Major Prophets of To-Day

by Edwin E. Slosson

At the age of twenty-four he began to contribute to La Pléiade, the organ of the "Young Belgians", a group of ambitious young writers, impressionists, seekers after novel effects of style, chiefly attained by means of transferring descriptive adjectives from one of the five senses to the other four. In the third number of this short-lived periodical was published Maeterlinck's first and apparently his last story, "The Massacre of the Innocents", a biblical incident reset in the times of the Spanish wars.[14] Here appeared some of the poems republished in 1889 in the little volume entitled "Serres Chaudes" ("Hot-house Blooms").

The cross-fertilization of Elizabethan drama with French symbolism gave rise to the "Princess Maleine", a new species if there ever was one, Shakespearean in form and incident, most un-Shakespearean in everything else. The first edition of this drama was an extremely limited one, twenty copies, printed on a hand press with Maeterlinck turning the crank.

It was the "Princess Maleine" which led to his "discovery" by Octave Mirbeau, who proclaimed it "the greatest work of genius of the times", and "superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in Shakespeare."[15] This newspaper praise made Maeterlinck instantly famous everywhere save in his own country. His neighbors in Ghent refused to take it seriously, and thought it a pity that his family should encourage the young man in his mania by paying for puffs like that.

To trace Maeterlinck's dramatic development is like watching a materialization at a séance. His characters have become increasingly solid and life-like, but they have lost the illusiveness and allusiveness that made their charm in his earlier plays. Maeterlinck has never been able to equal Ibsen—nor has anyone else—in the art of making a perfectly individualized and natural character serve also as a type or symbol, thus doubling our interest by combining the specific and the general.

Maeterlinck's genius shows best in his own peculiar field of symbolism and suggestion, that of his early dramas and of "The Blue Bird." His plays of a more conventional type, "Monna Vanna" and "Mary Magdalene", betray his deficiencies as a dramatic writer, his lack of the power of plot construction and a sense of humor. "Mary Magdalene" is really as much a one-act play as "The Interior", for the last act is the only one that counts. Here the crowd has the star part, the crowd of the lame, the halt and the blind, the sinners and the diseased, whom Jesus has cured and who now desert him; and the real drama is enacted, not in the upper chamber of the house of Joseph of Arimathea, but in the street outside, leading to the Place of the Skull. The scene of the woman taken in adultery is far less dramatic than in its biblical form, because in the play she is really protected by Roman swords, not by the awakened consciences of the mob.

The continuous development of Maeterlinck's philosophy of life is shown as well in his plays as in his essays. Mary Magdalene, who would not save her Savior by the sacrifice of her virtue, represents a higher ethical ideal than Monna Vanna, who gives herself for the city. In his earlier plays Maeterlinck tries to frighten us with the traditional Terrors which in "The Blue Bird" are shown to be imprisoned and harmless in the Palace of Night. Old Time with his scythe, who as "The Intruder" of twenty years ago brought death into the household, appears now in "The Blue Bird" under a kinder aspect, calling the Children of the Future into life. In fact, "The Blue Bird" represents the highest point of the philosophy of optimism, for it is based upon the most daring of all the assumptions of science—that the secret of existence is also the secret of happiness. "To be wise is above all to be happy", says Maeterlinck. Truly, he has got a long way from Schopenhauer, the object of his boyish admiration.

Maeterlinck has, in short, acquired a faith. I do not see exactly whom or what he has faith in, but he has faith, and that, after all, seems to be the main thing. The development of his thought has an especial interest in that it shows how a spiritual interpretation of the universe and a moral support can be built up on pure agnosticism. From Christianity he has derived little except a vague symbolism and certain ethical ideals. He looks back with bitterness upon his school days in the Jesuit college at Ghent, but his writings show no trace of the anticlerical animosity which is so conspicuous in Haeckel's. It was his latest book, "Death", the most religious of them all, breathing a spirit of unconquerable faith in immortality and future happiness, that brought down upon Maeterlinck the condemnation of Rome, and in 1914 all his books and plays were put upon the Index by the Sacred Congregation.

From the mystics he has derived much, especially from the German Novalis and the Flemish Ruysbroek, whose works he has translated into French. In his preface to the latter he says:

Mystical truths have this strange superiority over truths of the ordinary kind, that they know neither age nor death.... They possess the immunity of Swedenborg's angels, who progress continually toward the springtime of youth, so that the eldest angels always appear the youngest.

But he undoubtedly owes his ethical and philosophical growth most of all to the study of nature, not the vague contemplation of natural objects which in the early Victorian era was thought proper pabulum for poets, but the effort to understand nature through the use of modern scientific methods. We are reminded of Sir Thomas Browne, who says: "Those strange and mystical transmigrations that I have observed in silkworms turned my philosophy into divinity."