MAETERLINCK

Maeterlinck, after writing his first volume of verses, called Serres chaudes, a few poems published in Parnasse de la jeune Belgique, and then a volume of ballads and songs, La quenouille et la besace, passed into the field of drama and, but for some prose writing, has remained faithful to that literary form ever since.

As to the real causes of that change, he alone could say anything authentic.

The probability is that the Belgian poet-dramatist thought that the antithesis between infinity and limitation-the continual friction of those two sides of human nature in endless shapes and combinations, furnished by the variety of the phenomena of infinite existence in sensuous life,-could be better expressed in the dramatic form, which serves to render internal conflicts in the broadest way, to picture them better than could be done by epic or lyric poetry. That change, however, was not so essential with Maeterlinck as it would be with any other poet, on account of his original views on the theatre and the drama. "Art," he says,

is a temporary mask, under which the unknown without a face puzzles us. It is the substance of eternity, introduced within us by a distillation of infinity. It is the honey of eternity, taken from a flower which we do not see. A dramatic poem was a work of art, and bore the charming characteristics of such a work, but a show on the stage suddenly frightened the swans from the pond, and threw the pearls into bottomless depths: the mystic transparency of a work of art disappeared. King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet should not be performed. Something of Hamlet dies as soon as we see him dying on the stage. The ghost of the actor has dethroned him, and from that moment

we are unable to drive away the usurper from our dream. We open the book, the former prince does not return; almost all the inward voices that used to bring him forth have died out.

The stage is a place where masterpieces die; for the production of a masterpiece by means of accidental and human elements has something antinomic in itself. Every masterpiece is a symbol, and a symbol cannot bear the active presence of a man. There is continual discord between the forces of a symbol and the forces of a man; the symbol of a poem is the centre, the rays of which stretch into infinity; and these rays, as long as they come from a masterpiece, have an importance that is limited only by the might of an eye following them. But an actor's eye oversteps the sphere of the symbol. In the passive subject of a poem (the spectator) there appears a phenomenon of polarization; he does not any more see the diverging rays, he sees only the converging ones; an accidental thing spoiled the symbol, and the masterpiece in its essence was dead during the whole time of that presence. The Greeks felt that antinomy, and their masks, which seem incomprehensible to us, served to smooth down the presence of the man and to facilitate the symbol. During the Elizabethan time the recitation was melopoeian, the acting conventional and the stage symbolic. It was about the same in Louis XIV.'s time.

The poem begins to retreat into shadow as the man comes forth. A poem wishes to rescue us from the domination of the senses and to give a preponderance to the past and future; man acts only on our senses and exists only as far as he is able to attenuate that preponderance of past and future by interesting us exclusively in the moment at which he speaks. If man enters on the stage with all his faculties and his whole freedom, if his voice, gestures, attitude are not veiled by a great number of synthetic conditions, if even for a moment the human

being appears such as he is, there is not a poem in this world which could stand that event. In that moment, the spectacle of the poem is interrupted and we are present at some scene of outward life.,

When man oversteps the limits of a poem, the gigantic poem of his presence overshadows everything round him.

A poem which I see on the stage seems to me always a lie; in everyday life I must see man, who speaks to me, because the majority of his words have no meaning at all without his presence; a poem on the contrary, is a gathering of such unusual words, that the presence of the poet is connected with them for ever; one cannot free from voluntary slavery a soul dearer than others, in order to replace it by the manifestations of another soul, almost always insignificant, for in that moment it is impossible to assimilate those manifestations. 1

The essay from which these words are taken shows the fundamental principles of Maeterlinck's poetical æsthet. ics; it marks, in general but positive words, the tendencies of the symbolic drama; it emphasizes the unfitness of those means which the modern theatre uses to reproduce dramatic poems and explains all the peculiarities which may strike us in Maeterlinck's plays.

Every poetical work, and therefore a drama as well, ought to be "a temple of dreams." But the dream is only possible where the flight of imagination is not limited by narrow bounds; so that the poet does not limit his work, but leaves to the spirit of the reader a free field, where boundless horizons open beyond the picture itself, and where the work contains a symbol clothed in a piece of infinity, if one may put it so.

Therefore the interior depth, hidden at the bottom of infinity, is, according to Maeterlinck, the most important

1 La jeune Belgique, 1890, No. 9-Menus propos. Le Théâtre.

and the principal source of poetical beauty. This is the beginning of the most logical definition of the beautiful. After the downfall of all ideas and definitions of absolute beauty, and in presence of the necessity of a criterion for appreciation of a work of art, Maeterlinck's measure for the beautiful seems to be the only one which one can put against the positive and à posteriori view which indeed decides nothing. Maeterlinck's criterion of the beautiful seems to be in harmony with the lasting works of genius and to answer the mysterious question: Why? Why is this beautiful and that ugly? Why do we call this man a genius and that one only talented? What is it that assures life in the world of the beautiful?

Every creative artistic power consists in the capacity of seeing visions and of knowing how to communicate them to others. The greater an artist or a poet is, the more precise is his vision of the things in themselves, their real essence, that which they are and not which they seem to be superficially to our senses. The more visionary the words, the greater is the power, the more absolute its influence over other people's souls, its ability to keep them in a magic circle. The depth constitutes the grandeur of art. Suggestion, coming from a subject, gives only a value to it. Art cannot limit itself to pure sensation, color, sound and the exterior side of things. The artist, whose aim is reality, will not be satisfied with its apparent and vulgar side. To understand and penetrate, to fathom with the eyes of the soul the abyss of the fathomless and the incomprehensible, this is the greatest satisfaction we can get from poetry.

Consequently the beautiful cannot exist without the background of infinity, without a perspective looking towards the stars and even beyond them; the artist, poet, creator, genius, is he

Every immortal masterpiece affirms that assertion. What are the Rig-Veda and the Bible if not great metaphysical poems, in which the external view of nature, colored by imagination, is united with deep and melancholy views about things that lie beyond the limits of the sensuous world. Shakespeare's supremacy in literature depends on these depths of view, which he was able to unveil in themes often used and borrowed by him here and there.

This carries weight not in literature alone, but in every other art as well. Great, true, immortal art was and is symbolic; under sensuous analogy it hides elements of infinity, it unveils boundless horizons. Formerly it was so unconsciously, through the instinct of genius; to-day-perchance stimulated by the examples of daring pioneers of science, who, throwing themselves boldly into the abyss of the unknown, began to investigate the mysterious manifestations of death, dreams, instincts, hypnotism, magnetism, psychical force, etc.-it has become consciously symbolic. It is now clear that the fear of poets and æsthetes lest the sciences, explaining everything, should deprive poetry of the regions of infinity and mystery, is without any foundation; for the whole series of facts testifies to the fathomless abyss of unknown laws, and proves that the small island of our knowledge is surrounded by an infinite

On the other hand the same investigations and discoveries prove in fact that presentiments, predictions, witchcraft, supernatural things and miracles of the romantics and mystics, are not simply vain visions of their imagina tion, but that they are proofs of their great intuitive power in foreseeing facts which the sciences began to affirm. Formerly they classified those facts improperly, seeing in them something unusual and supernatural; and very often they searched for their explanation in religious dogmas. But having changed its point of view, mysticism was bound to continue its work in literature and it was born again in modern symbolism, which must be considered as the next true halting place in the development of poetry-next after the romantic movement-for naturalism, on account of its onesidedness, is only a phenomenon of reaction, and not a further step in the progress of evolution.

Modern mysticism in art has lost its former note of religious asceticism, its unearthly character, and has rather become scientific. Its prophets understand that infinity, towards which we are drawn by an eternal longing which never rests, is not hidden beyond the bounds of the real world, but that it constitutes the very essence of the universe, of every man, of the smallest phenomenon. They understand also, that if, on the one hand, naturalism, which deals only with the reality reached by the senses, deceives itself in thinking that it leads to the truth, on the other hand, mysticism, if it separates itself from the real world, cannot embrace the whole, and loses also in accessibility and clearness; for it speaks abstractly or by means of artificial symbols of the essence of things, which in most cases we can

only perceive in the framework of material shape.

In a word, they understand that as in life we cannot look continuously at the infirite essence of things, but have to be satisfied with those flashes which from time to time rend the gray veil of sensuous reality, so in poetry one may put pictures of infinity into a frame of sensuous details, and by touching them with the special poetical brush permit the spirit of a reader who is capable of dreaming to guess the mystic roads which conduct to the hidden depths.

Once conscious of these views, we have an exact idea of the symbol, which is a living, organic, inner analogy; it is a reproduction of reality, in which forms, shapes and the whole world of sensuous phenomena have their ordinary meaning for those who are satisfied with the superficial, but for those who look deeper reveal the inward abyss of infinity. The external, visible part of the symbol must be a concrete picture, taken so straight from the real world that its clear and ordinary meaning is comprehensible even to those who would not search in it for any depth; but beyond that concrete picture there must open boundless horizons of the hidden, infinite, eternal, immutable and incomprehensible essence of things.

If these principles of poetical art are applied logically to dramatic poetry, then Maeterlinck's campaign against "the presence of man on the stage" becomes comprehensible, as well as his intention that his drama should be played in a doll's theatre. "In the theatre," says the Belgian poet, "I wish to study exclusively man, not relatively to other people, not in his relations to others or to himself; but after sketching the ordinary facts of passion, to look at his attitude in presence of eternity and mystery, to attempt to unveil the eternal character

hidden under the accidental characteristics of the lover, father, husband, etc."

When a poet enters upon such unusual and limitless spheres of thought, the ordinary means of poetical art are insufficient for him, they confine and make paltry his primitive vision; notwithstanding the efforts of genius, the work never renders exactly what the poet intended to express in it. "Is the thought," asks Maeterlinck,—

an exact picture of that something which produced it? Is it not rather a shadow of some struggle, similar to that of Jacob with the angel? That first, not always transparent, pane of the window of eternity is followed by another still less transparent-the word. Words were invented for ordinary use in life, and they become like miserable, restless, vagabonds surprised at the steps of a throne, when from time to time some kind soul conducts them to another goal by other roads.3

But the words, not being able to render by themselves the interior and infinite side of things, can, nevertheless, when set by a genius, make a powerful suggestion, and open, beyond their sensuous meaning, boundless horizons towards an unlimited sea of dreams, towards mysterious, hidden meanings impossible to express. While reading a dramatic poem, we dominate, by some interior communion with the spirit of the poet, his whole vision, we identify ourselves with the poet, we fuse into one with his dreams, we penetrate his intention and aim; sensuous details, not acting upon us with the brutality of real things, have no preponderance over inner motives, do not absorb us; on the contrary, they seem to us to be natural, conventional signs, the purpose of which is to draw our attention to the perspective opening

2 L'ornement des noces spirituelles-Introduction, p. xxi.

"Loc. cit.," p. xx.

His

beyond them; the spirit and its manifestations interest us before all. But all that is entirely changed the moment we see the same poem on the stage. Between the spirit of the poet and that of the spectator or the listener there stands a third person, the actor. attitudes, characteristics, movements, gestures, the intonation of his voice, determine, confine to certain fixed shapes and dimensions, the characters created by the poet, and impose on us those ideas. Thus the sensuous part gains entire preponderance over the inner side, covers it up and drives it into the shade. Inward perspectives, dark depths of hidden infinity, accessible only to the spirit, disappear before the footlights. Either they cannot be seized by sensuous means, or they are absorbed by action which chains the eyes and ears of the spectator and prevents him from dreaming. When we read a poem we are interested in the facts only on account of the depth hidden in them; in the theatre, on the contrary, if we are interested in the depth it is only on account of the facts. This is that unusual phenomenon of polarization, about which Maeterlinck speaks, and which conducts us from the heights of the dream, embracing the world and existence, to the level of everyday life, satisfied with partial, superficial, sensuous truth.

It is quite another question whether Maeterlinck's suggestion of substitutes for man in the theatre is a possible one. He himself does not put his ideas in a very decided way, he calls them simply les tatonnements de quelqu'un qui est las du théâtre français d'aujourd'hui. But they are important, for they introduce us to the very heart of the aims of a symbolic theatre, which are that both sides of the human being, the external and the internal and infinite, should be brought into consideration.

These ideas are not merely theoreti

cal, for, judging by the dates of publication, Maeterlinck set them forth in a hypothetic form in regard to some details only after he had written his first three dramas: "Princess Maleine," "The Uninvited Guest" and "The Blindmen," which are more or less excellent and plastic embodiments of his theory; more or less excellent because it was only at a later stage that the poet reached his almost irreproachable perfection.

"Princess Maleine," published in 1889, was often compared with Shakespeare's dramas, either with a view of exalting its importance or of proving that it is only a weak and overdrawn imitation of the great English dramatist, or of questioning the author's obscure intention and aim. The erroneousness and superficiality of such a comparison are apparent from what has been said about Maeterlinck's ideas about the theatre. Our poet, with the daring of youth, determined to embody his ideas in a drama which should show the various sides of life. Such a work was not an easy enterprise, even for the most talented of beginners. A first work usually betrays the influence of an admired master. Maeterlinck was not able to get rid of the immense influence of Shakespeare which fascinates every true poet. But that influence neither lessens nor increases the value of "Princess Maleine," nor, what is more important, deprives it of its remarkable originality. Such an influence concerns chiefly the material life, which Maeterlinck does not set as his principal and exclusive aim, his only preoccupation being the relation of sensuous phenomena to the infinity of existence. So there is a great difference between Shakespeare and Maeterlinck.

For Shakespeare's man is a limited being, enclosed within the boundaries of sensuous consciousness, who has not in himself any impenetrable depth or