Lastly, to join today with yesterday, we have intercalated familiar faces among the new figures: and then, instead of rewriting a physiognomy known to many, we have tried to bring to light some obscure point, rather than the whole.
[MAURICE MAETERLINCK]
Of the life lived by sad beings who stir in the mystery of a night. They know nothing save to smile, to suffer, to love; when they wish to understand, the effort of their disquietude grows to anguish, their revolt vanishes in sobbings. To mount, forever to mount the mournful steps of Calvary and beat the brow against an iron door: so mounts Sister Ygraine, so mounts and beats against the cruel iron gate each of the poor creatures whose simple and pure tragedies Maeterlinck reveals to us.
In other times the meaning of life was known; then men were not ignorant of the essential; since they knew the end of their journey, and in what last inn they would find the bed of repose. When, by science itself, this elementary science had been taken from them, some rejoiced, believing themselves delivered of a burden; others grieved, feeling clearly that above all the other burdens on their shoulders, one had been thrown, itself heavier than all the rest: the burden of Doubt.
A whole literature has been begotten of this sensation, a literature of grief, revolt against the burden, blasphemies against the mute God. But, after the fury of their cries and interrogations, there was a remission, and this was the literature of sadness, uneasiness and anguish; revolt has been declared useless and imprecation puerile. Made wise by vain struggles, humanity slowly resigns itself to knowing nothing, comprehending nothing, fearing nothing, hoping for nothing—except the very remote.
There is an island somewhere in the mists, and in the island is a château, and in the château is a great room lit by a little lamp, and in the great room people are waiting. What do they await? They know not. They are expecting someone to knock at the door, they expect the lamp to go out, they expect Death. They converse; yes, they speak words which for an instant trouble the silence. Then they listen again, leaving their phrases unended and their gestures interrupted. They listen, they wait. She will perhaps not come? Oh! she will come. She always comes. It is late, she will perhaps not come till the morrow. And the people gathered in the great room beneath the little lamp begin to laugh and go on hoping. Someone knocks. And that is all; it is a whole life; it is the whole of life.
In this sense, Maeterlinck's dramas, so deliciously unreal, are deeply alive and true; his characters, with the appearance of phantoms, are steeped with life, like those seemingly inert balls, which, when charged with electricity, grow fulgent at the contact of a point; they are not abstractions but syntheses; they are states of soul or, better still, states of humanity, moments, minutes which shall be eternal. In short, they are real, by dint of their unreality.
A like kind of art was formerly practiced, after the Roman de la Rose, by the pious romancers who, in little books of pretentious clumsiness, made symbols and abstractions revolve. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Le Voyage Spirituel, by the Spaniard Palafox, le Palais de l'Amour divin, by an unknown person, are not altogether contemptible works, but things there are truly too explicit and the characters bear names that are truly too evident. Does one, in any free theater, see a drama played by beings called Courage, Hate, Joy, Silence, Care, Longing, Fear, Anger, and Shame? The hour of such amusement has passed or has not returned: do not re-read le Palais de l'Amour divin; read la Mort de Tintagiles, for it is of the new work that we must ask for these aesthetic pleasures, if we desire them complete, poignant and enveloping. Maeterlinck, truly, takes, pierces and entwines us in Octupi formed of the delicate hair of young sleeping princesses, and in the midst of them the troubled sleep of the little child, "sad as a young king". He entwines and bears us where he pleases, to the very depths of the abyss where whirls "the decomposed corpse of Alladin's lamb", and farther, to the pure dark regions where lovers say: "Kiss me gravely. Close not the eyes when I kiss you so. I want to see the kisses that tremble in your heart; and the dew that mounts from your soul.... We shall not find more kisses like these....—Evermore, evermore!...—No, no: one does not kiss twice on the heart of death." Before such delicate sighings, all objection grows mute; one is silent at having felt a new way of loving and expressing love. New, truly. Maeterlinck is very much himself, and to remain entirely personal he can be a monochord; but he has sown, steeped and scutched the hemp for this one cord, and it sings gently, sadly, uniquely under his drooping hands. He has achieved a true work; he has found an unheard muffled cry, a kind of lamentation, coldly mystical.