XXIII
MAETERLINCK[1]
I
Let a solemn man with a black cat in his hands lead you into a dark room. Let him begin patiently to rub the cat’s fur the wrong way, singing a nonsense song sotto voce. If you don’t fall asleep too soon you will see sparks fly from the cat’s fur. Then the man will begin to talk to you about sparks. Speaking in the low tone that is used in incantations, he will tell you that sparks are products of animal electricity, but that they may well be reflections of the fires of Hell—unless forsooth they be glimmerings of a celestial illumination. The cat, in dread uncertainty, will purr a little, and every now and then will venture a languid meow or will spit in dismay. The solemn man, unmoved, will go on talking in his white and specious voice. He will direct your glance to the pale window, and try to persuade you that the points of light out yonder are stars lost in the sky, or else will-o’-the-wisps of ancient cemeteries, or possibly fireflies rising from the damp grass; and he will finally suggest that fireflies may well be stars of the infernal world, and that stars may well be will-o’-the-wisps of the world above, and so on ad infinitum.
The solemn man is Maurice Maeterlinck. The ambiguous and labyrinthine discourses, interspersed with the meowings of the cat, are the books of Maurice Maeterlinck. Such, at least, is the impression his books have made on me for some time past. And that impression has been strengthened by the reading of his recently published Unknown Guest, a little breviary of subliminal marvels.
Maeterlinck’s specialty in the field of contemporary literature is the manipulation of mystery for the use of delicate souls. He creates little enigmas in order that he may provide three or four equally possible solutions. He stirs up little anguishes, he plays with quivers and shivers, he prepares dark recesses that he may walk through them with a lantern in his hand and his finger on his lips. He invents terrible problems—and solves them with the utmost amiability. He is a sort of austere Puck, a Puritan clown, a religious gnome. Real mysteries, the true and terrible mysteries, are too much for delicate souls; they cannot swallow them whole. The mystery of dogmas, the mystery of our universal ignorance, and the mystery of our inevitable death are too hard and too strong for the souls of ladies and gentlemen who can spare only odd moments for metaphysical anxiety.
Maeterlinck breaks up and subdivides his mysteries. He distributes them in digestible doses; he makes them into biscuits, cakes, and candies, he sweetens them with the sugar of poetry and serves them up in the pastry of literature. Thus the mysteries of life, of the spirit, and of the universe, disguised and powdered, thinned and triturated, appear presentable and edible to men of fashion, to Anglo-Saxon ladles, to young occultists, and to German Fräulein; and the books of Maeterlinck take their place on the tea-table between the steaming samovar and the cigarette box.
II
But though his books are full of mystery, there is nothing mysterious in the financial success of this cosmopolitan Belgian who, born at Ghent of a Flemish family, writes in French, publishes by preference in English, and is studied chiefly in German. Paris gave him his reputation, through the famous essay of Mirbeau, published in 1890. The English and the Americans pay him best for his magazine articles. The Germans, naturally, have taken him most seriously: they have devoted several books to him, and have written treatises on that which in their kindly condescension they term his philosophy.
Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck went to a Jesuit school, and later studied and practiced law. The Jesuits, to be sure, are not very strong on mystery. The more intransigent they are in matters of religion, the more accommodating and mundane they are in school and in life. But it was perhaps from the Jesuits that Maeterlinck got that habit of softening down and smoothing away asperities, that rather sickish sweetness that is almost unctuous, that fondness for unfinished sentences uttered in a low voice, that continual distinguishing and redistinguishing, that saying without saying anything, that love of nuances, that silent walking on the chemin de velours. Some of his books are but the casuistry of mysticism clad in a dress suit.
He did not long continue the practice of law, and yet he has retained certain forensic traits: the ability to see only what he wants to see, the art of insinuations withdrawn as soon as they are made, a quibbling type of argumentation, a tendency to undertake unsound causes and to indulge in elegant and complicated disquisitions, the habit of methodological procedure, the constant repetition of the very fact that he is seeking to establish as if it were an element of evidence. He often seems to be the lawyer of the subconscious, the attorney of the spirit-world.
In 1886, when he went to Paris, Symbolism was in full swing—and he became a Symbolist. Symbolism is a brief, magnificent movement in French poetry, created by the genius of three or four real Frenchmen, but developed and exploited by Belgians, Flemings, North Americans, and Greeks. The Flemings in particular—suffice it to mention the names of Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, both of them of Teutonic stock, and popular in Germany—succeeded in turning Symbolism to their own great advantage. While Rimbaud was dying forgotten in a hospital at Marseilles, while Verlaine was dragging his poverty and his diseases from one hospital to another, while Mallarme was giving English lessons to ward off starvation, these Belgians were winning glory—and Maeterlinck was winning wealth.
Maeterlinck was revealed to the hydra-headed public through a generous and exaggerated essay by Octave Mirbeau. Mirbeau was precisely the opposite of Maeterlinck in talent and in nature, but he was carried off his feet by his first reading of the Princess Maleine, and declared that the unknown beginner was greater than Shakespeare.
Yet nothing could be less Shakespearean than the plays of Maeterlinck. Shakespeare is virile, solid, full-blooded, concrete; he can jest and laugh; his spectres are even more substantial than his living men. The father of Hamlet is perfectly capable of knocking Bernardo and Marcellus down when they try to stop him; the ghost of Banquo is more vindictive than any living person. The characters of the early plays of Maeterlinck, on the contrary, are paler and more empty than the phantoms they pursue, and the spirits that disturb them are but the deliquescent reflections of an invisible silence. If the ingenuous Mirbeau, instead of suggesting Shakespeare, had read the plays of Villiers de l’Isle Adam—Axel, for example—and had known that Villiers was the first prominent writer visited by Maeterlinck in Paris, he would have perceived more clearly the origins of Maeterlinck’s drama of metaphysical marionettes. Later on Maeterlinck himself grew tired of fantastications sobbed forth in a dim light and ending in the chatter of delirious idiots. In The Blue Bird he tried his hand at the folktale, with much less wit than our own Gozzi; in Monna Vanna he sank into the drama of Fate, with less gorgeousness than our own d’Annunzio.
III
Remy de Gourmont, in a moment of kindliness, wrote an essay on the originality of Maeterlinck. He too was bewitched by that atmosphere of magic half-shadows full of a tragic-ascetic whispering. But in reality Maeterlinck is a translator, an adapter, a popularizer. He translated Novalis from the German, Ruysbroeck from the Flemish, Ford and Shakespeare from the English. In the Treasure of the Humble and in the various Double Gardens and Buried Temples that followed it, he adapted the religious mysticism of the primitives and the lay mysticism of Carlyle and Emerson. In the Life of the Bee and the Intelligence of Flowers he popularized the scientific manner of Fabre. Of late, following the tastes of his Anglo-Saxon and German clientèle, he has started dispensing the marvels and novelties of occultism and psychical research, not without a dash of spiritism and a sprinkling of theosophy. He began with a book on Death, which I read patiently, though I found nothing in it that was worth remembering. Now he continues with his Unknown Guest, and my patience is worn out.
In this book, a collection of three or four magazine articles originally published in English, he talks of phantoms of persons living or dead, of psychometry (communication with a dead or distant person by holding in the hand something once touched by that person), of second sight, and of the horses of Elberfeldt. I have not the slightest objection to the careful study of such problems; indeed, I have studied them myself. But there are only two methods by which they may be studied to advantage: by the collection of data, carefully observed, controlled, and tested; or by the formation of new and specific hypotheses with regard to the causes and varieties of these data. But Maeterlinck follows neither of these methods. He does nothing that is really useful either to science or to thought. He does not adduce a single new fact: once in a while he cites a fact that is perfectly familiar. As to theory, he gives way unashamed to the vagaries of his incurable ambiguity.
He seems to want to believe in a mysterious second soul within us, the reflection of a hidden universal soul; but at the same time he advances the arguments of a pettifogging materialist. He finds some good in the beliefs of spiritism; but he seeks to disregard them as far as possible. He does not scorn theosophy; but he avoids it, and lumps it with all other religions. He is religious; but he recognizes no authority save that of science. He tries to give himself the air of a scientist; but he loses himself in a sea of vague sophistication. You do not know whether he believes in mediums, in general telepathy, or in the intervention of spirits. He would like to believe, but he is afraid to believe; and with all his scruples and reservations, with all his hypocritical attempts at objectivity, he ends with phrases such as this: “II est fort possible et même assez probable que les morts nous entourent, puisqu’il est impossible que les morts ne vivent pas.”
In short, his book gives the impression of a merry-go-round of useless chatter about ambiguous mysteries. The only thing that is clear is that he is earning money by means of this chatter. The only thing he has done that called for personal exertion was to go to Elberfeldt to see the educated horses of Herr Krall. But his visit adds nothing to what we had learned from the reports of the psychologists who had preceded him. And Maeterlinck himself destroys all the significance which the calculations of the German steeds might be thought to have as a proof of animal intelligence, by pointing out that human calculating prodigies are in general children or half-witted persons who guess mathematical results by a strange sort of intuition, but do not carry through real mathematical operations. What is more, Maeterlinck (who has read Shakespeare, it would seem) ought to have recognized that the horses of Elberfeldt are not a novelty. At the end of the sixteenth century a certain Bankes exhibited in London, before St. Paul’s, a horse so well trained that he could count coins, and could carry things to a spectator whose name his master pronounced. Shakespeare refers to him in Love’s Labour Lost.
Mediocre enough as a poet, Maeterlinck has not even any great aptitude for metaphysics, whatever his French and German admirers may say. He is a parlor occultist, a moralist for old ladies, a syrupy philosopher, a friar without faith, a scientist without clearness, a poet without imagination, a casuist for idle consciences, a fakir of facile marvels. To read him after reading a great philosopher is like smoking opium after climbing a mountain. To read him after reading a great poet is like drinking a cup of camomile after a goblet of old wine.
- ↑ Written à propos of Maeterlinck’s l’Hôte Inconnu, Paris, 1917.