In cast of mind, Maeterlinck is sombrously meditative, and he has been wise in framing his outer existence so that it would accord with his habitual detachment. The greater part of his time used to be divided between his charming retreat at Quatre Chemins, near Grasse, and the grand old abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy, which he managed to snatch in the very nick of time from the tightening clutch of a manufacturing concern. With the temperament of a hermit, he has been, nevertheless, a keen observer of life, though one preferring to watch the motley spectacle from the aristocratic privacy of his box, sheltered, as it were, from prying curiosity. Well on in middle age, he is still an enthusiastic out-of-doors man,—gardener, naturalist, pedestrian, wheelman, and motorist, and commands an extraordinary amount of special knowledge in a variety of sports and sciences. In “The Double Garden” he discusses the automobile with the authority of an expert watt-man and mechanician. In one of his other books he evinces an extraordinary erudition in all matters pertaining to the higher education of dogs; and his work on “The Life of the Bee” passes him beyond question with high rank among “thirty-third degree” apiculturists.
One of the characteristics that seem to separate his books, especially those of the earlier period, from the literary tendencies of his age, is their surprising inattention to present social struggles. His metaphysical bias makes him dwell almost exclusively, and with great moral and logical consistency, on aspects of life that are slightly considered by the majority of men yet which he regards as ulteriorly of sole importance.
When men like Maeterlinck are encountered in the world of practical affairs, they are bound to impress us as odd, because of this inversion of the ordinary policies of behavior. But before classing them as “cranks,” we might well ask ourselves whether their appraisal of the component values of life does not, after all, correspond better to their true relativity than does our own habitual evaluation. With the average social being, the transcendental bearing of a proposition is synonymous with its practical unimportance. But in his essay on “The Invisible Goodness” Maeterlinck quite properly raises the question: “Is visible life alone of consequence, and are we made up only of things that can be grasped and handled like pebbles in the road?”
Throughout his career Maeterlinck reveals himself in the double aspect of poet and philosopher. In the first period his philosophy, as has already been amply hinted, is characterized chiefly by aversion from the externalities of life, and by that tense introversion of the mind which forms the mystic's main avenue to the goal of knowledge. But if, in order to find the key to his tragedies and puppet plays, we go to the thirteen essays representing the earlier trend of his philosophy and issued in 1896 under the collective title, “The Treasure of the Humble,” we discover easily that his cast of mysticism is very different from that of his philosophic predecessors and teachers in the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular from the devotional mysticism of the “Admirable” John Ruysbroeck, and Friedrich von Hardenberg-Novalis. Maeterlinck does not strive after the so-called “spiritual espousals,” expounded by the “doctor ecstaticus,” Ruysbroeck, in his celebrated treatise where Christ is symbolized as the divine groom and Human Nature as the bride glowing with desire for union with God. Maeterlinck feels too modernly to make use of that ancient sensuous imagery. The main thesis of his mystical belief is that there are divine forces dormant in human nature; how to arouse and release them, constitutes the paramount problem of human life. His doctrine is that a life not thus energized by its own latent divineness is, and must remain, humdrum and worthless. It will at once be noticed that such a doctrine harmonizes thoroughly with the romantic aspiration. Both mystic and romantic teach that, in the last resort, the battlefield of our fate lies not out in the wide world but that it is enclosed in the inner self, within the unknown quantity which we designate as our soul. The visible life, according to this modern prophet of mysticism, obeys the invisible; happiness and unhappiness flow exclusively from the inner sources.
Maeterlinck's speculations, despite their medieval provenience, have a practical orientation. He firmly believes that it is within the ability of mankind to raise some of the veils that cover life's central secret. In unison with some other charitable students of society, he holds to the faith that a more highly spiritualized era is dawning, and from the observed indications he prognosticates a wider awakening of the sleepbound soul of man. And certainly some of the social manifestations that appeared with cumulative force during the constructive period before the war were calculated to justify that faith. The revival of interest in the metaphysical powers of man which expressed itself almost epidemically through such widely divergent cults as Theosophy and Christian Science, was indubitable proof of spiritual yearnings in the broader masses of the people. And it had a practical counterpart in civic tendencies and reforms that evidenced a great agitation of the social conscience. And even to-day, when the great majority feel that the universal embroilment has caused civilized man to fall from his laboriously achieved level, this sage in his lofty solitude feels the redeeming spiritual connotation of our great calamity. “Humanity was ready to rise above itself, to surpass all that it had hitherto accomplished. It has surpassed it…. Never before had nations been seen that were able as a whole to understand that the happiness of each of those who live in this time of trial is of no consequence compared with the honor of those who live no more or the happiness of those who are not yet alive. We stand on heights that had not been attained before.”
But even for those many who find themselves unable to build very large hopes on the spiritual uplift of mankind through disaster, Maeterlinck's philosophy is a wholesome tonic. In the essay on “The Life Profound” in “The Treasure of the Humble,” we are told: “Every man must find for himself in the low and unavoidable reality of common life his special possibility of a higher existence.” The injunction, trite though it sound, articulates a moral very far from philistine. For it urges the pursuit of the transcendental self through those feelings which another very great idealist, Friedrich Schiller, describes in magnificent metaphor as
… “der dunklen Gefühle Gewalt,
die im Herzen wunderbar schliefen.”
In the labyrinth of the subliminal consciousness there lurks, however, a great danger for the seeker after the hidden treasures: the paralyzing effect of fatalism upon the normal energies. Maeterlinck was seriously threatened by this danger during his earlier period. How he eventually contrived his liberation from the clutch of fatalism is not made entirely clear by the progress of his thought. At all events, an era of greater intellectual freedom, which ultimately was to create him the undisputed captain of his soul and master of his fate, was soon to arrive for him. It is heralded by another book of essays: “Wisdom and Destiny.” But, as has been stated, we may in his case hardly hope to trace the precise route traveled by the mind between the points of departure and arrival.