Read Ebook: Major Prophets of To-Day by Slosson Edwin E Edwin Emery

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Ebook has 435 lines and 70504 words, and 9 pages

t, in cases where the crowd has obtained the experiment, it was wrong to insist upon it?

It would surely have been highly dangerous to confide the destinies of the species to Plato or Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare or Montesquieu. At the very worst moments of the French Revolution the fate of the people was in the hands of philosophers of no mean order.

The thoroughgoing character of his democracy is emphasized by Professor Dewey in his lecture on "Maeterlinck's Philosophy of Life" delivered at Columbia University:

"Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Maeterlinck are thus far, perhaps, the only men who have been habitually, and, as it were, instinctively, aware that democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience to nature; among these Maeterlinck has at least the advantage of greater illumination by the progress of natural science."

This democratic feeling seems to me to arise more from his mystical sense of the continuity of life than from personal disposition or political theory. In his earlier and more characteristic dramas, the persons are hardly more than talking symbols. Their looks and costumes are not described, either in the stage directions or in the dialogue. Their names--if he takes the trouble to give them names--are scarcely sufficient in some cases to indicate the sex. Their speech is language reduced to its lowest elements, excessively simplified, in fact, and full of the repetitions and incoherencies common to stupid and uneducated people the world over. Maeterlinck himself calls them "marionnettes", and says that they have the appearance of half deaf somnambulists just awakening from a painful dream.

But these puppet people are divested of individuality for the purpose of reducing them to the common denominator of humanity. They are devoided of personal interest in order to prevent the attention of the spectator from being fixed upon them. They are made transparent so that we may look through them and perceive the external forces which control them. The dramatic poet, he says in the preface to his early dramas, "must show us in what way, in what form, in what conditions, according to what laws, and to what end our destinies are controlled by the superior powers, the unintelligible influences, the infinite principles of which, in so far as he is a poet, he is persuaded that the universe is full."

Great poetry he regards as composed of three principal elements:

First, verbal beauty, then the contemplation and passionate depiction of what really exists around us and in ourselves, that is to say, nature and feeling, and, finally, enveloping the entire work and creating its own atmosphere, the idea which the poet has of the unknown in which float the beings and things he evokes, of the mystery which dominates them and judges them and presides over their destinies.

The critics were not altogether wrong when they called the characters of his earlier plays "mere shadows." But a shadow exists only when a bright light is cast on a real object. Maeterlinck's purpose is to make Plato's cave men aware of the drama that is being enacted behind their backs. The real action of these plays is not that seen on the stage. His dramas contain their message written in secret ink between the lines, and it becomes visible only when warmed by the sympathy of the reader.

The performance of "Macbeth" at Saint-Wandrille had a double interest. It introduced a novel form of the drama, and it added another to the many attempts to put Shakespeare into French. This select and household entertainment might be called "chamber pageantry", because it bears somewhat the same relation to the outdoor processionings now so popular as chamber music does to orchestral. Most of the incongruities which the critics pointed out are not inherent in the plan, but due to the fact that "Macbeth" is not adapted to such a setting any more than it is to the modern theater. Conceivably something more effective could be done in this line if a new play were written to fit the place and the conditions of enactment, requirements certainly not more exigeant than those of the Elizabethan stage. In this it would even be possible to keep strictly to the three unities, and play the scenes appropriately indoors and out, in daylight and dark.

Madame Georgette Leblanc-Maeterlinck has been, as wives are apt to be, both a help and a hindrance to her husband.

He illustrates these variant views of the same landscape by bringing together all the different versions of a couplet, from Letourneur of the eighteenth century to Duval, the latest translator of Shakespeare:

"Strange things I have in head that will to hand Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.

"J'ai dans la t?te d'?tranges choses qui aboutiront ? ma main; et qu'il faut accomplir avant qu'on les m?dite."--

"J'ai dans la t?te d'?tranges choses qui r?clament ma main et veulent ?tre ex?cut?s avant d'?tre m?dit?es."--

"Ma t?te a des projets ?tranges qui r?clament ma main; achevons l'acte avant d'y r?fl?chir."--

"J'ai dans la t?te d'?tranges choses qui passeront dans mes mains, des choses qu'il faut ex?cuter avant d'avoir le temps de les examiner."--

"J'ai dans ma t?te d'?tranges choses que ma main ex?cutera, et qui veulent ?tre accomplies sans me laisser le temps de les peser."--

"Ma t?te a des projets qu'ex?cutera ma main; je veux les accomplir de suite, sans me donner le temps de les examiner de trop pr?s."--

"J'ai d'?tranges projets en t?te qui veulent ?tre ex?cut?s avant d'y r?fl?chir."--

"J'ai dans la t?te d'?tranges projets, qui, de l?, passeront dans mes mains; et il faut les ex?cuter avant qu'on puisse les p?n?trer."--

This couplet is in itself an argument for more freedom of translation than is customarily allowed. The choice of "scann'd" from among other words that would have expressed the idea as well or better was obviously dictated by the necessity of rhyming with "hand", and this in turn was due to the desire to alliterate with "head." A translator, if he is to make as good poetry as the original author, must have an equal license. It is therefore not surprising to see that M. Maeterlinck has been most successful in preserving the spirit of the original where he has translated into rhyme instead of prose, for here the exactions of the French verse have forced him to a greater freedom. Here are fragments of the witches' songs:

Paddock crie, "Allez, allez." Le laid est beau et le beau laid Allons flotter dans la brume, Allons faire le tour du monde, Dans la brume et l'air immonde.

Trois fois le chat miaula Le h?risson piaula. Harpier crie, "Voil?! voil?!"

Double, double, puis redouble, Le feu chante au chaudron trouble.

Et, enfin, ce Duncan fut si doux sur son tr?ne, si pur dans sa puissance que ses vertues parleront comme d'ang?liques trompettes contre le crime damn? de son assassinat. Et la piti?, pareille ? un nouveau-n? chevauchant la temp?te, ou ? un cherubin c?leste qui monte les coursiers invisibles de l'air, soufflerait l'acte horrible dans les yeux de tout homme jusqu'? noyer le vent parmi les larmes.

"Tu ne dormiras! Macbeth a tu? le sommeil!" L'innocent sommeil, le sommeil qui d?vide l'?cheveau embrouill? des soucis.

Tout l'oc?an du grand Neptune pourrait-il laver ce sang de ma main? Non, c'est plut?t cette main qui empourprera les vagues innombrables, faisant de la mer verte un oc?an rouge.

Maeterlinck has himself suffered many things of many translators. Alfred Sutro has given us admirable versions of his philosophical works, "Wisdom and Destiny", "The Treasure of the Humble", and "The Life of the Bee", but his plays have not been so fortunate, for their emotional effect is dependent upon the maintenance of a peculiar atmosphere, so sensitive that a harsh breath will destroy it, leaving ridiculous wooden puppets where the moment before we thought we glimpsed beings of supernatural beauty. So even a reader whose French is feeble will prefer the plays in the original, for their language is of extreme simplicity and the effect may be even enhanced by the additional veil that his partial incomprehension draws across the stage picture. Then, too, Maeterlinck's trick of triple repetition which offends our Anglo-Saxon ears ceases to annoy us in French, for in that language even identical rhymes are permissible.

As an example of how a prosaic literalism may spoil the illusion, let us take that exquisite passage which closes "Pell?as et M?lisande":

C'?tait un petit ?tre si tranquille, si timide et si silencieux. C'?tait un pauvre petit tr?s myst?rieux, comme tout le monde. Elle est l?, comme si elle ?tait la grande soeur de son enfant.

This is the way it is rendered by Laurence Alma Tadema, and the libretto of the opera is still worse: "It was a little gentle being, so quiet, so timid and so silent. It was a poor little mysterious being, like all the world. She lies there as if she were her own child's big sister."

Genius only throws into bolder relief all that can and actually does take place in the lives of all men; otherwise were it genius no longer but incoherence or madness.

Even Richard Hovey, who first introduced Maeterlinck's plays to America in the days when the "Green Tree Library" flourished and bore its strange fruit, feared that "his devotion to the wormy side of things may prevent him from ever becoming popular." But he got over his devotion to the wormy side of things and has grown into a more wholesome philosophy and so into a greater popularity. The transition point in his style and thought is marked by the preface to his dramas, 1901. He neither recants nor apologizes for his earlier work, still less does he ridicule it, as Ruskin did his first writing, but he frankly and gracefully indicates the changed attitude toward life which shows itself in his later essays.

He ceases to use the word "destiny" exclusively in its evil sense, and to represent it as a power inimical to man, watching in the shadow to pounce upon us whenever we manifest a little joy. Fate in his later work does not always mean fatality, and events are controlled by character more than by external forces. Man by wisdom can overcome destiny. But Maeterlinck would have us take care to keep a sane balance of altruism and egoism:

You are told you should love your neighbor as yourself; but if you love yourself meanly, childishly, timidly, even so shall you love your neighbor. Learn, therefore, to love yourself with a love that is wise and healthy, that is large and complete.

It is a curious transformation by which this Belgian lawyer and esoteric poet has become one of the widest known of French playwrights and moralists. He was born in Ghent, August 29, 1862, of an old Flemish family. The name, "measurer of grain", is derived from an ancestor who was generous in a time of famine.

He was educated at the University of Ghent for law, in accordance with the wishes of his family, though he would have preferred medicine. But his dominant interest was always literature.

His experience at the bar was brief, a couple of criminal cases, and then he deserted the law and went to Paris for a year, where he was chiefly under the influence of the French symbolist, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Then he returned home to devote himself in quiet to the cultivation of his double garden of literature and science. He was especially attracted by the freshness and richness of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and, as he says, drank long and thirstily from the Elizabethan springs. In Shelley and Browning he was also deeply interested.

The cross-fertilization of Elizabethan drama with French symbolism gave rise to the "Princess Maleine", a new species if there ever was one, Shakespearean in form and incident, most un-Shakespearean in everything else. The first edition of this drama was an extremely limited one, twenty copies, printed on a hand press with Maeterlinck turning the crank.

It was the "Princess Maleine" which led to his "discovery" by Octave Mirbeau, who proclaimed it "the greatest work of genius of the times", and "superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in Shakespeare." This newspaper praise made Maeterlinck instantly famous everywhere save in his own country. His neighbors in Ghent refused to take it seriously, and thought it a pity that his family should encourage the young man in his mania by paying for puffs like that.

To trace Maeterlinck's dramatic development is like watching a materialization at a s?ance. His characters have become increasingly solid and life-like, but they have lost the illusiveness and allusiveness that made their charm in his earlier plays. Maeterlinck has never been able to equal Ibsen--nor has anyone else--in the art of making a perfectly individualized and natural character serve also as a type or symbol, thus doubling our interest by combining the specific and the general.

Maeterlinck's genius shows best in his own peculiar field of symbolism and suggestion, that of his early dramas and of "The Blue Bird." His plays of a more conventional type, "Monna Vanna" and "Mary Magdalene", betray his deficiencies as a dramatic writer, his lack of the power of plot construction and a sense of humor. "Mary Magdalene" is really as much a one-act play as "The Interior", for the last act is the only one that counts. Here the crowd has the star part, the crowd of the lame, the halt and the blind, the sinners and the diseased, whom Jesus has cured and who now desert him; and the real drama is enacted, not in the upper chamber of the house of Joseph of Arimathea, but in the street outside, leading to the Place of the Skull. The scene of the woman taken in adultery is far less dramatic than in its biblical form, because in the play she is really protected by Roman swords, not by the awakened consciences of the mob.

The continuous development of Maeterlinck's philosophy of life is shown as well in his plays as in his essays. Mary Magdalene, who would not save her Savior by the sacrifice of her virtue, represents a higher ethical ideal than Monna Vanna, who gives herself for the city. In his earlier plays Maeterlinck tries to frighten us with the traditional Terrors which in "The Blue Bird" are shown to be imprisoned and harmless in the Palace of Night. Old Time with his scythe, who as "The Intruder" of twenty years ago brought death into the household, appears now in "The Blue Bird" under a kinder aspect, calling the Children of the Future into life. In fact, "The Blue Bird" represents the highest point of the philosophy of optimism, for it is based upon the most daring of all the assumptions of science--that the secret of existence is also the secret of happiness. "To be wise is above all to be happy", says Maeterlinck. Truly, he has got a long way from Schopenhauer, the object of his boyish admiration.

Maeterlinck has, in short, acquired a faith. I do not see exactly whom or what he has faith in, but he has faith, and that, after all, seems to be the main thing. The development of his thought has an especial interest in that it shows how a spiritual interpretation of the universe and a moral support can be built up on pure agnosticism. From Christianity he has derived little except a vague symbolism and certain ethical ideals. He looks back with bitterness upon his school days in the Jesuit college at Ghent, but his writings show no trace of the anticlerical animosity which is so conspicuous in Haeckel's. It was his latest book, "Death", the most religious of them all, breathing a spirit of unconquerable faith in immortality and future happiness, that brought down upon Maeterlinck the condemnation of Rome, and in 1914 all his books and plays were put upon the Index by the Sacred Congregation.

From the mystics he has derived much, especially from the German Novalis and the Flemish Ruysbroek, whose works he has translated into French. In his preface to the latter he says:

Mystical truths have this strange superiority over truths of the ordinary kind, that they know neither age nor death.... They possess the immunity of Swedenborg's angels, who progress continually toward the springtime of youth, so that the eldest angels always appear the youngest.

But he undoubtedly owes his ethical and philosophical growth most of all to the study of nature, not the vague contemplation of natural objects which in the early Victorian era was thought proper pabulum for poets, but the effort to understand nature through the use of modern scientific methods. We are reminded of Sir Thomas Browne, who says: "Those strange and mystical transmigrations that I have observed in silkworms turned my philosophy into divinity."

The reason why many poets and imaginative writers of high ability find themselves without influence in the modern world is, in my opinion, because they are ignorant of science or inimical to it. They, therefore, write for antiquity, which does not buy books, or for posterity, which, it is safe to say, will never come back to the position they hold. The people do not enjoy science, but their manner of thought is molded by it, and they are unaffected or repelled by music out of tune with it.

Maeterlinck, while thoroughly appreciating science, does not exaggerate its power. He does not look to it for a complete explanation of the world.

Rarely does a mystery disappear; ordinarily it only changes its place. But it is often very important, very desirable, that it manage to change its place. From a certain point of view, all the progress of human thought reduces itself to two or three changes of this kind--to have dislodged two or three mysteries from the place where they did harm in order to transport them where they become harmless, where they can do good. Sometimes it is enough, without a mystery changing its place, if we can succeed in giving it another name. That which was called "the gods" is now called "life." And if life is just as inexplicable as the gods, we have at least gained this, that in the name of life no one has authority to speak nor right to do harm.

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