Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck

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 in The 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 from The Blue Bird that 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,83 the evolution of flowers – that we shall learn to solve the riddle of existence. This teaching, like that of The Life 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 be action. 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 another collection 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 high waves 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… Let us 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 that which came to him for having brought happiness and taught goodness to children.

The Blue Bird was 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 when The Blue Bird drew 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 demoniac Fitzebutze, 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 pay a 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 in Alladine and Palomides, they could not live in the light of day.

They reach the enchanted palaces where all men'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.

For The Blue Bird Maeterlinck was in 1912 awarded, for the third time in succession, the Belgian "Triennial prize for dramatic literature."

In 1910 appeared his translation of Macbeth, and the English translation of another play of his, Mary Magdalene. Macbeth was 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,84 and which is now his home. Mary Magdalene was first performed at Leipsic and Hamburg; in Great Britain it shares with Monna Vanna the honour of being refused an acting licence (because the voice of Jesus is heard in it!)

For Mary Magdalene Maeterlinck 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 the power 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;85 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 of Death. Maeterlinck takes up the thread of what he had said about death in his previous writings, especially in the noble essay on Immortality in Life and Flowers:

"For us, death is the one event that counts in our life or in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes 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 the Manchester 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."86 And there is another consideration, subtly suggested by Charles Bernard in an article in Le 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,87 or whether it be the sum total of our intellectual and moral qualities fortified by those of instinct and sub-consciousness88– 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?"89

Death appeared almost simultaneously with the news that Maeterlinck had been awarded the Nobel 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.

CHAPTER XII

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 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 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."90

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 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 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 difficult to 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 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 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.