[3] Impressions de Théâtre, huitième série, p. 153.
CHAPTER VIII
In 1895 Maeterlinck published Annabella, a translation of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. It had been acted at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre on the 6th of November, 1894. The published play is preceded by some entertaining gossip concerning Webster (whose Duchess of Malfi Georges Eekhoud translated) and Cyril Tourneur, "les deux princes noirs de l'horreur ... les deux tragiques mercuriels, compacts comme la houille et infernalement vénéneux, dont le premier surtout a semé à pleines mains des fleurs miraculeuses dans les poisons et les ténèbres"; concerning also "Jhon Fletcher" and "Jonson, le pachydermique, l'entêté et puissant Ben Jonson, qui appartient à la famille de ces grands monstres littéraires où rayonnent Diderot, Jean Paul et l'autre Jhonson, le Jhonson de Boswel." Interesting, too, is the way Maeterlinck reads his own theories into the Elizabethans. Ford, he finds, was a master of "interior dialogue":
"Ford is profoundly discreet. Annabella, Calantha, Bianca, Penthea do not cry out; and they speak very little. In the most tragical moments, in those most charged with misery, they say two or three very simple words; and it is, as it were, a thin coating of ice on which we can rest an instant to see what there is in the abyss."
There are some quaint passages inspired by mysticism; as this, with reference to the "great cyclone of poetry which burst over London towards the end of the sixteenth century":
"You seem to be in the very midst of the human soul's miraculous springtime. These were really days of marvellous promise. You would have said that humanity was about to become something else. Moreover, we do not know what influence these great poetic phenomena have exercised on our life; and I have forgotten what sage it was who said that if Plato or Swedenborg had not existed, the soul of this peasant who is passing along the road and who has never read anything would not be what it is to-day. Everything in the spiritual regions is connected more closely than people believe; and just as there is no malady which does not oppress all humanity and does not invisibly affect the healthiest man, so the most undeniable genius has not one thought which does not modify something in the inmost soul of the most hopeless idiot in the asylum."
It is in this style that Maeterlinck discusses mysticism in the introduction to Les Disciples à Saïs et les Fragments de Novalis (The Disciples at Saïs and the Fragments of Novalis), published also in 1895.
"All that one can say," he discourses, "is nothing in itself. Place in one side of a pair of scales all the words of the greatest sages, and in the other side the unconscious wisdom of this child who is passing, and you will see that what Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Schopenhauer, and Pascal have revealed to us will not lift the great treasures of unconsciousness by one ounce, for the child that is silent is a thousand times wiser than Marcus Aurelius speaking."[1]