What is it that decides what suffering shall bring to us? Not reason, but our anterior life, which has formed our soul. Nothing is more just than grief; and our life waits till the hour strikes, as the mould awaits the molten bronze, to pay us our wage.
What if it be true that the sage be punished instead of being rewarded! What soul could be called good if it were sure of its reward? And who shall measure the happiness or unhappiness of the sage? When we put unhappiness in one side of the scales, each one of us lays down in the other the idea he has of happiness. The savage will lay alcohol, gunpowder, and feathers there; the civilised man gold and days of intoxication; but the sage will lay down a thousand things that we do not see, his whole soul perhaps, and even the unhappiness which he will have purified.
Let us be loath to welcome the wisdom and the happiness which are founded on the scorn of anything. Scorn, and renunciation, which is the infirm child of scorn, open to us the asylum of the old and weak. We should only have the right to scorn a joy when it would not even be possible for us to know that we scorned it. Renunciation is a parasite of virtue. As long as a man knows that he renounces, the happiness of his renunciation is born of pride. The supreme end of wisdom is not to renounce, but to find the fixed point of happiness in life. It is not by renouncing joys that we shall become wise; but by becoming wise we shall renounce, without knowing it, the joys that cannot rise to our level. Certain ideas on renunciation,[4] resignation, and sacrifice exhaust the noblest moral forces of humanity more than great vices and great crimes. Infinitely too much importance, for instance, is attached to the triumph of the spirit over the flesh;[5] and these alleged triumphs are most often only total defeats of life. It is sad to die a virgin. But there must be no satisfaction of base instincts. Not I would like, but I will must be the guiding star.
When the just is punished, we are troubled by the negation of a high moral law; but from this very negation a higher moral law is born immediately. With the suppression of punishment and reward is born the necessity of doing good for the sake of good. So teaches the book.
There is still mysticism in the kernel of this philosophy: the identity of the soul with the divine; but in its practical results it is a positivist, a realist philosophy. "There is nothing to hope for," we are told, "apart from truth. A soul that grows is a soul that comes nearer to truth." Death and the other mysteries are now only the points where our present knowledge ends; but we may hope that science will dispel our ignorance. In the meantime if we seclude ourselves from reality to dream of loveliness, the fair things we see will turn into ashes, like the roses that Alladine and Palomides saw in the caverns, at the first inrush of light. The most fatal of thoughts is that which cannot be friend with reality.
The book is strongly anti-Christian in its rejection of what are called parasitic virtues—arbitrary chastity, sterile self-sacrifice, penitence, and others—which turn the waters of human morality from their course and force them into a stagnant pool. The saints were egotists, because they fled from life to shelter in a narrow cell; but it is contact with men which teaches us how to love God.[6] It is anti-ascetic too. Maeterlinck has the courage to say that a morbid virtue may do more harm than a healthy vice.[7] In this connection one might say of him what Stefan Zweig has said of Verhaeren:
"His whole evolution—which in this respect coincides with that of the great German poets, with Nietzsche and Dehmel—tends, not to the limitation of primordial instincts, but to their logical development."[8]
Perhaps the most tangible doctrine in Wisdom and Destiny is that of salvation by love. Love is wisdom's nearest sister. Love feeds wisdom, and wisdom feeds love; and the loving and the wise embrace in their own light. "Ceux qui vivent d'amour vivent d'éternité," Maeterlinck might have said with Verhaeren.[9] The main difference between Maeterlinck's final philosophy and that of his great countryman is this: that whereas Maeterlinck, like Goethe, brings his disciple to the shores of the sea of serenity and leaves him in a state of calm, Verhaeren sees spiritualising forces in passion, in exaltation, in paroxysm, and teaches that to be calm is to diminish oneself.
Wisdom and Destiny contains few of the apparent absurdities which confuse the reader of The Treasure of the Humble; but whether all the ideas will escape contradiction in independent minds may be questioned. To give an instance: it is no doubt true that a man may fight destiny; but if a man does fight destiny, it might be argued that it is only because it is his destiny to fight destiny. Louis XVI. is given as an example of a victim of destiny. He was the victim of destiny because of his feebleness, blindness, and vanity. But why was he weak, blind, and vain? According to the creed abandoned by Maeterlinck, it was his fate to be weak, blind, and vain. In Wisdom and Destiny the argument is: If he had been wise ... But how can a weak, blind, and vain man be wise? No wisdom on earth can make a fool anything but a fool. Character can be modified, urges Maeterlinck; and we must be content with that. Not a few of us, too, must feel that the stoic fortitude Maeterlinck would have us show when our loved ones die will seem less divine than the passionate despair once breathed into tearful numbers for lost Mystes.