The ideas, hysterical and few as they are, begin to assume some coherence if compared with the emotional and disconnected experiments of the poems.
Maeterlinck has defined his æsthetic in his prose essays. He played queer pranks upon the nerves with these shadows, these spiritual marionettes, which are pure abstractions typifying various qualities of the temperament. The iteration of his speech is like the dripping of water upon the heads of the condemned. It finally stuns the consciousness, and then, like a performer upon some fantastic instrument with one string, this virtuoso executes variations boasting a solitary theme—the fear of Fear.
Speech, says Maeterlinck, is never the medium of communication of real and inmost thoughts. Silence alone can transmit them from soul to soul. We talk to fill up the blanks of life. Silence is so truth-telling, so illuminative, that few have the courage to face it. Mankind fears silence more than the dark. (Poe again; Silence.) The most illuminating silence of all, the most irresistible, is the Silence of Death. It is the unspoken word that reveals our inner self. "We do not know each other; we have not yet dared to be silent together." Modern thought and literature lack this mystic element, lack the atmosphere of the spiritual, perfect as is its technic and its intellectual equipment. The Russians have it in their fiction—a fiction of epilepsy and burning spiritual crises. The Middle Ages had it. Men stood nearer to nature, to God. They understood children, women, animals, plants, inanimate objects, with greater tenderness and greater depth. "The statues and paintings they have left us may not be perfect, but a mysterious power and secret charm that I cannot define are imprisoned within them, and bestow upon them perpetual youth. Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, are filled with the mysterious chant of the infinite, the threatening silence of souls and of gods, eternity thundering on the horizon, fate and fatality perceived interiorly without any one being able to say by what signs they have been recognized."
Here we recognize the true mystic, the feeder upon the writings of Emerson, Novalis, the Admirable Ruysbroeck; Plato, Plotinus, St. Bernard, Jacob Boehme, and Coleridge. And while he achieves astonishing flights into the blue, he always returns to mother earth. There is spiritual lift in his words,—lift and ofttimes intoxication. Generations of Flemish ancestors have dowered this young thinker with solid nerves and a saner intellectual apparatus than his early critics imagined. And he never exhibits what old Chaucer called "the spiced conscience." Neither hell's flames nor the joys of heaven appear in his pages. He preaches only of man and the soul of man.
Without the mystery of life, life is not worth the living. The static opposed to the dynamic theatre is his ideal mood, not action; the immaterial, not the obvious. Hamlet is not awake—at every moment does he advance to the very brink of awakening. The mysterious chant of the Infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon, the destiny or fatality that we are conscious within us, though by what tokens none may tell—do not all these underlie King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet? Are there not elements of deeper gravity and stability in happiness in a single moment of repose than in the whirlwind of passion? Does the soul only flower on nights of storm? "But to the tragic author, as to the mediocre painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote that appeals ... whereas it is far away from bloodshed, battle-cry, and sword thrust that the lives of most of us flow on, and men's tears are silent to-day, and invisible, and almost spiritual."
Maeterlinck goes to the modern theatre and feels as if he had spent a few hours with his ancestors, who conceived life as something that was primitive, arid, and brutal. He sees murder, hears of deceived husbands and wives instead of being shown some act of life "traced back to its sources and to its mystery by connecting links." He yearns for one of the strange moments of a higher life that flit unperceived through his dreariest hours. "Othello does not appear to live the august daily life of Hamlet, who has the time to live, inasmuch as he does not act. Othello is admirably jealous. But is it not perhaps an ancient error to imagine that it is at the moment when this passion, or others of equal violence, possess us that we live our truest lives? I have grown to believe that an old man, seated in his arm-chair, waiting patiently with his lamp beside him; giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about the house, interpreting, without comprehending, the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice of light, submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny—an old man, who conceives not that all the powers of this world, like so many heedful servants, are mingling and keeping vigil in his room, who suspects not that the very sun is supporting in space the little table against which he leans or that every star in heaven and every fibre of the soul are directly concerned in the movement of an eyelid that closes, or a thought that springs to birth—I have grown to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the husband who avenges his honour."
This excerpt (translated by Alfred Sutro) shows the real Maeterlinck, the man whose mind is imbued by the strangeness of common life, the mystic correspondences, the star in the grain of wheat. The philosophy is akin to certain passages executed in the allegoric pictures of Albrecht Dürer, William Blake, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones.
Each century, he argues, has its own near sorrow. It is well that we should sally forth in search of our sorrows—the value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and disquiets. The tragic masterpieces of the past are inferior in the quality of their sorrow compared to the sorrows of to-day. To-day it is fatality that we challenge; and this is perhaps the distinguishing note of the new theatre. It is no longer the effects of disaster that arrest our attention; it is disaster itself; and we are eager to know its essence and its laws. It is the rallying point of the most recent dramas, the centre of light with strange flames gleaming, about which revolve the souls of women and men. And a step has been taken toward the mystery so that life's mysteries may be looked in the face. Between past and future man ("What is man but a god who is afraid?") stands trembling on the tiny oasis of the present. It is the disaster of our existence that we fear our soul; did we but allow it to smile frankly in its silence and its radiance, we should be already living an eternal life. O for those "reservoirs of certitudes" on the other side of night, "whither the silent herd of souls flock every morning to slake their thirst."
"To every man there come noble thoughts that pass his heart like great white birds." Then is recalled Browning and his similitude of the meanest soul that has its better side to show its love. "In life there is no creature so degraded but knows full well which is the noble and beautiful thing he must do." A life perceived is a life transformed. To love one's self is to love thy neighbour in thyself! Maeterlinck's attitude toward woman—the true touchstone of philosopher, poet, priest, and artist—is beautiful. "I have never met a single woman who did not bring to me something that was great."
The spiritual renascence may be at hand. It is the theatre that last feels its approach. Poetry, painting, sculpture, music, all have met it halfway; only the stage lags in the rear. Plot, action, trickeries, cheap illusions, must be swept away into the limbo of things used up. Atmosphere, the atmosphere of unuttered emotions, arrested attitudes, ideas of the spiritual subconscious, are to usurp the mechanical formulas of to-day. The ideal is music—music, the archetype of the arts. (Walter Pater preached this platonic doctrine.) "It is only the words that at first sight seem useless that really count in a work." But to realize, to exteriorize the mystery, the significance of the soul life, what a strange and symbolic web must be woven by the poet-dramatist! He must break with the conventions of the past and create something that is not quite painting, not quite drama, something that is more than poetry, less than music—full of ecstasies, silent joys, luminous pauses, and the burning fever of the soul that sometimes slays.