[6] The play (the symbol of the fates of the poet and Mme Leblanc, according to Oppeln-Bronikowski, the German translator of Maeterlinck's works—Bühne und Welt, November-Heft 2, 1902) had been specially written for her. As Monna Vanna, she made her debut as an actress—she had previously been an opera-singer.
CHAPTER XI
Maeterlinck's essays do not centre round himself. His vision is cosmic; the subject of his essays is the universe. But Le double Jardin (The Double Garden), a collection of essays strung together and published in 1904, is more personal than his other books, though it is still concerned with presenting a cosmic philosophy. Here he gives us glimpses into his life; we see him as a lover of dogs and flowers; on his travels in the south of Europe; as an automobilist; as an amateur of fencing.
The first essay is that famous one—"On the Death of a little Dog." Those who fight shy of Maeterlinck because they credit the report, sufficiently widespread, that he is a platitudinarian, might be advised to sample him in this essay. If, when they have read it, they are unable to admit his charm and originality, they may be considered cases of obstinacy. It is not written with any ostentation of style; its style, in these days of fine writing by intellectual acrobats, is not even brilliant. It is written so simply that you would say it had been written for children; and it is as touchingly beautiful and as full of meaning as that other sublimely simple story about the ugly duckling.
It is the life-story of a little bull-dog that died of distemper when he was six months old. He had a great bulging forehead, like Verlaine's. He was as beautiful as a beautiful natural monster. Life was as full of problems for him as it is for the burdened brains of the children of men. He had to resign himself, like any other mystic, to the mystery of closed doors; he had to admit that the essential bounties of existence, generally imprisoned in pots and pans, are inaccessible. What a lot of orders, prohibitions, and perils he had to class in his memory; and how was he to conciliate them all with other more vast and imperious laws implanted in him by instinct, laws which rise and grow from hour to hour, which come from the beginning of time and of the race, which invade the blood, the muscles, and the nerves, and of a sudden assert themselves, more irresistible and more powerful than pain, and even than the master's order and the pain of death? And then the stolen joys—first and foremost the refuse-tin! He sees the cook cleaning a fish—but he does not appear curious as to where those delicacies go; he bides his time.
The only animal that has made a compact with man is the dog. To the dog man is God—ideas soon to be made visible in The Blue Bird.
There is a beautiful essay on old-fashioned flowers—those which are being ousted out of our modern gardens by such flowers as tuberous-rooted begonias, with their red combs always crowing like so many cocks; and one on chrysanthemums, a symbol of the onward march of culture. (We know from The Blue Bird that our descendants are to have daisies as big as tables, grapes as big as pears, blue apples as big as melons, and melons as big as pumpkins: all the beauty, all the bounties of the future are only waiting for the intellect of man to awaken them.) In "The Olive Boughs" the teaching of the volume is concentrated:
"Hitherto the pivot of the world seemed to us to be formed of spiritual powers; to-day we are convinced that it is composed of purely material energies."