Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck Part 4

In this play, as also in _The Sightless_, and later on in _The Life of the Bees_, Maeterlinck shows himself a master of irony. The pa.s.sage just quoted is an example.

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

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

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

The scene of _Les Flaireurs_ is laid in a very poor cottage. It is a stormy night; the rain whips the windows, the wind howls, and a dog is barking in the distance. The room is lit by two candles. Loud knocking at the door. A girl jumps out of the bed with gestures of terror. She is in her night-shirt; her fair hair is unbound. She asks: "Who is there?"

and "The Voice," after some beating about the bush, answers: "I'm the man with the water." The voice of the mother, who thinks it is Jesus Christ, is heard from the bed urging the daughter to let Him in. She refuses, and the man answers that he will wait. Ten o'clock sounds, and the daughter puts the two candles out. ACT II. Knocking at the door again. The two candles are relit, and the daughter is seen standing against the bed, at watch, with her face turned towards the door. A voice is heard demanding admittance. "You said you would wait," says the girl. "Why, I've only just come!" answers the voice. She asks who he is, and he replies, "The man with the linen." The mother again urges her to open the door--she thinks it is the Virgin Mary. The daughter is obstinate, and the voice cries, "All right, I'll wait." ACT III. Louder knocks, and a voice again. This time it is "The man with the ...

thingumbob." The mother still thinks it is the Virgin Mary. She bids her daughter raise the curtain: and the shadow of the hea.r.s.e is projected on the wall. The mother asks what the shadow is; the daughter drops the curtain. The voice now answers brutally: "I'm the man with the coffin, that's what _I_ am." The neighing of horses is heard. The girl dashes herself against the door, but it is beaten in. An arm is seen putting a bucket into the room. Midnight strikes. The old woman utters a hoa.r.s.e cry; the daughter, who had been holding the door back, rushes to the bed; the door falls with a mighty din, and extinguishes the two candles.

It will be seen that whereas in _The Intruder_ there is nothing which cannot be explained by natural causes, the symbolism of _Les Flaireurs_ is untrue--death does _not_ come with bucket, linen, and coffin. Death does _not_ break the door in. This only amounts to saying that Maeterlinck's method is less romantic than that of his friend.

Maeterlinck's close realism, however, does give him certain advantages--the helplessness of the grandfather, for instance, is far more pathetic than the spectacle of the girl dashing herself against the door, though it does not move us so directly.

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

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

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

The blind people are waiting for their priest to return. He is getting too old, the men murmur; they suspect that he has not been blest with the Best of sight himself of late. They are sure he has lost his way and is looking for it. They have walked a long time; they must be far from the asylum. He only talks to the women now; they ask them where he has gone to. The women do not know. He had told them he wanted to see the island for the last time before the sunless winter. He was uneasy because the storms had flooded the river, and because all the dikes seemed ready to burst. He has gone in the direction of the sea, which is so near that when they are silent they can hear it thudding on the rocks. Where are they? None of them know. When did they come to the island? They do not know, they were all blind when they came. They were not born here, they came from beyond the sea. They hear the asylum clock strike twelve; they do not know whether it is noon or midnight. They are frightened at noises which they cannot understand. Suddenly the wind rises in the forest, and the sea is heard bellowing against the cliffs.

The sea seems very near; they are afraid it will reach them. They are about to rise and try to go away when they hear a noise of hasty feet in the dead leaves. It is the dog of the asylum. It puts its muzzle on the knees of one of the blind men. Feeling it pull, he rises, and it leads him to the motionless priest. He touches the priest's cold face ... and they know that their guide is dead. The dog will not move away from the corpse. A squall whirls the dead leaves round. It begins to snow. They think they hear footsteps ... The footsteps seem to stop in their midst....

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

The virtues and failings of humanity are hinted at with gentle irony.

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

Lessing thought no man could write a good tragedy till he was thirty.

Here are two written by a man of twenty-eight.

[1] "Les Avertis" (in _Le Tresor des Humbles_), p. 53.

[2] Cf. also "L'Evolution du Mystere" (in _Le Temple Enseveli_) Chapters V., XXI., and XXII.

[3] See Chapter XXVIII. of _L'Intelligence des Fleurs_.

[4] In a letter inserted in the programme when _Les Flaireurs_ was staged by Paul Fort at the Theatre d'Art (after _The Intruder_ had gone over the same boards). This statement of Maeterlinck's is a n.o.ble defence of his friend, and, as such, not to be trusted.

[5] But Death, in _The Intruder_, is understood to have made some noise while coming upstairs.

[6] Is. van Dijk, _Maurice Maeterlinck_, pp. 81-82.

CHAPTER VI

Few men entirely outgrow the influences of their education: the mind is made by what it is fed on while it is growing just as much as the body is. Carlyle was always more or less of a Scotch preacher threatening the world with h.e.l.l. Gerhart Hauptmann (who, by the way, was born in the same year as Maeterlinck) never got over his Moravian upbringing.

Maeterlinck came to hate the Jesuits; but his monastic training lingered in his love of the mystics. Mysticism is in any case a Flemish _trait_; and it is one of the outstanding features of Flemish literature as it is of Flemish painting. It is not astonishing, then, that Maeterlinck should have felt drawn to the most famous of Flemish mystics. He published, in 1891, _L'Ornement des Noces spirituelles_, a translation, illuminated by a preface, of Jan van Ruysbroeck's _Die Chierheit der gheesteleker Brulocht_. The "doctor ecstaticus" was born in 1274 at the little village of Ruysbroeck, near Brussels. He was a curate in the Church of Sainte Gudule in Brussels; but in his old days he with several friends founded the Monastery of Groenendal (Green Dale) in the Foret de Soignes, two miles from Brussels. The fame of his piety attracted many pilgrims to his retreat, among others the German mystic, Johannes Tauler, and the Dutch scholar who founded the Brotherhood of the Common Life, Geert Groote. He died in 1381. His contemporaries called him "the Admirable."

Maeterlinck warns us in his preface to _The Ornamentation of the Nuptials of the Spirit_, the subject of which is the _unio mystica_, the mystic union of the soul with G.o.d, that we must not expect a literary work; "you will perceive nothing," he says, "save the convulsive flight of a drunken eagle, blind and bleeding, over snowy summits." He only made the translation for the benefit of a few Platonists. But, apart from the translation itself, the preface is of value as showing how deeply read in the mystics Maeterlinck already was at this time, and the importance he attached to their teaching. "All certainty is in them alone," he says, paradoxically. Their ecstasies are only the beginning of the complete discovery of ourselves; their writings are the purest diamonds in the prodigious treasure of humanity; and their thoughts have the immunity of Swedenborg's angels who advance continually towards the springtide of their youth, so that the oldest angels seem the youngest.

Embedded in the preface are gems from Ruysbroeck's other writings. Here is one of them:

"And they (the doves) will tarry near the rivers and over the clear waters, so that if any bird should come from on high, which might seize or injure them, they may know it by its image in the water, and avoid it. This clear water is Holy Writ, the life of the Saints, and the mercy of G.o.d. We will look upon our image therein whenever we are tempted; and in this way none shall have power to harm us. These doves have an ardent disposition, and young doves are often born of them, for every time that to the honour of G.o.d and our own beat.i.tude we consider sin with hatred and scorn, we bring young doves into the world, that is to say new virtues."

The translation of the mystic was followed, in 1891, by a playlet in one act, _Les Sept Princesses_ (The Seven Princesses). It is "the angel"

among Maeterlinck's productions, a weakling which no fostering can save.

Few critics have a good word for it. "A girl's unpleasant dream,"

interprets Mieszner. "An indecipherable enigma," says Adolphe Brisson.

"The piece is something _seen_, purely pictorial," says Anselma Heine, "a transposition of paintings by Burne-Jones." "Can only claim the rank of an intermezzo," says Monty Jacobs, "an unfinished sketch." "We must not seek a literal signification," says Beaunier, "its signification is in its very strangeness." "Perhaps the weakest thing in Maeterlinck,"

says Oppeln von Bronikowski, "a sketch, or a testing of mystico-symbolic apparatus." "_Pa.s.sons_," says Adolphe van Bever. The Princesses have, however, found a friend in a Dutch critic, Dr Is. van Dijk, whose book on Maeterlinck is suggestive. His a.n.a.lysis and interpretation of the play runs somewhat as follows:

"In a s.p.a.cious marble hall, decorated with laurel bushes, lavender plants, and lilies in porcelain vases, is a white marble staircase with seven steps, on which seven white-robed princesses are lying, one on each step, sleeping on cushions of pale silk. Fearing lest they should awaken in the dark, they have lit a silver lamp, which casts its light over them. The lovely princesses sleep on and on; they must not be wakened, they are so weak! It is their weakness that has sent them to sleep. They have been so listless and weary since they came here; it is so cold and dreamy in this Castle in the North. They came hither from warm lands; and here they are always watching for the sun, but there is hardly any sun, and no sweet heaven over this level waste of fens, over these green ponds black with the shadows of forests of oaks and pines, over this willow-hung ca.n.a.l that runs to the rounded grey of the horizon. It is home-sickness that has sunk them in sleep. They sleep forlorn.

Everything around them is so very old. Their life is so dreary with their long, long waiting; they are aweary, aweary.... They are waiting for the comrade of their youth; always they are looking for his ship on the ca.n.a.l between the willows; but, 'He cometh not,'

they say. Now at last he is come while they are sleeping, and they have bolted the door from the inside. They cannot be wakened. With sick longing the Prince gazes at the seven through the thick window-panes. His eyes rest longest on the loveliest, Ursula, with whom he had loved best to play when he was a boy. Seven years she has looked for his coming, seven years, by day and by night. He sees them lying with linked hands, as though they were afraid of losing each other.... And yet they must have moved in their sleep, for the two sisters on the steps above and below Ursula have let go her hand; she is holding her hands so strangely.... At last the Prince makes his way into the room by an underground pa.s.sage, past the tombs of the dead. The noise of his entrance awakens six of the Princesses, but not Ursula. The six cry: 'The Prince has come!' But she lies motionless, stiff.... She has died of her long, long waiting, of the deep, unfulfilled longing of her soul...."

Dr van Dijk is indignant at the criticism of Rene Doumic, who, in an article on Maeterlinck, dismisses _Les Sept Princesses_ with these few words: "As for _The Seven Princesses_, the devout themselves confess they can find no appreciable sense in the play. All that I can say of it, now that I have read it, is that it is a thin volume published in Brussels, by Lacomblez."[1] "Let me have this French critic in my tuition six months," continues Dr van Dijk. "My curriculum would then be as follows: The first month he should learn by heart, in Greek and French, Plato's myth concerning _The Chariot of the Soul_, with the obligation of course to ponder on it. The following month he should learn by heart, in Greek and French, Plato's myth of _The Cave_, with the obligation of course to ponder on it. Then he should impress the well-known fable of _Amor and Psyche_ on his mind, so as to accustom himself to the atmosphere of fables. Then he should ponder for a month on the sovereign freedom of a poet to remould a fable wholly or in part.

Another month he should spend in reflecting over the fact that in order to understand a whole one does not need to know all the parts. And the last month he should be left to himself to try and find whether there was anything in his own soul which in any way could be said to resemble unfulfilled longing."

Another plausible interpretation is that of another Dutch critic, G.

Hulsman, in his _Karakters en Ideeen_. He quotes the following poem from Paul Bourget's _Espoir d'aimer_:

"Notre ame est le palais des legendes, ou dort Une jeune princesse en robe nuptiale, Immobile et si calme!... On dirait que la Mort A touche son visage pale.

Elle dort, elle reve et soupire en revant; Une larme a roule lentement sur sa joue.

Elle se reve errante en barque au gre du vent Sur l'Ocean, qui gronde et joue.

"Elle ne le voit pas, le beau Prince Charmant Qui chevauche, parmi les plaines eloignees Et s'en vient eveiller sa belle au bois dormant De son sommeil de cent annees"--

and continues:

"Our heart is this palace, and in this palace lies our soul, a beautiful sleeper. It sleeps, and dreams, and waits for the coming of the ideal hero, who shall awaken it out of its slumber and cherish it with the warmth of his love. And these seven princesses are the different qualities of the human soul."

Hulsman thinks that Maeterlinck must have thought of the Buddhistic idea, according to which the human soul consists of: the breath of G.o.d, the word, the thought, Psyche, the power of living, appearance, and the body.

"Ursula, the middle sister, is Psyche, that is, the real self, the deepest, the essential in our being. This real self is unconscious and unknowable. Let the ideal come, no ideal can unveil the deepest. It is dead to us."

Maeterlinck's imagination has been compared "to a lake with desolate and stagnant waters, unceasingly reflecting the same black landscapes, on whose banks the same suffering personages for ever come to sit." The same old castle, the same subterranean caverns, the same dark forests, another old tower, are the scenes of _Pelleas et Melisande_ (Pelleas and Melisanda) which was published at Brussels in 1892, and performed at the Theatre des Bouffes-Parisiens in Paris on the 16th May, 1893. The scene is the same; but there is a difference between this play and those which preceded it--here for the first time we have characters almost of flesh and blood; "the asphodelic shadows and marionettes begin to colour themselves with blood-warm humanity."[2] We have personages who represent the same ideas as those of the previous plays--Melisanda is again the soul--but here the puppets are moved by Love, not Death. In _Princess Maleine_ love is one of the means by which Fate moves the puppets to death; in Pelleas and Melisanda death is the bourne to which Love drives his sheep. The sheep do not know whither they are being driven; when they come to cross-roads they do not know which to take; but they do feel, dimly, that they are not on the road to the fold.

Hence the tragedy of their emotions; and it is the state of the soul filled with love, as tragic and as mystical a consciousness or subconsciousness as that of the soul in the clutch of fate or in the shadow of death, that Maeterlinck projects into _Pelleas and Melisanda_ as into _Alladine and Palomides_ and _Aglavaine and Selysette_.

We have nothing to do here with morality or the laws which regulate marriage. The soul knows nothing of such things; is unconscious even of the sins of the body.[3] The soul is subject only to such laws as are inherent in itself: "the secret laws of antipathy or of sympathy, elective or instinctive affinities."[4] The soul, remembering the fair sunny clime from which it came, pining in the cold air of the marshlands, groping about helplessly in the dark, always meeting closed doors, always gazing through gla.s.s at the unattainable, is an eternal searcher for the light; and if it meets a comrade who has the key to the closed door of its happiness, or who holds the lamp to light its path, it will follow the gleam blindly. It must do, for that is the law of its being. The tragedy lies in this: that it follows the gleam blindly, and the gleam leads it--at all events at present, because alien souls come athwart the path it is following--into the abyss of night.

Civic laws were made to fetter the body; but the soul has no consciousness of the body, of the senses, and cannot therefore be fettered by civic laws. So long as you hold that love is a function of the soul, and not of the senses, you cannot call Francesca da Rimini or Melisanda faithless wives. In your philosophy they are not on the road to adultery, but to the happiness for which their soul cries out, and to which it has inalienable right.

The story of _Pelleas and Melisanda_ is as old as love: it is the story of Francesca da Rimini; it is Sudermann's _Geschichte der stillen Muhle_. Golaud,[5] a prince of blood and iron, whose hair and beard are turning grey, losing his way while hunting in a forest, comes upon a lovely being whose dress, though torn by brambles, is princely. She is weeping by the side of a spring, into which her crown (the symbol of her royal birth; all souls are royal) has fallen. Somebody has hurt her--who? All of them, all of them. She has fled away, she is lost ...

she was born far away. Golaud marries her, and takes her to the Castle, where his grandfather, King Arkel, holds rule over a famine-stricken land by a desolate sea. Here dwells also Pelleas, his young brother.