Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck Part 3

Shakespeare flows along in lyrical and rhetorical sentences.

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

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

If the dialogue points forward to the theories propounded in _The Treasure of the Humble_, the melodrama of some of the scenes and the b.l.o.o.d.y catastrophe to which they tend is directly opposed to these theories. Too transparently throughout the play the intention of the poet is to horrify. Apart from the comets and other phenomena which portend ruin, he is constantly heightening the mystery by something eerie, all of it, no doubt, on close inspection, attributable to natural causes, but, if the truth must be told, perilously near the ridiculous.

The weeping willows, and the owls, and the bats, and the fearsome swans, and the croaking ravens, and the seven _beguines_, and the cemetery, and the sheep among the tombs, and the peac.o.c.ks in the cypresses, and the marshes, and the will-o'-the-wisps are an excessive agglomeration. But the atmosphere is finely suggested:

MALEINE: I am afraid!...

HJALMAR: But we are in the park....

MALEINE: Are there walls round the park?

HJALMAR: Of course; there are walls and moats round the park.

MALEINE: And n.o.body can get in?

HJALMAR: No;--but there are plenty of unknown things that get in all the same.

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

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

Each is helpless; they feel, dimly, that something which they do not understand is moving them: hence their groping speech.

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

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

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

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

[2] Figaro, 24th August, 1890.

[3] p.r.o.nounced in German like the French _Maleine_.

[4] Preface to _Theatre_, p. 2.

[5] In Swedenborg's mysticism, the literal meanings of words are only protecting veils which hide their inner meanings. See "Le Tragique Quotidien" (in _Le Tresor des Humbles_) pp. 173-4. That Maeterlinck was meditating the famous chapter on "Silence" in _The Treasure of the Humble_ when he wrote _Princess Maleine_ may be inferred from Act ii.

sc. 6: "I want to see her at last in presence of the evening.... I want to see if the night will make her think. May it not be that there is a little silence in her heart?"

[6] Schlaf's _Maeterlinck_, p. 31.

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

[8] Preface to _Theatre_, pp. 4-5.

CHAPTER V

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

Death, however, is only one of the mighty mysteries, the unknown powers, "the presences which are not to be put by," which rule our destinies.

Love is another. To these two cosmic forces are devoted a series of dramas which were in 1901-2 collected by Maeterlinck in three volumes under the t.i.tle of _Theatre_. In the preface[2] to the collection Maeterlinck has himself interpreted the plays with a clearness and fullness which leaves the reader in no doubt as to his aims.

"In these plays," he says, "faith is held in enormous powers, invisible and fatal. No one knows their intentions, but the spirit of the drama a.s.sumes they are malevolent, attentive to all our actions, hostile to smiles, to life, to peace, to happiness.

Destinies which are innocent but involuntarily hostile are here joined, and parted to the ruin of all, under the saddened eyes of the wisest, who foresee the future but can change nothing in the cruel and inflexible games which Love and Death practise among the living. And Love and Death and the other powers here exercise a sort of sly injustice, the penalties of which--for this injustice awards no compensation--are perhaps nothing but the whims of fate....

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

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

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

The subject of _The Intruder_ can be told in a few words. In a dark room in an old castle are sitting the blind grandfather, the father, the uncle, and the three daughters. In the adjoining room lies the mother who has recently been confined. She has been at death's door; but at last the doctors say the danger is over, and all but the grandfather are confident. He thinks she is not doing well.... he has heard her voice.

They think he is querulous. The uncle is more anxious about the child: he has scarcely stirred since he was born, he has not cried once, he is like a wax baby. The sister is expected to arrive at any minute. The eldest daughter watches for her from the window. It is moonlight, and she can see the avenue as far as the grove of cypresses. She hears the nightingales. A gentle breeze stirs in the avenue; the trees tremble a little. The grandfather remarks that he can no longer hear the nightingales, and the daughter is afraid someone has entered the garden.

She sees no one, but somebody must be pa.s.sing near the pond, for the swans are afraid, and all the fish dive suddenly. The dogs do not bark; she can see the house-dog crouching at the back of his kennel. The nightingales continue silent--there is a silence of death--it must be a stranger frightening them, says the grandfather. The roses shed their leaves. The grandfather feels cold; but the gla.s.s door on to the terrace will not shut--the joiner is to come to-morrow, he will put it right.

Suddenly the sharpening of a scythe is heard outside--it must be the gardener preparing to mow the gra.s.s. The lamp does not burn well. A noise is heard as of someone entering the house, but no one comes up the stairs. They ring for the servant. They hear her steps, and the grandfather thinks she is not alone. The father opens the door; she remains on the landing. She is alone. She says no one has entered the house, but she has closed the door below, which she had found open. The father tells her not to push the door to; she denies that she is doing so. The grandfather, who, though he is blind, is conscious of light, thinks they are putting the lamp out. He asks whether the servant, who has gone downstairs, is in the room: it had seemed to him that she was sitting at the table. He cannot believe that no one has entered. He asks why they have put the light out. He is filled with an unendurable desire to see his daughter, but they will not let him--she is sleeping. The lamp goes out. They sit in the darkness. Midnight strikes, and at the last stroke of the clock they seem to hear a noise as of someone rising hastily. The grandfather maintains that someone has risen from, his chair. Suddenly the child is heard crying, crying in terror. Hurried steps are heard in the sick woman's chamber. The door of it is opened, the light from it pours into the room, and on the threshold appears a Sister of Charity, who makes the sign of the Cross to announce the mother's death.

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

THE FATHER: He is nearly eighty.

THE UNCLE: No wonder he's eccentric.

THE FATHER: He's like all blind people.

THE UNCLE: They think too much.

THE FATHER: They've too much time on their hands.

THE UNCLE: They've nothing else to do.

THE FATHER: It's their only way of pa.s.sing the time.

THE UNCLE: It must be terrible.

THE FATHER: I suppose you get used to it.

THE UNCLE: I dare say.

THE FATHER: They are certainly to be pitied.