Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck Part 1

Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck.

by Jethro Bith.e.l.l.

PREFACE

It is not an easy task to write the life of a man who is still living.

If the biographer is hostile to his subject, the slaughtering may be an exciting spectacle; if he wishes, not to lay a victim out, but to pay a tribute of admiration tempered by criticism, he has to run the risk of offending the man he admires, and all those whose admiration is in the nature of blind hero-wors.h.i.+p. If he is conscientious, the only thing he can do is to give an honest expression of his own views, or a mosaic of the views of others which seem to him correct, knowing that he may be wrong, and that his authorities may be wrong, but challenging contradiction, and caring only for the truth as it appears to him.

So much for the tone of the book; there are difficulties, too, when the lion is alive, in setting up a true record of his movements. If the lion is a raging lion, how easy it is to write a tale of adventure; but if the lion is a tame specimen of his kind, you have either to _imagine_ exploits, making mountains out of molehills, or you have to give a page or so of facts, and for the rest occupy yourself with what is really essential.

When the lion is as tame as Maeterlinck is (or rather as Maeterlinck chooses to appear), the case is peculiarly difficult. The events in Maeterlinck's life are his books; and these are not, like Strindberg's books, for instance, so inspired by personality that they in themselves form a fascinating biography. They reveal little of the sound man of business Maeterlinck is; they do not show us what faults or pa.s.sions he may have; they tell us little of his personal relations--in short, Maeterlinck's books are practically impersonal.

The biographer cannot take handfuls of life out of Maeterlinck's own books; and it is not much he can get out of what has been written about him, very little of which is based on personal knowledge. Maeterlinck has always been hostile to collectors of "copy," those great purveyors of the stuff that books are made of. Huret made him talk, or says he did, when Maeterlinck took him into the beer-shop; and a few words of that interview will pa.s.s into every biography. That was at a time when he hated interviews. He wrote to a friend on the 4th of October, 1890:

"I beg you _in all sincerity, in all sincerity_, if you can stop the interviews you tell me of, for the love of G.o.d stop them. I am beginning to get frightfully tired of all this. Yesterday, while I was at dinner, two reporters from ... fell into my soup. I am going to leave for London, I am sick of all that is happening to me. So if you can't stop the interviews they will interview my servant."[1]

This is not a man who would chatter himself away,[2] not even to Mr Frank Harris, who found him aggressive (and no wonder either if the Englishman said by word of mouth what he says in print, namely that _The Treasure of the Humble_ was written "at length" after _The Life of the Bee_, _Monna Vanna_, and the translation of _Macbeth_![3]). The fact is, there is very little printed matter easily available on the biography proper of Maeterlinck. It is true we have several accounts of him by his wife in a style singularly like his own; we have gossip; we have delightful portraits of the houses he lives in--but we have no bricks for building with.

A future biographer may have at his hands what the present lacks; but I for my part have no other ambition for this book than that it should be a running account of Maeterlinck's works, with some suggestions as to their interpretation and value.

JETHRO BITh.e.l.l.

Hammerfield,

Nr. Hemel Hempstead,

31st January, 1913.

[1] Gerard Harry, _Maeterlinck_, p. 18.

[2] "Monsieur Maeterlinck being as all the world knows, hermetically mute."--(Gregoire Le Roy), _Le Masque_ (Brussels), Serie ii, No. 5 (1912).

[3] "_La Vie des Abeilles_ brought us from the tiptoe of expectance to a more reasonable att.i.tude, and _Monna Vanna_ and the translation of _Macbeth_ keyed our hopes still lower; but at length in _Le Tresor des Humbles_ Maeterlinck returned to his early inspiration."--_Academy_, 15th June, 1912.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

CHAPTER I

Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck[1] was born at Ghent on the 29th of August, 1862. It is known that his family was settled at Renaix in East Flanders as early as the fourteenth century; and the Maeterlincks are mentioned as burghers of Ghent in the annals of Flanders. The name is said to be derived from the Flemish word "maet"

(Dutch "maat"), "measure," and is interpreted as "the man who measures out: distributor." In harmony with this interpretation the story goes that one of the poet's ancestors was mayor of his village during a year of famine, and that he in that capacity distributed corn among the poor.

Maeterlinck's father was a notary by profession; being in comfortable circ.u.mstances, however, he did not practise, but lived in a country villa at Oostacker, near Ghent, on the banks of the broad ca.n.a.l which joins Ghent to the Scheldt at the Dutch town of Terneuzen.[2] Here through the paternal garden the sea-going s.h.i.+ps seemed to glide, "spreading their majestic shadows over the avenues filled with roses and bees."[3]

Those bees and flowers in his father's garden stand for much in the healthy work of his second period. Over the fatalistic work of his first period lies, it may be, the shadow of the town he was born in.

Maeterlinck was never absorbed by Ghent, as Rodenbach was by Bruges; but he was, as a young man, oppressed by some of its moods. Casual visitors to Ghent and Bruges may see nothing of the melancholy that poets and painters have woven into them; they may see in them thriving commercial towns; but poets and painters have loved their legendary gloom. "Black, suspicious watch-towers," this is Ghent seen by an artist's eyes, "dark ca.n.a.ls on whose weary waters swans are swimming, mediaeval gateways, convents hidden by walls, churches in whose dusk women in wide, dark cloaks and ruche caps cower on the floor like a flight of frightened winter birds. Little streets as narrow as your hand, with bowed-down ancient houses all awry, roofs with three-cornered windows which look like sleepy eyes. Hospitals, gloomy old castles. And over all a dull, septentrional heaven."[4] That hospital on the ca.n.a.l bank which starts a poem in _Serres Chaudes_[5] may be one he knew from childhood; the old citadel of Ghent with its dungeons may be the prototype of the castles of his dramas.

One part of his life in Ghent is still a bitter memory to our poet.

"Maeterlinck will never forgive the Jesuit fathers of the College de Sainte-Barbe[6] their narrow tyranny.... I have often heard him say that he would not begin life again if he had to pay for it by his seven years at school. There is, he is accustomed to say, only one crime which is beyond pardon, the crime which poisons the pleasures and kills the smile of a child."[7]

Out of twenty pupils in the highest cla.s.s at Sainte-Barbe fourteen were intended to be Jesuits or priests. Such a school was not likely to be a good training-place for poets. Indeed, though Latin verses were allowed, it forbade the practice of vernacular poetry.[8] And yet this very school has turned out not less than five poets of international reputation. Emile Verhaeren (who may be called the national poet of Flanders, the most international of French poets after Victor Hugo) and Georges Rodenbach had been schoolboys together at Sainte-Barbe; and on its benches three other poets, Maeterlinck, Gregoire Le Roy, and Charles van Lerberghe, formed friends.h.i.+ps for life. These three boys put their small cash together and subscribed to _La Jeune Belgique_, the clarion journal which, under the editors.h.i.+p of Max Waller, was calling Belgian literature into life; they devoured its pages clandestinely, as other schoolboys smoke their first cigarettes;[9] and Maeterlinck even sent in a poem which was accepted and printed. This was in 1883.

The fact that Maeterlinck was reading _La Jeune Belgique_ shows that he was already spoilt for a priest. But he was essentially religious; and his career has proved that he was one of those poets Verhaeren sings of, who have arrived too late in history to be priests, but who are constrained by the force of their convictions to preach a new gospel. It was the religion inborn in him, as well as his monastic training, which made him a reader and interpreter of such mystics as Ruysbroeck, Jakob Boehme, and Swedenborg. As a schoolboy he did not feel attracted to poetry alone; he had a great liking for science, and his great wish was to study medicine.[10] Some time ago he wrote to a French medical journal as follows:

"I never commenced the study of medicine. I did my duty in conforming with the family tradition, which ordains that the eldest son shall be an _avocat_. I shall regret to my last day that I obeyed that tradition, and consecrated my most precious years to the vainest of the sciences. All my instincts, all my inclinations, attached me to the study of medicine, which I am more than convinced is the most beautiful of the keys that give access to the great realities of life."

It was in 1885 that he entered the University of Ghent as a student of law. Like Lessing and Goethe, he had no respect for his professors. He was again a fellow-student of van Lerberghe and Le Roy; they also were students of jurisprudence. He was twenty-four when, according to his parents' wish, he settled in Ghent as an _avocat_; to lose, as Gerard Harry puts it, "with triumphant facility the first and last causes which were confided to him." His shyness and the thin, squeaking voice in his robust peasant's frame were against him in a profession which in any case he hated. He practised for a year or so, and then--"il a jete la toque et la robe aux orties."

In 1886 he set out for Paris, ostensibly with the object of completing his legal education there. Gregoire Le Roy accompanied him; and each stayed about seven months. They had lodgings at 22 Rue de Seine.

Gregoire Le Roy scamped painting at the Ecole St Luc and the Atelier Gervex et Humbert; and the pair of them spent a great deal of time in the museums. But the important thing in their stay in Paris was that they came into contact with men of letters. In the Bra.s.serie Pousset at the heart of the Quartier Latin they heard Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, "that evangelist of dream and irony," reciting his short stories before writing them down. "I saw Villiers de L'Isle-Adam very often during the seven months I spent at Paris," Maeterlinck told Huret. "All I have done I owe to Villiers, to his conversation more than to his works, though I admire the latter exceedingly." Villiers was twenty-two years older than Maeterlinck, having been born in 1840; but his masterpieces had not long been published, and it was only in the later 'eighties that the young poets who were to be known as symbolists began to gather round him, as they gathered round Mallarme and Verlaine.

Villiers de L'Isle-Adam died in Paris in 1889. In the same year died, also in Paris, another writer who might be proved to have influenced Maeterlinck,[11] even if the latter had not placed on record his high admiration of him. This was Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (born 1808).

Maeterlinck, after the banquet offered to him by the city of Brussels on the occasion of his receiving the n.o.bel prize, wrote despondently, expressing the good omen, seeing that men of real genius like Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly had died in obscurity and poverty.

Both men, indeed, had been hostile to cheap popularity. Barbey lived, to quote Paul Bourget, "in a state of permanent revolt and continued protest." He had written scathing attacks on the Parna.s.sians. Both poets were idealists among the naturalists; their idealism is a bridge spanning naturalism and joining the romanticists with the symbolists or neo-romanticists.

Villiers was a king in exile on whom the young squires attended. But they themselves had their spurs to win; and it was the greatest good fortune for Maeterlinck that he was able to join their company and take part in their campaign. Several of them, Jean Ajalbert, Ephram Mikhael, Pierre Quillard, had already been contributing to _La Basoche_, a review published at Brussels. There was Rodolphe Darzens, who, two years later, was to antic.i.p.ate Maeterlinck in writing a play on Mary Magdalene. There was Paul Roux, who, as time went on, blossomed into "Saint-Pol-Roux le Magnifique"--he who founded "le Magnificisme," the school of poetry which had for its programme "a mystical _magnificat_ to eternal nature."

It was in Pierre Quillard's rooms one evening that Gregoire Le Roy read to this circle of friends a short story by Maeterlinck: _Le Ma.s.sacre des Innocents_. On the day following he introduced the author of the tale.

On the 1st March, 1886, these young writers founded _La Pleiade_,[12] a short-lived review--six numbers appeared--which nevertheless played an important part. Beside the authors mentioned, it published contributions from Rene Ghil. It had the glory of printing the first verses of Charles van Lerberghe, and, in addition to several poems which were to appear in _Serres Chaudes_, Maeterlinck's _Ma.s.sacre des Innocents_ (May, 1886).

_Le Ma.s.sacre des Innocents_ was signed "Mooris Maeterlinck." The author discarded it; but it was reprinted in Gerard Harry's monograph (1909). A translation by Edith Wingate Rinder appeared at Chicago in 1895.[13]

It is a story which reproduces the delightful quaintness of early Dutch and Flemish painting:

"There were thirty hors.e.m.e.n or thereabouts, covered with armour, round an old man with a white beard. On the croup of their horses rode red or yellow lansquenets, who dismounted and ran across the snow to stretch their limbs, while several soldiers clad in iron dismounted also, and p.i.s.sed against the trees they had tied their horses to.

"Then they made for the Golden Sun Inn, and knocked at the door, which was opened reluctantly, and they went and warmed themselves by the fire while beer was served to them.

"Then they went out of the inn, with pots and pitchers and loaves of wheaten bread for their companions who had stayed round the man with the white beard, he who was waiting amid the lances.

"The street being still deserted, the captain sent hors.e.m.e.n behind the houses, in order to keep a hold on the hamlet from the side of the fields, and ordered the lansquenets to bring before him all infants of two years old or over, that they might be ma.s.sacred, even as it is written in the Gospel of Saint Matthew."

Maeterlinck in this story has simply turned an old picture, or perhaps several pictures, into words. The cruelty of the ma.s.sacre does not affect us in the least; the style is such that anyone who has seen the Breughels' paintings understands at once that a series of fantastic pictures, which have no relation whatever to fact, or logic, or history, are being drawn; not dream-pictures, but scenes drawn with the greatest clearness, and figures standing out boldly in flesh and blood:

"But he replied in terror that the Spaniards had arrived, that they had set fire to the farm, hanged his mother in the willow-trees, and tied his nine little sisters to the trunk of a great tree."

(You are to _see_ the woman hanging in the willow-trees, the deep green and any other colours you like.... Never mind about the pain the little girls must be suffering.)

"They came near a mill, on the skirts of the forest, and saw the farm burning in the midst of the stars." (This is a flat canvas, remember.) "Here they took their station, before a pond covered with ice, under enormous oaks....