Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck Part 6

_Interior_, which was performed at the Theatre de l'uvre in March, 1895, is better than _The Intruder_ in so far as the coming of death is not indicated by suspicious signs (which turn out to be from natural causes) and dim forebodings (which might possibly be the drivelling of old age). Here everything is taken absolutely from life. _Interior_, too, shows a great mastery of "active silence": some of the scenes in _Alladine and Palomides_ approach pantomime; in _Interior_ we have actual pantomime--the family whom the tragedy befalls are seen sitting in the lamplit room of their house, mute characters, and the spectators, together with the speaking characters, see them, through the three windows, resting from their day's toil. There are three daughters in the family, as in _The Intruder_; but one of them has drowned herself.

"She was perhaps one of those who won't say anything, and everybody has in his mind more than one; reason for ending his life.... You can't see into the soul as you see into that room. They are all the same.... They only say the usual things; and n.o.body suspects anything.... They look like dolls that don't move, and such a lot of things are happening in their souls.... They don't know themselves what they are.... No doubt she lived as the others live.... No doubt she went on saying to the day of her death: 'It's going to rain to-day'; or, it may be: 'The fruit isn't ripe yet.'

They talk with a smile of flowers that have withered, and in the dark they cry...."

"The Stranger" has waded into the river, and brought the body to the sh.o.r.e; and now he, with "The Greybeard," a friend of the family, is in the old garden planted with willows. The Greybeard is to tell the bad news before the crowd arrives with the corpse. But while he looks at the peaceful idyll in the lamplight--the mother with the baby sleeping on her left shoulder, not moving lest it should awake, the sisters embroidering, the father by the fire--his courage sinks, and it is only when the crowd with the body arrive that he enters the house. We see the father rising to greet the visitor, and one of the girls offering him a chair. By his gestures we know he is speaking. Suddenly the mother starts and rises. She questions the Greybeard. The whole family rush out at the door. The room is left empty, except for the baby, which sleeps on in the arm-chair where the mother has put it down.

_Interior_ needs no interpretation. It is one of the simplest, as it is one of the most terrible, masterpieces in all literature. Some critics consider it the best thing Maeterlinck has written.

In _The Death of Tintagiles_ the tragedy takes place behind a closed door. ("Victor Hugo said that nothing is more interesting than a wall behind which something is happening," Jules Lemaitre reminds us.[3]

"This tragic wall is in all M. Maeterlinck's poems," he continues; "and when it is not a wall, it is a door; and when it is not a door, it is a window veiled with curtains.") Behind the closed door, in an enormous tower which still withstands the ravages of time when the rest of the castle is crumbling to pieces, dwells the Queen (Death). The castle is stifled by poplars. It is sunk deep down in a girdle of darkness. They might have built it on the top of the mountains that take all the air from it.... One might have breathed there, and seen the sea all round the island. The Queen never comes down from her tower, and all the doors of it are closed night and day. But she has servants who move with noiseless feet. The Queen has a power that none can fathom; "and we live here with a great pitiless weight on our soul." "She is there on our soul like a tombstone, and none dares stretch out his arm." Ygraine explains this to her little brother Tintagiles, whom the Queen has sent for from over the sea. There is some talk of the boy's golden crown, as there was of Melisanda's; every soul is royal, and comes from far away, you remember. Bellangere, the boy's other sister, has heard the Queen's servants whispering. They know that the Queen has sent for the boy to kill him. The only friend the two sisters and the boy have is Aglovale, a greybeard, who, like Arkel, has long since renounced the vanity of resisting fate and having a will of his own. "All is useless," he says; but now he is willing to defend the boy, since they hope. He sits down on the threshold with his sword across his knees. The Queen's servants come with stealthy feet, and Aglovale's sword snaps when he tries to prevent them from opening the door. But this time the servants, meeting resistance, withdraw, only to return when Aglovale and the sisters are asleep. Tintagiles is sleeping too, between the sisters, with his arms round their necks; and their arms are round him. His hands are plunged deep into their hair; he holds a golden curl tight between his teeth.

The servants cut the sisters' hair, and remove the boy, still sleeping, with his little hands full of golden curls. At the end of the corridor he screams; Ygraine awakes, and rushes in pursuit. Bellangere falls in a dead faint on the threshold. The fifth act is a picture of unendurable anguish. "A great iron door under very dark vaults." Ygraine enters with a lamp in her hand. Faint knocking is heard on the other side of the door; then the voice of Tintagiles. Ygraine scratches her finger-nails out on the iron door, and smashes her lamp on it. The boy cries out that hands are at his throat. "The fall of a little body is heard behind the iron door." Ygraine implores, curses, sinks down exhausted.

It is probably wrong to look on _The Death of Tintagiles_ as, princ.i.p.ally, a picture of physical anguish. That would be dramatic, and therefore, in Maeterlinck's idea at the time he wrote the play, vulgar.

The play is rather based, like _The Sightless_, on the sensations of fear we have when we awaken from the poisoned apathy, which is the safeguard of the peace of mind of most people, in the stifling air of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. (The Queen's Tower overshadows all the rest of the castle.) Everything is plunged in darkness here....

Only the Queen's Tower is lit.... We know, but we do not understand....

TINTAGILES: What do you know, sister Ygraine?

YGRAINE: Very little, my child.... My sister and I, since we were born, have trailed our existence here without daring to understand anything of all that happens.... I have lived for a very long time like a blind woman in this island; and everything seemed natural to me.... I saw no other events here except a bird that was flying, a leaf that was trembling, a rose that was opening.... Such a silence reigned here that a ripe fruit falling in the park called faces to the windows.... And n.o.body seemed to have any suspicions ... but one night I found out that there must be something else.... I wanted to run away and I couldn't....

We cannot flee from our exile; and "we have got to live while we wait for the unexpected," as Aglovale says.

[1] Ablamore was not really wise, according to the theories propounded in _Wisdom and Destiny_. A wise man is one who knows himself; but he is not wise if he does not know himself in the future as well as in the present and in the past. He knows a part of his future because he is himself already a part of this future; and, since the events which will happen to him will become a.s.similated to his own nature, he knows what these events will become (Chapter VIII).

[2] Cf. in Strindberg's _Legends_, "The soul's irradiation and dilatability": "The secret of a great actor lies in his inborn capacity to let his soul ray out, and thereby enter into touch with his audience.

In great moments there is actually a radiance round a speaker who is full of soul, and his face irradiates a light which is visible even to those who do not believe." The idea is more or less of a commonplace.

[3] _Impressions de Theatre_, huitieme serie, p. 153.

CHAPTER VIII

In 1895 Maeterlinck published _Annabella_, a translation of John Ford's _'Tis Pity She's a Wh.o.r.e_. It had been acted at the Theatre de l'uvre on the 6th of November, 1894. The published play is preceded by some entertaining gossip concerning Webster (whose _d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_ Georges Eekhoud translated) and Cyril Tourneur, "les deux princes noirs de l'horreur ... les deux tragiques mercuriels, compacts comme la houille et infernalement veneneux, dont le premier surtout a seme a pleines mains des fleurs miraculeuses dans les poisons et les tenebres"; concerning also "Jhon Fletcher" and "Jonson, le pachydermique, l'entete et puissant Ben Jonson, qui appartient a la famille de ces grands monstres litteraires ou rayonnent Diderot, Jean Paul et l'autre Jhonson, le Jhonson de Boswel." Interesting, too, is the way Maeterlinck reads his own theories into the Elizabethans. Ford, he finds, was a master of "interior dialogue":

"Ford is profoundly discreet. Annabella, Calantha, Bianca, Penthea do not cry out; and they speak very little. In the most tragical moments, in those most charged with misery, they say two or three very simple words; and it is, as it were, a thin coating of ice on which we can rest an instant to see what there is in the abyss."

There are some quaint pa.s.sages inspired by mysticism; as this, with reference to the "great cyclone of poetry which burst over London towards the end of the sixteenth century":

"You seem to be in the very midst of the human soul's miraculous springtime. These were really days of marvellous promise. You would have said that humanity was about to become something else.

Moreover, we do not know what influence these great poetic phenomena have exercised on our life; and I have forgotten what sage it was who said that if Plato or Swedenborg had not existed, the soul of this peasant who is pa.s.sing along the road and who has never read anything would not be what it is to-day. Everything in the spiritual regions is connected more closely than people believe; and just as there is no malady which does not oppress all humanity and does not invisibly affect the healthiest man, so the most undeniable genius has not one thought which does not modify something in the inmost soul of the most hopeless idiot in the asylum."

It is in this style that Maeterlinck discusses mysticism in the introduction to _Les Disciples a Sas et les Fragments de Novalis_ (The Disciples at Sas and the Fragments of Novalis), published also in 1895.

"All that one can say," he discourses, "is nothing in itself. Place in one side of a pair of scales all the words of the greatest sages, and in the other side the unconscious wisdom of this child who is pa.s.sing, and you will see that what Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Schopenhauer, and Pascal have revealed to us will not lift the great treasures of unconsciousness by one ounce, for the child that is silent is a thousand times wiser than Marcus Aurelius speaking."[1]

Some of the things he says here prepare the way for his dramatic theories:

"Open the deepest of ordinary moralists or psychologists, he will speak to you of love, of hate, of pride, and of the other pa.s.sions of our heart; and these things may please us an instant, like flowers taken from their stalk. But our real and invariable life takes place a thousand leagues away from love and a hundred thousand leagues away from pride. We possess an _I_ which is deeper and more inexhaustible than the _I_ of pa.s.sions or of pure reason.

It is not a matter of telling us what we feel when the woman we love abandons us. She goes away to-day; our eyes weep, but our soul does not weep. It may be that our soul hears of the event and transforms it into light, for everything that falls into the soul irradiates. It may be too that our soul knows not of it; and if that be so what use is it to speak of it? We must leave these petty things to those who do not feel that life is deep....

"I may commit a crime without the least breath inclining the smallest flame of this fire" (the great central fire of our being); "and, on the other hand, one look exchanged, one thought which cannot unfold, one minute which pa.s.ses without saying anything, may stir it up in terrible whirlpools at the bottom of its retreats and cause it to overflow on to my life. Our soul does not judge as we do; it is a capricious, hidden thing. It may be reached by a breath and it may be unaware of a tempest. We must seek what reaches it; everything is there, for it is there that we are."

Maeterlinck has striking things to say concerning the German romanticist. "He is the clock," he says, "that has marked several of the most subtle hours of the human soul." In the following pa.s.sage he shows him to be a forerunner of the symbolists,[2] one of whose chief doctrines is that things are bound together by mysterious correspondences:

"Perhaps he is the man who has most deeply penetrated the intimate and mystical nature and the secret unity of the universe.... 'He sees nothing isolated,' and he is above all the amazed teacher of the mysterious relations there are among all things. He is for ever groping at the limits of this world, where the sun shines but rarely, and, on every hand, he suspects and touches strange coincidences and astonishing a.n.a.logies, obscure, trembling, fugitive, and shy, that fade before they are understood."

The fragmentary style of Novalis, though it provided Maeterlinck with ideas, did not influence his prose as much as that of Emerson did. He had written a preface for I. Will's translation of seven of Emerson's essays which Paul Lacomblez brought out in Brussels in 1894. This preface and the introductions to Ruysbroeck and Novalis are reprinted in abridged form in _Le Tresor des Humbles_ (_The Treasure of the Humble_), which the _Mercure de France_ issued in 1896. These essays are clearly modelled on Emerson's. He calls Emerson "the good morning shepherd of the pale green pastures of a new optimism." He came for many of us, Maeterlinck thinks, just at the right time. This points forward already to _Wisdom and Destiny_. The heroic hours which Carlyle glorified are less apparent than they were:

"All that remains to us is our everyday existence, and yet we cannot live without greatness.... You must live; all you who are crossing days and years without actions, without thoughts, without light, because your life after all is incomprehensible and divine.... You must live because there are no hours without the deepest miracles and the most unspeakable meanings.... Emerson came to affirm the secret grandeur which is the same in every man's life. He has surrounded us with silence and with admiration. He has set a ray of light under the feet of the artisan coming from the workshop.... He is the sage of ordinary days, and ordinary days make up the substance of our being...."

Emerson's gospel of everyday life harmonises admirably with the theory of the tragic advanced in another essay of the book, "_Le Tragique Quotidien_" ("Everyday Tragedy").

"Is it really dangerous to a.s.sert," asks the essayist, "that the veritable tragedy of life ... only begins the moment what are called adventures, griefs, and dangers are pa.s.sed?... Are there not other moments when one hears more permanent and purer voices?...

Nearly all our writers of tragedies only perceive the life of olden time; and one may a.s.sert that our whole theatre is an anachronism.... I admire Oth.e.l.lo, but he does not seem to me to live the august, everyday life of a Hamlet, who has the time to live because he does not act. Oth.e.l.lo is admirably jealous. But may it not be an ancient error to think that it is at the moments when we are possessed by such a pa.s.sion, or by others of equal violence, that we really live? I have come to think that an old man sitting in his arm-chair, simply waiting in the lamplight, listening without knowing it to all the eternal laws which reign around his house, interpreting, without understanding it, all that there is in the silence of the doors and the windows and in the low voice of the light, undergoing the presence of his soul and of his destiny, inclining his head a little, without suspecting that all the powers of this world intervene and hold watch in the room like attentive servants, not knowing that the sun itself sustains the little table on which he leans his elbows over the abyss, and that there is not one star of the sky nor one power of the soul which is indifferent to the movement of an eyelid that falls down or of a thought that rises--I have come to think that this motionless old man is living, in reality, with a deeper, more human, and more general life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who wins a victory, or 'the husband avenging his honour.'"

This eloquent pa.s.sage has made many critics shake their heads. "Put a vivisectional rabbit in the arm-chair," says one, "and all that is said still holds good."

It is in Emerson's "spiritual brother," Carlyle, that Maeterlinck finds his mainstay in the opening essay of the book, that on "Silence." This chapter is perhaps the most famous of his essays; and it must be understood if much in Maeterlinck's other work is not to remain obscure.

He distinguishes between active silence and pa.s.sive silence. The latter is only the reflex of sleep, death, or non-existence:

"It is silence sleeping; and while it is sleeping, it is less redoubtable even than speech; but an unexpected circ.u.mstance may awaken it of a sudden, and then its brother, the great active silence, seats itself on the throne. Be on your guard. Two souls are going to reach each other...."

What practical value such theories may have is seen from the dramas for marionettes, in which something never before attempted has been done.

Maeterlinck has indeed used silence to make the soul speak. But it may be questioned whether it is a doctrine solid enough to build with. It might, logically, lead to Max Reinhardt's wordless plays; but the latter, so far as they have yet been produced, have rather the reverse effect to that which Maeterlinck aimed at--Reinhardt spreads a feast for the eyes, and the silence of his pantomimes is only to enhance the spectacular appeal. Be that as it may, there are many astonishing things in Maeterlinck's mysticism, as there are in all mysticism. Many of them, no doubt, could be explained by the philosopher's "doctrine of ident.i.ty."[3] From a practical point of view, however, Maeterlinck might seem to be teaching that when we say "fine weather to-day," or "pa.s.s me the salt" (these are common words, but what "interior dialogue"

may there not be behind them?) we are expressing our souls; but that when we speak in the full heat of pa.s.sion, or with that eloquence which pours from us in the brighter moments of our brains, we are expressing nothing. When the old King in _Princess Maleine_ asks whether there will be salad for breakfast, he expresses admirably the state of a foundered soul; when Golaud finds Pelleas playing with Melisanda's hair in the dark, and, instead of bursting into a torrent of speech, says simply: "You are children.... What children!... What children!" his taciturnity, or, if you like, his active silence, renders to perfection his pained surprise, the confused feelings which he is forcing himself to restrain till he can be sure of his ground--but to pick out a few effective instances like these only proves that the theory will stand examination, not that it is universally valid. Golaud, for instance, is taciturn and slow to believe, and therefore the few words he speaks in the scene mentioned are well motived; but put a man in his place whose pa.s.sions are nearer the surface--a character of equal use to the dramatist, though of course less profound--and a torrent of words would have been more natural and equally effective.

If we cultivated silence more, we should perhaps discover, with Maeterlinck, that the period we live in is one of the soul's awakening.

"The soul," he says in another of these essays, "is like a sleeper who, under the weight of her dreams, is making immense efforts to move an arm or lift an eyelid." The soul is becoming visible almost: it does not shroud itself now in the same number of veils as it used to do. And "do you know--it is a disquieting and strange truth--do you know that if you are not good, it is more than probable that your presence proclaims it to-day a hundred times more clearly than it would have done two or three centuries ago." (If the essayist had added here that this is because our sensibilities are more refined, it would have been an evident truth; but he goes on to say: "Do you know that if you have made a single soul sad this morning, the soul of the peasant you are going to exchange a few words with about the storm or the rain was informed of it before his hand had half opened the door....")

The soul's awakening is seen best in those whom he calls _Les Avertis_ (those who are forewarned), and in women. "The forewarned" are precocious children, and those doomed to die young. As to women, Maeterlinck sees in them what Tacitus saw in the women of the Germans, something divinely prophetic. "It seems," he says, "that woman is more subject than we are to destinies. She undergoes them with a much greater simplicity. She never sincerely struggles against them. She is still nearer to G.o.d, and she surrenders herself with less reserve to the pure action of mystery." His description of woman's enn.o.bling effect on man (the main belief of the Minnesingers) is like the woman-worship in John Masefield's poem _Imagination_:

"All the beauty seen by all the wise Is but body to the soul seen by your eyes.

"Woman, if my quickened soul could win you, Nestle to the living soul within you--, Breathe the very breathing of your spirit, Tremble with you at the things which stir it,

"I should know the blinding, quick, intense Lightning of the soul's spring from the sense, Touch the very gleam of life's division.

Earth should learn a new soul from the vision."

In the chapter headed "The Star" Maeterlinck discusses fatalism. His conception of it, as might be expected from the dramas already discussed, is identical with pessimism. "There is no destiny of joy," he says, "there is no fortunate star." He explains the Scotch word "fey,"

and thinks it might be applied to all existences.