Part 1

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

—Bold text has been rendered as =bold text=.

The Treasure of the Humble

_By_ Maurice Maeterlinck

_Translated by_ Alfred Sutro

With _Introduction by_ A. B. Walkley

London: George Allen, _Ruskin House_

156 Charing Cross Road mcmv

_First Edition, March 1897. Reprinted October 1897; September 1901; January 1903; May 1904; November 1905._

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. At the Ballantyne Press

=_TO_=

_MADAME GEORGETTE LEBLANC_

The Treasure of the Humble

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION _Page_ ix

SILENCE 1

THE AWAKENING OF THE SOUL 23

THE PRE-DESTINED 43

MYSTIC MORALITY 59

ON WOMEN 75

THE TRAGICAL IN DAILY LIFE 95

THE STAR 121

THE INVISIBLE GOODNESS 147

THE DEEPER LIFE 169

THE INNER BEAUTY 197

INTRODUCTION

WITH M. Maeterlinck as a dramatist the world is pretty well acquainted. This little volume presents him in the new character of a philosopher and an æsthetician. And it is in some sort an ‘apology’ for his theatre, the one being to the other as theory to practice. Reversing the course prescribed by Mr. Squeers for his pupils, M. Maeterlinck, having cleaned w-i-n-d-e-r, winder, now goes and spells it. He began by visualising and synthetising his ideas of life; here you shall find him trying to analyse these ideas and consumed with anxiety to tell us the truth that is in him. It is not a truth for all markets; he is at no pains to conceal that. He appeals, as every mystic must, to the elect; M. Anatole France would say, to the _âmes bien nées_. If we are not sealed of the tribe of Plotinus, he warns us to go elsewhere. ‘If, plunging thine eyes into thyself—it is this same Plotinus that he is quoting—‘thou dost not feel the charm of beauty, it is in vain that, thy disposition being such, thou shouldst seek the charm of beauty; for thou wouldst seek it only with that which is ugly and impure. Therefore it is that the discourse we hold here is not addressed to all men.’ If we are to follow him in his expedition to a philosophic Ultima Thule, we must have the mind for that adventure. ‘We are here,’ as he tells us elsewhere of the ‘stiff’ but, it seems, ‘admirable’ Ruysbroeck, ‘all of a sudden on the borderland of human thought and far across the Arctic circle of the spirit. There is no ordinary cold, no ordinary dark there, and yet you shall find there naught but flames and light. But to those who arrive without having trained their minds to these new perceptions, the light and the flames are as dark and as cold as though they were painted.’ This means that the intelligence, the reason, will not suffice of themselves; we must have faith. There are passages in the book which may provoke a sniff from Mr. Worldly Wiseman; but we must beware of the Voltairean spirit, or this will be a closed book to us. ‘We live by admiration, hope, and love,’ said Wordsworth. And we understand by them, M. Maeterlinck would add. I fear we are not all of us found worthy of the mystical frame of mind. But it is a psychological fact, like another; and if we can only examine it from the outside, we can at least bring patience and placidity to the task. The point is: has M. Maeterlinck anything to say? It will be found, I think, that he has.

All men, the world has long been assured, are born Aristotelians or Platonists. There cannot be a doubt about M. Maeterlinck’s philosophic birthright. He may say, as Paul Verlaine sang:

Moi, j’allais rêvant du divin Platon, Sous l’œil clignotant des bleus becs de gaz.

More strictly, he is a Neo-Platonist. His remark about the Admirable Ruysbroeck’s idea is equally true of his own. ‘I fancy that all those who have not lived in the intimacy of Plato and of the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, will not go far with this reading.’ He quotes Plotinus, ‘the great Plotinus, who, of all the intellects known to me, draws the nearest to the divine.’ He cites Porphyry and the Gnostics and Swedenborg. These are not exactly popular authors of the moment. But M. Maeterlinck, it is plain, has devoured them; his is not what Pope called ‘index-learning.’ Plotinus (205-270 A.D.) stood between two worlds, the old and the new; and he made the best of both. He enlarged the boundaries of art by discerning in the idea of beauty an inward and spiritual grace not to be found in the ‘Platonic idea.’ That, too, is what M. Maeterlinck is striving for: a larger idea of beauty, and a better apprehension of its inward and spiritual grace.

His cardinal doctrine will, I conjecture, prove to be something like this. What should be of most account for us all is not external fact, but the supra-sensuous world. ‘What we know is not interesting’; the really interesting things are those which we can only divine—the veiled life of the soul, the crepuscular region of subconsciousness, our ‘borderland’ feelings, all that lies in the strange ‘neutral zone’ between the frontiers of consciousness and unconsciousness. The mystery of life is what makes life worth living. ‘’Twas a little being of mystery, like every one else,’ says the old King Arkel of the dead Mélisande. We are such stuff as dreams are made of, might be the ‘refrain’ of all M. Maeterlinck’s plays, and of most of these essays. He is penetrated by the feeling of the mystery in all human creatures, whose every act is regulated by far-off influences and obscurely rooted in things unexplained. Mystery is within us and around us. Of reality we can only get now and then the merest glimpse. Our senses are too gross. Between the invisible world and our own there is doubtless an intimate concordance; but it escapes us. We grope among shadows towards the unknown. Even the new conquests of what we vainly suppose to be ‘exact’ thought only deepen the mystery of life. There is, for example, the Schopenhauerian theory of love. We had fancied we could at least choose our loves in freedom: but ‘we are told that a thousand centuries divide us from ourselves when we choose the woman we love, and that the first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal which thousands of hands, craving for birth, have impressed upon the lips of the mother they desire.’ And so with the ‘heredity’ of the men of science. ‘We know that the dead do not die. We know that it is not in our churches they are to be found, but in the houses, the habits of us all.’ What was there in the old notion of Destiny so mysterious as this double thraldom of ours—thraldom to the dead and to the unborn? Conclusion: mysticism is your only wear. In the mystics alone is certitude. ‘If it be true, as has been said, that every man is a Shakespeare in his dreams, we have to ask ourselves whether every man, in his waking life, is not an inarticulate mystic, a thousandfold more transcendental than those circumscribed by speech.’ In silence is our only chance of knowing one another. And ‘mystic truths have over ordinary truths a strange privilege; they can neither age nor die.’ From all this you see M. Maeterlinck’s train of thought. He would fix our minds upon the obscure, pre-conscious, what M. Faguet calls the _incunabulary_ life of the soul. He finds no epithets too fine for this: the higher life, the transcendental life, the divine life, the absolute life.

Whatever we may think of these ideas in themselves, there is no doubt that the man who expresses them sounds a new and individual note. They show a reaction against the whole effort of modern literature, which has been nothing if not positive, quasi-scientific, ever on the prowl for ‘documents.’ And if for no other reason than that, this book, I submit, would have peculiar significance and value.

But there is at least one other reason. M. Maeterlinck puts forward a plea, and a plea not lightly to be dismissed, for a new æsthetic of the drama. The mystery which he finds everywhere around us and within us he would bring into the theatre. If there is one position which the whole world supposed itself to have definitively taken up, it is the position that the theatre lives by action and to offer us an exhibition of the will. Therein, for instance, M. Ferdinand Brunetière finds the _differentia_ of drama; it is the struggle of a will, conscious of itself, against obstacles. Traversing this position M. Maeterlinck boldly asks whether a ‘static’ theatre is impossible, a theatre of mood not of movement, a theatre where nothing material happens and where everything immaterial is felt. Even as it is, the real beauty and purport of a tragedy is not seldom to be found in that part of its dialogue which is superficially ‘useless.’ ‘Certain it is that in the ordinary drama the indispensable dialogue by no means corresponds to reality.... One may even affirm that the poem draws the nearer to beauty and loftier truth in the measure that it eliminates words that merely explain the action and replaces them by others that reveal not the so-called “soul-state,” but I know not what intangible and unceasing striving of the soul towards its beauty and its truth.’ The frivolous will be reminded here, perhaps, of the old stage direction for the miser: ‘Leans against a wall and grows generous.’ Others who remember their Xenophon will bethink them of a certain discussion which Socrates had with Parrhasius on the question, ‘Can the unseen be imitated?’ (_Soc. Memorabilia_, iii. 10). It may be that M. Maeterlinck’s ‘static’ theatre is an unrealisable dream; but it is a seductive one, by contrast with the reality. Do not all of us who are condemned to spend much of our time in the playhouse occasionally share M. Maeterlinck’s feeling of repugnance? ‘When I go to the theatre, I feel as though I were spending a few hours in the midst of my ancestors, who looked upon life as something that was primitive, arid, and brutal; but this conception of theirs scarcely even lingers in my memory, and surely it is not one that I can any longer share.... I had hoped to be shown some act of life traced back to its source and to its mystery by connecting links that my daily occupations afford me neither power nor occasion to study. I had gone thither hoping that the beauty, the grandeur, and the earnestness of my humble day-by-day existence would for one instant be revealed to me ... whereas, almost invariably, all that I beheld was but a man who would tell me at wearisome length why he was jealous, why he poisoned, or why he killed.’ And so he would have the drama make an effort to show us ‘how truly wonderful is the mere fact of living’; he would have it tackle ‘presentiments, the strange impression produced by a chance meeting or a look, a decision that the unknown side of human reason had governed, an intervention or a force inexplicable and yet understood, the secret laws of sympathy and antipathy, elective and instinctive affinities, the overwhelming influence of things unsaid.’

How is it all to come about? When we ask this question we find ourselves in the position of the lady who had been discussing the subject of a future state with Dr. Johnson. ‘She seemed desirous of knowing more,’ says Boswell, ‘but he left the question in obscurity.’ It is there that M. Maeterlinck, like a true mystic, is content to leave most of his questions. ‘The time has not yet come,’ he says with an engaging candour, ‘when we can speak lucidly of these things.’ One thinks of Sir Thomas Browne’s quaint fancy. ‘A dialogue between two infants in the womb concerning the state of this world might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Plato’s den, and are but embryon philosophers.’ Maybe M. Maeterlinck is but an embryon philosopher, one who discourses in Plato’s den. But I think we must all recognise the native distinction of his mind, the fastidious delicacy of his taste, his abiding and insatiable love of beauty. What he says, exquisitely enough but perhaps too liberally, of every man—‘to every man there come noble thoughts that pass across his heart like great white birds’—is certainly true of himself. Wherefore one may venture to invite people to his book as Heraclitus welcomed guests to his kitchen: ‘Enter boldly, for here also there are gods.’

A. B. W.

SILENCE

SILENCE

‘SILENCE and Secrecy!’ cries Carlyle. ‘Altars might still be raised to them (were this an altar-building time) for universal worship. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together, that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are henceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but _hold thy tongue for one day_; on the morrow how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have these mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought, but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech, too, is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss inscription says: _Sprechen ist Silbern, Schweigen ist goldern_ (Speech is silver, Silence is golden); or, as I might rather express it, Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.

‘Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue work except in secrecy.’

* * * * *

IT is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another. The lips or the tongue may represent the soul, even as a cipher or a number may represent a picture of Memling; but from the moment that we have _something to say to each other_, we are _compelled_ to hold our peace: and if at such times we do not listen to the urgent commands of silence, invisible though they be, we shall have suffered an eternal loss that all the treasures of human wisdom cannot make good; for we shall have let slip the opportunity of listening to another soul, and of giving existence, be it only for an instant, to our own; and many lives there are in which such opportunities do not present themselves twice....

It is only when life is sluggish within us that we speak: only at moments when reality lies far away, and we _do not wish_ to be conscious of our brethren. And no sooner do we speak than something warns us that the divine gates are closing. Thus it comes about that we hug silence to us, and are very misers of it; and even the most reckless will not squander it on the first comer. There is an instinct of the superhuman truths within us which warns us that it is dangerous to be silent with one whom we do not wish to know, or do not love: for words may pass between men, but let silence have had its instant of activity, and it will never efface itself; and indeed the true life, the only life that leaves a trace behind, is made up of silence alone. Bethink it well, in that silence to which you must again have recourse, so that it may explain itself, by itself; and if it be granted to you to descend for one moment into your soul, into the depths where the angels dwell, it is not the words spoken by the creature you loved so dearly that you will recall, or the gestures that he made, but it is, above all, the silences that you have lived together that will come back to you: for it is the _quality_ of those silences that alone revealed the quality of your love and your souls.

So far I have considered _active_ silence only, for there is a _passive_ silence, which is the shadow of sleep, of death or non-existence. It is the silence of lethargy, and is even less to be dreaded than speech, so long as it slumbers; but beware lest a sudden incident awake it, for then would its brother, the great active silence, at once rear himself upon his throne. Be on your guard. Two souls would draw near each other: the barriers would fall asunder, the gates fly open, and the life of every day be replaced by a life of deepest earnest, wherein all are defenceless; a life in which laughter dares not show itself, in which there is no obeying, in which nothing can evermore be forgotten....

And it is because we all of us know of this sombre power and its perilous manifestations, that we stand in so deep a dread of silence. We can bear, when need must be, the silence of ourselves, that of isolation: but the silence of many—silence multiplied—and above all the silence of a crowd—these are supernatural burdens, whose inexplicable weight brings dread to the mightiest soul. We spend a goodly portion of our lives in seeking places where silence is not. No sooner have two or three men met than their one thought is to drive away the invisible enemy; and of how many ordinary friendships may it not be said that their only foundation is the common hatred of silence! And if, all efforts notwithstanding, it contrives to steal among a number of men, disquiet will fall upon them, and their restless eyes will wander in the mysterious direction of things unseen: and each man will hurriedly go his way, flying before the intruder: and henceforth they will avoid each other, dreading lest a similar disaster should again befall them, and suspicious as to whether there be not one among them who would treacherously throw open the gate to the enemy....

In the lives of most of us, it will not happen more than twice or thrice that silence is really understood and freely admitted. It is only on the most solemn occasions that the inscrutable guest is welcomed; but, when such come about, there are few who do not make the welcome worthy, for even in the lives of the most wretched there are moments when they know how to act, even as though they knew already that which is known to the gods. Remember the day on which, without fear in your heart, you met your first silence. The dread hour had sounded; silence went before your soul. You saw it rising from the unspeakable abysses of life, from the depths of the inner sea of horror or beauty, and you did not fly.... It was at a home-coming, on the threshold of a departure, in the midst of a great joy, at the pillow of a death-bed, on the approach of a dire misfortune. Bethink you of those moments when all the secret jewels shone forth on you, and the slumbering truths sprung to life, and tell me whether silence, then, was not good and necessary, whether the caresses of the enemy you had so persistently shunned were not truly divine? The kisses of the silence of misfortune—and it is above all at times of misfortune that silence caresses us—can never be forgotten; and therefore it is that those to whom they have come more often than to others are worthier than those others. They alone know, perhaps, how voiceless and unfathomable are the waters on which the fragile shell of daily life reposes: they have approached nearer to God, and the steps they have taken towards the light are steps that can never be lost, for the soul may not rise, perhaps, but it can never sink.... ‘Silence, the great Empire of Silence,’ says Carlyle again—he who understood so well the empire of the life which holds us—‘higher than the stars, deeper than the Kingdom of Death!... Silence, and the great silent men!... Scattered here and there, each in his department; silently thinking, silently working; whom no morning newspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the earth. A country that has none or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest which had no _roots_; which had all turned to leaves and boughs; which must soon wither and be no forest.’

But the real silence, which is greater still and more difficult of approach than the material silence of which Carlyle speaks—the real silence is not one of those gods that can desert mankind. It surrounds us on every side; it is the source of the undercurrents of our life; and let one of us but knock, with trembling fingers, at the door of the abyss, it is always by the same attentive silence that this door will be opened.

It is a thing that knows no limit, and before it all men are equal; and the silence of king or slave, in presence of death, or grief, or love, reveals the same features, hides beneath its impenetrable mantle the self-same treasure. For this is the essential silence of our soul, our most inviolable sanctuary, and its secret can never be lost; and, were the first born of men to meet the last inhabitant of the earth, a kindred impulse would sway them, and they would be voiceless in their caresses, in their terror and their tears; a kindred impulse would sway them, and all that could be said without falsehood would call for no spoken word: and, the centuries notwithstanding, there would come to them, at the same moment, as though one cradle had held them both, comprehension of that which the tongue shall not learn to tell before the world ceases....