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CHAPTER VIII

In 1895 Maeterlinck published Annabella, a translation of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. It had been acted at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre on the 6th of November, 1894. The published play is preceded by some entertaining gossip concerning Webster (whose Duchess 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 vénéneux, dont le premier surtout a semé à pleines mains des fleurs miraculeuses dans les poisons et les ténèbres"; concerning also "Jhon Fletcher" and "Jonson, le pachydermique, l'entêté et puissant Ben Jonson, qui appartient à la famille de ces grands monstres littéraires où 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 passages 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 passing 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 à Saïs et les Fragments de Novalis (The Disciples at Saïs 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 passing, 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."⁶⁰

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 passions 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 passions 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 passes 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 passage he shows him to be a forerunner of the symbolists,⁶¹ 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 analogies, 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 Trésor 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 assert," asks the essayist, "that the veritable tragedy of life … only begins the moment what are called adventures, griefs, and dangers are passed?.. 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 assert that our whole theatre is an anachronism… I admire Othello, 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. Othello 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 passion, 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 passage 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 passive 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 circumstance 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 identity."⁶² From a practical point of view, however, Maeterlinck might seem to be teaching that when we say "fine weather to-day," or "pass 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 passion, 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 passions 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 God, and she surrenders herself with less reserve to the pure action of mystery." His description of woman's ennobling 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.

In the chapter on "La Morale Mystique" – one which has been sharply criticised by Christians – Maeterlinck sunders the soul from the conscious acts of the body.

"What would happen," he asks, "if our soul suddenly became visible and had to advance in the midst of her assembled sisters, despoiled of her veils, but charged with her most secret thoughts, and trailing behind her the most mysterious acts of her life that nothing could express? What would she blush for? What would she wish to hide? Would she, like a modest woman, cast the long mantle of her hair over the numberless sins of the flesh? She knew nothing of them, and these sins have never reached her. They were committed a thousand leagues away from her throne, and the soul of the Sodomite even would pass through the midst of the crowd without suspecting anything, and bearing in its eyes the transparent smile of a child. It had taken no part in the sin, it was pursuing its life on the side where light reigns, and it is this life alone that it will remember."

This might comfort a criminal; but it is nothing more than a pure worship of the spirit. Maeterlinck might reply to his Christian traducers that they in their creed have forgotten the soul, or found it hard to think of it as independent of the body; and that it might have been better for them had they concentrated their worship on the Holy Ghost (as he does, on the Holy Spirit), for their worship of Christ is a species of idolatry, the worship of a graven image, an image graven in flesh.

It is especially the "interior beauty," of which Maeterlinck treats in the last essay in the collection, which fills the play Aglavaine and Selysette, published in the same year. It is a competition between two women for the greater beauty of soul, a competition in which simplicity gains the victory over wisdom.

In a castle by the sea live Méléandre and his wife Selysette. They have been married four years. They have been happy, though sometimes the husband has asked himself whether they have lived near enough to each other. Now they are joined by Aglavaine, the widow of Selysette's brother, who has been unhappy in her marriage. Before she has been eight days in the castle, Méléandre cannot imagine that they were not "born in the same cradle" [sic].

Aglavaine on her part does not know whether he is her radiance or whether she is becoming his light. Everything is so joined in their beings that it is no longer possible to say where the one begins and where the other ends. (Pure love, according to the essays, is "a furtive but extremely penetrating recollection of the great primitive unity."⁶³) They think of loving each other like brother and sister; but they know in their hearts that it will not be possible. (The senses are beginning to intrude into Maeterlinck's writings.) Nor can they run away from each other, or, at least, they make out they cannot: "A thing so beautiful," says Méléandre, "was not born to die; and we have duties towards ourselves." They kiss; a cry of pain is heard among the trees, and Selysette is seen fleeing, disheveled, towards the castle.

This wounded wife has less control over her natural feelings than Astolaine had in similar circumstances; but Aglavaine, in several pages of parchment speech, shows herself so wise and strong a woman that Selysette's jealousy of her is turned into love. Now all three dream of a triangular love of equal magnitudes. "We will have no other cares," says Aglavaine, "save to become as beautiful as possible, so that all the three of us may love one another the more… We will put so much beauty into ourselves and our surroundings that there will be no room left for misfortune and sadness; and if these would enter in spite of all they must perforce become beautiful too before they dare knock at our door." They dream of a unio mystica of souls: "It seems to me," says Méléandre to Aglavaine, "as though my soul and my whole being and all they possess had changed their abode, as though I were embracing, with tears, that part of myself which is not of this world, when I am embracing you."

But Méléandre, though he loves Selysette's awakened soul more than in old days he loved her girlish body, cannot help loving Aglavaine more. "Is it not strange?" Aglavaine asks Selysette, "I love you, I love Méléandre, Méléandre loves me, he loves you too, you love us both, and yet we cannot be happy, because the hour has not yet come when human beings can be united so."

It is clear that one of the two women must go. In spite of her duty to herself Aglavaine, in a fit of generosity, decides to sacrifice herself; but Selysette makes her promise not to go till she herself tells her she may. She talks mysteriously to Aglavaine of a plan she has conceived for putting things right; and it is the great weakness of the drama that the wise woman, who can read souls so easily, cannot guess the truth in this one instance. A fool would have known that Selysette was contemplating suicide; but Aglavaine could not be allowed to wreck the tragedy…

There is an old abandoned lighthouse tower that the seagulls scream round. It is crumbling away at the top. Méléandre had only climbed it once, and then he was dizzy… Here comes Selysette with her little sister, Yssaline, for whom she has promised to catch a strange bird with green wings that has been seen flying round the tower… She thinks it has built its nest in a hole in the wall just where she can lean over… She leans over to seize it, and the top of the wall gives way. She is precipitated on to the sands below. She would be killed if it were not for the fifth act; but she lives long enough to make out that it was a pure accident, so that the two surviving lovers may be happy ever after with a clear conscience.

In spite of great beauties, the play as a whole is disappointing. The fourth act, indeed, is perfect. In the first four acts we have the doctrine of silence, as well as various other doctrines, dinned into our ears. Méléandre is a milksop; Aglavaine is a bore; but Selysette is a beautiful creation – the only one of Maeterlinck's women, perhaps, who is absolutely natural. She is "unconscious goodness," says a critic, whereas Aglavaine is "conscious goodness"; and no doubt she does represent an idea;⁶⁴ but she is nevertheless a real, created woman. Méligrane, the spiteful old grandmother, is in the main the same idea (wisdom is in babes and the very old) as the greybeards of other plays; but there is not very much of her, and she must be remembered for saying this (to her granddaughter, Selysette):

"And so it is thanks to you that I was a mother for the second time, when I had ceased to be beautiful; and you will know some day that women are never tired of being mothers, and that they would rock death itself, if death came to sleep on their knees."

Aglavaine and Selysette is at all events important as being a turning-point in Maeterlinck's development. We have seen that he had applauded Emerson's sturdy individualism. There is as much individualism as fatalism in this play. It is true that love is fatal to Selysette, but that is because Aglavaine is a monstrosity, not because love is a dark power – in this play it is distinctly painted as a bright power. Death is only called in as a saviour from an intolerable situation: Selysette dies, but she dies with a clear mind, and with a smile.

Aglavaine and Selysette is legendary in its setting only; and it is not vague, but a clear handling of a problem which is a favourite with contemporary dramatists – another notable example is Gerhart Hauptmann's Einsame Menschen ("Lonely Lives"). Hauptmann, like Maeterlinck, simplifies the complexity by the suicide of the most sensitive member of the group: both dramatists come to the conclusion that the time is not yet ripe for reorganising cohabitation on a plural basis, and that (to quote Dryden) one to one must still be cursedly confined. What Maeterlinck has contributed to the problem is that he makes the two women love each other as well as the man they sandwich…

There is nothing of this awakening courage to live in the collection of poems modelled on folksong (the symbolists generally learned much from folksong) which Maeterlinck published in this year of 1896. In Douze Chansons (Twelve Songs) which are now included in Quinze Chansons (Fifteen Songs) at the end of Serres Chaudes, the poor human soul is still groping in surrounding dark, and only catching rare glimpses of the light. In one poem the soul has been wandering for thirty years, seeking her saviour; he was everywhere, but she could not come near him. Now, in the evening of her days, she bids her sister souls of sixteen years take up her staff and seek him; they also, far away. Les Filles aux Yeux bandés and Les sept Filles d'Orlamonde⁶⁵ are sketches of a motive which was worked out in Ardiane and Bluebeard.

The poems are so beautifully illustrated by Charles Doudelet's woodcuts that it is hard to say whether the pictures illuminate the poem or the poems the pictures. Maeterlinck's Tower is there, hauntingly desolate, a nightmare, set against The three blind sisters. You know the meaning of She had three diadems of gold when you have seen the picture to it: the love you bestow on a person is a net wherewith that person imprisons you. The most desolating imprisonment of all is that in which a mother is plunged by her children (for there is no love so deep as hers): Doudelet shows us a woman chained up in a hole whelmed with snow.

To dream over this rare volume for an after-noon, stretching out its leaves before you like the wings of a bird, is to be borne into the atmosphere of the soul. And when you come to the last picture and the last poem "You have lighted the lamps" —

 
"The other days are wearisome,
The other days are also shy,
The other days will never come,
The other days shall also die,
We too shall die here by and bye" —
 

you would like to bury your head in your hands and sob like a woman – without knowing why…