"It is silence sleeping; and while it is sleeping, it is less redoubtable even than speech; but an unexpected circumstance may awaken it of a sudden, and then its brother, the great active silence, seats itself on the throne. Be on your guard. Two souls are going to reach each other...."
What practical value such theories may have is seen from the dramas for marionettes, in which something never before attempted has been done. Maeterlinck has indeed used silence to make the soul speak. But it may be questioned whether it is a doctrine solid enough to build with. It might, logically, lead to Max Reinhardt's wordless plays; but the latter, so far as they have yet been produced, have rather the reverse effect to that which Maeterlinck aimed at—Reinhardt spreads a feast for the eyes, and the silence of his pantomimes is only to enhance the spectacular appeal. Be that as it may, there are many astonishing things in Maeterlinck's mysticism, as there are in all mysticism. Many of them, no doubt, could be explained by the philosopher's "doctrine of identity."[3] From a practical point of view, however, Maeterlinck might seem to be teaching that when we say "fine weather to-day," or "pass me the salt" (these are common words, but what "interior dialogue" may there not be behind them?) we are expressing our souls; but that when we speak in the full heat of passion, or with that eloquence which pours from us in the brighter moments of our brains, we are expressing nothing. When the old King in Princess Maleine asks whether there will be salad for breakfast, he expresses admirably the state of a foundered soul; when Golaud finds Pelleas playing with Melisanda's hair in the dark, and, instead of bursting into a torrent of speech, says simply: "You are children.... What children!... What children!" his taciturnity, or, if you like, his active silence, renders to perfection his pained surprise, the confused feelings which he is forcing himself to restrain till he can be sure of his ground—but to pick out a few effective instances like these only proves that the theory will stand examination, not that it is universally valid. Golaud, for instance, is taciturn and slow to believe, and therefore the few words he speaks in the scene mentioned are well motived; but put a man in his place whose passions are nearer the surface—a character of equal use to the dramatist, though of course less profound—and a torrent of words would have been more natural and equally effective.
If we cultivated silence more, we should perhaps discover, with Maeterlinck, that the period we live in is one of the soul's awakening. "The soul," he says in another of these essays, "is like a sleeper who, under the weight of her dreams, is making immense efforts to move an arm or lift an eyelid." The soul is becoming visible almost: it does not shroud itself now in the same number of veils as it used to do. And "do you know—it is a disquieting and strange truth—do you know that if you are not good, it is more than probable that your presence proclaims it to-day a hundred times more clearly than it would have done two or three centuries ago." (If the essayist had added here that this is because our sensibilities are more refined, it would have been an evident truth; but he goes on to say: "Do you know that if you have made a single soul sad this morning, the soul of the peasant you are going to exchange a few words with about the storm or the rain was informed of it before his hand had half opened the door....")
The soul's awakening is seen best in those whom he calls Les Avertis (those who are forewarned), and in women. "The forewarned" are precocious children, and those doomed to die young. As to women, Maeterlinck sees in them what Tacitus saw in the women of the Germans, something divinely prophetic. "It seems," he says, "that woman is more subject than we are to destinies. She undergoes them with a much greater simplicity. She never sincerely struggles against them. She is still nearer to God, and she surrenders herself with less reserve to the pure action of mystery." His description of woman's ennobling effect on man (the main belief of the Minnesingers) is like the woman-worship in John Masefield's poem Imagination:
"All the beauty seen by all the wise
Is but body to the soul seen by your eyes.
"Woman, if my quickened soul could win you,
Nestle to the living soul within you—,
Breathe the very breathing of your spirit,
Tremble with you at the things which stir it,
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"I should know the blinding, quick, intense
Lightning of the soul's spring from the sense,
Touch the very gleam of life's division.
Earth should learn a new soul from the vision."
In the chapter headed "The Star" Maeterlinck discusses fatalism. His conception of it, as might be expected from the dramas already discussed, is identical with pessimism. "There is no destiny of joy," he says, "there is no fortunate star." He explains the Scotch word "fey," and thinks it might be applied to all existences.
In the chapter on "La Morale Mystique"—one which has been sharply criticised by Christians—Maeterlinck sunders the soul from the conscious acts of the body.
"What would happen," he asks, "if our soul suddenly became visible and had to advance in the midst of her assembled sisters, despoiled of her veils, but charged with her most secret thoughts, and trailing behind her the most mysterious acts of her life that nothing could express? What would she blush for? What would she wish to hide? Would she, like a modest woman, cast the long mantle of her hair over the numberless sins of the flesh? She knew nothing of them, and these sins have never reached her. They were committed a thousand leagues away from her throne, and the soul of the Sodomite even would pass through the midst of the crowd without suspecting anything, and bearing in its eyes the transparent smile of a child. It had taken no part in the sin, it was pursuing its life on the side where light reigns, and it is this life alone that it will remember."
This might comfort a criminal; but it is nothing more than a pure worship of the spirit. Maeterlinck might reply to his Christian traducers that they in their creed have forgotten the soul, or found it hard to think of it as independent of the body; and that it might have been better for them had they concentrated their worship on the Holy Ghost (as he does, on the Holy Spirit), for their worship of Christ is a species of idolatry, the worship of a graven image, an image graven in flesh.
It is especially the "interior beauty," of which Maeterlinck treats in the last essay in the collection, which fills the play Aglavaine and Selysette, published in the same year. It is a competition between two women for the greater beauty of soul, a competition in which simplicity gains the victory over wisdom.