Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck Part 11

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 Gra.s.se 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 Pergolese 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-gla.s.s, a table of rough wood, and three chairs. No books at all. But the walls were covered with little white b.u.t.terflies in flight. These were _thoughts_, 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 had installed 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 n.o.bel 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 Abbe Dimnet in _The Nineteenth Century and After_ for January, 1912, may be dismissed as Jesuitical. Various opinions, mostly favourable, by celebrities, were collected in the Brussels review _Le Thyrse_ for January, 1912, under the heading, "Maeterlinck et le prix n.o.bel." One of these letters is from Alfred Fouillee, 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 difficult to substantiate it. Not one critic has given us the exhaustive list of parallel pa.s.sages which would be required to shake our credit in Maeterlinck's essential originality. Typical is the att.i.tude of Mr Frank Harris in his too inaccurate and loosely written but not negligible articles in the _Academy_: 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 Moliere, 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 "morning charm" of _The Treasure of the Humble_ with "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 aestheticism of _Monna Vanna_, the cold allegory, the elementary philosophy of _Joyzelle_ and _The Blue Bird_." Already in _La Nouvelle Revue Francaise_ for February, 1910, Dumont-Wilden attempted to shatter the idol in the following terms:

"Le succes permet toujours aux hommes de lettres le supporter tres bien l'angoisse metaphysique, et Maeterlinck, grace a ses admirateurs et a ses amis, etait devenu un homme de lettres.

Prisonnier de ses premiers livres, et de son premier public, il trouva l'art subtil d'accomoder les balbutiements effares de Melisande, le naturisme ingenu qui fait le fonds de sa sensibilite de flamand, et ce vague optimisme 'humanitaire,' ce socialisme esthetique et scientifard, qui regne 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 meme, quel chef-d'uvre de 'literature': faire croire a Monsieur Homais qu'il appartient a l'elite, et a l'elite qu'elle peut se permettre les sentiments de M. Homais!

"D'abord la prose de Maeterlinck, sauce merveilleus.e.m.e.nt onctueuse, fit pa.s.ser ce singulier ragout intellectuel, que le grand public international, le public des liseurs de magazines et des inst.i.tutrices polyglottes continue a prendre pour le chef-d'uvre de la cuisine francaise."

As to the last item in this fierce diatribe, it would appear to be true that Maeterlinck's greatest 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'infame'; 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 melee 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. Goethe _was_ a patriot if you consider that his fatherland was the world. Maeterlinck _is_ a socialist if you look away from the din of the mere present to the future his writings undoubtedly prepare.

Maeterlinck is first and foremost a _futurist_, 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 elite. 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 is _the_ perfect type of Nietzsche's _New 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 n.o.ble for n.o.bility'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 La _Nouvelle Revue Francaise_ for 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 negligeable, et la comparaison s'impose d'elle-meme entre Maeterlinck et lui. En ecrivant _Les Etudes de la Nature_, cet auteur vieilli dont on ne lit plus guere qu'une bluette charmante qu'il composa en se jouant, apportait une nourriture salutaire au public de son temps, a ce public moyen que Jean-Jacques depa.s.sait. Son finalisme ingenu calmait les inquietudes de ceux que la secheresse d'une morale utilitaire et d'un materialisme sans grandeur avait decus et qui, pourtant, se refusaient a faire, meme avec Chateaubriand, le voyage du penitent vers les autels delaisses."

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 ma.s.s of whose writings, as far as the non-German reading public is concerned, is dead). What Goethe was to the elite of Europe in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Maeterlinck is to-day. His position, too, was a.s.sailed by a younger school of authors; but they could not shake it. Goethe, by the final moral of _Faust_, 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 sh.o.r.es 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 s.a.d.i.s.t'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; but _Interior_ and _The Sightless_ will 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 les _Serres Chaudes_, et qui s'y meurt; etouffee en ce palais empoisonne, elle s'y meurt, elle s'y meurt! Elle est claire, elle est pure, d'une chastete d'etrangere apparue,--et pourtant son haleine est d'une malade, il sourd de sa poitrine des effluves angeliques et pervers; elle est equivoque et triste, et nul ne saurait affirmer avec cert.i.tude que tout cela existe, ni qu'elle-meme _est_ bien la, devant nous. C'est la Princesse, la Princesse ... Elle, ses paupieres vagues et toutes ses boucles en lianes; ses cheveux qui s'enrouleraient de caresses vivantes, etrangement tiedes sinon de glace, un col irreel ou s'enlaceraient des malheurs,--un san Giovannino de Donatello parmi des terreurs ambigues, un Botticelli dans la Malaria."

INDEX

A.

"Academy, The," xiv.

Acting, present-day style of.

Action.

Adam, Paul.

Adultery.

aeschylus.

"Aglavaine et Selysette."

Ajalbert, Jean.

Alcohol.

"Alladine et Palomides."

Altruism, 111, 128, 131.

Andersen, Hans Christian.

"Anima vagula."

Animals.

"Annabella."

Anti-asceticism.

"Ardiane and Bluebeard," _see_ "Ariane et Barbe-Bleue."

"Ariane et Barbe-Bleue."

Art.

Artist.

Asceticism.

Aspiration.

Atmosphere.

Aurelius, Marcus.

Authority.

Avebury, Lord.

"Avertis, Les."

"Aveugles, Les."

B.

Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules.

"Basoche, La."

Baudelaire, Charles, 44, 84, (doctrine of correspondences).

Bazalgette, Leon.