Some of the things he says here prepare the way for his dramatic theories:
"Open the deepest of ordinary moralists or psychologists, he will speak to you of love, of hate, of pride, and of the other passions of our heart; and these things may please us an instant, like flowers taken from their stalk. But our real and invariable life takes place a thousand leagues away from love and a hundred thousand leagues away from pride. We possess an I which is deeper and more inexhaustible than the I of passions or of pure reason. It is not a matter of telling us what we feel when the woman we love abandons us. She goes away to-day; our eyes weep, but our soul does not weep. It may be that our soul hears of the event and transforms it into light, for everything that falls into the soul irradiates. It may be too that our soul knows not of it; and if that be so what use is it to speak of it? We must leave these petty things to those who do not feel that life is deep....
"I may commit a crime without the least breath inclining the smallest flame of this fire" (the great central fire of our being); "and, on the other hand, one look exchanged, one thought which cannot unfold, one minute which passes without saying anything, may stir it up in terrible whirlpools at the bottom of its retreats and cause it to overflow on to my life. Our soul does not judge as we do; it is a capricious, hidden thing. It may be reached by a breath and it may be unaware of a tempest. We must seek what reaches it; everything is there, for it is there that we are."
Maeterlinck has striking things to say concerning the German romanticist. "He is the clock," he says, "that has marked several of the most subtle hours of the human soul." In the following passage he shows him to be a forerunner of the symbolists,[2] one of whose chief doctrines is that things are bound together by mysterious correspondences:
"Perhaps he is the man who has most deeply penetrated the intimate and mystical nature and the secret unity of the universe.... 'He sees nothing isolated,' and he is above all the amazed teacher of the mysterious relations there are among all things. He is for ever groping at the limits of this world, where the sun shines but rarely, and, on every hand, he suspects and touches strange coincidences and astonishing analogies, obscure, trembling, fugitive, and shy, that fade before they are understood."
The fragmentary style of Novalis, though it provided Maeterlinck with ideas, did not influence his prose as much as that of Emerson did. He had written a preface for I. Will's translation of seven of Emerson's essays which Paul Lacomblez brought out in Brussels in 1894. This preface and the introductions to Ruysbroeck and Novalis are reprinted in abridged form in Le Trésor des Humbles (The Treasure of the Humble), which the Mercure de France issued in 1896. These essays are clearly modelled on Emerson's. He calls Emerson "the good morning shepherd of the pale green pastures of a new optimism." He came for many of us, Maeterlinck thinks, just at the right time. This points forward already to Wisdom and Destiny. The heroic hours which Carlyle glorified are less apparent than they were:
"All that remains to us is our everyday existence, and yet we cannot live without greatness.... You must live; all you who are crossing days and years without actions, without thoughts, without light, because your life after all is incomprehensible and divine.... You must live because there are no hours without the deepest miracles and the most unspeakable meanings.... Emerson came to affirm the secret grandeur which is the same in every man's life. He has surrounded us with silence and with admiration. He has set a ray of light under the feet of the artisan coming from the workshop.... He is the sage of ordinary days, and ordinary days make up the substance of our being...."
Emerson's gospel of everyday life harmonises admirably with the theory of the tragic advanced in another essay of the book, "Le Tragique Quotidien" ("Everyday Tragedy").
"Is it really dangerous to assert," asks the essayist, "that the veritable tragedy of life ... only begins the moment what are called adventures, griefs, and dangers are passed?... Are there not other moments when one hears more permanent and purer voices?... Nearly all our writers of tragedies only perceive the life of olden time; and one may assert that our whole theatre is an anachronism.... I admire Othello, but he does not seem to me to live the august, everyday life of a Hamlet, who has the time to live because he does not act. Othello is admirably jealous. But may it not be an ancient error to think that it is at the moments when we are possessed by such a passion, or by others of equal violence, that we really live? I have come to think that an old man sitting in his arm-chair, simply waiting in the lamplight, listening without knowing it to all the eternal laws which reign around his house, interpreting, without understanding it, all that there is in the silence of the doors and the windows and in the low voice of the light, undergoing the presence of his soul and of his destiny, inclining his head a little, without suspecting that all the powers of this world intervene and hold watch in the room like attentive servants, not knowing that the sun itself sustains the little table on which he leans his elbows over the abyss, and that there is not one star of the sky nor one power of the soul which is indifferent to the movement of an eyelid that falls down or of a thought that rises—I have come to think that this motionless old man is living, in reality, with a deeper, more human, and more general life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who wins a victory, or 'the husband avenging his honour.'"
This eloquent passage has made many critics shake their heads. "Put a vivisectional rabbit in the arm-chair," says one, "and all that is said still holds good."
It is in Emerson's "spiritual brother," Carlyle, that Maeterlinck finds his mainstay in the opening essay of the book, that on "Silence." This chapter is perhaps the most famous of his essays; and it must be understood if much in Maeterlinck's other work is not to remain obscure. He distinguishes between active silence and passive silence. The latter is only the reflex of sleep, death, or non-existence: