I
If we did not possess Maeterlinck's own dramas, we might be able to judge from his essays what his position towards the drama and fiction would be. Here we have revealed to us a manner of apprehending life and of looking out upon the world that could find expression only in some such novel dramatic form as Maeterlinck has adopted. The dramatist himself, however, has given us, in his exquisite chapters on "The Tragical in Daily Life" and "The Awakening of the Soul," in The Treasure of the Humble, a statement, at once explicit and impassioned, of his creed. He advances the theory that the ordinary tragedy of startling incident is, or ought to be, a thing of the past, a concept of barbaric ages, when men could be thrilled by the secret under forces of life only by reaching towards them through crude and violent action. In a more refined and subtle age like this, we should be able to trace the hand of destiny even when it does not work through media so coarse and palpable. It is not the primitive sensation of seeing one man act the murder of another that is the essence of tragedy. It is the sense of spiritual enlightenment that comes to us; the feeling that, somehow or other, the murder itself, the passion and the events that led up to it, the consequences that flow from it, are all subtly interwoven threads of the great indwelling laws of things. Most of the action, indeed, that is associated with our current notion of tragedy is, from a higher point of view, both æsthetically superfluous and an evidence of our earthiness. We should be capable of being moved to pity, of feeling the most refined tragic sorrow, by a play that eliminates the coarser and more obvious facts, and relies on gentler and more intimate suggestions of universal truth. Our present age, he thinks, is capable, or is becoming capable, of this. "In former days," he says in his essay on "The Awakening of the Soul," "if there was question, for a moment, of a presentiment, of the strange impressions produced by a chance meeting or a look, of a decision that the unknown side of human reason had governed, of an intervention or a force, inexplicable and yet understood, of the sacred laws of sympathy and antipathy, of elective and instinctive affinities, of the overwhelming influence of the thing that had not been spoken—in former days these problems would have been carelessly passed by; and, besides, it was but seldom that they obtruded themselves upon the serenity of the thinker. They seemed to come about by the merest chance. That they are ever pressing upon life, unceasingly and with prodigious force—this was unsuspected of all; and the philosopher hastened back to familiar studies of passion, and of incident that floated on the surface."
This is clearly part of a philosophy of life and art in which the cruder nervous strands are put aside, as useless for that spiritual illumination which the thinker desires. They are too thick to be sensitive to the finer currents that pass through them; only the more delicate nerve-tracts, alive to every wave of feeling, can be stimulated to philosophic light and heat. The essence of all Maeterlinck's work, of course, is this supersensitiveness. He is endowed with other senses than ours, other modes of apprehending the universe. He is a mystic, and by reason of being a mystic he is at the same time out of touch with many things that the normal man calls real, and delicately sensitive to many currents in the spiritual atmosphere of the universe of whose very existence the normal man is all his life unaware. We have to remember that this world is after all only what our own senses and intellect make it for each of us. The little we can see and feel must be as nothing compared with the immensities that we can neither see nor feel, but that always attend our thoughts, our footsteps, our very breathing, like silent, invisible spectators. Even the world of the animal is not our world, for the animal is alive to many things that never penetrate our consciousness; and there are exceptionally constituted human beings on whose nerves the universe seems to write different messages from those that are communicated to the ordinary soul. The mystic catches vibrations in life to which duller natures are, except in moments of abnormal exaltation, for the most part insensitive. When we find fault with him for the apparent weakness of his hold upon reality, we need to remember that his realities are not always ours. He frequently has difficulty in expressing himself in our ordinary speech, for the reason that this is mainly the instrument of normal cerebration, not of the sub-normal or the super-normal. Hence Maeterlinck's theorem—which is not half such a paradox as it looks—that the profounder vibrations of the soul are more easily communicated by silence than by speech. We are beset by intuitions that can never find adequate expression in words. "How strangely," he says, "do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words!" Speech hardly seems necessary to him as a means of carrying on his thoughts, which, as they lie in deeper, more obscure places than language has ever visited, must seek a more immediate way of passage from his own brain to that of another. "A time will come, perhaps, when our souls will know of each other without the intermediary of the senses.... A spiritual epoch is perhaps upon us...." Thus the favourite means of communication between the soul of the spiritual elect is not speech, but silence—silence, which is far more eloquent, far more illuminative of the profoundest depths of being, than language can ever be. "It is idle," he writes, "to think that by means of words any real communication can ever pass from one man to another.... It is only when life is sluggish within us that we speak." And just as the mystic despises words as instruments of communication, so he looks down upon facts as guides to illumination. As the inner life is too subtle to be expressed in ordinary language, so its interests are too refined to be spent upon crude facts. These are "nothing but the laggards, the spies and camp followers, of the great forces we cannot see." [57]