Major Prophets of To-Day

by Edwin E. Slosson

"Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Maeterlinck are thus far, perhaps, the only men who have been habitually, and, as it were, instinctively, aware that democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience to nature; among these Maeterlinck has at least the advantage of greater illumination by the progress of natural science."

This democratic feeling seems to me to arise more from his mystical sense of the continuity of life than from personal disposition or political theory. In his earlier and more characteristic dramas, the persons are hardly more than talking symbols. Their looks and costumes are not described, either in the stage directions or in the dialogue. Their names—if he takes the trouble to give them names—are scarcely sufficient in some cases to indicate the sex. Their speech is language reduced to its lowest elements, excessively simplified, in fact, and full of the repetitions and incoherencies common to stupid and uneducated people the world over. Maeterlinck himself calls them "marionnettes", and says that they have the appearance of half deaf somnambulists just awakening from a painful dream.

But these puppet people are divested of individuality for the purpose of reducing them to the common denominator of humanity. They are devoided of personal interest in order to prevent the attention of the spectator from being fixed upon them. They are made transparent so that we may look through them and perceive the external forces which control them. The dramatic poet, he says in the preface to his early dramas, "must show us in what way, in what form, in what conditions, according to what laws, and to what end our destinies are controlled by the superior powers, the unintelligible influences, the infinite principles of which, in so far as he is a poet, he is persuaded that the universe is full."

Great poetry he regards as composed of three principal elements:

First, verbal beauty, then the contemplation and passionate depiction of what really exists around us and in ourselves, that is to say, nature and feeling, and, finally, enveloping the entire work and creating its own atmosphere, the idea which the poet has of the unknown in which float the beings and things he evokes, of the mystery which dominates them and judges them and presides over their destinies.

The critics were not altogether wrong when they called the characters of his earlier plays "mere shadows." But a shadow exists only when a bright light is cast on a real object. Maeterlinck's purpose is to make Plato's cave men aware of the drama that is being enacted behind their backs. The real action of these plays is not that seen on the stage. His dramas contain their message written in secret ink between the lines, and it becomes visible only when warmed by the sympathy of the reader.

The performance of "Macbeth" at Saint-Wandrille had a double interest. It introduced a novel form of the drama, and it added another to the many attempts to put Shakespeare into French. This select and household entertainment might be called "chamber pageantry", because it bears somewhat the same relation to the outdoor processionings now so popular as chamber music does to orchestral. Most of the incongruities which the critics pointed out[11] are not inherent in the plan, but due to the fact that "Macbeth" is not adapted to such a setting any more than it is to the modern theater. Conceivably something more effective could be done in this line if a new play were written to fit the place and the conditions of enactment, requirements certainly not more exigeant than those of the Elizabethan stage. In this it would even be possible to keep strictly to the three unities, and play the scenes appropriately indoors and out, in daylight and dark.

Madame Georgette Leblanc-Maeterlinck has been, as wives are apt to be, both a help and a hindrance to her husband.

She has inspired some of his best work and also embroiled him in interminable controversies with theatrical managers. "Monna Vanna" was written for her, so, very naturally, she wanted a monopoly of the title rôle, and when Debussy set "Pelléas et Mélisande" to music as unearthly as the play, she insisted upon singing Mélisande. But the Parisian managers, either because they had protégées of their own or because they did not have a sufficiently high opinion of Madame Leblanc's capabilities as an actress and a prima donna, declined to take her, and M. Maeterlinck was not able to compel them to, or to prevent the production of the play and opera with other leading ladies. She did, however, finally sing the part both at home and in America, though she lost the distinction of creating it.

But, at any rate, we owe to her assiduity a new translation of "Macbeth", which the London Times says "is the most conscientious effort to preserve the atmosphere of a Shakespearean play which has been attempted in French since M. Marcel Schwab's remarkable rendering of 'Hamlet.'" The difficulty of translating poetical language, wherein the sound and connotation of the words are as essential as their literal meaning, is admirably stated by M. Maeterlinck: