calculated to justify that faith. The revival of interest in the metaphysical powers of man which expressed itself almost epidemically through such widely divergent cults as Theosophy and Christian Science, was indubitable proof of spiritual yearnings in the broader masses of the people. And it had a practical counterpart in civic tendencies and reforms that evidenced a great agitation of the social conscience. And even to-day, when the great majority feel that the universal embroilment has caused civilized man to fall from his laboriously achieved level, this sage in his lofty solitude feels the redeeming spiritual connotation of our great calamity. "Humanity was ready to rise above itself, to surpass all that it had hitherto accomplished. It has surpassed it.... Never before had nations been seen that were able as a whole to understand that the happiness of each of those who live in this time of trial is of no consequence compared with the honor of those who live no more or the happiness of those who are not yet alive. We stand on heights that had not been attained before."

But even for those many who find themselves unable to build very large hopes on the spiritual uplift of mankind through disaster, Maeterlinck's philosophy is a wholesome tonic. In the essay on "The Life Profound" in "The Treasure of the Humble," we are told: "Every man must find for himself in the low and unavoidable reality of common life his special possibility of a higher existence." The injunction, trite though it sound, articulates a moral very far from philistine. For it urges the pursuit of the transcendental self through those feelings which another very great idealist, Friedrich Schiller, describes in magnificent metaphor as

... "der dunklen Gefühle Gewalt, die im Herzen wunderbar schliefen."

In the labyrinth of the subliminal consciousness there lurks, however, a great danger for the seeker after the hidden treasures: the paralyzing effect of fatalism upon the normal energies. Maeterlinck was seriously threatened by this danger during his earlier period. How he eventually contrived his liberation from the clutch of fatalism is not made entirely clear by the progress of his thought. At all events, an era of greater intellectual freedom, which ultimately was to create him the undisputed captain of his soul and master of his fate, was soon to arrive for him. It is heralded by another book of essays: "Wisdom and Destiny." But, as has been stated, we may in his case hardly hope to trace the precise route traveled by the mind between the points of departure and arrival.

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So closely are the vital convictions in this truthful writer linked with the artistic traits of his work that without some grasp of his metaphysics even the technical peculiarities of his plays cannot be fully appreciated. To the mystic temper of mind, all life is secretly pregnant with great meaning, so that none of its phenomena can be deemed inconsequential. Thus, while Maeterlinck is a poet greatly preoccupied with spiritual matters yet nothing to him is more wonderful and worthy of attention than the bare facts and processes of living. Real life, just like the theatre which purports to represent it, manipulates a multiform assortment of stage effects, now coarse and obvious and claptrap, now refined and esoteric, to suit the diversified taste and capacity of the patrons. To the cultured esthetic sense the tragical tendency carries more meaning than the catastrophic finale; our author accordingly scorns, and perhaps inordinately, whatsoever may appear as merely adventitious in the action of plays. "What can be told," he exclaims, "by beings who are possessed of a fixed idea and have no time to live because they have to kill off a rival or a mistress?" The internalized action in his plays is all of one piece with the profound philosophical conviction that the inner life alone matters; that consequently the small and unnoticed events are more worthy of attention than the sensational, cataclysmic moments. "Why wait ye," he asks in that wonderful rhapsody on "Silence"(7) "for Heaven to open at the strike of the thunderbolt? Ye should attend upon the blessed hours when it silently opens--and it is incessantly opening."

(7) "The Treasure of the Humble."

His purpose, then, is to reveal the working of hidden forces in their intricate and inseparable connection with external events; and in order that the _vie intérieure_ might have the right of way, drama in his practice emancipates itself very far from the traditional realistic methods. "Poetry," he maintains, "has no other purpose than to keep open the great roads that lead from the visible to the invisible." To be sure, this definition postulates, rather audaciously, a widespread spiritual susceptibility. But in Maeterlinck's optimistic anthropology no human being is spiritually so deadened as to be forever out of all communication with the things that are divine and infinite. He fully realizes, withal, that for the great mass of men there exists no intellectual approach to the truly significant problems of life. It is rather through our emotional capacity that our spiritual experience brings us into touch with the final verities. Anyway, the poet of mysticism appeals from the _impasse_ of pure reasoning to the voice of the inner oracles. But how to detect in the deepest recesses of the soul the echoes of universal life and give outward resonance to their faint reverberations? That is the artistic, and largely technical, side of the problem.

Obvious it is that if the beholder's collaboration in the difficult enterprise is to be secured, his imagination has to be stirred to a super-normal degree. Once a dramatist has succeeded in stimulating the imaginative activity, he can dispense with a mass of descriptive detail. But he must comply with two irremissible technical demands. In the first place, the "_vie intérieure_" calls forth a _dialogue intérieur_; an esoteric language, I would say, contrived predominantly for the "expressional" functions of speech, as differenced from its "impressional" purposes. Under Swedenborg's fanciful theory of "correspondences" the literal meaning of a word is merely a sort of protective husk for its secret spiritual kernel. It is this inner, essential meaning that Maeterlinck's dialogue attempts to set free. By a fairly simple and consistent code of intimations the underlying meaning of the colloquy is laid bare and a basis created for a more fundamental understanding of the dramatic transactions. Maeterlinck going, at first, to undue lengths in this endeavor, exposed the diction of his dramas to much cheap ridicule. The extravagant use of repetition, in particular, made him a mark for facile burlesque. The words of the Queen in _Princesse Maleine_: "_Mais ne répetez pas toujours ce que l'on dit_," were sarcastically turned against the poet himself.

As a result of the extreme simplicity of his dialogue, Maeterlinck was reproached with having invented the "monosyllabic theatre," the "theatre without words," and with having perpetrated a surrogate sort of drama, a hybrid between libretto and pantomime.

The fact, however, is, his characters speak a language which, far from being absurd, as it was at first thought to be by many of his readers, is instinct with life and quite true to life--to life, that is, as made articulate in the intense privacy of dreams, or hallucinations, or moments of excessive emotional perturbation.

The other principal requisite for the attainment of the inner dramatic vitalness in drama is a pervasive atmospheric mood, a sustained _Stimmung_. This, in the case of Maeterlinck, is brought about by the combined employment of familiar and original artistic devices.

The grave and melancholy mood that so deeply impregnates the work of Maeterlinck is tinged in the earlier stage, as has been pointed out, with the sombre coloring of fatalism. In the first few books, in particular, there hovers a brooding sense of terror and an undefinable feeling of desolation. Through _Serres Chaudes_ ("Hot Houses"), his first published book, (1889), there runs a tenor of weariness, of ideal yearnings overshadowed by the hopelessness of circumstances. Even in this collection of poems, where so much less necessity exists for a unity of mood than in the plays, Maeterlinck's predilection for scenic effects suggestive of weirdness and superstitious fear became apparent in the recurrent choice of sombre scenic motifs: oppressive nocturnal silence,--a stagnant sheet of water,--moonlight filtered through green windows, etc. The diction, too, through the incessant use of terms like _morne_, _las_, _pâle_, _désire_, _ennui_, _tiède_, _indolent_, _malade_, exhales as it were a lazy resignation. Temporarily, then, the fatalistic strain is uppermost both in the philosophy and the poetry of the rising young author; and to make matters worse, his is the fatalism of pessimistic despair: Fate is forsworn against man. The objective point of life is death. We constantly receive warnings from within, but the voices are not unequivocal and emphatic enough to save us from ourselves.

Probing the abysses of his subliminal self, the mystic may sense, along with the diviner promptings of the heart, the lurking demons that undermine happiness,--"the malignant powers,"--again quoting Schiller--"whom no man's craft can make familiar"--that element in human nature which in truth makes man "his own worst enemy." It is a search which at this stage of his development Maeterlinck, as a mystic, cannot bring himself to relinquish, even though, pessimistically, he anticipates that which he most dreads to find; in this way, fatalism and pessimism act as insuperable barriers against his artistic self-assertion. His fixed frame of mind confines him to the representation of but one elemental instinct, namely, that of fear. The rustic in the German fairy tale who sallied forth to learn how to shudder,--_gruseln_,--would have mastered the art to his complete satisfaction if favored with a performance or two of such plays as "Princess Maleine," "The Intruder," or "The Sightless." Perhaps no other dramatist has ever commanded a similarly well-equipped arsenal of thrills and terrible foreshadowings. The commonest objects are fraught with ominous forebodings: a white gown lying on a _prie-dieu_, a curtain suddenly set swaying by a puff of air, the melancholy soughing of a clump of trees,--the simplest articles of daily use are converted into awful symbols that make us shiver by their whisperings of impending doom.

Nor in the earlier products of Maeterlinck are the cruder practices of melodrama scorned or spared,--the crash and flash of thunder and lightning, the clang of bells and clatter of chains, the livid light and ghastly shadows, the howling hurricane, the ominous croaking of ravens amid nocturnal solitude, trees illumined by the fiery eyes of owls, bats whirring portentously through the gloom,--so many harbingers of dread and death. And the prophetic import of these tokens and their sort is reinforced by repeated assertions from the persons in the action that never before has anything like this been known to occur. To such a fearsome state are we wrought up by all this uncanny apparatus that at the critical moment a well calculated knock at the door is sufficient to make our flesh creep and our hair stand on end.

Thus, the _vie intérieure_ would seem to prerequire for its externalization a completely furnished chamber of horrors. And when it is added that the scene of the action is by preference a lonely churchyard or a haunted old mansion, a crypt, a cavern, a silent forest or a solitary tower, it is easy to understand why plays like "Princess Maleine" could be classed by superficial and unfriendly critics with the gruesome ebullitions of that fantastic quasi-literary occupation to which we owe a well known variety of "water-front" drama and, in fiction, the "shilling shocker." Their immeasurably greater psychological refinement could not save them later on from condemnation at the hands of their own maker. And yet they are not without very great artistic merits. Octave Mirbeau, in his habitual enthusiasm for the out-of-the-ordinary, hailed Maeterlinck, on the strength of "Princess Maleine," as the Belgian Shakespeare, evidently because Maeterlinck derived some of his motifs from "Hamlet": mainly the churchyard scene, and Prince Hjalmar's defiance of the queen, as well as his general want of decision. As a matter of fact, Maeterlinck has profoundly studied, not Shakespeare alone, but the minor Elizabethans as well. He has made an admirable translation of "Macbeth." Early in his career he even translated one of John Ford's Plays, "'Tis Pity She's a Whore," one of the coarsest works ever written for the stage, but to which he was attracted by the intrinsic human interest that far outweighs its offensiveness. As for any real kinship of Maeterlinck with Shakespeare, the resemblance between the two is slight. They differ philosophically in the fundamental frame of mind, ethically in the outlook upon life, dramaturgically in the value attached to external action, and humanly,--much to the disadvantage of the Belgian,--in their sense of humor. For unfortunately it has to be confessed that this supreme gift of the gods has been very sparingly dispensed to Maeterlinck. Altogether, whether or no he is to be counted among the disciples of Shakespeare, his works show no great dependence on the master. With far better reason might he be called a debtor to Germanic folklore, especially in its fantastic elements.

A German fairy world it is to which we are transported by Maeterlinck's first dramatic attempt, "Princess Maleine," (1889), a play refashioned after Grimm's tale of the Maid Maleen; only that in the play all the principals come to a harrowing end and that in it an esoteric meaning lies concealed underneath the primitive plot. The action, symbolically interpreted, illustrates the fatalist's doctrine that man is nothing but a toy in the hands of dark and dangerous powers. Practical wisdom does not help us to discern the working of these powers until it is too late. Neither can we divine their presence, for the prophetic apprehension of the future resides not in the expert and proficient, but rather in the helpless or decrepit,--the blind, the feeble-minded, and the stricken in years, or again in young children and in dumb animals. Take the scene in "Princess Maleine" where the murderers, having invaded the chamber, lie there in wait, with bated breath. In the corridor outside, people are unconcernedly passing to and fro, while the only creatures who, intuitively, sense the danger, are the little Prince and a dog that keeps anxiously scraping at the door.