Part 3

In _L'Intruse_ ("The Intruder"), (1890), a one-act play on a theme which is collaterally developed later on in _Les Aveugles_ ("The Sightless"), and in _L'Intérieur_ ("Home"), the arriving disaster that cannot be shut out by bolts or bars announces itself only to the clairvoyant sense of a blind old man. The household gathered around the table is placidly waiting for the doctor. Only the blind grandfather is anxious and heavy-laden because he alone knows that Death is entering the house, he alone can feel his daughter's life withering away under the breath of the King of Terror: the sightless have a keener sensitiveness than the seeing for what is screened from the physical eye.

It would hardly be possible to name within the whole range of dramatic literature another work so thoroughly pervaded with the chilling horror of approaching calamity. The talk at the table is of the most commonplace,--that the door will not shut properly, and they must send for the carpenter to-morrow. But from the mechanism of the environment there comes cumulative and incremental warning that something extraordinary and fatal is about to happen. The wind rises, the trees shiver, the nightingales break off their singing, the fishes in the pond grow restive, the dogs cower in fear,--an unseen Presence walks through the garden. Then the clanging of a scythe is heard. A cold current of air rushes into the room. Nearer and nearer come the steps. The grandfather insists that a stranger has seated himself in the midst of the family. The lamp goes out. The bell strikes midnight. The old man is sure that somebody is rising from the table. Then suddenly the baby whose voice has never been heard starts crying. Through an inner door steps a deaconess silently crossing herself: the mother of the house is dead.

These incidents in themselves are not necessarily miraculous. There are none of them but might be accounted for on perfectly natural grounds. In fact, very plausible explanations do offer themselves for the weirdest things that come to pass. So, especially, it was a real, ordinary mower that chanced to whet his scythe; yet the apparition of the Old Reaper in person could not cause the chilling consternation produced by this trivial circumstance coming as it does as the climax of a succession of commonplace happenings exaggerated and distorted by a fear-haunted imagination. To produce an effect like that upon an audience whose credulity refuses to be put to any undue strain is a victorious proof of prime artistic ability.

_Les Aveugles_ ("The Sightless"), (1891), is pitched in the same psychological key. The atmosphere is surcharged with unearthly apprehension. A dreary twilight--in the midst of a thick forest--on a lonely island; twelve blind people fretting about the absence of their guardian. He is gone to find a way out of the woods--what can have become of him? From moment to moment the deserted, helpless band grows more fearstricken. The slightest sound becomes the carrier of evil forebodings: the rustling of the foliage, the flapping of a bird's wings, the swelling roar of the nearby sea in its dash against the shore. The bell strikes twelve--they wonder is it noon or night? Then questions, eager and calamitous, pass in whispers among them: Has the leader lost his way? Will he never come back? Has the dam burst apart and will they all be swallowed by the ocean? The pathos is greatly heightened by an extremely delicate yet sure individuation of the figures, as when at the mention of Heaven those not sightless from birth raise their countenance to the sky. And where in the meanwhile is the lost leader? He is seated right in their midst, but smitten by death. They learn it at last through the actions of the dog; besides whom--in striking parallel to "Princess Maleine"--the only other creature able to see is a little child. The horror-stricken unfortunates realize that they can never get home, and that they must perish in the woods.

In _Les Sept Princesses_ ("The Seven Princesses"), (1891), although it is one of Maeterlinck's minor achievements, some of the qualities that are common to all his work become peculiarly manifest. This is particularly true of the skill shown in conveying the feeling of the story by means of suitable scenic devices. Most of his plays depend to a considerable degree for their dark and heavy nimbus of unreality upon a studied combination of paraphernalia in themselves neither numerous nor far-sought. In fact, the resulting scenic repertory, too, is markedly limited: a weird forest, a deserted castle with marble staircase and dreamy moonlit terrace, a tower with vaulted dungeons, a dismal corridor flanked by impenetrable chambers, a lighted interior viewed from the garden, a landscape bodefully crêped with twilight--the list nearly exhausts his store of "sets."

The works mentioned so far are hardly more than able exercises preparatory for the ampler and more finished products which were to succeed them. Yet they represent signal steps in the evolution of a new dramatic style, designed, as has already been intimated, to give palpable form to emotional data descried in moments anterior not only to articulation but even to consciousness itself; and for this reason, the plane of the dramatic action lies deep below the surface of life, down in the inner tabernacle where the mystic looks for the hidden destinies. In his style, Maeterlinck had gradually developed an unprecedented capacity for bringing to light the secret agencies of fate. A portion of the instructed public had already learned to listen in his writings for the finer reverberations that swing in the wake of the uttered phrase, to heed the slightest hints and allusions in the text, to overlook no glance or gesture that might betray the mind of the acting characters. It is true that art to be great must be plain, but that does not mean that the sole test of great art is the response of the simple and apathetic.

In Maeterlinck's first masterpiece, _Pélléas et Mélisande_, (1892), the motives again are drawn up from the lower regions of consciousness; once more the plot is born of a gloomy fancy, and the darkling mood hovering over scene and action attests the persistence of fatalism in the poet. The theory of old King Arkel, the spokesman of the author's personal philosophy, is that one should not seek to be active; one should ever wait on the threshold of Fate. Even the younger people in the play are infected by the morbid doctrine of an inevitable necessity for all things that happen to them: "We do not go where we would go. We do not do that which we would do." Perhaps, however, these beliefs are here enounced for the last time with the author's assent or acquiescence.

In artistic merit "Pélléas and Mélisande" marks a nearer approach to mastery, once the integral peculiarities of the form and method have been granted. Despite a noticeable lack of force, directness, and plasticity in the characterization, the _vie intérieure_ is most convincingly expressed. In one of the finest scenes of the play we see the principals at night gazing out upon a measureless expanse of water dotted with scattered lights. The atmosphere is permeated with a reticent yearning of love. The two young creatures, gentle, shy, their souls tinged with melancholy, are drawn towards one another by an ineluctable mutual attraction. Yet, though their hearts are filled to overflowing, not a word of affection is uttered. Their love reveals itself to us even as to themselves, without a loud and jarring declaration, through its very speechlessness, as it were. The situation well bears out the _roi sage_ in _Alladine et Palomides_: "There is a moment when souls touch one another and know everything without a need of our opening the lips." There are still other scenes in this play so tense with emotion that words would be intrusive and dissonant. There is that lovely picture of Mélisande at the window; Pélléas cannot reach up to her hand, but is satisfied to feel her loosened hair about his face. It is a question whether even that immortal love duet in "Romeo and Juliet" casts a poetic spell more enchanting than this. At another moment in the drama, we behold the lovers in Maeterlinck's beloved half-light, softly weeping as they stare with speechless rapture into the flames. And not until the final parting does any word of love pass their lips. In another part of the play Goland, Mélisande's aging husband, who suspects his young stepbrother, Pélléas, of loving Mélisande, conducts him to an underground chamber. We are not told why he has brought him there, and why he has led him to the brink of the pitfall from which there mounts a smell of death. If it be a heinous deed he is brooding, why does he pause in its execution? His terrible struggle does not reveal itself through speech, yet it is eloquently expressed in the wildness of his looks, the trembling of his voice, and the sudden anguished outcry: "Pélléas! Pélléas!"

Evidently Maeterlinck completely achieves the very purpose to which the so-called Futurists think they must sacrifice all traditional conceptions of Art; and achieves it without any brutal stripping and skinning of the poetic subject, without the hideous exhibition of its _disjecta membra_, and above all, without that implied disqualification for the higher artistic mission which alone could induce a man to limit his service to the dishing-up of chunks and collops, "cubic" or amorphous.

In recognition of a certain tendency towards mannerism that lay in his technique, Maeterlinck, in a spirit of self-persiflage, labeled the book of one-act plays which he next published, (1894), _Trois Petits Drames pour Marionettes_ ("Three Little Puppet Plays"). They are entitled, severally: _Alladine et Palomides_, _Intérieur_, and _La Mort de Tintagiles_. While in motifs and materials as well as in the principal points of style these playlets present a sort of epitome of his artistic progression up to date, they also display some new and significant qualities. Of the three the first named is most replete with suggestive symbolism and at the same time most remindful of the older plays, especially of "Pélléas and Mélisande." King Ablamore is in character and demeanor clearly a counterpart of King Arkel. To be sure he makes a temporary stand against the might of Fate, but his resistance is meek and futile, and his wisdom culminates in the same old fatalistic formula: "_Je sais qu'on ne fait pas ce que l'on voudrait faire._"

_L'Intérieur_ ("Home") handles a theme almost identical with that of _L'Intruse_: Life and Death separated only by a thin pane of glass,--the sudden advent of affliction from a cloudless sky. In this little tragedy a family scene, enacted in "dumb show," is watched from the outside. The play is without suspense in the customary use of the term, since after the first whispered conversation between the bringers of the fateful tidings the audience is fully aware of the whole story:--the daughter of the house, for whose return the little group is waiting, has been found dead in the river. The quiescent mood is sustained to the end; no great outburst of lamentation; the curtain drops the instant the news has been conveyed. But the poignancy of the tragic strain is only enhanced by the repression of an exciting climax.

"The Death of Tintagiles" repeats in a still more harrowing form the fearful predicament of a helpless child treated with so much dramatic tension in Maeterlinck's first tragedy. Again, as in "Princess Maleine," the action of this dramolet attains its high point in a scene where murderous treachery is about to spring the trap set for an innocent young prince. Intuitively he senses the approach of death, and in vain beats his little fists against the door that imprisons him. The situation is rendered more piteous even than in the earlier treatment of the motif, because the door which bars his escape also prevents his faithful sister Ygraine from coming to the rescue.

We have observed in all the plays so far a marked simplicity of construction. _Aglavaine et Selysette_, (1896), denotes a still further simplification. Here the scenic apparatus is reduced to the very minimum, and the psychological premises are correspondingly plain. The story presents a "triangular" love entanglement strangely free from the sensual ingredient; two women dream of sharing, in all purity, one lover--and the dream ends for one of them in heroic self-sacrifice brought to secure the happiness of the rival. However, more noteworthy than the structure of the plot is the fact that the philosophic current flowing through it has perceptibly altered its habitual direction. The spiritual tendency is felt to be turning in its course, and even though fatalism still holds the rule, with slowly relaxing grip, yet a changed ethical outlook is manifest. Also, this play for the first time proclaims, though in no vociferous manner, the duty of the individual toward himself, the duty so emphatically proclaimed by two of Maeterlinck's greatest teachers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henrik Ibsen.

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The inner philosophic conflict was but of short duration. In 1898 _La Sagesse et La Destinée_ ("Wisdom and Destiny") saw the light. The metaphor might be taken in a meaning higher and more precise than the customary, for, coming to this book from those that preceded is indeed like emerging from some dark and dismal cave into the warm and cheering light of the sun. "Wisdom and Destiny" is a collection of essays and aphorisms which stands to this second phase of Maeterlinck's dramaturgy in a relation closely analogous to that existing between "The Treasure of the Humble" and the works heretofore surveyed. Without amounting to a wholesale recantation of the idea that is central in the earlier set of essays, the message of the newer set is of a very different kind. The author of "Wisdom and Destiny" has not changed his view touching the superiority of the intuitional function over the intellectual. The significant difference between the old belief and the new consists simply in this: the latent force of life is no longer imagined as an antagonistic agency; rather it is conceived as a benign energy that makes for a serene acceptance of the world that is. Of this turn in the outlook, the philosophic affirmation of life and the consent of the will to subserve the business of living are the salutary concomitants. Wisdom, in expanding, has burst the prison of fatalism and given freedom to vision. The world, beheld in the light of this emancipation, is not to be shunned by the wise man. Let Fortune bring what she will, he can strip his afflictions of their terrors by transmuting them into higher knowledge. Therefore, pain and suffering need not be feared and shirked; they may even be hailed with satisfaction, for, as is paradoxically suggested in _Aglavaine et Selysette_, they help man "_être heureux en devenant plus triste_,"--to be happy in becoming sadder. The poet, who till now had clung to the conviction that there can be no happy fate, that all our destinies are guided by unlucky stars, now on the contrary persuades us to consider how even calamity may be refined in the medium of wisdom in such fashion as to become an asset of life, and warns us against recoiling in spirit from any reverse of our fortunes. He holds that blows and sorrows cannot undo the sage. Fate has no weapons save those we supply, and "wise is he for whom even the evil must feed the pyre of love." In fine, Fate obeys him who dares to command it. After all, then, man has a right to appoint himself the captain of his soul, the master of his fate.

Yet, for all that, the author of "Wisdom and Destiny" should not be regarded as the partizan and apologist of sadness for the sake of wisdom. If sorrow be a rich mine of satisfaction, joy is by far the richer mine. This new outlook becomes more and more optimistic because of the increasing faculty of such a philosophy to extract from the mixed offerings of life a more near-at-hand happiness than sufferings can possibly afford; not perchance that perpetual grinning merriment over the comicality of the passing spectacle which with so many passes for a "sense of humor," but rather a calm and serious realization of what is lastingly beautiful, good, and true. A person's attainment of this beatitude imposes on him the clear duty of helping others to rise to a similar exalted level of existence. And this duty Maeterlinck seeks to discharge by proclaiming in jubilant accents the concrete reality of happiness. _L'Oiseau Bleu_ ("The Blue Bird"), above all other works, illustrates the fact that human lives suffer not so much for the lack of happiness as for the want of being clearly conscious of the happiness they possess. It is seen that the seed of optimism in "The Treasure of the Humble" has sprouted and spread out, and at last triumphantly shot forth through the overlaying fatalism. The newly converted, hence all the more thoroughgoing, optimist, believing that counsel and consolation can come only from those who trust in the regenerative power of hope, throws himself into a mental attitude akin to that of the Christian Scientist, and confidently proceeds to cure the ills of human kind by a categorical denial of their existence. Or perhaps it would be more just to say of Maeterlinck's latter-day outlook, the serenity of which even the frightful experience of the present time has failed to destroy, that instead of peremptorily negating evil, he merely denies its supremacy. All about him he perceives in the midst of the worst wrongs and evils many fertile germs of righteousness; vice itself seems to distil its own antitoxin.

Together with Maeterlinck's optimistic strain, his individualism gains an unexpected emphasis. "Before one exists for others, one must exist for one's self. The egoism of a strong and clear-sighted soul is of a more beneficent effect than all the devotion of a blind and feeble soul." Here we have a promulgation identical in gist with Emerson's unqualified declaration of moral independence when he says: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature."(8)

(8) "Self-Reliance."

His attitude of countenancing the positive joys of living causes Maeterlinck in his later career to reverse his former judgment, and to inveigh, much in the manner of Nietzsche, against the "parasitical virtues." "Certain notions about resignation and self-sacrifice sap the finest moral forces of mankind more thoroughly than do great vices and even crimes. The alleged triumphs over the flesh are in most cases only complete defeats of life." When to such rebellious sentiments is joined an explicit warning against the seductions and intimidations held out by the official religions--their sugar plums and dog whips, as Maeterlinck puts it--one can only wonder how his writings escaped as long as they did the attention of the authorities that swing the power of imprimatur and anathema.

Maeterlinck may not be classed unreservedly as a radical individualist. For whereas a philosophy like that of Nietzsche takes no account of the "much-too-many," who according to that great fantasist do not interest anybody except the statistician and the devil, Maeterlinck realizes the supreme importance of the great mass as the ordained transmitters of civilization. The gulf between aristocratic subjectivism, devoted single-mindedly to the ruthless enforcement of self-interest, and, on the other hand, a self-forgetful social enthusiasm, is bridged in Maeterlinck by an extremely strong instinct for justice and, moreover, by his firm belief--at least for the time being--that the same strong instinct exists universally as a specific trait of human nature. By such a philosophy Justice, then, is discerned not as a supra-natural function, but as a function of human nature as distinguished from nature at large. The restriction is made necessary by our knowledge of the observable operations of nature. In particular would the principle of heredity seem to argue against the reign of justice in the administration of human destinies, inasmuch as we find ourselves quite unable to recognize in the apportionment of pleasure and pain anything like a due ratio of merit. And yet Maeterlinck realizes that perhaps nature measures life with a larger standard than the individual's short span of existence, and warns us in his essay on "Justice" not to indulge our self-conceit in a specious emulation of ways that are utterly beyond our comprehension. After all, then, our poet-philosopher succeeds _foro conscientiæ_ in reconciling his cult of self with devotion to the common interest. Morality, in that essay, is defined as the co-ordination of personal desire to the task assigned by nature to the race. And is it not true that a contrary, that is, ascetic concept of morality reduces itself to absurdity through its antagonism to that primal human instinct that makes for the continuity of life?

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From the compromise effected between two fairly opposite ethical principles, there emerges in the works of this period something akin to a socialistic tendency. It is organically related to the mystical prepossession of the author's manner of thinking. Maeterlinck gratefully acknowledges that by the search-light of science the uppermost layers of darkness have been dispelled; but realizes also that the deep-seated central enigma still remains in darkness: as much as ever are the primordial causes sealed against a glimpse of finite knowledge. We have changed the names, not the problems. Instead of God, Providence, or Fate, we say Nature, Selection, and Heredity. But in reality do we know more concerning Life than did our ancestors?

What, then, questions the persevering pursuer of the final verities, shall we do in order that we may press nearer to Truth? May we not perchance steep our souls in light that flows from another source than science? And what purer light is there to illumine us than the halo surrounding a contented worker performing his task, not under coercion, but from a voluntary, or it may be instinctive, submission to the law of life? If such subordination of self constitutes the basis of rational living, we shall do well to study its workings on a lowlier and less complicated plane than the human; for instance, in the behavior of the creature that is proverbial for its unflagging industry. For this industry is not motivated by immediate or selfish wants; it springs from instinctive self-dedication to the common cause. Some people expected from _La Vie des Abeilles_ ("The Life of the Bee"), (1901), much brand-new information about matters of apiculture. But in spite of his twenty-five years' experience, Maeterlinck had no startling discoveries to convey to his fellow-hivers. His book on bees is not primarily the result of a specialist's investigations but a poetical record of the observations made by a mind at once romantic and philosophical and strongly attracted to the study of this particular form of community life, because by its organization on a miniature scale it spreads before the student of society a synoptic view of human affairs.