There is nothing of this awakening courage to live in the collection of poems modelled on folksong (the symbolists generally learned much from folksong) which Maeterlinck published in this year of 1896. In Douze Chansons (Twelve Songs) which are now included in Quinze Chansons (Fifteen Songs) at the end of Serres Chaudes, the poor human soul is still groping in surrounding dark, and only catching rare glimpses of the light. In one poem the soul has been wandering for thirty years, seeking her saviour; he was everywhere, but she could not come near him. Now, in the evening of her days, she bids her sister souls of sixteen years take up her staff and seek him; they also, far away. Les Filles aux Yeux bandés and Les sept Filles d'Orlamonde[6] are sketches of a motive which was worked out in Ardiane and Bluebeard.
The poems are so beautifully illustrated by Charles Doudelet's woodcuts that it is hard to say whether the pictures illuminate the poem or the poems the pictures. Maeterlinck's Tower is there, hauntingly desolate, a nightmare, set against The three blind sisters. You know the meaning of She had three diadems of gold when you have seen the picture to it: the love you bestow on a person is a net wherewith that person imprisons you. The most desolating imprisonment of all is that in which a mother is plunged by her children (for there is no love so deep as hers): Doudelet shows us a woman chained up in a hole whelmed with snow.
To dream over this rare volume for an after-noon, stretching out its leaves before you like the wings of a bird, is to be borne into the atmosphere of the soul. And when you come to the last picture and the last poem "You have lighted the lamps"—
"The other days are wearisome,
The other days are also shy,
The other days will never come,
The other days shall also die,
We too shall die here by and bye"—
you would like to bury your head in your hands and sob like a woman—without knowing why....
[1] See note 3 below.
[2] One of the features which distinguish the poetry of the symbolists is the mixing of genres. Cf. the following fragment (p. 103 in Maeterlinck's translation): "One ought never to see a work of plastic art without music, nor listen to a work of music anywhere save in beautifully decorated halls."
[3] Cf. Dr van Dijk, Maeterlinck, pp. 26 ff.; "Now in order to find the life interior you must be at the other end of all your agitations, you must be behind your conscious thoughts, words, and deeds. Behind all that makes you finite, keeps you finite, lies the infinite; the ocean of the infinite flows round you there, and there lie the ice-fields of mystery, the great treasures of the unconscious, there are the deeps of the interior sea. There is no longer that which has an end, a bound, a limit, that which is shared and divided, that which is joined and separated, there is perfect identity of all things, there is everywhere and always identical mystery, there God is. There it is, too, says Maeterlinck, that we first understand each other, for subtle, tender bonds are there between all souls.... When you now, with Maeterlinck, turn your back on the conscious in every form, it follows that even the best word will always be a more or less disturbing wrinkle, a wrinkle that darkens the unmoving silent waters of the unconscious. Think and put your thoughts into words, and you must move further and further in the direction of the conscious; that is, in the direction of that which is limited and the limiting." Cf. one of the opening sentences of the essay "La Morale mystique": "As soon as we express something, we diminish it strangely. We think we have dived to the depth of the abysses, and when we reach the surface again the drop of water glittering at the end of our pale fingers no longer resembles the sea it came from."
[4] In The Invisible Goodness.