CHAPTER XI

[1]Preface toThéâtre, p. XVIII. The interpretation given on the following page is his own, as given to a friend.

[2]Cf.Le Temple Enseveli, Chapters XXVI and XXVII.

[3]"Aus unseren Zierpuppen und aus unseren Blaustrümpfen werden erst Vollmenschen, nachdem die Mädchen und Frauen ihre natürlichen Reize entdeckt haben und sie selbst gebrauchen lernen."—Mieszner,Maeterlinck's Werke, p. 48.

[4]Cf. also Chapters XXVIII and XXIX ofL'Evolution du Mystèrein this volume.

[5]It was performed in December, 1911, by the Players' Club in Dublin.

[6]The play (the symbol of the fates of the poet and Mme Leblanc, according to Oppeln-Bronikowski, the German translator of Maeterlinck's works—Bühne und Welt, November-Heft 2, 1902) had been specially written for her. As Monna Vanna, she made her debut as an actress—she had previously been an opera-singer.

Maeterlinck's essays do not centre round himself. His vision is cosmic; the subject of his essays is the universe. ButLe double Jardin(The Double Garden), a collection of essays strung together and published in 1904, is more personal than his other books, though it is still concerned with presenting a cosmic philosophy. Here he gives us glimpses into his life; we see him as a lover of dogs and flowers; on his travels in the south of Europe; as an automobilist; as an amateur of fencing.

The first essay is that famous one—"On the Death of a little Dog." Those who fight shy of Maeterlinck because they credit the report, sufficiently widespread, that he is a platitudinarian, might be advised to sample him in this essay. If, when they have read it, they are unable to admit his charm and originality, they may be considered cases of obstinacy. It is not written with any ostentation of style; its style, in these days of fine writing by intellectual acrobats, is not evenbrilliant. It is written so simply that you would say it had been written for children; and it is as touchingly beautiful and as full of meaning as that other sublimely simple story about the ugly duckling.

It is the life-story of a little bull-dog that died of distemper when he was six months old. He had a great bulging forehead, like Verlaine's. He was as beautiful as a beautiful natural monster. Life was as full of problems for him as it is for the burdened brains of the children of men. He had to resign himself, like any other mystic, to the mystery of closed doors; he had to admit that the essential bounties of existence, generally imprisoned in pots and pans, are inaccessible. What a lot of orders, prohibitions, and perils he had to class in his memory; and how was he to conciliate them all with other more vast and imperious laws implanted in him by instinct, laws which rise and grow from hour to hour, which come from the beginning of time and of the race, which invade the blood, the muscles, and the nerves, and of a sudden assert themselves, more irresistible and more powerful than pain, and even than the master's order and the pain of death? And then the stolen joys—first and foremost the refuse-tin! He sees the cook cleaning a fish—but he does not appear curious as to where those delicacies go; he bides his time.

The only animal that has made a compact with man is the dog. To the dog man is God—ideas soon to be made visible inThe Blue Bird.

There is a beautiful essay on old-fashioned flowers—those which are being ousted out of our modern gardens by such flowers as tuberous-rooted begonias, with their red combs always crowing like so many cocks; and one on chrysanthemums, a symbol of the onward march of culture. (We know fromThe Blue Birdthat our descendants are to have daisies as big as tables, grapes as big as pears, blue apples as big as melons, and melons as big as pumpkins: all the beauty, all the bounties of the future are only waiting for the intellect of man to awaken them.) In "The Olive Boughs" the teaching of the volume is concentrated:

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

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

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

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

The chapter called "L'Inquiétude de notre Morale" strides over dead religions to hold out a hand of welcome to the religion of the future. Two main rivers of contemporary thought, whose sources are Tolstoy and Nietzsche, flow with highwaves far from the bogs and shallow pools where those who are poisoned by dead religions lie stifling. One of these rivers is flowing violently backwards to an illusory past; the other roars foam-flecked in its fury to an improbable future. Between these two rivers lies the broad plateau of reality; and we who are Maeterlinck's disciples may add that we build our homesteads round the placid lake his teaching forms on this broad plateau between the two dangerous rivers....

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

Another section, "Our Social Duty," tends towards Socialism. "Extreme opinion," we read, "demands immediately an integral sharing, the suppression of property, obligatory work, etc. We do not know yet how these demands can be realised; but it is at this moment certain that very simple circumstances will make them some day seem as natural as the suppression of primogenitureship and the privileges of the nobility.... Truth here is situated less in reason, which is always turned towards the past, than in imagination, which sees farther than the future.... Letus only listen to the experience which urges us forward; it is always higher than that which restrains us or throws us backward. Let us reject all the counsels of the past which are not turned towards the future.... It is above all important to destroy. In all social progress, the great work, the only difficult work, is the destruction of the past. We do not need to be anxious about what we shall set up in place of the ruins. The force of things and of life will undertake the work of reconstruction."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ForThe Blue BirdMaeterlinck was in 1912 awarded, for the third time in succession, the Belgian "Triennial prize for dramatic literature."

In 1910 appeared his translation ofMacbeth, and the English translation of another play of his,Mary Magdalene.Macbethwas performed (a sensational event, and a triumph for Mme Maeterlinck) at the Abbey of Saint Wandrille, the Benedictine cloister which Maeterlinck saved from being turned into a chemical factory,[2]and which is now his home.Mary Magdalenewas first performed at Leipsic and Hamburg; in GreatBritain it shares withMonna Vannathe honour of being refused an acting licence (because the voice of Jesus is heard in it!)

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

The death of Christ is a tragedy which is waiting for a great dramatist to master. Both Grillparzer and Hebbel pondered it. Maeterlinck has not done what they left undone; he was not dramatist enough to do it. Grillparzer would have spun his play round Judas as a type of an envious man; Maeterlinck places Mary Magdalene in the centre,not the sinner, but the convert—and this convert is the same character as Aglavaine, as Monna Vanna—Maeterlinck's strong, wise woman. This tragedy is again in the nature of a dramatised essay—another essay on wisdom. The idea is that the wise, who are certain of their knowledge, cannot yield to what is wrong. Joyzelle, we remember, would not sacrifice to save one man (it is true she pretended to be willing to, but her pretence was foolish, for she should have known it would be vain, seeing that Merlin was a magician) what Monna Vanna was willing to sacrifice to save a multitude. Mary Magdalene refuses to make the same sacrifice to save Christ: for Christ has made her a wise and therefore a good woman, and she would be untrue to Him in her if she were to rescue Him from Death—in other words His teaching, the essence of His Soul, must not be soiled, whatever torture be inflicted on His poor, human body. There would be tense tragedy in the situation when she hears Him being led to crucifixion, if we did not feel that she is no character but a wise idea; and if, too, the Roman who has it in his power to save Christ were not such a vulgar, melodramatic villain. Maeterlinck has been singularly unsuccessful in this drama. As a courtesan Mary Magdalene is a bore; as a convert she is still a bore.

It is not a human drama. If Jesus has thepower to awaken the dead, and to summon the living so that they walk as in sleep (Mary comes to Him in this way), there is no human conflict. One might suspect sexual attraction in Mary's conversion, but she gives one the impression of being a sexless blue-stocking; we are forced to the conclusion that she is mesmerised. Jesus is a mesmerist;[3]from a dramatic point of view. He is no more convincing than Svengali. Maeterlinck's play is on a level with those of Hall Caine; his Roman villain especially might have been conceived by Hall Caine.

In 1911 appeared, in an English translation (the French original was not published till 1913), another book of essays under the title ofDeath. Maeterlinck takes up the thread of what he had said about death in his previous writings, especially in the noble essay on Immortality inLife and Flowers:

"For us, death is the one event that counts in our life or in our universe. It is the point whereat all thatescapes our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it battens but on our fears lie who seeks to forget it burdens his memory with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But though we think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously without learning to know death."

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

"Why should the doctors," asks the essayist, "consider it their duty to protract even the most excruciating convulsions of the most hopeless agony? Who has not, at a bedside, twenty times wished and not once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to show mercy?... One day this prejudice will strike us as barbarian. Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions which have long since died out in the mind of men. That is why the doctors act as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown.... The day will come when science will turn against this error, and no longer hesitate to shorten our misfortunes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3]LAZARUS: Come. The Master calls you.[MAGDALENEleaves the column against which she is leaning and takes four or five steps towardsLAZARUSas though walking in her sleep.]-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------MAGDALENE: He fixed his eyes for but a moment on mine; and that will be enough for the rest of my life.—(p. 72).

[3]

LAZARUS: Come. The Master calls you.[MAGDALENEleaves the column against which she is leaning and takes four or five steps towardsLAZARUSas though walking in her sleep.]-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------MAGDALENE: He fixed his eyes for but a moment on mine; and that will be enough for the rest of my life.—(p. 72).

[4]I have re-translated from the French in which Mr de Sélincourt's article was reproduced inLe Thyrsefor January, 1912.

[5]"L'Immortalité" (inL'Intelligence des Fleurs) p. 282.

[6]Ibid., p. 295.

[7]Ibid., p. 307.

I have reported little of the gossip concerning Maeterlinck. Everybody knows that he smokes denicotinised tobacco; that he resides in the summer at Saint Wandrille and in the winter at his house "Villa des Abeilles" at Nice (having now left his villa aux Quatre Chemins, near Grasse in the south of France); and so forth. One little picture I would like to contribute; I have it from a friend and admirer of his, and it concerns a visit to the Villa Dupont, the house in the Rue Pergolèse where Maeterlinck lived when he first settled in Paris:

"His study was like a monk's cell, but very original in style. It was simply lime-washed; and this lime-wash was of a hard, raw blue in colour, approaching indigo. For furniture, a little looking-glass, a table of rough wood, and three chairs. No books at all. But the walls were covered with little white butterflies in flight. These werethoughts, and every one was fastened to the wall simply by a pin. The effect was singular, violently original at all events, but with nothing that gave you the idea of a pose. Maeterlinck at this period received no visitors, saw none of his friends. He hadinstalled himself in surroundings as bare as possible, so that he might meditate; and to these surroundings he had given the colour he desired."This room was empty when I was brought into it; and I beguiled the tedium of waiting for Maeterlinck by reading some of the thoughts on the slips of white paper pinned to the wall. Some of them were nothing very particular; others were obscure or appeared rather childish—isolated, as I read them;—but some were very beautiful. Maeterlinck coming into the room and finding me thus occupied, laughed heartily. But severely I pointed to the butterflies on the wall, and inquired about the name of each species. The names, I was told, were very great names indeed. I tried to guess one or two, but luck was against me, and I felt it a puzzle to set the right name to each bit of paper."Maeterlinck, reading with me, smiled as he saw me attack a new battalion of thoughts. These were placed somewhat apart from the others. 'Are they yours?' I asked. 'Yes,' he answered modestly; 'nothing more than studies for a book I am working at. But take notice of this one, please, and of this one, and of this one too. Are they not most beautiful?' Then, in a tone of jubilant admiration, he pronounced the name of their author—the name of a French lady who, some years afterwards, was to be Melisanda, Monna Vanna, and Ardiane on the stage. Several of these thoughts, I must say, seemed really worth attention; and I felt particularly surprised that a woman should have been able to compress them into three short lines, or even into five or six words."

"This room was empty when I was brought into it; and I beguiled the tedium of waiting for Maeterlinck by reading some of the thoughts on the slips of white paper pinned to the wall. Some of them were nothing very particular; others were obscure or appeared rather childish—isolated, as I read them;—but some were very beautiful. Maeterlinck coming into the room and finding me thus occupied, laughed heartily. But severely I pointed to the butterflies on the wall, and inquired about the name of each species. The names, I was told, were very great names indeed. I tried to guess one or two, but luck was against me, and I felt it a puzzle to set the right name to each bit of paper.

"Maeterlinck, reading with me, smiled as he saw me attack a new battalion of thoughts. These were placed somewhat apart from the others. 'Are they yours?' I asked. 'Yes,' he answered modestly; 'nothing more than studies for a book I am working at. But take notice of this one, please, and of this one, and of this one too. Are they not most beautiful?' Then, in a tone of jubilant admiration, he pronounced the name of their author—the name of a French lady who, some years afterwards, was to be Melisanda, Monna Vanna, and Ardiane on the stage. Several of these thoughts, I must say, seemed really worth attention; and I felt particularly surprised that a woman should have been able to compress them into three short lines, or even into five or six words."

As to Maeterlinck's personal appearance at the present time, the following is the impression he made recently on Mr Frank Harris:

"Maeterlinck is easily described: a man of about five feet nine in height, inclined to be stout; silver hair lends distinction to the large round head and boyish fresh complexion; blue-grey eyes, now thoughtful, now merry, and an unaffected off-hand manner. The features are not cut, left rather "in the rough" as sculptors say, even the heavy jaw and chin are drowned in fat; the forehead bulges and the eyes lose colour in the light and seem hard; still, an interesting and attractive personality."[1]

A few words must be devoted to the present position of Maeterlinck in critical estimation. Since the award of the Nobel prize imposed him on the public consciousness as one of the foremost of living writers, voices have been raised in protest. The attack of the Abbé Dimnet inThe Nineteenth Century and Afterfor January, 1912, may be dismissed as Jesuitical. Various opinions, mostly favourable, by celebrities, were collected in the Brussels reviewLe Thyrsefor January, 1912, under the heading, "Maeterlinck et le prix Nobel." One of these letters is from Alfred Fouillée, who suggests that Maeterlinck's philosophy owes much to that of Jean Marie Guyau. The old complaint that the dramas are "childish" is rarely heard nowadays; but there is a vague feeling in the air that the substance of the essays is a potpourri from earlier writers. It is the easiest thing in the world to make such a charge; it is far more difficultto substantiate it. Not one critic has given us the exhaustive list of parallel passages which would be required to shake our credit in Maeterlinck's essential originality. Typical is the attitude of Mr Frank Harris in his too inaccurate and loosely written but not negligible articles in theAcademy: he finds nothing in the essays which is not already contained in "Moralis" (does he mean Novalis?) and the other somewhat recondite writers in whom he (Mr Frank Harris) is obviously so deeply read. But even if it were proved that Maeterlinck, like Molière, has taken his wealth where he found it, there would be no more reason to think the less of him than there is to think the less of any artist for melting old metal and re-casting it, or of any thinker for sifting, rejecting, and re-stating old conclusions. It is an effort of profound originality to take whatever is good from a vast, and in some cases buried literature, and from this stock to polish and set in currency ideas which have an immediate effect on the spiritual or mental life of to-day, which fortify character, give us confidence in the future, make us better men and force us to make our children better men than we are ourselves.

By far the most scathing of Maeterlinck's detractors is a Belgian critic born in Ghent, Louis Dumont-Wilden, a critic who, as he confesses, was in his youth enchanted by the "morningcharm" ofThe Treasure of the Humblewith "its violent and sustained effort to soar to a kind of philosophical lyrism," who has still a good word to say for the early dramas, but who condemns "the adulterated æstheticism ofMonna Vanna, the cold allegory, the elementary philosophy ofJoyzelleandThe Blue Bird." Already inLa Nouvelle Revue Françaisefor February, 1910, Dumont-Wilden attempted to shatter the idol in the following terms:

"Le succès permet toujours aux hommes de lettres le supporter très bien l'angoisse métaphysique, et Maeterlinck, grâce à ses admirateurs et à ses amis, était devenu un homme de lettres. Prisonnier de ses premiers livres, et de son premier public, il trouva l'art subtil d'accomoder les balbutiements effarés de Mélisande, le naturisme ingénu qui fait le fonds de sa sensibilité de flamand, et ce vague optimisme 'humanitaire,' ce socialisme esthétique et scientifard, qui règne aujourd'hui parmi ceux que Nietzsche appelle 'les philistins de la culture.' Il est vrai qu'un peu de mysticisme arrange tout; mais tout de même, quel chef-d'œuvre de 'literature': faire croire à Monsieur Homais qu'il appartient à l'élite, et à l'élite qu'elle peut se permettre les sentiments de M. Homais!"D'abord la prose de Maeterlinck, sauce merveilleusement onctueuse, fit passer ce singulier ragoût intellectuel, que le grand public international, le public des liseurs de magazines et des institutrices polyglottes continue à prendre pour le chef-d'œuvre de la cuisine française."

"D'abord la prose de Maeterlinck, sauce merveilleusement onctueuse, fit passer ce singulier ragoût intellectuel, que le grand public international, le public des liseurs de magazines et des institutrices polyglottes continue à prendre pour le chef-d'œuvre de la cuisine française."

As to the last item in this fierce diatribe, it would appear to be true that Maeterlinck'sgreatest public is composed of "the philistines of culture." Maeterlinck is an antagonist of Christianity; and yet perhaps the majority of his admirers are those who love him because he has such beautiful things to tell them about their immortal souls. Like Voltaire, he fights 'l'infâme'; and yet to many a Christian virgin his works are an edifice which he might have inscribed with the device:Deo erexit Maeterlinck. Again, he has prophesied the inevitable victory of socialism; but has he helped the socialists? Is he counted one of the paladins of socialism? It might be argued that he has not the zest in hard fighting which alone can help a fighting cause: he stands apart from the mêlée with a wise face imperturbable: he would persuade, not fight, and he is too persuasive to persuade. Those who waver or resist must be shattered into conviction, the fanatic might urge. In short, Maeterlinck is a socialist much as Goethe was a patriot.

Well, probably the fact is that Maeterlinck is no more a "socialist" than Goethe was a "patriot." All such terms may be interpreted variously. Goethewasa patriot if you consider that his fatherland was the world. Maeterlinckisa socialist if you look away from the din of the mere present to the future his writings undoubtedly prepare. Maeterlinck is first and foremost afuturist, a seer of the future. Even as a dramatist(apart from his later dramas, which must, on the whole, be rejected) he is a futurist. And in this sense he has his public among the élite. M. Dumont-Wilden would not call Johannes Schlaf a philistine of culture? And to Johannes Schlaf, as to me, Maeterlinck's importance lies in the fact that he istheperfect type of Nietzsche'sNew European, in himself a prophecy of the race our descendants will be when patriotism is: to be a citizen of the whole world, and religion is: to be noble for nobility's sake. As for his Christian readers, why should they not, if they can, find confirmation of their own creed in the teaching of an enemy of it? The fact of Maeterlinck's vogue with Christian readers only proves that Christianity has much in common with the religion of the future.

In an article, which created a sensation, in LaNouvelle Revue Françaisefor September, 1912, M. Dumont-Wilden compares Maeterlinck's popularity with that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre three generations ago. He says:

"La gloire de Bernardin n'est point négligeable, et la comparaison s'impose d'elle-même entre Maeterlinck et lui. En écrivantLes Etudes de la Nature, cet auteur vieilli dont on ne lit plus guère qu'une bluette charmante qu'il composa en se jouant, apportait une nourriture salutaire au public de son temps, à ce public moyen que Jean-Jacques dépassait. Son finalisme ingénu calmait les inquiétudes de ceux que la sécheresse d'une moraleutilitaire et d'un matérialisme sans grandeur avait déçus et qui, pourtant, se refusaient à faire, même avec Chateaubriand, le voyage du pénitent vers les autels délaissés."

Now, if Jean-Jacques was to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre what Nietzsche is to Maeterlinck, it would not be difficult to prove that Maeterlinck appeals to Nietzscheans, and that his teaching has points of contact with that of Nietzsche. To be quite short, Maeterlinck's man of the future is essentially the superman. And even if it were true that Maeterlinck's writings will be no more read in the future than are those of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to-day, that would not reduce him to the rank of a minor writer. Voltaire's writings, which prepared a revolution, are now little read; and yet how much of Voltaire's thinking, or abstract of thinking (was Voltaire "original"?) is woven into the fabric of the mental life of to-day? We cannot, it is true, draw a close comparison between Voltaire and Maeterlinck, for Maeterlinck has no venom, and no disposition to thrust himself forward into the forefront of public interest; but it would be possible to compare his present position with that of Goethe (another writer the great mass of whose writings, as far as the non-German reading public is concerned, is dead). What Goethe was to the élite of Europe in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Maeterlinck isto-day. His position, too, was assailed by a younger school of authors; but they could not shake it. Goethe, by the final moral ofFaust, taught his generation to channel their activities and, confident of the result, to pour their strength into unselfish work; Maeterlinck teaches the same doctrine, and it may be said again of him, as he has said of Goethe, that he has brought us to the shores of the sea of serenity.

So much for Maeterlinck's philosophy. But his critics, especially M. Dumont-Wilden, are apt to forget one thing—his poetry. It is possible, of course, to state even his dramas in terms of philosophy; but when you have interpreted the symbols, there still remains something that cannot be set down in equations—the poetry. Granted that Maleine = the human soul: does she not still remain a beautiful dream, a Sadist's dream of a girl?[2]Against M. Dumont-Wilden's criticism

Albert Mockel,La Wallonie,June and July, 1890.

it must be urged that Maeterlinck, besides being a thinker, is also a poet—not a lyric poet, of course (his rank is low here), but a creator of new things, a master of atmosphere and suggestion—in short, when all deductions are made, a great writer. The philosophy will be absorbed by everyday life and become commonplace; butInteriorandThe Sightlesswill always be the first-fruits of a new poetry and deathless works of art.

There is one other thing to be said. There have been thinkers whose private life did not bear comparison with the ideals proclaimed in their writings. Of Maeterlinck the man nothing but good is known. The man he is would stand unshaken if all his literary works withered like bindweed round a tree at the first breath of winter. A eulogy of his character based on the long list of his good deeds is impossible; for these are unknown—suspected merely, or secrets of his friends and not to be revealed without offending him. But the sage needs no approbation save his own; and Maeterlinck's good deeds were done, not for praise, but because he was Maeterlinck.

[1]Academy; 22nd June, 1912.

[2]"C'est une fillette de van Lerberghe si inconsciemment venue dans lesSerres Chaudes, et qui s'y meurt; étouffée en ce palais empoisonné, elle s'y meurt, elle s'y meurt! Elle est claire, elle est pure, d'une chasteté d'étrangère apparue,—et pourtant son haleine est d'une malade, il sourd de sa poitrine des effluves angéliques et pervers; elle est équivoque et triste, et nul ne saurait affirmer avec certitude que tout cela existe, ni qu'elle-mêmeestbien là, devant nous. C'est la Princesse, la Princesse ... Elle, ses paupières vagues et toutes ses boucles en lianes; ses cheveux qui s'enrouleraient de caresses vivantes, étrangement tièdes sinon de glace, un col irréel où s'enlaceraient des malheurs,—un san Giovannino de Donatello parmi des terreurs ambiguës, un Botticelli dans la Malaria."

A."Academy, The,"xiv,157.Acting, present-day style of,69.Action,38,45,83,101,125,126,139.Adam, Paul,13.Adultery,60-62,64-65,130-131.Æschylus,132."Aglavaine et Selysette,"60,71,93-98,116,125.Ajalbert, Jean,8.Alcohol,105,113,114,122-123."Alladine et Palomides,"60,68-75,107,116,133,144.Altruism,111,128,131.Andersen, Hans Christian,137."Anima vagula,"61,62,70,73,78.Animals,124,136-137,143-144."Annabella,"81-82.Anti-asceticism,106-108,111."Ardiane and Bluebeard,"see"Ariane et Barbe-Bleue.""Ariane et Barbe-Bleue,"116-118,155.Art,152.Artist, the,102.Asceticism,106-108,111.Aspiration,29,140.Atmosphere,11,35,43,99,163.Aurelius, Marcus,83.Authority,112.Avebury, Lord,113."Avertis, Les,"39,91."Aveugles, Les,"41,44,48-52,79,163.

Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules,7."Basoche, La,"8,61,62,143.Baudelaire, Charles,44,84, (doctrine of correspondences).Bazalgette, Léon,4.Beaunier, André,56.Beauty,93,94-95,103,117-118,138,145.Bees,110-115.Bernard, Charles.151.Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,160,161.Bever, Adolphe van,11,19,"Blue Bird, The,"see"Oiseau Bleu, L'."Blue-stockings,118,149.Boehme, Jakob,5.Boswell. James,81.Botticelli, Sandro,163.Bourget, Paul,7,58-59.Boxing,141.Brain, the,26,112-115,133-135,137,140.Breughels, The,10.Bridges, Robert,27.Brisson, Adolphe,55.Brotherhood of the Common Life,54.Browning, Robert,129,131-132.Bruges,2.Buddhism,59."Buried Temple, The,"see"Temple Enseveli, Le."Burne-Jones, Sir Edward,55,64,65,73.

Caine, Hall,149.Calm,109,141,162.Carlyle, Thomas,53,85,87,126.Carpentier, Georges,141.Cassius,129.Cats,143.Censor, the,125-126,146."Chance, La,"123.Character,104,110.Characterisation,37,125,142.Chastity,65,94,106-107,108,111,162.Chateaubriand, François-René de,161.Chaucer, Geoffrey,21.Children,106,121,142-146.Christ,120,146-149.Christianity,92-93,108,121,150,159,160.Chrysanthemums,138.Closed door, the,61,77,79.Collectivism,111.Communism,111,128.Conscious, the,101,152.Contradictions,101.Convent life,118-121.Correspondences, doctrine of,84.Crane, Walter,31,64."Cravache, La,"14.Crime,60-62,64-65,84,92,106,122-123.Crusoe, Robinson,113.

Darzens, Rodolphe,8.Davidson, John,122."Death,"see"Mort, La."Death,26,29,37,39,40-48,60,77-80,97,101,107,112,137,149-152."Death of a Little Dog, On the,"136-137,142."Death of Tintagiles, The,"see"Mort de Tintagiles, La."Debauch,122.Decadents, the,24,26,27.Defoe, Daniel,113.Dehmel, Richard,108,143.Delia Rocca de Vergalo,17.Deman, Edmond,18,19.Destiny,seeFate.Destiny, exterior and moral,103.Development,108,125,139.Development of Maeterlinck,108.Diderot, Denis,81.Dijk, Is. van,48,56-58,88-89.Dimnet, the Abbé,146-147,156."Disciples à Saïs, Les, et les Fragments de Novalis,"82-85.Doctors, the,150.Dogs,136-138,143-144.Donatello,163."Double Garden, The,"see"Double Jardin, Le.""Double Jardin, Le,"103,108,127,136-139.Doudelet, Charles,99.Doumic, René,33,57-58."Douze Chansons,"98-99.Drama, Maeterlinck's theories of,79,83,86-87,125,127,139.Dramaturgy,39,63,121,131,148-149.Dreyfus affair,123.Dryden, John,98."Duchess of Main, The,"81.Dumont-Wilden, Louis,157-158,160-162.Dupont, Villa,154.Dyck, Ernest van,18.

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