Arnold's expression might perhaps have been a little more artistic, but there is no controverting the general truth he voices—that poetry looks before and after in a way that music cannot possibly do; is wider in its philosophic sweep than music, clearer in its vision, making up for its weaker idealism by its sympathetic evocation of a hundred notes that are denied to music.
IV
And just as we pass from music to poetry to reach certain emotions that are not to be found in the more generalised art, so we pass from Maeterlinck's æsthetic world to that of the cruder realist, in the search for certain further artistic satisfactions. Mysticism has this in common with music—that it gives voice to the broader, more generalised feelings of mankind, and hesitates to come into contact with the less ecstatic faculties that are exercised upon the harder facts of life. Maeterlinck, like Wagner, tries to lay hold upon the universal in art; but he does so simply because, again like Wagner, he is comparatively insensitive to other stimuli. And as Wagner's æsthetic holds good for the most part only of those who, like him, apprehend the world through music, so Maeterlinck's theory of drama is completely valid only for those who share his general attitude toward life and knowledge. If it is really the mystics who have the key to the knowledge of things; if, as Maeterlinck himself says in his introduction to Ruysbroeck's L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, "toute certitude est en eux seuls," and that "les vérités mystiques ont sur les vérités ordinaires un privilège étrange—elles ne peuvent ni vieillir ni mourir"; if in the hypnotic semi-swoon of the faculties before the abyss of the universal we come closest to the real secret of things, then is there nothing to be added to or taken from Maeterlinck's statement of the essence of drama. If, on the other hand, the evolution of the more acutely specialised perceptions in us points to man's need of a mental system that shall embrace ever more and more of the phenomena of the world, then must we have an art that can shape these perceptions too into a beauty of their own. Did we all apprehend the universe as Maeterlinck and the mystics do—through a kind of sixth sense that is an instantaneous blend of the ordinary five; could we all arrive at his serenely philosophical outlook, and be content with so much understanding of the world as came to us in immediate intuitions—we should then see in his kind of art a mode of expression co-extensive with all that we could know or feel. But since we do not all look at life with the semi-Oriental fatalism of Maeterlinck, in whose soul the passive elements seem to outweigh the active, we have to turn to other types of dramatic art for the satisfaction of our cravings. "The poet," he says in one place, "adds to ordinary life something—I know not what—which is the poet's secret: and there comes to us a sudden revelation of life in its stupendous grandeur, in its submissiveness to the unknown powers, in its endless affinities, in its awe-inspiring misery." Well, for a great many of us there are moments when "submissiveness to the unknown powers" does not express the be-all and the end-all of life—more vivid moments of revolt, of struggle with uncertainties, of passionate assertions of personality, that have little kinship with the grey resignation of the mystic. If life is ugly and bitter, there is an art that can interest us deeply in this bitterness and ugliness, because it ministers to that deep-seated need of ours to leave no corner of life and nature unexplored. This art of the mercilessly real may not be so "philosophical" as Maeterlinck's; it may not speak to us so clearly of the "mysterious chant of the infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon," for these voices can make themselves heard only in a wider, serener, less turbid space than ours. But just as the poet foregoes some of the formal perfection of the musician, finding his compensation in his power to touch a wider range of things, so the realist finds in the bracing, ever-interesting contact with the cruder facts of life something that compensates him for missing the broader peace of the mystic—a sense of energetic personality, of struggle with and dominion over inimical forces, that the languor of mysticism cannot provide. "No human reason," says Maeterlinck, in our actions, "no human reason; nothing but destiny." Well, thought and action, to the mystic, may be only the children of illusion; but may there not be as much illusion in passivity, in the ecstatic collapse of the intellect under the pressure of an incomprehensible world? In the Maeterlinck drama, beautiful as it is, we cannot all of us find complete satisfaction. To quote the words that he himself has used in another context: "Here we are no longer in the well-known valleys of human and psychic life. We find ourselves at the door of the third enclosure—that of the divine life of the mystics. We have to grope timidly, and make sure of every footstep, as we cross the threshold." And when we have crossed the threshold, we find ourselves hungering and thirsting for the more troubled but at any rate broader life we have left behind us; just as the Wagnerian drama, mighty as it is, brings home to us the fact that there are needs of our nature that music cannot satisfy. Formal perfection, absolute homogeneity, are obtainable in an art only when we abstract it from outer incident and long reflection. Music comes before poetry in this respect, poetry before the drama, the drama before fiction. Take, from a master of reticence, an example of apparent dissipation of artistic force that Wagner would have held to prove his own theories. It is the scene in Madame Bovary where Léon, expecting to see Emma, is detained at dinner by Homais. "At two o'clock they were still at table, opposite each other. The large room was emptying; the stovepipe, in the shape of a palm tree, spread its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white basin, where, in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in a pile on their sides." "Watercress! asparagus! quails! three torpid lobsters!" Wagner would have said, "what have these to do with art? Music's manner of describing the impatience of two separated lovers is that of the mad prelude to the duet in Tristan. Here we have all the essential soul-states, without the admixture of crude external realities." Yet there is something in Léon's impatience that music cannot express—the dreary boredom inflicted by his companion, the helpless wandering of the mind over the insignificant uglinesses of his surroundings. This also is part of human psychology, and a part that can find expression only in words. In consideration of the wider sweep of the artistic net, we gladly abate our demands for perfection of quality in the yield; for the phenomena of the extensive and the intensive are meant to be compensatory, the one taking the burden upon itself where the strength of the other fails. Wagner erred in thinking that the union of all the arts in music-drama could render each separate art superfluous; Maeterlinck errs in thinking that the mystic, in his withdrawal to the centre of consciousness, can tell us all we desire to know of the outer circle. [58]
FOOTNOTES:
[56] I am compelled to draw attention to the words "æsthetic systems" because, on the appearance of this article in The Atlantic Monthly, a not unkindly reviewer took me to task for asserting, as he thought, that the art-work of Wagner was akin to that of Maeterlinck; he pointed out, quite rightly, that César Franck's work lies closer to Maeterlinck's than does Wagner's. But of course I had never asserted that Wagner and Maeterlinck spoke to us in the same language or of the same things. I was only concerned to prove that underlying the so very different practice of the two men was a curious similarity of æsthetic theory.
[57] Compare Amiel's saying—"Action is but coarsened thought."
[58] It is interesting to note that many things in Maeterlinck either move us, by their very vagueness, just in the way that music does, or else seem like a fragment from a libretto, needing to be set to music before they can attain their full significance. Of the former class the reader will remember such things as the conclusion of Alladine and Palomides. To the latter class belong many of those curious scenes in which the characters keep on reiterating apparently insignificant words, to the intense annoyance of the Man in the Street, who cannot see the meaning of it all. In Aglavaine and Selysette there are many passages that seem, without music, to be only the skeleton, the scaffolding, of an emotional effect. There is a salient example of the same thing in Joyzelle:
Joyzelle. Je t'embrassais la nuit, quand j'embrassais mes rêves....
Lancéor. Je n'ai pas eu de doute.... Joyzelle. Je n'ai pas eu de crainte....
Lancéor. Et tout m'est accordé....
Joyzelle. Et tout me rend heureuse!...
Lancéor. Que tes yeux sont profonds et pleins de confiance!...
Joyzelle. Et que les tiens sont purs et pleins de certitudes!...
Lancéor. Comme je les reconnais!...
Joyzelle. Et comme je les retrouve!...
Lancéor. Tes mains sur mes épaules ont le geste qu'elles avaient quand je les attendais sans oser m'eveiller....
Joyzelle. Et ton bras sur mon cou reprend la même place....
Lancéor. C'est ainsi qu'autrefois tes paupières se fermaient au souffle de l'amour.
Joyzelle. Et c'est de même aussi que les larmes montaient dans tes yeux qui s'ouvraient....
Lancéor. Quand le bonheur est tel....
Joyzelle. Le malheur ne vient pas tant que l'amour l'enchaine.
Lancéor. Tu m'aimes?...
Joyzelle. Oui....
It reads almost exactly like a libretto without its music.