CHAPTER XII
I have reported little of the gossip concerning Maeterlinck. Everybody knows that he smokes denicotinised tobacco; that he resides in the summer at Saint Wandrille and in the winter at his house "Villa des Abeilles" at Nice (having now left his villa aux Quatre Chemins, near Grasse in the south of France); and so forth. One little picture I would like to contribute; I have it from a friend and admirer of his, and it concerns a visit to the Villa Dupont, the house in the Rue Pergolèse where Maeterlinck lived when he first settled in Paris:
"His study was like a monk's cell, but very original in style. It was simply lime-washed; and this lime-wash was of a hard, raw blue in colour, approaching indigo. For furniture, a little looking-glass, a table of rough wood, and three chairs. No books at all. But the walls were covered with little white butterflies in flight. These were thoughts, and every one was fastened to the wall simply by a pin. The effect was singular, violently original at all events, but with nothing that gave you the idea of a pose. Maeterlinck at this period received no visitors, saw none of his friends. He had installed himself in surroundings as bare as possible, so that he might meditate; and to these surroundings he had given the colour he desired.
"This room was empty when I was brought into it; and I beguiled the tedium of waiting for Maeterlinck by reading some of the thoughts on the slips of white paper pinned to the wall. Some of them were nothing very particular; others were obscure or appeared rather childish—isolated, as I read them;—but some were very beautiful. Maeterlinck coming into the room and finding me thus occupied, laughed heartily. But severely I pointed to the butterflies on the wall, and inquired about the name of each species. The names, I was told, were very great names indeed. I tried to guess one or two, but luck was against me, and I felt it a puzzle to set the right name to each bit of paper.
"Maeterlinck, reading with me, smiled as he saw me attack a new battalion of thoughts. These were placed somewhat apart from the others. 'Are they yours?' I asked. 'Yes,' he answered modestly; 'nothing more than studies for a book I am working at. But take notice of this one, please, and of this one, and of this one too. Are they not most beautiful?' Then, in a tone of jubilant admiration, he pronounced the name of their author—the name of a French lady who, some years afterwards, was to be Melisanda, Monna Vanna, and Ardiane on the stage. Several of these thoughts, I must say, seemed really worth attention; and I felt particularly surprised that a woman should have been able to compress them into three short lines, or even into five or six words."
As to Maeterlinck's personal appearance at the present time, the following is the impression he made recently on Mr Frank Harris:
"Maeterlinck is easily described: a man of about five feet nine in height, inclined to be stout; silver hair lends distinction to the large round head and boyish fresh complexion; blue-grey eyes, now thoughtful, now merry, and an unaffected off-hand manner. The features are not cut, left rather "in the rough" as sculptors say, even the heavy jaw and chin are drowned in fat; the forehead bulges and the eyes lose colour in the light and seem hard; still, an interesting and attractive personality."[1]
A few words must be devoted to the present position of Maeterlinck in critical estimation. Since the award of the Nobel prize imposed him on the public consciousness as one of the foremost of living writers, voices have been raised in protest. The attack of the Abbé Dimnet in The Nineteenth Century and After for January, 1912, may be dismissed as Jesuitical. Various opinions, mostly favourable, by celebrities, were collected in the Brussels review Le Thyrse for January, 1912, under the heading, "Maeterlinck et le prix Nobel." One of these letters is from Alfred Fouillée, who suggests that Maeterlinck's philosophy owes much to that of Jean Marie Guyau. The old complaint that the dramas are "childish" is rarely heard nowadays; but there is a vague feeling in the air that the substance of the essays is a potpourri from earlier writers. It is the easiest thing in the world to make such a charge; it is far more difficult to substantiate it. Not one critic has given us the exhaustive list of parallel passages which would be required to shake our credit in Maeterlinck's essential originality. Typical is the attitude of Mr Frank Harris in his too inaccurate and loosely written but not negligible articles in the Academy: he finds nothing in the essays which is not already contained in "Moralis" (does he mean Novalis?) and the other somewhat recondite writers in whom he (Mr Frank Harris) is obviously so deeply read. But even if it were proved that Maeterlinck, like Molière, has taken his wealth where he found it, there would be no more reason to think the less of him than there is to think the less of any artist for melting old metal and re-casting it, or of any thinker for sifting, rejecting, and re-stating old conclusions. It is an effort of profound originality to take whatever is good from a vast, and in some cases buried literature, and from this stock to polish and set in currency ideas which have an immediate effect on the spiritual or mental life of to-day, which fortify character, give us confidence in the future, make us better men and force us to make our children better men than we are ourselves.
By far the most scathing of Maeterlinck's detractors is a Belgian critic born in Ghent, Louis Dumont-Wilden, a critic who, as he confesses, was in his youth enchanted by the "morning charm" of The Treasure of the Humble with "its violent and sustained effort to soar to a kind of philosophical lyrism," who has still a good word to say for the early dramas, but who condemns "the adulterated æstheticism of Monna Vanna, the cold allegory, the elementary philosophy of Joyzelle and The Blue Bird." Already in La Nouvelle Revue Française for February, 1910, Dumont-Wilden attempted to shatter the idol in the following terms:
"Le succès permet toujours aux hommes de lettres le supporter très bien l'angoisse métaphysique, et Maeterlinck, grâce à ses admirateurs et à ses amis, était devenu un homme de lettres. Prisonnier de ses premiers livres, et de son premier public, il trouva l'art subtil d'accomoder les balbutiements effarés de Mélisande, le naturisme ingénu qui fait le fonds de sa sensibilité de flamand, et ce vague optimisme 'humanitaire,' ce socialisme esthétique et scientifard, qui règne aujourd'hui parmi ceux que Nietzsche appelle 'les philistins de la culture.' Il est vrai qu'un peu de mysticisme arrange tout; mais tout de même, quel chef-d'œuvre de 'literature': faire croire à Monsieur Homais qu'il appartient à l'élite, et à l'élite qu'elle peut se permettre les sentiments de M. Homais!
"D'abord la prose de Maeterlinck, sauce merveilleusement onctueuse, fit passer ce singulier ragoût intellectuel, que le grand public international, le public des liseurs de magazines et des institutrices polyglottes continue à prendre pour le chef-d'œuvre de la cuisine française."
As to the last item in this fierce diatribe, it would appear to be true that Maeterlinck's greatest public is composed of "the philistines of culture." Maeterlinck is an antagonist of Christianity; and yet perhaps the majority of his admirers are those who love him because he has such beautiful things to tell them about their immortal souls. Like Voltaire, he fights 'l'infâme'; and yet to many a Christian virgin his works are an edifice which he might have inscribed with the device: Deo erexit Maeterlinck. Again, he has prophesied the inevitable victory of socialism; but has he helped the socialists? Is he counted one of the paladins of socialism? It might be argued that he has not the zest in hard fighting which alone can help a fighting cause: he stands apart from the mêlée with a wise face imperturbable: he would persuade, not fight, and he is too persuasive to persuade. Those who waver or resist must be shattered into conviction, the fanatic might urge. In short, Maeterlinck is a socialist much as Goethe was a patriot.
Well, probably the fact is that Maeterlinck is no more a "socialist" than Goethe was a "patriot." All such terms may be interpreted variously. Goethe was a patriot if you consider that his fatherland was the world. Maeterlinck is a socialist if you look away from the din of the mere present to the future his writings undoubtedly prepare. Maeterlinck is first and foremost a futurist, a seer of the future. Even as a dramatist (apart from his later dramas, which must, on the whole, be rejected) he is a futurist. And in this sense he has his public among the élite. M. Dumont-Wilden would not call Johannes Schlaf a philistine of culture? And to Johannes Schlaf, as to me, Maeterlinck's importance lies in the fact that he is the perfect type of Nietzsche's New European, in himself a prophecy of the race our descendants will be when patriotism is: to be a citizen of the whole world, and religion is: to be noble for nobility's sake. As for his Christian readers, why should they not, if they can, find confirmation of their own creed in the teaching of an enemy of it? The fact of Maeterlinck's vogue with Christian readers only proves that Christianity has much in common with the religion of the future.