Life and Writings
of
Maurice Maeterlinck
BY
JETHRO BITHELL
London and Felling-on-Tyne:
THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO., LTD
NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE
TO
ALBERT MOCKEL,
THE PENETRATING CRITIC, THE SUBTLE POET
"Maurice Maeterlinck.—Il débuta ... dans La Pléiade par un chef-d'œuvre: Le Massacre des Innocents. Albert Mockel devint plus tard son patient et infatigable apôtre à Paris. C'est lui qui nous fit connaître Les Serres Chaudes et surtout cette Princesse Maleine qui formula définitivement l'idéal des Symbolistes au théâtre."
STUART MERRILL,
Le Masque, Série ii, No. 9 and 10.
PREFACE
It is not an easy task to write the life of a man who is still living. If the biographer is hostile to his subject, the slaughtering may be an exciting spectacle; if he wishes, not to lay a victim out, but to pay a tribute of admiration tempered by criticism, he has to run the risk of offending the man he admires, and all those whose admiration is in the nature of blind hero-worship. If he is conscientious, the only thing he can do is to give an honest expression of his own views, or a mosaic of the views of others which seem to him correct, knowing that he may be wrong, and that his authorities may be wrong, but challenging contradiction, and caring only for the truth as it appears to him.
So much for the tone of the book; there are difficulties, too, when the lion is alive, in setting up a true record of his movements. If the lion is a raging lion, how easy it is to write a tale of adventure; but if the lion is a tame specimen of his kind, you have either to imagine exploits, making mountains out of molehills, or you have to give a page or so of facts, and for the rest occupy yourself with what is really essential.
When the lion is as tame as Maeterlinck is (or rather as Maeterlinck chooses to appear), the case is peculiarly difficult. The events in Maeterlinck's life are his books; and these are not, like Strindberg's books, for instance, so inspired by personality that they in themselves form a fascinating biography. They reveal little of the sound man of business Maeterlinck is; they do not show us what faults or passions he may have; they tell us little of his personal relations—in short, Maeterlinck's books are practically impersonal.
The biographer cannot take handfuls of life out of Maeterlinck's own books; and it is not much he can get out of what has been written about him, very little of which is based on personal knowledge. Maeterlinck has always been hostile to collectors of "copy," those great purveyors of the stuff that books are made of. Huret made him talk, or says he did, when Maeterlinck took him into the beer-shop; and a few words of that interview will pass into every biography. That was at a time when he hated interviews. He wrote to a friend on the 4th of October, 1890:
"I beg you in all sincerity, in all sincerity, if you can stop the interviews you tell me of, for the love of God stop them. I am beginning to get frightfully tired of all this. Yesterday, while I was at dinner, two reporters from ... fell into my soup. I am going to leave for London, I am sick of all that is happening to me. So if you can't stop the interviews they will interview my servant."[1]
This is not a man who would chatter himself away,[2] not even to Mr Frank Harris, who found him aggressive (and no wonder either if the Englishman said by word of mouth what he says in print, namely that The Treasure of the Humble was written "at length" after The Life of the Bee, Monna Vanna, and the translation of Macbeth![3]). The fact is, there is very little printed matter easily available on the biography proper of Maeterlinck. It is true we have several accounts of him by his wife in a style singularly like his own; we have gossip; we have delightful portraits of the houses he lives in—but we have no bricks for building with.
A future biographer may have at his hands what the present lacks; but I for my part have no other ambition for this book than that it should be a running account of Maeterlinck's works, with some suggestions as to their interpretation and value.
JETHRO BITHELL.
Hammerfield,
Nr. Hemel Hempstead,
31st January, 1913.
[1] Gérard Harry, Maeterlinck, p. 18.
[2] "Monsieur Maeterlinck being as all the world knows, hermetically mute."—(Grégoire Le Roy), Le Masque (Brussels), Série ii, No. 5 (1912).
[3] "La Vie des Abeilles brought us from the tiptoe of expectance to a more reasonable attitude, and Monna Vanna and the translation of Macbeth keyed our hopes still lower; but at length in Le Trésor des Humbles Maeterlinck returned to his early inspiration."—Academy, 15th June, 1912.
CONTENTS
Maeterlinck born, August 29th, 1862; his family; meaning of his name; his father; residence at Oostacker; atmosphere of Ghent; educated at the Collège de Sainte-Barbe; his hatred of the Jesuits; his schoolfellows; subscribes to "La Jeune Belgique"; his first poem printed; his religious nature; his wish to study medicine; studies law at the University of Ghent; practises for a time as avocat; stay in Paris; influence of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly; introduced by Grégoire Le Roy to the founders of "La Pléiade"; contributes "Le Massacre des Innocents"; influence on him of Flemish painting; other early efforts; influence of Charles van Lerberghe; meets Mallarmé; the symbolists; the birth of the vers libre; influence of Walt Whitman
Return to Belgium; residence at Ghent and Oostacker; introduced by Georges Rodenbach to the directors of "La Jeune Belgique"; contributes to this review, and to "Le Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique"; beginnings of the Belgian renaissance at Louvain and Brussels; "La Wallonie" founded; Belgian realism; the banquet to Lemonnier; reaction against naturalism; influence of Rodenbach
"Serres Chaudes" published; Ghent scandalised; decadent poetry; Maeterlinck refused a post by the Belgian Government; Maeterlinck always healthy, the appearance of disease in "Serres Chaudes" due to fashion; the new poetry; critical estimates of Maeterlinck as a lyrist
Influence of German pessimism; the forerunners of the new optimism, or futurism, of Maeterlinck and Verhaeren; "La Princesse Maleine" hailed as a work of the first rank; influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and of Shakespeare; the new elements in the book; Maeterlinck's invention, or adaptation from Ibsen, of interior dialogue; Maeterlinck's methods of suggesting mystery; the helplessness of man in the power of Fate; the questions of characterisation and of action
A new idea of tragedy; the unknown powers, or mysteries—Fate, Love, and Death; influence of Plato; "The Intruder"; "The Sightless"; Maeterlinck's irony; Charles van Lerberghe's "Les Flaireurs"; "The Intruder" performed at Paris
Influence of Maeterlinck's Jesuit training; translation of Ruysbroeck; Maeterlinck and the mystics; "Les Sept Princesses" not understood by the critics; scenery of the early dramas; "Pelleas and Melisanda"; the question of adultery; the soul in exile; Maeterlinck and dramaturgy; influence of Walter Crane's picture-books
"Dramas for marionettes"; meaning of the term; "Alladine and Palomides"; Maeterlinck's first emancipated woman; the irradiation of the soul; the doctrine of reality; "Interior"; "The Death of Tintagiles"; the closed door
"Annabella"; translation of Novalis; Maeterlinck's dramatic theories; the doctrine of "correspondences"; influence of Emerson; "The Treasure of the Humble"; influence of Carlyle; the doctrine of silence; dramatic possibilities of same; "the soul's awakening"; "les avertis"; woman-worship; fatalism; Maeterlinck and Christianity; "interior beauty"; "Aglavaine and Selysette"; the problem of marriage; "Douze Chansons"
Maeterlinck settles in Paris; Georgette Leblanc; "Wisdom and Destiny"; Maeterlinck's new philosophy; life, not death; anti-Christian teaching; Maeterlinck's evolution coincides partially with that of Nietzsche and Dehmel; salvation by love; Maeterlinck and Verhaeren; the shores of serenity; "The Life of the Bee"; cerebralism; futurism
"Ardiane and Bluebeard" inspired by Georgette Leblanc; feminism; emancipation of the flesh; "Sister Beatrice"; quietism again; Maeterlinck's version of the legend compared with that of Gottfried Keller; family life and religious prejudice; "The Buried Temple"; heredity and morality; poverty and socialism; the aims of Nature; vegetarianism; "Monna Vanna" banned by the censor in England; Ibsen's idea of absolute truth in marriage; the idea of honour; Maeterlinck and Browning; "Joyzelle"; instinct and the designs of life; sensual and intellectual love; "The Miracle of St Antony"
"The Double Garden" affords glimpses into Maeterlinck's life; the essay, "On the Death of a Little Dog"; flowers old and new, symbols of the onward march of man; the reign of matter; the modern drama; "Life and Flowers"; the doctrine of aspiration; the religion of the future; Maeterlinck's teaching midway between that of Nietzsche and Tolstoy; Maeterlinck as a boxer; the victory of socialism inevitable; "The Blue Bird"—an epitome of Maeterlinck's ideas—performed in Moscow and London; the quest of happiness; futurism again; the drama awarded the Belgian "Triennial prize for dramatic literature"; translation and performance at St Wandrille of "Macbeth"; "Mary Magdalene" banned in England; quarrel with Paul Heyse; "Death" shocks the critics; its importance lies in its discussion of immortality; Maeterlinck awarded the Nobel prize for literature; he is honoured by the City of Brussels; he founds the "Maeterlinck prize"
Maeterlinck at the Villa Dupont; his personal appearance; the present position of Maeterlinck in critical estimation; the question of his originality; his public; Maeterlinck a futurist; compared by Louis Dumont-Wilden with Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; compared with Goethe; Maeterlinck a poet
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
CHAPTER I
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck[1] was born at Ghent on the 29th of August, 1862. It is known that his family was settled at Renaix in East Flanders as early as the fourteenth century; and the Maeterlincks are mentioned as burghers of Ghent in the annals of Flanders. The name is said to be derived from the Flemish word "maet" (Dutch "maat"), "measure," and is interpreted as "the man who measures out: distributor." In harmony with this interpretation the story goes that one of the poet's ancestors was mayor of his village during a year of famine, and that he in that capacity distributed corn among the poor. Maeterlinck's father was a notary by profession; being in comfortable circumstances, however, he did not practise, but lived in a country villa at Oostacker, near Ghent, on the banks of the broad canal which joins Ghent to the Scheldt at the Dutch town of Terneuzen.[2] Here through the paternal garden the sea-going ships seemed to glide, "spreading their majestic shadows over the avenues filled with roses and bees."[3]
Those bees and flowers in his father's garden stand for much in the healthy work of his second period. Over the fatalistic work of his first period lies, it may be, the shadow of the town he was born in. Maeterlinck was never absorbed by Ghent, as Rodenbach was by Bruges; but he was, as a young man, oppressed by some of its moods. Casual visitors to Ghent and Bruges may see nothing of the melancholy that poets and painters have woven into them; they may see in them thriving commercial towns; but poets and painters have loved their legendary gloom. "Black, suspicious watch-towers," this is Ghent seen by an artist's eyes, "dark canals on whose weary waters swans are swimming, mediaeval gateways, convents hidden by walls, churches in whose dusk women in wide, dark cloaks and ruche caps cower on the floor like a flight of frightened winter birds. Little streets as narrow as your hand, with bowed-down ancient houses all awry, roofs with three-cornered windows which look like sleepy eyes. Hospitals, gloomy old castles. And over all a dull, septentrional heaven."[4] That hospital on the canal bank which starts a poem in Serres Chaudes[5] may be one he knew from childhood; the old citadel of Ghent with its dungeons may be the prototype of the castles of his dramas.
One part of his life in Ghent is still a bitter memory to our poet. "Maeterlinck will never forgive the Jesuit fathers of the Collège de Sainte-Barbe[6] their narrow tyranny.... I have often heard him say that he would not begin life again if he had to pay for it by his seven years at school. There is, he is accustomed to say, only one crime which is beyond pardon, the crime which poisons the pleasures and kills the smile of a child."[7]
Out of twenty pupils in the highest class at Sainte-Barbe fourteen were intended to be Jesuits or priests. Such a school was not likely to be a good training-place for poets. Indeed, though Latin verses were allowed, it forbade the practice of vernacular poetry.[8] And yet this very school has turned out not less than five poets of international reputation. Emile Verhaeren (who may be called the national poet of Flanders, the most international of French poets after Victor Hugo) and Georges Rodenbach had been schoolboys together at Sainte-Barbe; and on its benches three other poets, Maeterlinck, Grégoire Le Roy, and Charles van Lerberghe, formed friendships for life. These three boys put their small cash together and subscribed to La Jeune Belgique, the clarion journal which, under the editorship of Max Waller, was calling Belgian literature into life; they devoured its pages clandestinely, as other schoolboys smoke their first cigarettes;[9] and Maeterlinck even sent in a poem which was accepted and printed. This was in 1883.
The fact that Maeterlinck was reading La Jeune Belgique shows that he was already spoilt for a priest. But he was essentially religious; and his career has proved that he was one of those poets Verhaeren sings of, who have arrived too late in history to be priests, but who are constrained by the force of their convictions to preach a new gospel. It was the religion inborn in him, as well as his monastic training, which made him a reader and interpreter of such mystics as Ruysbroeck, Jakob Boehme, and Swedenborg. As a schoolboy he did not feel attracted to poetry alone; he had a great liking for science, and his great wish was to study medicine.[10] Some time ago he wrote to a French medical journal as follows:
"I never commenced the study of medicine. I did my duty in conforming with the family tradition, which ordains that the eldest son shall be an avocat. I shall regret to my last day that I obeyed that tradition, and consecrated my most precious years to the vainest of the sciences. All my instincts, all my inclinations, attached me to the study of medicine, which I am more than convinced is the most beautiful of the keys that give access to the great realities of life."
It was in 1885 that he entered the University of Ghent as a student of law. Like Lessing and Goethe, he had no respect for his professors. He was again a fellow-student of van Lerberghe and Le Roy; they also were students of jurisprudence. He was twenty-four when, according to his parents' wish, he settled in Ghent as an avocat; to lose, as Gérard Harry puts it, "with triumphant facility the first and last causes which were confided to him." His shyness and the thin, squeaking voice in his robust peasant's frame were against him in a profession which in any case he hated. He practised for a year or so, and then—"il a jeté la toque et la robe aux orties."
In 1886 he set out for Paris, ostensibly with the object of completing his legal education there. Grégoire Le Roy accompanied him; and each stayed about seven months. They had lodgings at 22 Rue de Seine. Grégoire Le Roy scamped painting at the Ecole St Luc and the Atelier Gervex et Humbert; and the pair of them spent a great deal of time in the museums. But the important thing in their stay in Paris was that they came into contact with men of letters. In the Brasserie Pousset at the heart of the Quartier Latin they heard Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, "that evangelist of dream and irony," reciting his short stories before writing them down. "I saw Villiers de L'Isle-Adam very often during the seven months I spent at Paris," Maeterlinck told Huret. "All I have done I owe to Villiers, to his conversation more than to his works, though I admire the latter exceedingly." Villiers was twenty-two years older than Maeterlinck, having been born in 1840; but his masterpieces had not long been published, and it was only in the later 'eighties that the young poets who were to be known as symbolists began to gather round him, as they gathered round Mallarmé and Verlaine.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam died in Paris in 1889. In the same year died, also in Paris, another writer who might be proved to have influenced Maeterlinck,[11] even if the latter had not placed on record his high admiration of him. This was Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (born 1808). Maeterlinck, after the banquet offered to him by the city of Brussels on the occasion of his receiving the Nobel prize, wrote despondently, expressing the good omen, seeing that men of real genius like Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly had died in obscurity and poverty. Both men, indeed, had been hostile to cheap popularity. Barbey lived, to quote Paul Bourget, "in a state of permanent revolt and continued protest." He had written scathing attacks on the Parnassians. Both poets were idealists among the naturalists; their idealism is a bridge spanning naturalism and joining the romanticists with the symbolists or neo-romanticists.
Villiers was a king in exile on whom the young squires attended. But they themselves had their spurs to win; and it was the greatest good fortune for Maeterlinck that he was able to join their company and take part in their campaign. Several of them, Jean Ajalbert, Ephraïm Mikhaël, Pierre Quillard, had already been contributing to La Basoche, a review published at Brussels. There was Rodolphe Darzens, who, two years later, was to anticipate Maeterlinck in writing a play on Mary Magdalene. There was Paul Roux, who, as time went on, blossomed into "Saint-Pol-Roux le Magnifique"—he who founded "le Magnificisme," the school of poetry which had for its programme "a mystical magnificat to eternal nature." It was in Pierre Quillard's rooms one evening that Grégoire Le Roy read to this circle of friends a short story by Maeterlinck: Le Massacre des Innocents. On the day following he introduced the author of the tale. On the 1st March, 1886, these young writers founded La Pléiade,[12] a short-lived review—six numbers appeared—which nevertheless played an important part. Beside the authors mentioned, it published contributions from René Ghil. It had the glory of printing the first verses of Charles van Lerberghe, and, in addition to several poems which were to appear in Serres Chaudes, Maeterlinck's Massacre des Innocents (May, 1886).
Le Massacre des Innocents was signed "Mooris Maeterlinck." The author discarded it; but it was reprinted in Gérard Harry's monograph (1909). A translation by Edith Wingate Rinder appeared at Chicago in 1895.[13]
It is a story which reproduces the delightful quaintness of early Dutch and Flemish painting:
"There were thirty horsemen or thereabouts, covered with armour, round an old man with a white beard. On the croup of their horses rode red or yellow lansquenets, who dismounted and ran across the snow to stretch their limbs, while several soldiers clad in iron dismounted also, and pissed against the trees they had tied their horses to.
"Then they made for the Golden Sun Inn, and knocked at the door, which was opened reluctantly, and they went and warmed themselves by the fire while beer was served to them.
"Then they went out of the inn, with pots and pitchers and loaves of wheaten bread for their companions who had stayed round the man with the white beard, he who was waiting amid the lances.
"The street being still deserted, the captain sent horsemen behind the houses, in order to keep a hold on the hamlet from the side of the fields, and ordered the lansquenets to bring before him all infants of two years old or over, that they might be massacred, even as it is written in the Gospel of Saint Matthew."
Maeterlinck in this story has simply turned an old picture, or perhaps several pictures, into words. The cruelty of the massacre does not affect us in the least; the style is such that anyone who has seen the Breughels' paintings understands at once that a series of fantastic pictures, which have no relation whatever to fact, or logic, or history, are being drawn; not dream-pictures, but scenes drawn with the greatest clearness, and figures standing out boldly in flesh and blood:
"But he replied in terror that the Spaniards had arrived, that they had set fire to the farm, hanged his mother in the willow-trees, and tied his nine little sisters to the trunk of a great tree."
(You are to see the woman hanging in the willow-trees, the deep green and any other colours you like.... Never mind about the pain the little girls must be suffering.)
"They came near a mill, on the skirts of the forest, and saw the farm burning in the midst of the stars." (This is a flat canvas, remember.) "Here they took their station, before a pond covered with ice, under enormous oaks....
"There was a great massacre on the pond, in the midst of huddling sheep, and cows that looked on the battle and the moon."
This transposition of the mood (Stimming) of old paintings (not by any means word-painting or descriptive writing) is the secret of much of the verse of two other Flemings—Elskamp and Verhaeren. It is an immense pity that Maeterlinck did not write more in this fashion; many of us would have given some of his essays for this pure artistry. Not that he threw his gift of seeing pictures away; he made good use of it even when he had' given up the direct painting of moods for the indirect suggestion of them (or, in other words, when from a realist he had become a symbolist).
Maeterlinck, at the time he wrote The Massacre of the Innocents, must have been trying his hand at various forms of literature. Adolphe van Bever in his little book publishes a letter from Charles van Lerberghe to himself which shows that the two young poets corrected each other's efforts. The letter, too, draws a portrait of Maeterlinck as he appeared at this time:
"Maeterlinck sent me verses, sonnets principally in Heredia's manner, but Flemish in colour, short stories something like Maupassant's, a comedy full of humour and ironical observation, and other attempts. It is characteristic that he never sent me any tragedy or epic poem, never anything bombastic or declamatory, never anything languorous or sentimental either. Neither the rhetorical nor the elegiac had any hold on him. He was a fine handsome young fellow, always riding his bicycle or rowing, the kind of student you would expect to see at Yale or Harvard. But he was a poet besides being an athlete, and his robust exterior concealed a temperament of extreme sensitiveness...."
It was certainly van Lerberghe's own idea that it was he who had trained Maeterlinck; and Maeterlinck would certainly admit it. It was van Lerberghe, too, more than any other, who won Maeterlinck over to symbolism. But Maeterlinck met Mallarmé personally during his stay in Paris; in short, various influences worked upon him to turn him from Heredia's and Maupassant's manner to that of Mallarmé's disciples.
The tide was flowing in that direction. Verhaeren was soon to desert the Parnassian camp.[14] Henri de Régnier was on the point of doing so.[15] Two years before Jean Moréas had published his first book: Les Syrtes (December 1884). In 1885 René Ghil's Légendes d'âmes et de sangs and Jules Laforgue's Les Complaintes came out; in 1886, René Ghil's Le Traité du Verbe, Jean Moréas's Les Cantilènes, Rimbaud's Les Illuminations, Vielé-Griffin's Cueille d'Avril. In the pages of La Vogue, launched on the 11th of April, 1886, were appearing some of the poems which Gustave Khan was to publish in 1887, as Les Palais Nomades. All these books are landmarks in the onward path of symbolism;[16] not because they are all, technically, symbolistic, but because each is in a new manner.
Closely associated with the birth and growth of symbolism is the question of the origin of vers libres. French authorities differ: some credit Jules Laforgue with its invention; others a Polish Jewess, Marie Kryzinska, who seems to have attempted to write French poetry; and two of the French poets who were the first to use the medium, Francis Vielé-Griffin and Gustave Kahn, might dispute the glory of being its originators. As to Francis Vielé-Griffin, he is said to have introduced it by translations of Walt Whitman;[17] or, in other words, the French vers libre is an imitation of Whitman's lawless line. Now this is a matter which, as we shall see, directly concerns Maeterlinck; so it will not be extraneous to our subject to discuss here the question of the origin of vers libres.
Marie Kryzinska may be ruled out to begin with. Her poetry was laughed at; nobody took her seriously—at the most she served as an engine of war against Gustave Kahn, who was then anything but popular. As to Jules Laforgue, he was very much admired, and his influence is beyond question; but what he attempted in his verses was something quite different to what the verslibristes proper attempted: it was rather a manner of compressing his ideas than of expressing them musically. As for Walt Whitman and Vielé-Griffin, it is true that translations had appeared, but they had not attracted the least notice, and no one betrayed the slightest interest for the technique of the American poet. As a matter of fact, few people knew anything about Whitman, beside the two poets of American birth, Francis Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill; and both at that time, although of course their manner was new, were writing, as far as form is concerned, regular verses. Another of the first poets to write free verses, the Walloon poet, Albert Mockel, was not unacquainted with Whitman; he had read American Poems selected by William M. Rossetti. Now Mockel, as editor of La Wallonie, which he had founded to defend the new style, was connected with the whole group of symbolists and verslibristes, all of whom, practically, were regular contributors to the review. And La Wallonie was hardy: it lasted seven years; a great rallying ground of the young fighters before the advent of the Mercure de France, the second series of La Vogue, and La Plume. But, as it happened, Mockel was not in the least inspired by the selections from Whitman in Rossetti's collection; they made the impression on him of being Bible verses rather than real verses. One poet Whitman's lawless line did directly influence; and this was Maeterlinck, whose rhymeless verse in Serres Chaudes was written under the inspiration of Leaves of Grass. But Serres Chaudes did not appear till 1889, and even then the majority of the poems in the volume were rhymed and regular; so that it could hardly be claimed that Maeterlinck was the originator of the vers libre.[18]
It would seem that Gustave Kahn has the greatest claim to priority. But it was Vielé-Griffin who popularised the new medium. Albert Mockel, too, must be mentioned. Kahn's Palais Nomades appeared in April, 1887; Mockel's first vers libres appeared in La Wallonie in July, 1887. But these poems of Mockel had been written earlier, tentative verse by a young man not so confident in himself as Kahn, and who was only induced to publish by Kahn's audacious book.
Mallarmé's attitude should be decisive. He studied the question, and reflected for a long time when he was invited to preside at a banquet offered to Gustave Kahn, in honour of the latter's book, La Pluie et le beau Temps. But, having weighed the arguments for and against, Mallarmé not only agreed to preside at the banquet, but actually to bear witness in favour of Kahn as the innovator of the vers libre—which he did in a toast reproduced in La Revue blanche.
Catulle Mendès, in his half-serious manner, suggested that the first advocacy of the vers libre was to be found in a book called Poésie nouvelle, which Lemerre brought out in 1880. The author, a certain Della Rocca de Vergalo, was a Peruvian exile living in Paris; his ideas were that lines of poetry should begin with small letters, and that the alternance of masculine and feminine rhymes should be discarded. But the founders of the vers libre, I am told, had never heard of this book. Mallarmé, it is true, had been interested in finding a publisher for it; but merely because he wished to help the author to earn money enough to take him back to Peru.
These questions of symbolism and free verse must have been discussed in the cénacle which Maeterlinck joined. Not one of the group adopted the vers libre at this time; more than one, though all had the greatest regard for Mallarmé, may be said to have remained tolerably faithful to the Parnassian prosody in after years. The symbolist element among them was represented really by Saint-Pol-Roux and Maeterlinck.
[1] The Flemish pronunciation is Màh-ter-lee-nk; but Frenchmen pronounce it as though it were a French name.
[2] It was by this canal, no doubt, that Maeterlinck as a young man would skate "into Holland." See Huret's Enquête. And it inspired the scenery of The Seven Princesses.
[3] Mme Georgette Leblanc, Morceaux choisis, Introduction.
[4] Anselma Heine, Maeterlinck, pp. 7-8.
[5] Serres Chaudes, "Hôpital."
[6] "The literary history of modern Belgium, by the freaks of chance, was born in one single house. In Ghent, the favourite city of the Emperor Charles V., in the old Flemish city heavy with fortifications, rises remote, far from noisy streets, Sainte-Barbe, the grey-walled Jesuit monastery. Its thick, defensive walls, its silent corridors and refectories, remind one somewhat of Oxford's beautiful colleges; here, however, there is no ivy softening the walls, there are no flowers to lay their variegated carpet over the green courts."—Stefan Zweig, Emile Verhaeren (Mercure de France, 1910), pp. 39-40.
[7] Mme Georgette Leblanc, Morceaux choisis, Introduction.
[8] Anselma Heine, Maeterlinck, p. 9. But cf. Léon Bazalgette, Emile Verhaeren, p. 14.
[9] Gérard Harry, Maeterlinck, p. 9, note.
[10] Gérard Harry, Maeterlinck, p. 26; Heine, Maeterlinck, p. 9.
[11] Cf., for instance, Barbey's "Réfléchir sur son bonheur n'est-ce pas le doubler?" with the opening chapters of Sagesse et Destinée.
[12] The review of the same name which was published at Brussels, by Lacomblez, beginning three years later, and in which Maeterlinck's criticism of Iwan Gilkin's Damnation de l'Artiste appeared, was a third-rate periodical.
[13] The Massacre of the Innocents and other Tales by Belgian Writers.
[14] Verhaeren's first vers libres appeared in book form in January, 1891 (printed in December, 1890) in Les Flambeaux noirs. But in May, 1890, he had published, in La Wallonie, a poem in vers libres; and this is dated 1889.
[15] Poèmes anciens et romanesques, his first book of acknowledged symbolism, did not appear till 1890, but the poems which compose it were written between 1887 and 1888.
[16] It was in 1886, too, that Gustave Kahn with the collaboration of Jean Moréas and Paul Adam, founded the review Le Symboliste.
[17] A translation of Whitman's Enfants d'Adam, by Jules Laforgue, appeared in La Vogue in 1886. Stuart Merrill personally handed this translation to Whitman, who was delighted. (See Le Masque, Série ii, Nos. 9 and 10, 1912). Vielé-Griffin's first translation of Whitman appeared in November, 1888, in. La Revue indépendante; another translation of his appeared afterwards in La Cravache. A translation of Whitman had appeared in the Revue des deux Mondes in the reign of Napoleon III.
[18] He himself told Huret that La Princesse Maleine was written in vers libres concealed typographically as prose.
CHAPTER II
On his return to Belgium, Maeterlinck spent his winters in Ghent, in the house of his parents; his summers in the family villa at the village of Oostacker.
He now (1887) became, acquainted with Georges Rodenbach, who introduced him to the directors of La Jeune Belgique. He was in no hurry to write, however; in three years the magazine only published three poems, still in regular verse, from his pen. These were included later in Serres Chaudes, as also were the few poems in regular verse which appeared in the anthology of Belgian verse, Le Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique, published in 1887 under the auspices of La Jeune Belgique.
The fact that by 1887 it was possible to compile such an anthology is remarkable; for before 1880 Belgium, from the point of view of literature, was a desert. But in 1879 certain noisy students at the University of Louvain (Verhaeren, Gilkin, Giraud, Ernest van Dyck,[1] Edmond Deman,[2] and others) put their heads together and founded a bantam magazine, La Semaine des Etudiants.[3] This magazine was the beginning of the modern movement in Belgian literature. In October of the "following year, another student, who, when his identity was disclosed, turned out to be Max Waller, brought out a hostile magazine, Le Type; and the fight between the rivals became so merciless that the University authorities suppressed them both. Max Waller, however, nothing daunted, went to Brussels, and acquired La Jeune Belgique, a review that had been founded by students of Brussels University, made friends with his antagonists of La Semaine, and associated them with himself in the editing of his review. Georges Eekhoud, Georges Rodenbach, and other writers joined them; and La Jeune Belgique went on with its task of fighting the Philistine. Max Waller died in 1889; and when Gilkin became editor in 1891, it became the organ of the Parnassians in Belgium, while the symbolists (French as well as Belgian) enriched the pages of La Wallonie, which Albert Mockel had founded in Liège in 1886.
We have seen, from Charles van Lerberghe's letter to Adolphe van Bever, that Maeterlinck began by writing "short stories something like Maupassant's." The Massacre of the Innocents is realistic. Verhaeren, too, had discovered himself when, a student at Louvain, he read Maupassant's poems. His first book, Les Flamandes, made a critic say that the poet had burst on the world like an abcess. And the Belgians had in Camille Lemonnier a realist whose novels are as uncompromising as those of Zola. At the time when Maeterlinck began to write Lemonnier was, as they called him, the field-marshal of Belgian literature. In the spring of 1883, the jury whose duty it was to award a prize for the best work published during the last five years decided that no book had been published which was sufficiently meritorious. It was felt that this was an official insult to Belgian letters, and particularly to Camille Lemonnier, who had published various works of striking merit in the five years concerned. A banquet de guerre to Lemonnier was arranged by La Jeune Belgique, and there were two hundred and twelve subscribers. The banquet took place on the 27th May, 1883, and this event may be said to mark, not only the triumph of naturalism in Belgium, but also the fact that the élite of the Belgians were now conscious of the renaissance of their literature.[4] It will be Maeterlinck's task, after his return to Belgium, to react against this naturalism, and to write works which precipitate the decay of naturalism, not in Belgium only, but in the whole world; he and other Belgians, until Belgian literature becomes, as it was in the time of chivalry, "when the muse was the august sister of the sword, and stanzas were like bright staircases climbed, in pomp and epic fires, by verses casqued with silver like knights,"[5] the most discussed, the most suggestive literature in Europe.[6]
In this reaction against naturalism in Belgium, Maeterlinck's work was hardly more effective than the dreamy poetry of Georges Rodenbach. It was not till 1887 that Rodenbach definitely left Belgium for Paris, and by that time he was a force in Belgian literature. No doubt he influenced Maeterlinck;[7] he too was a mystic and a poet of silence. Rodenbach compares his soul with half-transparent water, with the water shut up in an aquarium: "he stands in silent fear before the riddle of this 'âme sous-marine,' surmising a deep and mysterious abyss, at the bottom of which a priceless treasure of dreams is lying buried, under the shimmering surface that quietly reflects images of the world. He complains that the poor immensurable soul knows itself so little, knows no more of its life than the water-lily knows of the surface it floats on:
"'Ah! ce que l'âme sait d'elle-même est si peu
Devant l'immensité de sa vie inconnue!'
"Then he would fain descend into this unknown world, seek through the dark deeps, dive for the treasures which slumber there perhaps.... But it remains a longing, a wish, a dream:
"'Je rêve de plonger jusqu'au fond de mon âme
Où des rêves sombres ont perdu leur trésor."
"And so Rodenbach remains standing on the surface, staring at the deeps, but without seeing anything in them other than the trembling reflection of the things around him."[8]
Maeterlinck, as we shall see, is also the poet of the soul; he sees it under a bell-jar as Rodenbach saw it in an aquarium; but Maeterlinck does not stand gazing at the unknown waters: he dives into the deeps, and brings back the treasures which Rodenbach surmised.
[1] The famous Wagner tenor.
[2] The Brussels publisher.
[3] The first number is dated Saturday, the 18th October, 1879, and begins with "rimes d'avant poste" by "Rodolphe" (=Verhaeren).
[4] Iwan Gilkin, Quinze années de littérature.
[5] Albert Giraud, Hors du Siècle.
[6] In the thirteenth century in Germany, "Fleming" was synonymous with "verray parfit, gentil knight." The Bavarian Sir Neidhart von Reuental, for instance, refers to himself as a "Fleming."
[7] Cf. Rodenbach's;
"Je vis comme si mon âme avait été
De la lune et de l'eau qu'on aurait mis sous verre"
with Maeterlinck's:
"On en a mis plusieurs sur d'anciens clairs de lune."
—Serres Chaudes, "Cloches de verre."
[8] G. van Hamel, Het Letterkundige Leven van Frankrijk, pp. 127-8.
CHAPTER III
In 1889 Maeterlinck published his first book: Serres Chaudes (Hot-houses). We have seen that several of the poems which compose it had already appeared in La Pléiade and in Le Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique.
The subject of this collection of verse, as, indeed, of the dramas and the essays which were to follow, is the soul. Rodenbach, we remember, saw the soul prisoned in an aquarium, "at the bottom of the ponds of dream," reflected in the glass of mirrors; Maeterlinck sees it languid, and moist, and oppressed, and helplessly inactive[1] in a hot-house whose doors are closed for ever. The tropical atmosphere is created by pictures (seen through the deep green windows of the hot-house) as of lions drowned in sunshine, or of mighty forests lying with not a leaf stirring over the roses of passion by night. But of a sudden (for it is all a dream) we may find ourselves in the reek of the "strange exhalations" of fever-patients in some dark hospital glooming a clogged canal in Ghent.... Evidently not a book for the normal Philistine. In Ghent it made people look askance at Maeterlinck. It branded him as a decadent.
And that was a dreadful thing in Belgium. Nay, in that country, at that time, and for long after, even to be a poet was a disgrace. It is only by remembering this fact that one can understand the brutality of the fight waged by the reviews, and by the poets in their books; and it is perhaps owing to the hostility of the public that such a great mass of good poetry was written. Year after year Charles van Lerberghe renewed his futile application to the Government for a poor post as secondary teacher, and on account of his first writings[2] Maeterlinck was refused some modest public office for which he applied.
The contempt of the Belgians for young poets may be condoned to a certain extent when one appreciates the absurdities in which some of them indulged. It was not the gaminerie of such poets as Théodore Hannon and Max Waller which shocked the honest burghers; they were rather horrified at the absurdities of the new style. Rodenbach, who was a real poet, wrote crazy things; as, for instance, when he compared a muslin curtain to a communicant partaking of the moon.[3] Even when the absurdity is an application of the theories of the symbolists it is often apt to raise a laugh, e.g., when Théodore Hannon, extending the doctrine that perfumes sing, makes a perfume blare:
"Opoponax! nom très bizarre
Et parfum plus bizarre encor!
Opoponax, le son du cor
Est pâle auprès de ta fanfare!"
A goodly list of absurdities could be collected from Serres Chaudes also, if the collector detached odd passages from their context:
"Perhaps there is a tramp on a throne,
You have the idea that corsars are waiting on a pond,
And that antediluvian beings are going to invade towns."
And a scientist of Lombroso's type could easily, by culling choice quotations, draw an appalling picture of a degenerate:
"Pity my absence on
The threshold of my will!
My soul is helpless, wan,
With white inaction ill."
So incoherent and strange have these poems[4] appeared to some people who are ardent Maeterlinckians that they assume he may, for a period, have been mentally ill.[5] If he had been, it would have been historically significant. Verhaeren went through such a period of mental illness. It might be asserted that the modern man must be mad. The life of to-day, especially in cities, with its whipped hurry, its dust and noises, is too complex to be lived with the nerves of a Victorian. But the human organism is capable of infinite assimilation; and the period we live in is busy creating a new type of man.[6] It is the glory of Verhaeren to have sung the advent of this new man; it is the glory of Maeterlinck, as we shall see, to have proved that a species forcibly adjusts itself to existing conditions.
To a Victorian the poems in Serres Chaudes must of necessity seem diseased; just as the greater part of Tennyson's poetry must of necessity seem ordinary to us. How many "Dickhäuter" have called Hoffmansthal's poetry diseased? If it is, so is Yeats's. Turn from Robert Bridges's poems of outdoor life—the noble old English style—to Yeats's dim visions, or to Arthur Symons's harpsichord dreaming through the room, and you have the difference between yesterday and to-day.
At all events Serres Chaudes, whether mad or not, is bathed in the same atmosphere as the dramas soon to follow. As to the relative value of the book from the point of view of art, opinion differs. Some good critics who are not prone to praise think highly of it; but the general impression seems to be that these poems are chiefly of interest as marking a stage in the author's development. If Maeterlinck had written nothing more he would have been quite forgotten, or only remembered because, for instance, Charles van Lerberghe wrote some poetry in the form of a criticism of the book. Compared with other Belgian lyric verse, Verhaeren's, or Charles van Lerberghe's, or Max Elskamp's, it is inferior work. Not that there are no good poems; some of them, indeed, are excellent, and not seldom the poet is on the track of something fine:
"Attention! the shadow of great sailing-ships passes
over the dahlias of submarine forests;
And I am for a moment in the shadow of whales
going to the pole!"
Whatever value the book may have as poetry, the rhymeless poems in it have, as we have seen, considerable importance as being attempts to reproduce Walt Whitman's manner. They are interesting, too, because they attempt to create a mood by the use of successive images.[7] Perhaps, elsewhere (Tancrède de Visan suggests the Song of Solomon) this method has been applied successfully. The poems in Serres Chaudes are experiments.
[1] Cf. Rodenbach, Le Règne du Silence, p. 1:
"Mais les choses pourtant entre le cadre d'or
Ont un air de souffrir de leur vie inactive;
Le miroir qui les aime a borné leur essor
En un recul de vie exigüe et captive..."
[2] Gérard Harry, p. 19. Le Masque, Série ii, No. 5: "jeune encore, il avait sollicité les fonctions de juge de paix, mais le gouvernement belge, prévoyant son destin de poète, les lui avait généreusement refusées, et pour reconnaître ce service, Maeterlinck ne lui rend que mépris et dédain et refuse même les distinctions honorifiques les plus hautes, celles qu'on n'accorde généralement qu'aux très grands industriels ou aux très vieux militaires ou politiciens."
"Chambres pleines de songe! Elles vivent vraiment
En des rêves plus beaux que la vie ambiante,
Grandissant toute chose au Symbole, voyant
Dans chaque rideau pâle une Communiante
Aux falbalas de mousseline s'éployant
Qui communie au bord des vitres, de la Lune!"
—Le Règne du Silence, p. 4.
[4] They make one think of what Novalis wrote: "poems unconnected, yet with associations, like dreams; poems, melodious merely and full of beautiful words, but absolutely without sense or connection—at most individual sentences intelligible—nothing but fragments, so to speak, of the most varied things."
[5] See Schlaf's Maeterlinck, p. 12; ibid., p. 30; and Monty Jacobs' Maeterlinck, p. 39. But Maeterlinck's brain was always as healthy as his body. At the time he wrote Serres Chaudes disease was fashionable, that is all; and, beside the main influence of Baudelaire, there was the fear of death instilled by the Jesuits.
[6] Verhaeren, in his monograph on Rembrandt (1905), has suggested that the man of genius may, "in specially favourable conditions, create a new race, thanks to the happy deformation of his brain fixing itself first, by a propitious crossing, in his direct descendants, to be transmitted afterwards to a whole posterity."
[7] See Tancrède de Visan's interpretation in L'Attitude du Lyrisme contemporain, pp. 119 ff.
CHAPTER IV
Some of the most eminent symbolists were strongly influenced by the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer[1] and Eduard von Hartmann. Their outlook on the world is not a whit more rosy than that of the naturalists. Vielé-Griffin did, it is true, preach the doctrine that the principle of all things is activity; and that, since every "function in exercise" implies a pleasure, there cannot be activity without joy, even grief being good, for grief, too, is a spending of energy. Albert Mockel's doctrine of aspiration, moreover—his theory that the soul, constantly changing like a river, runs like a river to some far ocean of the future—is elevating and consoling; and is a step onward to the complete victory won over pessimism by Verhaeren and Maeterlinck. But when we read the first plays of Maeterlinck we must not forget that he is still a prisoner in the dark cave, with his back to the full light of the real which he was to turn round to later.
The first of these plays out of the darkness, La Princesse Maleine (The Princess Maleine), a drama in five acts, came out in 1889 in a first edition of thirty copies which Maeterlinck himself, with the help of a friend, had printed for private circulation on a small hand-press.
Iwan Gilkin, to whose Damnation de l'Artiste, published in 1890, Maeterlinck was to dedicate his first critique, was the first to analyse it in La Jeune Belgique; and he was not wrong when he called it "an important work which marks a date in the history of the contemporary theatre." But it was Octave Mirbeau's famous article in Figaro which made Maeterlinck. Literally, he awoke and found himself famous. The trumpet-blast that awoke the world and frightened Maeterlinck into deeper shyness, was this:
"I know nothing of M. Maurice Maeterlinck. I know not whence he is nor how he is. Whether he is old or young, rich or poor, I know not. I only know that no man is more unknown than he; and I know also that he has created a masterpiece, not a masterpiece labelled masterpiece in advance, such as our young masters publish every day, sung to all the notes of the squeaking lyre—or rather of the squeaking flute of our day; but an admirable and a pure eternal masterpiece, a masterpiece which is sufficient to immortalise a name, and to make all those who are an-hungered for the beautiful and the great rise up and call this name blessèd; a masterpiece such as honest and tormented artists have, sometimes, in their hours of enthusiasm, dreamed of writing, and such as up to the present not one of them has written. In short, M. Maurice Maeterlinck has given us the greatest work of genius of our time, and the most extraordinary and the most simple also, comparable, and—shall I dare to say it—superior in beauty to whatever is most beautiful in Shakespeare. This work is called La Princesse Maleine. Are there in all the world twenty persons who know it? I doubt it."[2]
The Pre-Raphaelite atmosphere of the play will escape no one. At the time he wrote it Maeterlinck had covered the walls of his study with pictures taken from Walter Crane's books for children; and he had enhanced their effect by framing them under green-tinted glass. He found his source in the English translation of one of Grimm's fairy-tales, that which tells of the fair maid Maleen.[3] He has changed the Low German atmosphere of the tale to one suggested vaguely by Dutch, Scandinavian, and English names. He has imported, as the instigator of all the evil, a copy of Queen Gertrude in Hamlet. This is Anne, the dethroned Queen of Jutland, who has taken refuge at the Court of King Hjalmar at Ysselmonde. She soon has the old king in her power; and at the same time she lays traps for his son, Prince Hjalmar. The latter is betrothed to Princess Maleine, the daughter of King Marcellus; but at the banquet to celebrate the betrothal a fierce quarrel between the two kings breaks out, the consequence of which is a war in which King Hjalmar kills Marcellus and lays his realm waste. Before the outbreak of the war, however, Marcellus had immured Maleine, because she would not forget Prince Hjalmar, together with her nurse, in an old tower from which the two women, loosening the stones with their finger-nails, escape. They go wandering until they arrive at the Castle of Ysselmonde; and here Maleine becomes serving-woman to Princess Uglyane, the daughter of Queen Anne. Uglyane is about to be married to Prince Hjalmar; but Maleine makes herself known to him, and he is so happy that he believes he is "up to the heart in Heaven." At a Court festival a door opens and Princess Maleine is seen in white bridal garments; the queen pretends to be kind to her, makes an attempt to poison her which is only half successful, and finally strangles her. Prince Hjalmar finds the corpse, and stabs the queen and himself; and the old king asks whether there will be salad for breakfast.
It is not astonishing that Octave Mirbeau thought the play was in the Shakespearian style. The resemblance is striking. Hjalmar is clearly modelled on Hamlet. The nurse is a mere copy of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet. There is a clown. There is the same changing of scenes as in Shakespeare. Dire portents accompany the action: there is a comet shedding blood over the castle, there is a rain of stars; there is the same eclipse of the moon as heralded the fall of Cæsar; and if the graves are not tenantless, as they were in Rome, someone says they are going to be. It would be easy to draw up a list of apparent reminiscences. Notwithstanding this René Doumic is quite wrong when he talks of the drama being made with rags of Shakespeare. Maeterlinck has simply taken his requisites from Shakespeare. There are two things in which Maeterlinck is quite original: the dialogue, and the æsthetic intention.
Shakespeare flows along in lyrical and rhetorical sentences. Maeterlinck's sentences are short, often unfinished, leaving much to be guessed at; and they are the common speech of everyday life, containing no archaic or poetic diction. It is no doubt quite true that French people do not talk in this style; but, as van Hamel points out, it is the language of the taciturn Flemish peasants among whom the poet was living when he wrote the play. Maeterlinck has himself[4] criticised "the astonished repeating of words which gives the personages the appearance of rather deaf somnambulists for ever being shocked out of a painful dream."...
"However," he continues, "this want of promptitude in hearing and replying is intimately connected with their psychology and the somewhat haggard idea they have of the universe." It is already that interior dialogue of which he showed such a mastery in his next plays: the characters grope for words and stammer fragments, but we know by what they do not say what is happening in their souls. "It is closely connected with what Maeterlinck has written about Silence.[5] This second, unspoken dialogue, which, as a matter of fact, for our poet is the real one, is made possible by various expedients: by pauses, gestures, and by other indirect means of this nature. Most of all, however, by the spoken word itself, and by a dialogue which in the whole course of dramatic development hitherto has been employed for the first time by Maeterlinck and, beside him, by Ibsen. It is a dialogue marked by an unheard-of triviality and banality of the flattest everyday speech, which, however, in the midst of this second, inner dialogue, is invested with an indefinable magic."[6]
If the dialogue points forward to the theories propounded in The Treasure of the Humble, the melodrama of some of the scenes and the bloody catastrophe to which they tend is directly opposed to these theories. Too transparently throughout the play the intention of the poet is to horrify. Apart from the comets and other phenomena which portend ruin, he is constantly heightening the mystery by something eerie, all of it, no doubt, on close inspection, attributable to natural causes, but, if the truth must be told, perilously near the ridiculous. The weeping willows, and the owls, and the bats, and the fearsome swans, and the croaking ravens, and the seven béguines, and the cemetery, and the sheep among the tombs, and the peacocks in the cypresses, and the marshes, and the will-o'-the-wisps are an excessive agglomeration. But the atmosphere is finely suggested:
MALEINE: I am afraid!...
HJALMAR: But we are in the park....
MALEINE: Are there walls round the park?
HJALMAR: Of course; there are walls and moats round the park.
MALEINE: And nobody can get in?
HJALMAR: No;—but there are plenty of unknown things that get in all the same.
In the murder scene[7] the falling of the lily in the vase, the scratching of the dog at the door, are some of the things that are effective. And if Webster's manner is worth all the praise it has had, surely the murder in this play is tense tragedy.
This scene is only by its bourgeois language different from the accepted Shakespearian conception of tragedy. But, as we have said, Maeterlinck's intention differs from that of Shakespeare, from whom he has borrowed most: Shakespeare's intention, in his tragedies, was to move his audience by the spectacle of human beings acting under the mastery of various passions; Maeterlinck's intention is to suggest the helplessness of human beings, and the impossibility of their resistance in the hands of Fate. Maleine—who is no heavier than a bird—who cannot hold a flower in her hand—is the poor human soul, the prey of Fate. The King and Hjalmar also are the prey of Fate; Queen Anne not less so, for crime, like love, is one of the strings by which Fate works her puppets. Each is helpless; they feel, dimly, that something which they do not understand is moving them: hence their groping speech.
And the essential tragedy is this: the perverse and the wicked and the good and the pure alike are moved to disaster, as though they were dreaming and wished to awaken but could not, by unseen powers. Life is a nightmare. In Grimm's tale the wicked princess had her head chopped off; but the fairy-tale was a dream dreamt in the infancy of the soul; now the soul is awakening to the consciousness of its destiny; and we are beginning to feel that there is no retribution and no reward, that there is only Fate. And it is the young and the happy and the good and pure that Fate takes first, simply because they are not so passive as the unhappy and the wicked.[8]
Given the intentions of the dramatist, one should not ask for characterisation in the accepted sense. Characters!—Maeterlinck himself told Huret that his intention was to write "a play in Shakespeare's manner for a marionette theatre." That is to say, the real actors are behind the scenes, the forces that move the marionettes. In a Punch and Judy show, of course, you can guess at the character of the showman by the voice he imputes to the dolls; but when the showman is Death, or Fate, or God, or something for which we have no name, there is no possibility of characterisation—we can only judge by what the showman makes the dolls do whether he is a good or an evil being. The fact that Hjalmar is modelled on Hamlet, and Queen Anne on Queen Gertrude only proves that the dramatist is not yet full master of his own powers; and, if we look closely, we shall find that the unconscious puppets resemble their living patterns only as shadows resemble the shapes that cast them. We need not expect from characters that shadow forth states of mind—feelings of helplessness, terror, uneasiness, "blank misgivings..." sadness—the deliberate or headlong action we are accustomed to in beings of flesh and blood. What action there seems to be is illusory—if Maleine escapes from the tower, it is only to fall deeper into the power of her evil destiny; if, by a move as though a hand were put forth in the dark, a faint stirring of her passivity, she wins back her lover, it is only to lose him and herself the more. We shall see that Maeterlinck in some of his next dramas dispenses with seen action altogether: in The Intruder, for instance, the only action, the death of the mother, takes place behind the scenes; in The Interior the action, the daughter's suicide, has taken place when the play opens.
There is, however, some rudimentary characterisation in Princess Maleine. The doting old king is not an original creation; but the drivelling of his terror-stricken conscience should be effective (as melodrama) on the stage. "Look at their eyes!" he says, pointing to the corpses which strew the stage, "they are going to leap on me like frogs." And his longing for salad is probably immortal....
[1] Maeterlinck told Huret that he had been influenced by Schopenhauer "qui arrive jusqu'à vous consoler de la mort."
[2] Figaro, 24th August, 1890.
[3] Pronounced in German like the French Maleine.
[4] Preface to Théâtre, p. 2.
[5] In Swedenborg's mysticism, the literal meanings of words are only protecting veils which hide their inner meanings. See "Le Tragique Quotidien" (in Le Trésor des Humbles) pp. 173-4. That Maeterlinck was meditating the famous chapter on "Silence" in The Treasure of the Humble when he wrote Princess Maleine may be inferred from Act ii. sc. 6: "I want to see her at last in presence of the evening.... I want to see if the night will make her think. May it not be that there is a little silence in her heart?"
[6] Schlaf's Maeterlinck, p. 31.
[7] Suggested, perhaps, by the strangling of Little Snow-white in Grimm's story.
[8] Preface to Théâtre, pp. 4-5.
CHAPTER V
According to the accepted dramatic canons, a play is a tragedy when death allays the excitement aroused in us by the action, the whole course of which moves onward to this inevitable end. In such tragedies death is a relief from the stormy happenings which bring it; it is not in itself represented as profoundly interesting—it is not an aim, but a result, "it is our death that guides our life," says Maeterlinck, "and life has no other aim than our death."[1] Not only the careers, crowded with events, of the great, but also the simple, quiet lives of lowly people are raised into high significance by this common bourne. Death is not so much a catastrophe as a mystery. It casts its shadow over the whole of our finite existence; and beyond it lies infinity.
Death, however, is only one of the mighty mysteries, the unknown powers, "the presences which are not to be put by," which rule our destinies. Love is another. To these two cosmic forces are devoted a series of dramas which were in 1901-2 collected by Maeterlinck in three volumes under the title of Théâtre. In the preface[2] to the collection Maeterlinck has himself interpreted the plays with a clearness and fullness which leaves the reader in no doubt as to his aims.
"In these plays," he says, "faith is held in enormous powers, invisible and fatal. No one knows their intentions, but the spirit of the drama assumes they are malevolent, attentive to all our actions, hostile to smiles, to life, to peace, to happiness. Destinies which are innocent but involuntarily hostile are here joined, and parted to the ruin of all, under the saddened eyes of the wisest, who foresee the future but can change nothing in the cruel and inflexible games which Love and Death practise among the living. And Love and Death and the other powers here exercise a sort of sly injustice, the penalties of which—for this injustice awards no compensation—are perhaps nothing but the whims of fate....
"This Unknown takes on, most frequently, the form of Death. The infinite presence of death, gloomy, hypocritically active, fills all the interstices of the poem. To the problem of existence no reply is made except by the riddle of its annihilation."
There is another thing to be remembered (this is a repetition, but it is necessary) in reading Maeterlinck's early plays. Behind the scene which he chooses with varying degrees of clearness, lies Plato's famous image—the image of a cavern on whose walls enigmatic shadows are reflected.[3] In this cavern man gropes about in exile, with his back to the light he is seeking.
The mysterious coming of death is the theme of The Intruder, a play by Maeterlinck which was published in 1890. It appeared as the first of two plays in a volume called Les Aveugles (The Sightless). This is the name of the second play in the book; but the grandfather in The Intruder too is blind, and through both plays runs the idea that we are blind beings groping in the dark (in Plato's cavern), and that those who see least see most.
The subject of The Intruder can be told in a few words. In a dark room in an old castle are sitting the blind grandfather, the father, the uncle, and the three daughters. In the adjoining room lies the mother who has recently been confined. She has been at death's door; but at last the doctors say the danger is over, and all but the grandfather are confident. He thinks she is not doing well.... he has heard her voice. They think he is querulous. The uncle is more anxious about the child: he has scarcely stirred since he was born, he has not cried once, he is like a wax baby. The sister is expected to arrive at any minute. The eldest daughter watches for her from the window. It is moonlight, and she can see the avenue as far as the grove of cypresses. She hears the nightingales. A gentle breeze stirs in the avenue; the trees tremble a little. The grandfather remarks that he can no longer hear the nightingales, and the daughter is afraid someone has entered the garden. She sees no one, but somebody must be passing near the pond, for the swans are afraid, and all the fish dive suddenly. The dogs do not bark; she can see the house-dog crouching at the back of his kennel. The nightingales continue silent—there is a silence of death—it must be a stranger frightening them, says the grandfather. The roses shed their leaves. The grandfather feels cold; but the glass door on to the terrace will not shut—the joiner is to come to-morrow, he will put it right. Suddenly the sharpening of a scythe is heard outside—it must be the gardener preparing to mow the grass. The lamp does not burn well. A noise is heard as of someone entering the house, but no one comes up the stairs. They ring for the servant. They hear her steps, and the grandfather thinks she is not alone. The father opens the door; she remains on the landing. She is alone. She says no one has entered the house, but she has closed the door below, which she had found open. The father tells her not to push the door to; she denies that she is doing so. The grandfather, who, though he is blind, is conscious of light, thinks they are putting the lamp out. He asks whether the servant, who has gone downstairs, is in the room: it had seemed to him that she was sitting at the table. He cannot believe that no one has entered. He asks why they have put the light out. He is filled with an unendurable desire to see his daughter, but they will not let him—she is sleeping. The lamp goes out. They sit in the darkness. Midnight strikes, and at the last stroke of the clock they seem to hear a noise as of someone rising hastily. The grandfather maintains that someone has risen from, his chair. Suddenly the child is heard crying, crying in terror. Hurried steps are heard in the sick woman's chamber. The door of it is opened, the light from it pours into the room, and on the threshold appears a Sister of Charity, who makes the sign of the Cross to announce the mother's death.
Already in The Princess Maleine the miraculous happenings could all be explained by natural causes. Still more so in The Intruder. It was not the reaper Death who was sharpening his scythe, but the gardener. If the lamp goes out, it is because there is no oil in it. Accompanying the naturalness of the atmosphere (the atmosphere that is natural when a patient is in danger of dying), there is the naturalness of the dialogue. The family is worn out with anxious watching: how natural then is the sleepy tone of the talking, which is only quickened somewhat by the apparent irritability of the grandfather:
THE FATHER: He is nearly eighty.
THE UNCLE: No wonder he's eccentric.
THE FATHER: He's like all blind people.
THE UNCLE: They think too much.
THE FATHER: They've too much time on their hands.
THE UNCLE: They've nothing else to do.
THE FATHER: It's their only way of passing the time.
THE UNCLE: It must be terrible.
THE FATHER: I suppose you get used to it.
THE UNCLE: I dare say.
THE FATHER: They are certainly to be pitied.
In this play, as also in The Sightless, and later on in The Life of the Bees, Maeterlinck shows himself a master of irony. The passage just quoted is an example.
To Maeterlinck, with reference to The Intruder, has been applied what Victor Hugo said to Baudelaire after he had read The Flowers of Evil: "You have created a new shudder." Certainly, the new frisson is there; but was it Maeterlinck who created it? It will be well to go into this question; for Maeterlinck, in connection with The Intruder, has been charged with plagiarism.
The Intruder first appeared in La Wallonie for January, 1890. In the same periodical for January, 1889, that is, exactly a year before, had appeared Les Flaireurs, a drama in three acts by Maeterlinck's friend, Charles van Lerberghe. It is dedicated "to the poet Maurice Maeterlinck." The title is annotated: "Légende originale et drame en 3 actes pour le théâtre des fantoches." Here, to begin with, we have a "drama for marionettes." Maeterlinck seems to have first used the word "marionette" in connection with his plays when undergoing cross-examination by Jules Huret, whose Enquête was published in 1891: when writing Princess Maleine, he said, he had wanted to write "a play in Shakespeare's manner for marionettes." Maeterlinck and van Lerberghe were seeing each other nearly every day at the time Les Flaireurs was being written; and there is nothing to show that they did not discuss their theories of the drama; it is only certain that with regard to the idea, superb irony, of a theatre for marionettes, the published priority rests with van Lerberghe. Van Lerberghe, however, was charged with having imitated Maeterlinck; and it was only when Maeterlinck himself proclaimed the priority of Les Flaireurs[4] that the charge of plagiarism was turned against him. Now the fact is that Maeterlinck, to a certain extent, collaborated in Les Flaireurs.
The subject of the two plays is identical; both symbolise the coming of death to a woman. But each is entirely independent. In Les Flaireurs death is expected; in The Intruder it is not expected. In van Lerberghe's play resistance is offered to visible personifications of death; in Maeterlinck's play resistance is impossible, because death is invisible. The first play is full of brawling noise, and peasant slang, and the action is violent: the second is only a succession of whispers tearing the web of silence;[5] nothing visible happens, there is only expectancy. In short, one play is for the senses; the other is for the soul. The charge of plagiarism is absolutely unfounded: it is only a case of friendly rivalry in the working out of an idea—the tale indeed goes that the idea occurred to the two friends simultaneously. If it really was a game of skill, it would be hard to say who was victor: each play is a masterpiece.
The scene of Les Flaireurs is laid in a very poor cottage. It is a stormy night; the rain whips the windows, the wind howls, and a dog is barking in the distance. The room is lit by two candles. Loud knocking at the door. A girl jumps out of the bed with gestures of terror. She is in her night-shirt; her fair hair is unbound. She asks: "Who is there?" and "The Voice," after some beating about the bush, answers: "I'm the man with the water." The voice of the mother, who thinks it is Jesus Christ, is heard from the bed urging the daughter to let Him in. She refuses, and the man answers that he will wait. Ten o'clock sounds, and the daughter puts the two candles out. ACT II. Knocking at the door again. The two candles are relit, and the daughter is seen standing against the bed, at watch, with her face turned towards the door. A voice is heard demanding admittance. "You said you would wait," says the girl. "Why, I've only just come!" answers the voice. She asks who he is, and he replies, "The man with the linen." The mother again urges her to open the door—she thinks it is the Virgin Mary. The daughter is obstinate, and the voice cries, "All right, I'll wait." ACT III. Louder knocks, and a voice again. This time it is "The man with the ... thingumbob." The mother still thinks it is the Virgin Mary. She bids her daughter raise the curtain: and the shadow of the hearse is projected on the wall. The mother asks what the shadow is; the daughter drops the curtain. The voice now answers brutally: "I'm the man with the coffin, that's what I am." The neighing of horses is heard. The girl dashes herself against the door, but it is beaten in. An arm is seen putting a bucket into the room. Midnight strikes. The old woman utters a hoarse cry; the daughter, who had been holding the door back, rushes to the bed; the door falls with a mighty din, and extinguishes the two candles.
It will be seen that whereas in The Intruder there is nothing which cannot be explained by natural causes, the symbolism of Les Flaireurs is untrue—death does not come with bucket, linen, and coffin. Death does not break the door in. This only amounts to saying that Maeterlinck's method is less romantic than that of his friend. Maeterlinck's close realism, however, does give him certain advantages—the helplessness of the grandfather, for instance, is far more pathetic than the spectacle of the girl dashing herself against the door, though it does not move us so directly.
The Intruder was first acted in French at Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art in Paris, on the 20th May, 1891, at a historic performance of this and other playlets for the benefit of Paul Verlaine and the painter, Paul Gauguin.
In the second play of the 1890 volume, The Sightless, which was first acted on the 7th December, 1891, at the Théâtre d'Art, we have again the mystery of death; but the main theme would seem to be the mystery of human life—"this earthly existence is conceived as a deep, impenetrable night of ignorance and uncertainty."[6] The fable is this:
In a very ancient forest in the north, under a sky profoundly starred, is sitting a very agèd priest, wrapped in an ample black cloak. He is leaning his head and the upper part of his body against the bole of a huge, cavernous oak. His motionless face has the lividity of wax; his lips are violet and half open. His eyes seem bleeding under a multitude of immemorial griefs and tears. His white hair falls in rigid and scanty locks over a face more illumined and more weary than all that surrounds him in the attentive silence of the desolate forest. His emaciated hands are rigidly joined on his thighs. To the right of him six blind old men are sitting on stones, stumps of trees, and dead leaves. To the left, separated from them by an unrooted tree and split boulders, six women who are likewise blind sit facing the old men. Three of these women are praying and moaning uninterruptedly. A fourth is extremely old; the fifth, in an attitude of speechless madness, holds a sleeping baby on her knees. The sixth is young and radiantly beautiful, and her hair floods her whole being. Most of them sit waiting, with their elbows on their knees, and their faces in their hands. Great funereal trees, yews, weeping willows, cypresses, cover them with faithful shadows. A cluster of tall and sickly asphodel are in blossom near the priest. The darkness is extraordinary, in spite of the moonlight which, here and there, glints through the darkness of the foliage.
The blind people are waiting for their priest to return. He is getting too old, the men murmur; they suspect that he has not been blest with the Best of sight himself of late. They are sure he has lost his way and is looking for it. They have walked a long time; they must be far from the asylum. He only talks to the women now; they ask them where he has gone to. The women do not know. He had told them he wanted to see the island for the last time before the sunless winter. He was uneasy because the storms had flooded the river, and because all the dikes seemed ready to burst. He has gone in the direction of the sea, which is so near that when they are silent they can hear it thudding on the rocks. Where are they? None of them know. When did they come to the island? They do not know, they were all blind when they came. They were not born here, they came from beyond the sea. They hear the asylum clock strike twelve; they do not know whether it is noon or midnight. They are frightened at noises which they cannot understand. Suddenly the wind rises in the forest, and the sea is heard bellowing against the cliffs. The sea seems very near; they are afraid it will reach them. They are about to rise and try to go away when they hear a noise of hasty feet in the dead leaves. It is the dog of the asylum. It puts its muzzle on the knees of one of the blind men. Feeling it pull, he rises, and it leads him to the motionless priest. He touches the priest's cold face ... and they know that their guide is dead. The dog will not move away from the corpse. A squall whirls the dead leaves round. It begins to snow. They think they hear footsteps ... The footsteps seem to stop in their midst....
The Sightless is a notable example of clear symbolism. The dead priest is religion. Religion is dead now in the midst of us; and we are without a guide and groping in the dark. "There is something which moves above our heads, but we cannot reach it." We are prisoners in a little finite space washed round by the Ocean of Infinity, whose mighty waters we can hear in our calm seasons. Above the dense forest somewhere rises a lighthouse (Wisdom). We have strayed from the asylum (that goodness which religion instilled in us when it was alive). The baby alone can see; but it cannot speak yet (the future will reveal).
The virtues and failings of humanity are hinted at with gentle irony. One blind man, when he goes out in the sunshine, suspects the great radiances; another prefers to stay near the good coal fire in the refectory.... The oldest blind woman dreams sometimes that she sees; the oldest blind man only sees when he dreams.... The young beauty smells the scent of flowers around them (the promptings of sense guide us; and the beautiful are the sensuous); one who was born blind only smells the scent of the earth (Philistines).... Heaven is mentioned, and all raise their heads towards the sky, except the three who were born blind—they keep their faces bent earthwards....
Lessing thought no man could write a good tragedy till he was thirty. Here are two written by a man of twenty-eight.
[1] "Les Avertis" (in Le Trésor des Humbles), p. 53.
[2] Cf. also "L'Evolution du Mystère" (in Le Temple Enseveli) Chapters V., XXI., and XXII.
[3] See Chapter XXVIII. of L'Intelligence des Fleurs.
[4] In a letter inserted in the programme when Les Flaireurs was staged by Paul Fort at the Théâtre d'Art (after The Intruder had gone over the same boards). This statement of Maeterlinck's is a noble defence of his friend, and, as such, not to be trusted.
[5] But Death, in The Intruder, is understood to have made some noise while coming upstairs.
[6] Is. van Dijk, Maurice Maeterlinck, pp. 81-82.
CHAPTER VI
Few men entirely outgrow the influences of their education: the mind is made by what it is fed on while it is growing just as much as the body is. Carlyle was always more or less of a Scotch preacher threatening the world with hell. Gerhart Hauptmann (who, by the way, was born in the same year as Maeterlinck) never got over his Moravian upbringing. Maeterlinck came to hate the Jesuits; but his monastic training lingered in his love of the mystics. Mysticism is in any case a Flemish trait; and it is one of the outstanding features of Flemish literature as it is of Flemish painting. It is not astonishing, then, that Maeterlinck should have felt drawn to the most famous of Flemish mystics. He published, in 1891, L'Ornement des Noces spirituelles, a translation, illuminated by a preface, of Jan van Ruysbroeck's Die Chierheit der gheesteleker Brulocht. The "doctor ecstaticus" was born in 1274 at the little village of Ruysbroeck, near Brussels. He was a curate in the Church of Sainte Gudule in Brussels; but in his old days he with several friends founded the Monastery of Groenendal (Green Dale) in the Forêt de Soignes, two miles from Brussels. The fame of his piety attracted many pilgrims to his retreat, among others the German mystic, Johannes Tauler, and the Dutch scholar who founded the Brotherhood of the Common Life, Geert Groote. He died in 1381. His contemporaries called him "the Admirable."
Maeterlinck warns us in his preface to The Ornamentation of the Nuptials of the Spirit, the subject of which is the unio mystica, the mystic union of the soul with God, that we must not expect a literary work; "you will perceive nothing," he says, "save the convulsive flight of a drunken eagle, blind and bleeding, over snowy summits." He only made the translation for the benefit of a few Platonists. But, apart from the translation itself, the preface is of value as showing how deeply read in the mystics Maeterlinck already was at this time, and the importance he attached to their teaching. "All certainty is in them alone," he says, paradoxically. Their ecstasies are only the beginning of the complete discovery of ourselves; their writings are the purest diamonds in the prodigious treasure of humanity; and their thoughts have the immunity of Swedenborg's angels who advance continually towards the springtide of their youth, so that the oldest angels seem the youngest. Embedded in the preface are gems from Ruysbroeck's other writings. Here is one of them:
"And they (the doves) will tarry near the rivers and over the clear waters, so that if any bird should come from on high, which might seize or injure them, they may know it by its image in the water, and avoid it. This clear water is Holy Writ, the life of the Saints, and the mercy of God. We will look upon our image therein whenever we are tempted; and in this way none shall have power to harm us. These doves have an ardent disposition, and young doves are often born of them, for every time that to the honour of God and our own beatitude we consider sin with hatred and scorn, we bring young doves into the world, that is to say new virtues."
The translation of the mystic was followed, in 1891, by a playlet in one act, Les Sept Princesses (The Seven Princesses). It is "the angel" among Maeterlinck's productions, a weakling which no fostering can save. Few critics have a good word for it. "A girl's unpleasant dream," interprets Mieszner. "An indecipherable enigma," says Adolphe Brisson. "The piece is something seen, purely pictorial," says Anselma Heine, "a transposition of paintings by Burne-Jones." "Can only claim the rank of an intermezzo," says Monty Jacobs, "an unfinished sketch." "We must not seek a literal signification," says Beaunier, "its signification is in its very strangeness." "Perhaps the weakest thing in Maeterlinck," says Oppeln von Bronikowski, "a sketch, or a testing of mystico-symbolic apparatus." "Passons," says Adolphe van Bever. The Princesses have, however, found a friend in a Dutch critic, Dr Is. van Dijk, whose book on Maeterlinck is suggestive. His analysis and interpretation of the play runs somewhat as follows:
"In a spacious marble hall, decorated with laurel bushes, lavender plants, and lilies in porcelain vases, is a white marble staircase with seven steps, on which seven white-robed princesses are lying, one on each step, sleeping on cushions of pale silk. Fearing lest they should awaken in the dark, they have lit a silver lamp, which casts its light over them. The lovely princesses sleep on and on; they must not be wakened, they are so weak! It is their weakness that has sent them to sleep. They have been so listless and weary since they came here; it is so cold and dreamy in this Castle in the North. They came hither from warm lands; and here they are always watching for the sun, but there is hardly any sun, and no sweet heaven over this level waste of fens, over these green ponds black with the shadows of forests of oaks and pines, over this willow-hung canal that runs to the rounded grey of the horizon. It is home-sickness that has sunk them in sleep. They sleep forlorn. Everything around them is so very old. Their life is so dreary with their long, long waiting; they are aweary, aweary.... They are waiting for the comrade of their youth; always they are looking for his ship on the canal between the willows; but, 'He cometh not,' they say. Now at last he is come while they are sleeping, and they have bolted the door from the inside. They cannot be wakened. With sick longing the Prince gazes at the seven through the thick window-panes. His eyes rest longest on the loveliest, Ursula, with whom he had loved best to play when he was a boy. Seven years she has looked for his coming, seven years, by day and by night. He sees them lying with linked hands, as though they were afraid of losing each other.... And yet they must have moved in their sleep, for the two sisters on the steps above and below Ursula have let go her hand; she is holding her hands so strangely.... At last the Prince makes his way into the room by an underground passage, past the tombs of the dead. The noise of his entrance awakens six of the Princesses, but not Ursula. The six cry: 'The Prince has come!' But she lies motionless, stiff.... She has died of her long, long waiting, of the deep, unfulfilled longing of her soul...."
Dr van Dijk is indignant at the criticism of René Doumic, who, in an article on Maeterlinck, dismisses Les Sept Princesses with these few words: "As for The Seven Princesses, the devout themselves confess they can find no appreciable sense in the play. All that I can say of it, now that I have read it, is that it is a thin volume published in Brussels, by Lacomblez."[1] "Let me have this French critic in my tuition six months," continues Dr van Dijk. "My curriculum would then be as follows: The first month he should learn by heart, in Greek and French, Plato's myth concerning The Chariot of the Soul, with the obligation of course to ponder on it. The following month he should learn by heart, in Greek and French, Plato's myth of The Cave, with the obligation of course to ponder on it. Then he should impress the well-known fable of Amor and Psyche on his mind, so as to accustom himself to the atmosphere of fables. Then he should ponder for a month on the sovereign freedom of a poet to remould a fable wholly or in part. Another month he should spend in reflecting over the fact that in order to understand a whole one does not need to know all the parts. And the last month he should be left to himself to try and find whether there was anything in his own soul which in any way could be said to resemble unfulfilled longing."
Another plausible interpretation is that of another Dutch critic, G. Hulsman, in his Karakters en Ideeën. He quotes the following poem from Paul Bourget's Espoir d'aimer:
"Notre âme est le palais des légendes, où dort
Une jeune princesse en robe nuptiale,
Immobile et si calme!... On dirait que la Mort
A touché son visage pâle.
Elle dort, elle rêve et soupire en rêvant;
Une larme a roulé lentement sur sa joue.
Elle se rêve errante en barque au gré du vent
Sur l'Océan, qui gronde et joue.
"Elle ne le voit pas, le beau Prince Charmant
Qui chevauche, parmi les plaines éloignées
Et s'en vient éveiller sa belle au bois dormant
De son sommeil de cent années"—
and continues:
"Our heart is this palace, and in this palace lies our soul, a beautiful sleeper. It sleeps, and dreams, and waits for the coming of the ideal hero, who shall awaken it out of its slumber and cherish it with the warmth of his love. And these seven princesses are the different qualities of the human soul."
Hulsman thinks that Maeterlinck must have thought of the Buddhistic idea, according to which the human soul consists of: the breath of God, the word, the thought, Psyche, the power of living, appearance, and the body.
"Ursula, the middle sister, is Psyche, that is, the real self, the deepest, the essential in our being. This real self is unconscious and unknowable. Let the ideal come, no ideal can unveil the deepest. It is dead to us."
Maeterlinck's imagination has been compared "to a lake with desolate and stagnant waters, unceasingly reflecting the same black landscapes, on whose banks the same suffering personages for ever come to sit." The same old castle, the same subterranean caverns, the same dark forests, another old tower, are the scenes of Pelléas et Mélisande (Pelleas and Melisanda) which was published at Brussels in 1892, and performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in Paris on the 16th May, 1893. The scene is the same; but there is a difference between this play and those which preceded it—here for the first time we have characters almost of flesh and blood; "the asphodelic shadows and marionettes begin to colour themselves with blood-warm humanity."[2] We have personages who represent the same ideas as those of the previous plays—Melisanda is again the soul—but here the puppets are moved by Love, not Death. In Princess Maleine love is one of the means by which Fate moves the puppets to death; in Pelleas and Melisanda death is the bourne to which Love drives his sheep. The sheep do not know whither they are being driven; when they come to cross-roads they do not know which to take; but they do feel, dimly, that they are not on the road to the fold. Hence the tragedy of their emotions; and it is the state of the soul filled with love, as tragic and as mystical a consciousness or subconsciousness as that of the soul in the clutch of fate or in the shadow of death, that Maeterlinck projects into Pelleas and Melisanda as into Alladine and Palomides and Aglavaine and Selysette.
We have nothing to do here with morality or the laws which regulate marriage. The soul knows nothing of such things; is unconscious even of the sins of the body.[3] The soul is subject only to such laws as are inherent in itself: "the secret laws of antipathy or of sympathy, elective or instinctive affinities."[4] The soul, remembering the fair sunny clime from which it came, pining in the cold air of the marshlands, groping about helplessly in the dark, always meeting closed doors, always gazing through glass at the unattainable, is an eternal searcher for the light; and if it meets a comrade who has the key to the closed door of its happiness, or who holds the lamp to light its path, it will follow the gleam blindly. It must do, for that is the law of its being. The tragedy lies in this: that it follows the gleam blindly, and the gleam leads it—at all events at present, because alien souls come athwart the path it is following—into the abyss of night.
Civic laws were made to fetter the body; but the soul has no consciousness of the body, of the senses, and cannot therefore be fettered by civic laws. So long as you hold that love is a function of the soul, and not of the senses, you cannot call Francesca da Rimini or Melisanda faithless wives. In your philosophy they are not on the road to adultery, but to the happiness for which their soul cries out, and to which it has inalienable right.
The story of Pelleas and Melisanda is as old as love: it is the story of Francesca da Rimini; it is Sudermann's Geschichte der stillen Mühle. Golaud,[5] a prince of blood and iron, whose hair and beard are turning grey, losing his way while hunting in a forest, comes upon a lovely being whose dress, though torn by brambles, is princely. She is weeping by the side of a spring, into which her crown (the symbol of her royal birth; all souls are royal) has fallen. Somebody has hurt her—who? All of them, all of them. She has fled away, she is lost ... she was born far away. Golaud marries her, and takes her to the Castle, where his grandfather, King Arkel, holds rule over a famine-stricken land by a desolate sea. Here dwells also Pelleas, his young brother.
Pelleas is very anxious to depart on a long journey to see a friend who is dying. If he had done so, the tragedy might have been, if not prevented, at all events retarded. But his father is lying dangerously ill in the Castle (the only use for this father in the economy of the play is to be ill); filial duty chains him there. This is in the nature of an accident; and by the canons of dramaturgy accidents must not precipitate tragedy, but Maeterlinck's plays proudly ignore the canons of dramaturgy. (Maeterlinck would say the accident was arranged by Fate.) Pelleas and Melisanda meet on a high place overlooking the sea. They watch a great ship—the ship that has brought Melisanda—sailing across the strip of light cast by the lighthouse, sailing out into the great open spaces where the soul is at home. A few words of common speech tell us what perilous life is awakening in these two sister souls that till now had not lived:
PELLEAS: Let us descend here. Will you give me your hand?
MELISANDA: You see I have my hands full of flowers and leaves....
PELLEAS: I will hold you by the arm, the path is steep, and it is
very dark here.... I am going away to-morrow perhaps....
MELISANDA: O, why are you going away?
We find them again under an old lime-tree in the dense, discreet forest, at the "Fountain of the Blind." (They are the blind.) Melisanda would like to plunge her two hands into the water ... it seems to her that her hands are ill. Her hair, which is longer than her body (what poetry Maeterlinck has dreamed into hair and hands!) falls down, and touches the water (a Burne-Jones). She tosses her wedding-ring into the air (as the Princess at the fountain under the lime-tree in the dark forest near the King's castle in The Frog Prince[6] tosses a golden ball), and just as noon is striking it falls into the water. She had cast it too high towards the sunlight.... We hear soon that at the twelfth stroke of noon Golaud's horse, taking fright in the forest, had dashed against a tree, and seriously injured its rider. While Melisanda is at her husband's bedside, he notices that her ring is gone. She lies to him; she has lost it in a cave, she says. Does she lie? Her union with Golaud is an external bond; but her soul knows nothing of things external, her soul is innocent of whatever her mouth may say to a man who is a stranger to her soul. He sends her to the cave to look for the ring, in the dark—with Pelleas. She is frightened by the noise of the cave—is it the noise of the night or the noise of silence? Later on Pelleas finds Melisanda combing her hair at the casement of a tower. She leans over; he holds her hand; her golden hair falls down and inundates him (another Burne-Jones):
PELLEAS: O! O! what is this?... Your hair, your hair comes down to me!... All your hair, Melisanda, all your hair has fallen from the tower! I am holding it in my hands, I am touching it with my lips.... I am holding it in my arms, I am putting it round my neck.... I shall not open my hands again this night....
Doves (the doves of the body's chastity, perhaps) come out of the tower and fly around them. Golaud surprises the pair, and tells them they are children. What he suspects, however, we know from a scene in the caverns under the Castle, when he is on the point of pushing his brother over a ledge of rock into a stagnant pool that stinks of death. But his jealousy has not yet grown sufficiently to force him to murder, and he contents himself with warning Pelleas. There follows a scene which brings the house down whenever the play is acted: Golaud questions his little son by a former marriage as to how the pair behave when they are alone; and lifts the little boy up so that he may peep in at the window of the tower and tell him what they are doing in the room. Golaud in his anguish digs his nails into the child's flesh, but he finds nothing to justify his suspicions; nevertheless in a following scene he loses his self-control, and, in the presence of his grandfather, ill-treats Melisanda. In the meantime the father is declared to be out of danger (Fate needs the father's recovery now to precipitate the tragedy); Pelleas is free to go away, and he asks Melisanda for a last meeting, by night, in the forest. She leaves her husband asleep, and the lovers meet in the moonlight. "How great our shadows are this evening!" says Melisanda. "They enlace each other to the back of the garden," replies Pelleas. "O! how they kiss each other far from us." Here Melisanda sees Golaud behind a tree, where their shadows end. They know they cannot escape; they fall into each other's arms and exchange their first guilty kiss. Golaud kills Pelleas, wounds Melisanda, and stabs himself. But Melisanda, ere she dies (of a wound which would not kill a pigeon) gives birth to a daughter, "a little girl that a beggar woman would be ashamed to bring into the world." On her death-bed Golaud implores her to tell him the truth—has she loved Pelleas with a guilty love? But she can only whisper vague words.
The child-wife dies; and King Arkel, the wise old man of the play, closes it by a few fatalistic sentences:
"She was so tranquil, so timid, and so silent a little being.... She was a mysterious little being like everybody else.... She lies there as though she were the big sister of her child.... Come away, come away.... My God! My God!... I shall not be able to understand anything any more.... Don't let us stay here.—Come away; the child must not stay in this room.... It must live now, in its turn.... It's the poor little one's turn now...."
[1] Les Jeunes, p. 230.
[2] Johannes Schlaf's Maeterlinck, p. 32.
[3] See chapter "La Morale mystique" in Le Trésor des Humbles. This is the doctrine for which quietism was condemned. I find the following definition of the soul quoted in La Wallonie for February to March, 1889; "Qu'est-ce donc que l'âme? Une possibilité idéale qui réside en nous comme la substance réelle de nous-mêmes, que les erreurs et les tâches de la vie ne peuvent entamer, que ses découragements ne peuvent abattre et qui les contemple avec sérénité dans l'extériorité réelle, et séparés, pour ainsi dire de sa propre essence."—JOHNSON.
[4] "Le Réveil de L'Ame" (in Le Trésor des Humbles), p. 38.
[5] Perhaps a Gallicised form of Golo, the lover of Genoveva. The name of Golaud's mother is Geneviève.
[6] M.G.M. Rodrigue, of Le Thyrse tells me (and Grégoire Le Roy told him) that Maeterlinck at the time he wrote his early dramas drew inspiration from Walter Crane's picture-books. The Frog Prince was one of them. Perhaps Maeterlinck had Grimm's Household Stories, done into pictures by Walter Crane (Macmillan, 1882).
CHAPTER VII
It is natural that an artist should wish to recreate something he has attempted and not completed to his satisfaction, or which, when his mind is more mature, he thinks he could do better. The three plays which Maeterlinck published together in 1894 are such attempts at reconstruction. Alladine and Palomides is a love story which has much in common with Pelleas and Melisanda: "both dramas are dominated by the idea of the enigmatic in our deeds" (van Hamel), and in both the love that is given is taken from its lawful owner. Interior is clearly a version of The Intruder. In The Death of Tintagiles we have again, but more concentrated, the physical anguish of The Princess Maleine.
The three plays had for their secondary title "trois petits drames pour marionettes" (three little dramas for marionettes). But we have seen that Maeterlinck had described his very first play as a drama for a marionette theatre; and the three 1894 plays are not a whit less adapted for the ordinary stage than those which preceded them. Perhaps in deliberately ticketing his plays with this ironic label Maeterlinck wished to indicate that they were unsuited for the garish light and the artificial voices of the present-day tragedy style on the stage. It is more probable, however, that he would not have dreamt of suggesting a slight on his actor friends. The characters are described as marionettes, it is likely, because the scene is spiritualised by distance. We look down on the movements of the puppets as from a higher world—we are richer by an idea than they are: we see what Player is pulling the strings, the strings of which they are only half conscious. Our position in all these plays is the same as that of the greybeard, the stranger, the two girls, and the crowd in The Interior, and the acting of the family in this play is an example of the "active silence" which Maeterlinck in his essay, "Everyday Tragedy," was to suggest for the theatre when the actor is become an automaton through which the soul speaks more than words can say.
"In Alladine and Palomides there is more than one scene in which silence is the principal speaker; so, for instance, when Alladine and Palomides meet on the bridge over the castle moat, and the girl's pet lamb escapes from her hands, slips, and rolls into the water:
ALLADINE: What has he done? Where is he?
PALOMIDES: He has slipped! He is struggling in the middle of the whirlpool. Don't look at him; there is nothing we can do....
ALLADINE: You are going to save him?
PALOMIDES: Save him? Why, look at him; he is already in the suck of the whirlpool. In another minute he will be under the vaults; and God himself will not see him again....
ALLADINE: Go away! Go away!
PALOMIDES: What is the matter?
ALLADINE: Go away! I don't want to see you any more!...
[Enter ABLAMORE precipitately; he seizes ALLADINE and drags her away roughly without saying a word.]
Perhaps such a scene as this, with its prattling as of children, would be better in perfect than active silence, that is, as pantomime. (That pantomime may fascinate a modern audience has been proved by Max Reinhardt.) But to relate our story: Alladine's pet lamb, a symbol of her peace of mind or maiden apathy, had been frightened by Palomides' charger when the two first met. He had come to the castle (gloomy, etc.) of King Ablamore, to wed the latter's daughter Astolaine. Here he finds Alladine, who has come from Arcady.
Ablamore has been surnamed "The Wise";[1]] he was wise because nothing had happened to him, because hitherto he had lived
"In apathy of life unrealised,
And days to Lethe floating unenjoyed."
But now he stands on his turrets and summons the events which had avoided him. They come—and they overpower him. It is love that brings the events. "How beautiful she is," he says, bending over Alladine while she is asleep. "I will kiss her without her knowing it, holding back my poor white beard." He would fain make her his queen; but she returns the love which Palomides, untrue to Astolaine, conceives for her. Astolaine discovers the truth; but she, the first of Maeterlinck's strong, emancipated women, feels no jealousy. Her behaviour is similar to that of Selysette in a later play; but her character is identical with Aglavaine's in that play: the rôles of the women in Aglavaine and Selysette are reversed. It is Aglavaine's beautiful soul for the sake of which Méléandre is untrue to Selysette. Palomides recognises, when his love turns from the woman to the child, "that there must be something more incomprehensible than the beauty of the most beautiful soul or the most beautiful face"; and something more powerful too, for he cannot help obeying it. Palomides is quite aware that Astolaine is a type superior to Alladine. He loves her even when he is faithless. "I love you," he says to her, "more than her I love." (The situation is the same in Grillparzer's Sappho: Phaon prefers Melitta, also a little Greek slave, to the renowned and noble poetess.) "She has a soul," Palomides says of Astolaine, "that you can see round her, that takes you in its arms as though you were a suffering child, and which, without speaking, consoles you for everything...." This doctrine of the soul's fluidity appears in the scene in which Astolaine tells her father that she has ceased to love Palomides:
ABLAMORE: Come hither, Astolaine. It is not so that you were accustomed to speak to your father. You are waiting there, on the threshold of a door that is hardly open, as though you were ready to run away; and with your hand on the key, as though you wished to close the secret of your heart on me for ever. You know well that I have not understood what you have just said, and that words have no meaning when souls are not within reach of each other. Come nearer, and speak no more. (ASTOLAINE comes slowly nearer.) There is a moment when souls touch and know everything without there being any need of moving the lips. Come nearer.... Our souls do not reach each other yet, and their ray [2] is so dim around us!... (ASTOLAINE holds still.) You dare not?—You know then how far one can go? Very well then, I will come to you.... (With slow steps he comes near ASTOLAINE, then stops, and looks at her long.) I see you, Astolaine....
ASTOLAINE: My father!... (She sobs and embraces the old man.)
ABLAMORE: You see that it was useless ...
Palomides promises Alladine that he will take her away from this cold clime where the sky is like the vault of a cave to a land where Heaven is sweet, where the trees are not a wilderness of boughs blackening the steep hill-sides like carrion ribs, but a wind-waved sea of rustling shade.... They are both poor little wandering souls aweary in exile. While they are preparing their flight, the events Ablamore has summoned drive him mad; and now, with golden keys in his hand (gold glinting against white walls, no doubt, another Pre-Raphaelite picture), he
"Wanders along the marble corridors
That interlace their soundless floors around
And to the centre of his royal home,"
singing a dirge with a refrain which is Maeterlinck's best lyric line: Allez où vos yeux vous mènent. He thwarts the lovers' plans by shutting them up, blindfolded and pinioned, in the vast caverns under the castle. "These caverns," comments Mieszner, "are the place we all dream in, the place where our longing for the light leads us astray into strange, contradictory deeds." The symbolism of the play is concentrated in these scenes below the ground: the thought that life is sublimated in moments of enchantment which pitiless light soon dispels. The prisoners break their bonds. When their eyes get used to the light, it seems to them that they are in a great blue hall, whose vault, drunken with jewels, is held aloft by pillars wreathed by innumerable roses. They see below them a lake so blue that the sky might have flowed thither.... It is full of strange and stirless flowers.... They think they are embracing in the vestibules of Heaven.... But suddenly they hear the din of iron ringing on the rock above them.... Stones fall from the roof; and as the light pours in through the opening, "it reveals to them little by little the wretchedness of the cave they had deemed wonderful; the miraculous lake grows dull and sinister; the jewels lose their light; and the glowing roses are seen to be the stains of rubbish phosphorescent with decay."
Ablamore has fled raving into the land; and the good Astolaine (this woman of Maeterlinck we love) has come to rescue the forsaken lovers. She comes too late—they have been poisoned by the deadly reek of the unreal in the caverns they dreamed in; and they die moaning piteously to each other across the corridor that parts their beds:
ALLADINE'S VOICE: They were not jewels....
PALOMIDES' VOICE: And the flowers were not real....
The passion of love may break the bonds of custom, and for a swift space the world may seem lit by a magic light; but the awakening comes, and the poison works, and in the cold wretchedness of reality even love will die. Love (sensual love) is a short dream of fair things that fade....
Interior, which was performed at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in March, 1895, is better than The Intruder in so far as the coming of death is not indicated by suspicious signs (which turn out to be from natural causes) and dim forebodings (which might possibly be the drivelling of old age). Here everything is taken absolutely from life. Interior, too, shows a great mastery of "active silence": some of the scenes in Alladine and Palomides approach pantomime; in Interior we have actual pantomime—the family whom the tragedy befalls are seen sitting in the lamplit room of their house, mute characters, and the spectators, together with the speaking characters, see them, through the three windows, resting from their day's toil. There are three daughters in the family, as in The Intruder; but one of them has drowned herself.
"She was perhaps one of those who won't say anything, and everybody has in his mind more than one; reason for ending his life.... You can't see into the soul as you see into that room. They are all the same.... They only say the usual things; and nobody suspects anything.... They look like dolls that don't move, and such a lot of things are happening in their souls.... They don't know themselves what they are.... No doubt she lived as the others live.... No doubt she went on saying to the day of her death: 'It's going to rain to-day'; or, it may be: 'The fruit isn't ripe yet.' They talk with a smile of flowers that have withered, and in the dark they cry...."
"The Stranger" has waded into the river, and brought the body to the shore; and now he, with "The Greybeard," a friend of the family, is in the old garden planted with willows. The Greybeard is to tell the bad news before the crowd arrives with the corpse. But while he looks at the peaceful idyll in the lamplight—the mother with the baby sleeping on her left shoulder, not moving lest it should awake, the sisters embroidering, the father by the fire—his courage sinks, and it is only when the crowd with the body arrive that he enters the house. We see the father rising to greet the visitor, and one of the girls offering him a chair. By his gestures we know he is speaking. Suddenly the mother starts and rises. She questions the Greybeard. The whole family rush out at the door. The room is left empty, except for the baby, which sleeps on in the arm-chair where the mother has put it down.
Interior needs no interpretation. It is one of the simplest, as it is one of the most terrible, masterpieces in all literature. Some critics consider it the best thing Maeterlinck has written.
In The Death of Tintagiles the tragedy takes place behind a closed door. ("Victor Hugo said that nothing is more interesting than a wall behind which something is happening," Jules Lemaître reminds us.[3] "This tragic wall is in all M. Maeterlinck's poems," he continues; "and when it is not a wall, it is a door; and when it is not a door, it is a window veiled with curtains.") Behind the closed door, in an enormous tower which still withstands the ravages of time when the rest of the castle is crumbling to pieces, dwells the Queen (Death). The castle is stifled by poplars. It is sunk deep down in a girdle of darkness. They might have built it on the top of the mountains that take all the air from it.... One might have breathed there, and seen the sea all round the island. The Queen never comes down from her tower, and all the doors of it are closed night and day. But she has servants who move with noiseless feet. The Queen has a power that none can fathom; "and we live here with a great pitiless weight on our soul." "She is there on our soul like a tombstone, and none dares stretch out his arm." Ygraine explains this to her little brother Tintagiles, whom the Queen has sent for from over the sea. There is some talk of the boy's golden crown, as there was of Melisanda's; every soul is royal, and comes from far away, you remember. Bellangère, the boy's other sister, has heard the Queen's servants whispering. They know that the Queen has sent for the boy to kill him. The only friend the two sisters and the boy have is Aglovale, a greybeard, who, like Arkel, has long since renounced the vanity of resisting fate and having a will of his own. "All is useless," he says; but now he is willing to defend the boy, since they hope. He sits down on the threshold with his sword across his knees. The Queen's servants come with stealthy feet, and Aglovale's sword snaps when he tries to prevent them from opening the door. But this time the servants, meeting resistance, withdraw, only to return when Aglovale and the sisters are asleep. Tintagiles is sleeping too, between the sisters, with his arms round their necks; and their arms are round him. His hands are plunged deep into their hair; he holds a golden curl tight between his teeth. The servants cut the sisters' hair, and remove the boy, still sleeping, with his little hands full of golden curls. At the end of the corridor he screams; Ygraine awakes, and rushes in pursuit. Bellangère falls in a dead faint on the threshold. The fifth act is a picture of unendurable anguish. "A great iron door under very dark vaults." Ygraine enters with a lamp in her hand. Faint knocking is heard on the other side of the door; then the voice of Tintagiles. Ygraine scratches her finger-nails out on the iron door, and smashes her lamp on it. The boy cries out that hands are at his throat. "The fall of a little body is heard behind the iron door." Ygraine implores, curses, sinks down exhausted.
It is probably wrong to look on The Death of Tintagiles as, principally, a picture of physical anguish. That would be dramatic, and therefore, in Maeterlinck's idea at the time he wrote the play, vulgar. The play is rather based, like The Sightless, on the sensations of fear we have when we awaken from the poisoned apathy, which is the safeguard of the peace of mind of most people, in the stifling air of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. (The Queen's Tower overshadows all the rest of the castle.) Everything is plunged in darkness here.... Only the Queen's Tower is lit.... We know, but we do not understand....
TINTAGILES: What do you know, sister Ygraine?
YGRAINE: Very little, my child.... My sister and I, since we were born, have trailed our existence here without daring to understand anything of all that happens.... I have lived for a very long time like a blind woman in this island; and everything seemed natural to me.... I saw no other events here except a bird that was flying, a leaf that was trembling, a rose that was opening.... Such a silence reigned here that a ripe fruit falling in the park called faces to the windows.... And nobody seemed to have any suspicions ... but one night I found out that there must be something else.... I wanted to run away and I couldn't....
We cannot flee from our exile; and "we have got to live while we wait for the unexpected," as Aglovale says.
[1] Ablamore was not really wise, according to the theories propounded in Wisdom and Destiny. A wise man is one who knows himself; but he is not wise if he does not know himself in the future as well as in the present and in the past. He knows a part of his future because he is himself already a part of this future; and, since the events which will happen to him will become assimilated to his own nature, he knows what these events will become (Chapter VIII).
[2] Cf. in Strindberg's Legends, "The soul's irradiation and dilatability": "The secret of a great actor lies in his inborn capacity to let his soul ray out, and thereby enter into touch with his audience. In great moments there is actually a radiance round a speaker who is full of soul, and his face irradiates a light which is visible even to those who do not believe." The idea is more or less of a commonplace.
[3] Impressions de Théâtre, huitième série, p. 153.
CHAPTER VIII
In 1895 Maeterlinck published Annabella, a translation of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. It had been acted at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre on the 6th of November, 1894. The published play is preceded by some entertaining gossip concerning Webster (whose Duchess of Malfi Georges Eekhoud translated) and Cyril Tourneur, "les deux princes noirs de l'horreur ... les deux tragiques mercuriels, compacts comme la houille et infernalement vénéneux, dont le premier surtout a semé à pleines mains des fleurs miraculeuses dans les poisons et les ténèbres"; concerning also "Jhon Fletcher" and "Jonson, le pachydermique, l'entêté et puissant Ben Jonson, qui appartient à la famille de ces grands monstres littéraires où rayonnent Diderot, Jean Paul et l'autre Jhonson, le Jhonson de Boswel." Interesting, too, is the way Maeterlinck reads his own theories into the Elizabethans. Ford, he finds, was a master of "interior dialogue":
"Ford is profoundly discreet. Annabella, Calantha, Bianca, Penthea do not cry out; and they speak very little. In the most tragical moments, in those most charged with misery, they say two or three very simple words; and it is, as it were, a thin coating of ice on which we can rest an instant to see what there is in the abyss."
There are some quaint passages inspired by mysticism; as this, with reference to the "great cyclone of poetry which burst over London towards the end of the sixteenth century":
"You seem to be in the very midst of the human soul's miraculous springtime. These were really days of marvellous promise. You would have said that humanity was about to become something else. Moreover, we do not know what influence these great poetic phenomena have exercised on our life; and I have forgotten what sage it was who said that if Plato or Swedenborg had not existed, the soul of this peasant who is passing along the road and who has never read anything would not be what it is to-day. Everything in the spiritual regions is connected more closely than people believe; and just as there is no malady which does not oppress all humanity and does not invisibly affect the healthiest man, so the most undeniable genius has not one thought which does not modify something in the inmost soul of the most hopeless idiot in the asylum."
It is in this style that Maeterlinck discusses mysticism in the introduction to Les Disciples à Saïs et les Fragments de Novalis (The Disciples at Saïs and the Fragments of Novalis), published also in 1895.
"All that one can say," he discourses, "is nothing in itself. Place in one side of a pair of scales all the words of the greatest sages, and in the other side the unconscious wisdom of this child who is passing, and you will see that what Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Schopenhauer, and Pascal have revealed to us will not lift the great treasures of unconsciousness by one ounce, for the child that is silent is a thousand times wiser than Marcus Aurelius speaking."[1]