CHAPTER IX

[1]See note 3 below.

[2]One of the features which distinguish the poetry of the symbolists is the mixing ofgenres. Cf. the following fragment (p. 103 in Maeterlinck's translation): "One ought never to see a work of plastic art without music, nor listen to a work of music anywhere save in beautifully decorated halls."

[3]Cf. Dr van Dijk,Maeterlinck, pp. 26 ff.; "Now in order to find the life interior you must be at the other end of all your agitations, you must be behind your conscious thoughts, words, and deeds. Behind all that makes you finite, keeps you finite, lies the infinite; the ocean of the infinite flows round you there, and there lie the ice-fields of mystery, the great treasures of the unconscious, there are the deeps of the interior sea.Thereis no longer that which has an end, a bound, a limit, that which is shared and divided, that which is joined and separated,thereis perfect identity of all things,thereis everywhere and always identical mystery,thereGod is. There it is, too, says Maeterlinck, that we first understand each other, for subtle, tender bonds are there between all souls.... When you now, with Maeterlinck, turn your back on the conscious in every form, it follows that even the best word will always be a more or less disturbing wrinkle, a wrinkle that darkens the unmoving silent waters of the unconscious. Think and put your thoughts into words, and you must move further and further in the direction of the conscious; that is, in the direction of that which is limited and the limiting." Cf. one of the opening sentences of the essay "La Morale mystique": "As soon as we express something, we diminish it strangely. We think we have dived to the depth of the abysses, and when we reach the surface again the drop of water glittering at the end of our pale fingers no longer resembles the sea it came from."

[4]InThe Invisible Goodness.

[5]According to Mieszner, Aglavaine is a "Mannweib," Selysette a "Nurweib."

[6]Is the name from the GermanVolkslied"Herzogin von Orlamünde"?

Towards the end of 1896 Maeterlinck settled in Paris. His life here was no less retired than it had been in Ghent. A new light had come into his life.The Treasure of the Humblehad been dedicated to a Parisian lady, Georgette Leblanc. To her also he dedicatesSagesse et Destinée(Wisdom and Destiny), in 1898, in these words:

"To you I dedicate this book, which is, so to speak, your work. There is a higher and a more real collaboration than that of the pen—that of thought and example. I have not been constrained to imagine painfully the resolutions and the actions of an ideal sage, or to draw from my heart the moral of a beautiful dream perforce a little vague. It has sufficed me to listen to your words. It has sufficed me to let my eyes follow you attentively in your life; they were then following the movements, the gestures, the habits of wisdom itself."

The book was a great surprise for Maeterlinck's already world-wide community. "By the side ofThe Treasure of the Humble," wrote van Hamel, "it gives you the impression of a catechism bythe side of a breviary." Not the unconscious, but the conscious, occupies the first place. The earlier philosophy is directly contradicted.[1]Whereas inThe Treasure of the Humblewe read of "the august, everyday life of a Hamlet ... who has the time to live because he does not act," we now hear of "the miserable blindness of Hamlet," who, though he had more intelligence than all those around him, was no wise man, for he did not, by exercising will-power, prevent the horrible tragedy. In the first book of essays action hinders life; in the second, to act is to think more rapidly and more completely than thought can do. To act is to think with one's whole being, not with the brain alone.

"It is our death that guides our life, and our life has no other object than death," Maeterlinck had said. Now he can write: "When shall we give up the idea that death is more important than life, and that misfortune is greater than happiness?... Who has told us that we ought to measure life by the standard of death, and not death by the standard of life?"[2]

That a great change had taken place in Maeterlinck's conception of the universe would be clear to anyone who read his works consecutively. He himself wrote to G. van Hamel, soon after the publication ofSagesse et Destinée, to this effect. Van Hamel does not give the exact words, but reports the gist of the letter as follows:

"The mysterious seems to have lost a great deal of its attraction for him. Only the great, the 'metaphysical mystery,' 'the unknowable essence of reality,' continues to chain him. But the many mysteries which have dominated the mind and the life of men, and which possess no sufficient reality, he would now banish from art as well. Fate, divine justice, and all those other obsolete ideas have no longer the power to dominate even the imagination. Life, the life of the artist too, must be cleansed of all that is unreal."

Maeterlinck added to the above (these words are quoted in French):

"I do not know whether I am doing better or worse; all I do know is that I want to express things more and more simple, things more and more human, less and less brilliant, more and more true."[3]

The change in Maeterlinck is generally ascribed to the inspiration of Mme Georgette Leblanc. He has himself drawn her portrait in a chapterof a later book,Le double Jardin. In 1904 she published a novel,Le Choix de la Vie; it is full of the words "beauty" and "happiness."

Happiness is what humanity was made for, Maeterlinck teaches inWisdom and Destiny. Misery is an illness of humanity, just as illness is a misery of man. We ought to have doctors for human misery, just as we have doctors for illness. Because illness is common, it does not follow that we ought never to talk of health; and the fact that we live in the midst of misery is no reason why the moralist should not make happiness his starting-point. To be wise is to learn to be happy.

To be happy is only to have freed our soul from the unrest of unhappiness. To be happy we must learn to separate our exterior destiny from our moral destiny. Nothing happens to men except what they will shall happen to them. We have very little influence over a certain number of exterior events; but we have a very powerful action on what these events become in ourselves. It is what happens to most men that darkens or lightens their life; but the interior life of good men itself lightens all that happens to them. If you have been betrayed, it is not the treason that matters; it is the forgiveness that has come of it in your soul. Nothing happens which is not of the same nature as ourselves. Climb the mountainor descend to the village, you will find none but yourself on the highroads of chance.

In proportion as we become wise, we escape from some of our instinctive destinies. Every man who is able to diminish the blind force of instinct in himself, diminishes around him the force of destiny. Destiny has remained a barbarian; it cannot reach souls that have grown nobler than itself. That is why tragic poets rarely permit a sage to appear on the scene; no drama ever happens among sages, and the presence of the sage paralyses destiny. There is not a single tragedy in which fatality reigns; what the hero combats in all of them is not destiny, but wisdom. If predestination exists, it only exists in character; and character can be modified. Fatality obeys those who dare give it orders, and therefore there is no inevitable tragedy.

The shadow of destiny casts an enormous shadow over the valley it seems to drown in darkness, and in this shadow we are born; but many men can travel beyond it; and those who cannot may find happiness in wisdom which no catastrophe can reach.

But what is wisdom? Consciousness of oneself; knowledge of oneself. It is not reason: reason opens the door to wisdom. It is from the threshold of reason that all sages set out; but they travel in different directions. Reason gives birthto justice; wisdom gives birth to goodness. There is no love in reason; there is much in wisdom. Not reason, but love, must be the glass in which the flower of genuine wisdom is cultivated. It is true that reason is found at the root of wisdom; but wisdom is not the flower of reason. Wisdom is the light of love; love, and you will be wise.

And does the sage never suffer? He suffers; and suffering is one of the elements of his wisdom. It is not suffering we must avoid, but the discouragement—it brings to those who receive it like a master. People suffer little by suffering itself; they suffer enormously by the way they accept it. Misfortune comes to us, but it only does what it is ordered to do.

What is it that decides what suffering shall bring to us? Not reason, but our anterior life, which has formed our soul. Nothing is more just than grief; and our life waits till the hour strikes, as the mould awaits the molten bronze, to pay us our wage.

What if it be true that the sage be punished instead of being rewarded! What soul could be called good if it were sure of its reward? And who shall measure the happiness or unhappiness of the sage? When we put unhappiness in one side of the scales, each one of us lays down in the other the idea he has of happiness. The savage will lay alcohol, gunpowder, and feathers there;the civilised man gold and days of intoxication; but the sage will lay down a thousand things that we do not see, his whole soul perhaps, and even the unhappiness which he will have purified.

Let us be loath to welcome the wisdom and the happiness which are founded on the scorn of anything. Scorn, and renunciation, which is the infirm child of scorn, open to us the asylum of the old and weak. We should only have the right to scorn a joy when it would not even be possible for us to know that we scorned it. Renunciation is a parasite of virtue. As long as a man knows that he renounces, the happiness of his renunciation is born of pride. The supreme end of wisdom is not to renounce, but to find the fixed point of happiness in life. It is not by renouncing joys that we shall become wise; but by becoming wise we shall renounce, without knowing it, the joys that cannot rise to our level. Certain ideas on renunciation,[4]resignation, and sacrifice exhaust the noblest moral forces of humanity more than great vices and great crimes. Infinitely too much importance, for instance, is attached to the triumph of the spirit over the flesh;[5]and these allegedtriumphs are most often only total defeats of life. It is sad to die a virgin. But there must be no satisfaction of base instincts. NotI would like, butI willmust be the guiding star.

When the just is punished, we are troubled by the negation of a high moral law; but from this very negation a higher moral law is born immediately. With the suppression of punishment and reward is born the necessity of doing good for the sake of good. So teaches the book.

There is still mysticism in the kernel of this philosophy: the identity of the soul with the divine; but in its practical results it is a positivist, a realist philosophy. "There is nothing to hope for," we are told, "apart from truth. A soul that grows is a soul that comes nearer to truth." Death and the other mysteries are now only the points where our present knowledge ends; but we may hope that science will dispel our ignorance. In the meantime if we seclude ourselves from reality to dream of loveliness, the fair things we see will turn into ashes, like the roses that Alladine and Palomides saw in the caverns, at the first inrush of light. The most fatal ofthoughts is that which cannot be friend with reality.

The book is strongly anti-Christian in its rejection of what are called parasitic virtues—arbitrary chastity, sterile self-sacrifice, penitence, and others—which turn the waters of human morality from their course and force them into a stagnant pool. The saints were egotists, because they fled from life to shelter in a narrow cell; but it is contact with men which teaches us how to love God.[6]It is anti-ascetic too. Maeterlinck has the courage to say that a morbid virtue may do more harm than a healthy vice.[7]In this connection one might say of him what Stefan Zweig has said of Verhaeren:

"His whole evolution—which in this respect coincides with that of the great German poets, with Nietzsche and Dehmel—tends, not to the limitation of primordial instincts, but to their logical development."[8]

Perhaps the most tangible doctrine inWisdom and Destinyis that of salvation by love. Love is wisdom's nearest sister. Love feeds wisdom, andwisdom feeds love; and the loving and the wise embrace in their own light. "Ceux qui vivent d'amour vivent d'éternité," Maeterlinck might have said with Verhaeren.[9]The main difference between Maeterlinck's final philosophy and that of his great countryman is this: that whereas Maeterlinck, like Goethe, brings his disciple to the shores of the sea of serenity and leaves him in a state of calm, Verhaeren sees spiritualising forces in passion, in exaltation, in paroxysm, and teaches that to be calm is to diminish oneself.

Wisdom and Destinycontains few of the apparent absurdities which confuse the reader ofThe Treasure of the Humble; but whether all the ideas will escape contradiction in independent minds may be questioned. To give an instance: it is no doubt true that a man may fight destiny; but if a man does fight destiny, it might be argued that it is only because it is his destiny to fight destiny. Louis XVI. is given as an example of a victim of destiny. He was the victim of destiny because of his feebleness, blindness, and vanity. But why was he weak, blind, and vain? According to the creed abandoned by Maeterlinck, it was his fate to be weak, blind, and vain. InWisdom and Destinythe argument is: If he had beenwise... But howcana weak, blind, and vain man be wise? No wisdom on earth can make a fool anythingbut a fool. Character can be modified, urges Maeterlinck; and we must be content with that. Not a few of us, too, must feel that the stoic fortitude Maeterlinck would have us show when our loved ones die will seem less divine than the passionate despair once breathed into tearful numbers for lost Mystes.

"The destinies of humanity are contained in epitome in the existence of the humblest little animals," is a thought of Pascal which might well have suggested Maeterlinck'sLa Vie des Abeilles(The Life of the Bee). It appeared in 1901. Maeterlinck had kept bees for years; and continued to do so when he set up his abode at a villa in Gruchet-Saint-Siméon in Normandy.

The Life of the Beeis not a scientific treatise, though it is scientifically correct; it does not claim to bring new material; it is a simple account of the bees' short year from April to the last days of September, told by one who loves and knows them to those who, he assumes, have no intimate knowledge. His intention is to observe bees and see if his observations can throw light on the destinies of humanity.

To begin with, bees are incessantly working, each at a different trade. Those that seem most idle, as you watch them in an observation hive, have the most mysterious and fatiguing task ofall, to secrete and form the wax; just as there are some men (the thinkers) who appear useless, but who alone make it possible for a certain number of men to be useful.[10]

The bee is a creature of the crowd: isolate her and she will die of loneliness. From the city she derives an aliment that is as necessary to her as honey. (We remember that inWisdom and Destinysaints were called egotists because they fled from their fellow-men.) In the hive the individual is nothing. The bees are socialists, we shall find; they are as united as the good thoughts that dwell in the same soul; they have a collectivist policy. This was not always so; and even to-day there are savage bees who live in lonely wretchedness. The hive of to-day is perfect, though pitiless; it merges the individual in the republic, and the republic itself is regularly sacrificed to the abstract, immortal city of the future. The will of Nature clearly tends to the improvement of the race, but she shows at the same time that she cannot obtain this improvement except by sacrificing the liberty of the individual to the general interest. First, the individual must renounce his vices, which are acts of independence. Whereas the workers among the humble-bees, a lower order, do not dream of renouncing love, our domestic bee lives in perpetual chastity.

It is the "spirit of the hive" that rules the bees and all they do. It decrees that when the hour comes they shall "swarm." This desertion of the hive was previously thought to be an attack of fatal folly (we are in the habit of ascribing things we do not understand to "fatality"); but science has discovered (what may not science discover?) that it is a deliberate sacrifice of the present generation to the future generation. The god of the bees is the future. To this future everything is subordinated, with astonishing foresight, co-operation, and inflexibility. It is clear that the bees have will-power. You may see where this will-power, which is the "spirit of the hive," resides, if you place the careworn head of a virgin worker under the microscope: within this little head are the circumvolutions of the vastest and the most ingenious brain of the hive, the most beautiful, the most complicated brain which is in nature after that of man. Here again, as everywhere else in the world, where the brain is there is authority, the real strength, wisdom, and victory. Here again it is an almost invisible atom of that mysterious substance that organises and subjugates matter, and is able to create for itself a little triumphant and durable place amid, the stupendous and inert powers of nothingness and death.

The description of the swarming is very beautiful.When the beekeeper is collecting the bees from the bough they have settled on, he need not fear them. They are inoffensive because they are happy, and they are happy without knowing why: they are fulfilling the law. All creatures, great and small, have such a moment of blind happiness when Nature wishes to accomplish her ends. The bees are Nature's dupes; so are we.

Some observers, Lord Avebury for instance, do not estimate the intelligence of the bee as highly as Maeterlinck does; but the experiments on which they base their conclusions do not seem to Maeterlinck to be more decisive than the spectacle of the ravages of alcohol, or of a battlefield, would be to a superhuman observer trying to fix the limits of human intelligence. And then, think of the situation of the bee in the world: by the side of an extraordinary being who is always upsetting the laws of its nature. How should we behave if some Higher Being should foil our wisdom? And how do we know there is no such Higher Being, or more than one, who might be to us as indistinguishable as man, the great ape, and the bear are to the bee? It is certain that there are within us and around us influences and powers as dissimilar and as indistinguishable.

It is as interesting and as important to us to discover signs of intellect outside ourselves as it was to Robinson Crusoe to find the imprint of ahuman foot other than his own on the sandy beach of his island. When we study the intelligence of bees we study what is most precious in our own substance, an atom of that extraordinary matter which has the property of transfiguring blind necessity, of organising and multiplying life and making it more beautiful, of checking the obstinate force of death and the great irresponsible wave that rolls round in earth's diurnal course all eternally unconscious things.

This intelligence is the devouring force of the future. Do not say that mankind is deteriorating. Alcohol and syphilis, for instance, are accidents that the race will overcome; perhaps they are tests by which some of our organs, the nervous organs for instance, will profit, for life constantly profits by the ills it surmounts. A trifle may be discovered to-morrow which will make them innocuous. Confidence in life is the first of our duties. We have everything to hope from evolution. It will lessen exertion, insecurity, and wretchedness; it will increase comfort. To this end it will not hesitate to sacrifice the individual. And let us note that progress recorded by nature is never lost. Life is a constant progression, whither, we do not know.

The whole book is a powerful epic of brain force. It is easy, Maeterlinck concludes his message, to discover the preordained duty of anybeing. You can read it in the organ which distinguishes it, and to which all its other organs are subordinated. Just as it is written on the tongue, in the mouth, and in the stomach of the bee that its duty is to produce honey, so it is written in our eyes, our ears, our marrow, in every lobe of our head, in the whole nervous system of our body, that we have been created to transform what we absorb from the things of the earth into that strange fluid we call brain power. Everything has been sacrificed to that. Our muscles, our health, the agility of our limbs, bear the growing pain of its preponderance.

Now in this cult of the future and of the human brain which is to make man God, Maeterlinck is not alone. By a different route he has reached the same goal as Verhaeren. The "futurists" have based their manifesto on what these two Flemings teach; and though the futurists go to scandalous extremes they will do some good if they shock those good people who feed on classic lore into a suspicion that new ideals have sprung into being:

"Voici l'heure qui bout de sang et de jeunesse ...--------------------------------------------------Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu, déplaceL'équilibre ancien dont les âmes sont lasses;La nature paraît sculpterUn visage nouveau à son éternité."[11]

[1]Schrijver in hisMaeterlinck, pp. 54 ff., collects passages inThe Treasurewhich point forward toWisdom and Destiny.

[2]Sagesse et Destinée, p. 122. Cf. Verhaeren, "Un Matin" (Les Forces Tumultueuses):"Il me semble jusqu'à ce jour n'avoir vécuQue pour mourir et non pour vivre."

[2]Sagesse et Destinée, p. 122. Cf. Verhaeren, "Un Matin" (Les Forces Tumultueuses):

"Il me semble jusqu'à ce jour n'avoir vécuQue pour mourir et non pour vivre."

[3]Het Letterkundig Leven van Frankrijk, pp. 180-181. Cf. also Chapter VII of "L'Evolution du Mystère" inLe Temple Enseveli.

[4]In theBuried Temple, Chapter XXI, Maeterlinck says: "Nature rejects renunciation in all its forms, except that of maternal love."

[5]Cf. Chapter XXI of L'Inquiétude de notre Morale (inL'Intelligence des Fleurs): "We are no longer chaste, now that we have recognised that the work of the flesh, cursed during twenty centuries, is natural and legitimate. We no longer go out in search of resignation, of mortification, of sacrifice; we are no longer humble in heart nor poor in spirit."

[6]"Man is created to live in harmony with others; it is in society and not in solitude that he finds numerous opportunities of practising Christian charity to his neighbours."—Swedenborg.

[7]In "Portrait de Femme" (Le double Jardin) Maeterlinck distinguishes between virtue and vice: they are the same forces, he says ... a virtue is only a vice that rises instead of falling.

[8]Verhaeren, p. 298.

[9]Les Heures d'après-midi.

[10]Wisdom and Destiny, Chapter I.

[11]Verhaeren, "La Foule" (Les Visages de la Vie).

OfAriane et Barbe-Bleue(Ardiane and Bluebeard) andSœur Béatrice(Sister Beatrice) which are contained in the third volume ofThéâtre(1901) Maeterlinck has said that they were written as libretti for musicians who had asked for them, and that they contain no philosophical or poeticalarrière-pensée.[1]Critics, however, seem to be agreed in reading considerable meaning into both plays. The fact that of the six wives of Bluebeard five bear the names of Maeterlinck's previous heroines—Melisanda, Alladine, Ygraine, Bellangère, and Selysette—at once suggests a symbolic intention, which we are the more inclined to suspect when we find that Ardiane, though a new name, is in reality the same person, or the same idea, as both Astolaine and Aglavaine.

The drama was written under the direct inspiration, and probably collaboration, of Mme Leblanc,whose ideas, as expressed inLe Choix de la Vie, are emphasised in the second act, which, apart from its doctrine, is beautiful.

The five child-like wives have been thrust by Bluebeard into the familiar dark caverns under his castle; and, since they are the passive creatures of the former plays, they endure their incarceration without the least attempt to effect an escape. They merely wait, praying, singing, and weeping. They could not flee, they say; they have been forbidden to.

They are joined by Ardiane, the strong, wise woman of Maeterlinck's second period; and she delivers the poor little limp creatures. When they have the monster at their mercy, however, they are more inclined to fondle him than to harm him; and when Ardiane throws the door open, announces her intention of returning to freedom, and invites them to follow her, they remain at Bluebeard's side. The play has for its sub-titleLa Délivrance inutile(The Vain Deliverance); and it is to be interpreted as meaning that women are in great need of emancipation,[2]but that it is their nature to cling to the brute who oppresses them.

An unmistakable motive of the play is that sanctification of the flesh which emblazons the breviaryof the second Maeterlinck. Ardiane bares the arms and shoulders of the timid wives. "Really, my young sisters," she says, "I do not wonder that he did not love you as he ought to have done, and that he wanted a hundred wives ... he had not one.... We shall have nothing to fear if we are very beautiful."[3]

Sister Beatriceis another work which is variously interpreted. To Mieszner, Sister Beatrice represents "the human soul prisoned in prejudice." To many who have readThe Treasure of the Humbleit will suggest itself that we have here a spectacle of the human soul remaining pure while the body it dwells in is steeped in sin. To Anselma Heine, the nun is "one who has been made richer, one who has lived"; and it may indeed be the poet's intention to show us that the flesh is holy and is not contaminated by fulfilling its functions. If the latter interpretation is correct, Maeterlinck has not enforced his meaning so convincingly as Gottfried Keller, the great Swiss writer, did in his short story "Die Jungfrau und die Nonne" (one of hisSieben Legenden).

In Maeterlinck's play the nun flees from the convent,seeks love and finds degradation, and returns, after twenty-five years, to find that her duties have all the time been performed by the Virgin Mary. In Gottfried Keller's story, Beatrice, the door-keeper of the monastery, feels her heart turn sick with longing for the world outside. "When she could no longer hold back her desire, she arose in a moonlit night of July ... and said to the statue of the Virgin Mary: 'I have served You many a long year, but now take the keys, for I cannot endure the heat in my heart any longer.'"

She goes out, and rests till dawn in a dim glade in an oak-forest. When the sun rises, a knight in armour comes riding along. He asks her whither she is bound, and she can only tell him that she has fled from the cloister "to see the world." He laughs at this, and offers, if she will go with him, to put her on the way. He lifts her on to his saddle, and merrily they gallop along; and when they come to his castle, Beatrice lies with him and stills her longing, and after some time he makes her his lawful wife, and she bears him eight sons.

But when the eldest son is eighteen, she arises one night from her husband's side, goes to the beds of her sons, and kisses them gently one after the other; she kisses her sleeping husband also; then she shears the long hair that had once folded him in flame, dons the nun's gown in which she had come to the castle so many years ago, andwanders in the howling wind and through the whirling autumn leaves to the convent. Here the statue of the Virgin tells her that She Herself has taken her place all the time; she has only to take up her keys and resume her duties where she had laid them down when she fled.

Ten years after her return the nuns make preparations for a great festival, and agree together that each one shall bring an offering to the Virgin. One of them embroiders a church banner, another an altar-cloth. One composes a Latin hymn, and another sets it to music. They who can do nothing else stitch a new shirt for the Christ-child, and the sister who is cook bakes Him a dish of fritters. Beatrice alone gets nothing ready: she is tired of life, and living more in the past than in the present. But when the festive day arrives and the nuns begin their chant, it happens that a grey-haired knight comes riding past the convent door with his eight stalwart sons, all on their way to the Emperor's wars. Hearing the service in the chapel, he bids his sons dismount, and enters with them to offer up a prayer to the Virgin. In the iron old man and the eight youths like so many angels in armour, Beatrice recognises her husband and her sons, and runs to them in the presence of all; and when she has confessed her story all agree that her gift to the Virgin is the richest offered that day.

Gottfried Keller's story is a glorification of family life. His nun is a healthy girl who needs children; and so does Heaven if the truth were known. In his story Beatrice never "falls." Her only mistake is when, driven by morbid superstition, she deserts her real duties to return to her imaginary ones. We never lose our respect for her. Maeterlinck's heroine, on the other hand, sinks lower than harlotry: when her body is beyond buying she sells her hand. She is a depraved being. It would be humbug to make out that the depravity of men forced her into such dirt. If she had been good, she could have died; if she is not good, what feelings is the drama to awaken in us? Feelings of pity perhaps, but not of sympathy; and when we have no sympathy for the subject of a drama, the drama is wasted. To glorify this woman's debasement, as Maeterlinck's play might seem to do, would be to wallow in morbid Christianity. But that would be a strange charge to bring against so anti-Christian a writer; and it is no doubt preferable to interpret the play by the theory of the soul's immunity from the body's pitch.

Maeterlinck's immediate source may have been a translation of the old Dutch version of the legend by L. Simons and Laurence Housman, which appeared inThe Pageantfor 1896, the year in which this now extinct magazine printed the poemEt s'il revenaitand Sutro's translation of theDeath of Tintagiles. Adelaide Anne Procter had made a poem out of the legend; John Davidson's splendid ballad (worth all Maeterlinck's play) is well known. The story was brought home to tens of thousands of spectators in London in 1911-12 by Max Reinhardt's staging of Karl Gustav Vollmoeller's wordless playThe Miracle.

As a reading playSister Beatriceis ruined by the species of blank verse in which it is said to be written. Typographically it is arranged in prose form; but palpable verses of this kind madden the reader:

"Il est prudent et sage; et ses yeux sont plus doux Que les yeux d'un enfant qui se met à genoux."

One of the things that Maeterlinck had treated inWisdom and Destinywas the principal of justice. InLe Temple Enseveli(The Buried Temple) he deals with the subject exhaustively. He asks whether there is a justice other than that organised by men, and he finds it where he found fate, in their own breast. He proves that there is no physical justice coming from moral causes. Excess and imprudence have often a cause which we call immoral; but excess and imprudence may have an innocent or even heroic cause. Drunkards and debauchees are not necessarily criminals; they may be drawn into excess because they are weak and amiable (we all know very charming men wholike drink; and what excellent uncles city bachelors often make). You are imprudent if you jump into the water in very cold weather to save somebody, and the consequences, let us say consumption for yourself and your children, are the same for you as for the villain who falls into the water while trying to throw somebody in. There is the same ignorance of moral causes in nature, the same indifference in heredity.[4]Why should the offspring of amiable drunkards be punished while the children of parricides and poisoners go scot-free? As to debauch, justice strikes according as precautions are taken or not, and never takes account of the victim's state of mind.

But we should be wrong to complain of the indifference of the universe. We have no right to be astonished at an injustice in which we ourselves take a very active part. Look at poverty, for instance—we class it with ills that cannot be helped, such as pestilence and shipwreck, but it is surely a result of the injustice of our social organisation. We shudder from one end of the world to the other when a judicial error is committed (Dreyfus affair); but the error which condemns the majority of our fellowmen to wretchedness we attribute to some inaccessible, implacable power. Again (this argument is in the section "La Chance," ChapterVII), look at animals. Compare the fate of the pampered race-horse with that of the tortured cab-horse: for all your talk of predestination, it is a case of injustice. But to the animals we work to death we are as the powers behind Nature are to us. Should we then expect more justice from Nature than we mete out to animals? Let us not condone our culpability by any appeal to Nature: Nature is not concerned with justice; her one aim, as was shown inThe Life of the Bee, is to maintain, renew, and multiply life. Nature is not just with regard to us; but she may be just with regard to herself. When we say that Nature is not just, it comes to the same thing as saying that she takes no notice of our little virtues; it is our vanity, not our sense of justice, that is wounded. But because our morality is not proportionate to the immensity of the universe, it does not follow that we ought to give it up; it is proportionate to our stature and to our restricted destiny. Justice is identical with logic. It is in himself, not in Nature, that man must find an approbation of justice.

The second part of the book, which has much in common withThe Life of the Bee, is devoted to the "reign of matter." Maeterlinck here (Chapter V) takes the opportunity of praising vegetarianism, which he is said to have tried. He says:

"It is not my intention to go deeply into the question of vegetarianism, nor to meet the objections that canbe made to it; but it must be recognised that few of these objections withstand a loyal and attentive examination; and it may be asserted that all those who have tried this diet have recovered or fortified their health, and felt their mind grow brighter and purer, as though they had been freed from an immemorial, nauseating prison."

The admirers of Maeterlinck's mysticism were more astonished when, in 1902,Monna Vannaappeared than they had been on reading those worldly-wise essays inWisdom and Destiny. Why here was a real play! A play in the theatrical sense, with action, attempted murder, conflict, tension, "honour," and all the rest of it. A play with characterisation at least attempted; for, though Marco is that wise old man we know so well by this time (the most awful version of him was in reserve forMary Magdalene), though Guido Colonna is Golaudredivivus; Prinzivalle is at all events a passable shadow of Othello, and Monna Vanna is a heroine who positively develops (let us admit that Selysette had developed too). A play rhetorical in style; pictorial even—a city lit up by fireworks, the Leaning Tower of Pisa all aflame "your Hugo-flare against the night," (William Watson might have jeered). A play with a situation which might have been written specially for that dear old lady, Mrs Grundy; a situation which makes a licence for its performance quite out ofthe question in Mrs Grundy's England.[5]And when the play proves a great success in Paris and Germany, and more especially when the great dramatist goes on tour with it and Mme Leblanc,[6]who plays the title-rôle, Maeterlinck's old guard call him a renegade to himself, to the Maeterlinck who had once held forth the exciting prospect of a stage without actors and without action. But why should a writer not change his views?

Monna Vannais written, partly, in the same kind of blank verse asSister Beatrice—very poor stuff considered as poetry, and very troublesome to read as prose. From the point of view of style it is quite impossible to consider it as a great work of art. Dramatically, however, it is one of the most interesting plays produced so far in the twentieth century.

This is the first of Maeterlinck's plays which has not some legendary Weisznichtwo for its scene. These are not shapes seen vaguely through a gloaming of romance; they move in the full light of reality.Monna Vanna, in short, is a historicaldrama, a species of drama which, as we shall see, Maeterlinck rejects in a chapter ofThe Double Garden.

Perhaps, however, those critics are right who deny toMonna Vannathe title of a genuine historical drama. It is at all events evident that the chief interest lies in the soul's awakening in love of Monna and of Prinzivalle. It is concerned, too, with truth: no marriage can be moral in which either party doubts anything the other party says—if you love, you must believe. Historically, the characters are untrue: Marco could not have read Maeterlinck at the time he lived, and, not having read Maeterlinck, he could not be so wise as he is; Monna Vanna could not have read either Maeterlinck or Ibsen, and therefore she could not have had such ideas as she has. But why should a modern play be truly historical? Friedrich Hebbel, a far greater dramatist than Maeterlinck, said something to the effect that a play may be historical if it keeps fresh long enough for our descendants to see from it how we, at our period of history, conceived the past.

However, when the curtain rises we find ourselves in Pisa at the end of the fifteenth century. The town is being besieged by Prinzivalle, the general of the army of Florence. The inhabitants are starving, and the city can hold out no longer. Guido Colonna, the commandant of the garrison,has sent his father, Marco, to Prinzivalle, and the envoy's return is awaited. He comes with this message: Florence has decided to annihilate Pisa. There is to be no question of a capitulation; the town is to be taken by assault, and the citizens butchered. Florence is pressing Prinzivalle to deliver the final assault; but he has intercepted letters by which it appears that he is unjustly accused of treachery. Death awaits him at Florence after his victory. He undertakes, therefore, to introduce a huge convoy of munition and provisions into the starving city, and to join the besieged army with the pick of his mercenaries. His condition is this: Monna Vanna, Guido's wife, shall come to his tent for the night, and she shall be naked under her cloak.

Guido is furious; but Monna Vanna decides to go. She has it in her power to save a whole city; and she thinks, as her father-in-law does, that two people have no right, by considering themselves, to ensure the destruction of so many thousands. There is no attempt on the dramatist's part to belittle the sacrifice she is willing to make; she has, at the time she makes up her mind, the time-honoured idea as to the importance of the sexual act. But she is an altruist, like the bees: it is not she, it is not her husband, it is the community that matters. Guido, however, is an egotist of the old school; he clings to his"honour" to such an extent that he thinks Pisa should be butchered to keep it intact. Monna Vanna goes....

ACT II.—Prinzivalle's tent. Sumptuous disorder. Hangings of silk and gold. Weapons, heaps of precious furs, huge coffers half open, overflowing with jewels and gorgeous raiment. Interview with Trivulzio, Commissary of the Republic of Florence; a copy of Cassius inJulius Cæsar—the emaciated man of thought, "the clear, fine intellect, the cold, acute, instructed mind"—"believes in Florence as the saint tied to the wheel believes in God." Prinzivalle on the other hand is an utter alien, a Basque or a Breton; but his victories have made him popular in Florence, and he might make himself dictator; Trivulzio, therefore, has denounced him to "the grey-headed, toothless, doting fools at home." Prinzivalle unmasks Trivulzio, who attempts to stab him, but only succeeds in gashing his face. Trivulzio very noble in his way; all for Florence. Excitement of the audience: will Vanna come? She comes; is she naked under her cloak? She has been wounded on the shoulder by a stray shot; just a scratch, but enough to serve as an excuse for exciting the audience. Prinzivalle tells her to show him the wound, and she half opens her cloak. He asks her directly: "You are naked under your cloak?" She answers "Yes," makes a movement to throwher cloak off (great tension), but he "stops her with a gesture." Now follows the great love-scene, in every way one of the finest things in modern drama. It turns out that they had played together as boy and girl in Venice. He has loved her ever since. He loves her now; and for that reason there is no question of her removing her cloak. Love triumphs over luxury. She goes back to Pisa, taking him with her, to save him from the Commissaries of Florence.

ACT III.—Convoy arrived, Pisa rejoicing, Guido cursing. Vanna comes, deliriously acclaimed. She has the great news for Guido that she returns unscathed. He refuses to believe it. Everybody refuses to believe it except Marco. She introduces Prinzivalle; and Guido persuades himself that she has trapped the brute, and brought him for private butchery. Since Guido will not credit the truth, she gives him the lie he asks for: "Il m'a prise," she cries out. But she claims Prinzivalle as her own prey, and has him conducted to the dungeons on the understanding that she will end his life herself. The spectators, however, who have an advantage over Guido in that they hear various asides, understand that she will rescue the Florentine general and elope with him. Guido can believe she could lie, therefore he does not love her—he only loves his "honour"; therefore she cannot love him, Prinzivalle, on the otherhand, had been most undisguisedly frank in his private interview with her. It is clear he loves her; and since she is no longer bound to love her husband, she is free to love Prinzivalle. "It was an evil dream," she says; "the beautiful is going to begin...."

To some critics the weak point in the drama might seem to be this: Monna Vanna goes out to Prinzivalle although she has no reliable information as to what manner of man he is. There was the greatest likelihood, Guido might have urged, that the man who makes such an infamous condition will not dream of keeping his promise. But the dramatist makes the heroine tell Prinzivalle that the one man who could have given her a favourable account of his character (and who, as we know, had given a favourable account of it to Guido) had told her nothing about him; possibly Maeterlinck desired in this way to emphasise the motive that Monna Vanna goes to sacrifice her honouron the mere chanceof saving the city.

The scene between Prinzivalle and Trivulzio in the second act has points of similarity with the argument of Browning'sLuria. This was pointed out by Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale in an article in theNew York Independentof the 5th March, 1903. Browning's play, too, is set in the fifteenth century on the eve of a battlebetween Pisa and Florence; and, like Prinzivalle, "Luria holds Pisa's fortunes in his hand." Both Luria and Prinzivalle are "utter aliens "; and both are modelled on Othello (Luria is a Moor; Prinzivalle is "a Basque or a Breton," but he has served in Africa). The character of the two Commissaries in the plays is identical. Maeterlinck wrote as follows to Professor Phelps:

"You are quite right. There is a likeness between [Browning's play and] the scene in the second act, in which Prinzivalle unmasks Trivulzio. I am surprised nobody has noticed it before, the more so as I made no attempt to conceal it, for I took exactly the same hostile cities, the same period, and almost the same characters; although of course it would have been very easy to alter the whole. I admire Browning, who, in my opinion, is one of the greatest of English poets. For that reason I regarded him as belonging to classic and universal literature, and as a poet whom everybody ought to know; and I thought I was entitled to borrow a situation, or rather the fragment of a situation, from him, a thing which occurs every day with Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. Such borrowings take placecoram populo, and are in the nature of a public homage. I regard the scene as a passage which I have piously dedicated to the poet who created in me the atmosphere in whichMonna Vannawas written."

With this naïve and sincere letter Maeterlinck clears himself of any charge of plagiarism. If he was a plagiarist inMonna Vanna, he was a plagiarist, too, inJoyzelle(1903), for in a postscript ofhis letter to Professor Phelps he confesses that this play was written in the atmosphere of Shakespeare'sTempest.

Joyzelle, another dramatised essay, is again written in the irritating blank verse which Maeterlinck at this stage of his career seems to have grown perversely fond of. To Merlin (Prosper rechristened) on his enchanted island comes his long-lost son Lancéor. The first person the newcomer meets is Joyzelle, who is destined to be his bride if she stands the trials prepared for her. The young couple fall in love with each other at first sight; but Merlin, who is attended by Arielle, his disembodied genius (his interior force, the forgotten power that sleeps in every soul), is also in love with Joyzelle.

Merlin, being a magician, is able to set traps for the lovers. He clouds the brain of Lancéor, and delivers him up to instinct, so that he compromises himself with Arielle, who for the purpose of playing the tempter has become visible, has half opened the veils that invest her, and unbound her long hair. (Men always fall into traps when their instinct leads them, their frailties being necessary for the designs of life.) Joyzelle discovers her lover in the act of embracing the supposed lady; but, with that nobility above jealousy which distinguishes the heroines of Maeterlinck after Astolaine, she continues to lovehim. She reveals to Lancéor, in curious language, the depth of her affections:

"When one loves as I love thee, it is not what he says, it is not what he does, it is not what he is that one loves in what one loves; it is he, and nothing but him, and he remains the same, through the years and misfortunes that pass.... It is he alone, it is thou alone, and in thee nothing can change without making love grow.... He who is all in thee; thou who art all in him, whom I see, whom I hear, whom I listen to without pause, and whom I love always.... We have to fight, we shall have to suffer; for this is a world which seems full of traps.... We are only two, but we are all love!..."

"Men are victimised by every beautiful woman," comments Mieszner, "and only the woman to whom they surrender themselves blindly can educate them to a higher love. This is the idea that clearly shines through the action ... woman rescuing sensual man from his sensuality."

Merlin now instils a subtle poison into Lancéor's veins, confirms Joyzelle's suspicions that her lover is on the point of death, but offers to save his life if she will give herself to him. "You would not need to tell him," the old swine suggests. "But I should have to tell him, because I love him," she answers. (Moral again: love cannot lie.) Joyzelle is not willing to do for one human being, though he is the being she loves best on earth, what Monna Vanna was willing to do for hundredsof strangers. She feigns consent, however, and promises to come at night; but she makes Merlin restore Lancéor there and then. When she comes to the old man's couch, it is with a dagger ready; she finds him sleeping, and lifts the dagger, but Arielle prevents the blow. Her trials are over; she has stood the last test. Merlin explains matters to his son: "She might have yielded," he says, "might have sacrificed herself, her love; she might have despaired—and then she would not have been the one love craves." To Joyzelle he says that it was written that she and those who resemble her should have a right to the love fate shows them; and that this love (the one love in life) must break injustice down. As to his own love for the girl, he bids Arielle kiss her; it seems to her then that flowers she cannot gather are touching her brow and caressing her lips, and Merlin tells her not to brush them aside, they are sad and pure—a symbolisation, perhaps, of intellectual love which renounces sensuality.

Joyzellewas first performed, with Mme Leblanc in the title-rôle, at the Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris on the 20th May, 1903. In the same year Maeterlinck's comedy,Le Miracle de St Antoine(The Miracle of St Antony) was performed at Geneva and Brussels. It has been published in German, but not yet in French or English.

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