Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck

She goes out, and rests till dawn in a dim glade in an oak-forest. When the sun rises, a knight in armour comes riding along. He asks her whither she is bound, and she can only tell him that she has fled from the cloister "to see the world." He laughs at this, and offers, if she will go with him, to put her on the way. He lifts her on to his saddle, and merrily they gallop along; and when they come to his castle, Beatrice lies with him and stills her longing, and after some time he makes her his lawful wife, and she bears him eight sons.

But when the eldest son is eighteen, she arises one night from her husband's side, goes to the beds of her sons, and kisses them gently one after the other; she kisses her sleeping husband also; then she shears the long hair that had once folded him in flame, dons the nun's gown in which she had come to the castle so many years ago, and wanders in the howling wind and through the whirling autumn leaves to the convent. Here the statue of the Virgin tells her that She Herself has taken her place all the time; she has only to take up her keys and resume her duties where she had laid them down when she fled.

Ten years after her return the nuns make preparations for a great festival, and agree together that each one shall bring an offering to the Virgin. One of them embroiders a church banner, another an altar-cloth. One composes a Latin hymn, and another sets it to music. They who can do nothing else stitch a new shirt for the Christ-child, and the sister who is cook bakes Him a dish of fritters. Beatrice alone gets nothing ready: she is tired of life, and living more in the past than in the present. But when the festive day arrives and the nuns begin their chant, it happens that a grey-haired knight comes riding past the convent door with his eight stalwart sons, all on their way to the Emperor's wars. Hearing the service in the chapel, he bids his sons dismount, and enters with them to offer up a prayer to the Virgin. In the iron old man and the eight youths like so many angels in armour, Beatrice recognises her husband and her sons, and runs to them in the presence of all; and when she has confessed her story all agree that her gift to the Virgin is the richest offered that day.

Gottfried Keller's story is a glorification of family life. His nun is a healthy girl who needs children; and so does Heaven if the truth were known. In his story Beatrice never "falls." Her only mistake is when, driven by morbid superstition, she deserts her real duties to return to her imaginary ones. We never lose our respect for her. Maeterlinck's heroine, on the other hand, sinks lower than harlotry: when her body is beyond buying she sells her hand. She is a depraved being. It would be humbug to make out that the depravity of men forced her into such dirt. If she had been good, she could have died; if she is not good, what feelings is the drama to awaken in us? Feelings of pity perhaps, but not of sympathy; and when we have no sympathy for the subject of a drama, the drama is wasted. To glorify this woman's debasement, as Maeterlinck's play might seem to do, would be to wallow in morbid Christianity. But that would be a strange charge to bring against so anti-Christian a writer; and it is no doubt preferable to interpret the play by the theory of the soul's immunity from the body's pitch.

Maeterlinck's immediate source may have been a translation of the old Dutch version of the legend by L. Simons and Laurence Housman, which appeared in The Pageant for 1896, the year in which this now extinct magazine printed the poem Et s'il revenait and Sutro's translation of the Death of Tintagiles. Adelaide Anne Procter had made a poem out of the legend; John Davidson's splendid ballad (worth all Maeterlinck's play) is well known. The story was brought home to tens of thousands of spectators in London in 1911-12 by Max Reinhardt's staging of Karl Gustav Vollmoeller's wordless play The Miracle.

As a reading play Sister Beatrice is ruined by the species of blank verse in which it is said to be written. Typographically it is arranged in prose form; but palpable verses of this kind madden the reader:

"Il est prudent et sage; et ses yeux sont plus doux Que les yeux d'un enfant qui se met à genoux."

One of the things that Maeterlinck had treated in Wisdom and Destiny was the principal of justice. In Le Temple Enseveli (The Buried Temple) he deals with the subject exhaustively. He asks whether there is a justice other than that organised by men, and he finds it where he found fate, in their own breast. He proves that there is no physical justice coming from moral causes. Excess and imprudence have often a cause which we call immoral; but excess and imprudence may have an innocent or even heroic cause. Drunkards and debauchees are not necessarily criminals; they may be drawn into excess because they are weak and amiable (we all know very charming men who like drink; and what excellent uncles city bachelors often make). You are imprudent if you jump into the water in very cold weather to save somebody, and the consequences, let us say consumption for yourself and your children, are the same for you as for the villain who falls into the water while trying to throw somebody in. There is the same ignorance of moral causes in nature, the same indifference in heredity.80 Why should the offspring of amiable drunkards be punished while the children of parricides and poisoners go scot-free? As to debauch, justice strikes according as precautions are taken or not, and never takes account of the victim's state of mind.

But we should be wrong to complain of the indifference of the universe. We have no right to be astonished at an injustice in which we ourselves take a very active part. Look at poverty, for instance – we class it with ills that cannot be helped, such as pestilence and shipwreck, but it is surely a result of the injustice of our social organisation. We shudder from one end of the world to the other when a judicial error is committed (Dreyfus affair); but the error which condemns the majority of our fellowmen to wretchedness we attribute to some inaccessible, implacable power. Again (this argument is in the section "La Chance," Chapter VII), look at animals. Compare the fate of the pampered race-horse with that of the tortured cab-horse: for all your talk of predestination, it is a case of injustice. But to the animals we work to death we are as the powers behind Nature are to us. Should we then expect more justice from Nature than we mete out to animals? Let us not condone our culpability by any appeal to Nature: Nature is not concerned with justice; her one aim, as was shown in The Life of the Bee, is to maintain, renew, and multiply life. Nature is not just with regard to us; but she may be just with regard to herself. When we say that Nature is not just, it comes to the same thing as saying that she takes no notice of our little virtues; it is our vanity, not our sense of justice, that is wounded. But because our morality is not proportionate to the immensity of the universe, it does not follow that we ought to give it up; it is proportionate to our stature and to our restricted destiny. Justice is identical with logic. It is in himself, not in Nature, that man must find an approbation of justice.

The second part of the book, which has much in common with The Life of the Bee, is devoted to the "reign of matter." Maeterlinck here (Chapter V) takes the opportunity of praising vegetarianism, which he is said to have tried. He says:

"It is not my intention to go deeply into the question of vegetarianism, nor to meet the objections that can be made to it; but it must be recognised that few of these objections withstand a loyal and attentive examination; and it may be asserted that all those who have tried this diet have recovered or fortified their health, and felt their mind grow brighter and purer, as though they had been freed from an immemorial, nauseating prison."

The admirers of Maeterlinck's mysticism were more astonished when, in 1902, Monna Vanna appeared than they had been on reading those worldly-wise essays in Wisdom and Destiny. Why here was a real play! A play in the theatrical sense, with action, attempted murder, conflict, tension, "honour," and all the rest of it. A play with characterisation at least attempted; for, though Marco is that wise old man we know so well by this time (the most awful version of him was in reserve for Mary Magdalene), though Guido Colonna is Golaud redivivus; Prinzivalle is at all events a passable shadow of Othello, and Monna Vanna is a heroine who positively develops (let us admit that Selysette had developed too). A play rhetorical in style; pictorial even – a city lit up by fireworks, the Leaning Tower of Pisa all aflame "your Hugo-flare against the night," (William Watson might have jeered). A play with a situation which might have been written specially for that dear old lady, Mrs Grundy; a situation which makes a licence for its performance quite out of the question in Mrs Grundy's England.81 And when the play proves a great success in Paris and Germany, and more especially when the great dramatist goes on tour with it and Mme Leblanc,82 who plays the title-rôle, Maeterlinck's old guard call him a renegade to himself, to the Maeterlinck who had once held forth the exciting prospect of a stage without actors and without action. But why should a writer not change his views?

Monna Vanna is written, partly, in the same kind of blank verse as Sister Beatrice– very poor stuff considered as poetry, and very troublesome to read as prose. From the point of view of style it is quite impossible to consider it as a great work of art. Dramatically, however, it is one of the most interesting plays produced so far in the twentieth century.

This is the first of Maeterlinck's plays which has not some legendary Weisznichtwo for its scene. These are not shapes seen vaguely through a gloaming of romance; they move in the full light of reality. Monna Vanna, in short, is a historical drama, a species of drama which, as we shall see, Maeterlinck rejects in a chapter of The Double Garden.

Perhaps, however, those critics are right who deny to Monna Vanna the title of a genuine historical drama. It is at all events evident that the chief interest lies in the soul's awakening in love of Monna and of Prinzivalle. It is concerned, too, with truth: no marriage can be moral in which either party doubts anything the other party says – if you love, you must believe. Historically, the characters are untrue: Marco could not have read Maeterlinck at the time he lived, and, not having read Maeterlinck, he could not be so wise as he is; Monna Vanna could not have read either Maeterlinck or Ibsen, and therefore she could not have had such ideas as she has. But why should a modern play be truly historical? Friedrich Hebbel, a far greater dramatist than Maeterlinck, said something to the effect that a play may be historical if it keeps fresh long enough for our descendants to see from it how we, at our period of history, conceived the past.

However, when the curtain rises we find ourselves in Pisa at the end of the fifteenth century. The town is being besieged by Prinzivalle, the general of the army of Florence. The inhabitants are starving, and the city can hold out no longer. Guido Colonna, the commandant of the garrison, has sent his father, Marco, to Prinzivalle, and the envoy's return is awaited. He comes with this message: Florence has decided to annihilate Pisa. There is to be no question of a capitulation; the town is to be taken by assault, and the citizens butchered. Florence is pressing Prinzivalle to deliver the final assault; but he has intercepted letters by which it appears that he is unjustly accused of treachery. Death awaits him at Florence after his victory. He undertakes, therefore, to introduce a huge convoy of munition and provisions into the starving city, and to join the besieged army with the pick of his mercenaries. His condition is this: Monna Vanna, Guido's wife, shall come to his tent for the night, and she shall be naked under her cloak.

Guido is furious; but Monna Vanna decides to go. She has it in her power to save a whole city; and she thinks, as her father-in-law does, that two people have no right, by considering themselves, to ensure the destruction of so many thousands. There is no attempt on the dramatist's part to belittle the sacrifice she is willing to make; she has, at the time she makes up her mind, the time-honoured idea as to the importance of the sexual act. But she is an altruist, like the bees: it is not she, it is not her husband, it is the community that matters. Guido, however, is an egotist of the old school; he clings to his "honour" to such an extent that he thinks Pisa should be butchered to keep it intact. Monna Vanna goes…

ACT II. – Prinzivalle's tent. Sumptuous disorder. Hangings of silk and gold. Weapons, heaps of precious furs, huge coffers half open, overflowing with jewels and gorgeous raiment. Interview with Trivulzio, Commissary of the Republic of Florence; a copy of Cassius in Julius Cæsar– the emaciated man of thought, "the clear, fine intellect, the cold, acute, instructed mind" – "believes in Florence as the saint tied to the wheel believes in God." Prinzivalle on the other hand is an utter alien, a Basque or a Breton; but his victories have made him popular in Florence, and he might make himself dictator; Trivulzio, therefore, has denounced him to "the grey-headed, toothless, doting fools at home." Prinzivalle unmasks Trivulzio, who attempts to stab him, but only succeeds in gashing his face. Trivulzio very noble in his way; all for Florence. Excitement of the audience: will Vanna come? She comes; is she naked under her cloak? She has been wounded on the shoulder by a stray shot; just a scratch, but enough to serve as an excuse for exciting the audience. Prinzivalle tells her to show him the wound, and she half opens her cloak. He asks her directly: "You are naked under your cloak?" She answers "Yes," makes a movement to throw her cloak off (great tension), but he "stops her with a gesture." Now follows the great love-scene, in every way one of the finest things in modern drama. It turns out that they had played together as boy and girl in Venice. He has loved her ever since. He loves her now; and for that reason there is no question of her removing her cloak. Love triumphs over luxury. She goes back to Pisa, taking him with her, to save him from the Commissaries of Florence.

ACT III. – Convoy arrived, Pisa rejoicing, Guido cursing. Vanna comes, deliriously acclaimed. She has the great news for Guido that she returns unscathed. He refuses to believe it. Everybody refuses to believe it except Marco. She introduces Prinzivalle; and Guido persuades himself that she has trapped the brute, and brought him for private butchery. Since Guido will not credit the truth, she gives him the lie he asks for: "Il m'a prise," she cries out. But she claims Prinzivalle as her own prey, and has him conducted to the dungeons on the understanding that she will end his life herself. The spectators, however, who have an advantage over Guido in that they hear various asides, understand that she will rescue the Florentine general and elope with him. Guido can believe she could lie, therefore he does not love her – he only loves his "honour"; therefore she cannot love him, Prinzivalle, on the other hand, had been most undisguisedly frank in his private interview with her. It is clear he loves her; and since she is no longer bound to love her husband, she is free to love Prinzivalle. "It was an evil dream," she says; "the beautiful is going to begin…"

To some critics the weak point in the drama might seem to be this: Monna Vanna goes out to Prinzivalle although she has no reliable information as to what manner of man he is. There was the greatest likelihood, Guido might have urged, that the man who makes such an infamous condition will not dream of keeping his promise. But the dramatist makes the heroine tell Prinzivalle that the one man who could have given her a favourable account of his character (and who, as we know, had given a favourable account of it to Guido) had told her nothing about him; possibly Maeterlinck desired in this way to emphasise the motive that Monna Vanna goes to sacrifice her honour on the mere chance of saving the city.

The scene between Prinzivalle and Trivulzio in the second act has points of similarity with the argument of Browning's Luria. This was pointed out by Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale in an article in the New York Independent of the 5th March, 1903. Browning's play, too, is set in the fifteenth century on the eve of a battle between Pisa and Florence; and, like Prinzivalle, "Luria holds Pisa's fortunes in his hand." Both Luria and Prinzivalle are "utter aliens "; and both are modelled on Othello (Luria is a Moor; Prinzivalle is "a Basque or a Breton," but he has served in Africa). The character of the two Commissaries in the plays is identical. Maeterlinck wrote as follows to Professor Phelps:

"You are quite right. There is a likeness between [Browning's play and] the scene in the second act, in which Prinzivalle unmasks Trivulzio. I am surprised nobody has noticed it before, the more so as I made no attempt to conceal it, for I took exactly the same hostile cities, the same period, and almost the same characters; although of course it would have been very easy to alter the whole. I admire Browning, who, in my opinion, is one of the greatest of English poets. For that reason I regarded him as belonging to classic and universal literature, and as a poet whom everybody ought to know; and I thought I was entitled to borrow a situation, or rather the fragment of a situation, from him, a thing which occurs every day with Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. Such borrowings take place coram populo, and are in the nature of a public homage. I regard the scene as a passage which I have piously dedicated to the poet who created in me the atmosphere in which Monna Vanna was written."

With this naïve and sincere letter Maeterlinck clears himself of any charge of plagiarism. If he was a plagiarist in Monna Vanna, he was a plagiarist, too, in Joyzelle (1903), for in a postscript of his letter to Professor Phelps he confesses that this play was written in the atmosphere of Shakespeare's Tempest.

Joyzelle, another dramatised essay, is again written in the irritating blank verse which Maeterlinck at this stage of his career seems to have grown perversely fond of. To Merlin (Prosper rechristened) on his enchanted island comes his long-lost son Lancéor. The first person the newcomer meets is Joyzelle, who is destined to be his bride if she stands the trials prepared for her. The young couple fall in love with each other at first sight; but Merlin, who is attended by Arielle, his disembodied genius (his interior force, the forgotten power that sleeps in every soul), is also in love with Joyzelle.

Merlin, being a magician, is able to set traps for the lovers. He clouds the brain of Lancéor, and delivers him up to instinct, so that he compromises himself with Arielle, who for the purpose of playing the tempter has become visible, has half opened the veils that invest her, and unbound her long hair. (Men always fall into traps when their instinct leads them, their frailties being necessary for the designs of life.) Joyzelle discovers her lover in the act of embracing the supposed lady; but, with that nobility above jealousy which distinguishes the heroines of Maeterlinck after Astolaine, she continues to love him. She reveals to Lancéor, in curious language, the depth of her affections:

"When one loves as I love thee, it is not what he says, it is not what he does, it is not what he is that one loves in what one loves; it is he, and nothing but him, and he remains the same, through the years and misfortunes that pass… It is he alone, it is thou alone, and in thee nothing can change without making love grow… He who is all in thee; thou who art all in him, whom I see, whom I hear, whom I listen to without pause, and whom I love always… We have to fight, we shall have to suffer; for this is a world which seems full of traps… We are only two, but we are all love!.."

"Men are victimised by every beautiful woman," comments Mieszner, "and only the woman to whom they surrender themselves blindly can educate them to a higher love. This is the idea that clearly shines through the action … woman rescuing sensual man from his sensuality."

Merlin now instils a subtle poison into Lancéor's veins, confirms Joyzelle's suspicions that her lover is on the point of death, but offers to save his life if she will give herself to him. "You would not need to tell him," the old swine suggests. "But I should have to tell him, because I love him," she answers. (Moral again: love cannot lie.) Joyzelle is not willing to do for one human being, though he is the being she loves best on earth, what Monna Vanna was willing to do for hundreds of strangers. She feigns consent, however, and promises to come at night; but she makes Merlin restore Lancéor there and then. When she comes to the old man's couch, it is with a dagger ready; she finds him sleeping, and lifts the dagger, but Arielle prevents the blow. Her trials are over; she has stood the last test. Merlin explains matters to his son: "She might have yielded," he says, "might have sacrificed herself, her love; she might have despaired – and then she would not have been the one love craves." To Joyzelle he says that it was written that she and those who resemble her should have a right to the love fate shows them; and that this love (the one love in life) must break injustice down. As to his own love for the girl, he bids Arielle kiss her; it seems to her then that flowers she cannot gather are touching her brow and caressing her lips, and Merlin tells her not to brush them aside, they are sad and pure – a symbolisation, perhaps, of intellectual love which renounces sensuality.

Joyzelle was first performed, with Mme Leblanc in the title-rôle, at the Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris on the 20th May, 1903. In the same year Maeterlinck's comedy, Le Miracle de St Antoine (The Miracle of St Antony) was performed at Geneva and Brussels. It has been published in German, but not yet in French or English.