66 Individualism is the most resonant note in the symphony of modern thought; and individualism and reaction in philosophy rang out the dying years of the last century. To-day the three names that are emblazoned on the oriflamme of Revolt are Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen and Maurice Maeterlinck. Their supreme distinction is modernity-in art, in vitality of thought, in form of expression. Each in his particular sphere, they represent what Nietzsche has called the link between Man and Superman, between Man as he is and Man as they would have him to be. Under their diverse guidance man may be enabled to 'rise above himself to himself and cloudlessly to smile." They represent the restless, throbbing, unquiet spirit of the age. If they stand forth for anything, it is as apostles of regeneration-the physical, mental and spiritual regeneration of the individual. Individualism, enfranchisement, freedom, is the message they are bringing to the world to aid the individual in his struggle towards a more perfect and ideal type. Each one soars over the most novel spheres of thought, truth's red torch aflame within his brain. It is by that ruddy and clarifying light that we shall see our way clearly. Heinrich the Bell Founder, Stockmann, Monna Vanna, and Zarathustra mutely attest humanity's struggle towards the light. Advancing along strikingly distinct paths and unique each in his view of life, nevertheless these three men-Nietzsche, Ibsen, Maeterlinck-in reality are following radiating lines which converge towards some far distant point. They follow the so-called parallel lines of human endeavor which are said to meet at some Utopian infinity. In his millennial philosophy of the Uebermensch, the late Friedrich Nietzsche-poet, philosopher and prophet-symbolizes the reaction of dynamism from the mechanism of Darwin, of radiant individualism from the self-effacing altruism of Tolstoi, of aristrocratic anarchy against the levelism of the age. The divinity of Nietzsche's rhapsody is not a subject for Bertillon or Lombroso, but the "roaming, blond animal,” created through the felicitous conjunction of man's cunning and Nature's process. The physical development of the individual, his supreme exaltation, the cultivation of the most strenuous physical type -thus spake Zarathustra. With dauntless front, Henrik Ibsen flung his bold defiance in the teeth of modern society in his dramas of revolt. That trenchant sentence, "The Majority is always wrong," seems to sum up his message to humanity. He has taught the final efficacy and supremacy of Will: but with marvelous sanity, his doctrine involves the salutary concession that “submission is the base of perfection." He stands out, in grim aloofness, as the soul's captain, the apostle of individual freedom-freedom of choice, freedom to live one's own life, freedom from the false conventions and trammels of society. He has etched his own personality into the century's page with the corrosive acid of his mordant irony. Maurice Maeterlinck-poet, mystic, with gentle transcendentalist-comes words of wise and aspiring sincerity to impress upon the world the belief that the development and disclosure of the human soul is the ultimate aim and goal of existence. Marking the spiritual reaction from Zolaism, with all its blatant bestiality, he seeks to realize the infinite, to know the unknowable, to express the inexpressible. "Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!" is his eternal prayer. He is individualistic in the sense that he is unique and essentially modern, not explainable as a product of the age, but rather as a reactionary, hostile to all its materialistic tendencies. He heralds the dawn of a spiritual renascence. I. Maeterlinck's first little volume of lyrics, Serres Chaudes, expressive of his initial manner, most completely identifies him with that band of poets and mystics in France known as the Symbolists. There is no greater mistake than that of supposing that the wide hearing he has gained is attributable to the peculiar eccentricities of his style, the novelties in literary form he has employed, or the seeming inanities and solemn mystifications of his poetry. At first there was about him a trace of the fumisterie, that air of solemn shamming which has helped to make the Parisian "Cymbalists," as Verlaine loved to call them, a jest and a mockery. Perhaps he first caught the most obvious tricks of his style, those very idiosyncrasies his own fine instinct has since taught him to discard, from the school of Mallarmé, Vielé-Griffin and De Regnier. Yet the Ollendorfian puerilities, the reiterant ejaculations, the hyperethereal imaginings of the Symbolist manner, are the symptoms of a tentative talent, not of an authoritative art. Symbolism the casting of the immaterial thought into the material mould of speech, to use the word in a broad connotation-marks the correspondence between the outward visible sign and the inward spiritual idea. One must distinguish with the greatest care between the Symbolism of the French school and that of Ibsen, of Hauptmann, or of D'Annunzio. The point of departure for the art of the French Symbolists was the effort, by tricks of sound and rhythm, of figure and image, by allusion and suggestion, to cast a langorous spell over the reader, evoking rare and fleeting emotions, producing strange and indefinable impressions. As Henri de Regnier expresses it: “It is the function of the poet to express his own emotions. He realizes that his ideas are beautiful. He would convey them to the reader as they are. It is then that the power of common speech forces him to place known words in uncommon sequence or to resurrect an archaism that his idea may be better expressed. He is in no sense an analyst of the emotions but an artist, pure and simple; his function is not with life and nature, but with the imagination." A symbolist in this sense is an artist who finds the words at his command inadequate clearly to express his emotions, and is therefore compelled to employ words as symbols, deeply suggestive in their meaning. It is apparent that, with the symbolists, the simplest words, the homeliest figures, may take on untold significance. The poetry of the symbolists is characterized by peculiar, haunting and elusive beauty and destined for the profoundest suggestiveness; but quite too often, it must be confessed, conveying no meaning at all to anyone save to the initiated devotee. To compare Maeterlinck's early poems with the "unrhymed, loose rhythmic prose" of Walt. Whitman is to make a perfectly obvious and yet at the same time perfectly irrelevant criticism. While both are disjointed, formless, enumerative, Maeterlinck's every line is charged with a certain vague significance, suggestive of subtile and ever subtler possibilities of interest. There is something in it of the dim and haunting fancies of Poe, of the puerile vaporings of Arthur Rimbaud. Take a passage from Serres Chaudes like the following: "O hothouse in the midst of the forests! Is this pompous mystification or profound poetry? Is it sense? As Bernard Shaw would say: "Is it right, is it proper, is it decent?" And yet the morbid mind of the isolated child of modernity sighs and frets through it all: he is excluded by very reason of his supersensitive, exotic, orchidaceous soul from spontaneous and untrammeled communication with nature. Witness the poignant image of the princess, born in affluence and bred in the lap of luxury, suffering the unimagined pangs of hunger. The isolation and hopeless sense of desertion are accentuated by the figure of the sailor, longing for the cool waves and bracing salt breeze of health, as he wanders with parched throat over the hot sand of the endless desert. What more eloquent, what more laconically modern symbol than that of the military band passing under the windows of a hospital for incurables! Lonely souls, obsessed with world-weariness, harassed with morbid self-distrust and uncertain of a goal; these are sketchily bodied forth with the ruthless, the mystifying laconism of the Flemish mystic. As an illustration of the beauty and finish and simplicity of Maeterlinck's art as a poet, at its highest and least symbolical pitch, may be cited Richard Hovey's translation of Maeterlinck's unnamed poem: "And if some day he come back, What shall he be told? Till my heart was cold. And if he ask me yet again, And if he asks me where you are, And if he should ask me Why the hall is left deserted? For fear lest he should weep." II. M. Maeterlinck owes his great reputation, not to faddism, to decadentism, or to symbolism. He is admired because he is the sincerest of literary artists, because he is ever striving for that Truth which is Beauty-the beauty which Baudelaire called “la grace suprême litteraire." His poetry, even when vaguest and most mysterious in its strangely symbolic vesture, leaves always upon the mind, or rather upon the senses, an ineffaceable impression of peculiar and unusual beauty. He cannot be said to have created any great, distinctive or strikingly modern form of prose writing. Still his prose wears a gentle simplicity, a quiet impressiveness, and a pensive appeal that charms one when the fulminations of the blatant rhetorician, the vaporings of the phantasmagoric imagination, tire the senses, or the polished periods of the faultless prosateur leave one cold and unmoved. Such a book as Wisdom and Destiny a book that may truly be called noble-marks a distinct epoch in spiritual and cosmic evolution. The calm philosophy of Marcus Aurelius; the longings after the Infinite, if haply they may find it, of the fourteenth century mystics, Ruysbroeck the Admirable and the gentle Novalis: the transcendentalism of the Greek spirit in our own literature, Emerson; the “second sphere," the realm of unconscious revelation of the Ibsen of The Lady from the Sea and The Master-Builder; the brooding mysticism of the Shakespeare of Hamlet-these and other inspiring influences mingle with and color Maeterlinck's own conception of la vie intérieure. If, in Maeterlinck's interpretation of the world-riddle, there is one charm more fascinating than another, it is his disinterested search for truth. He is never didactic, never even definitive in any ultimate sense. Quite often he is actually found contradicting himself, consciously doing so, in the hope of retracing his steps a little way, aided by the faint glimmer of some new light, until he enter once more the straight path to his goal. His books show that, in a sense rightly understood, he is a scientific worker, difficult as this is to reconcile with the vagueness and groping insecurity of his mysticism. From the evidence of his books, M. Maeterlinck has studied the most modern theories of auto-suggestion, hypnotism. telepathy, psychology, and psychic phenomena. No reader of The Life of the Bee can doubt that M. Maeterlinck is a scientific worker, although this exquisite social history is the work of an artist and a littérateur as well as of a scientist. His works-poetry, prose, drama-all evidence his close study and deep comprehension of modern scientific theories, especially of a psychic or psychologic character, and these works evidence it concretely and suggestively, but more often by mere implication. It would be a serious mistake to imagine M. Maeterlinck to be the mere mouthpiece of the mystics of other years. It is not to be doubted that his mysticism is based upon a long and loving acquaintance with the greatest mystics of the past. To find standards of comparison for a phenomenon like the rare mind of this new-century mystic, we have to seek, not in our own, but in another age. A comparison of M. Maeterlinck's philosophy with that of the mystics of the past shows similarity in fundamentals to exist between them. But to say that M. Maeterlinck follows Ruysbroeck here or Novalis there, is not an easy matter: with other mystics M. Maeterlinck has in common only mysticism. The point of vantage from which he views the world, the eyes with which he sees it, the transmuting mind, are all his own. Nor has he studied modern science that of the body, the organism, that of the mind, the intelligence, that of the soul, the emotions only to be thrown back upon himself in disappointment, disillusionment and despair. Rather, as someone has recently said:"There is evidence that his mysticism is not so much a refuge from the tyranny of scientific naturalism as the deliberate choice of a man who finds in it confirr a tions of countless hopes and suspicions science herself raised within him." III. It is the fundamental faith of M. Maeterlinck that the theater of to-day needs reorganization and reformation in order to conform to the subtler demands of the higher and more complex life of our epoch. The theater, he affirms, has for its supreme mission the revelation of infinity, and of the grandeur as well as the secret beauty of life. He would have a theater in accordance with modern psychic demands, giving a revelation of what the Parisian mystic Schuré calls the abimes and profondeurs of the soul. Carlyle also pleaded for a recognition of what he called in his own speech the Eternities and the Immensities. M. Maeterlinck would bring the inner life of the soul closer to us; he would push the actors farther off. Thus he regrets that he has ever seen Hamlet performed on the stage, since it robbed him of his own conception of its mystic significance. The actor, the specter of an actor, dethroned his own image of the real Hamlet. From the printed page starts forth the old Hamlet of his dreams never again. His great regret is for the loss of the "second sphere," that subconscious realm where soul speaks to soul without the intermediary of words. He hails the coming of the Renascence of Wonder, the mystic epoch when men shall penetrate deep into the soil of their subliminal selves. That age which, as Phillips Brooks once said, "stands off and looks at itself"-that age M. Maeterlinck heralds and summons. Ibsen, too, has dreamed of this dawning day: Julian perhaps in the end caught some faint prevision of the "third kingdom." Silence is the pall that hangs over the earlier plays of M. Maeterlinck; the characters themselves are quiescent and immobile. It is only in silence that we can really know each other in the fugitive look, the chance meeting, the sudden hand-clasp. Only in such moments do we truly come to know anything that is worth knowing. Half conscious of his deep-rooted faith in the meaning of presentiments, the significance of sub-conscious revelations, M. Maeterlinck wrote a number of plays surcharged with the impalpable and imponderable weight of pathos and groping nescience. “The keynote of these little plays," he once wrote, "is dread of the unknown that surrounds us. I, or rather some obscure poetical feeling within me (for with the sincerest of the poets a division must often be made between the instinctive feeling of their art and the thoughts of their real life), seemed to believe in a species of monstrous, invisible, fatal power that gave heed to our every action, and was hostile to our smile, to our life, to our peace and our love. Its intentions could not be divined, but the spirit of the drama assumed them to be malevolent always. In its essence, perhaps, this power was just, but only in anger; and it exercised justice in a manner so crooked, so secret, so sluggish and remote, that its punishments for rewards there were nevertook the semblance of inexplicable, arbitrary acts of fate. We had then more or less the idea of the God of the Christians, blent with that of fatality of old, lurking in nature's impenetrable twilight, whence it eagerly watched, contested, and saddened the projects, the feelings, the thoughts, and the happiness of man." In those early plays the interest hangs upon the passage rather than upon the victim of fatality; our grief is not excited by the tragedy: we shudder with wideeyed horror at the argument of the invisible, the evidence of things not seen. By the intuitive apprehensions of the soul, its instinctive groping for elective affinities, and the incomprehensible, disquieting movements in nature in sympathetic attune with dark forebodings of dumb, shadowy events-by these means M. Maeterlinck made us aware of the adumbration, the gradual approach, and ultimate presence of the mysterious forces of Fate, Terror, and Death. He objectified and concretized for us those moments of life "When in some nimble interchange of thought The silence enters and the talkers stare." The unnamed presence was always Death -Death the Intruder. In "L'Intruse" we waited with tense expectancy and strained senses for his coming; in "Intérieure" we accompanied him to the scene of the eternal tragedy; in "Les Aveugles' we awaken with a start to find Death in our very midst. Terror lurks behind a half-closed door, and all the poignant mystery of the universe seems embodied in the figures of seven princesses sleeping in a dim castle beside the sounding sea. There was no escape from the obsession of some dire, inexpressibly dreadful unknown presence. "This unknown," M. Maeterlinck himself has said, "would most frequently appear in the shape of death. The presence of death—infinite, menacing, forever treacherously activefilled every interstice of the poem. The problem of existence was answered only by the enigma of annihilation. And it was a callous, inexorable death; blind, and groping its mysterious way with only chance to guide it; laying its hands preferentially on the youngest and the least unhappy, for that those held themselves less motionless than others, and that every too sudden movement in the night arrested its attention. And round it were only poor, little, trembling, elementary creatures, who shivered for an instant and wept, on the brink of a gulf; and their words and their tears had importance only from the fact that each word they spoke and each tear they shed fell into this gulf, and resounded therein so strangely at times as to lead one to think that the gulf must be vast if tear or word, as it fell, could send forth so confused and muffled a sound." A time came in M. Maeterlinck's career when he recognized the morbidity and unhealthiness of such a view of life, and realized that, in the transition, he had come out on the other side of good and evil. This conception of life may be truth, he grants, but it is "one of those profound but sterile truths which the poet may salute as he passes on his way"; with it he should not abide. It is perhaps this early conception which led him to avow that he had written these plays for a theater of marionettes. The characters all silently and unresistingly do the bidding of some unseen, unknown power. Duse said of Maeterlinck: "He gives you only figures in a mist-children and spirits." Even that "savage little legend" of the misfortunes of Maleine, M. Maeterlinck's first play, with all its violence, lust, bloodshed, tears and terror, is overbrooded by haunting and inexpressible |