Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck Part 10

"Hitherto the pivot of the world seemed to us to be formed of spiritual powers; to-day we are convinced that it is composed of purely material energies."

It is by the study of concrete things--the mechanism of an automobile, the adaptability of dogs to climate and occupation,[1] the evolution of flowers--that we shall learn to solve the riddle of existence. This teaching, like that of _The Life of the Bee_, is absolutely identical with Verhaeren's.

An important essay is that on "The Modern Drama." Maeterlinck has some hard things to say about historical dramas, "those necessarily artificial poems which are born of an impossible marriage between the past and the present." The pa.s.sions and feelings that a modern poet reads into a past age must of necessity be modern, and cannot live in an alien atmosphere. The modern drama "unfolds itself in a modern house, among men and women of to-day." The task of the modern dramatist is to go deeper into consciousness than was the custom of old: the drama of to-day cannot deck itself out in gaudy trappings, the ermines and sables of regal pomp, the show of circ.u.mstance; it cannot appeal to divinity; it cannot appeal to any fixed fatality; it must try to discover, in the regions of psychology, and in those of moral life, the equivalent of what it has lost in the exterior life of epic times. And the sovereign law of the theatre will always be _action_. No matter how beautiful, no matter how deep the language is, it is bound to weary us if it changes nothing in the situation, if it does not lead to a decisive conflict, if it does not hurry on to a final solution.

_L'Intelligence des Fleurs_ (English translation: Life and Flowers), published in 1907, is another collection of essays twining "the instinctive ideal" round the solid pillars of reality. Maeterlinck describes the vehement, obstinate revolt of flowers against their destiny. They have one aim: to escape from the fatality that fixes them to the soil, to invent wings, as it were, so that they may soar above the region that gave them birth, and there expand in the light which is their blossoming. Flowers set us a prodigious example of insubordination, of courage, of perseverance, and of cunning. It is the genius of the earth which is acting in them--the earth-spirit, Maeterlinck might have said with Goethe. "The ideal of the earth-spirit is often confused, but you can distinguish in it a mult.i.tude of great lines which rise aloft to a life more ardent, more complex, more nervous, more spiritual." Insects and flowers bring gleams of the light without into the dark cavern in which we are prisoners. They, too, have something of the fluid which religions called divine--the fluid to which man, of all things on earth, offers the least resistance. Their evolution should make us feel that man is on the way to divinity.

The chapter called "L'Inquietude de notre Morale" strides over dead religions to hold out a hand of welcome to the religion of the future.

Two main rivers of contemporary thought, whose sources are Tolstoy and Nietzsche, flow with high waves far from the bogs and shallow pools where those who are poisoned by dead religions lie stifling. One of these rivers is flowing violently backwards to an illusory past; the other roars foam-flecked in its fury to an improbable future. Between these two rivers lies the broad plateau of reality; and we who are Maeterlinck's disciples may add that we build our homesteads round the placid lake his teaching forms on this broad plateau between the two dangerous rivers....

The chapter "In Praise of Boxing," is not a literary exercise on a fancy subject. Maeterlinck is a boxer who needs some beating. We have all read in all the newspapers in the year of grace 1912 that a public match in the interests of charity had been arranged between him and the middleweight champion of Europe, Georges Carpentier.

Another section, "Our Social Duty," tends towards Socialism. "Extreme opinion," we read, "demands immediately an integral sharing, the suppression of property, obligatory work, etc. We do not know yet how these demands can be realised; but it is at this moment certain that very simple circ.u.mstances will make them some day seem as natural as the suppression of primogenitures.h.i.+p and the privileges of the n.o.bility....

Truth here is situated less in reason, which is always turned towards the past, than in imagination, which sees farther than the future....

Let us only listen to the experience which urges us forward; it is always higher than that which restrains us or throws us backward. Let us reject all the counsels of the past which are not turned towards the future.... It is above all important to destroy. In all social progress, the great work, the only difficult work, is the destruction of the past.

We do not need to be anxious about what we shall set up in place of the ruins. The force of things and of life will undertake the work of reconstruction."

_L'Oiseau bleu_ (The Blue Bird) is an epitome of these and other Maeterlinckian ideas. But this is no dramatised essay. The characters, it is true, are still ideas personified; but this time they are galvanised into life by a saving quality--humour. The humour that made the essay "On the Death of a Little Dog" so irresistible makes this presentation of Maeterlinck's philosophy for children a thing of pure delight. It is, moreover, as easy to understand, and as sparkling to the eyes in its magic changes, as a Christmas pantomime. And a child who has seen this fairy tale on the stage has not only enjoyed itself immensely, and had an experience it will never forget, but it has also learned, it cannot fail to have learned, lessons that should have an immediate and lasting effect on its character and behaviour. Maeterlinck has many jewels in her crown; but the brightest is that which came to him for having brought happiness and taught goodness to children.

_The Blue Bird_ was first produced at the Theatre des Arts in Moscow on the 30th September, 1908. This theatre, which had been supported for years by a group of rich amateurs, first paid its way when _The Blue Bird_ drew thousands to its boards. In December, 1909, Mr Herbert Trench staged it, with a poet's understanding of a poet at the Haymarket Theatre in London; it ran till June, and was revived for Christmas, 1910.

_The Blue Bird_, like another modern pantomime for children, Richard Dehmel's demoniac _Fitzebutze_, is as entertaining to read as it is fascinating to see. The two children of a woodcutter, a boy, Tyltyl, and a girl, Mytyl, are sent out by a fairy in quest of "the blue bird, that is to say, the great secret of things and of happiness." They are accompanied by Light (whom the fairy conjures out of the lamp in the cottage), the Dog, the Cat (a very nasty cat--cats must be nasty because dogs, the friends of man, don't like them), Sugar (who breaks off his fingers for them to eat when they are hungry), Bread (who slices his paunch to add substance to the sugar), Fire (a red-faced lout), Water (whom Fire keeps at a respectful distance because she has not brought her umbrella), and Milk (a very shy, impressionable youth--as one might say, a milksop). First the children pay a visit to their dead grandparents in the misty Land of Memory. They find the old couple asleep on a bench in front of the same old cottage they occupied on earth; they awaken at the children's approach, and we are taught that the dead awaken every time the loved ones whom they left behind think of them. Before they leave, the old people make them a present of a blackbird which is quite blue; but when they have left the Land of Memory they find it has turned black. (It was not real, it was a dream, and could not bear the light of reality.)

Continuing their wanderings they come to the Palace of Night. The Cat has hurried on in advance to tell Mother Night, with whom he is in league, of the coming of their enemy, Man, who is guided by Light. Night is very much upset: already, she complains, Man has captured a third of her mysteries, all her Terrors are afraid and dare not leave the house, her Ghosts have taken flight, the greater part of her Sicknesses are ill. The children arrive, and in the end capture a number of blue birds behind one of the doors to which Night holds the key. But as soon as the company have escaped from the Palace of Night, the birds are seen to be dead. Like the roses in the cavern in _Alladine and Palomides_, they could not live in the light of day.

They reach the enchanted palaces where all men's joys, all men's happinesses are gathered together in the charge of Fate. First they meet the Luxuries of the Earth, bloated revellers whose banqueting-hall is separated from the cavern of the Miseries only by a thin curtain. The Blue Bird is not here. Next they interview the Happinesses (the Happiness of Home, the Happiness of Being Well, etc.) and the Great Joys (the Joy of Maternal Love, the Joy of Understanding, etc.). In the end they arrive at the Kingdom of the Future, an Azure Palace pretty high up in the clouds. Here all unborn children, enough to last to the end of the world, more than thirty thousand, are awaiting the hour of their birth. When the fathers and mothers want children, Father Time throws back the opalescent doors which open upon the quays of the Dawn, and s.h.i.+ps the babies off in a galley with White and gold sails; then are heard the sounds of the earth like a distant music, and the song of the mothers coming out to meet their children. Gliding about among the children are taller figures, "clad in a paler and more diaphanous azure, figures of a sovereign and silent beauty"--the race which shall inhabit the earth when man has made way for his offspring the superman. The babes unborn are pondering, while they wait:

"some little plan or chart, Some fragment from their dream of human life,"

the inventions they are to make, the happiness they are to confer, the crimes they are to commit. Of a sudden Father Time discovers the children, and comes towards them in a fury, asking them why they are not blue; but Light tells the boy to turn the magic diamond which has preserved them thus far, and she has just time to whisper that she has got the blue bird, when down goes the curtain.

ACT VI. shows the children in their little cots, where they were when the play opened; it has all been a dream.

For _The Blue Bird_ Maeterlinck was in 1912 awarded, for the third time in succession, the Belgian "Triennial prize for dramatic literature."

In 1910 appeared his translation of _Macbeth_, and the English translation of another play of his, _Mary Magdalene_. _Macbeth_ was performed (a sensational event, and a triumph for Mme Maeterlinck) at the Abbey of Saint Wandrille, the Benedictine cloister which Maeterlinck saved from being turned into a chemical factory,[2] and which is now his home. _Mary Magdalene_ was first performed at Leipsic and Hamburg; in Great Britain it shares with _Monna Vanna_ the honour of being refused an acting licence (because the voice of Jesus is heard in it!)

For _Mary Magdalene_ Maeterlinck borrowed two situations from a German play, _Maria von Magdala_, by Paul Heyse--"namely, at the end of the first act, the intervention of Christ, Who stops the crowd raging against Mary Magdalene with these words, spoken behind the scenes: 'He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone'; and, in the third, the dilemma in which the great sinner finds herself, of saving or destroying the Son of G.o.d, according as she consents or refuses to give herself to a Roman." Paul Heyse refused Maeterlinck his authorisation to develop these two situations; whereupon Maeterlinck decided that "the words of the gospel, quoted above, are common property; and that the dilemma ... is one of those which occur pretty frequently in dramatic literature." It was the very situation, Maeterlinck claims, which he had himself imagined in the final trial of Joyzelle.

The death of Christ is a tragedy which is waiting for a great dramatist to master. Both Grillparzer and Hebbel pondered it. Maeterlinck has not done what they left undone; he was not dramatist enough to do it.

Grillparzer would have spun his play round Judas as a type of an envious man; Maeterlinck places Mary Magdalene in the centre, not the sinner, but the convert--and this convert is the same character as Aglavaine, as Monna Vanna--Maeterlinck's strong, wise woman. This tragedy is again in the nature of a dramatised essay--another essay on wisdom. The idea is that the wise, who are certain of their knowledge, cannot yield to what is wrong. Joyzelle, we remember, would not sacrifice to save one man (it is true she pretended to be willing to, but her pretence was foolish, for she should have known it would be vain, seeing that Merlin was a magician) what Monna Vanna was willing to sacrifice to save a mult.i.tude.

Mary Magdalene refuses to make the same sacrifice to save Christ: for Christ has made her a wise and therefore a good woman, and she would be untrue to Him in her if she were to rescue Him from Death--in other words His teaching, the essence of His Soul, must not be soiled, whatever torture be inflicted on His poor, human body. There would be tense tragedy in the situation when she hears Him being led to crucifixion, if we did not feel that she is no character but a wise idea; and if, too, the Roman who has it in his power to save Christ were not such a vulgar, melodramatic villain. Maeterlinck has been singularly unsuccessful in this drama. As a courtesan Mary Magdalene is a bore; as a convert she is still a bore.

It is not a human drama. If Jesus has the power to awaken the dead, and to summon the living so that they walk as in sleep (Mary comes to Him in this way), there is no human conflict. One might suspect s.e.xual attraction in Mary's conversion, but she gives one the impression of being a s.e.xless blue-stocking; we are forced to the conclusion that she is mesmerised. Jesus is a mesmerist;[3] from a dramatic point of view.

He is no more convincing than Svengali. Maeterlinck's play is on a level with those of Hall Caine; his Roman villain especially might have been conceived by Hall Caine.

In 1911 appeared, in an English translation (the French original was not published till 1913), another book of essays under the t.i.tle of _Death_.

Maeterlinck takes up the thread of what he had said about death in his previous writings, especially in the n.o.ble essay on Immortality in _Life and Flowers_:

"For us, death is the one event that counts in our life or in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around it.

The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it battens but on our fears lie who seeks to forget it burdens his memory with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But though we think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously without learning to know death."

The book shocked many of its critics, who found one of Maeterlinck's ideas repugnant--his plea that it is to no purpose to prolong the agonies of the sick-bed.

"Why should the doctors," asks the essayist, "consider it their duty to protract even the most excruciating convulsions of the most hopeless agony? Who has not, at a bedside, twenty times wished and not once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to show mercy?... One day this prejudice will strike us as barbarian.

Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions which have long since died out in the mind of men. That is why the doctors act as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown.... The day will come when science will turn against this error, and no longer hesitate to shorten our misfortunes."

Why should we fear death? It is not the nightmare which superst.i.tion has made it out to be. It is not the arrival of death, but the departure of life which is appalling.

"Here begins the open sea. Here begins the glorious adventure, the only one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as high as its highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard death as a form of life which we do not yet understand; let us learn to look upon it with the same eye that looks upon birth; and soon our mind will be accompanied to the steps of the tomb with the same glad expectation that greets a birth."

It may be doubted whether men will ever grow so wise that they will look forward to death as they look forward to a birth; in the meantime, as Mr Basil de Selincourt pointed out in the _Manchester Guardian_, they will be getting toothless, bald, and blind, and "the logic of the mystics may wish to a.s.sure us that these are processes of life and not of death; we shall continue to think such an a.s.surance rather sophistical and insipid.... The fear of the moment of death and a pa.s.sionate protest of the soul against the idea of its finality are probably as normal in the highest types of men as in the lowest."[4] And there is another consideration, subtly suggested by Charles Bernard in an article in _Le Masque_, Serie ii, Nos. 7 and 8: the fear of the physical agony of death and the decomposition that follows it intensifies the raptures of health, and even all the moments of pleasure an ageing man can s.n.a.t.c.h from his decay.

But the importance of the book does not lie in this discussion of the physical facts of death. It lies in its investigation of ideas concerning the immortality of our soul. Whatever the soul be--whether it be that mysterious thing which cannot be definitely located, but which we carry about with us like a mirror in a world whose phenomena only take shape in so far as they are reflected in it,[5] or whether it be the sum total of our intellectual and moral qualities fortified by those of instinct and sub-consciousness[6]--Maeterlinck's suggestions, in his various essays, of a solution brings us to something which strengthens the spiritual, or if you like the intellectual, part of our nature.

"Is it not possible" he asks, "that the enjoyment of art for its own sake, the calm and full satisfaction we are plunged into by the contemplation of a beautiful statue or of a perfect monument, things that do not belong to us and that we shall never see again, which excite no sensual desire, which can profit us nothing--is it not possible that this satisfaction may be the pale gleam of a different consciousness filtering through a fissure of that consciousness of ours which is built up of memories?"[7]

_Death_ appeared almost simultaneously with the news that Maeterlinck had been awarded the n.o.bel prize for literature. The occasion was celebrated by a public banquet offered to the poet by the City of Brussels; official Belgium had at last awakened to the fact that its poets were more honoured in the world than its rulers. As to the one hundred and ninety thousand francs, he had no need of the money for himself, and it was announced that his intention was to found a "Maeterlinck prize with it," to be given every two years to the writer of the most remarkable book published in that period in the French language.

[1] He does not mention the soft mouth of the old English sheep-dog.

[2] The Abbe Dimnet, in an article in _The Nineteenth Century_ for January, 1912, charges Maeterlinck with indelicacy for having occupied the abbey so soon after its confiscation! The abbe does not mention the chemical project.

[3]

LAZARUS: Come. The Master calls you.

[MAGDALENE _leaves the column against which she is leaning and takes four or five steps towards_ LAZARUS _as though walking in her sleep_.]

MAGDALENE: He fixed his eyes for but a moment on mine; and that will be enough for the rest of my life.

--(p. 72).

[4] I have re-translated from the French in which Mr de Selincourt's article was reproduced in _Le Thyrse_ for January, 1912.

[5] "L'Immortalite" (in _L'Intelligence des Fleurs_) p. 282.

[6] _Ibid._, p. 295.

[7] _Ibid._, p. 307.

CHAPTER XII