Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck Part 2

[3] The first number is dated Sat.u.r.day, the 18th October, 1879, and begins with "rimes d'avant poste" by "Rodolphe" (=Verhaeren).

[4] Iwan Gilkin, _Quinze annees de litterature_.

[5] Albert Giraud, _Hors du Siecle_.

[6] In the thirteenth century in Germany, "Fleming" was synonymous with "verray parfit, gentil knight." The Bavarian Sir Neidhart von Reuental, for instance, refers to himself as a "Fleming."

[7] Cf. Rodenbach's;

"Je vis comme si mon ame avait ete De la lune et de l'eau qu'on aurait mis sous verre"

with Maeterlinck's:

"On en a mis plusieurs sur d'anciens clairs de lune."

--_Serres Chaudes_, "Cloches de verre."

[8] G. van Hamel, _Het Letterkundige Leven van Frankrijk_, pp. 127-8.

CHAPTER III

In 1889 Maeterlinck published his first book: _Serres Chaudes_ (Hot-houses). We have seen that several of the poems which compose it had already appeared in _La Pleiade_ and in _Le Parna.s.se de la Jeune Belgique_.

The subject of this collection of verse, as, indeed, of the dramas and the essays which were to follow, is _the soul_. Rodenbach, we remember, saw the soul prisoned in an aquarium, "at the bottom of the ponds of dream," reflected in the gla.s.s of mirrors; Maeterlinck sees it languid, and moist, and oppressed, and helplessly inactive[1] in a hot-house whose doors are closed for ever. The tropical atmosphere is created by pictures (seen through the deep green windows of the hot-house) as of lions drowned in suns.h.i.+ne, or of mighty forests lying with not a leaf stirring over the roses of pa.s.sion by night. But of a sudden (for it is all a dream) we may find ourselves in the reek of the "strange exhalations" of fever-patients in some dark hospital glooming a clogged ca.n.a.l in Ghent.... Evidently not a book for the normal Philistine. In Ghent it made people look askance at Maeterlinck. It branded him as a decadent.

And that was a dreadful thing in Belgium. Nay, in that country, at that time, and for long after, even to be a poet was a disgrace. It is only by remembering this fact that one can understand the brutality of the fight waged by the reviews, and by the poets in their books; and it is perhaps owing to the hostility of the public that such a great ma.s.s of good poetry was written. Year after year Charles van Lerberghe renewed his futile application to the Government for a poor post as secondary teacher, and on account of his first writings[2] Maeterlinck was refused some modest public office for which he applied.

The contempt of the Belgians for young poets may be condoned to a certain extent when one appreciates the absurdities in which some of them indulged. It was not the _gaminerie_ of such poets as Theodore Hannon and Max Waller which shocked the honest burghers; they were rather horrified at the absurdities of the new style. Rodenbach, who was a real poet, wrote crazy things; as, for instance, when he compared a muslin curtain to a communicant partaking of the moon.[3] Even when the absurdity is an application of the theories of the symbolists it is often apt to raise a laugh, e.g., when Theodore Hannon, extending the doctrine that perfumes sing, makes a perfume blare:

"Opoponax! nom tres bizarre Et parfum plus bizarre encor!

Opoponax, le son du cor Est pale aupres de ta fanfare!"

A goodly list of absurdities could be collected from _Serres Chaudes_ also, if the collector detached odd pa.s.sages from their context:

"Perhaps there is a tramp on a throne, You have the idea that corsars are waiting on a pond, And that antediluvian beings are going to invade towns."

And a scientist of Lombroso's type could easily, by culling choice quotations, draw an appalling picture of a degenerate:

"Pity my absence on The threshold of my will!

My soul is helpless, wan, With white inaction ill."

So incoherent and strange have these poems[4] appeared to some people who are ardent Maeterlinckians that they a.s.sume he may, for a period, have been mentally ill.[5] If he had been, it would have been historically significant. Verhaeren went through such a period of mental illness. It might be a.s.serted that the modern man must be mad. The life of to-day, especially in cities, with its whipped hurry, its dust and noises, is too complex to be lived with the nerves of a Victorian. But the human organism is capable of infinite a.s.similation; and the period we live in is busy creating a new type of man.[6] It is the glory of Verhaeren to have sung the advent of this new man; it is the glory of Maeterlinck, as we shall see, to have proved that a species forcibly adjusts itself to existing conditions.

To a Victorian the poems in _Serres Chaudes_ must of necessity seem diseased; just as the greater part of Tennyson's poetry must of necessity seem ordinary to us. How many "d.i.c.khauter" have called Hoffmansthal's poetry diseased? If it is, so is Yeats's. Turn from Robert Bridges's poems of outdoor life--the n.o.ble old English style--to Yeats's dim visions, or to Arthur Symons's harpsichord dreaming through the room, and you have the difference between yesterday and to-day.

At all events _Serres Chaudes_, whether mad or not, is bathed in the same atmosphere as the dramas soon to follow. As to the relative value of the book from the point of view of art, opinion differs. Some good critics who are not p.r.o.ne to praise think highly of it; but the general impression seems to be that these poems are chiefly of interest as marking a stage in the author's development. If Maeterlinck had written nothing more he would have been quite forgotten, or only remembered because, for instance, Charles van Lerberghe wrote some poetry in the form of a criticism of the book. Compared with other Belgian lyric verse, Verhaeren's, or Charles van Lerberghe's, or Max Elskamp's, it is inferior work. Not that there are no good poems; some of them, indeed, are excellent, and not seldom the poet is on the track of something fine:

"Attention! the shadow of great sailing-s.h.i.+ps pa.s.ses over the dahlias of submarine forests; And I am for a moment in the shadow of whales going to the pole!"

Whatever value the book may have as poetry, the rhymeless poems in it have, as we have seen, considerable importance as being attempts to reproduce Walt Whitman's manner. They are interesting, too, because they attempt to create a mood by the use of successive images.[7] Perhaps, elsewhere (Tancrede de Visan suggests the Song of Solomon) this method has been applied successfully. The poems in _Serres Chaudes_ are experiments.

[1] Cf. Rodenbach, _Le Regne du Silence_, p. 1:

"Mais les choses pourtant entre le cadre d'or Ont un air de souffrir de leur vie inactive; Le miroir qui les aime a borne leur essor En un recul de vie exigue et captive..."

[2] Gerard Harry, p. 19. _Le Masque_, Serie ii, No. 5: "jeune encore, il avait sollicite les fonctions de juge de paix, mais le gouvernement belge, prevoyant son destin de poete, les lui avait genereus.e.m.e.nt refusees, et pour reconnaitre ce service, Maeterlinck ne lui rend que mepris et dedain et refuse meme les distinctions honorifiques les plus hautes, celles qu'on n'accorde generalement qu'aux tres grands industriels ou aux tres vieux militaires ou politiciens."

[3]

"Chambres pleines de songe! Elles vivent vraiment En des reves plus beaux que la vie ambiante, Grandissant toute chose au Symbole, voyant Dans chaque rideau pale une Communiante Aux falbalas de mousseline s'eployant Qui communie au bord des vitres, de la Lune!"

--_Le Regne du Silence_, p. 4.

[4] They make one think of what Novalis wrote: "poems unconnected, yet with a.s.sociations, like dreams; poems, melodious merely and full of beautiful words, but absolutely without sense or connection--at most individual sentences intelligible--nothing but fragments, so to speak, of the most varied things."

[5] See Schlaf's _Maeterlinck_, p. 12; _ibid._, p. 30; and Monty Jacobs'

_Maeterlinck_, p. 39. But Maeterlinck's brain was always as healthy as his body. At the time he wrote _Serres Chaudes_ disease was fas.h.i.+onable, that is all; and, beside the main influence of Baudelaire, there was the fear of death instilled by the Jesuits.

[6] Verhaeren, in his monograph on Rembrandt (1905), has suggested that the man of genius may, "in specially favourable conditions, create a new race, thanks to the happy deformation of his brain fixing itself first, by a propitious crossing, in his direct descendants, to be transmitted afterwards to a whole posterity."

[7] See Tancrede de Visan's interpretation in _L'Att.i.tude du Lyrisme contemporain_, pp. 119 ff.

CHAPTER IV

Some of the most eminent symbolists were strongly influenced by the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer[1] and Eduard von Hartmann. Their outlook on the world is not a whit more rosy than that of the naturalists. Viele-Griffin did, it is true, preach the doctrine that the principle of all things is activity; and that, since every "function in exercise" implies a pleasure, there cannot be activity without joy, even grief being good, for grief, too, is a spending of energy. Albert Mockel's doctrine of aspiration, moreover--his theory that the soul, constantly changing like a river, runs like a river to some far ocean of the future--is elevating and consoling; and is a step onward to the complete victory won over pessimism by Verhaeren and Maeterlinck. But when we read the first plays of Maeterlinck we must not forget that he is still a prisoner in the dark cave, with his back to the full light of the real which he was to turn round to later.

The first of these plays out of the darkness, _La Princesse Maleine_ (The Princess Maleine), a drama in five acts, came out in 1889 in a first edition of thirty copies which Maeterlinck himself, with the help of a friend, had printed for private circulation on a small hand-press.

Iwan Gilkin, to whose _d.a.m.nation de l'Artiste_, published in 1890, Maeterlinck was to dedicate his first critique, was the first to a.n.a.lyse it in _La Jeune Belgique_; and he was not wrong when he called it "an important work which marks a date in the history of the contemporary theatre." But it was Octave Mirbeau's famous article in _Figaro_ which made Maeterlinck. Literally, he awoke and found himself famous. The trumpet-blast that awoke the world and frightened Maeterlinck into deeper shyness, was this:

"I know nothing of M. Maurice Maeterlinck. I know not whence he is nor how he is. Whether he is old or young, rich or poor, I know not. I only know that no man is more unknown than he; and I know also that he has created a masterpiece, not a masterpiece labelled masterpiece in advance, such as our young masters publish every day, sung to all the notes of the squeaking lyre--or rather of the squeaking flute of our day; but an admirable and a pure eternal masterpiece, a masterpiece which is sufficient to immortalise a name, and to make all those who are an-hungered for the beautiful and the great rise up and call this name blessed; a masterpiece such as honest and tormented artists have, sometimes, in their hours of enthusiasm, dreamed of writing, and such as up to the present not one of them has written. In short, M. Maurice Maeterlinck has given us the greatest work of genius of our time, and the most extraordinary and the most simple also, comparable, and--shall I dare to say it--superior in beauty to whatever is most beautiful in Shakespeare. This work is called _La Princesse Maleine_. Are there in all the world twenty persons who know it? I doubt it."[2]

The Pre-Raphaelite atmosphere of the play will escape no one. At the time he wrote it Maeterlinck had covered the walls of his study with pictures taken from Walter Crane's books for children; and he had enhanced their effect by framing them under green-tinted gla.s.s. He found his source in the English translation of one of Grimm's fairy-tales, that which tells of the fair maid Maleen.[3] He has changed the Low German atmosphere of the tale to one suggested vaguely by Dutch, Scandinavian, and English names. He has imported, as the instigator of all the evil, a copy of Queen Gertrude in Hamlet. This is Anne, the dethroned Queen of Jutland, who has taken refuge at the Court of King Hjalmar at Ysselmonde. She soon has the old king in her power; and at the same time she lays traps for his son, Prince Hjalmar. The latter is betrothed to Princess Maleine, the daughter of King Marcellus; but at the banquet to celebrate the betrothal a fierce quarrel between the two kings breaks out, the consequence of which is a war in which King Hjalmar kills Marcellus and lays his realm waste. Before the outbreak of the war, however, Marcellus had immured Maleine, because she would not forget Prince Hjalmar, together with her nurse, in an old tower from which the two women, loosening the stones with their finger-nails, escape. They go wandering until they arrive at the Castle of Ysselmonde; and here Maleine becomes serving-woman to Princess Uglyane, the daughter of Queen Anne. Uglyane is about to be married to Prince Hjalmar; but Maleine makes herself known to him, and he is so happy that he believes he is "up to the heart in Heaven." At a Court festival a door opens and Princess Maleine is seen in white bridal garments; the queen pretends to be kind to her, makes an attempt to poison her which is only half successful, and finally strangles her. Prince Hjalmar finds the corpse, and stabs the queen and himself; and the old king asks whether there will be salad for breakfast.

It is not astonis.h.i.+ng that Octave Mirbeau thought the play was in the Shakespearian style. The resemblance is striking. Hjalmar is clearly modelled on Hamlet. The nurse is a mere copy of the nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_. There is a clown. There is the same changing of scenes as in Shakespeare. Dire portents accompany the action: there is a comet shedding blood over the castle, there is a rain of stars; there is the same eclipse of the moon as heralded the fall of Caesar; and if the graves are not tenantless, as they were in Rome, someone says they are going to be. It would be easy to draw up a list of apparent reminiscences. Notwithstanding this Rene Doumic is quite wrong when he talks of the drama being made with rags of Shakespeare. Maeterlinck has simply taken his requisites from Shakespeare. There are two things in which Maeterlinck is quite original: the dialogue, and the aesthetic intention.