CHAPTER II

[16]It was in 1886, too, that Gustave Kahn with the collaboration of Jean Moréas and Paul Adam, founded the reviewLe Symboliste.

[17]A translation of Whitman'sEnfants d'Adam, by Jules Laforgue, appeared inLa Voguein 1886. Stuart Merrill personally handed this translation to Whitman, who was delighted. (SeeLe Masque, Série ii, Nos. 9 and 10, 1912). Vielé-Griffin's first translation of Whitman appeared in November, 1888, in.La Revue indépendante; another translation of his appeared afterwards inLa Cravache. A translation of Whitman had appeared in theRevue des deux Mondesin the reign of Napoleon III.

[18]He himself told Huret thatLa Princesse Maleinewas written invers libresconcealed typographically as prose.

On his return to Belgium, Maeterlinck spent his winters in Ghent, in the house of his parents; his summers in the family villa at the village of Oostacker.

He now (1887) became, acquainted with Georges Rodenbach, who introduced him to the directors ofLa Jeune Belgique. He was in no hurry to write, however; in three years the magazine only published three poems, still in regular verse, from his pen. These were included later inSerres Chaudes, as also were the few poems in regular verse which appeared in the anthology of Belgian verse,Le Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique, published in 1887 under the auspices ofLa Jeune Belgique.

The fact that by 1887 it was possible to compile such an anthology is remarkable; for before 1880 Belgium, from the point of view of literature, was a desert. But in 1879 certain noisy students at the University of Louvain (Verhaeren, Gilkin, Giraud, Ernest van Dyck,[1]EdmondDeman,[2]and others) put their heads together and founded a bantam magazine,La Semaine des Etudiants.[3]This magazine was the beginning of the modern movement in Belgian literature. In October of the "following year, another student, who, when his identity was disclosed, turned out to be Max Waller, brought out a hostile magazine,Le Type; and the fight between the rivals became so merciless that the University authorities suppressed them both. Max Waller, however, nothing daunted, went to Brussels, and acquiredLa Jeune Belgique, a review that had been founded by students of Brussels University, made friends with his antagonists ofLa Semaine, and associated them with himself in the editing of his review. Georges Eekhoud, Georges Rodenbach, and other writers joined them; andLa Jeune Belgiquewent on with its task of fighting the Philistine. Max Waller died in 1889; and when Gilkin became editor in 1891, it became the organ of the Parnassians in Belgium, while the symbolists (French as well as Belgian) enriched the pages of La Wallonie, which Albert Mockel had founded in Liège in 1886.

We have seen, from Charles van Lerberghe's letter to Adolphe van Bever, that Maeterlinckbegan by writing "short stories something like Maupassant's."The Massacre of the Innocentsis realistic. Verhaeren, too, had discovered himself when, a student at Louvain, he read Maupassant's poems. His first book,Les Flamandes, made a critic say that the poet had burst on the world like an abcess. And the Belgians had in Camille Lemonnier a realist whose novels are as uncompromising as those of Zola. At the time when Maeterlinck began to write Lemonnier was, as they called him, the field-marshal of Belgian literature. In the spring of 1883, the jury whose duty it was to award a prize for the best work published during the last five years decided that no book had been published which was sufficiently meritorious. It was felt that this was an official insult to Belgian letters, and particularly to Camille Lemonnier, who had published various works of striking merit in the five years concerned.A banquet de guerreto Lemonnier was arranged byLa Jeune Belgique, and there were two hundred and twelve subscribers. The banquet took place on the 27th May, 1883, and this event may be said to mark, not only the triumph of naturalism in Belgium, but also the fact that the élite of the Belgians were now conscious of the renaissance of their literature.[4]It will be Maeterlinck's task, after his return toBelgium, to react against this naturalism, and to write works which precipitate the decay of naturalism, not in Belgium only, but in the whole world; he and other Belgians, until Belgian literature becomes, as it was in the time of chivalry, "when the muse was the august sister of the sword, and stanzas were like bright staircases climbed, in pomp and epic fires, by verses casqued with silver like knights,"[5]the most discussed, the most suggestive literature in Europe.[6]

In this reaction against naturalism in Belgium, Maeterlinck's work was hardly more effective than the dreamy poetry of Georges Rodenbach. It was not till 1887 that Rodenbach definitely left Belgium for Paris, and by that time he was a force in Belgian literature. No doubt he influenced Maeterlinck;[7]he too was a mystic and a poet of silence. Rodenbach compares his soul with half-transparent water, with the water shut up in anaquarium: "he stands in silent fear before the riddle of this 'âme sous-marine,' surmising a deep and mysterious abyss, at the bottom of which a priceless treasure of dreams is lying buried, under the shimmering surface that quietly reflects images of the world. He complains that the poor immensurable soul knows itself so little, knows no more of its life than the water-lily knows of the surface it floats on:

"'Ah! ce que l'âme sait d'elle-même est si peuDevant l'immensité de sa vie inconnue!'

"Then he would fain descend into this unknown world, seek through the dark deeps, dive for the treasures which slumber there perhaps.... But it remains a longing, a wish, a dream:

"'Je rêve de plonger jusqu'au fond de mon âmeOù des rêves sombres ont perdu leur trésor."

"And so Rodenbach remains standing on the surface, staring at the deeps, but without seeing anything in them other than the trembling reflection of the things around him."[8]

Maeterlinck, as we shall see, is also the poet of the soul; he sees it under a bell-jar as Rodenbach saw it in an aquarium; but Maeterlinck does not stand gazing at the unknown waters: he dives into the deeps, and brings back the treasures which Rodenbach surmised.

[1]The famous Wagner tenor.

[2]The Brussels publisher.

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

[4]Iwan Gilkin,Quinze années de littérature.

[5]Albert Giraud,Hors du Siècle.

[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 âme avait étéDe 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."

[7]Cf. Rodenbach's;

"Je vis comme si mon âme avait étéDe 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.

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 inLa Pléiadeand inLe Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique.

The subject of this collection of verse, as, indeed, of the dramas and the essays which were to follow, isthe soul. Rodenbach, we remember, saw the soul prisoned in an aquarium, "at the bottom of the ponds of dream," reflected in the glass 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 sunshine, or of mighty forests lying with not a leaf stirring overthe roses of passion 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 canal 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 mass 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 thegaminerieof such poets as Théodore 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 Théodore Hannon, extending the doctrine that perfumes sing, makes a perfume blare:

"Opoponax! nom très bizarreEt parfum plus bizarre encor!Opoponax, le son du corEst pâle auprès de ta fanfare!"

A goodly list of absurdities could be collectedfromSerres Chaudesalso, if the collector detached odd passages 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 onThe 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 assume 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 asserted 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 assimilation; 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 inSerres Chaudesmust of necessity seem diseased; just as the greater part of Tennyson's poetry must of necessity seem ordinary to us. How many "Dickhäuter" have called Hoffmansthal's poetry diseased? If it is, so is Yeats's. Turn from Robert Bridges's poems of outdoor life—the noble 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 eventsSerres 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, opiniondiffers. Some good critics who are not prone 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-ships passesover the dahlias of submarine forests;And I am for a moment in the shadow of whalesgoing 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 (Tancrède de Visan suggests the Song of Solomon) this method has been applied successfully. The poems inSerres Chaudesare experiments.

[1]Cf. Rodenbach,Le Règne du Silence, p. 1:"Mais les choses pourtant entre le cadre d'orOnt un air de souffrir de leur vie inactive;Le miroir qui les aime a borné leur essorEn un recul de vie exigüe et captive..."

[1]Cf. Rodenbach,Le Règne du Silence, p. 1:

"Mais les choses pourtant entre le cadre d'orOnt un air de souffrir de leur vie inactive;Le miroir qui les aime a borné leur essorEn un recul de vie exigüe et captive..."

[2]Gérard Harry, p. 19.Le Masque, Série ii, No. 5: "jeune encore, il avait sollicité les fonctions de juge de paix, mais le gouvernement belge, prévoyant son destin de poète, les lui avait généreusement refusées, et pour reconnaître ce service, Maeterlinck ne lui rend que mépris et dédain et refuse même les distinctions honorifiques les plus hautes, celles qu'on n'accorde généralement qu'aux très grands industriels ou aux très vieux militaires ou politiciens."

[3]"Chambres pleines de songe! Elles vivent vraimentEn des rêves plus beaux que la vie ambiante,Grandissant toute chose au Symbole, voyantDans chaque rideau pâle une CommunianteAux falbalas de mousseline s'éployantQui communie au bord des vitres, de la Lune!"—Le Règne du Silence, p. 4.

[3]

"Chambres pleines de songe! Elles vivent vraimentEn des rêves plus beaux que la vie ambiante,Grandissant toute chose au Symbole, voyantDans chaque rideau pâle une CommunianteAux falbalas de mousseline s'éployantQui communie au bord des vitres, de la Lune!"—Le Règne du Silence, p. 4.

[4]They make one think of what Novalis wrote: "poems unconnected, yet with associations, 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'sMaeterlinck, 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 wroteSerres Chaudesdisease was fashionable, 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 Tancrède de Visan's interpretation inL'Attitude du Lyrisme contemporain, pp. 119 ff.

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. Vielé-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 thedark 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 whoseDamnation de l'Artiste, published in 1890, Maeterlinck was to dedicate his first critique, was the first to analyse it inLa 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 inFigarowhich 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 nameblessèd; 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 calledLa 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 glass. 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 isbetrothed 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 astonishing 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 ofthe nurse inRomeo 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 Cæsar; 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 René 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 æsthetic intention.

Shakespeare flows along in lyrical and rhetorical sentences. Maeterlinck's sentences are short, often unfinished, leaving much to be guessed at; and they are the common speech of everyday life, containing no archaic or poetic diction. It is no doubt quite true that French people do not talk in this style; but, as van Hamel points out, it is the language of the taciturn Flemish peasants among whom the poet was living when he wrote the play. Maeterlinck has himself[4]criticised "the astonished repeating of words which gives the personages the appearance of rather deaf somnambulists for ever being shocked out of a painful dream."...

"However," he continues, "this want of promptitude in hearing and replying is intimately connected with their psychology and the somewhat haggard idea they have of the universe." It is already thatinterior dialogueof which he showed such a mastery in his next plays: the characters grope for words and stammer fragments, but we know by what they do not say what is happening in their souls. "It is closely connected with what Maeterlinck has written about Silence.[5]This second, unspoken dialogue, which, as a matter of fact, for our poet is the real one, is made possible by various expedients: by pauses, gestures, and by other indirect means of this nature. Most of all, however, by the spoken word itself, and by a dialogue which in the whole course of dramatic development hitherto has been employed for the first time by Maeterlinck and, beside him, by Ibsen. It is a dialogue marked by an unheard-of triviality andbanality of the flattest everyday speech, which, however, in the midst of this second, inner dialogue, is invested with an indefinable magic."[6]

If the dialogue points forward to the theories propounded inThe Treasure of the Humble, the melodrama of some of the scenes and the bloody catastrophe to which they tend is directly opposed to these theories. Too transparently throughout the play the intention of the poet is to horrify. Apart from the comets and other phenomena which portend ruin, he is constantly heightening the mystery by something eerie, all of it, no doubt, on close inspection, attributable to natural causes, but, if the truth must be told, perilously near the ridiculous. The weeping willows, and the owls, and the bats, and the fearsome swans, and the croaking ravens, and the sevenbéguines, and the cemetery, and the sheep among the tombs, and the peacocks in the cypresses, and the marshes, and the will-o'-the-wisps are an excessive agglomeration. But the atmosphere is finely suggested:

MALEINE: I am afraid!...HJALMAR: But we are in the park....MALEINE: Are there walls round the park?HJALMAR: Of course; there are walls and moats round the park.MALEINE: And nobody can get in?HJALMAR: No;—but there are plenty of unknown things that get in all the same.

In the murder scene[7]the falling of the lily in the vase, the scratching of the dog at the door, are some of the things that are effective. And if Webster's manner is worth all the praise it has had, surely the murder in this play is tense tragedy.

This scene is only by its bourgeois language different from the accepted Shakespearian conception of tragedy. But, as we have said, Maeterlinck's intention differs from that of Shakespeare, from whom he has borrowed most: Shakespeare's intention, in his tragedies, was to move his audience by the spectacle of human beings acting under the mastery of various passions; Maeterlinck's intention is to suggest the helplessness of human beings, and the impossibility of their resistance in the hands of Fate. Maleine—who is no heavier than a bird—who cannot hold a flower in her hand—is the poor human soul, the prey of Fate. The King and Hjalmar also are the prey of Fate; Queen Anne not less so, for crime, like love, is one of the strings by which Fate works her puppets. Each is helpless; they feel, dimly, that something which they do not understand is moving them: hence their groping speech.

And the essential tragedy is this: the perverse and the wicked and the good and the pure alike are moved to disaster, as though they were dreaming and wished to awaken but could not, byunseen powers. Life is a nightmare. In Grimm's tale the wicked princess had her head chopped off; but the fairy-tale was a dream dreamt in the infancy of the soul; now the soul is awakening to the consciousness of its destiny; and we are beginning to feel that there is no retribution and no reward, that there is only Fate. And it is the young and the happy and the good and pure that Fate takes first, simply because they are not so passive as the unhappy and the wicked.[8]

Given the intentions of the dramatist, one should not ask for characterisation in the accepted sense. Characters!—Maeterlinck himself told Huret that his intention was to write "a play in Shakespeare's manner for a marionette theatre." That is to say, the real actors are behind the scenes, the forces that move the marionettes. In a Punch and Judy show, of course, you can guess at the character of the showman by the voice he imputes to the dolls; but when the showman is Death, or Fate, or God, or something for which we have no name, there is no possibility of characterisation—we can only judge by what the showman makes the dolls do whether he is a good or an evil being. The fact that Hjalmar is modelled on Hamlet, and Queen Anne on Queen Gertrude only proves that the dramatist is not yet full master of his own powers; and, if we lookclosely, we shall find that the unconscious puppets resemble their living patterns only as shadows resemble the shapes that cast them. We need not expect from characters that shadow forth states of mind—feelings of helplessness, terror, uneasiness, "blank misgivings..." sadness—the deliberate or headlong action we are accustomed to in beings of flesh and blood. What action there seems to be is illusory—if Maleine escapes from the tower, it is only to fall deeper into the power of her evil destiny; if, by a move as though a hand were put forth in the dark, a faint stirring of her passivity, she wins back her lover, it is only to lose him and herself the more. We shall see that Maeterlinck in some of his next dramas dispenses with seen action altogether: inThe Intruder, for instance, the only action, the death of the mother, takes place behind the scenes; inThe Interiorthe action, the daughter's suicide, has taken place when the play opens.

There is, however, some rudimentary characterisation inPrincess Maleine. The doting old king is not an original creation; but the drivelling of his terror-stricken conscience should be effective (as melodrama) on the stage. "Look at their eyes!" he says, pointing to the corpses which strew the stage, "they are going to leap on me like frogs." And his longing for salad is probably immortal....

[1]Maeterlinck told Huret that he had been influenced by Schopenhauer "qui arrive jusqu'à vous consoler de la mort."

[2]Figaro, 24th August, 1890.

[3]Pronounced in German like the FrenchMaleine.

[4]Preface toThéâtre, p. 2.

[5]In Swedenborg's mysticism, the literal meanings of words are only protecting veils which hide their inner meanings. See "Le Tragique Quotidien" (inLe Trésor des Humbles) pp. 173-4. That Maeterlinck was meditating the famous chapter on "Silence" inThe Treasure of the Humblewhen he wrotePrincess Maleinemay be inferred from Act ii. sc. 6: "I want to see her at last in presence of the evening.... I want to see if the night will make her think. May it not be that there is a little silence in her heart?"

[6]Schlaf'sMaeterlinck, p. 31.

[7]Suggested, perhaps, by the strangling of Little Snow-white in Grimm's story.

[8]Preface toThéâtre, pp. 4-5.

According to the accepted dramatic canons, a play is a tragedy when death allays the excitement aroused in us by the action, the whole course of which moves onward to this inevitable end. In such tragedies death is a relief from the stormy happenings which bring it; it is not in itself represented as profoundly interesting—it is not an aim, but a result, "it is our death that guides our life," says Maeterlinck, "and life has no other aim than our death."[1]Not only the careers, crowded with events, of the great, but also the simple, quiet lives of lowly people are raised into high significance by this common bourne. Death is not so much a catastrophe as a mystery. It casts its shadow over the whole of our finite existence; and beyond it lies infinity.

Death, however, is only one of the mighty mysteries, the unknown powers, "the presences which are not to be put by," which rule our destinies. Love is another. To these two cosmicforces are devoted a series of dramas which were in 1901-2 collected by Maeterlinck in three volumes under the title ofThéâtre. In the preface[2]to the collection Maeterlinck has himself interpreted the plays with a clearness and fullness which leaves the reader in no doubt as to his aims.

"In these plays," he says, "faith is held in enormous powers, invisible and fatal. No one knows their intentions, but the spirit of the drama assumes they are malevolent, attentive to all our actions, hostile to smiles, to life, to peace, to happiness. Destinies which are innocent but involuntarily hostile are here joined, and parted to the ruin of all, under the saddened eyes of the wisest, who foresee the future but can change nothing in the cruel and inflexible games which Love and Death practise among the living. And Love and Death and the other powers here exercise a sort of sly injustice, the penalties of which—for this injustice awards no compensation—are perhaps nothing but the whims of fate...."This Unknown takes on, most frequently, the form of Death. The infinite presence of death, gloomy, hypocritically active, fills all the interstices of the poem. To the problem of existence no reply is made except by the riddle of its annihilation."

"This Unknown takes on, most frequently, the form of Death. The infinite presence of death, gloomy, hypocritically active, fills all the interstices of the poem. To the problem of existence no reply is made except by the riddle of its annihilation."

There is another thing to be remembered (this is a repetition, but it is necessary) in reading Maeterlinck's early plays. Behind the scene which he chooses with varying degrees of clearness, liesPlato's famous image—the image of a cavern on whose walls enigmatic shadows are reflected.[3]In this cavern man gropes about in exile, with his back to the light he is seeking.

The mysterious coming of death is the theme ofThe Intruder, a play by Maeterlinck which was published in 1890. It appeared as the first of two plays in a volume calledLes Aveugles(The Sightless). This is the name of the second play in the book; but the grandfather inThe Intrudertoo is blind, and through both plays runs the idea that we are blind beings groping in the dark (in Plato's cavern), and that those who see least see most.

The subject ofThe Intrudercan be told in a few words. In a dark room in an old castle are sitting the blind grandfather, the father, the uncle, and the three daughters. In the adjoining room lies the mother who has recently been confined. She has been at death's door; but at last the doctors say the danger is over, and all but the grandfather are confident. He thinks she is not doing well.... he has heard her voice. They think he is querulous. The uncle is more anxious about the child: he has scarcely stirred since he was born, he has not cried once, he is like a wax baby. The sister is expected to arrive at any minute. The eldest daughter watches for her from the window.It is moonlight, and she can see the avenue as far as the grove of cypresses. She hears the nightingales. A gentle breeze stirs in the avenue; the trees tremble a little. The grandfather remarks that he can no longer hear the nightingales, and the daughter is afraid someone has entered the garden. She sees no one, but somebody must be passing near the pond, for the swans are afraid, and all the fish dive suddenly. The dogs do not bark; she can see the house-dog crouching at the back of his kennel. The nightingales continue silent—there is a silence of death—it must be a stranger frightening them, says the grandfather. The roses shed their leaves. The grandfather feels cold; but the glass door on to the terrace will not shut—the joiner is to come to-morrow, he will put it right. Suddenly the sharpening of a scythe is heard outside—it must be the gardener preparing to mow the grass. The lamp does not burn well. A noise is heard as of someone entering the house, but no one comes up the stairs. They ring for the servant. They hear her steps, and the grandfather thinks she is not alone. The father opens the door; she remains on the landing. She is alone. She says no one has entered the house, but she has closed the door below, which she had found open. The father tells her not to push the door to; she denies that she is doing so. The grandfather, who, though he is blind, is consciousof light, thinks they are putting the lamp out. He asks whether the servant, who has gone downstairs, is in the room: it had seemed to him that she was sitting at the table. He cannot believe that no one has entered. He asks why they have put the light out. He is filled with an unendurable desire to see his daughter, but they will not let him—she is sleeping. The lamp goes out. They sit in the darkness. Midnight strikes, and at the last stroke of the clock they seem to hear a noise as of someone rising hastily. The grandfather maintains that someone has risen from, his chair. Suddenly the child is heard crying, crying in terror. Hurried steps are heard in the sick woman's chamber. The door of it is opened, the light from it pours into the room, and on the threshold appears a Sister of Charity, who makes the sign of the Cross to announce the mother's death.

Already inThe Princess Maleinethe miraculous happenings could all be explained by natural causes. Still more so inThe Intruder. It was not the reaper Death who was sharpening his scythe, but the gardener. If the lamp goes out, it is because there is no oil in it. Accompanying the naturalness of the atmosphere (the atmosphere that is natural when a patient is in danger of dying), there is the naturalness of the dialogue. The family is worn out with anxious watching:how natural then is the sleepy tone of the talking, which is only quickened somewhat by the apparent irritability of the grandfather:

THE FATHER: He is nearly eighty.THE UNCLE: No wonder he's eccentric.THE FATHER: He's like all blind people.THE UNCLE: They think too much.THE FATHER: They've too much time on their hands.THE UNCLE: They've nothing else to do.THE FATHER: It's their only way of passing the time.THE UNCLE: It must be terrible.THE FATHER: I suppose you get used to it.THE UNCLE: I dare say.THE FATHER: They are certainly to be pitied.

In this play, as also inThe Sightless, and later on inThe Life of the Bees, Maeterlinck shows himself a master of irony. The passage just quoted is an example.

To Maeterlinck, with reference toThe Intruder, has been applied what Victor Hugo said to Baudelaire after he had readThe Flowers of Evil: "You have created a new shudder." Certainly, the newfrissonis there; but was it Maeterlinck who created it? It will be well to go into this question; for Maeterlinck, in connection withThe Intruder, has been charged with plagiarism.

The Intruder first appeared inLa Walloniefor January, 1890. In the same periodical for January, 1889, that is, exactly a year before, hadappearedLes Flaireurs, a drama in three acts by Maeterlinck's friend, Charles van Lerberghe. It is dedicated "to the poet Maurice Maeterlinck." The title is annotated: "Légende originale et drame en 3 actes pour le théâtre des fantoches." Here, to begin with, we have a "drama for marionettes." Maeterlinck seems to have first used the word "marionette" in connection with his plays when undergoing cross-examination by Jules Huret, whoseEnquêtewas published in 1891: when writingPrincess Maleine, he said, he had wanted to write "a play in Shakespeare's manner for marionettes." Maeterlinck and van Lerberghe were seeing each other nearly every day at the timeLes Flaireurswas being written; and there is nothing to show that they did not discuss their theories of the drama; it is only certain that with regard to the idea, superb irony, of a theatre for marionettes, thepublishedpriority rests with van Lerberghe. Van Lerberghe, however, was charged with having imitated Maeterlinck; and it was only when Maeterlinck himself proclaimed the priority ofLes Flaireurs[4]that the charge of plagiarism wasturned against him. Now the fact is that Maeterlinck, to a certain extent, collaborated inLes Flaireurs.

The subject of the two plays is identical; both symbolise the coming of death to a woman. But each is entirely independent. InLes Flaireursdeath is expected; inThe Intruderit is not expected. In van Lerberghe's play resistance is offered to visible personifications of death; in Maeterlinck's play resistance is impossible, because death is invisible. The first play is full of brawling noise, and peasant slang, and the action is violent: the second is only a succession of whispers tearing the web of silence;[5]nothing visible happens, there is only expectancy. In short, one play is for the senses; the other is for the soul. The charge of plagiarism is absolutely unfounded: it is only a case of friendly rivalry in the working out of an idea—the tale indeed goes that the idea occurred to the two friends simultaneously. If it really was a game of skill, it would be hard to say who was victor: each play is a masterpiece.

The scene ofLes Flaireursis laid in a very poor cottage. It is a stormy night; the rain whips the windows, the wind howls, and a dog is barking inthe distance. The room is lit by two candles. Loud knocking at the door. A girl jumps out of the bed with gestures of terror. She is in her night-shirt; her fair hair is unbound. She asks: "Who is there?" and "The Voice," after some beating about the bush, answers: "I'm the man with the water." The voice of the mother, who thinks it is Jesus Christ, is heard from the bed urging the daughter to let Him in. She refuses, and the man answers that he will wait. Ten o'clock sounds, and the daughter puts the two candles out. ACT II. Knocking at the door again. The two candles are relit, and the daughter is seen standing against the bed, at watch, with her face turned towards the door. A voice is heard demanding admittance. "You said you would wait," says the girl. "Why, I've only just come!" answers the voice. She asks who he is, and he replies, "The man with the linen." The mother again urges her to open the door—she thinks it is the Virgin Mary. The daughter is obstinate, and the voice cries, "All right, I'll wait." ACT III. Louder knocks, and a voice again. This time it is "The man with the ... thingumbob." The mother still thinks it is the Virgin Mary. She bids her daughter raise the curtain: and the shadow of the hearse is projected on the wall. The mother asks what the shadow is; the daughter drops the curtain. The voicenow answers brutally: "I'm the man with the coffin, that's whatIam." The neighing of horses is heard. The girl dashes herself against the door, but it is beaten in. An arm is seen putting a bucket into the room. Midnight strikes. The old woman utters a hoarse cry; the daughter, who had been holding the door back, rushes to the bed; the door falls with a mighty din, and extinguishes the two candles.

It will be seen that whereas inThe Intruderthere is nothing which cannot be explained by natural causes, the symbolism ofLes Flaireursis untrue—death doesnotcome with bucket, linen, and coffin. Death doesnotbreak the door in. This only amounts to saying that Maeterlinck's method is less romantic than that of his friend. Maeterlinck's close realism, however, does give him certain advantages—the helplessness of the grandfather, for instance, is far more pathetic than the spectacle of the girl dashing herself against the door, though it does not move us so directly.

The Intruderwas first acted in French at Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art in Paris, on the 20th May, 1891, at a historic performance of this and other playlets for the benefit of Paul Verlaine and the painter, Paul Gauguin.

In the second play of the 1890 volume,The Sightless, which was first acted on the 7th December,1891, at the Théâtre d'Art, we have again the mystery of death; but the main theme would seem to be the mystery of human life—"this earthly existence is conceived as a deep, impenetrable night of ignorance and uncertainty."[6]The fable is this:

In a very ancient forest in the north, under a sky profoundly starred, is sitting a very agèd priest, wrapped in an ample black cloak. He is leaning his head and the upper part of his body against the bole of a huge, cavernous oak. His motionless face has the lividity of wax; his lips are violet and half open. His eyes seem bleeding under a multitude of immemorial griefs and tears. His white hair falls in rigid and scanty locks over a face more illumined and more weary than all that surrounds him in the attentive silence of the desolate forest. His emaciated hands are rigidly joined on his thighs. To the right of him six blind old men are sitting on stones, stumps of trees, and dead leaves. To the left, separated from them by an unrooted tree and split boulders, six women who are likewise blind sit facing the old men. Three of these women are praying and moaning uninterruptedly. A fourth is extremely old; the fifth, in an attitude of speechless madness, holds a sleeping baby on her knees. The sixth is young and radiantly beautiful, and her hair floods her whole being. Most ofthem sit waiting, with their elbows on their knees, and their faces in their hands. Great funereal trees, yews, weeping willows, cypresses, cover them with faithful shadows. A cluster of tall and sickly asphodel are in blossom near the priest. The darkness is extraordinary, in spite of the moonlight which, here and there, glints through the darkness of the foliage.

The blind people are waiting for their priest to return. He is getting too old, the men murmur; they suspect that he has not been blest with the Best of sight himself of late. They are sure he has lost his way and is looking for it. They have walked a long time; they must be far from the asylum. He only talks to the women now; they ask them where he has gone to. The women do not know. He had told them he wanted to see the island for the last time before the sunless winter. He was uneasy because the storms had flooded the river, and because all the dikes seemed ready to burst. He has gone in the direction of the sea, which is so near that when they are silent they can hear it thudding on the rocks. Where are they? None of them know. When did they come to the island? They do not know, they were all blind when they came. They were not born here, they came from beyond the sea. They hear the asylum clock strike twelve; they do not know whether it is noon or midnight. They are frightenedat noises which they cannot understand. Suddenly the wind rises in the forest, and the sea is heard bellowing against the cliffs. The sea seems very near; they are afraid it will reach them. They are about to rise and try to go away when they hear a noise of hasty feet in the dead leaves. It is the dog of the asylum. It puts its muzzle on the knees of one of the blind men. Feeling it pull, he rises, and it leads him to the motionless priest. He touches the priest's cold face ... and they know that their guide is dead. The dog will not move away from the corpse. A squall whirls the dead leaves round. It begins to snow. They think they hear footsteps ... The footsteps seem to stop in their midst....

The Sightlessis a notable example of clear symbolism. The dead priest is religion. Religion is dead now in the midst of us; and we are without a guide and groping in the dark. "There is something which moves above our heads, but we cannot reach it." We are prisoners in a little finite space washed round by the Ocean of Infinity, whose mighty waters we can hear in our calm seasons. Above the dense forest somewhere rises a lighthouse (Wisdom). We have strayed from the asylum (that goodness which religion instilled in us when it was alive). The baby alone can see; but it cannot speak yet (the future will reveal).

The virtues and failings of humanity are hinted at with gentle irony. One blind man, when he goes out in the sunshine, suspects the great radiances; another prefers to stay near the good coal fire in the refectory.... The oldest blind woman dreams sometimes that she sees; the oldest blind man only sees when he dreams.... The young beauty smells the scent of flowers around them (the promptings of sense guide us; and the beautiful are the sensuous); one who was born blind only smells the scent of the earth (Philistines).... Heaven is mentioned, and all raise their heads towards the sky, except the three who were born blind—they keep their faces bent earthwards....

Lessing thought no man could write a good tragedy till he was thirty. Here are two written by a man of twenty-eight.

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