Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck

CHAPTER IX

Towards the end of 1896 Maeterlinck settled in Paris. His life here was no less retired than it had been in Ghent. A new light had come into his life. The Treasure of the Humble had been dedicated to a Parisian lady, Georgette Leblanc. To her also he dedicates Sagesse et Destinée (Wisdom and Destiny), in 1898, in these words:

"To you I dedicate this book, which is, so to speak, your work. There is a higher and a more real collaboration than that of the pen – that of thought and example. I have not been constrained to imagine painfully the resolutions and the actions of an ideal sage, or to draw from my heart the moral of a beautiful dream perforce a little vague. It has sufficed me to listen to your words. It has sufficed me to let my eyes follow you attentively in your life; they were then following the movements, the gestures, the habits of wisdom itself."

The book was a great surprise for Maeterlinck's already world-wide community. "By the side of The Treasure of the Humble," wrote van Hamel, "it gives you the impression of a catechism by the side of a breviary." Not the unconscious, but the conscious, occupies the first place. The earlier philosophy is directly contradicted.66 Whereas in The Treasure of the Humble we read of "the august, everyday life of a Hamlet … who has the time to live because he does not act," we now hear of "the miserable blindness of Hamlet," who, though he had more intelligence than all those around him, was no wise man, for he did not, by exercising will-power, prevent the horrible tragedy. In the first book of essays action hinders life; in the second, to act is to think more rapidly and more completely than thought can do. To act is to think with one's whole being, not with the brain alone.

"It is our death that guides our life, and our life has no other object than death," Maeterlinck had said. Now he can write: "When shall we give up the idea that death is more important than life, and that misfortune is greater than happiness?.. Who has told us that we ought to measure life by the standard of death, and not death by the standard of life?"67[Pg 102]

That a great change had taken place in Maeterlinck's conception of the universe would be clear to anyone who read his works consecutively. He himself wrote to G. van Hamel, soon after the publication of Sagesse et Destinée, to this effect. Van Hamel does not give the exact words, but reports the gist of the letter as follows:

"The mysterious seems to have lost a great deal of its attraction for him. Only the great, the 'metaphysical mystery,' 'the unknowable essence of reality,' continues to chain him. But the many mysteries which have dominated the mind and the life of men, and which possess no sufficient reality, he would now banish from art as well. Fate, divine justice, and all those other obsolete ideas have no longer the power to dominate even the imagination. Life, the life of the artist too, must be cleansed of all that is unreal."

Maeterlinck added to the above (these words are quoted in French):

"I do not know whether I am doing better or worse; all I do know is that I want to express things more and more simple, things more and more human, less and less brilliant, more and more true."68

The change in Maeterlinck is generally ascribed to the inspiration of Mme Georgette Leblanc. He has himself drawn her portrait in a chapter of a later book, Le double Jardin. In 1904 she published a novel, Le Choix de la Vie; it is full of the words "beauty" and "happiness."

Happiness is what humanity was made for, Maeterlinck teaches in Wisdom and Destiny. Misery is an illness of humanity, just as illness is a misery of man. We ought to have doctors for human misery, just as we have doctors for illness. Because illness is common, it does not follow that we ought never to talk of health; and the fact that we live in the midst of misery is no reason why the moralist should not make happiness his starting-point. To be wise is to learn to be happy.

To be happy is only to have freed our soul from the unrest of unhappiness. To be happy we must learn to separate our exterior destiny from our moral destiny. Nothing happens to men except what they will shall happen to them. We have very little influence over a certain number of exterior events; but we have a very powerful action on what these events become in ourselves. It is what happens to most men that darkens or lightens their life; but the interior life of good men itself lightens all that happens to them. If you have been betrayed, it is not the treason that matters; it is the forgiveness that has come of it in your soul. Nothing happens which is not of the same nature as ourselves. Climb the mountain or descend to the village, you will find none but yourself on the highroads of chance.

In proportion as we become wise, we escape from some of our instinctive destinies. Every man who is able to diminish the blind force of instinct in himself, diminishes around him the force of destiny. Destiny has remained a barbarian; it cannot reach souls that have grown nobler than itself. That is why tragic poets rarely permit a sage to appear on the scene; no drama ever happens among sages, and the presence of the sage paralyses destiny. There is not a single tragedy in which fatality reigns; what the hero combats in all of them is not destiny, but wisdom. If predestination exists, it only exists in character; and character can be modified. Fatality obeys those who dare give it orders, and therefore there is no inevitable tragedy.

The shadow of destiny casts an enormous shadow over the valley it seems to drown in darkness, and in this shadow we are born; but many men can travel beyond it; and those who cannot may find happiness in wisdom which no catastrophe can reach.

But what is wisdom? Consciousness of oneself; knowledge of oneself. It is not reason: reason opens the door to wisdom. It is from the threshold of reason that all sages set out; but they travel in different directions. Reason gives birth to justice; wisdom gives birth to goodness. There is no love in reason; there is much in wisdom. Not reason, but love, must be the glass in which the flower of genuine wisdom is cultivated. It is true that reason is found at the root of wisdom; but wisdom is not the flower of reason. Wisdom is the light of love; love, and you will be wise.

And does the sage never suffer? He suffers; and suffering is one of the elements of his wisdom. It is not suffering we must avoid, but the discouragement – it brings to those who receive it like a master. People suffer little by suffering itself; they suffer enormously by the way they accept it. Misfortune comes to us, but it only does what it is ordered to do.

What is it that decides what suffering shall bring to us? Not reason, but our anterior life, which has formed our soul. Nothing is more just than grief; and our life waits till the hour strikes, as the mould awaits the molten bronze, to pay us our wage.

What if it be true that the sage be punished instead of being rewarded! What soul could be called good if it were sure of its reward? And who shall measure the happiness or unhappiness of the sage? When we put unhappiness in one side of the scales, each one of us lays down in the other the idea he has of happiness. The savage will lay alcohol, gunpowder, and feathers there; the civilised man gold and days of intoxication; but the sage will lay down a thousand things that we do not see, his whole soul perhaps, and even the unhappiness which he will have purified.

Let us be loath to welcome the wisdom and the happiness which are founded on the scorn of anything. Scorn, and renunciation, which is the infirm child of scorn, open to us the asylum of the old and weak. We should only have the right to scorn a joy when it would not even be possible for us to know that we scorned it. Renunciation is a parasite of virtue. As long as a man knows that he renounces, the happiness of his renunciation is born of pride. The supreme end of wisdom is not to renounce, but to find the fixed point of happiness in life. It is not by renouncing joys that we shall become wise; but by becoming wise we shall renounce, without knowing it, the joys that cannot rise to our level. Certain ideas on renunciation,69 resignation, and sacrifice exhaust the noblest moral forces of humanity more than great vices and great crimes. Infinitely too much importance, for instance, is attached to the triumph of the spirit over the flesh;70 and these alleged triumphs are most often only total defeats of life. It is sad to die a virgin. But there must be no satisfaction of base instincts. Not I would like, but I will must be the guiding star.

When the just is punished, we are troubled by the negation of a high moral law; but from this very negation a higher moral law is born immediately. With the suppression of punishment and reward is born the necessity of doing good for the sake of good. So teaches the book.

There is still mysticism in the kernel of this philosophy: the identity of the soul with the divine; but in its practical results it is a positivist, a realist philosophy. "There is nothing to hope for," we are told, "apart from truth. A soul that grows is a soul that comes nearer to truth." Death and the other mysteries are now only the points where our present knowledge ends; but we may hope that science will dispel our ignorance. In the meantime if we seclude ourselves from reality to dream of loveliness, the fair things we see will turn into ashes, like the roses that Alladine and Palomides saw in the caverns, at the first inrush of light. The most fatal of thoughts is that which cannot be friend with reality.

The book is strongly anti-Christian in its rejection of what are called parasitic virtues – arbitrary chastity, sterile self-sacrifice, penitence, and others – which turn the waters of human morality from their course and force them into a stagnant pool. The saints were egotists, because they fled from life to shelter in a narrow cell; but it is contact with men which teaches us how to love God.71 It is anti-ascetic too. Maeterlinck has the courage to say that a morbid virtue may do more harm than a healthy vice.72 In this connection one might say of him what Stefan Zweig has said of Verhaeren:

"His whole evolution – which in this respect coincides with that of the great German poets, with Nietzsche and Dehmel – tends, not to the limitation of primordial instincts, but to their logical development."73

Perhaps the most tangible doctrine in Wisdom and Destiny is that of salvation by love. Love is wisdom's nearest sister. Love feeds wisdom, and wisdom feeds love; and the loving and the wise embrace in their own light. "Ceux qui vivent d'amour vivent d'éternité," Maeterlinck might have said with Verhaeren.74 The main difference between Maeterlinck's final philosophy and that of his great countryman is this: that whereas Maeterlinck, like Goethe, brings his disciple to the shores of the sea of serenity and leaves him in a state of calm, Verhaeren sees spiritualising forces in passion, in exaltation, in paroxysm, and teaches that to be calm is to diminish oneself.

Wisdom and Destiny contains few of the apparent absurdities which confuse the reader of The Treasure of the Humble; but whether all the ideas will escape contradiction in independent minds may be questioned. To give an instance: it is no doubt true that a man may fight destiny; but if a man does fight destiny, it might be argued that it is only because it is his destiny to fight destiny. Louis XVI. is given as an example of a victim of destiny. He was the victim of destiny because of his feebleness, blindness, and vanity. But why was he weak, blind, and vain? According to the creed abandoned by Maeterlinck, it was his fate to be weak, blind, and vain. In Wisdom and Destiny the argument is: If he had been wise … But how can a weak, blind, and vain man be wise? No wisdom on earth can make a fool anything but a fool. Character can be modified, urges Maeterlinck; and we must be content with that. Not a few of us, too, must feel that the stoic fortitude Maeterlinck would have us show when our loved ones die will seem less divine than the passionate despair once breathed into tearful numbers for lost Mystes.

"The destinies of humanity are contained in epitome in the existence of the humblest little animals," is a thought of Pascal which might well have suggested Maeterlinck's La Vie des Abeilles (The Life of the Bee). It appeared in 1901. Maeterlinck had kept bees for years; and continued to do so when he set up his abode at a villa in Gruchet-Saint-Siméon in Normandy.

The Life of the Bee is not a scientific treatise, though it is scientifically correct; it does not claim to bring new material; it is a simple account of the bees' short year from April to the last days of September, told by one who loves and knows them to those who, he assumes, have no intimate knowledge. His intention is to observe bees and see if his observations can throw light on the destinies of humanity.

To begin with, bees are incessantly working, each at a different trade. Those that seem most idle, as you watch them in an observation hive, have the most mysterious and fatiguing task of all, to secrete and form the wax; just as there are some men (the thinkers) who appear useless, but who alone make it possible for a certain number of men to be useful.75

The bee is a creature of the crowd: isolate her and she will die of loneliness. From the city she derives an aliment that is as necessary to her as honey. (We remember that in Wisdom and Destiny saints were called egotists because they fled from their fellow-men.) In the hive the individual is nothing. The bees are socialists, we shall find; they are as united as the good thoughts that dwell in the same soul; they have a collectivist policy. This was not always so; and even to-day there are savage bees who live in lonely wretchedness. The hive of to-day is perfect, though pitiless; it merges the individual in the republic, and the republic itself is regularly sacrificed to the abstract, immortal city of the future. The will of Nature clearly tends to the improvement of the race, but she shows at the same time that she cannot obtain this improvement except by sacrificing the liberty of the individual to the general interest. First, the individual must renounce his vices, which are acts of independence. Whereas the workers among the humble-bees, a lower order, do not dream of renouncing love, our domestic bee lives in perpetual chastity.

It is the "spirit of the hive" that rules the bees and all they do. It decrees that when the hour comes they shall "swarm." This desertion of the hive was previously thought to be an attack of fatal folly (we are in the habit of ascribing things we do not understand to "fatality"); but science has discovered (what may not science discover?) that it is a deliberate sacrifice of the present generation to the future generation. The god of the bees is the future. To this future everything is subordinated, with astonishing foresight, co-operation, and inflexibility. It is clear that the bees have will-power. You may see where this will-power, which is the "spirit of the hive," resides, if you place the careworn head of a virgin worker under the microscope: within this little head are the circumvolutions of the vastest and the most ingenious brain of the hive, the most beautiful, the most complicated brain which is in nature after that of man. Here again, as everywhere else in the world, where the brain is there is authority, the real strength, wisdom, and victory. Here again it is an almost invisible atom of that mysterious substance that organises and subjugates matter, and is able to create for itself a little triumphant and durable place amid, the stupendous and inert powers of nothingness and death.

The description of the swarming is very beautiful. When the beekeeper is collecting the bees from the bough they have settled on, he need not fear them. They are inoffensive because they are happy, and they are happy without knowing why: they are fulfilling the law. All creatures, great and small, have such a moment of blind happiness when Nature wishes to accomplish her ends. The bees are Nature's dupes; so are we.

Some observers, Lord Avebury for instance, do not estimate the intelligence of the bee as highly as Maeterlinck does; but the experiments on which they base their conclusions do not seem to Maeterlinck to be more decisive than the spectacle of the ravages of alcohol, or of a battlefield, would be to a superhuman observer trying to fix the limits of human intelligence. And then, think of the situation of the bee in the world: by the side of an extraordinary being who is always upsetting the laws of its nature. How should we behave if some Higher Being should foil our wisdom? And how do we know there is no such Higher Being, or more than one, who might be to us as indistinguishable as man, the great ape, and the bear are to the bee? It is certain that there are within us and around us influences and powers as dissimilar and as indistinguishable.

It is as interesting and as important to us to discover signs of intellect outside ourselves as it was to Robinson Crusoe to find the imprint of a human foot other than his own on the sandy beach of his island. When we study the intelligence of bees we study what is most precious in our own substance, an atom of that extraordinary matter which has the property of transfiguring blind necessity, of organising and multiplying life and making it more beautiful, of checking the obstinate force of death and the great irresponsible wave that rolls round in earth's diurnal course all eternally unconscious things.

This intelligence is the devouring force of the future. Do not say that mankind is deteriorating. Alcohol and syphilis, for instance, are accidents that the race will overcome; perhaps they are tests by which some of our organs, the nervous organs for instance, will profit, for life constantly profits by the ills it surmounts. A trifle may be discovered to-morrow which will make them innocuous. Confidence in life is the first of our duties. We have everything to hope from evolution. It will lessen exertion, insecurity, and wretchedness; it will increase comfort. To this end it will not hesitate to sacrifice the individual. And let us note that progress recorded by nature is never lost. Life is a constant progression, whither, we do not know.

The whole book is a powerful epic of brain force. It is easy, Maeterlinck concludes his message, to discover the preordained duty of any being. You can read it in the organ which distinguishes it, and to which all its other organs are subordinated. Just as it is written on the tongue, in the mouth, and in the stomach of the bee that its duty is to produce honey, so it is written in our eyes, our ears, our marrow, in every lobe of our head, in the whole nervous system of our body, that we have been created to transform what we absorb from the things of the earth into that strange fluid we call brain power. Everything has been sacrificed to that. Our muscles, our health, the agility of our limbs, bear the growing pain of its preponderance.

Now in this cult of the future and of the human brain which is to make man God, Maeterlinck is not alone. By a different route he has reached the same goal as Verhaeren. The "futurists" have based their manifesto on what these two Flemings teach; and though the futurists go to scandalous extremes they will do some good if they shock those good people who feed on classic lore into a suspicion that new ideals have sprung into being:

CHAPTER X

Of Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (Ardiane and Bluebeard) and Sœur Béatrice (Sister Beatrice) which are contained in the third volume of Théâtre (1901) Maeterlinck has said that they were written as libretti for musicians who had asked for them, and that they contain no philosophical or poetical arrière-pensée.77 Critics, however, seem to be agreed in reading considerable meaning into both plays. The fact that of the six wives of Bluebeard five bear the names of Maeterlinck's previous heroines – Melisanda, Alladine, Ygraine, Bellangère, and Selysette – at once suggests a symbolic intention, which we are the more inclined to suspect when we find that Ardiane, though a new name, is in reality the same person, or the same idea, as both Astolaine and Aglavaine.

The drama was written under the direct inspiration, and probably collaboration, of Mme Leblanc, whose ideas, as expressed in Le Choix de la Vie, are emphasised in the second act, which, apart from its doctrine, is beautiful.

The five child-like wives have been thrust by Bluebeard into the familiar dark caverns under his castle; and, since they are the passive creatures of the former plays, they endure their incarceration without the least attempt to effect an escape. They merely wait, praying, singing, and weeping. They could not flee, they say; they have been forbidden to.

They are joined by Ardiane, the strong, wise woman of Maeterlinck's second period; and she delivers the poor little limp creatures. When they have the monster at their mercy, however, they are more inclined to fondle him than to harm him; and when Ardiane throws the door open, announces her intention of returning to freedom, and invites them to follow her, they remain at Bluebeard's side. The play has for its sub-title La Délivrance inutile (The Vain Deliverance); and it is to be interpreted as meaning that women are in great need of emancipation,78 but that it is their nature to cling to the brute who oppresses them.

An unmistakable motive of the play is that sanctification of the flesh which emblazons the breviary of the second Maeterlinck. Ardiane bares the arms and shoulders of the timid wives. "Really, my young sisters," she says, "I do not wonder that he did not love you as he ought to have done, and that he wanted a hundred wives … he had not one… We shall have nothing to fear if we are very beautiful."79

Sister Beatrice is another work which is variously interpreted. To Mieszner, Sister Beatrice represents "the human soul prisoned in prejudice." To many who have read The Treasure of the Humble it will suggest itself that we have here a spectacle of the human soul remaining pure while the body it dwells in is steeped in sin. To Anselma Heine, the nun is "one who has been made richer, one who has lived"; and it may indeed be the poet's intention to show us that the flesh is holy and is not contaminated by fulfilling its functions. If the latter interpretation is correct, Maeterlinck has not enforced his meaning so convincingly as Gottfried Keller, the great Swiss writer, did in his short story "Die Jungfrau und die Nonne" (one of his Sieben Legenden).

In Maeterlinck's play the nun flees from the convent, seeks love and finds degradation, and returns, after twenty-five years, to find that her duties have all the time been performed by the Virgin Mary. In Gottfried Keller's story, Beatrice, the door-keeper of the monastery, feels her heart turn sick with longing for the world outside. "When she could no longer hold back her desire, she arose in a moonlit night of July … and said to the statue of the Virgin Mary: 'I have served You many a long year, but now take the keys, for I cannot endure the heat in my heart any longer.'"