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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck, by 
+Jethro Bithell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck
+
+Author: Jethro Bithell
+
+Release Date: February 18, 2012 [EBook #38917]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE, WRITINGS, MAURICE MAETERLINCK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Andrea Ball & Marc D'Hooghe at
+http://www.freeliterature.org (Images generously made
+available by the Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+Life and Writings
+
+of
+
+Maurice Maeterlinck
+
+BY
+
+JETHRO BITHELL
+
+London and Felling-on-Tyne:
+
+THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO., LTD
+
+NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE
+
+
+
+TO
+
+ALBERT MOCKEL,
+
+THE PENETRATING CRITIC, THE SUBTLE POET
+
+
+
+"Maurice Maeterlinck.--Il débuta ... dans _La Pléiade_
+par un chef-d'oeuvre: _Le Massacre des Innocents_. Albert
+Mockel devint plus tard son patient et infatigable apôtre
+à Paris. C'est lui qui nous fit connaître _Les Serres Chaudes_
+et surtout cette _Princesse Maleine_ qui formula définitivement
+l'idéal des Symbolistes au théâtre."
+
+STUART MERRILL,
+
+_Le Masque_, Série ii, No. 9 and 10.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+It is not an easy task to write the life of a man who is still living.
+If the biographer is hostile to his subject, the slaughtering may be an
+exciting spectacle; if he wishes, not to lay a victim out, but to pay a
+tribute of admiration tempered by criticism, he has to run the risk of
+offending the man he admires, and all those whose admiration is in the
+nature of blind hero-worship. If he is conscientious, the only thing he
+can do is to give an honest expression of his own views, or a mosaic of
+the views of others which seem to him correct, knowing that he may be
+wrong, and that his authorities may be wrong, but challenging
+contradiction, and caring only for the truth as it appears to him.
+
+So much for the tone of the book; there are difficulties, too, when the
+lion is alive, in setting up a true record of his movements. If the lion
+is a raging lion, how easy it is to write a tale of adventure; but if
+the lion is a tame specimen of his kind, you have either to _imagine_
+exploits, making mountains out of molehills, or you have to give a page
+or so of facts, and for the rest occupy yourself with what is really
+essential.
+
+When the lion is as tame as Maeterlinck is (or rather as Maeterlinck
+chooses to appear), the case is peculiarly difficult. The events in
+Maeterlinck's life are his books; and these are not, like Strindberg's
+books, for instance, so inspired by personality that they in themselves
+form a fascinating biography. They reveal little of the sound man of
+business Maeterlinck is; they do not show us what faults or passions he
+may have; they tell us little of his personal relations--in short,
+Maeterlinck's books are practically impersonal.
+
+The biographer cannot take handfuls of life out of Maeterlinck's own
+books; and it is not much he can get out of what has been written about
+him, very little of which is based on personal knowledge. Maeterlinck
+has always been hostile to collectors of "copy," those great purveyors
+of the stuff that books are made of. Huret made him talk, or says he
+did, when Maeterlinck took him into the beer-shop; and a few words of
+that interview will pass into every biography. That was at a time when
+he hated interviews. He wrote to a friend on the 4th of October, 1890:
+
+     "I beg you _in all sincerity, in all sincerity_, if you can stop
+     the interviews you tell me of, for the love of God stop them. I am
+     beginning to get frightfully tired of all this. Yesterday, while I
+     was at dinner, two reporters from ... fell into my soup. I am going
+     to leave for London, I am sick of all that is happening to me. So
+     if you can't stop the interviews they will interview my
+     servant."[1]
+
+This is not a man who would chatter himself away,[2] not even to Mr
+Frank Harris, who found him aggressive (and no wonder either if the
+Englishman said by word of mouth what he says in print, namely that _The
+Treasure of the Humble_ was written "at length" after _The Life of the
+Bee_, _Monna Vanna_, and the translation of _Macbeth_![3]). The fact is,
+there is very little printed matter easily available on the biography
+proper of Maeterlinck. It is true we have several accounts of him by his
+wife in a style singularly like his own; we have gossip; we have
+delightful portraits of the houses he lives in--but we have no bricks
+for building with.
+
+A future biographer may have at his hands what the present lacks; but I
+for my part have no other ambition for this book than that it should be
+a running account of Maeterlinck's works, with some suggestions as to
+their interpretation and value.
+
+JETHRO BITHELL.
+
+Hammerfield,
+
+Nr. Hemel Hempstead,
+
+31st January, 1913.
+
+
+[1] Gérard Harry, _Maeterlinck_, p. 18.
+
+[2] "Monsieur Maeterlinck being as all the world knows, hermetically
+mute."--(Grégoire Le Roy), _Le Masque_ (Brussels), Série ii, No. 5
+(1912).
+
+[3] "_La Vie des Abeilles_ brought us from the tiptoe of expectance to a
+more reasonable attitude, and _Monna Vanna_ and the translation of
+_Macbeth_ keyed our hopes still lower; but at length in _Le Trésor des
+Humbles_ Maeterlinck returned to his early inspiration."--_Academy_,
+15th June, 1912.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Maeterlinck born, August 29th, 1862; his family; meaning of his name;
+his father; residence at Oostacker; atmosphere of Ghent; educated at the
+Collège de Sainte-Barbe; his hatred of the Jesuits; his schoolfellows;
+subscribes to "La Jeune Belgique"; his first poem printed; his religious
+nature; his wish to study medicine; studies law at the University of
+Ghent; practises for a time as _avocat_; stay in Paris; influence of
+Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly; introduced by Grégoire
+Le Roy to the founders of "La Pléiade"; contributes "Le Massacre des
+Innocents"; influence on him of Flemish painting; other early efforts;
+influence of Charles van Lerberghe; meets Mallarmé; the symbolists; the
+birth of the _vers libre_; influence of Walt Whitman
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+Return to Belgium; residence at Ghent and Oostacker; introduced by
+Georges Rodenbach to the directors of "La Jeune Belgique"; contributes
+to this review, and to "Le Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique"; beginnings of
+the Belgian renaissance at Louvain and Brussels; "La Wallonie" founded;
+Belgian realism; the banquet to Lemonnier; reaction against naturalism;
+influence of Rodenbach
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+"Serres Chaudes" published; Ghent scandalised; decadent poetry;
+Maeterlinck refused a post by the Belgian Government; Maeterlinck always
+healthy, the appearance of disease in "Serres Chaudes" due to fashion;
+the new poetry; critical estimates of Maeterlinck as a lyrist
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+Influence of German pessimism; the forerunners of the new optimism, or
+futurism, of Maeterlinck and Verhaeren; "La Princesse Maleine" hailed as
+a work of the first rank; influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and of
+Shakespeare; the new elements in the book; Maeterlinck's invention, or
+adaptation from Ibsen, of interior dialogue; Maeterlinck's methods of
+suggesting mystery; the helplessness of man in the power of Fate; the
+questions of characterisation and of action
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+A new idea of tragedy; the unknown powers, or mysteries--Fate, Love, and
+Death; influence of Plato; "The Intruder"; "The Sightless";
+Maeterlinck's irony; Charles van Lerberghe's "Les Flaireurs"; "The
+Intruder" performed at Paris
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+Influence of Maeterlinck's Jesuit training; translation of Ruysbroeck;
+Maeterlinck and the mystics; "Les Sept Princesses" not understood by the
+critics; scenery of the early dramas; "Pelleas and Melisanda"; the
+question of adultery; the soul in exile; Maeterlinck and dramaturgy;
+influence of Walter Crane's picture-books
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+"Dramas for marionettes"; meaning of the term; "Alladine and Palomides";
+Maeterlinck's first emancipated woman; the irradiation of the soul; the
+doctrine of reality; "Interior"; "The Death of Tintagiles"; the closed
+door
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+"Annabella"; translation of Novalis; Maeterlinck's dramatic theories;
+the doctrine of "correspondences"; influence of Emerson; "The Treasure
+of the Humble"; influence of Carlyle; the doctrine of silence; dramatic
+possibilities of same; "the soul's awakening"; "les avertis";
+woman-worship; fatalism; Maeterlinck and Christianity; "interior
+beauty"; "Aglavaine and Selysette"; the problem of marriage; "Douze
+Chansons"
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+Maeterlinck settles in Paris; Georgette Leblanc; "Wisdom and Destiny";
+Maeterlinck's new philosophy; life, not death; anti-Christian teaching;
+Maeterlinck's evolution coincides partially with that of Nietzsche and
+Dehmel; salvation by love; Maeterlinck and Verhaeren; the shores of
+serenity; "The Life of the Bee"; cerebralism; futurism
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+"Ardiane and Bluebeard" inspired by Georgette Leblanc; feminism;
+emancipation of the flesh; "Sister Beatrice"; quietism again;
+Maeterlinck's version of the legend compared with that of Gottfried
+Keller; family life and religious prejudice; "The Buried Temple";
+heredity and morality; poverty and socialism; the aims of Nature;
+vegetarianism; "Monna Vanna" banned by the censor in England; Ibsen's
+idea of absolute truth in marriage; the idea of honour; Maeterlinck and
+Browning; "Joyzelle"; instinct and the designs of life; sensual and
+intellectual love; "The Miracle of St Antony"
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+"The Double Garden" affords glimpses into Maeterlinck's life; the essay,
+"On the Death of a Little Dog"; flowers old and new, symbols of the
+onward march of man; the reign of matter; the modern drama; "Life and
+Flowers"; the doctrine of aspiration; the religion of the future;
+Maeterlinck's teaching midway between that of Nietzsche and Tolstoy;
+Maeterlinck as a boxer; the victory of socialism inevitable; "The Blue
+Bird"--an epitome of Maeterlinck's ideas--performed in Moscow and
+London; the quest of happiness; futurism again; the drama awarded the
+Belgian "Triennial prize for dramatic literature"; translation and
+performance at St Wandrille of "Macbeth"; "Mary Magdalene" banned in
+England; quarrel with Paul Heyse; "Death" shocks the critics; its
+importance lies in its discussion of immortality; Maeterlinck awarded
+the Nobel prize for literature; he is honoured by the City of Brussels;
+he founds the "Maeterlinck prize"
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+Maeterlinck at the Villa Dupont; his personal appearance; the present
+position of Maeterlinck in critical estimation; the question of his
+originality; his public; Maeterlinck a futurist; compared by Louis
+Dumont-Wilden with Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; compared with Goethe;
+Maeterlinck a poet
+
+Index
+
+Bibliography
+
+
+
+
+MAURICE MAETERLINCK
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck[1] was born at Ghent on the
+29th of August, 1862. It is known that his family was settled at Renaix
+in East Flanders as early as the fourteenth century; and the
+Maeterlincks are mentioned as burghers of Ghent in the annals of
+Flanders. The name is said to be derived from the Flemish word "maet"
+(Dutch "maat"), "measure," and is interpreted as "the man who measures
+out: distributor." In harmony with this interpretation the story goes
+that one of the poet's ancestors was mayor of his village during a year
+of famine, and that he in that capacity distributed corn among the poor.
+Maeterlinck's father was a notary by profession; being in comfortable
+circumstances, however, he did not practise, but lived in a country
+villa at Oostacker, near Ghent, on the banks of the broad canal which
+joins Ghent to the Scheldt at the Dutch town of Terneuzen.[2] Here
+through the paternal garden the sea-going ships seemed to glide,
+"spreading their majestic shadows over the avenues filled with roses and
+bees."[3]
+
+Those bees and flowers in his father's garden stand for much in the
+healthy work of his second period. Over the fatalistic work of his first
+period lies, it may be, the shadow of the town he was born in.
+Maeterlinck was never absorbed by Ghent, as Rodenbach was by Bruges; but
+he was, as a young man, oppressed by some of its moods. Casual visitors
+to Ghent and Bruges may see nothing of the melancholy that poets and
+painters have woven into them; they may see in them thriving commercial
+towns; but poets and painters have loved their legendary gloom. "Black,
+suspicious watch-towers," this is Ghent seen by an artist's eyes, "dark
+canals on whose weary waters swans are swimming, mediaeval gateways,
+convents hidden by walls, churches in whose dusk women in wide, dark
+cloaks and ruche caps cower on the floor like a flight of frightened
+winter birds. Little streets as narrow as your hand, with bowed-down
+ancient houses all awry, roofs with three-cornered windows which look
+like sleepy eyes. Hospitals, gloomy old castles. And over all a dull,
+septentrional heaven."[4] That hospital on the canal bank which starts a
+poem in _Serres Chaudes_[5] may be one he knew from childhood; the old
+citadel of Ghent with its dungeons may be the prototype of the castles
+of his dramas.
+
+One part of his life in Ghent is still a bitter memory to our poet.
+"Maeterlinck will never forgive the Jesuit fathers of the Collège de
+Sainte-Barbe[6] their narrow tyranny.... I have often heard him say that
+he would not begin life again if he had to pay for it by his seven years
+at school. There is, he is accustomed to say, only one crime which is
+beyond pardon, the crime which poisons the pleasures and kills the
+smile of a child."[7]
+
+Out of twenty pupils in the highest class at Sainte-Barbe fourteen were
+intended to be Jesuits or priests. Such a school was not likely to be a
+good training-place for poets. Indeed, though Latin verses were allowed,
+it forbade the practice of vernacular poetry.[8] And yet this very
+school has turned out not less than five poets of international
+reputation. Emile Verhaeren (who may be called the national poet of
+Flanders, the most international of French poets after Victor Hugo) and
+Georges Rodenbach had been schoolboys together at Sainte-Barbe; and on
+its benches three other poets, Maeterlinck, Grégoire Le Roy, and Charles
+van Lerberghe, formed friendships for life. These three boys put their
+small cash together and subscribed to _La Jeune Belgique_, the clarion
+journal which, under the editorship of Max Waller, was calling Belgian
+literature into life; they devoured its pages clandestinely, as other
+schoolboys smoke their first cigarettes;[9] and Maeterlinck even sent in
+a poem which was accepted and printed. This was in 1883.
+
+The fact that Maeterlinck was reading _La Jeune Belgique_ shows that he
+was already spoilt for a priest. But he was essentially religious; and
+his career has proved that he was one of those poets Verhaeren sings of,
+who have arrived too late in history to be priests, but who are
+constrained by the force of their convictions to preach a new gospel. It
+was the religion inborn in him, as well as his monastic training, which
+made him a reader and interpreter of such mystics as Ruysbroeck, Jakob
+Boehme, and Swedenborg. As a schoolboy he did not feel attracted to
+poetry alone; he had a great liking for science, and his great wish was
+to study medicine.[10] Some time ago he wrote to a French medical
+journal as follows:
+
+     "I never commenced the study of medicine. I did my duty in
+     conforming with the family tradition, which ordains that the eldest
+     son shall be an _avocat_. I shall regret to my last day that I
+     obeyed that tradition, and consecrated my most precious years to
+     the vainest of the sciences. All my instincts, all my inclinations,
+     attached me to the study of medicine, which I am more than
+     convinced is the most beautiful of the keys that give access to the
+     great realities of life."
+
+It was in 1885 that he entered the University of Ghent as a student of
+law. Like Lessing and Goethe, he had no respect for his professors. He
+was again a fellow-student of van Lerberghe and Le Roy; they also were
+students of jurisprudence. He was twenty-four when, according to his
+parents' wish, he settled in Ghent as an _avocat_; to lose, as Gérard
+Harry puts it, "with triumphant facility the first and last causes which
+were confided to him." His shyness and the thin, squeaking voice in his
+robust peasant's frame were against him in a profession which in any
+case he hated. He practised for a year or so, and then--"il a jeté la
+toque et la robe aux orties."
+
+In 1886 he set out for Paris, ostensibly with the object of completing
+his legal education there. Grégoire Le Roy accompanied him; and each
+stayed about seven months. They had lodgings at 22 Rue de Seine.
+Grégoire Le Roy scamped painting at the Ecole St Luc and the Atelier
+Gervex et Humbert; and the pair of them spent a great deal of time in
+the museums. But the important thing in their stay in Paris was that
+they came into contact with men of letters. In the Brasserie Pousset at
+the heart of the Quartier Latin they heard Villiers de L'Isle-Adam,
+"that evangelist of dream and irony," reciting his short stories before
+writing them down. "I saw Villiers de L'Isle-Adam very often during the
+seven months I spent at Paris," Maeterlinck told Huret. "All I have done
+I owe to Villiers, to his conversation more than to his works, though I
+admire the latter exceedingly." Villiers was twenty-two years older
+than Maeterlinck, having been born in 1840; but his masterpieces had not
+long been published, and it was only in the later 'eighties that the
+young poets who were to be known as symbolists began to gather round
+him, as they gathered round Mallarmé and Verlaine.
+
+Villiers de L'Isle-Adam died in Paris in 1889. In the same year died,
+also in Paris, another writer who might be proved to have influenced
+Maeterlinck,[11] even if the latter had not placed on record his high
+admiration of him. This was Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (born 1808).
+Maeterlinck, after the banquet offered to him by the city of Brussels on
+the occasion of his receiving the Nobel prize, wrote despondently,
+expressing the good omen, seeing that men of real genius like Villiers
+de L'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly had died in obscurity and poverty.
+Both men, indeed, had been hostile to cheap popularity. Barbey lived, to
+quote Paul Bourget, "in a state of permanent revolt and continued
+protest." He had written scathing attacks on the Parnassians. Both poets
+were idealists among the naturalists; their idealism is a bridge
+spanning naturalism and joining the romanticists with the symbolists or
+neo-romanticists.
+
+Villiers was a king in exile on whom the young squires attended. But
+they themselves had their spurs to win; and it was the greatest good
+fortune for Maeterlinck that he was able to join their company and take
+part in their campaign. Several of them, Jean Ajalbert, Ephraïm Mikhaël,
+Pierre Quillard, had already been contributing to _La Basoche_, a review
+published at Brussels. There was Rodolphe Darzens, who, two years later,
+was to anticipate Maeterlinck in writing a play on Mary Magdalene. There
+was Paul Roux, who, as time went on, blossomed into "Saint-Pol-Roux le
+Magnifique"--he who founded "le Magnificisme," the school of poetry
+which had for its programme "a mystical _magnificat_ to eternal nature."
+It was in Pierre Quillard's rooms one evening that Grégoire Le Roy read
+to this circle of friends a short story by Maeterlinck: _Le Massacre des
+Innocents_. On the day following he introduced the author of the tale.
+On the 1st March, 1886, these young writers founded _La Pléiade_,[12] a
+short-lived review--six numbers appeared--which nevertheless played an
+important part. Beside the authors mentioned, it published contributions
+from René Ghil. It had the glory of printing the first verses of Charles
+van Lerberghe, and, in addition to several poems which were to appear in
+_Serres Chaudes_, Maeterlinck's _Massacre des Innocents_ (May, 1886).
+
+_Le Massacre des Innocents_ was signed "Mooris Maeterlinck." The author
+discarded it; but it was reprinted in Gérard Harry's monograph (1909). A
+translation by Edith Wingate Rinder appeared at Chicago in 1895.[13]
+
+It is a story which reproduces the delightful quaintness of early Dutch
+and Flemish painting:
+
+     "There were thirty horsemen or thereabouts, covered with armour,
+     round an old man with a white beard. On the croup of their horses
+     rode red or yellow lansquenets, who dismounted and ran across the
+     snow to stretch their limbs, while several soldiers clad in iron
+     dismounted also, and pissed against the trees they had tied their
+     horses to.
+
+     "Then they made for the Golden Sun Inn, and knocked at the door,
+     which was opened reluctantly, and they went and warmed themselves
+     by the fire while beer was served to them.
+
+     "Then they went out of the inn, with pots and pitchers and loaves
+     of wheaten bread for their companions who had stayed round the man
+     with the white beard, he who was waiting amid the lances.
+
+     "The street being still deserted, the captain sent horsemen behind
+     the houses, in order to keep a hold on the hamlet from the side of
+     the fields, and ordered the lansquenets to bring before him all
+     infants of two years old or over, that they might be massacred,
+     even as it is written in the Gospel of Saint Matthew."
+
+Maeterlinck in this story has simply turned an old picture, or perhaps
+several pictures, into words. The cruelty of the massacre does not
+affect us in the least; the style is such that anyone who has seen the
+Breughels' paintings understands at once that a series of fantastic
+pictures, which have no relation whatever to fact, or logic, or history,
+are being drawn; not dream-pictures, but scenes drawn with the greatest
+clearness, and figures standing out boldly in flesh and blood:
+
+     "But he replied in terror that the Spaniards had arrived, that they
+     had set fire to the farm, hanged his mother in the willow-trees,
+     and tied his nine little sisters to the trunk of a great tree."
+
+(You are to _see_ the woman hanging in the willow-trees, the deep green
+and any other colours you like.... Never mind about the pain the little
+girls must be suffering.)
+
+     "They came near a mill, on the skirts of the forest, and saw the
+     farm burning in the midst of the stars." (This is a flat canvas,
+     remember.) "Here they took their station, before a pond covered
+     with ice, under enormous oaks....
+
+     "There was a great massacre on the pond, in the midst of huddling
+     sheep, and cows that looked on the battle and the moon."
+
+This transposition of the mood (_Stimming_) of old paintings (not by any
+means word-painting or descriptive writing) is the secret of much of the
+verse of two other Flemings--Elskamp and Verhaeren. It is an immense
+pity that Maeterlinck did not write more in this fashion; many of us
+would have given some of his essays for this pure artistry. Not that he
+threw his gift of seeing pictures away; he made good use of it even when
+he had' given up the direct painting of moods for the indirect
+suggestion of them (or, in other words, when from a realist he had
+become a symbolist).
+
+Maeterlinck, at the time he wrote _The Massacre of the Innocents_, must
+have been trying his hand at various forms of literature. Adolphe van
+Bever in his little book publishes a letter from Charles van Lerberghe
+to himself which shows that the two young poets corrected each other's
+efforts. The letter, too, draws a portrait of Maeterlinck as he appeared
+at this time:
+
+     "Maeterlinck sent me verses, sonnets principally in Heredia's
+     manner, but Flemish in colour, short stories something like
+     Maupassant's, a comedy full of humour and ironical observation,
+     and other attempts. It is characteristic that he never sent me any
+     tragedy or epic poem, never anything bombastic or declamatory,
+     never anything languorous or sentimental either. Neither the
+     rhetorical nor the elegiac had any hold on him. He was a fine
+     handsome young fellow, always riding his bicycle or rowing, the
+     kind of student you would expect to see at Yale or Harvard. But he
+     was a poet besides being an athlete, and his robust exterior
+     concealed a temperament of extreme sensitiveness...."
+
+It was certainly van Lerberghe's own idea that it was he who had trained
+Maeterlinck; and Maeterlinck would certainly admit it. It was van
+Lerberghe, too, more than any other, who won Maeterlinck over to
+symbolism. But Maeterlinck met Mallarmé personally during his stay in
+Paris; in short, various influences worked upon him to turn him from
+Heredia's and Maupassant's manner to that of Mallarmé's disciples.
+
+The tide was flowing in that direction. Verhaeren was soon to desert the
+Parnassian camp.[14] Henri de Régnier was on the point of doing so.[15]
+Two years before Jean Moréas had published his first book: _Les Syrtes_
+(December 1884). In 1885 René Ghil's _Légendes d'âmes et de sangs_ and
+Jules Laforgue's _Les Complaintes_ came out; in 1886, René Ghil's _Le
+Traité du Verbe_, Jean Moréas's _Les Cantilènes_, Rimbaud's _Les
+Illuminations_, Vielé-Griffin's _Cueille d'Avril_. In the pages of _La
+Vogue_, launched on the 11th of April, 1886, were appearing some of the
+poems which Gustave Khan was to publish in 1887, as _Les Palais
+Nomades_. All these books are landmarks in the onward path of
+symbolism;[16] not because they are all, technically, symbolistic, but
+because each is in a new manner.
+
+Closely associated with the birth and growth of symbolism is the
+question of the origin of _vers libres_. French authorities differ: some
+credit Jules Laforgue with its invention; others a Polish Jewess, Marie
+Kryzinska, who seems to have attempted to write French poetry; and two
+of the French poets who were the first to use the medium, Francis
+Vielé-Griffin and Gustave Kahn, might dispute the glory of being its
+originators. As to Francis Vielé-Griffin, he is said to have introduced
+it by translations of Walt Whitman;[17] or, in other words, the French
+_vers libre_ is an imitation of Whitman's lawless line. Now this is a
+matter which, as we shall see, directly concerns Maeterlinck; so it will
+not be extraneous to our subject to discuss here the question of the
+origin of _vers libres_.
+
+Marie Kryzinska may be ruled out to begin with. Her poetry was laughed
+at; nobody took her seriously--at the most she served as an engine of
+war against Gustave Kahn, who was then anything but popular. As to Jules
+Laforgue, he was very much admired, and his influence is beyond
+question; but what he attempted in his verses was something quite
+different to what the _verslibristes_ proper attempted: it was rather a
+manner of compressing his ideas than of expressing them musically. As
+for Walt Whitman and Vielé-Griffin, it is true that translations had
+appeared, but they had not attracted the least notice, and no one
+betrayed the slightest interest for the technique of the American poet.
+As a matter of fact, few people knew anything about Whitman, beside the
+two poets of American birth, Francis Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill;
+and both at that time, although of course their manner was new, were
+writing, as far as _form_ is concerned, _regular_ verses. Another of the
+first poets to write free verses, the Walloon poet, Albert Mockel, was
+not unacquainted with Whitman; he had read _American Poems selected by
+William M. Rossetti_. Now Mockel, as editor of _La Wallonie_, which he
+had founded to defend the new style, was connected with the whole group
+of symbolists and _verslibristes_, all of whom, practically, were
+regular contributors to the review. And _La Wallonie_ was hardy: it
+lasted seven years; a great rallying ground of the young fighters before
+the advent of the _Mercure de France_, the second series of _La Vogue_,
+and _La Plume_. But, as it happened, Mockel was not in the least
+inspired by the selections from Whitman in Rossetti's collection; they
+made the impression on him of being Bible verses rather than real
+verses. One poet Whitman's lawless line did directly influence; and this
+was Maeterlinck, whose rhymeless verse in _Serres Chaudes_ was written
+under the inspiration of _Leaves of Grass_. But _Serres Chaudes_ did not
+appear till 1889, and even then the majority of the poems in the volume
+were rhymed and regular; so that it could hardly be claimed that
+Maeterlinck was the originator of the _vers libre_.[18]
+
+It would seem that Gustave Kahn has the greatest claim to priority. But
+it was Vielé-Griffin who popularised the new medium. Albert Mockel, too,
+must be mentioned. Kahn's _Palais Nomades_ appeared in April, 1887;
+Mockel's first _vers libres_ appeared in _La Wallonie_ in July, 1887.
+But these poems of Mockel had been written earlier, tentative verse by a
+young man not so confident in himself as Kahn, and who was only induced
+to publish by Kahn's audacious book.
+
+Mallarmé's attitude should be decisive. He studied the question, and
+reflected for a long time when he was invited to preside at a banquet
+offered to Gustave Kahn, in honour of the latter's book, _La Pluie et le
+beau Temps_. But, having weighed the arguments for and against, Mallarmé
+not only agreed to preside at the banquet, but actually to bear witness
+in favour of Kahn as the innovator of the _vers libre_--which he did in
+a toast reproduced in _La Revue blanche_.
+
+Catulle Mendès, in his half-serious manner, suggested that the first
+advocacy of the _vers libre_ was to be found in a book called _Poésie
+nouvelle_, which Lemerre brought out in 1880. The author, a certain
+Della Rocca de Vergalo, was a Peruvian exile living in Paris; his ideas
+were that lines of poetry should begin with small letters, and that the
+alternance of masculine and feminine rhymes should be discarded. But the
+founders of the _vers libre_, I am told, had never heard of this book.
+Mallarmé, it is true, had been interested in finding a publisher for it;
+but merely because he wished to help the author to earn money enough to
+take him back to Peru.
+
+These questions of symbolism and free verse must have been discussed in
+the _cénacle_ which Maeterlinck joined. Not one of the group adopted the
+_vers libre_ at this time; more than one, though all had the greatest
+regard for Mallarmé, may be said to have remained tolerably faithful to
+the Parnassian prosody in after years. The symbolist element among them
+was represented really by Saint-Pol-Roux and Maeterlinck.
+
+
+[1] The Flemish pronunciation is Màh-ter-lee-nk; but Frenchmen pronounce
+it as though it were a French name.
+
+[2] It was by this canal, no doubt, that Maeterlinck as a young man
+would skate "into Holland." See Huret's _Enquête_. And it inspired the
+scenery of _The Seven Princesses_.
+
+[3] Mme Georgette Leblanc, _Morceaux choisis_, Introduction.
+
+[4] Anselma Heine, _Maeterlinck_, pp. 7-8.
+
+[5] _Serres Chaudes_, "Hôpital."
+
+[6] "The literary history of modern Belgium, by the freaks of chance,
+was born in one single house. In Ghent, the favourite city of the
+Emperor Charles V., in the old Flemish city heavy with fortifications,
+rises remote, far from noisy streets, Sainte-Barbe, the grey-walled
+Jesuit monastery. Its thick, defensive walls, its silent corridors and
+refectories, remind one somewhat of Oxford's beautiful colleges; here,
+however, there is no ivy softening the walls, there are no flowers to
+lay their variegated carpet over the green courts."--Stefan Zweig,
+_Emile Verhaeren_ (_Mercure de France_, 1910), pp. 39-40.
+
+[7] Mme Georgette Leblanc, _Morceaux choisis_, Introduction.
+
+[8] Anselma Heine, _Maeterlinck_, p. 9. But cf. Léon Bazalgette, _Emile
+Verhaeren_, p. 14.
+
+[9] Gérard Harry, _Maeterlinck_, p. 9, note.
+
+
+[10] Gérard Harry, _Maeterlinck_, p. 26; Heine, _Maeterlinck_, p. 9.
+
+[11] Cf., for instance, Barbey's "Réfléchir sur son bonheur n'est-ce pas
+le doubler?" with the opening chapters of _Sagesse et Destinée_.
+
+[12] The review of the same name which was published at Brussels, by
+Lacomblez, beginning three years later, and in which Maeterlinck's
+criticism of Iwan Gilkin's _Damnation de l'Artiste_ appeared, was a
+third-rate periodical.
+
+[13] _The Massacre of the Innocents and other Tales by Belgian Writers._
+
+[14] Verhaeren's first _vers libres_ appeared in book form in January,
+1891 (printed in December, 1890) in _Les Flambeaux noirs_. But in May,
+1890, he had published, in _La Wallonie_, a poem in _vers libres_; and
+this is dated 1889.
+
+[15] _Poèmes anciens et romanesques_, his first book of acknowledged
+symbolism, did not appear till 1890, but the poems which compose it were
+written between 1887 and 1888.
+
+[16] It was in 1886, too, that Gustave Kahn with the collaboration of
+Jean Moréas and Paul Adam, founded the review _Le Symboliste_.
+
+[17] A translation of Whitman's _Enfants d'Adam_, by Jules Laforgue,
+appeared in _La Vogue_ in 1886. Stuart Merrill personally handed this
+translation to Whitman, who was delighted. (See _Le Masque_, Série ii,
+Nos. 9 and 10, 1912). Vielé-Griffin's first translation of Whitman
+appeared in November, 1888, in. _La Revue indépendante_; another
+translation of his appeared afterwards in _La Cravache_. A translation
+of Whitman had appeared in the _Revue des deux Mondes_ in the reign of
+Napoleon III.
+
+[18] He himself told Huret that _La Princesse Maleine_ was written in
+_vers libres_ concealed typographically as prose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+On his return to Belgium, Maeterlinck spent his winters in Ghent, in the
+house of his parents; his summers in the family villa at the village of
+Oostacker.
+
+He now (1887) became, acquainted with Georges Rodenbach, who introduced
+him to the directors of _La Jeune Belgique_. He was in no hurry to
+write, however; in three years the magazine only published three poems,
+still in regular verse, from his pen. These were included later in
+_Serres Chaudes_, as also were the few poems in regular verse which
+appeared in the anthology of Belgian verse, _Le Parnasse de la Jeune
+Belgique_, published in 1887 under the auspices of _La Jeune Belgique_.
+
+The fact that by 1887 it was possible to compile such an anthology is
+remarkable; for before 1880 Belgium, from the point of view of
+literature, was a desert. But in 1879 certain noisy students at the
+University of Louvain (Verhaeren, Gilkin, Giraud, Ernest van Dyck,[1]
+Edmond Deman,[2] and others) put their heads together and founded a
+bantam magazine, _La Semaine des Etudiants_.[3] This magazine was the
+beginning of the modern movement in Belgian literature. In October of
+the "following year, another student, who, when his identity was
+disclosed, turned out to be Max Waller, brought out a hostile magazine,
+_Le Type_; and the fight between the rivals became so merciless that the
+University authorities suppressed them both. Max Waller, however,
+nothing daunted, went to Brussels, and acquired _La Jeune Belgique_, a
+review that had been founded by students of Brussels University, made
+friends with his antagonists of _La Semaine_, and associated them with
+himself in the editing of his review. Georges Eekhoud, Georges
+Rodenbach, and other writers joined them; and _La Jeune Belgique_ went
+on with its task of fighting the Philistine. Max Waller died in 1889;
+and when Gilkin became editor in 1891, it became the organ of the
+Parnassians in Belgium, while the symbolists (French as well as Belgian)
+enriched the pages of La Wallonie, which Albert Mockel had founded in
+Liège in 1886.
+
+We have seen, from Charles van Lerberghe's letter to Adolphe van Bever,
+that Maeterlinck began by writing "short stories something like
+Maupassant's." _The Massacre of the Innocents_ is realistic. Verhaeren,
+too, had discovered himself when, a student at Louvain, he read
+Maupassant's poems. His first book, _Les Flamandes_, made a critic say
+that the poet had burst on the world like an abcess. And the Belgians
+had in Camille Lemonnier a realist whose novels are as uncompromising as
+those of Zola. At the time when Maeterlinck began to write Lemonnier
+was, as they called him, the field-marshal of Belgian literature. In the
+spring of 1883, the jury whose duty it was to award a prize for the best
+work published during the last five years decided that no book had been
+published which was sufficiently meritorious. It was felt that this was
+an official insult to Belgian letters, and particularly to Camille
+Lemonnier, who had published various works of striking merit in the five
+years concerned. _A banquet de guerre_ to Lemonnier was arranged by _La
+Jeune Belgique_, and there were two hundred and twelve subscribers. The
+banquet took place on the 27th May, 1883, and this event may be said to
+mark, not only the triumph of naturalism in Belgium, but also the fact
+that the élite of the Belgians were now conscious of the renaissance of
+their literature.[4] It will be Maeterlinck's task, after his return to
+Belgium, to react against this naturalism, and to write works which
+precipitate the decay of naturalism, not in Belgium only, but in the
+whole world; he and other Belgians, until Belgian literature becomes, as
+it was in the time of chivalry, "when the muse was the august sister of
+the sword, and stanzas were like bright staircases climbed, in pomp and
+epic fires, by verses casqued with silver like knights,"[5] the most
+discussed, the most suggestive literature in Europe.[6]
+
+In this reaction against naturalism in Belgium, Maeterlinck's work was
+hardly more effective than the dreamy poetry of Georges Rodenbach. It
+was not till 1887 that Rodenbach definitely left Belgium for Paris, and
+by that time he was a force in Belgian literature. No doubt he
+influenced Maeterlinck;[7] he too was a mystic and a poet of silence.
+Rodenbach compares his soul with half-transparent water, with the water
+shut up in an aquarium: "he stands in silent fear before the riddle of
+this 'âme sous-marine,' surmising a deep and mysterious abyss, at the
+bottom of which a priceless treasure of dreams is lying buried, under
+the shimmering surface that quietly reflects images of the world. He
+complains that the poor immensurable soul knows itself so little, knows
+no more of its life than the water-lily knows of the surface it floats
+on:
+
+    "'Ah! ce que l'âme sait d'elle-même est si peu
+     Devant l'immensité de sa vie inconnue!'
+
+"Then he would fain descend into this unknown world, seek through the
+dark deeps, dive for the treasures which slumber there perhaps.... But
+it remains a longing, a wish, a dream:
+
+    "'Je rêve de plonger jusqu'au fond de mon âme
+     Où des rêves sombres ont perdu leur trésor."
+
+"And so Rodenbach remains standing on the surface, staring at the deeps,
+but without seeing anything in them other than the trembling reflection
+of the things around him."[8]
+
+Maeterlinck, as we shall see, is also the poet of the soul; he sees it
+under a bell-jar as Rodenbach saw it in an aquarium; but Maeterlinck
+does not stand gazing at the unknown waters: he dives into the deeps,
+and brings back the treasures which Rodenbach surmised.
+
+
+
+[1] The famous Wagner tenor.
+
+[2] The Brussels publisher.
+
+[3] The first number is dated Saturday, the 18th October, 1879, and
+begins with "rimes d'avant poste" by "Rodolphe" (=Verhaeren).
+
+[4] Iwan Gilkin, _Quinze années de littérature_.
+
+[5] Albert Giraud, _Hors du Siècle_.
+
+[6] In the thirteenth century in Germany, "Fleming" was synonymous with
+"verray parfit, gentil knight." The Bavarian Sir Neidhart von Reuental,
+for instance, refers to himself as a "Fleming."
+
+[7] Cf. Rodenbach's;
+
+"Je vis comme si mon âme avait été
+ De la lune et de l'eau qu'on aurait mis sous verre"
+
+with Maeterlinck's:
+
+"On en a mis plusieurs sur d'anciens clairs de lune."
+
+--_Serres Chaudes_, "Cloches de verre."
+
+[8] G. van Hamel, _Het Letterkundige Leven van Frankrijk_, pp. 127-8.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+In 1889 Maeterlinck published his first book: _Serres Chaudes_
+(Hot-houses). We have seen that several of the poems which compose it
+had already appeared in _La Pléiade_ and in _Le Parnasse de la Jeune
+Belgique_.
+
+The subject of this collection of verse, as, indeed, of the dramas and
+the essays which were to follow, is _the soul_. Rodenbach, we remember,
+saw the soul prisoned in an aquarium, "at the bottom of the ponds of
+dream," reflected in the glass of mirrors; Maeterlinck sees it languid,
+and moist, and oppressed, and helplessly inactive[1] in a hot-house
+whose doors are closed for ever. The tropical atmosphere is created by
+pictures (seen through the deep green windows of the hot-house) as of
+lions drowned in sunshine, or of mighty forests lying with not a leaf
+stirring over the roses of passion by night. But of a sudden (for it is
+all a dream) we may find ourselves in the reek of the "strange
+exhalations" of fever-patients in some dark hospital glooming a clogged
+canal in Ghent.... Evidently not a book for the normal Philistine. In
+Ghent it made people look askance at Maeterlinck. It branded him as a
+decadent.
+
+And that was a dreadful thing in Belgium. Nay, in that country, at that
+time, and for long after, even to be a poet was a disgrace. It is only
+by remembering this fact that one can understand the brutality of the
+fight waged by the reviews, and by the poets in their books; and it is
+perhaps owing to the hostility of the public that such a great mass of
+good poetry was written. Year after year Charles van Lerberghe renewed
+his futile application to the Government for a poor post as secondary
+teacher, and on account of his first writings[2] Maeterlinck was refused
+some modest public office for which he applied.
+
+The contempt of the Belgians for young poets may be condoned to a
+certain extent when one appreciates the absurdities in which some of
+them indulged. It was not the _gaminerie_ of such poets as Théodore
+Hannon and Max Waller which shocked the honest burghers; they were
+rather horrified at the absurdities of the new style. Rodenbach, who was
+a real poet, wrote crazy things; as, for instance, when he compared a
+muslin curtain to a communicant partaking of the moon.[3] Even when the
+absurdity is an application of the theories of the symbolists it is
+often apt to raise a laugh, e.g., when Théodore Hannon, extending the
+doctrine that perfumes sing, makes a perfume blare:
+
+    "Opoponax! nom très bizarre
+     Et parfum plus bizarre encor!
+     Opoponax, le son du cor
+     Est pâle auprès de ta fanfare!"
+
+A goodly list of absurdities could be collected from _Serres Chaudes_
+also, if the collector detached odd passages from their context:
+
+    "Perhaps there is a tramp on a throne,
+     You have the idea that corsars are waiting on a pond,
+     And that antediluvian beings are going to invade towns."
+
+And a scientist of Lombroso's type could easily, by culling choice
+quotations, draw an appalling picture of a degenerate:
+
+                 "Pity my absence on
+                    The threshold of my will!
+                  My soul is helpless, wan,
+                    With white inaction ill."
+
+So incoherent and strange have these poems[4] appeared to some people
+who are ardent Maeterlinckians that they assume he may, for a period,
+have been mentally ill.[5] If he had been, it would have been
+historically significant. Verhaeren went through such a period of mental
+illness. It might be asserted that the modern man must be mad. The life
+of to-day, especially in cities, with its whipped hurry, its dust and
+noises, is too complex to be lived with the nerves of a Victorian. But
+the human organism is capable of infinite assimilation; and the period
+we live in is busy creating a new type of man.[6] It is the glory of
+Verhaeren to have sung the advent of this new man; it is the glory of
+Maeterlinck, as we shall see, to have proved that a species forcibly
+adjusts itself to existing conditions.
+
+To a Victorian the poems in _Serres Chaudes_ must of necessity seem
+diseased; just as the greater part of Tennyson's poetry must of
+necessity seem ordinary to us. How many "Dickhäuter" have called
+Hoffmansthal's poetry diseased? If it is, so is Yeats's. Turn from
+Robert Bridges's poems of outdoor life--the noble old English style--to
+Yeats's dim visions, or to Arthur Symons's harpsichord dreaming through
+the room, and you have the difference between yesterday and to-day.
+
+At all events _Serres Chaudes_, whether mad or not, is bathed in the
+same atmosphere as the dramas soon to follow. As to the relative value
+of the book from the point of view of art, opinion differs. Some good
+critics who are not prone to praise think highly of it; but the general
+impression seems to be that these poems are chiefly of interest as
+marking a stage in the author's development. If Maeterlinck had written
+nothing more he would have been quite forgotten, or only remembered
+because, for instance, Charles van Lerberghe wrote some poetry in the
+form of a criticism of the book. Compared with other Belgian lyric
+verse, Verhaeren's, or Charles van Lerberghe's, or Max Elskamp's, it is
+inferior work. Not that there are no good poems; some of them, indeed,
+are excellent, and not seldom the poet is on the track of something
+fine:
+
+  "Attention! the shadow of great sailing-ships passes
+     over the dahlias of submarine forests;
+   And I am for a moment in the shadow of whales
+     going to the pole!"
+
+Whatever value the book may have as poetry, the rhymeless poems in it
+have, as we have seen, considerable importance as being attempts to
+reproduce Walt Whitman's manner. They are interesting, too, because they
+attempt to create a mood by the use of successive images.[7] Perhaps,
+elsewhere (Tancrède de Visan suggests the Song of Solomon) this method
+has been applied successfully. The poems in _Serres Chaudes_ are
+experiments.
+
+
+
+[1] Cf. Rodenbach, _Le Règne du Silence_, p. 1:
+
+    "Mais les choses pourtant entre le cadre d'or
+     Ont un air de souffrir de leur vie inactive;
+     Le miroir qui les aime a borné leur essor
+     En un recul de vie exigüe et captive..."
+
+]
+
+
+[2] Gérard Harry, p. 19. _Le Masque_, Série ii, No. 5: "jeune encore, il
+avait sollicité les fonctions de juge de paix, mais le gouvernement
+belge, prévoyant son destin de poète, les lui avait généreusement
+refusées, et pour reconnaître ce service, Maeterlinck ne lui rend que
+mépris et dédain et refuse même les distinctions honorifiques les plus
+hautes, celles qu'on n'accorde généralement qu'aux très grands
+industriels ou aux très vieux militaires ou politiciens."
+
+[3]
+
+    "Chambres pleines de songe! Elles vivent vraiment
+     En des rêves plus beaux que la vie ambiante,
+     Grandissant toute chose au Symbole, voyant
+     Dans chaque rideau pâle une Communiante
+     Aux falbalas de mousseline s'éployant
+     Qui communie au bord des vitres, de la Lune!"
+                 --_Le Règne du Silence_, p. 4.
+
+
+
+[4] They make one think of what Novalis wrote: "poems unconnected, yet
+with associations, like dreams; poems, melodious merely and full of
+beautiful words, but absolutely without sense or connection--at most
+individual sentences intelligible--nothing but fragments, so to speak,
+of the most varied things."
+
+[5] See Schlaf's _Maeterlinck_, p. 12; _ibid._, p. 30; and Monty Jacobs'
+_Maeterlinck_, p. 39. But Maeterlinck's brain was always as healthy as
+his body. At the time he wrote _Serres Chaudes_ disease was fashionable,
+that is all; and, beside the main influence of Baudelaire, there was the
+fear of death instilled by the Jesuits.
+
+[6] Verhaeren, in his monograph on Rembrandt (1905), has suggested that
+the man of genius may, "in specially favourable conditions, create a new
+race, thanks to the happy deformation of his brain fixing itself first,
+by a propitious crossing, in his direct descendants, to be transmitted
+afterwards to a whole posterity."
+
+[7] See Tancrède de Visan's interpretation in _L'Attitude du Lyrisme
+contemporain_, pp. 119 ff.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Some of the most eminent symbolists were strongly influenced by the
+pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer[1] and Eduard von Hartmann. Their
+outlook on the world is not a whit more rosy than that of the
+naturalists. Vielé-Griffin did, it is true, preach the doctrine that the
+principle of all things is activity; and that, since every "function in
+exercise" implies a pleasure, there cannot be activity without joy, even
+grief being good, for grief, too, is a spending of energy. Albert
+Mockel's doctrine of aspiration, moreover--his theory that the soul,
+constantly changing like a river, runs like a river to some far ocean of
+the future--is elevating and consoling; and is a step onward to the
+complete victory won over pessimism by Verhaeren and Maeterlinck. But
+when we read the first plays of Maeterlinck we must not forget that he
+is still a prisoner in the dark cave, with his back to the full light
+of the real which he was to turn round to later.
+
+The first of these plays out of the darkness, _La Princesse Maleine_
+(The Princess Maleine), a drama in five acts, came out in 1889 in a
+first edition of thirty copies which Maeterlinck himself, with the help
+of a friend, had printed for private circulation on a small hand-press.
+
+Iwan Gilkin, to whose _Damnation de l'Artiste_, published in 1890,
+Maeterlinck was to dedicate his first critique, was the first to analyse
+it in _La Jeune Belgique_; and he was not wrong when he called it "an
+important work which marks a date in the history of the contemporary
+theatre." But it was Octave Mirbeau's famous article in _Figaro_ which
+made Maeterlinck. Literally, he awoke and found himself famous. The
+trumpet-blast that awoke the world and frightened Maeterlinck into
+deeper shyness, was this:
+
+     "I know nothing of M. Maurice Maeterlinck. I know not whence he is
+     nor how he is. Whether he is old or young, rich or poor, I know
+     not. I only know that no man is more unknown than he; and I know
+     also that he has created a masterpiece, not a masterpiece labelled
+     masterpiece in advance, such as our young masters publish every
+     day, sung to all the notes of the squeaking lyre--or rather of the
+     squeaking flute of our day; but an admirable and a pure eternal
+     masterpiece, a masterpiece which is sufficient to immortalise a
+     name, and to make all those who are an-hungered for the beautiful
+     and the great rise up and call this name blessèd; a masterpiece
+     such as honest and tormented artists have, sometimes, in their
+     hours of enthusiasm, dreamed of writing, and such as up to the
+     present not one of them has written. In short, M. Maurice
+     Maeterlinck has given us the greatest work of genius of our time,
+     and the most extraordinary and the most simple also, comparable,
+     and--shall I dare to say it--superior in beauty to whatever is most
+     beautiful in Shakespeare. This work is called _La Princesse
+     Maleine_. Are there in all the world twenty persons who know it? I
+     doubt it."[2]
+
+The Pre-Raphaelite atmosphere of the play will escape no one. At the
+time he wrote it Maeterlinck had covered the walls of his study with
+pictures taken from Walter Crane's books for children; and he had
+enhanced their effect by framing them under green-tinted glass. He found
+his source in the English translation of one of Grimm's fairy-tales,
+that which tells of the fair maid Maleen.[3] He has changed the Low
+German atmosphere of the tale to one suggested vaguely by Dutch,
+Scandinavian, and English names. He has imported, as the instigator of
+all the evil, a copy of Queen Gertrude in Hamlet. This is Anne, the
+dethroned Queen of Jutland, who has taken refuge at the Court of King
+Hjalmar at Ysselmonde. She soon has the old king in her power; and at
+the same time she lays traps for his son, Prince Hjalmar. The latter is
+betrothed to Princess Maleine, the daughter of King Marcellus; but at
+the banquet to celebrate the betrothal a fierce quarrel between the two
+kings breaks out, the consequence of which is a war in which King
+Hjalmar kills Marcellus and lays his realm waste. Before the outbreak of
+the war, however, Marcellus had immured Maleine, because she would not
+forget Prince Hjalmar, together with her nurse, in an old tower from
+which the two women, loosening the stones with their finger-nails,
+escape. They go wandering until they arrive at the Castle of Ysselmonde;
+and here Maleine becomes serving-woman to Princess Uglyane, the daughter
+of Queen Anne. Uglyane is about to be married to Prince Hjalmar; but
+Maleine makes herself known to him, and he is so happy that he believes
+he is "up to the heart in Heaven." At a Court festival a door opens and
+Princess Maleine is seen in white bridal garments; the queen pretends to
+be kind to her, makes an attempt to poison her which is only half
+successful, and finally strangles her. Prince Hjalmar finds the corpse,
+and stabs the queen and himself; and the old king asks whether there
+will be salad for breakfast.
+
+It is not astonishing that Octave Mirbeau thought the play was in the
+Shakespearian style. The resemblance is striking. Hjalmar is clearly
+modelled on Hamlet. The nurse is a mere copy of the nurse in _Romeo and
+Juliet_. There is a clown. There is the same changing of scenes as in
+Shakespeare. Dire portents accompany the action: there is a comet
+shedding blood over the castle, there is a rain of stars; there is the
+same eclipse of the moon as heralded the fall of Cæsar; and if the
+graves are not tenantless, as they were in Rome, someone says they are
+going to be. It would be easy to draw up a list of apparent
+reminiscences. Notwithstanding this René Doumic is quite wrong when he
+talks of the drama being made with rags of Shakespeare. Maeterlinck has
+simply taken his requisites from Shakespeare. There are two things in
+which Maeterlinck is quite original: the dialogue, and the æsthetic
+intention.
+
+Shakespeare flows along in lyrical and rhetorical sentences.
+Maeterlinck's sentences are short, often unfinished, leaving much to be
+guessed at; and they are the common speech of everyday life, containing
+no archaic or poetic diction. It is no doubt quite true that French
+people do not talk in this style; but, as van Hamel points out, it is
+the language of the taciturn Flemish peasants among whom the poet was
+living when he wrote the play. Maeterlinck has himself[4] criticised
+"the astonished repeating of words which gives the personages the
+appearance of rather deaf somnambulists for ever being shocked out of a
+painful dream."...
+
+"However," he continues, "this want of promptitude in hearing and
+replying is intimately connected with their psychology and the somewhat
+haggard idea they have of the universe." It is already that _interior
+dialogue_ of which he showed such a mastery in his next plays: the
+characters grope for words and stammer fragments, but we know by what
+they do not say what is happening in their souls. "It is closely
+connected with what Maeterlinck has written about Silence.[5] This
+second, unspoken dialogue, which, as a matter of fact, for our poet is
+the real one, is made possible by various expedients: by pauses,
+gestures, and by other indirect means of this nature. Most of all,
+however, by the spoken word itself, and by a dialogue which in the whole
+course of dramatic development hitherto has been employed for the first
+time by Maeterlinck and, beside him, by Ibsen. It is a dialogue marked
+by an unheard-of triviality and banality of the flattest everyday
+speech, which, however, in the midst of this second, inner dialogue, is
+invested with an indefinable magic."[6]
+
+If the dialogue points forward to the theories propounded in _The
+Treasure of the Humble_, the melodrama of some of the scenes and the
+bloody catastrophe to which they tend is directly opposed to these
+theories. Too transparently throughout the play the intention of the
+poet is to horrify. Apart from the comets and other phenomena which
+portend ruin, he is constantly heightening the mystery by something
+eerie, all of it, no doubt, on close inspection, attributable to natural
+causes, but, if the truth must be told, perilously near the ridiculous.
+The weeping willows, and the owls, and the bats, and the fearsome swans,
+and the croaking ravens, and the seven _béguines_, and the cemetery, and
+the sheep among the tombs, and the peacocks in the cypresses, and the
+marshes, and the will-o'-the-wisps are an excessive agglomeration. But
+the atmosphere is finely suggested:
+
+     MALEINE: I am afraid!...
+
+     HJALMAR: But we are in the park....
+
+     MALEINE: Are there walls round the park?
+
+     HJALMAR: Of course; there are walls and moats round the park.
+
+     MALEINE: And nobody can get in?
+
+     HJALMAR: No;--but there are plenty of unknown things that get in
+     all the same.
+
+In the murder scene[7] the falling of the lily in the vase, the
+scratching of the dog at the door, are some of the things that are
+effective. And if Webster's manner is worth all the praise it has had,
+surely the murder in this play is tense tragedy.
+
+This scene is only by its bourgeois language different from the accepted
+Shakespearian conception of tragedy. But, as we have said, Maeterlinck's
+intention differs from that of Shakespeare, from whom he has borrowed
+most: Shakespeare's intention, in his tragedies, was to move his
+audience by the spectacle of human beings acting under the mastery of
+various passions; Maeterlinck's intention is to suggest the helplessness
+of human beings, and the impossibility of their resistance in the hands
+of Fate. Maleine--who is no heavier than a bird--who cannot hold a
+flower in her hand--is the poor human soul, the prey of Fate. The King
+and Hjalmar also are the prey of Fate; Queen Anne not less so, for
+crime, like love, is one of the strings by which Fate works her puppets.
+Each is helpless; they feel, dimly, that something which they do not
+understand is moving them: hence their groping speech.
+
+And the essential tragedy is this: the perverse and the wicked and the
+good and the pure alike are moved to disaster, as though they were
+dreaming and wished to awaken but could not, by unseen powers. Life is
+a nightmare. In Grimm's tale the wicked princess had her head chopped
+off; but the fairy-tale was a dream dreamt in the infancy of the soul;
+now the soul is awakening to the consciousness of its destiny; and we
+are beginning to feel that there is no retribution and no reward, that
+there is only Fate. And it is the young and the happy and the good and
+pure that Fate takes first, simply because they are not so passive as
+the unhappy and the wicked.[8]
+
+Given the intentions of the dramatist, one should not ask for
+characterisation in the accepted sense. Characters!--Maeterlinck himself
+told Huret that his intention was to write "a play in Shakespeare's
+manner for a marionette theatre." That is to say, the real actors are
+behind the scenes, the forces that move the marionettes. In a Punch and
+Judy show, of course, you can guess at the character of the showman by
+the voice he imputes to the dolls; but when the showman is Death, or
+Fate, or God, or something for which we have no name, there is no
+possibility of characterisation--we can only judge by what the showman
+makes the dolls do whether he is a good or an evil being. The fact that
+Hjalmar is modelled on Hamlet, and Queen Anne on Queen Gertrude only
+proves that the dramatist is not yet full master of his own powers; and,
+if we look closely, we shall find that the unconscious puppets resemble
+their living patterns only as shadows resemble the shapes that cast
+them. We need not expect from characters that shadow forth states of
+mind--feelings of helplessness, terror, uneasiness, "blank
+misgivings..." sadness--the deliberate or headlong action we are
+accustomed to in beings of flesh and blood. What action there seems to
+be is illusory--if Maleine escapes from the tower, it is only to fall
+deeper into the power of her evil destiny; if, by a move as though a
+hand were put forth in the dark, a faint stirring of her passivity, she
+wins back her lover, it is only to lose him and herself the more. We
+shall see that Maeterlinck in some of his next dramas dispenses with
+seen action altogether: in _The Intruder_, for instance, the only
+action, the death of the mother, takes place behind the scenes; in _The
+Interior_ the action, the daughter's suicide, has taken place when the
+play opens.
+
+There is, however, some rudimentary characterisation in _Princess
+Maleine_. The doting old king is not an original creation; but the
+drivelling of his terror-stricken conscience should be effective (as
+melodrama) on the stage. "Look at their eyes!" he says, pointing to the
+corpses which strew the stage, "they are going to leap on me like
+frogs." And his longing for salad is probably immortal....
+
+
+
+[1] Maeterlinck told Huret that he had been influenced by Schopenhauer
+"qui arrive jusqu'à vous consoler de la mort."
+
+[2] Figaro, 24th August, 1890.
+
+[3] Pronounced in German like the French _Maleine_.
+
+[4] Preface to _Théâtre_, p. 2.
+
+[5] In Swedenborg's mysticism, the literal meanings of words are only
+protecting veils which hide their inner meanings. See "Le Tragique
+Quotidien" (in _Le Trésor des Humbles_) pp. 173-4. That Maeterlinck was
+meditating the famous chapter on "Silence" in _The Treasure of the
+Humble_ when he wrote _Princess Maleine_ may be inferred from Act ii.
+sc. 6: "I want to see her at last in presence of the evening.... I want
+to see if the night will make her think. May it not be that there is a
+little silence in her heart?"
+
+[6] Schlaf's _Maeterlinck_, p. 31.
+
+[7] Suggested, perhaps, by the strangling of Little Snow-white in
+Grimm's story.
+
+[8] Preface to _Théâtre_, pp. 4-5.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+According to the accepted dramatic canons, a play is a tragedy when
+death allays the excitement aroused in us by the action, the whole
+course of which moves onward to this inevitable end. In such tragedies
+death is a relief from the stormy happenings which bring it; it is not
+in itself represented as profoundly interesting--it is not an aim, but a
+result, "it is our death that guides our life," says Maeterlinck, "and
+life has no other aim than our death."[1] Not only the careers, crowded
+with events, of the great, but also the simple, quiet lives of lowly
+people are raised into high significance by this common bourne. Death is
+not so much a catastrophe as a mystery. It casts its shadow over the
+whole of our finite existence; and beyond it lies infinity.
+
+Death, however, is only one of the mighty mysteries, the unknown powers,
+"the presences which are not to be put by," which rule our destinies.
+Love is another. To these two cosmic forces are devoted a series of
+dramas which were in 1901-2 collected by Maeterlinck in three volumes
+under the title of _Théâtre_. In the preface[2] to the collection
+Maeterlinck has himself interpreted the plays with a clearness and
+fullness which leaves the reader in no doubt as to his aims.
+
+     "In these plays," he says, "faith is held in enormous powers,
+     invisible and fatal. No one knows their intentions, but the spirit
+     of the drama assumes they are malevolent, attentive to all our
+     actions, hostile to smiles, to life, to peace, to happiness.
+     Destinies which are innocent but involuntarily hostile are here
+     joined, and parted to the ruin of all, under the saddened eyes of
+     the wisest, who foresee the future but can change nothing in the
+     cruel and inflexible games which Love and Death practise among the
+     living. And Love and Death and the other powers here exercise a
+     sort of sly injustice, the penalties of which--for this injustice
+     awards no compensation--are perhaps nothing but the whims of
+     fate....
+
+     "This Unknown takes on, most frequently, the form of Death. The
+     infinite presence of death, gloomy, hypocritically active, fills
+     all the interstices of the poem. To the problem of existence no
+     reply is made except by the riddle of its annihilation."
+
+There is another thing to be remembered (this is a repetition, but it is
+necessary) in reading Maeterlinck's early plays. Behind the scene which
+he chooses with varying degrees of clearness, lies Plato's famous
+image--the image of a cavern on whose walls enigmatic shadows are
+reflected.[3] In this cavern man gropes about in exile, with his back to
+the light he is seeking.
+
+The mysterious coming of death is the theme of _The Intruder_, a play by
+Maeterlinck which was published in 1890. It appeared as the first of two
+plays in a volume called _Les Aveugles_ (The Sightless). This is the
+name of the second play in the book; but the grandfather in _The
+Intruder_ too is blind, and through both plays runs the idea that we are
+blind beings groping in the dark (in Plato's cavern), and that those who
+see least see most.
+
+The subject of _The Intruder_ can be told in a few words. In a dark room
+in an old castle are sitting the blind grandfather, the father, the
+uncle, and the three daughters. In the adjoining room lies the mother
+who has recently been confined. She has been at death's door; but at
+last the doctors say the danger is over, and all but the grandfather are
+confident. He thinks she is not doing well.... he has heard her voice.
+They think he is querulous. The uncle is more anxious about the child:
+he has scarcely stirred since he was born, he has not cried once, he is
+like a wax baby. The sister is expected to arrive at any minute. The
+eldest daughter watches for her from the window. It is moonlight, and
+she can see the avenue as far as the grove of cypresses. She hears the
+nightingales. A gentle breeze stirs in the avenue; the trees tremble a
+little. The grandfather remarks that he can no longer hear the
+nightingales, and the daughter is afraid someone has entered the garden.
+She sees no one, but somebody must be passing near the pond, for the
+swans are afraid, and all the fish dive suddenly. The dogs do not bark;
+she can see the house-dog crouching at the back of his kennel. The
+nightingales continue silent--there is a silence of death--it must be a
+stranger frightening them, says the grandfather. The roses shed their
+leaves. The grandfather feels cold; but the glass door on to the terrace
+will not shut--the joiner is to come to-morrow, he will put it right.
+Suddenly the sharpening of a scythe is heard outside--it must be the
+gardener preparing to mow the grass. The lamp does not burn well. A
+noise is heard as of someone entering the house, but no one comes up the
+stairs. They ring for the servant. They hear her steps, and the
+grandfather thinks she is not alone. The father opens the door; she
+remains on the landing. She is alone. She says no one has entered the
+house, but she has closed the door below, which she had found open. The
+father tells her not to push the door to; she denies that she is doing
+so. The grandfather, who, though he is blind, is conscious of light,
+thinks they are putting the lamp out. He asks whether the servant, who
+has gone downstairs, is in the room: it had seemed to him that she was
+sitting at the table. He cannot believe that no one has entered. He asks
+why they have put the light out. He is filled with an unendurable desire
+to see his daughter, but they will not let him--she is sleeping. The
+lamp goes out. They sit in the darkness. Midnight strikes, and at the
+last stroke of the clock they seem to hear a noise as of someone rising
+hastily. The grandfather maintains that someone has risen from, his
+chair. Suddenly the child is heard crying, crying in terror. Hurried
+steps are heard in the sick woman's chamber. The door of it is opened,
+the light from it pours into the room, and on the threshold appears a
+Sister of Charity, who makes the sign of the Cross to announce the
+mother's death.
+
+Already in _The Princess Maleine_ the miraculous happenings could all be
+explained by natural causes. Still more so in _The Intruder_. It was not
+the reaper Death who was sharpening his scythe, but the gardener. If the
+lamp goes out, it is because there is no oil in it. Accompanying the
+naturalness of the atmosphere (the atmosphere that is natural when a
+patient is in danger of dying), there is the naturalness of the
+dialogue. The family is worn out with anxious watching: how natural
+then is the sleepy tone of the talking, which is only quickened somewhat
+by the apparent irritability of the grandfather:
+
+     THE FATHER: He is nearly eighty.
+
+     THE UNCLE: No wonder he's eccentric.
+
+     THE FATHER: He's like all blind people.
+
+     THE UNCLE: They think too much.
+
+     THE FATHER: They've too much time on their hands.
+
+     THE UNCLE: They've nothing else to do.
+
+     THE FATHER: It's their only way of passing the time.
+
+     THE UNCLE: It must be terrible.
+
+     THE FATHER: I suppose you get used to it.
+
+     THE UNCLE: I dare say.
+
+     THE FATHER: They are certainly to be pitied.
+
+In this play, as also in _The Sightless_, and later on in _The Life of
+the Bees_, Maeterlinck shows himself a master of irony. The passage just
+quoted is an example.
+
+To Maeterlinck, with reference to _The Intruder_, has been applied what
+Victor Hugo said to Baudelaire after he had read _The Flowers of Evil_:
+"You have created a new shudder." Certainly, the new _frisson_ is there;
+but was it Maeterlinck who created it? It will be well to go into this
+question; for Maeterlinck, in connection with _The Intruder_, has been
+charged with plagiarism.
+
+The Intruder first appeared in _La Wallonie_ for January, 1890. In the
+same periodical for January, 1889, that is, exactly a year before, had
+appeared _Les Flaireurs_, a drama in three acts by Maeterlinck's friend,
+Charles van Lerberghe. It is dedicated "to the poet Maurice
+Maeterlinck." The title is annotated: "Légende originale et drame en 3
+actes pour le théâtre des fantoches." Here, to begin with, we have a
+"drama for marionettes." Maeterlinck seems to have first used the word
+"marionette" in connection with his plays when undergoing
+cross-examination by Jules Huret, whose _Enquête_ was published in 1891:
+when writing _Princess Maleine_, he said, he had wanted to write "a play
+in Shakespeare's manner for marionettes." Maeterlinck and van Lerberghe
+were seeing each other nearly every day at the time _Les Flaireurs_ was
+being written; and there is nothing to show that they did not discuss
+their theories of the drama; it is only certain that with regard to the
+idea, superb irony, of a theatre for marionettes, the _published_
+priority rests with van Lerberghe. Van Lerberghe, however, was charged
+with having imitated Maeterlinck; and it was only when Maeterlinck
+himself proclaimed the priority of _Les Flaireurs_[4] that the charge of
+plagiarism was turned against him. Now the fact is that Maeterlinck, to
+a certain extent, collaborated in _Les Flaireurs_.
+
+The subject of the two plays is identical; both symbolise the coming of
+death to a woman. But each is entirely independent. In _Les Flaireurs_
+death is expected; in _The Intruder_ it is not expected. In van
+Lerberghe's play resistance is offered to visible personifications of
+death; in Maeterlinck's play resistance is impossible, because death is
+invisible. The first play is full of brawling noise, and peasant slang,
+and the action is violent: the second is only a succession of whispers
+tearing the web of silence;[5] nothing visible happens, there is only
+expectancy. In short, one play is for the senses; the other is for the
+soul. The charge of plagiarism is absolutely unfounded: it is only a
+case of friendly rivalry in the working out of an idea--the tale indeed
+goes that the idea occurred to the two friends simultaneously. If it
+really was a game of skill, it would be hard to say who was victor: each
+play is a masterpiece.
+
+The scene of _Les Flaireurs_ is laid in a very poor cottage. It is a
+stormy night; the rain whips the windows, the wind howls, and a dog is
+barking in the distance. The room is lit by two candles. Loud knocking
+at the door. A girl jumps out of the bed with gestures of terror. She is
+in her night-shirt; her fair hair is unbound. She asks: "Who is there?"
+and "The Voice," after some beating about the bush, answers: "I'm the
+man with the water." The voice of the mother, who thinks it is Jesus
+Christ, is heard from the bed urging the daughter to let Him in. She
+refuses, and the man answers that he will wait. Ten o'clock sounds, and
+the daughter puts the two candles out. ACT II. Knocking at the door
+again. The two candles are relit, and the daughter is seen standing
+against the bed, at watch, with her face turned towards the door. A
+voice is heard demanding admittance. "You said you would wait," says the
+girl. "Why, I've only just come!" answers the voice. She asks who he is,
+and he replies, "The man with the linen." The mother again urges her to
+open the door--she thinks it is the Virgin Mary. The daughter is
+obstinate, and the voice cries, "All right, I'll wait." ACT III. Louder
+knocks, and a voice again. This time it is "The man with the ...
+thingumbob." The mother still thinks it is the Virgin Mary. She bids her
+daughter raise the curtain: and the shadow of the hearse is projected on
+the wall. The mother asks what the shadow is; the daughter drops the
+curtain. The voice now answers brutally: "I'm the man with the coffin,
+that's what _I_ am." The neighing of horses is heard. The girl dashes
+herself against the door, but it is beaten in. An arm is seen putting a
+bucket into the room. Midnight strikes. The old woman utters a hoarse
+cry; the daughter, who had been holding the door back, rushes to the
+bed; the door falls with a mighty din, and extinguishes the two candles.
+
+It will be seen that whereas in _The Intruder_ there is nothing which
+cannot be explained by natural causes, the symbolism of _Les Flaireurs_
+is untrue--death does _not_ come with bucket, linen, and coffin. Death
+does _not_ break the door in. This only amounts to saying that
+Maeterlinck's method is less romantic than that of his friend.
+Maeterlinck's close realism, however, does give him certain
+advantages--the helplessness of the grandfather, for instance, is far
+more pathetic than the spectacle of the girl dashing herself against the
+door, though it does not move us so directly.
+
+_The Intruder_ was first acted in French at Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art in
+Paris, on the 20th May, 1891, at a historic performance of this and
+other playlets for the benefit of Paul Verlaine and the painter, Paul
+Gauguin.
+
+In the second play of the 1890 volume, _The Sightless_, which was first
+acted on the 7th December, 1891, at the Théâtre d'Art, we have again
+the mystery of death; but the main theme would seem to be the mystery of
+human life--"this earthly existence is conceived as a deep, impenetrable
+night of ignorance and uncertainty."[6] The fable is this:
+
+In a very ancient forest in the north, under a sky profoundly starred,
+is sitting a very agèd priest, wrapped in an ample black cloak. He is
+leaning his head and the upper part of his body against the bole of a
+huge, cavernous oak. His motionless face has the lividity of wax; his
+lips are violet and half open. His eyes seem bleeding under a multitude
+of immemorial griefs and tears. His white hair falls in rigid and scanty
+locks over a face more illumined and more weary than all that surrounds
+him in the attentive silence of the desolate forest. His emaciated hands
+are rigidly joined on his thighs. To the right of him six blind old men
+are sitting on stones, stumps of trees, and dead leaves. To the left,
+separated from them by an unrooted tree and split boulders, six women
+who are likewise blind sit facing the old men. Three of these women are
+praying and moaning uninterruptedly. A fourth is extremely old; the
+fifth, in an attitude of speechless madness, holds a sleeping baby on
+her knees. The sixth is young and radiantly beautiful, and her hair
+floods her whole being. Most of them sit waiting, with their elbows on
+their knees, and their faces in their hands. Great funereal trees, yews,
+weeping willows, cypresses, cover them with faithful shadows. A cluster
+of tall and sickly asphodel are in blossom near the priest. The darkness
+is extraordinary, in spite of the moonlight which, here and there,
+glints through the darkness of the foliage.
+
+The blind people are waiting for their priest to return. He is getting
+too old, the men murmur; they suspect that he has not been blest with
+the Best of sight himself of late. They are sure he has lost his way and
+is looking for it. They have walked a long time; they must be far from
+the asylum. He only talks to the women now; they ask them where he has
+gone to. The women do not know. He had told them he wanted to see the
+island for the last time before the sunless winter. He was uneasy
+because the storms had flooded the river, and because all the dikes
+seemed ready to burst. He has gone in the direction of the sea, which is
+so near that when they are silent they can hear it thudding on the
+rocks. Where are they? None of them know. When did they come to the
+island? They do not know, they were all blind when they came. They were
+not born here, they came from beyond the sea. They hear the asylum clock
+strike twelve; they do not know whether it is noon or midnight. They are
+frightened at noises which they cannot understand. Suddenly the wind
+rises in the forest, and the sea is heard bellowing against the cliffs.
+The sea seems very near; they are afraid it will reach them. They are
+about to rise and try to go away when they hear a noise of hasty feet in
+the dead leaves. It is the dog of the asylum. It puts its muzzle on the
+knees of one of the blind men. Feeling it pull, he rises, and it leads
+him to the motionless priest. He touches the priest's cold face ... and
+they know that their guide is dead. The dog will not move away from the
+corpse. A squall whirls the dead leaves round. It begins to snow. They
+think they hear footsteps ... The footsteps seem to stop in their
+midst....
+
+_The Sightless_ is a notable example of clear symbolism. The dead priest
+is religion. Religion is dead now in the midst of us; and we are without
+a guide and groping in the dark. "There is something which moves above
+our heads, but we cannot reach it." We are prisoners in a little finite
+space washed round by the Ocean of Infinity, whose mighty waters we can
+hear in our calm seasons. Above the dense forest somewhere rises a
+lighthouse (Wisdom). We have strayed from the asylum (that goodness
+which religion instilled in us when it was alive). The baby alone can
+see; but it cannot speak yet (the future will reveal).
+
+The virtues and failings of humanity are hinted at with gentle irony.
+One blind man, when he goes out in the sunshine, suspects the great
+radiances; another prefers to stay near the good coal fire in the
+refectory.... The oldest blind woman dreams sometimes that she sees; the
+oldest blind man only sees when he dreams.... The young beauty smells
+the scent of flowers around them (the promptings of sense guide us; and
+the beautiful are the sensuous); one who was born blind only smells the
+scent of the earth (Philistines).... Heaven is mentioned, and all raise
+their heads towards the sky, except the three who were born blind--they
+keep their faces bent earthwards....
+
+Lessing thought no man could write a good tragedy till he was thirty.
+Here are two written by a man of twenty-eight.
+
+
+[1] "Les Avertis" (in _Le Trésor des Humbles_), p. 53.
+
+[2] Cf. also "L'Evolution du Mystère" (in _Le Temple Enseveli_) Chapters
+V., XXI., and XXII.
+
+[3] See Chapter XXVIII. of _L'Intelligence des Fleurs_.
+
+[4] In a letter inserted in the programme when _Les Flaireurs_ was
+staged by Paul Fort at the Théâtre d'Art (after _The Intruder_ had gone
+over the same boards). This statement of Maeterlinck's is a noble
+defence of his friend, and, as such, not to be trusted.
+
+[5] But Death, in _The Intruder_, is understood to have made some noise
+while coming upstairs.
+
+[6] Is. van Dijk, _Maurice Maeterlinck_, pp. 81-82.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Few men entirely outgrow the influences of their education: the mind is
+made by what it is fed on while it is growing just as much as the body
+is. Carlyle was always more or less of a Scotch preacher threatening the
+world with hell. Gerhart Hauptmann (who, by the way, was born in the
+same year as Maeterlinck) never got over his Moravian upbringing.
+Maeterlinck came to hate the Jesuits; but his monastic training lingered
+in his love of the mystics. Mysticism is in any case a Flemish _trait_;
+and it is one of the outstanding features of Flemish literature as it is
+of Flemish painting. It is not astonishing, then, that Maeterlinck
+should have felt drawn to the most famous of Flemish mystics. He
+published, in 1891, _L'Ornement des Noces spirituelles_, a translation,
+illuminated by a preface, of Jan van Ruysbroeck's _Die Chierheit der
+gheesteleker Brulocht_. The "doctor ecstaticus" was born in 1274 at the
+little village of Ruysbroeck, near Brussels. He was a curate in the
+Church of Sainte Gudule in Brussels; but in his old days he with
+several friends founded the Monastery of Groenendal (Green Dale) in the
+Forêt de Soignes, two miles from Brussels. The fame of his piety
+attracted many pilgrims to his retreat, among others the German mystic,
+Johannes Tauler, and the Dutch scholar who founded the Brotherhood of
+the Common Life, Geert Groote. He died in 1381. His contemporaries
+called him "the Admirable."
+
+Maeterlinck warns us in his preface to _The Ornamentation of the
+Nuptials of the Spirit_, the subject of which is the _unio mystica_, the
+mystic union of the soul with God, that we must not expect a literary
+work; "you will perceive nothing," he says, "save the convulsive flight
+of a drunken eagle, blind and bleeding, over snowy summits." He only
+made the translation for the benefit of a few Platonists. But, apart
+from the translation itself, the preface is of value as showing how
+deeply read in the mystics Maeterlinck already was at this time, and the
+importance he attached to their teaching. "All certainty is in them
+alone," he says, paradoxically. Their ecstasies are only the beginning
+of the complete discovery of ourselves; their writings are the purest
+diamonds in the prodigious treasure of humanity; and their thoughts have
+the immunity of Swedenborg's angels who advance continually towards the
+springtide of their youth, so that the oldest angels seem the youngest.
+Embedded in the preface are gems from Ruysbroeck's other writings. Here
+is one of them:
+
+     "And they (the doves) will tarry near the rivers and over the clear
+     waters, so that if any bird should come from on high, which might
+     seize or injure them, they may know it by its image in the water,
+     and avoid it. This clear water is Holy Writ, the life of the
+     Saints, and the mercy of God. We will look upon our image therein
+     whenever we are tempted; and in this way none shall have power to
+     harm us. These doves have an ardent disposition, and young doves
+     are often born of them, for every time that to the honour of God
+     and our own beatitude we consider sin with hatred and scorn, we
+     bring young doves into the world, that is to say new virtues."
+
+The translation of the mystic was followed, in 1891, by a playlet in one
+act, _Les Sept Princesses_ (The Seven Princesses). It is "the angel"
+among Maeterlinck's productions, a weakling which no fostering can save.
+Few critics have a good word for it. "A girl's unpleasant dream,"
+interprets Mieszner. "An indecipherable enigma," says Adolphe Brisson.
+"The piece is something _seen_, purely pictorial," says Anselma Heine,
+"a transposition of paintings by Burne-Jones." "Can only claim the rank
+of an intermezzo," says Monty Jacobs, "an unfinished sketch." "We must
+not seek a literal signification," says Beaunier, "its signification is
+in its very strangeness." "Perhaps the weakest thing in Maeterlinck,"
+says Oppeln von Bronikowski, "a sketch, or a testing of mystico-symbolic
+apparatus." "_Passons_," says Adolphe van Bever. The Princesses have,
+however, found a friend in a Dutch critic, Dr Is. van Dijk, whose book
+on Maeterlinck is suggestive. His analysis and interpretation of the
+play runs somewhat as follows:
+
+     "In a spacious marble hall, decorated with laurel bushes, lavender
+     plants, and lilies in porcelain vases, is a white marble staircase
+     with seven steps, on which seven white-robed princesses are lying,
+     one on each step, sleeping on cushions of pale silk. Fearing lest
+     they should awaken in the dark, they have lit a silver lamp, which
+     casts its light over them. The lovely princesses sleep on and on;
+     they must not be wakened, they are so weak! It is their weakness
+     that has sent them to sleep. They have been so listless and weary
+     since they came here; it is so cold and dreamy in this Castle in
+     the North. They came hither from warm lands; and here they are
+     always watching for the sun, but there is hardly any sun, and no
+     sweet heaven over this level waste of fens, over these green ponds
+     black with the shadows of forests of oaks and pines, over this
+     willow-hung canal that runs to the rounded grey of the horizon. It
+     is home-sickness that has sunk them in sleep. They sleep forlorn.
+     Everything around them is so very old. Their life is so dreary with
+     their long, long waiting; they are aweary, aweary.... They are
+     waiting for the comrade of their youth; always they are looking for
+     his ship on the canal between the willows; but, 'He cometh not,'
+     they say. Now at last he is come while they are sleeping, and they
+     have bolted the door from the inside. They cannot be wakened. With
+     sick longing the Prince gazes at the seven through the thick
+     window-panes. His eyes rest longest on the loveliest, Ursula, with
+     whom he had loved best to play when he was a boy. Seven years she
+     has looked for his coming, seven years, by day and by night. He
+     sees them lying with linked hands, as though they were afraid of
+     losing each other.... And yet they must have moved in their sleep,
+     for the two sisters on the steps above and below Ursula have let go
+     her hand; she is holding her hands so strangely.... At last the
+     Prince makes his way into the room by an underground passage, past
+     the tombs of the dead. The noise of his entrance awakens six of the
+     Princesses, but not Ursula. The six cry: 'The Prince has come!' But
+     she lies motionless, stiff.... She has died of her long, long
+     waiting, of the deep, unfulfilled longing of her soul...."
+
+Dr van Dijk is indignant at the criticism of René Doumic, who, in an
+article on Maeterlinck, dismisses _Les Sept Princesses_ with these few
+words: "As for _The Seven Princesses_, the devout themselves confess
+they can find no appreciable sense in the play. All that I can say of
+it, now that I have read it, is that it is a thin volume published in
+Brussels, by Lacomblez."[1] "Let me have this French critic in my
+tuition six months," continues Dr van Dijk. "My curriculum would then be
+as follows: The first month he should learn by heart, in Greek and
+French, Plato's myth concerning _The Chariot of the Soul_, with the
+obligation of course to ponder on it. The following month he should
+learn by heart, in Greek and French, Plato's myth of _The Cave_, with
+the obligation of course to ponder on it. Then he should impress the
+well-known fable of _Amor and Psyche_ on his mind, so as to accustom
+himself to the atmosphere of fables. Then he should ponder for a month
+on the sovereign freedom of a poet to remould a fable wholly or in part.
+Another month he should spend in reflecting over the fact that in order
+to understand a whole one does not need to know all the parts. And the
+last month he should be left to himself to try and find whether there
+was anything in his own soul which in any way could be said to resemble
+unfulfilled longing."
+
+Another plausible interpretation is that of another Dutch critic, G.
+Hulsman, in his _Karakters en Ideeën_. He quotes the following poem from
+Paul Bourget's _Espoir d'aimer_:
+
+    "Notre âme est le palais des légendes, où dort
+       Une jeune princesse en robe nuptiale,
+     Immobile et si calme!... On dirait que la Mort
+       A touché son visage pâle.
+
+     Elle dort, elle rêve et soupire en rêvant;
+       Une larme a roulé lentement sur sa joue.
+     Elle se rêve errante en barque au gré du vent
+       Sur l'Océan, qui gronde et joue.
+
+    "Elle ne le voit pas, le beau Prince Charmant
+       Qui chevauche, parmi les plaines éloignées
+     Et s'en vient éveiller sa belle au bois dormant
+       De son sommeil de cent années"--
+
+and continues:
+
+     "Our heart is this palace, and in this palace lies our soul, a
+     beautiful sleeper. It sleeps, and dreams, and waits for the coming
+     of the ideal hero, who shall awaken it out of its slumber and
+     cherish it with the warmth of his love. And these seven princesses
+     are the different qualities of the human soul."
+
+Hulsman thinks that Maeterlinck must have thought of the Buddhistic
+idea, according to which the human soul consists of: the breath of God,
+the word, the thought, Psyche, the power of living, appearance, and the
+body.
+
+     "Ursula, the middle sister, is Psyche, that is, the real self, the
+     deepest, the essential in our being. This real self is unconscious
+     and unknowable. Let the ideal come, no ideal can unveil the
+     deepest. It is dead to us."
+
+Maeterlinck's imagination has been compared "to a lake with desolate and
+stagnant waters, unceasingly reflecting the same black landscapes, on
+whose banks the same suffering personages for ever come to sit." The
+same old castle, the same subterranean caverns, the same dark forests,
+another old tower, are the scenes of _Pelléas et Mélisande_ (Pelleas and
+Melisanda) which was published at Brussels in 1892, and performed at
+the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in Paris on the 16th May, 1893. The
+scene is the same; but there is a difference between this play and those
+which preceded it--here for the first time we have characters almost of
+flesh and blood; "the asphodelic shadows and marionettes begin to colour
+themselves with blood-warm humanity."[2] We have personages who
+represent the same ideas as those of the previous plays--Melisanda is
+again the soul--but here the puppets are moved by Love, not Death. In
+_Princess Maleine_ love is one of the means by which Fate moves the
+puppets to death; in Pelleas and Melisanda death is the bourne to which
+Love drives his sheep. The sheep do not know whither they are being
+driven; when they come to cross-roads they do not know which to take;
+but they do feel, dimly, that they are not on the road to the fold.
+Hence the tragedy of their emotions; and it is the state of the soul
+filled with love, as tragic and as mystical a consciousness or
+subconsciousness as that of the soul in the clutch of fate or in the
+shadow of death, that Maeterlinck projects into _Pelleas and Melisanda_
+as into _Alladine and Palomides_ and _Aglavaine and Selysette_.
+
+We have nothing to do here with morality or the laws which regulate
+marriage. The soul knows nothing of such things; is unconscious even of
+the sins of the body.[3] The soul is subject only to such laws as are
+inherent in itself: "the secret laws of antipathy or of sympathy,
+elective or instinctive affinities."[4] The soul, remembering the fair
+sunny clime from which it came, pining in the cold air of the
+marshlands, groping about helplessly in the dark, always meeting closed
+doors, always gazing through glass at the unattainable, is an eternal
+searcher for the light; and if it meets a comrade who has the key to the
+closed door of its happiness, or who holds the lamp to light its path,
+it will follow the gleam blindly. It must do, for that is the law of its
+being. The tragedy lies in this: that it follows the gleam blindly, and
+the gleam leads it--at all events at present, because alien souls come
+athwart the path it is following--into the abyss of night.
+
+Civic laws were made to fetter the body; but the soul has no
+consciousness of the body, of the senses, and cannot therefore be
+fettered by civic laws. So long as you hold that love is a function of
+the soul, and not of the senses, you cannot call Francesca da Rimini or
+Melisanda faithless wives. In your philosophy they are not on the road
+to adultery, but to the happiness for which their soul cries out, and to
+which it has inalienable right.
+
+The story of _Pelleas and Melisanda_ is as old as love: it is the story
+of Francesca da Rimini; it is Sudermann's _Geschichte der stillen
+Mühle_. Golaud,[5] a prince of blood and iron, whose hair and beard are
+turning grey, losing his way while hunting in a forest, comes upon a
+lovely being whose dress, though torn by brambles, is princely. She is
+weeping by the side of a spring, into which her crown (the symbol of her
+royal birth; all souls are royal) has fallen. Somebody has hurt
+her--who? All of them, all of them. She has fled away, she is lost ...
+she was born far away. Golaud marries her, and takes her to the Castle,
+where his grandfather, King Arkel, holds rule over a famine-stricken
+land by a desolate sea. Here dwells also Pelleas, his young brother.
+
+Pelleas is very anxious to depart on a long journey to see a friend who
+is dying. If he had done so, the tragedy might have been, if not
+prevented, at all events retarded. But his father is lying dangerously
+ill in the Castle (the only use for this father in the economy of the
+play is to be ill); filial duty chains him there. This is in the nature
+of an accident; and by the canons of dramaturgy accidents must not
+precipitate tragedy, but Maeterlinck's plays proudly ignore the canons
+of dramaturgy. (Maeterlinck would say the accident was arranged by
+Fate.) Pelleas and Melisanda meet on a high place overlooking the sea.
+They watch a great ship--the ship that has brought Melisanda--sailing
+across the strip of light cast by the lighthouse, sailing out into the
+great open spaces where the soul is at home. A few words of common
+speech tell us what perilous life is awakening in these two sister souls
+that till now had not lived:
+
+     PELLEAS: Let us descend here. Will you give me your hand?
+
+     MELISANDA: You see I have my hands full of flowers and leaves....
+
+     PELLEAS: I will hold you by the arm, the path is steep, and it is
+     very dark here.... I am going away to-morrow perhaps....
+
+     MELISANDA: O, why are you going away?
+
+We find them again under an old lime-tree in the dense, discreet forest,
+at the "Fountain of the Blind." (They are the blind.) Melisanda would
+like to plunge her two hands into the water ... it seems to her that her
+hands are ill. Her hair, which is longer than her body (what poetry
+Maeterlinck has dreamed into hair and hands!) falls down, and touches
+the water (a Burne-Jones). She tosses her wedding-ring into the air (as
+the Princess at the fountain under the lime-tree in the dark forest near
+the King's castle in _The Frog Prince_[6] tosses a golden ball), and
+just as noon is striking it falls into the water. She had cast it too
+high towards the sunlight.... We hear soon that at the twelfth stroke of
+noon Golaud's horse, taking fright in the forest, had dashed against a
+tree, and seriously injured its rider. While Melisanda is at her
+husband's bedside, he notices that her ring is gone. She lies to him;
+she has lost it in a cave, she says. Does she lie? Her union with Golaud
+is an external bond; but her soul knows nothing of things external, her
+soul is innocent of whatever her mouth may say to a man who is a
+stranger to her soul. He sends her to the cave to look for the ring, in
+the dark--with Pelleas. She is frightened by the noise of the cave--is
+it the noise of the night or the noise of silence? Later on Pelleas
+finds Melisanda combing her hair at the casement of a tower. She leans
+over; he holds her hand; her golden hair falls down and inundates him
+(another Burne-Jones):
+
+     PELLEAS: O! O! what is this?... Your hair, your hair comes down to
+     me!... All your hair, Melisanda, all your hair has fallen from the
+     tower! I am holding it in my hands, I am touching it with my
+     lips.... I am holding it in my arms, I am putting it round my
+     neck.... I shall not open my hands again this night....
+
+Doves (the doves of the body's chastity, perhaps) come out of the tower
+and fly around them. Golaud surprises the pair, and tells them they are
+children. What he suspects, however, we know from a scene in the caverns
+under the Castle, when he is on the point of pushing his brother over a
+ledge of rock into a stagnant pool that stinks of death. But his
+jealousy has not yet grown sufficiently to force him to murder, and he
+contents himself with warning Pelleas. There follows a scene which
+brings the house down whenever the play is acted: Golaud questions his
+little son by a former marriage as to how the pair behave when they are
+alone; and lifts the little boy up so that he may peep in at the window
+of the tower and tell him what they are doing in the room. Golaud in his
+anguish digs his nails into the child's flesh, but he finds nothing to
+justify his suspicions; nevertheless in a following scene he loses his
+self-control, and, in the presence of his grandfather, ill-treats
+Melisanda. In the meantime the father is declared to be out of danger
+(Fate needs the father's recovery now to precipitate the tragedy);
+Pelleas is free to go away, and he asks Melisanda for a last meeting, by
+night, in the forest. She leaves her husband asleep, and the lovers meet
+in the moonlight. "How great our shadows are this evening!" says
+Melisanda. "They enlace each other to the back of the garden," replies
+Pelleas. "O! how they kiss each other far from us." Here Melisanda sees
+Golaud behind a tree, where their shadows end. They know they cannot
+escape; they fall into each other's arms and exchange their first guilty
+kiss. Golaud kills Pelleas, wounds Melisanda, and stabs himself. But
+Melisanda, ere she dies (of a wound which would not kill a pigeon) gives
+birth to a daughter, "a little girl that a beggar woman would be ashamed
+to bring into the world." On her death-bed Golaud implores her to tell
+him the truth--has she loved Pelleas with a guilty love? But she can
+only whisper vague words.
+
+The child-wife dies; and King Arkel, the wise old man of the play,
+closes it by a few fatalistic sentences:
+
+     "She was so tranquil, so timid, and so silent a little being....
+     She was a mysterious little being like everybody else.... She lies
+     there as though she were the big sister of her child.... Come away,
+     come away.... My God! My God!... I shall not be able to understand
+     anything any more.... Don't let us stay here.--Come away; the child
+     must not stay in this room.... It must live now, in its turn....
+     It's the poor little one's turn now...."
+
+
+[1] _Les Jeunes_, p. 230.
+
+[2] Johannes Schlaf's _Maeterlinck_, p. 32.
+
+[3] See chapter "La Morale mystique" in _Le Trésor des Humbles_. This is
+the doctrine for which quietism was condemned. I find the following
+definition of the soul quoted in _La Wallonie_ for February to March,
+1889; "Qu'est-ce donc que l'âme? Une _possibilité idéale_ qui réside en
+nous comme la substance réelle de nous-mêmes, que les erreurs et les
+tâches de la vie ne peuvent entamer, que ses découragements ne peuvent
+abattre et qui les contemple avec sérénité dans l'extériorité réelle, et
+séparés, pour ainsi dire de sa propre essence."--JOHNSON.
+
+[4] "Le Réveil de L'Ame" (in _Le Trésor des Humbles_), p. 38.
+
+[5] Perhaps a Gallicised form of Golo, the lover of Genoveva. The name
+of Golaud's mother is Geneviève.
+
+[6] M.G.M. Rodrigue, of _Le Thyrse_ tells me (and Grégoire Le Roy told
+him) that Maeterlinck at the time he wrote his early dramas drew
+inspiration from Walter Crane's picture-books. _The Frog Prince_ was one
+of them. Perhaps Maeterlinck had Grimm's _Household Stories_, done into
+pictures by Walter Crane (Macmillan, 1882).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+It is natural that an artist should wish to recreate something he has
+attempted and not completed to his satisfaction, or which, when his mind
+is more mature, he thinks he could do better. The three plays which
+Maeterlinck published together in 1894 are such attempts at
+reconstruction. _Alladine and Palomides_ is a love story which has much
+in common with _Pelleas and Melisanda_: "both dramas are dominated by
+the idea of the enigmatic in our deeds" (van Hamel), and in both the
+love that is given is taken from its lawful owner. _Interior_ is clearly
+a version of _The Intruder_. In _The Death of Tintagiles_ we have again,
+but more concentrated, the physical anguish of _The Princess Maleine_.
+
+The three plays had for their secondary title "trois petits drames pour
+marionettes" (three little dramas for marionettes). But we have seen
+that Maeterlinck had described his very first play as a drama for a
+marionette theatre; and the three 1894 plays are not a whit less adapted
+for the ordinary stage than those which preceded them. Perhaps in
+deliberately ticketing his plays with this ironic label Maeterlinck
+wished to indicate that they were unsuited for the garish light and the
+artificial voices of the present-day tragedy style on the stage. It is
+more probable, however, that he would not have dreamt of suggesting a
+slight on his actor friends. The characters are described as
+marionettes, it is likely, because the scene is spiritualised by
+distance. We look down on the movements of the puppets as from a higher
+world--we are richer by an idea than they are: we see what Player is
+pulling the strings, the strings of which they are only half conscious.
+Our position in all these plays is the same as that of the greybeard,
+the stranger, the two girls, and the crowd in _The Interior_, and the
+acting of the family in this play is an example of the "active silence"
+which Maeterlinck in his essay, "Everyday Tragedy," was to suggest for
+the theatre when the actor is become an automaton through which the soul
+speaks more than words can say.
+
+In _Alladine and Palomides_ there is more than one scene in which
+silence is the principal speaker; so, for instance, when Alladine and
+Palomides meet on the bridge over the castle moat, and the girl's pet
+lamb escapes from her hands, slips, and rolls into the water:
+
+     ALLADINE: What has he done? Where is he?
+
+     PALOMIDES: He has slipped! He is struggling in the middle of the
+     whirlpool. Don't look at him; there is nothing we can do....
+
+     ALLADINE: You are going to save him?
+
+     PALOMIDES: Save him? Why, look at him; he is already in the suck of
+     the whirlpool. In another minute he will be under the vaults; and
+     God himself will not see him again....
+
+     ALLADINE: Go away! Go away!
+
+     PALOMIDES: What is the matter?
+
+     ALLADINE: Go away! I don't want to see you any more!...
+
+     [_Enter_ ABLAMORE _precipitately; he seizes_ ALLADINE _and drags
+     her away roughly without saying a word_.]
+
+Perhaps such a scene as this, with its prattling as of children, would
+be better in perfect than active silence, that is, as pantomime. (That
+pantomime may fascinate a modern audience has been proved by Max
+Reinhardt.) But to relate our story: Alladine's pet lamb, a symbol of
+her peace of mind or maiden apathy, had been frightened by Palomides'
+charger when the two first met. He had come to the castle (gloomy, etc.)
+of King Ablamore, to wed the latter's daughter Astolaine. Here he finds
+Alladine, who has come from Arcady.
+
+Ablamore has been surnamed "The Wise";[1] he was wise because nothing
+had happened to him, because hitherto he had lived
+
+    "In apathy of life unrealised,
+     And days to Lethe floating unenjoyed."
+
+But now he stands on his turrets and summons the events which had
+avoided him. They come--and they overpower him. It is love that brings
+the events. "How beautiful she is," he says, bending over Alladine while
+she is asleep. "I will kiss her without her knowing it, holding back my
+poor white beard." He would fain make her his queen; but she returns the
+love which Palomides, untrue to Astolaine, conceives for her. Astolaine
+discovers the truth; but she, the first of Maeterlinck's strong,
+emancipated women, feels no jealousy. Her behaviour is similar to that
+of Selysette in a later play; but her character is identical with
+Aglavaine's in that play: the rôles of the women in _Aglavaine and
+Selysette_ are reversed. It is Aglavaine's beautiful soul for the sake
+of which Méléandre is untrue to Selysette. Palomides recognises, when
+his love turns from the woman to the child, "that there must be
+something more incomprehensible than the beauty of the most beautiful
+soul or the most beautiful face"; and something more powerful too, for
+he cannot help obeying it. Palomides is quite aware that Astolaine is a
+type superior to Alladine. He loves her even when he is faithless. "I
+love you," he says to her, "more than her I love." (The situation is the
+same in Grillparzer's _Sappho_: Phaon prefers Melitta, also a little
+Greek slave, to the renowned and noble poetess.) "She has a soul,"
+Palomides says of Astolaine, "that you can see round her, that takes you
+in its arms as though you were a suffering child, and which, without
+speaking, consoles you for everything...." This doctrine of the soul's
+fluidity appears in the scene in which Astolaine tells her father that
+she has ceased to love Palomides:
+
+     ABLAMORE: Come hither, Astolaine. It is not so that you were
+     accustomed to speak to your father. You are waiting there, on the
+     threshold of a door that is hardly open, as though you were ready
+     to run away; and with your hand on the key, as though you wished to
+     close the secret of your heart on me for ever. You know well that I
+     have not understood what you have just said, and that words have no
+     meaning when souls are not within reach of each other. Come nearer,
+     and speak no more. (ASTOLAINE _comes slowly nearer_.) There is a
+     moment when souls touch and know everything without there being any
+     need of moving the lips. Come nearer.... Our souls do not reach
+     each other yet, and their ray[2] is so dim around us!...
+     (ASTOLAINE _holds still_.) You dare not?--You know then how far one
+     can go? Very well then, I will come to you.... (_With slow steps he
+     comes near_ ASTOLAINE, _then stops, and looks at her long_.) I see
+     you, Astolaine....
+
+     ASTOLAINE: My father!... (_She sobs and embraces the old man_.)
+
+     ABLAMORE: You see that it was useless ...
+
+Palomides promises Alladine that he will take her away from this cold
+clime where the sky is like the vault of a cave to a land where Heaven
+is sweet, where the trees are not a wilderness of boughs blackening the
+steep hill-sides like carrion ribs, but a wind-waved sea of rustling
+shade.... They are both poor little wandering souls aweary in exile.
+While they are preparing their flight, the events Ablamore has summoned
+drive him mad; and now, with golden keys in his hand (gold glinting
+against white walls, no doubt, another Pre-Raphaelite picture), he
+
+    "Wanders along the marble corridors
+     That interlace their soundless floors around
+     And to the centre of his royal home,"
+
+singing a dirge with a refrain which is Maeterlinck's best lyric line:
+_Allez où vos yeux vous mènent_. He thwarts the lovers' plans by
+shutting them up, blindfolded and pinioned, in the vast caverns under
+the castle. "These caverns," comments Mieszner, "are the place we all
+dream in, the place where our longing for the light leads us astray into
+strange, contradictory deeds." The symbolism of the play is concentrated
+in these scenes below the ground: the thought that life is sublimated in
+moments of enchantment which pitiless light soon dispels. The prisoners
+break their bonds. When their eyes get used to the light, it seems to
+them that they are in a great blue hall, whose vault, drunken with
+jewels, is held aloft by pillars wreathed by innumerable roses. They see
+below them a lake so blue that the sky might have flowed thither.... It
+is full of strange and stirless flowers.... They think they are
+embracing in the vestibules of Heaven.... But suddenly they hear the din
+of iron ringing on the rock above them.... Stones fall from the roof;
+and as the light pours in through the opening, "it reveals to them
+little by little the wretchedness of the cave they had deemed wonderful;
+the miraculous lake grows dull and sinister; the jewels lose their
+light; and the glowing roses are seen to be the stains of rubbish
+phosphorescent with decay."
+
+Ablamore has fled raving into the land; and the good Astolaine (this
+woman of Maeterlinck we love) has come to rescue the forsaken lovers.
+She comes too late--they have been poisoned by the deadly reek of the
+unreal in the caverns they dreamed in; and they die moaning piteously to
+each other across the corridor that parts their beds:
+
+     ALLADINE'S VOICE: They were not jewels....
+
+     PALOMIDES' VOICE: And the flowers were not real....
+
+The passion of love may break the bonds of custom, and for a swift space
+the world may seem lit by a magic light; but the awakening comes, and
+the poison works, and in the cold wretchedness of reality even love will
+die. Love (sensual love) is a short dream of fair things that fade....
+
+_Interior_, which was performed at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in March,
+1895, is better than _The Intruder_ in so far as the coming of death is
+not indicated by suspicious signs (which turn out to be from natural
+causes) and dim forebodings (which might possibly be the drivelling of
+old age). Here everything is taken absolutely from life. _Interior_,
+too, shows a great mastery of "active silence": some of the scenes in
+_Alladine and Palomides_ approach pantomime; in _Interior_ we have
+actual pantomime--the family whom the tragedy befalls are seen sitting
+in the lamplit room of their house, mute characters, and the spectators,
+together with the speaking characters, see them, through the three
+windows, resting from their day's toil. There are three daughters in the
+family, as in _The Intruder_; but one of them has drowned herself.
+
+     "She was perhaps one of those who won't say anything, and everybody
+     has in his mind more than one; reason for ending his life.... You
+     can't see into the soul as you see into that room. They are all the
+     same.... They only say the usual things; and nobody suspects
+     anything.... They look like dolls that don't move, and such a lot
+     of things are happening in their souls.... They don't know
+     themselves what they are.... No doubt she lived as the others
+     live.... No doubt she went on saying to the day of her death: 'It's
+     going to rain to-day'; or, it may be: 'The fruit isn't ripe yet.'
+     They talk with a smile of flowers that have withered, and in the
+     dark they cry...."
+
+"The Stranger" has waded into the river, and brought the body to the
+shore; and now he, with "The Greybeard," a friend of the family, is in
+the old garden planted with willows. The Greybeard is to tell the bad
+news before the crowd arrives with the corpse. But while he looks at the
+peaceful idyll in the lamplight--the mother with the baby sleeping on
+her left shoulder, not moving lest it should awake, the sisters
+embroidering, the father by the fire--his courage sinks, and it is only
+when the crowd with the body arrive that he enters the house. We see the
+father rising to greet the visitor, and one of the girls offering him a
+chair. By his gestures we know he is speaking. Suddenly the mother
+starts and rises. She questions the Greybeard. The whole family rush out
+at the door. The room is left empty, except for the baby, which sleeps
+on in the arm-chair where the mother has put it down.
+
+_Interior_ needs no interpretation. It is one of the simplest, as it is
+one of the most terrible, masterpieces in all literature. Some critics
+consider it the best thing Maeterlinck has written.
+
+In _The Death of Tintagiles_ the tragedy takes place behind a closed
+door. ("Victor Hugo said that nothing is more interesting than a wall
+behind which something is happening," Jules Lemaître reminds us.[3]
+"This tragic wall is in all M. Maeterlinck's poems," he continues; "and
+when it is not a wall, it is a door; and when it is not a door, it is a
+window veiled with curtains.") Behind the closed door, in an enormous
+tower which still withstands the ravages of time when the rest of the
+castle is crumbling to pieces, dwells the Queen (Death). The castle is
+stifled by poplars. It is sunk deep down in a girdle of darkness. They
+might have built it on the top of the mountains that take all the air
+from it.... One might have breathed there, and seen the sea all round
+the island. The Queen never comes down from her tower, and all the doors
+of it are closed night and day. But she has servants who move with
+noiseless feet. The Queen has a power that none can fathom; "and we live
+here with a great pitiless weight on our soul." "She is there on our
+soul like a tombstone, and none dares stretch out his arm." Ygraine
+explains this to her little brother Tintagiles, whom the Queen has sent
+for from over the sea. There is some talk of the boy's golden crown, as
+there was of Melisanda's; every soul is royal, and comes from far away,
+you remember. Bellangère, the boy's other sister, has heard the Queen's
+servants whispering. They know that the Queen has sent for the boy to
+kill him. The only friend the two sisters and the boy have is Aglovale,
+a greybeard, who, like Arkel, has long since renounced the vanity of
+resisting fate and having a will of his own. "All is useless," he says;
+but now he is willing to defend the boy, since they hope. He sits down
+on the threshold with his sword across his knees. The Queen's servants
+come with stealthy feet, and Aglovale's sword snaps when he tries to
+prevent them from opening the door. But this time the servants, meeting
+resistance, withdraw, only to return when Aglovale and the sisters are
+asleep. Tintagiles is sleeping too, between the sisters, with his arms
+round their necks; and their arms are round him. His hands are plunged
+deep into their hair; he holds a golden curl tight between his teeth.
+The servants cut the sisters' hair, and remove the boy, still sleeping,
+with his little hands full of golden curls. At the end of the corridor
+he screams; Ygraine awakes, and rushes in pursuit. Bellangère falls in a
+dead faint on the threshold. The fifth act is a picture of unendurable
+anguish. "A great iron door under very dark vaults." Ygraine enters with
+a lamp in her hand. Faint knocking is heard on the other side of the
+door; then the voice of Tintagiles. Ygraine scratches her finger-nails
+out on the iron door, and smashes her lamp on it. The boy cries out that
+hands are at his throat. "The fall of a little body is heard behind the
+iron door." Ygraine implores, curses, sinks down exhausted.
+
+It is probably wrong to look on _The Death of Tintagiles_ as,
+principally, a picture of physical anguish. That would be dramatic, and
+therefore, in Maeterlinck's idea at the time he wrote the play, vulgar.
+The play is rather based, like _The Sightless_, on the sensations of
+fear we have when we awaken from the poisoned apathy, which is the
+safeguard of the peace of mind of most people, in the stifling air of
+the Valley of the Shadow of Death. (The Queen's Tower overshadows all
+the rest of the castle.) Everything is plunged in darkness here....
+Only the Queen's Tower is lit.... We know, but we do not understand....
+
+     TINTAGILES: What do you know, sister Ygraine?
+
+     YGRAINE: Very little, my child.... My sister and I, since we were
+     born, have trailed our existence here without daring to understand
+     anything of all that happens.... I have lived for a very long time
+     like a blind woman in this island; and everything seemed natural to
+     me.... I saw no other events here except a bird that was flying, a
+     leaf that was trembling, a rose that was opening.... Such a silence
+     reigned here that a ripe fruit falling in the park called faces to
+     the windows.... And nobody seemed to have any suspicions ... but
+     one night I found out that there must be something else.... I
+     wanted to run away and I couldn't....
+
+We cannot flee from our exile; and "we have got to live while we wait
+for the unexpected," as Aglovale says.
+
+
+[1] Ablamore was not really wise, according to the theories propounded
+in _Wisdom and Destiny_. A wise man is one who knows himself; but he is
+not wise if he does not know himself in the future as well as in the
+present and in the past. He knows a part of his future because he is
+himself already a part of this future; and, since the events which will
+happen to him will become assimilated to his own nature, he knows what
+these events will become (Chapter VIII).
+
+[2] Cf. in Strindberg's _Legends_, "The soul's irradiation and
+dilatability": "The secret of a great actor lies in his inborn capacity
+to let his soul ray out, and thereby enter into touch with his audience.
+In great moments there is actually a radiance round a speaker who is
+full of soul, and his face irradiates a light which is visible even to
+those who do not believe." The idea is more or less of a commonplace.
+
+[3] _Impressions de Théâtre_, huitième série, p. 153.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+In 1895 Maeterlinck published _Annabella_, a translation of John Ford's
+_'Tis Pity She's a Whore_. It had been acted at the Théâtre de
+l'Oeuvre on the 6th of November, 1894. The published play is preceded
+by some entertaining gossip concerning Webster (whose _Duchess of Malfi_
+Georges Eekhoud translated) and Cyril Tourneur, "les deux princes noirs
+de l'horreur ... les deux tragiques mercuriels, compacts comme la
+houille et infernalement vénéneux, dont le premier surtout a semé à
+pleines mains des fleurs miraculeuses dans les poisons et les ténèbres";
+concerning also "Jhon Fletcher" and "Jonson, le pachydermique, l'entêté
+et puissant Ben Jonson, qui appartient à la famille de ces grands
+monstres littéraires où rayonnent Diderot, Jean Paul et l'autre Jhonson,
+le Jhonson de Boswel." Interesting, too, is the way Maeterlinck reads
+his own theories into the Elizabethans. Ford, he finds, was a master of
+"interior dialogue":
+
+     "Ford is profoundly discreet. Annabella, Calantha, Bianca, Penthea
+     do not cry out; and they speak very little. In the most tragical
+     moments, in those most charged with misery, they say two or three
+     very simple words; and it is, as it were, a thin coating of ice on
+     which we can rest an instant to see what there is in the abyss."
+
+There are some quaint passages inspired by mysticism; as this, with
+reference to the "great cyclone of poetry which burst over London
+towards the end of the sixteenth century":
+
+     "You seem to be in the very midst of the human soul's miraculous
+     springtime. These were really days of marvellous promise. You would
+     have said that humanity was about to become something else.
+     Moreover, we do not know what influence these great poetic
+     phenomena have exercised on our life; and I have forgotten what
+     sage it was who said that if Plato or Swedenborg had not existed,
+     the soul of this peasant who is passing along the road and who has
+     never read anything would not be what it is to-day. Everything in
+     the spiritual regions is connected more closely than people
+     believe; and just as there is no malady which does not oppress all
+     humanity and does not invisibly affect the healthiest man, so the
+     most undeniable genius has not one thought which does not modify
+     something in the inmost soul of the most hopeless idiot in the
+     asylum."
+
+It is in this style that Maeterlinck discusses mysticism in the
+introduction to _Les Disciples à Saïs et les Fragments de Novalis_ (The
+Disciples at Saïs and the Fragments of Novalis), published also in
+1895.
+
+     "All that one can say," he discourses, "is nothing in itself. Place
+     in one side of a pair of scales all the words of the greatest
+     sages, and in the other side the unconscious wisdom of this child
+     who is passing, and you will see that what Plato, Marcus Aurelius,
+     Schopenhauer, and Pascal have revealed to us will not lift the
+     great treasures of unconsciousness by one ounce, for the child that
+     is silent is a thousand times wiser than Marcus Aurelius
+     speaking."[1]
+
+Some of the things he says here prepare the way for his dramatic
+theories:
+
+     "Open the deepest of ordinary moralists or psychologists, he will
+     speak to you of love, of hate, of pride, and of the other passions
+     of our heart; and these things may please us an instant, like
+     flowers taken from their stalk. But our real and invariable life
+     takes place a thousand leagues away from love and a hundred
+     thousand leagues away from pride. We possess an _I_ which is deeper
+     and more inexhaustible than the _I_ of passions or of pure reason.
+     It is not a matter of telling us what we feel when the woman we
+     love abandons us. She goes away to-day; our eyes weep, but our soul
+     does not weep. It may be that our soul hears of the event and
+     transforms it into light, for everything that falls into the soul
+     irradiates. It may be too that our soul knows not of it; and if
+     that be so what use is it to speak of it? We must leave these petty
+     things to those who do not feel that life is deep....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "I may commit a crime without the least breath inclining the
+     smallest flame of this fire" (the great central fire of our being);
+     "and, on the other hand, one look exchanged, one thought which
+     cannot unfold, one minute which passes without saying anything, may
+     stir it up in terrible whirlpools at the bottom of its retreats and
+     cause it to overflow on to my life. Our soul does not judge as we
+     do; it is a capricious, hidden thing. It may be reached by a breath
+     and it may be unaware of a tempest. We must seek what reaches it;
+     everything is there, for it is there that we are."
+
+Maeterlinck has striking things to say concerning the German
+romanticist. "He is the clock," he says, "that has marked several of the
+most subtle hours of the human soul." In the following passage he shows
+him to be a forerunner of the symbolists,[2] one of whose chief
+doctrines is that things are bound together by mysterious
+correspondences:
+
+     "Perhaps he is the man who has most deeply penetrated the intimate
+     and mystical nature and the secret unity of the universe.... 'He
+     sees nothing isolated,' and he is above all the amazed teacher of
+     the mysterious relations there are among all things. He is for ever
+     groping at the limits of this world, where the sun shines but
+     rarely, and, on every hand, he suspects and touches strange
+     coincidences and astonishing analogies, obscure, trembling,
+     fugitive, and shy, that fade before they are understood."
+
+The fragmentary style of Novalis, though it provided Maeterlinck with
+ideas, did not influence his prose as much as that of Emerson did. He
+had written a preface for I. Will's translation of seven of Emerson's
+essays which Paul Lacomblez brought out in Brussels in 1894. This
+preface and the introductions to Ruysbroeck and Novalis are reprinted in
+abridged form in _Le Trésor des Humbles_ (_The Treasure of the Humble_),
+which the _Mercure de France_ issued in 1896. These essays are clearly
+modelled on Emerson's. He calls Emerson "the good morning shepherd of
+the pale green pastures of a new optimism." He came for many of us,
+Maeterlinck thinks, just at the right time. This points forward already
+to _Wisdom and Destiny_. The heroic hours which Carlyle glorified are
+less apparent than they were:
+
+     "All that remains to us is our everyday existence, and yet we
+     cannot live without greatness.... You must live; all you who are
+     crossing days and years without actions, without thoughts, without
+     light, because your life after all is incomprehensible and
+     divine.... You must live because there are no hours without the
+     deepest miracles and the most unspeakable meanings.... Emerson came
+     to affirm the secret grandeur which is the same in every man's
+     life. He has surrounded us with silence and with admiration. He
+     has set a ray of light under the feet of the artisan coming from
+     the workshop.... He is the sage of ordinary days, and ordinary days
+     make up the substance of our being...."
+
+Emerson's gospel of everyday life harmonises admirably with the theory
+of the tragic advanced in another essay of the book, "_Le Tragique
+Quotidien_" ("Everyday Tragedy").
+
+     "Is it really dangerous to assert," asks the essayist, "that the
+     veritable tragedy of life ... only begins the moment what are
+     called adventures, griefs, and dangers are passed?... Are there not
+     other moments when one hears more permanent and purer voices?...
+     Nearly all our writers of tragedies only perceive the life of olden
+     time; and one may assert that our whole theatre is an
+     anachronism.... I admire Othello, but he does not seem to me to
+     live the august, everyday life of a Hamlet, who has the time to
+     live because he does not act. Othello is admirably jealous. But may
+     it not be an ancient error to think that it is at the moments when
+     we are possessed by such a passion, or by others of equal violence,
+     that we really live? I have come to think that an old man sitting
+     in his arm-chair, simply waiting in the lamplight, listening
+     without knowing it to all the eternal laws which reign around his
+     house, interpreting, without understanding it, all that there is in
+     the silence of the doors and the windows and in the low voice of
+     the light, undergoing the presence of his soul and of his destiny,
+     inclining his head a little, without suspecting that all the powers
+     of this world intervene and hold watch in the room like attentive
+     servants, not knowing that the sun itself sustains the little table
+     on which he leans his elbows over the abyss, and that there is not
+     one star of the sky nor one power of the soul which is indifferent
+     to the movement of an eyelid that falls down or of a thought that
+     rises--I have come to think that this motionless old man is living,
+     in reality, with a deeper, more human, and more general life than
+     the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who wins a
+     victory, or 'the husband avenging his honour.'"
+
+This eloquent passage has made many critics shake their heads. "Put a
+vivisectional rabbit in the arm-chair," says one, "and all that is said
+still holds good."
+
+It is in Emerson's "spiritual brother," Carlyle, that Maeterlinck finds
+his mainstay in the opening essay of the book, that on "Silence." This
+chapter is perhaps the most famous of his essays; and it must be
+understood if much in Maeterlinck's other work is not to remain obscure.
+He distinguishes between active silence and passive silence. The latter
+is only the reflex of sleep, death, or non-existence:
+
+     "It is silence sleeping; and while it is sleeping, it is less
+     redoubtable even than speech; but an unexpected circumstance may
+     awaken it of a sudden, and then its brother, the great active
+     silence, seats itself on the throne. Be on your guard. Two souls
+     are going to reach each other...."
+
+What practical value such theories may have is seen from the dramas for
+marionettes, in which something never before attempted has been done.
+Maeterlinck has indeed used silence to make the soul speak. But it may
+be questioned whether it is a doctrine solid enough to build with. It
+might, logically, lead to Max Reinhardt's wordless plays; but the
+latter, so far as they have yet been produced, have rather the reverse
+effect to that which Maeterlinck aimed at--Reinhardt spreads a feast for
+the eyes, and the silence of his pantomimes is only to enhance the
+spectacular appeal. Be that as it may, there are many astonishing things
+in Maeterlinck's mysticism, as there are in all mysticism. Many of them,
+no doubt, could be explained by the philosopher's "doctrine of
+identity."[3] From a practical point of view, however, Maeterlinck
+might seem to be teaching that when we say "fine weather to-day," or
+"pass me the salt" (these are common words, but what "interior dialogue"
+may there not be behind them?) we are expressing our souls; but that
+when we speak in the full heat of passion, or with that eloquence which
+pours from us in the brighter moments of our brains, we are expressing
+nothing. When the old King in _Princess Maleine_ asks whether there will
+be salad for breakfast, he expresses admirably the state of a foundered
+soul; when Golaud finds Pelleas playing with Melisanda's hair in the
+dark, and, instead of bursting into a torrent of speech, says simply:
+"You are children.... What children!... What children!" his taciturnity,
+or, if you like, his active silence, renders to perfection his pained
+surprise, the confused feelings which he is forcing himself to restrain
+till he can be sure of his ground--but to pick out a few effective
+instances like these only proves that the theory will stand examination,
+not that it is universally valid. Golaud, for instance, is taciturn and
+slow to believe, and therefore the few words he speaks in the scene
+mentioned are well motived; but put a man in his place whose passions
+are nearer the surface--a character of equal use to the dramatist,
+though of course less profound--and a torrent of words would have been
+more natural and equally effective.
+
+If we cultivated silence more, we should perhaps discover, with
+Maeterlinck, that the period we live in is one of the soul's awakening.
+"The soul," he says in another of these essays, "is like a sleeper who,
+under the weight of her dreams, is making immense efforts to move an arm
+or lift an eyelid." The soul is becoming visible almost: it does not
+shroud itself now in the same number of veils as it used to do. And "do
+you know--it is a disquieting and strange truth--do you know that if you
+are not good, it is more than probable that your presence proclaims it
+to-day a hundred times more clearly than it would have done two or three
+centuries ago." (If the essayist had added here that this is because our
+sensibilities are more refined, it would have been an evident truth; but
+he goes on to say: "Do you know that if you have made a single soul sad
+this morning, the soul of the peasant you are going to exchange a few
+words with about the storm or the rain was informed of it before his
+hand had half opened the door....")
+
+The soul's awakening is seen best in those whom he calls _Les Avertis_
+(those who are forewarned), and in women. "The forewarned" are
+precocious children, and those doomed to die young. As to women,
+Maeterlinck sees in them what Tacitus saw in the women of the Germans,
+something divinely prophetic. "It seems," he says, "that woman is more
+subject than we are to destinies. She undergoes them with a much greater
+simplicity. She never sincerely struggles against them. She is still
+nearer to God, and she surrenders herself with less reserve to the pure
+action of mystery." His description of woman's ennobling effect on man
+(the main belief of the Minnesingers) is like the woman-worship in John
+Masefield's poem _Imagination_:
+
+    "All the beauty seen by all the wise
+     Is but body to the soul seen by your eyes.
+
+    "Woman, if my quickened soul could win you,
+     Nestle to the living soul within you--,
+     Breathe the very breathing of your spirit,
+     Tremble with you at the things which stir it,
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "I should know the blinding, quick, intense
+     Lightning of the soul's spring from the sense,
+     Touch the very gleam of life's division.
+     Earth should learn a new soul from the vision."
+
+In the chapter headed "The Star" Maeterlinck discusses fatalism. His
+conception of it, as might be expected from the dramas already
+discussed, is identical with pessimism. "There is no destiny of joy," he
+says, "there is no fortunate star." He explains the Scotch word "fey,"
+and thinks it might be applied to all existences.
+
+In the chapter on "La Morale Mystique"--one which has been sharply
+criticised by Christians--Maeterlinck sunders the soul from the
+conscious acts of the body.
+
+     "What would happen," he asks, "if our soul suddenly became visible
+     and had to advance in the midst of her assembled sisters, despoiled
+     of her veils, but charged with her most secret thoughts, and
+     trailing behind her the most mysterious acts of her life that
+     nothing could express? What would she blush for? What would she
+     wish to hide? Would she, like a modest woman, cast the long mantle
+     of her hair over the numberless sins of the flesh? She knew nothing
+     of them, and these sins have never reached her. They were committed
+     a thousand leagues away from her throne, and the soul of the
+     Sodomite even would pass through the midst of the crowd without
+     suspecting anything, and bearing in its eyes the transparent smile
+     of a child. It had taken no part in the sin, it was pursuing its
+     life on the side where light reigns, and it is this life alone that
+     it will remember."
+
+This might comfort a criminal; but it is nothing more than a pure
+worship of the spirit. Maeterlinck might reply to his Christian
+traducers that they in their creed have forgotten the soul, or found it
+hard to think of it as independent of the body; and that it might have
+been better for them had they concentrated their worship on the Holy
+Ghost (as he does, on the Holy _Spirit_), for their worship of Christ is
+a species of idolatry, the worship of a graven image, an image graven in
+flesh.
+
+It is especially the "interior beauty," of which Maeterlinck treats in
+the last essay in the collection, which fills the play _Aglavaine and
+Selysette_, published in the same year. It is a competition between two
+women for the greater beauty of soul, a competition in which simplicity
+gains the victory over wisdom.
+
+In a castle by the sea live Méléandre and his wife Selysette. They have
+been married four years. They have been happy, though sometimes the
+husband has asked himself whether they have lived near enough to each
+other. Now they are joined by Aglavaine, the widow of Selysette's
+brother, who has been unhappy in her marriage. Before she has been eight
+days in the castle, Méléandre cannot imagine that they were not "born in
+the same cradle" [_sic_].
+
+Aglavaine on her part does not know whether he is her radiance or
+whether she is becoming his light. Everything is so joined in their
+beings that it is no longer possible to say where the one begins and
+where the other ends. (Pure love, according to the essays, is "a furtive
+but extremely penetrating recollection of the great primitive
+unity."[4]) They think of loving each other like brother and sister; but
+they know in their hearts that it will not be possible. (The senses are
+beginning to intrude into Maeterlinck's writings.) Nor can they run away
+from each other, or, at least, they make out they cannot: "A thing so
+beautiful," says Méléandre, "was not born to die; and we have duties
+towards ourselves." They kiss; a cry of pain is heard among the trees,
+and Selysette is seen fleeing, disheveled, towards the castle.
+
+This wounded wife has less control over her natural feelings than
+Astolaine had in similar circumstances; but Aglavaine, in several pages
+of parchment speech, shows herself so wise and strong a woman that
+Selysette's jealousy of her is turned into love. Now all three dream of
+a triangular love of equal magnitudes. "We will have no other cares,"
+says Aglavaine, "save to become as beautiful as possible, so that all
+the three of us may love one another the more.... We will put so much
+beauty into ourselves and our surroundings that there will be no room
+left for misfortune and sadness; and if these would enter in spite of
+all they must perforce become beautiful too before they dare knock at
+our door." They dream of a _unio mystica_ of souls: "It seems to me,"
+says Méléandre to Aglavaine, "as though my soul and my whole being and
+all they possess had changed their abode, as though I were embracing,
+with tears, that part of myself which is not of this world, when I am
+embracing you."
+
+But Méléandre, though he loves Selysette's awakened soul more than in
+old days he loved her girlish body, cannot help loving Aglavaine more.
+"Is it not strange?" Aglavaine asks Selysette, "I love you, I love
+Méléandre, Méléandre loves me, he loves you too, you love us both, and
+yet we cannot be happy, because the hour has not yet come when human
+beings can be united so."
+
+It is clear that one of the two women must go. In spite of her duty to
+herself Aglavaine, in a fit of generosity, decides to sacrifice herself;
+but Selysette makes her promise not to go till she herself tells her she
+may. She talks mysteriously to Aglavaine of a plan she has conceived for
+putting things right; and it is the great weakness of the drama that the
+wise woman, who can read souls so easily, cannot guess the truth in this
+one instance. A fool would have known that Selysette was contemplating
+suicide; but Aglavaine could not be allowed to wreck the tragedy....
+
+There is an old abandoned lighthouse tower that the seagulls scream
+round. It is crumbling away at the top. Méléandre had only climbed it
+once, and then he was dizzy.... Here comes Selysette with her little
+sister, Yssaline, for whom she has promised to catch a strange bird with
+green wings that has been seen flying round the tower.... She thinks it
+has built its nest in a hole in the wall just where she can lean
+over.... She leans over to seize it, and the top of the wall gives way.
+She is precipitated on to the sands below. She would be killed if it
+were not for the fifth act; but she lives long enough to make out that
+it was a pure accident, so that the two surviving lovers may be happy
+ever after with a clear conscience.
+
+In spite of great beauties, the play as a whole is disappointing. The
+fourth act, indeed, is perfect. In the first four acts we have the
+doctrine of silence, as well as various other doctrines, dinned into our
+ears. Méléandre is a milksop; Aglavaine is a bore; but Selysette is a
+beautiful creation--the only one of Maeterlinck's women, perhaps, who is
+absolutely natural. She is "unconscious goodness," says a critic,
+whereas Aglavaine is "conscious goodness"; and no doubt she does
+represent an idea;[5] but she is nevertheless a real, created woman.
+Méligrane, the spiteful old grandmother, is in the main the same idea
+(wisdom is in babes and the very old) as the greybeards of other plays;
+but there is not very much of her, and she must be remembered for saying
+this (to her granddaughter, Selysette):
+
+     "And so it is thanks to you that I was a mother for the second
+     time, when I had ceased to be beautiful; and you will know some day
+     that women are never tired of being mothers, and that they would
+     rock death itself, if death came to sleep on their knees."
+
+_Aglavaine and Selysette_ is at all events important as being a
+turning-point in Maeterlinck's development. We have seen that he had
+applauded Emerson's sturdy individualism. There is as much individualism
+as fatalism in this play. It is true that love is fatal to Selysette,
+but that is because Aglavaine is a monstrosity, not because love is a
+_dark_ power--in this play it is distinctly painted as a _bright_ power.
+Death is only called in as a saviour from an intolerable situation:
+Selysette dies, but she dies with a clear mind, and with a smile.
+
+_Aglavaine and Selysette_ is legendary in its setting only; and it is
+not vague, but a clear handling of a problem which is a favourite with
+contemporary dramatists--another notable example is Gerhart Hauptmann's
+_Einsame Menschen_ ("Lonely Lives"). Hauptmann, like Maeterlinck,
+simplifies the complexity by the suicide of the most sensitive member
+of the group: both dramatists come to the conclusion that the time is
+not yet ripe for reorganising cohabitation on a plural basis, and that
+(to quote Dryden) one to one must still be cursedly confined. What
+Maeterlinck has contributed to the problem is that he makes the two
+women love each other as well as the man they sandwich....
+
+There is nothing of this awakening courage to live in the collection of
+poems modelled on folksong (the symbolists generally learned much from
+folksong) which Maeterlinck published in this year of 1896. In _Douze
+Chansons_ (Twelve Songs) which are now included in _Quinze Chansons_
+(Fifteen Songs) at the end of _Serres Chaudes_, the poor human soul is
+still groping in surrounding dark, and only catching rare glimpses of
+the light. In one poem the soul has been wandering for thirty years,
+seeking her saviour; he was everywhere, but she could not come near him.
+Now, in the evening of her days, she bids her sister souls of sixteen
+years take up her staff and seek him; they also, far away. Les _Filles
+aux Yeux bandés_ and _Les sept Filles d'Orlamonde_[6] are sketches of a
+motive which was worked out in _Ardiane and Bluebeard_.
+
+The poems are so beautifully illustrated by Charles Doudelet's woodcuts
+that it is hard to say whether the pictures illuminate the poem or the
+poems the pictures. Maeterlinck's Tower is there, hauntingly desolate, a
+nightmare, set against _The three blind sisters_. You know the meaning
+of _She had three diadems of gold_ when you have seen the picture to it:
+the love you bestow on a person is a net wherewith that person imprisons
+you. The most desolating imprisonment of all is that in which a mother
+is plunged by her children (for there is no love so _deep_ as hers):
+Doudelet shows us a woman chained up in a hole whelmed with snow.
+
+To dream over this rare volume for an after-noon, stretching out its
+leaves before you like the wings of a bird, is to be borne into the
+atmosphere of the soul. And when you come to the last picture and the
+last poem "_You have lighted the lamps_"--
+
+    "The other days are wearisome,
+       The other days are also shy,
+     The other days will never come,
+       The other days shall also die,
+       We too shall die here by and bye"--
+
+you would like to bury your head in your hands and sob like a
+woman--without knowing why....
+
+
+[1] See note, p. 88.
+
+[2] One of the features which distinguish the poetry of the symbolists
+is the mixing of _genres_. Cf. the following fragment (p. 103 in
+Maeterlinck's translation): "One ought never to see a work of plastic
+art without music, nor listen to a work of music anywhere save in
+beautifully decorated halls."
+
+[3] Cf. Dr van Dijk, _Maeterlinck_, pp. 26 ff.; "Now in order to find
+the life interior you must be at the other end of all your agitations,
+you must be behind your conscious thoughts, words, and deeds. Behind all
+that makes you finite, keeps you finite, lies the infinite; the ocean of
+the infinite flows round you there, and there lie the ice-fields of
+mystery, the great treasures of the unconscious, there are the deeps of
+the interior sea. _There_ is no longer that which has an end, a bound, a
+limit, that which is shared and divided, that which is joined and
+separated, _there_ is perfect identity of all things, _there_ is
+everywhere and always identical mystery, _there_ God is. There it is,
+too, says Maeterlinck, that we first understand each other, for subtle,
+tender bonds are there between all souls.... When you now, with
+Maeterlinck, turn your back on the conscious in every form, it follows
+that even the best word will always be a more or less disturbing
+wrinkle, a wrinkle that darkens the unmoving silent waters of the
+unconscious. Think and put your thoughts into words, and you must move
+further and further in the direction of the conscious; that is, in the
+direction of that which is limited and the limiting." Cf. one of the
+opening sentences of the essay "La Morale mystique": "As soon as we
+express something, we diminish it strangely. We think we have dived to
+the depth of the abysses, and when we reach the surface again the drop
+of water glittering at the end of our pale fingers no longer resembles
+the sea it came from."
+
+[4] In _The Invisible Goodness_.
+
+[5] According to Mieszner, Aglavaine is a "Mannweib," Selysette a
+"Nurweib."
+
+[6] Is the name from the German _Volkslied_ "Herzogin von Orlamünde"?
+
+
+
+
+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.[1] 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?"[2]
+
+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."[3]
+
+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,[4] 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;[5] 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.[6] It is
+anti-ascetic too. Maeterlinck has the courage to say that a morbid
+virtue may do more harm than a healthy vice.[7] 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."[8]
+
+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.[9] 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.[10]
+
+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:
+
+    "Voici l'heure qui bout de sang et de jeunesse ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu, déplace
+     L'équilibre ancien dont les âmes sont lasses;
+           La nature paraît sculpter
+     Un visage nouveau à son éternité."[11]
+
+
+[1] Schrijver in his _Maeterlinck_, pp. 54 ff., collects passages in
+_The Treasure_ which point forward to _Wisdom and Destiny_.
+
+[2] _Sagesse et Destinée_, p. 122. Cf. Verhaeren, "Un Matin" (_Les
+Forces Tumultueuses_):
+
+    "Il me semble jusqu'à ce jour n'avoir vécu
+     Que pour mourir et non pour vivre."
+
+]
+
+[3] _Het Letterkundig Leven van Frankrijk_, pp. 180-181. Cf. also
+Chapter VII of "L'Evolution du Mystère" in _Le Temple Enseveli_.
+
+[4] In the _Buried Temple_, Chapter XXI, Maeterlinck says: "Nature
+rejects renunciation in all its forms, except that of maternal love."
+
+[5] Cf. Chapter XXI of L'Inquiétude de notre Morale (in _L'Intelligence
+des Fleurs_): "We are no longer chaste, now that we have recognised that
+the work of the flesh, cursed during twenty centuries, is natural and
+legitimate. We no longer go out in search of resignation, of
+mortification, of sacrifice; we are no longer humble in heart nor poor
+in spirit."
+
+[6] "Man is created to live in harmony with others; it is in society and
+not in solitude that he finds numerous opportunities of practising
+Christian charity to his neighbours."--Swedenborg.
+
+[7] In "Portrait de Femme" (_Le double Jardin_) Maeterlinck
+distinguishes between virtue and vice: they are the same forces, he says
+... a virtue is only a vice that rises instead of falling.
+
+[8] _Verhaeren_, p. 298.
+
+[9] _Les Heures d'après-midi_.
+
+[10] _Wisdom and Destiny_, Chapter I.
+
+[11] Verhaeren, "La Foule" (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Of _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_ (Ardiane and Bluebeard) and _Soeur
+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_.[1] 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,[2] 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."[3]
+
+_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.'"
+
+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.[4] 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.[5] 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,[6] 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.
+
+
+[1] Preface to _Théâtre_, p. XVIII. The interpretation given on the
+following page is his own, as given to a friend.
+
+[2] Cf. _Le Temple Enseveli_, Chapters XXVI and XXVII.
+
+[3] "Aus unseren Zierpuppen und aus unseren Blaustrümpfen werden erst
+Vollmenschen, nachdem die Mädchen und Frauen ihre natürlichen Reize
+entdeckt haben und sie selbst gebrauchen lernen."--Mieszner,
+_Maeterlinck's Werke_, p. 48.
+
+[4] Cf. also Chapters XXVIII and XXIX of _L'Evolution du Mystère_ in
+this volume.
+
+[5] It was performed in December, 1911, by the Players' Club in Dublin.
+
+[6] The play (the symbol of the fates of the poet and Mme Leblanc,
+according to Oppeln-Bronikowski, the German translator of Maeterlinck's
+works--_Bühne und Welt_, November-Heft 2, 1902) had been specially
+written for her. As Monna Vanna, she made her debut as an actress--she
+had previously been an opera-singer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Maeterlinck's essays do not centre round himself. His vision is cosmic;
+the subject of his essays is the universe. But _Le double Jardin_ (The
+Double Garden), a collection of essays strung together and published in
+1904, is more personal than his other books, though it is still
+concerned with presenting a cosmic philosophy. Here he gives us glimpses
+into his life; we see him as a lover of dogs and flowers; on his travels
+in the south of Europe; as an automobilist; as an amateur of fencing.
+
+The first essay is that famous one--"On the Death of a little Dog."
+Those who fight shy of Maeterlinck because they credit the report,
+sufficiently widespread, that he is a platitudinarian, might be advised
+to sample him in this essay. If, when they have read it, they are unable
+to admit his charm and originality, they may be considered cases of
+obstinacy. It is not written with any ostentation of style; its style,
+in these days of fine writing by intellectual acrobats, is not even
+brilliant. It is written so simply that you would say it had been
+written for children; and it is as touchingly beautiful and as full of
+meaning as that other sublimely simple story about the ugly duckling.
+
+It is the life-story of a little bull-dog that died of distemper when he
+was six months old. He had a great bulging forehead, like Verlaine's. He
+was as beautiful as a beautiful natural monster. Life was as full of
+problems for him as it is for the burdened brains of the children of
+men. He had to resign himself, like any other mystic, to the mystery of
+closed doors; he had to admit that the essential bounties of existence,
+generally imprisoned in pots and pans, are inaccessible. What a lot of
+orders, prohibitions, and perils he had to class in his memory; and how
+was he to conciliate them all with other more vast and imperious laws
+implanted in him by instinct, laws which rise and grow from hour to
+hour, which come from the beginning of time and of the race, which
+invade the blood, the muscles, and the nerves, and of a sudden assert
+themselves, more irresistible and more powerful than pain, and even than
+the master's order and the pain of death? And then the stolen
+joys--first and foremost the refuse-tin! He sees the cook cleaning a
+fish--but he does not appear curious as to where those delicacies go; he
+bides his time.
+
+The only animal that has made a compact with man is the dog. To the dog
+man is God--ideas soon to be made visible in _The Blue Bird_.
+
+There is a beautiful essay on old-fashioned flowers--those which are
+being ousted out of our modern gardens by such flowers as
+tuberous-rooted begonias, with their red combs always crowing like so
+many cocks; and one on chrysanthemums, a symbol of the onward march of
+culture. (We know from _The Blue Bird_ that our descendants are to have
+daisies as big as tables, grapes as big as pears, blue apples as big as
+melons, and melons as big as pumpkins: all the beauty, all the bounties
+of the future are only waiting for the intellect of man to awaken them.)
+In "The Olive Boughs" the teaching of the volume is concentrated:
+
+     "Hitherto the pivot of the world seemed to us to be formed of
+     spiritual powers; to-day we are convinced that it is composed of
+     purely material energies."
+
+It is by the study of concrete things--the mechanism of an automobile,
+the adaptability of dogs to climate and occupation,[1] the evolution of
+flowers--that we shall learn to solve the riddle of existence. This
+teaching, like that of _The Life of the Bee_, is absolutely identical
+with Verhaeren's.
+
+An important essay is that on "The Modern Drama." Maeterlinck has some
+hard things to say about historical dramas, "those necessarily
+artificial poems which are born of an impossible marriage between the
+past and the present." The passions and feelings that a modern poet
+reads into a past age must of necessity be modern, and cannot live in an
+alien atmosphere. The modern drama "unfolds itself in a modern house,
+among men and women of to-day." The task of the modern dramatist is to
+go deeper into consciousness than was the custom of old: the drama of
+to-day cannot deck itself out in gaudy trappings, the ermines and sables
+of regal pomp, the show of circumstance; it cannot appeal to divinity;
+it cannot appeal to any fixed fatality; it must try to discover, in the
+regions of psychology, and in those of moral life, the equivalent of
+what it has lost in the exterior life of epic times. And the sovereign
+law of the theatre will always be _action_. No matter how beautiful, no
+matter how deep the language is, it is bound to weary us if it changes
+nothing in the situation, if it does not lead to a decisive conflict, if
+it does not hurry on to a final solution.
+
+_L'Intelligence des Fleurs_ (English translation: Life and Flowers),
+published in 1907, is another collection of essays twining "the
+instinctive ideal" round the solid pillars of reality. Maeterlinck
+describes the vehement, obstinate revolt of flowers against their
+destiny. They have one aim: to escape from the fatality that fixes them
+to the soil, to invent wings, as it were, so that they may soar above
+the region that gave them birth, and there expand in the light which is
+their blossoming. Flowers set us a prodigious example of
+insubordination, of courage, of perseverance, and of cunning. It is the
+genius of the earth which is acting in them--the earth-spirit,
+Maeterlinck might have said with Goethe. "The ideal of the earth-spirit
+is often confused, but you can distinguish in it a multitude of great
+lines which rise aloft to a life more ardent, more complex, more
+nervous, more spiritual." Insects and flowers bring gleams of the light
+without into the dark cavern in which we are prisoners. They, too, have
+something of the fluid which religions called divine--the fluid to which
+man, of all things on earth, offers the least resistance. Their
+evolution should make us feel that man is on the way to divinity.
+
+The chapter called "L'Inquiétude de notre Morale" strides over dead
+religions to hold out a hand of welcome to the religion of the future.
+Two main rivers of contemporary thought, whose sources are Tolstoy and
+Nietzsche, flow with high waves far from the bogs and shallow pools
+where those who are poisoned by dead religions lie stifling. One of
+these rivers is flowing violently backwards to an illusory past; the
+other roars foam-flecked in its fury to an improbable future. Between
+these two rivers lies the broad plateau of reality; and we who are
+Maeterlinck's disciples may add that we build our homesteads round the
+placid lake his teaching forms on this broad plateau between the two
+dangerous rivers....
+
+The chapter "In Praise of Boxing," is not a literary exercise on a fancy
+subject. Maeterlinck is a boxer who needs some beating. We have all read
+in all the newspapers in the year of grace 1912 that a public match in
+the interests of charity had been arranged between him and the
+middleweight champion of Europe, Georges Carpentier.
+
+Another section, "Our Social Duty," tends towards Socialism. "Extreme
+opinion," we read, "demands immediately an integral sharing, the
+suppression of property, obligatory work, etc. We do not know yet how
+these demands can be realised; but it is at this moment certain that
+very simple circumstances will make them some day seem as natural as the
+suppression of primogenitureship and the privileges of the nobility....
+Truth here is situated less in reason, which is always turned towards
+the past, than in imagination, which sees farther than the future....
+Let us only listen to the experience which urges us forward; it is
+always higher than that which restrains us or throws us backward. Let us
+reject all the counsels of the past which are not turned towards the
+future.... It is above all important to destroy. In all social progress,
+the great work, the only difficult work, is the destruction of the past.
+We do not need to be anxious about what we shall set up in place of the
+ruins. The force of things and of life will undertake the work of
+reconstruction."
+
+_L'Oiseau bleu_ (The Blue Bird) is an epitome of these and other
+Maeterlinckian ideas. But this is no dramatised essay. The characters,
+it is true, are still ideas personified; but this time they are
+galvanised into life by a saving quality--humour. The humour that made
+the essay "On the Death of a Little Dog" so irresistible makes this
+presentation of Maeterlinck's philosophy for children a thing of pure
+delight. It is, moreover, as easy to understand, and as sparkling to the
+eyes in its magic changes, as a Christmas pantomime. And a child who has
+seen this fairy tale on the stage has not only enjoyed itself immensely,
+and had an experience it will never forget, but it has also learned, it
+cannot fail to have learned, lessons that should have an immediate and
+lasting effect on its character and behaviour. Maeterlinck has many
+jewels in her crown; but the brightest is that which came to him for
+having brought happiness and taught goodness to children.
+
+_The Blue Bird_ was first produced at the Théâtre des Arts in Moscow on
+the 30th September, 1908. This theatre, which had been supported for
+years by a group of rich amateurs, first paid its way when _The Blue
+Bird_ drew thousands to its boards. In December, 1909, Mr Herbert Trench
+staged it, with a poet's understanding of a poet at the Haymarket
+Theatre in London; it ran till June, and was revived for Christmas,
+1910.
+
+_The Blue Bird_, like another modern pantomime for children, Richard
+Dehmel's demoniac _Fitzebutze_, is as entertaining to read as it is
+fascinating to see. The two children of a woodcutter, a boy, Tyltyl, and
+a girl, Mytyl, are sent out by a fairy in quest of "the blue bird, that
+is to say, the great secret of things and of happiness." They are
+accompanied by Light (whom the fairy conjures out of the lamp in the
+cottage), the Dog, the Cat (a very nasty cat--cats must be nasty because
+dogs, the friends of man, don't like them), Sugar (who breaks off his
+fingers for them to eat when they are hungry), Bread (who slices his
+paunch to add substance to the sugar), Fire (a red-faced lout), Water
+(whom Fire keeps at a respectful distance because she has not brought
+her umbrella), and Milk (a very shy, impressionable youth--as one might
+say, a milksop). First the children pay a visit to their dead
+grandparents in the misty Land of Memory. They find the old couple
+asleep on a bench in front of the same old cottage they occupied on
+earth; they awaken at the children's approach, and we are taught that
+the dead awaken every time the loved ones whom they left behind think of
+them. Before they leave, the old people make them a present of a
+blackbird which is quite blue; but when they have left the Land of
+Memory they find it has turned black. (It was not real, it was a dream,
+and could not bear the light of reality.)
+
+Continuing their wanderings they come to the Palace of Night. The Cat
+has hurried on in advance to tell Mother Night, with whom he is in
+league, of the coming of their enemy, Man, who is guided by Light. Night
+is very much upset: already, she complains, Man has captured a third of
+her mysteries, all her Terrors are afraid and dare not leave the house,
+her Ghosts have taken flight, the greater part of her Sicknesses are
+ill. The children arrive, and in the end capture a number of blue birds
+behind one of the doors to which Night holds the key. But as soon as the
+company have escaped from the Palace of Night, the birds are seen to be
+dead. Like the roses in the cavern in _Alladine and Palomides_, they
+could not live in the light of day.
+
+They reach the enchanted palaces where all men's joys, all men's
+happinesses are gathered together in the charge of Fate. First they meet
+the Luxuries of the Earth, bloated revellers whose banqueting-hall is
+separated from the cavern of the Miseries only by a thin curtain. The
+Blue Bird is not here. Next they interview the Happinesses (the
+Happiness of Home, the Happiness of Being Well, etc.) and the Great Joys
+(the Joy of Maternal Love, the Joy of Understanding, etc.). In the end
+they arrive at the Kingdom of the Future, an Azure Palace pretty high up
+in the clouds. Here all unborn children, enough to last to the end of
+the world, more than thirty thousand, are awaiting the hour of their
+birth. When the fathers and mothers want children, Father Time throws
+back the opalescent doors which open upon the quays of the Dawn, and
+ships the babies off in a galley with White and gold sails; then are
+heard the sounds of the earth like a distant music, and the song of the
+mothers coming out to meet their children. Gliding about among the
+children are taller figures, "clad in a paler and more diaphanous azure,
+figures of a sovereign and silent beauty"--the race which shall inhabit
+the earth when man has made way for his offspring the superman. The
+babes unborn are pondering, while they wait:
+
+                       "some little plan or chart,
+    Some fragment from their dream of human life,"
+
+the inventions they are to make, the happiness they are to confer, the
+crimes they are to commit. Of a sudden Father Time discovers the
+children, and comes towards them in a fury, asking them why they are not
+blue; but Light tells the boy to turn the magic diamond which has
+preserved them thus far, and she has just time to whisper that she has
+got the blue bird, when down goes the curtain.
+
+ACT VI. shows the children in their little cots, where they were when
+the play opened; it has all been a dream.
+
+For _The Blue Bird_ Maeterlinck was in 1912 awarded, for the third time
+in succession, the Belgian "Triennial prize for dramatic literature."
+
+In 1910 appeared his translation of _Macbeth_, and the English
+translation of another play of his, _Mary Magdalene_. _Macbeth_ was
+performed (a sensational event, and a triumph for Mme Maeterlinck) at
+the Abbey of Saint Wandrille, the Benedictine cloister which Maeterlinck
+saved from being turned into a chemical factory,[2] and which is now his
+home. _Mary Magdalene_ was first performed at Leipsic and Hamburg; in
+Great Britain it shares with _Monna Vanna_ the honour of being refused
+an acting licence (because the voice of Jesus is heard in it!)
+
+For _Mary Magdalene_ Maeterlinck borrowed two situations from a German
+play, _Maria von Magdala_, by Paul Heyse--"namely, at the end of the
+first act, the intervention of Christ, Who stops the crowd raging
+against Mary Magdalene with these words, spoken behind the scenes: 'He
+that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone'; and, in
+the third, the dilemma in which the great sinner finds herself, of
+saving or destroying the Son of God, according as she consents or
+refuses to give herself to a Roman." Paul Heyse refused Maeterlinck his
+authorisation to develop these two situations; whereupon Maeterlinck
+decided that "the words of the gospel, quoted above, are common
+property; and that the dilemma ... is one of those which occur pretty
+frequently in dramatic literature." It was the very situation,
+Maeterlinck claims, which he had himself imagined in the final trial of
+Joyzelle.
+
+The death of Christ is a tragedy which is waiting for a great dramatist
+to master. Both Grillparzer and Hebbel pondered it. Maeterlinck has not
+done what they left undone; he was not dramatist enough to do it.
+Grillparzer would have spun his play round Judas as a type of an envious
+man; Maeterlinck places Mary Magdalene in the centre, not the sinner,
+but the convert--and this convert is the same character as Aglavaine, as
+Monna Vanna--Maeterlinck's strong, wise woman. This tragedy is again in
+the nature of a dramatised essay--another essay on wisdom. The idea is
+that the wise, who are certain of their knowledge, cannot yield to what
+is wrong. Joyzelle, we remember, would not sacrifice to save one man (it
+is true she pretended to be willing to, but her pretence was foolish,
+for she should have known it would be vain, seeing that Merlin was a
+magician) what Monna Vanna was willing to sacrifice to save a multitude.
+Mary Magdalene refuses to make the same sacrifice to save Christ: for
+Christ has made her a wise and therefore a good woman, and she would be
+untrue to Him in her if she were to rescue Him from Death--in other
+words His teaching, the essence of His Soul, must not be soiled,
+whatever torture be inflicted on His poor, human body. There would be
+tense tragedy in the situation when she hears Him being led to
+crucifixion, if we did not feel that she is no character but a wise
+idea; and if, too, the Roman who has it in his power to save Christ were
+not such a vulgar, melodramatic villain. Maeterlinck has been singularly
+unsuccessful in this drama. As a courtesan Mary Magdalene is a bore; as
+a convert she is still a bore.
+
+It is not a human drama. If Jesus has the power to awaken the dead, and
+to summon the living so that they walk as in sleep (Mary comes to Him in
+this way), there is no human conflict. One might suspect sexual
+attraction in Mary's conversion, but she gives one the impression of
+being a sexless blue-stocking; we are forced to the conclusion that she
+is mesmerised. Jesus is a mesmerist;[3] from a dramatic point of view.
+He is no more convincing than Svengali. Maeterlinck's play is on a level
+with those of Hall Caine; his Roman villain especially might have been
+conceived by Hall Caine.
+
+In 1911 appeared, in an English translation (the French original was not
+published till 1913), another book of essays under the title of _Death_.
+Maeterlinck takes up the thread of what he had said about death in his
+previous writings, especially in the noble essay on Immortality in _Life
+and Flowers_:
+
+     "For us, death is the one event that counts in our life or in our
+     universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes our vigilance
+     unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our thoughts
+     struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around it.
+     The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it battens
+     but on our fears lie who seeks to forget it burdens his memory with
+     it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But though we think
+     of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously without learning to
+     know death."
+
+The book shocked many of its critics, who found one of Maeterlinck's
+ideas repugnant--his plea that it is to no purpose to prolong the
+agonies of the sick-bed.
+
+     "Why should the doctors," asks the essayist, "consider it their
+     duty to protract even the most excruciating convulsions of the most
+     hopeless agony? Who has not, at a bedside, twenty times wished and
+     not once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to
+     show mercy?... One day this prejudice will strike us as barbarian.
+     Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by
+     religions which have long since died out in the mind of men. That
+     is why the doctors act as though they were convinced that there is
+     no known torture but is preferable to those awaiting us in the
+     unknown.... The day will come when science will turn against this
+     error, and no longer hesitate to shorten our misfortunes."
+
+Why should we fear death? It is not the nightmare which superstition has
+made it out to be. It is not the arrival of death, but the departure of
+life which is appalling.
+
+     "Here begins the open sea. Here begins the glorious adventure, the
+     only one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as
+     high as its highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard
+     death as a form of life which we do not yet understand; let us
+     learn to look upon it with the same eye that looks upon birth; and
+     soon our mind will be accompanied to the steps of the tomb with the
+     same glad expectation that greets a birth."
+
+It may be doubted whether men will ever grow so wise that they will look
+forward to death as they look forward to a birth; in the meantime, as Mr
+Basil de Sélincourt pointed out in the _Manchester Guardian_, they will
+be getting toothless, bald, and blind, and "the logic of the mystics may
+wish to assure us that these are processes of life and not of death; we
+shall continue to think such an assurance rather sophistical and
+insipid.... The fear of the moment of death and a passionate protest of
+the soul against the idea of its finality are probably as normal in the
+highest types of men as in the lowest."[4] And there is another
+consideration, subtly suggested by Charles Bernard in an article in _Le
+Masque_, Série ii, Nos. 7 and 8: the fear of the physical agony of death
+and the decomposition that follows it intensifies the raptures of
+health, and even all the moments of pleasure an ageing man can snatch
+from his decay.
+
+But the importance of the book does not lie in this discussion of the
+physical facts of death. It lies in its investigation of ideas
+concerning the immortality of our soul. Whatever the soul be--whether it
+be that mysterious thing which cannot be definitely located, but which
+we carry about with us like a mirror in a world whose phenomena only
+take shape in so far as they are reflected in it,[5] or whether it be
+the sum total of our intellectual and moral qualities fortified by those
+of instinct and sub-consciousness[6]--Maeterlinck's suggestions, in his
+various essays, of a solution brings us to something which strengthens
+the spiritual, or if you like the intellectual, part of our nature.
+
+"Is it not possible" he asks, "that the enjoyment of art for its own
+sake, the calm and full satisfaction we are plunged into by the
+contemplation of a beautiful statue or of a perfect monument, things
+that do not belong to us and that we shall never see again, which excite
+no sensual desire, which can profit us nothing--is it not possible that
+this satisfaction may be the pale gleam of a different consciousness
+filtering through a fissure of that consciousness of ours which is built
+up of memories?"[7]
+
+_Death_ appeared almost simultaneously with the news that Maeterlinck
+had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. The occasion was
+celebrated by a public banquet offered to the poet by the City of
+Brussels; official Belgium had at last awakened to the fact that its
+poets were more honoured in the world than its rulers. As to the one
+hundred and ninety thousand francs, he had no need of the money for
+himself, and it was announced that his intention was to found a
+"Maeterlinck prize with it," to be given every two years to the writer
+of the most remarkable book published in that period in the French
+language.
+
+
+[1] He does not mention the soft mouth of the old English sheep-dog.
+
+[2] The Abbé Dimnet, in an article in _The Nineteenth Century_ for
+January, 1912, charges Maeterlinck with indelicacy for having occupied
+the abbey so soon after its confiscation! The abbé does not mention the
+chemical project.
+
+[3]
+
+     LAZARUS: Come. The Master calls you.
+
+     [MAGDALENE _leaves the column against which she is leaning and
+     takes four or five steps towards_ LAZARUS _as though walking in her
+     sleep_.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     MAGDALENE: He fixed his eyes for but a moment on mine; and that
+     will be enough for the rest of my life.
+
+--(p. 72).
+
+[4] I have re-translated from the French in which Mr de Sélincourt's
+article was reproduced in _Le Thyrse_ for January, 1912.
+
+
+[5] "L'Immortalité" (in _L'Intelligence des Fleurs_) p. 282.
+
+[6] _Ibid._, p. 295.
+
+[7] _Ibid._, p. 307.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+I have reported little of the gossip concerning Maeterlinck. Everybody
+knows that he smokes denicotinised tobacco; that he resides in the
+summer at Saint Wandrille and in the winter at his house "Villa des
+Abeilles" at Nice (having now left his villa aux Quatre Chemins, near
+Grasse in the south of France); and so forth. One little picture I would
+like to contribute; I have it from a friend and admirer of his, and it
+concerns a visit to the Villa Dupont, the house in the Rue Pergolèse
+where Maeterlinck lived when he first settled in Paris:
+
+     "His study was like a monk's cell, but very original in style. It
+     was simply lime-washed; and this lime-wash was of a hard, raw blue
+     in colour, approaching indigo. For furniture, a little
+     looking-glass, a table of rough wood, and three chairs. No books at
+     all. But the walls were covered with little white butterflies in
+     flight. These were _thoughts_, and every one was fastened to the
+     wall simply by a pin. The effect was singular, violently original
+     at all events, but with nothing that gave you the idea of a pose.
+     Maeterlinck at this period received no visitors, saw none of his
+     friends. He had installed himself in surroundings as bare as
+     possible, so that he might meditate; and to these surroundings he
+     had given the colour he desired.
+
+     "This room was empty when I was brought into it; and I beguiled the
+     tedium of waiting for Maeterlinck by reading some of the thoughts
+     on the slips of white paper pinned to the wall. Some of them were
+     nothing very particular; others were obscure or appeared rather
+     childish--isolated, as I read them;--but some were very beautiful.
+     Maeterlinck coming into the room and finding me thus occupied,
+     laughed heartily. But severely I pointed to the butterflies on the
+     wall, and inquired about the name of each species. The names, I was
+     told, were very great names indeed. I tried to guess one or two,
+     but luck was against me, and I felt it a puzzle to set the right
+     name to each bit of paper.
+
+     "Maeterlinck, reading with me, smiled as he saw me attack a new
+     battalion of thoughts. These were placed somewhat apart from the
+     others. 'Are they yours?' I asked. 'Yes,' he answered modestly;
+     'nothing more than studies for a book I am working at. But take
+     notice of this one, please, and of this one, and of this one too.
+     Are they not most beautiful?' Then, in a tone of jubilant
+     admiration, he pronounced the name of their author--the name of a
+     French lady who, some years afterwards, was to be Melisanda, Monna
+     Vanna, and Ardiane on the stage. Several of these thoughts, I must
+     say, seemed really worth attention; and I felt particularly
+     surprised that a woman should have been able to compress them into
+     three short lines, or even into five or six words."
+
+As to Maeterlinck's personal appearance at the present time, the
+following is the impression he made recently on Mr Frank Harris:
+
+     "Maeterlinck is easily described: a man of about five feet nine in
+     height, inclined to be stout; silver hair lends distinction to the
+     large round head and boyish fresh complexion; blue-grey eyes, now
+     thoughtful, now merry, and an unaffected off-hand manner. The
+     features are not cut, left rather "in the rough" as sculptors say,
+     even the heavy jaw and chin are drowned in fat; the forehead bulges
+     and the eyes lose colour in the light and seem hard; still, an
+     interesting and attractive personality."[1]
+
+A few words must be devoted to the present position of Maeterlinck in
+critical estimation. Since the award of the Nobel prize imposed him on
+the public consciousness as one of the foremost of living writers,
+voices have been raised in protest. The attack of the Abbé Dimnet in
+_The Nineteenth Century and After_ for January, 1912, may be dismissed
+as Jesuitical. Various opinions, mostly favourable, by celebrities, were
+collected in the Brussels review _Le Thyrse_ for January, 1912, under
+the heading, "Maeterlinck et le prix Nobel." One of these letters is
+from Alfred Fouillée, who suggests that Maeterlinck's philosophy owes
+much to that of Jean Marie Guyau. The old complaint that the dramas are
+"childish" is rarely heard nowadays; but there is a vague feeling in the
+air that the substance of the essays is a potpourri from earlier
+writers. It is the easiest thing in the world to make such a charge; it
+is far more difficult to substantiate it. Not one critic has given us
+the exhaustive list of parallel passages which would be required to
+shake our credit in Maeterlinck's essential originality. Typical is the
+attitude of Mr Frank Harris in his too inaccurate and loosely written
+but not negligible articles in the _Academy_: he finds nothing in the
+essays which is not already contained in "Moralis" (does he mean
+Novalis?) and the other somewhat recondite writers in whom he (Mr Frank
+Harris) is obviously so deeply read. But even if it were proved that
+Maeterlinck, like Molière, has taken his wealth where he found it, there
+would be no more reason to think the less of him than there is to think
+the less of any artist for melting old metal and re-casting it, or of
+any thinker for sifting, rejecting, and re-stating old conclusions. It
+is an effort of profound originality to take whatever is good from a
+vast, and in some cases buried literature, and from this stock to polish
+and set in currency ideas which have an immediate effect on the
+spiritual or mental life of to-day, which fortify character, give us
+confidence in the future, make us better men and force us to make our
+children better men than we are ourselves.
+
+By far the most scathing of Maeterlinck's detractors is a Belgian critic
+born in Ghent, Louis Dumont-Wilden, a critic who, as he confesses, was
+in his youth enchanted by the "morning charm" of _The Treasure of the
+Humble_ with "its violent and sustained effort to soar to a kind of
+philosophical lyrism," who has still a good word to say for the early
+dramas, but who condemns "the adulterated æstheticism of _Monna Vanna_,
+the cold allegory, the elementary philosophy of _Joyzelle_ and _The Blue
+Bird_." Already in _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ for February, 1910,
+Dumont-Wilden attempted to shatter the idol in the following terms:
+
+     "Le succès permet toujours aux hommes de lettres le supporter très
+     bien l'angoisse métaphysique, et Maeterlinck, grâce à ses
+     admirateurs et à ses amis, était devenu un homme de lettres.
+     Prisonnier de ses premiers livres, et de son premier public, il
+     trouva l'art subtil d'accomoder les balbutiements effarés de
+     Mélisande, le naturisme ingénu qui fait le fonds de sa sensibilité
+     de flamand, et ce vague optimisme 'humanitaire,' ce socialisme
+     esthétique et scientifard, qui règne aujourd'hui parmi ceux que
+     Nietzsche appelle 'les philistins de la culture.' Il est vrai qu'un
+     peu de mysticisme arrange tout; mais tout de même, quel
+     chef-d'oeuvre de 'literature': faire croire à Monsieur Homais
+     qu'il appartient à l'élite, et à l'élite qu'elle peut se permettre
+     les sentiments de M. Homais!
+
+     "D'abord la prose de Maeterlinck, sauce merveilleusement onctueuse,
+     fit passer ce singulier ragoût intellectuel, que le grand public
+     international, le public des liseurs de magazines et des
+     institutrices polyglottes continue à prendre pour le
+     chef-d'oeuvre de la cuisine française."
+
+As to the last item in this fierce diatribe, it would appear to be true
+that Maeterlinck's greatest public is composed of "the philistines of
+culture." Maeterlinck is an antagonist of Christianity; and yet perhaps
+the majority of his admirers are those who love him because he has such
+beautiful things to tell them about their immortal souls. Like Voltaire,
+he fights 'l'infâme'; and yet to many a Christian virgin his works are
+an edifice which he might have inscribed with the device: _Deo erexit
+Maeterlinck_. Again, he has prophesied the inevitable victory of
+socialism; but has he helped the socialists? Is he counted one of the
+paladins of socialism? It might be argued that he has not the zest in
+hard fighting which alone can help a fighting cause: he stands apart
+from the mêlée with a wise face imperturbable: he would persuade, not
+fight, and he is too persuasive to persuade. Those who waver or resist
+must be shattered into conviction, the fanatic might urge. In short,
+Maeterlinck is a socialist much as Goethe was a patriot.
+
+Well, probably the fact is that Maeterlinck is no more a "socialist"
+than Goethe was a "patriot." All such terms may be interpreted
+variously. Goethe _was_ a patriot if you consider that his fatherland
+was the world. Maeterlinck _is_ a socialist if you look away from the
+din of the mere present to the future his writings undoubtedly prepare.
+Maeterlinck is first and foremost a _futurist_, a seer of the future.
+Even as a dramatist (apart from his later dramas, which must, on the
+whole, be rejected) he is a futurist. And in this sense he has his
+public among the élite. M. Dumont-Wilden would not call Johannes Schlaf
+a philistine of culture? And to Johannes Schlaf, as to me, Maeterlinck's
+importance lies in the fact that he is _the_ perfect type of Nietzsche's
+_New European_, in himself a prophecy of the race our descendants will
+be when patriotism is: to be a citizen of the whole world, and religion
+is: to be noble for nobility's sake. As for his Christian readers, why
+should they not, if they can, find confirmation of their own creed in
+the teaching of an enemy of it? The fact of Maeterlinck's vogue with
+Christian readers only proves that Christianity has much in common with
+the religion of the future.
+
+In an article, which created a sensation, in La _Nouvelle Revue
+Française_ for September, 1912, M. Dumont-Wilden compares Maeterlinck's
+popularity with that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre three generations ago.
+He says:
+
+     "La gloire de Bernardin n'est point négligeable, et la comparaison
+     s'impose d'elle-même entre Maeterlinck et lui. En écrivant _Les
+     Etudes de la Nature_, cet auteur vieilli dont on ne lit plus guère
+     qu'une bluette charmante qu'il composa en se jouant, apportait une
+     nourriture salutaire au public de son temps, à ce public moyen que
+     Jean-Jacques dépassait. Son finalisme ingénu calmait les
+     inquiétudes de ceux que la sécheresse d'une morale utilitaire et
+     d'un matérialisme sans grandeur avait déçus et qui, pourtant, se
+     refusaient à faire, même avec Chateaubriand, le voyage du pénitent
+     vers les autels délaissés."
+
+Now, if Jean-Jacques was to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre what Nietzsche is
+to Maeterlinck, it would not be difficult to prove that Maeterlinck
+appeals to Nietzscheans, and that his teaching has points of contact
+with that of Nietzsche. To be quite short, Maeterlinck's man of the
+future is essentially the superman. And even if it were true that
+Maeterlinck's writings will be no more read in the future than are those
+of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to-day, that would not reduce him to the
+rank of a minor writer. Voltaire's writings, which prepared a
+revolution, are now little read; and yet how much of Voltaire's
+thinking, or abstract of thinking (was Voltaire "original"?) is woven
+into the fabric of the mental life of to-day? We cannot, it is true,
+draw a close comparison between Voltaire and Maeterlinck, for
+Maeterlinck has no venom, and no disposition to thrust himself forward
+into the forefront of public interest; but it would be possible to
+compare his present position with that of Goethe (another writer the
+great mass of whose writings, as far as the non-German reading public is
+concerned, is dead). What Goethe was to the élite of Europe in the
+opening decades of the nineteenth century, Maeterlinck is to-day. His
+position, too, was assailed by a younger school of authors; but they
+could not shake it. Goethe, by the final moral of _Faust_, taught his
+generation to channel their activities and, confident of the result, to
+pour their strength into unselfish work; Maeterlinck teaches the same
+doctrine, and it may be said again of him, as he has said of Goethe,
+that he has brought us to the shores of the sea of serenity.
+
+So much for Maeterlinck's philosophy. But his critics, especially M.
+Dumont-Wilden, are apt to forget one thing--his poetry. It is possible,
+of course, to state even his dramas in terms of philosophy; but when you
+have interpreted the symbols, there still remains something that cannot
+be set down in equations--the poetry. Granted that Maleine = the human
+soul: does she not still remain a beautiful dream, a Sadist's dream of a
+girl?[2] Against M. Dumont-Wilden's criticism
+
+
+
+                      Albert Mockel, _La Wallonie_,
+                        June and July, 1890.
+
+it must be urged that Maeterlinck, besides being a thinker, is also a
+poet--not a lyric poet, of course (his rank is low here), but a creator
+of new things, a master of atmosphere and suggestion--in short, when all
+deductions are made, a great writer. The philosophy will be absorbed by
+everyday life and become commonplace; but _Interior_ and _The Sightless_
+will always be the first-fruits of a new poetry and deathless works of
+art.
+
+There is one other thing to be said. There have been thinkers whose
+private life did not bear comparison with the ideals proclaimed in their
+writings. Of Maeterlinck the man nothing but good is known. The man he
+is would stand unshaken if all his literary works withered like bindweed
+round a tree at the first breath of winter. A eulogy of his character
+based on the long list of his good deeds is impossible; for these are
+unknown--suspected merely, or secrets of his friends and not to be
+revealed without offending him. But the sage needs no approbation save
+his own; and Maeterlinck's good deeds were done, not for praise, but
+because he was Maeterlinck.
+
+
+
+[1] _Academy_; 22nd June, 1912.
+
+[2] "C'est une fillette de van Lerberghe si inconsciemment venue dans
+les _Serres Chaudes_, et qui s'y meurt; étouffée en ce palais
+empoisonné, elle s'y meurt, elle s'y meurt! Elle est claire, elle est
+pure, d'une chasteté d'étrangère apparue,--et pourtant son haleine est
+d'une malade, il sourd de sa poitrine des effluves angéliques et
+pervers; elle est équivoque et triste, et nul ne saurait affirmer avec
+certitude que tout cela existe, ni qu'elle-même _est_ bien là, devant
+nous. C'est la Princesse, la Princesse ... Elle, ses paupières vagues et
+toutes ses boucles en lianes; ses cheveux qui s'enrouleraient de
+caresses vivantes, étrangement tièdes sinon de glace, un col irréel où
+s'enlaceraient des malheurs,--un san Giovannino de Donatello parmi des
+terreurs ambiguës, un Botticelli dans la Malaria."
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+A.
+
+"Academy, The," xiv.
+Acting, present-day style of.
+Action.
+Adam, Paul.
+Adultery.
+Æschylus.
+"Aglavaine et Selysette."
+Ajalbert, Jean.
+Alcohol.
+"Alladine et Palomides."
+Altruism, 111, 128, 131.
+Andersen, Hans Christian.
+"Anima vagula."
+Animals.
+"Annabella."
+Anti-asceticism.
+"Ardiane and Bluebeard," _see_ "Ariane et Barbe-Bleue."
+"Ariane et Barbe-Bleue."
+Art.
+Artist.
+Asceticism.
+Aspiration.
+Atmosphere.
+Aurelius, Marcus.
+Authority.
+Avebury, Lord.
+"Avertis, Les."
+"Aveugles, Les."
+
+
+B.
+
+Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules.
+"Basoche, La."
+Baudelaire, Charles, 44, 84, (doctrine of correspondences).
+Bazalgette, Léon.
+Beaunier, André.
+Beauty.
+Bees.
+Bernard, Charles.
+Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
+Bever, Adolphe van.
+"Blue Bird, The," _see_ "Oiseau Bleu, L'."
+Blue-stockings.
+Boehme, Jakob.
+Boswell. James.
+Botticelli, Sandro.
+Bourget, Paul.
+Boxing.
+Brain, the.
+Breughels, The.
+Bridges, Robert.
+Brisson, Adolphe.
+Brotherhood of the Common Life.
+Browning, Robert.
+Bruges.
+Buddhism.
+"Buried Temple, The," _see_ "Temple Enseveli, Le."
+Burne-Jones, Sir Edward.
+
+C.
+
+Caine.
+Calm.
+Carlyle, Thomas.
+Carpentier, Georges.
+Cassius.
+Cats.
+Censor, the.
+"Chance, La."
+
+Character, 104, 110.
+Characterisation, 37, 125, 142.
+Chastity, 65, 94, 106-107, 108, 111, 162.
+Chateaubriand, François-René de, 161.
+Chaucer, Geoffrey, 21.
+Children.
+Christ.
+Christianity.
+Chrysanthemums.
+Closed door, the.
+Collectivism.
+Communism.
+Conscious, the.
+Contradictions.
+Convent life.
+Correspondences, doctrine of,.
+Crane, Walter
+"Cravache, La."
+Crime.
+Crusoe, Robinson, 113.
+
+
+D.
+
+Darzens, Rodolphe.
+Davidson.
+"Death," _see_ "Mort.
+Death.
+"Death of a Little Dog, On the."
+"Death of Tintagiles, The," _see_ "Mort de Tintagiles, La."
+Debauch.
+Decadents, the.
+Defoe, Daniel.
+Dehmel, Richard.
+Delia Rocca de Vergalo.
+Deman, Edmond.
+Destiny, _see_ Fate.
+Destiny, exterior and moral.
+Development.
+Development of Maeterlinck.
+Diderot, Denis.
+Dijk, Is. van.
+Dimnet, the Abbé.
+"Disciples à Saïs, Les, et les Fragments de Novalis."
+Doctors, the.
+Dogs, 136-138.
+Donatello, 163.
+"Double Garden, The," _see_ "Double Jardin, Le."
+"Double Jardin, Le."
+Doudelet, Charles.
+Doumic, René.
+"Douze Chansons."
+Drama, Maeterlinck's theories of.
+Dramaturgy.
+Dreyfus affair.
+Dryden, John.
+"Duchess of Main, The."
+Dumont-Wilden, Louis.
+Dupont, Villa.
+Dyck, Ernest van.
+
+
+E.
+
+Eekhoud, Georges.
+Egoism, 108, in.
+"Einsame Menschen."
+Elective affinities.
+Elizabethans, the.
+Elskamp, Max.
+Emancipation.
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo.
+Everyday life, gospel of.
+Evolution.
+"Evolution du Mystère, L'."
+Evolution of Maeterlinck.
+
+
+F.
+
+Family life.
+Fatalism.
+Fate.
+"Faust".
+Feminism.
+"Figaro."
+"Fitzebutze."
+"Flaireurs, Les."
+Flaubert, Gustave.
+Flemish features.
+Flesh, the.
+Fletcher, John.
+Flowers.
+Ford, John.
+Fort, Paul.
+Fouillée, Alfred.
+Francesca da Rimini.
+"Frog Prince, The."
+Future, the.
+Futurism.
+Futurists, the.
+
+
+G.
+
+Gauguin, Paul.
+Genius.
+Genoveva, story of.
+_Genres_, mixing of, 84-85..
+Ghent.
+Ghil, René.
+Gilkin, Iwan.
+Giraud, Albert.
+God, 37.
+Goethe, Johann Wolfgang.
+Goodness.
+Grasse.
+Grillparzer, Franz.
+Grimm's Fairy Tales.
+Groote, Geert.
+Gruchet-Saint-Siméon.
+Grundy, Mrs.
+Guyau, Jean Marie.
+
+
+H.
+
+Hamel, Gustav van.
+"Hamlet."
+Hannon, Théodore.
+Happiness.
+Harlotry.
+Harris, Frank.
+Harry, Gérard.
+Hartmann, Eduard von.
+Hauptmann, Gerhart.
+"Haymarket Theatre."
+Hebbel, Friedrich.
+Heine, Anselma.
+Heredia, José Maria de.
+Heredity.
+Heyse, Paul.
+Historical drama.
+Hoffmansthal, Hugo von.
+"Honour."
+Horace.
+Horses.
+Housman, Laurence.
+Hugo, Victor.
+Hulsman, G.
+Humility.
+Humour, 142.
+Huret, Jules.
+
+
+I
+
+Ibsen, Henrik.
+Identity, doctrine of.
+Immortality.
+Individualism.
+Injustice.
+"Inquiétude de notre Morale, L'."
+Instinct.
+Intellect, the, _see_ Brain.
+"Intelligence des Fleurs, L'."
+"Intérieur, L'."
+"Interior," _see_ "Intérieur, L'."
+Interior beauty, the.
+Interior dialogue.
+"Intruder, The," _see_ "Intruse, L'."
+"Intruse, L'."
+Irony.
+
+
+J.
+
+Jacobs, Monty.
+Jealousy, 71, 86-87, 94, 133..
+Jean Paul [Richter].
+Jesuits.
+"Jeune Belgique, La."
+Johnson, Dr Samuel.
+Jonson, Ben.
+"Joyzelle."
+"Julius Cæsar."
+Justice.
+
+
+K.
+
+Kahn, Gustave.
+Keller, Gottfried.
+Kryzinska, Marie.
+
+
+L.
+
+Lacomblez, Paul.
+Laforgue, Jules.
+Leblanc, Mme Georgette.
+Lemaître, Jules.
+Lemonnier, Camille.
+Lerberghe, Charles van.
+Le Roy, Grégoire.
+Lessing, Gotthold Ephraïm.
+Liberty.
+Libretti.
+"Life and Flowers," _see_ "Intelligence des Fleurs, L'."
+Life, contrasted with death.
+"Life of the Bee, The," _see_ "Vie des Abeilles, La."
+Logic.
+Lombroso, Cesare.
+"Lonely Lives," _see_ "Einsame Menschen."
+Louis XVI..
+Love.
+Lubbock, Sir John, _see_ Avebury, Lord.
+"Luria."
+Luxury.
+
+
+M.
+
+"Macbeth," Maeterlinck's translation of.
+Madness.
+Maeterlinck, Maurice, his hatred of interviews, ix;
+  birth and family, pronunciation of name;
+  education at the Collège de Sainte-Barb;
+  first poem printed;
+  wishes to study medicine;
+  studies law at the University of Ghent;
+  practises as _avocat_;
+  stay in Paris;
+  introduced to the founders of "La Pléiade,";
+  "Le Massacre des Innocents" read to the circle;
+  printed in "La Pléiade;
+  as he appeared about 1886-7, and his first attempts at writing;
+  meets Mallarmé;
+  meets Rodenbach and the directors of "La Jeune Belgique";
+  "Serres Chaudes";
+  his robust mental and physical health;
+  "La Princesse Maleine";
+  "Les Aveugles";
+  "L'Intruse" and "Les Aveugles" performed at Paris;
+  "L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles";
+  "Les Sept Princesses";
+  "Pelléas et Mélisande";
+  "Alladine and Palomides," "Interior," and "The Intruder";
+  "Annabella";
+  "Les Disciples à Saïs et les Fragments de Novalis";
+  "Le Trésor des Humbles";
+  "Aglavaine and Selysette";
+  "Douze Chansons";
+  settles in Paris;
+  "Sagesse et Destinée," dedicated to Georgette Leblanc;
+  "La Vie des Abeilles";
+  "Ariane et Barbe-Bleu" and "Soeur Béatrice";
+  "Le Temple Enseveli";
+  "Monna Vanna";
+  "Joyzelle";
+  "Le Miracle de St Antoine";
+  "Le Double Jardin";
+  "L'Intelligence des Fleurs";
+  "L'Oiseau Bleu";
+  translation of "Macbeth";
+  "Mary Magdalene";
+  settles at St Wandrille;
+  quarrel with Paul Heyse;
+  "La Mort";
+  awarded Nobel prize for literature;
+  founds Maeterlinck prize.
+Magnificisme, Le.
+Mallarmé, Stéphane.
+Malthusianism.
+Man, purpose of his life.
+Man shall be God.
+"Manchester Guardian".
+Marcus Aurelius.
+"Maria von Magdala".
+Marionettes, plays for.
+Marriage.
+"Mary Magdalene."
+Masefield, John.
+"Masque, Le."
+"Massacre des Innocents, Le."
+Maternity, _see_ Motherhood.
+Matter, reign of.
+Maupassant, Guy de.
+Maurier, George du.
+Medical science.
+Melodrama.
+Mendès, Catulle.
+"Mercure de France, Le."
+Merrill, Stuart.
+Mieszner, W.
+Mikhaël, Ephraïm.
+Minnesingers, The.
+"Miracle, The."
+"Miracle de St Antoine, Le."
+Mirbeau, Octave.
+Misery.
+Mockel, Albert.
+Molière, Jean Poquehn.
+"Monna Vanna."
+"Morale Mystique, La."
+Morality.
+Moréas.
+"Mort, La."
+"Mort de Tintagiles, La."
+Motherhood.
+Mystery.
+Mysticism.
+Mystics.
+
+
+N.
+
+Naturalism.
+Nature.
+Neidhart von Reuental, Sir.
+Nerves, the.
+Nietzsche, Friedrich W.
+"Nineteenth Century and After."
+Nobel prize for literature.
+Nobility, the.
+Nordau, Max (by inference).
+"Nouvelle Revue Française, La."
+Novalis.
+
+
+O.
+
+"Oiseau Bleu, L'."
+"Olive Boughs, The."
+Oostacker.
+Oppeln von Bronikowski, Friedrich Freiherr von.
+Optimism.
+"Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, L'."
+"Othello."
+
+
+P.
+
+"Pageant, The."
+Pantomime.
+Parasitic virtues.
+"Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique, Le."
+Parnassians, the.
+Paroxysm.
+Pascal, Blaise.
+Passion.
+Passivity.
+Past, the.
+"Pelléas et Mélisande."
+Penitence.
+Pessimism.
+Phelps, Professor William Lyon.
+Philistine, the.
+Plagiarism, unjust charge of.
+Plato.
+"Pléiade, La" (Parisian review).
+"Pléiade, La" (Brussels review).
+"Plume, La,".
+"Portrait de Femme"
+Positivism.
+Poverty.
+Predestination.
+Pre-Raphaelites, The.
+Present, the.
+Pride.
+Primogenitureship.
+"Princesse Maleine, La."
+Procter, Adelaide Anne.
+Prosody, Maeterlinck's.
+Psychology.
+Purity.
+
+
+Q.
+
+Quatre Chemins, aux.
+Quietism.
+Quillard, Pierre.
+
+
+R.
+
+Realism.
+Reality.
+Reason.
+"Recollections of Immortality from Childhood."
+Régnier, Henri de.
+Remhardt, Professor Max.
+Religion.
+Rembrandt.
+Renunciation.
+"Réveil de l'Ame, Le."
+"Revue Blanche, La."
+"Revue des deux Mondes."
+"Revue Indépendante, La."
+Richter, Jean Paul.
+Riddle of existence, the.
+Rimbaud, Arthur.
+Rimini, Francesca da.
+Rinder, Edith Wingate.
+Rodenbach, Georges.
+Rodrigue, G.M.
+Roman Catholicism.
+"Romeo and Juliet."
+Rossetti, William M.
+Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.
+Roux, Paul, _see_ Saint-Pol-Roux le Magnifique.
+Ruysbroeck, Jan.
+
+
+S.
+
+Sacrifice.
+"Sagesse et Destinée."
+Sainte-Barbe, Collège de.
+Saint-Pol-Roux le Magnifique.
+Saints, the.
+Saint Wandrille.
+Salvation, 108.
+Scenery of dramas.
+Schlaf, Johannes.
+Schopenhauer, Artur.
+Schrijver, J..
+Science.
+Scorn.
+Self-sacrifice.
+Sélincourt, Basil de.
+"Semaine des Etudiants, La."
+Senses, the.
+Sensuality.
+"Sept Princesses, Les."
+Serenity.
+"Serres Chaudes."
+"Seven Princesses, The," _see_ "Sept Princesses, Les."
+Sex questions.
+Shakespeare.
+"Sightless, The," _see_ "Aveugles, Les."
+Silence.
+Silence, active and passive.
+Simons, L.
+Simplicity.
+"Sin."
+"Sister Beatrice," _see_ "Soeur Béatrice."
+Socialism.
+Sodomy.
+"Soeur Béatrice."
+Song of Solomon.
+Sophocles.
+Soul, the.
+Spirit, the.
+Spirit of the hive, the.
+Stoicism.
+Strindberg, August, viii.
+Style of Maeterlinck.
+Subconscious, the.
+Sudermann, Hermann.
+Suffering.
+Suicide.
+Superman, the.
+Superstition.
+Sutro, Alfred.
+Svengali.
+Swedenborg.
+Symbolism.
+"Symboliste, Le."
+Symbolists, the.
+Symons, Arthur.
+Syphilis.
+
+
+T.
+
+Tacitus.
+Tauler, Johannes.
+"Tempest, The"
+"Temple Enseveli, Le."
+Tennyson, Alfred.
+Theatre, the contemporary.
+"Théâtre d'Art."
+"Théâtre de l'Oeuvre."
+"Théâtre des Arts," Moscow.
+"Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens."
+"Théâtre du Gymnase."
+Thinkers, the.
+Thought, contrasted with action.
+"Thyrse, Le."
+"'Tis Pity She's a Whore."
+Tolstoy, Count Leo.
+Tourneur, Cyril.
+"Treasure of the Humble," _see_ "Trésor des Humbles."
+"Tragique Quotidien, Le."
+Trench, Herbert.
+"Trésor des Humbles, Le.".
+Truth.
+"Type, Le."
+
+
+U.
+
+Unconscious, the.
+Unhappiness.
+_Unio mystica_.
+Unknown, the.
+
+
+V.
+
+Vegetarianism.
+Vergalo, Delia Rocca de.
+Verhaeren, Emile.
+Verlaine, Paul.
+_Vers libres_.
+Vices.
+Victorian, the.
+"Vie des Abeilles, La."
+Vielé-Griffin, Francis.
+Villa Dupont.
+Villiers de L'Isle-Adam.
+Virgin Mary.
+Virginity.
+Virtues.
+Visan, Tancrède de.
+"Vogue, La."
+Vollmoeller, Karl Gustav.
+Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de.
+
+
+W.
+
+Waller, Max.
+"Wallonie, La."
+War.
+Watson, William.
+Webster, John.
+Whitman, Walt.
+Will, I..
+Will-power.
+Wisdom.
+"Wisdom and Destiny," _see_ "Sagesse et Destinée."
+Woman, the new.
+Women.
+Wordless plays.
+Wordsworth, William.
+
+
+Y.
+
+Yeats, W.B., 27.
+
+
+Z.
+
+Zola, Emile, 20.
+Zweig, Stefan, 3, 108.
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+I. WORKS.
+II. SELECTIONS.
+III. PREFACES.
+IV. APPENDIX.
+
+Biography, Criticism, Works set to Music, etc., Newspaper Articles.
+
+V. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS.
+
+
+
+
+WORKS.
+
+
+_Serres Chaudes._ Poèmes, frontispice et culs-de-lampe de Georges Minne.
+Paris: Vanier, 1889, 155 copies.
+
+----Another Edition. Brussels: P. Lacomblez, 1890 and 1895.
+
+----Suivies de quinze chansons, nouvelle édition. Brussels: P.
+Lacomblez, 1900.
+
+_La Princesse Maleine_. Twenty-five copies on vellum and five on
+Holland, printed on a hand-press by Maeterlinck for private circulation.
+
+----Drame en cinq actes (couverture et fig. de Georges Minne). Ghent:
+Imprimerie Louis van Melle, 1889.
+
+----Second Edition. Ghent: Imprimerie Louis van Melle, 1889, 155 copies.
+
+_La Princesse Maleine._ Third Edition. Brussels: P. Lacomblez, 1890.
+
+_The Princess Maleine._ Translated by Gérard Harry. London: Heinemann,
+1890.
+
+_Les Aveugles_ ["L'Intruse" (1). "Les Aveugles" (2).] Brussels: P.
+Lacomblez, 1890, 150 copies.
+
+----Second Edition. Brussels: P. Lacomblez, 1891.
+
+_L'Ornement des Noces spirituelles de Ruysbroeck l'Admirable._ Traduit
+du flamand et accompagné d'une introduction. Brussels: P. Lacomblez,
+1891.
+
+----Second Edition. Brussels: P. Lacomblez, 1900.
+
+_Les sept Princesses._ Brussels: P. Lacomblez, 1891.
+
+_Blind._ _The Intruder._ Translated from the French of Maurice
+Maeterlinck by Mary Vielé.[1] Washington: W.H. Morrison, 1891.
+
+_The Princess Maleine_ and _The Intruder_. With an Introduction by Hall
+Caine. London: Heinemann, 1892. (_The Princess Maleine_, translated by
+Gérard Harry; _The Intruder_, "based upon a rough sketch of a
+translation by Mr Wm. Wilson.")
+
+_Pelléas et Mélisande._ Brussels: P. Lacomblez, 1892.
+
+----Nouvelle édition, modifiée conformément aux représentations de
+l'Opéra-Comique. Brussels: P. Lacomblez, 1902.
+
+_Pelleas and Melisanda_ and _The Sightless_. Translated by Laurence Alma
+Tadema. London: Walter Scott (1892). The Scott Library.
+
+_Alladine et Palomides_, _Intérieur_, et _La Mort de Tintagiles_. Trois
+petits drames pour marionettes, et culs-de-lampe par Georges Minne.
+Brussels: Collection du "Réveil," chez Ed. Deman, 1894.
+
+_Ruysbroeck and the Mystics_, with selections from Ruysbroeck by Maurice
+Maeterlinck. Translated by Jane T. Stoddart. London: Hodder & Stoughton,
+1894.
+
+_Pelléas et Mélisande_. Translated by Ewing Winslow. New York: Thomas Y.
+Crowell & Co., 1894.
+
+_Annabella_ ("'Tis Pity she's a Whore"). Drame en cinq actes de John
+Ford. Traduit et adapté pour le Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. Paris:
+Ollendorff, 1895.
+
+_Les Disciples à Saïs et les Fragments de Novalis._ Traduits de
+l'allemand et précédés d'une introduction. Bruxelles: P. Lacomblez,
+1895.
+
+_The Massacre of the Innocents and other Tales by Belgian Writers._
+Translated by Edith Wingate Rinder. Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895.
+
+_Le Trésor des Humbles._ Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1896.
+
+_Douze Chansons._ Illustrées par Charles Doudelet. Paris: P.V. Stock,
+1896. Tirage 600 exemplaires sur papier Ingres. (Reprinted with
+alterations at the end of _Serres Chaudes_. Brussels: P. Lacomblez,
+1900.)
+
+_Aglavaine et Selysette._ Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1896.
+
+_Aglavaine and Selysette._ A drama in five acts, translated by Alfred
+Sutro, with an Introduction by J.W. Mackail. First Edition published by
+Grant Richards (1897); all subsequent Editions by George Allen & Sons,
+London.
+
+_The Treasure of the Humble._ Translated by A. Sutro. With an
+Introduction by A.B. Walkley. London: Geo. Allen, 1897.
+
+----(Reprinted from the translation of Mr Alfred Sutro.) London: Arthur
+L. Humphreys, 1905.
+
+_Aglavaine and Selysette._ Acting Version. London: George Allen, 1904.
+
+_Aglavaine and Selysette._ Pocket Edition, 1908.
+
+_La Sagesse et la Destinée._ Paris: Fasquelle, 1898. Wisdom and Destiny.
+Translated by A. Sutro. London: George Allen, 1898.
+
+----Pocket Edition. London: George Allen, 1908.
+
+_Alladine and Palomides._ _Interior._ _The Death of Tintagiles._ Three
+little dramas for marionettes. London: Duckworth & Co., 1899. (Modern
+Plays, edited by R. Brimley Johnson and N. Erichsen.) (_Alladine and
+Palomides_ and _The Death of Tintagiles_, translated by Alfred Sutro.
+_Interior_ by Wm. Archer. _Interior_ had appeared in the _New Review_
+for Nov., 1894; _The Death of Tintagiles_ in _The Pageant_ for Dec,
+1896.)
+
+_Schwester Béatrix._ Translated from the manuscript by Fr. von
+Oppeln-Bronikowski. Berlin and Leipzig, 1900.
+
+_La Vie des Abeilles._ Paris: Fasquelle, 1901.
+
+_The Life of the Bee._ Translated by A. Sutro. London: George Allen,
+1901.
+
+----Illustrated by E.J. Detmold. London: George Allen, 1911.
+
+_Sister Beatrice_ and _Ardiane and Barbe-Bleue_. Two plays translated
+into English verse from the manuscript of Maurice Maeterlinck by Bernard
+Miall. London: George Allen, 1901.
+
+----American Edition. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1902.
+
+_Théâtre I._ _La Princesse Maleine._ _L'Intruse._ _Les Aveugles._
+_Aglavaine et Selysette._ _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue._ _Soeur Béatrice._
+Bruxelles: P. Lacomblez, 1901, 2 vols. _Théâtre II._ _Pelléas et
+Mélisande._ _Alladine et Palomides._ _Intérieur._ _La Mort de
+Tintagiles._ Bruxelles: P. Lacomblez, 1902.
+
+_Le Temple Enseveli._ Paris: Fasquelle, 1902.
+
+_The Buried Temple._ Translated by A. Sutro. With portrait. London:
+George Allen, 1902.
+
+_Monna Vanna._ Pièce en trois actes, représentée pour la première fois
+sur la scène du Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, le 17 mai 1902. Paris: Fasquelle,
+1902.
+
+_Théâtre_ de Maurice Maeterlinck (_La Princesse Maleine._ _L'Intruse._
+_Les Aveugles._ _Pelléas et Mélisande._ _Alladine et Palomides._
+_Intérieur._ _La Mort de Tintagiles._ _Aglavaine et Selysette._ _Ariane
+et Barbe-Bleue._ _Soeur Béatrice_), avec une préface inédite de
+l'auteur, illustré de 10 compositions originales lithographiées par
+Auguste Donnay. Bruxelles: Ed. Deman, 1902, 3 vols., 8vo. [100 copies
+printed.]
+
+_Joyzelle._ Pièce en trois actes représentée pour la première fois au
+Théâtre du Gymnase, le 20 mai 1903. Paris: Fasquelle, 1903.
+
+_Monna Vanna._ Translated by A. Sutro. London: George Allen, 1904.
+
+_Le double Jardin._ Paris: Fasquelle, 1904, in 18--. (Twenty copies in
+8vo were printed for the Société des XX, and signed by the author.)
+
+_The Double Garden._ Translated by A. Teixeira de Mattos. London: George
+Allen, 1904.
+
+_Das Wunder des Heiligen Antonius._ Uebersetzt von Fr. von
+Oppeln-Bronikowski, Leipzig, 1904.
+
+_My Dog._ Translated by A. Teixeira de Mattos. Illustrated by G. Vernon
+Stokes. London: George Allen, 1906.
+
+_Old-fashioned Flowers and Other Open-air Essays._ Translated by A.
+Teixeira de Mattos. With illustrations by G.S. Elgood. London: Geo.
+Allen, 1906.
+
+_Joyzelle._ Translated by A. Teixeira de Mattos. London: George Allen,
+1907 [1906].
+
+_L'Intelligence des Fleurs._ Paris: Fasquelle, 1907.
+
+_Life and Flowers._ Translated by A. Teixeira de Mattos. London: George
+Allen, 1907.
+
+_Interior._ A play. Translated by Wm. Archer. (Gowans's International
+Library, No. 20.) London: Gowans and Gray, 1908.
+
+_The Death of Tintagiles._ A play. Translated by Alfred Sutro. (Gowans's
+International Library, No. 26.) London: Gowans and Gray, 1909.
+
+_L'Oiseau bleu._ Féerie en cinq actes et dix tableaux. Paris: Fasquelle,
+1909.
+
+_The Blue Bird._ A fairy play in six acts. Translated by A. Teixeira de
+Mattos. London: Methuen, 1909.
+
+----Eighteenth Edition. With an additional act. London: Methuen, 1910.
+
+----With twenty-five illustrations in colour, by F. Cayley Robinson.
+London: Methuen, 1911.
+
+----London: Methuen (Methuen's Shilling Books), 1911.
+
+_The Seven Princesses._ A Play. Translated by Wm. Metcalfe. (Gowans's
+International Library, No. 28.) London: Gowans & Gray, 1909.
+
+_Macbeth_, par W. Shakespeare. Traduction nouvelle de Maurice
+Maeterlinck. L'Illustration Théâtrale. Paris: 28th August, 1909.
+(Contains interesting photographs of the Abbey of Saint Wandrille.)
+
+William Shakespeare. _La Tragédie de Macbeth._ Traduction nouvelle, avec
+une introduction et des notes, par Maurice Maeterlinck. Paris:
+Fasquelle, 1910.
+
+_Mary Magdalene._ A play in three acts. Translated by A. Teixeira de
+Mattos. Methuen: 1910. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1910.
+
+_Mary Magdalene._ Shilling Edition. Methuen, 1912.
+
+_Alladine and Palomides._ _Interior._ _The Death of Tintagiles._ Three
+plays by Maurice Maeterlinck, with Introduction by H. Granville Barker.
+London and Glasgow: Gowans & Gray, Ltd., 1911. (Gowans's Copyright
+Series, No. 2.)
+
+_La Mort._ _Figaro_, 1911.
+
+_Death._ Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. London: Methuen,
+1911.
+
+_La Mort._ Paris: Fasquelle, 1913.
+
+
+[1] Sister of Francis Vielé-Griffin.
+
+
+
+
+SELECTIONS.
+
+
+_Thoughts from Maeterlinck._ Chosen and arranged by E.S.S. London:
+George Allen, 1903.
+
+_The Inner Beauty._ London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1910. (Reprint of _The
+Inner Beauty, Silence, and The Invisible Goodness._)
+
+_Morceaux choisis._ Par Maurice Maeterlinck. Induction par Mme Georgette
+Leblanc. Paris, Londres, Edinbourg, et New York: Nelson (1910).
+
+_Hours of Gladness._ By M. Maeterlinck. London: Allen, 1912.
+
+Selections from Maeterlinck's works have appeared in the following
+anthologies, etc.:
+
+_Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique._ Paris: Léon Vanier, 1887. (Twelve poems
+reprinted in Serres Chaudes.)
+
+_Poètes belges d'expression française, par Pol-de-Mont._ Almelo: W.
+Hilarius, 1899. (Twenty-one poems selected from _Serres Chaudes_ and
+_Douze Chansons_).
+
+_Poètes d'aujourd'hui_, morceaux choisis accompagnés de Notices
+biographiques et d'un essai de Bibliographie, par Ad. van Bever et Paul
+Léautaud. Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1900. (Eight poems from
+_Serres Chaudes_ and _Douze Chansons_.)
+
+_Anthologie des Poètes français contemporains_, par G. Walch, Vol. ii.
+Paris: Ch. Delagrave [no date]. (Eight poems from _Serres Chaudes_ and
+_Douze Chansons_.)
+
+_Die belgische Lyrik, von 1880-1900._ Eine Studie und Uebersetzungen von
+Otto Hauser. Groszenhain: Baumert und Ronge, 1902. (Thirteen poems from
+_Serres Chaudes_.)
+
+_Anthologie des Poètes lyriques français de France et de l'etranger
+depuis le moyen âge jusqu'à nos jours_, par T. Fonsny et J. van Dooren.
+Verviers: Alb. Hermann, 1903. (Two poems from _Serres Chaudes_ and
+_Douze Chansons_.)
+
+_Die Lyrik des Auslandes in neuerer Zeit_, herausgegeben von Hans
+Bethge. Leipzig: Max Hesses Verlag [no date]. (Seven poems translated
+from _Serres Chaudes_ and _Douze Chansons_.)
+
+_Contemporary Belgian Poetry._ Selected and translated by Jethro
+Bithell. London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 1911.
+(Twenty-five poems from _Serres Chaudes_ and _Douze Chansons_.)
+
+_Toutes les Lyres._ Anthologie-Critique ornée de dessins et de portraits
+(nouvelle série). By Florian-Parmentier. Paris: Gastein-Serge (1911).
+[Contains: Masque, par Djinn, criticism, etc., of nine pages, and three
+poems from _Serres Chaudes_.]
+
+Drey, Agnes E. _Poems after Verlaine, Maeterlinck and Others._ London:
+St Catherine Press, 1911.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACES.
+
+
+_Sept essais d'Emerson._ Traduits par I. Will avec une préface de
+Maurice Maeterlinck. Bruxelles: P. Lacomblez, 1894 and 1899.
+
+_Expositions des Oeuvres_ de M. Franz, M. Melchers, chez le Bare de
+Boutteville, 47 Rue Le Peletier (ouverture le vendredi 15 novembre
+1895), préface de Maurice Maeterlinck. Paris: Edm. Girard [no date].
+
+_Jules Laforgue_, par Camille Mauclair, avec une introduction de Maurice
+Maeterlinck. Paris: Mercure de France, 1896.
+
+_The Cave of Illusion._ A play in four acts by Alfred Sutro. With an
+Introduction by Maurice Maeterlinck. London: Grant Richards, 1900.
+
+_Martin Harvey._ Some pages of his life. By George Edgar. With a
+foreword by M. Maeterlinck. London: Grant Richards, 1912.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHY, CRITICISM, ETC.
+
+
+Archer, William. _Study and Stage._ A year-book of Criticism. London:
+Grant Richards, 1889.
+
+Bacaloglu-Densuseannu, E. _Despre simbolizm si Maeterlinck._ Bucuresti,
+1903.
+
+Bahr, Hermann. Renaissance: _Neue Studien zur Kritik der Moderne._
+Berlin: S. Fischer, 1897.
+
+Barre, André. _Le Symbolisme._ Essai historique sur le mouvement
+symboliste en France de 1885 à 1900, suivi d'une Bibliographie de la
+Poésie symboliste. Paris: Jouve et Cie, 1912.
+
+Beaunier, André. _La Poésie nouvelle._ Paris: Société du Mercure de
+France 1903.
+
+Bever, Adolphe van. _Maurice Maeterlinck_, biographie précédée d'un
+portrait-frontispice, illustrée de divers dessins et d'un autogr. suivie
+d'opinions et d'une bibliographie. Paris: Sansot, 1904.
+
+Bever, Ad. van et Paul Léautaud. _Poètes d'aujourd'hui_, morceaux
+choisis accompagnés de notices biographiques et d'un essai de
+bibliographie. Paris: Mercure de France, 1900. Boer, Julius de._ Maurice
+Maeterlinck_--(_Mannen en Vrouwen van beteekenis in onze dagen_).
+Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink en Zoon, 1908.
+
+Brisson, Adolphe. _La Comédie littéraire._ Paris: A. Colin, 1895.
+
+----_Portraits intimes_, 3e série. Paris: A. Colin, 1897.
+
+Courtney, W.L. _The Development of Maurice Maeterlinck and other
+Sketches of Foreign Writers._ London: Grant Richards, 1904.
+
+Crawford, Virginia M. _Studies in Foreign Literature._ London:
+Duckworth, 1899.
+
+Dijk, Dr Is. van, _Maurice Maeterlinck._ Een Studie. Nijmegen, Firma H.
+Ten Hoet, 1897.
+
+Doumic, René. _Les Jeunes._ Etudes et portraits. Paris: Perrin et Cie,
+1896.
+
+Gilbert, Eugène. _En Marge et quelques Pages._ Paris: Plon, 1900.
+
+Gilbert, Eugène. _France et Belgique._ Etudes littéraires. Paris: Plon,
+1905.
+
+Gourmont, Remy de._ Le Livre des Masques._ Portraits symbolistes, gloses
+et documents sur les écrivains d'hier et d'aujourd'hui. Les masques, au
+nombre de xxx, dessinés par F. Vallotton. Paris: Société du Mercure de
+France, 1897.
+
+Hale, Edward Everett, jun. _Dramatists of To-day._ London: George Bell &
+Sons, 1906.
+
+Hamel, A.G. van. _Het letterkundig Leven van Frankrijk._ Studiën en
+Schetsen, derde Serie. Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen en Zoon [1907].
+
+Harry, Gérard. _Maurice Maeterlinck._ [Annexe: _Le Massacre des
+Innocents_.] Bruxelles: Ch. Carrington, 1909.
+
+Harry, Gérard. _Maurice Maeterlinck._ A biographical study, with two
+essays by M. Maeterlinck. Translated from the French by Alfred
+Allinson. With nine illustrations and facsimile. London: George Allen &
+Sons, 1910.
+
+Heine, Anselma. _Maeterlinck._ ("Die Dichtung," Bd. 33). Berlin:
+Schuster and Loeffler, 1905.
+
+Henderson, Archibald. _Interpreters of Life and the Modern Spirit._
+London: Duckworth & Co., 1911.
+
+Heumann, Albert. _Le Mouvement littéraire belge d'expression française
+depuis 1880._ With preface by Camille Jullian. Mercure de France, 1913.
+
+Horrent, Désiré. _Ecrivains belges d'aujourd'hui, 1re série._ Bruxelles.
+P. Lacomblez, 1904.
+
+Hovey, R. Introduction to the American translation of _La Princesse
+Maleine_, _L'Intruse_, _Les Aveugles_, _Les sept Princesses_, _Pelléas
+et Mélisande_, _Alladine et Palomides_, _Intérieur_, _La Mort de
+Tintagiles_. Chicago; Stow & Kimball,
+
+Hulsman, G. _Karakters en Ideeën_, Haarlem: Vincent Loosjes, 1903.
+
+Huneker, James. _Iconoclasts, a Book of Dramatists._ New York: Ch.
+Scribner's, 1905; London: Werner Laurie, [1906].
+
+Huret, Jules. _Enquête sur l'Evolution littéraire._ Paris: Charpentier,
+1891.
+
+Jackson, Holbrook. _Romance and Reality._ Essays and Studies. London:
+Grant Richards. 1911.
+
+Jacobs, Dr Monty, _Maeterlinck._ Eine kritische Studie, zur Einführung
+in seine Werke. Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1902.
+
+Key, Ellen. _Tankebilder_, senare delen. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers
+Forlag, 1898.
+
+----_Aufsätze._ Fischer, Berlin.
+
+Lazare, Bernard. _Figures contemporaines._ Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1895.
+
+Leblanc, Georgette (Mme Maurice Maeterlinck). Introduction to Morceaux
+choisis. Collection Nelson.
+
+Le Cardonnel, Georges, et Charles Vellay. _La littérature
+contemporaine._ Paris: Mercure de France, 1905.
+
+Lemaître, Jules. _Impressions de Théâtre_; 8e série. Paris: Lecène,
+Oudin et Cie, 1895.
+
+Leneveu, Georges. _Ibsen et Maeterlinck._ Paris: Ollendorf, 1902.
+
+Lorenz, Max. _Die Litteratur am Jahrhundertende._ Stuttgart: 1900.
+
+Mainor, Yves. _M. Maeterlinck, moraliste._ Angers: 1902.
+
+Meyer-Benfey, Heinrich. _Moderne Religion._ Schleiermacher, Maeterlinck.
+Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1902.
+
+Mieszner, W. _Maeterlinck's Werke._ Eine literar-psychologische Studie
+über die Neuromantik. Berlin: Richard Schroder, 1904.
+
+Mockel, Albert. _Quelques Livres._ Liège: Vaillant-Carmanne, 1890.
+(Printed for private circulation.)
+
+Picard, Gaston. _Maurice Maeterlinck où le mystère de la porte close._
+Paris, 1912.
+
+Poppenberg, F. _Maeterlinck_ ("Moderne Essays," 30). Berlin, 1903.
+
+Recolin, Chr. _L'Anarchie Littéraire._ Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1898.
+
+Reggio, Albert. _Au seuil de leur âme._ Etudes de psychologie critique.
+Paris: Perrin & Cie, 1904, in 18--.
+
+Rose, Henry. _Maeterlinck's Symbolism: The Blue Bird and other Essays._
+London: H.C. Fifield, 1910.
+
+Rose, Henry. _On Maeterlinck: or Notes on the Study of Symbols, with
+special reference to_ "The Blue Bird." To which is added an exposition
+of The Sightless. London: Fifield, 1911.
+
+Schlaf, Johannes. _Maurice Maeterlinck._ Berlin: Bard-Marquardt & Co.
+[1906].
+
+Schrijver, J. _Maeterlinck._ Een Studie. Amsterdam: Scheltema &
+Holkema, 1900.
+
+Schuré, Edouard. _Précurseurs et Révoltés._ Paris: Perrin, 1904.
+
+Souza, Robert de. _La poésie populaire et le lyrisme sentimental._
+Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1899.
+
+Steiger, E. _Das Werden des neuen Dramas, Vol. ii.: Von Hauptmann bis
+Maeterlinck_. Berlin: Fontane & Co., 1898.
+
+Symons, Arthur. _The Symbolist Movement in Literature._ London:
+Heinemann, 1899.
+
+----Second Edition, revised. London: Constable, 1908.
+
+----_Plays, Acting, and Music._ London: Duckworth, 1903.
+
+Thomas, Edward. _Maurice Maeterlinck._ London: Methuen, 1911.
+
+Thompson, Vance. _French Portraits._ Boston: Richard G. Badger Co.,
+1900.
+
+Timmermans, B. _L'Evolution de Maeterlinck._ Brussels: éditions de la
+Belgique artistique et littéraire, 1912.
+
+Trench, Herbert. _Souvenir of the Blue Bird_, containing a short essay
+on the life and work of Maeterlinck, etc. London: John Long, Ltd.,
+[1910].
+
+Verhaeren, Emile. _Les lettres françaises en Belgique._ Brussels:
+Lamertin, 1907.
+
+Visan, Tancrède de. _L'Attitude du Lyrisme-contemporain._ Paris: Mercure
+de France, 1911.
+
+Walkley, A.B. _Frames of Mind._ London: Grant Richards, 1899.
+
+Wilmotte, Maurice. _La Culture Française en Belgique._ Paris: H.
+Champion, Dec., 1912.
+
+
+
+
+WORKS SET TO MUSIC,. ETC.
+
+
+_Pellas et Mélisande_, drame lyrique de Maurice Maeterlinck, musique de
+Claude Debussy, représenté pour la première fois au Théâtre National de
+l'Opéra Comique en mai 1902. Partition piano et chant. Paris: E.
+Fromont, 1902.
+
+_La Mort de Tintagiles._ Paroles de Maurice Maeterlinck. Musique de Jean
+Nouguès. Bruxelles: P. Lacomblez, 1905.
+
+_La Mort de Tintagiles_, etc., mis en musique par Jean Nouguès,
+représenté pour la première fois aux "Matinées de Georgette Leblanc"
+(Théâtre des Mathurins), 28th Dec, 1905.
+
+Gilman, Lawrence. Debussy's _Pelléas et Mélisande_. A Guide to the Opera
+with musical examples from the score. New York: G. Schirmer, 1907.
+
+_Ariane et Barbe-Bleue._ Conte en trois actes tiré du théâtre de Maurice
+Maeterlinck. Musique de Paul Dukas. Brussels: Lacomblez, 1907.
+
+_Ariane et Barbe-Bleue._ Conte en trois actes, etc., musique de Paul
+Dukas, représenté pour la première fois sur la scène de l'Opéra-Comique
+le 10 mai 1907.
+
+_Chansons de Maeterlinck._ Dix poèmes précédés d'un prélude, instrum.
+pour violon, violoncelle et piano, par Gabriel Fabre. Paris: Heugel.
+
+_Monna Vanna._ Drame lyrique en quatre actes. Musique de Henry Février.
+Représenté pour la première fois à Paris sur la scène de l'Académie
+Nationale de Musique le 13 janvier 1909. Paris: Fasquelle, 1909.
+
+Other dramas and songs of Maeterlinck have been set to music by Pierre
+de Bréville; L. Camilieri; Ernest Chausson; Gabriel Fabre; Gabriel Fauré
+(see _Pelléas et Mélisande_, suite d'orchestre tirée de la musique de
+scène de Gabriel Fauré. Paris: Hamelle, 1901); Henry Février; G.
+Samazeuilh; Eug. Samuel, etc.
+
+
+
+
+MAGAZINE ARTICLES.
+
+
+Anonymous [Jean E. Schmitt and the editor].--Pour clore une
+polémique.--_Entretiens politiques et littéraires_, Oct., 1890.
+
+Anonymous.--Princess Maleine and The Intruder.--_Athenoeum_, 23rd
+April, 1892.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck's Plays.--_Spectator_, 1892, p. 455.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck--_Poet-Lore_ (Boston), 1893, p. 151.
+
+Anonymous.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Academy_, 1897, pp. 45, 113.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck as an Essayist--_Academy_, 1897, p. 465.
+
+Anonymous--Wisdom and Destiny.--_Academy_, 1898, p. 147.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck as a Realist.--_Academy_, 1899, p. 285.
+
+Anonymous (D.M.J.).--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Westminster Review_, 1899,
+p. 409.
+
+Anonymous--The Life of the Bee.--_Academy_, 1901, p. 459.
+
+Anonymous--Review of The Life of the Bee.--_Blackwood's Magazine_, May
+and June, 1901.
+
+Anonymous--Review of The Life of the Bee--_Athenoeum_, June 15th,
+1901.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck, Moralist and Artist.--Littell's _Living Age_,
+July 27th, 1901.
+
+Anonymous.--The Life of The Bee.--_Current Literature_, Nov., 1901.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck, Dramatist and Mystic.--_Outlook_, Nov. 16th,
+1901.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck, Man and Mystic.--_Harper's Weekly Bazar_, March
+22nd, 1902.
+
+Anonymous.--Review of Sister Beatrice and Ariane et
+Barbe-Bleue.--_Athenoeum_, May 3rd, 1902.
+
+Anonymous.--Review of Théâtre de Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Athenoeum_,
+May 3rd, 1902.
+
+Anonymous.--The Buried Temple.--_Athenoeum_, Aug. 30th, 1902.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck as a Philosopher.--_Academy_, 1902, p. 451.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck.--_Church Quarterly Review_ (London), 1902, p.
+381.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck.--_Pall Mall Magazine_, 1902, p. 108.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck.--_Academy_, 1903, p. 559.
+
+Anonymous.--Monna Vanna.--_Book News_ (Philadelphia), 1904, p. 145.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck and the Eternal Womanly.--_Harper's Bazar_ (New
+York), July, 1904.
+
+Anonymous.--Review of The Blue Bird.--_Athenoeum_, Aug. 7th, 1909.
+
+Anonymous.--Review of performance of The Blue Bird at the Haymarket
+Theatre.--_Athenoeum_, Dec, 18th, 1909.
+
+Anonymous.--The Land of Unborn Children.--_Ladies' Home Journal_,
+Philadelphia, Jan., 1910.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck's New Type of Heroine.--_Current Literature_,
+May, 1910.
+
+Anonymous.--The Insect's Homer.--_Forum_ (New York), Sept., 1910.
+
+Anonymous.--The Blue Bird.--_Outlook_, Oct. 15th, 1910.
+
+Anonymous.--Review of Mary Magdalene--_Athenoeum_, Nov. 5th, 1910.
+
+Anonymous.--Review of performance of The Blue Bird at the Haymarket
+Theatre.--_Athenoeum_, Dec. 31st, 1910.
+
+Anonymous.--Maeterlinck's Exit from Shadowland: Mary
+Magdalene.--_Current Literature_, Dec, 1910.
+
+Anonymous--The Blue Bird as a féerie.--_Scribner's Magazine_ (New York),
+Dec, 1910.
+
+Anonymous.--The Woman Question in Grand Opera: Ariane and
+Bluebeard.--_Current Literature_, May, 1911.
+
+Anonymous.--Review of Life and Flowers.--_Athenoeum_, June 3rd, 1911.
+
+Anonymous.--Review of Death.--_Athenoeum_, Nov. 11th, 1911.
+
+Anonymous.--La philosophie de Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Le xxe Siècle_,
+Brussels, 15th Feb., 1912.
+
+Anonymous.--(? Grégoire Le Roy), Le poète prodigue--Propos de Table,
+_Le Masque_, Brussels, Série ii, No. 5. 1912.
+
+Anonymous.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Everyman_, Oct. 25th, 1912.
+
+Archer, W.--A Pessimist Playwright--_Fortnightly Review_, 1891, p. 346.
+
+Archer, W.--Maurice Maeterlinck and Mystery.--_Critic_, 1900, p. 220.
+
+Beerbohm, Max--Pelléas and Mélisande.--_Saturday Review_, 1898, p. 843.
+
+Berg, Leo.--Maeterlinck, _Umschau_, No. 32 f., 1898.
+
+Bonnier, Gaston.--La Science chez Maeterlinck.--_La Revue_, 15th Aug.,
+1907.
+
+Bornstein P.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Wiener Rundschau_, ii., 19, 20, 21
+Aug.-Sept., 1897.
+
+Bornstein. P.--Maurice Maeterlinck. _Monatschrift fur neue Literatur und
+Kunst_, ii., 8 and 9 May and June, 1898.
+
+Boynton, H.W.--The Double Garden.--_Atlantic Monthly_ (Boston), August
+1904.
+
+Bradley, W.A.--Maeterlinck's Mary Magdalene.--_Bookman_ (New York), Dec,
+1910.
+
+Bragdon, C.--Maeterlinck.--_Critic_ (New York), 1904, p. 156.
+
+Brunnemann, A.--Maurice Maeterlinck--_Pan_, Berlin, 3rd year, 4th
+number, 1898.
+
+Burton, R.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Atlantic Monthly_ (Boston), 1894, p.
+672.
+
+Buysse, Cyriel.--Maurice Maeterlinck. With bibliography.--_Den
+Gulden-Winckel_ (Baarn), 15th July, 1902.
+
+Chambers, E.K.--Joyzelle.--_Academy_, 1903, p. 89.
+
+Chrysale.--La Vie des Abeilles.--_Figaro_, 14th July, 1901.
+
+Coleman, A.I. du P.--The Buried Temple.--_Critic_, Jan., 1903.
+
+Cooper, F.T.--The Forbidden Play.--_Bookman_ (New York), Sept., 1902.
+
+Corneau, G.--Maeterlinck and Joyzelle.--_Critic_, Aug., 1903.
+
+Cornut, Samuel.--Maurice Maeterlinck--_La Semaine littéraire_, Geneva,
+18th and 25th Jan., 1902.
+
+Courtney, W.L.--Development of Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Contemporary
+Review_, Sept., 1004.
+
+Crawford, Virginia M.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Fortnightly Review_, 1897,
+p. 176.
+
+Crawford, Virginia M.--Maeterlinck's Aspirations.--_Current Literature_,
+August, 1900.
+
+Daniels, E.D.--Symbolism in The Blind.--_Poet-Lore_, 1902, p. 554.
+
+Dauriac, Lionel.--Un stoïcien du temps présent.--_Revue Latine_, 22nd
+June, 1902.
+
+Deschamps, Gaston.--La Vie littéraire.--_Le Temps_, 21st April, 1907.
+
+Deschamps, L.--M. Maeterlinck.--_La Plume_, 15th Nov., 1902.
+
+Dewey, J.--Maeterlinck's Philosophy of Life.--_Hibbert Journal_, July,
+1911.
+
+Deyssel, Lodewijk van.--Het schoone beeld.--_Twee-maandelijksch
+Tijdschrift_, Sept., 1897.
+
+Dimnet, Abbé Ernest.--Is M. Maeterlinck critically
+estimated?--_Nineteenth Century and After_, Jan., 1912.
+
+Dreux, André.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Le Correspondent_, 25th March,
+1897.
+
+Drews, Arthur.--Maurice Maeterlinck als Philosoph.--_Preuszische
+Jahrbücher_, Berlin, Jan.-March, 1900, vol. xc., No. 12, pp. 232-262.
+
+Drews, Arthur.--Das Leben der Bienen.--_Preuszische Jahrbücher_, vol.
+cvii., No. 3.
+
+Drews, Arthur.--Der begrabene Tempel.--_Preuszische Jahrbücher_, vol.
+cx., No. 1.
+
+Dumont-Wilden, L., et Georges Marlow.--L'Oiseau Bleu, _Le Masque_,
+Brussels, May, 1910.
+
+Dumont-Wilden, Louis.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_La Nouvelle Revue
+Française_, Sept., 1912.
+
+Dumont-Wilden, Louis.--Correspondence.--_La Vie Intellectuelle_,
+Brussels, Nov. 1912.
+
+Ettlinger, Anna.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Beilage zur Allgemeinen
+Zeitung_, No. 155 f., 1901.
+
+Fidler, Florence G.--Maeterlinck's Blue Bird.--_Everyman_, Feb. 14th,
+1913.
+
+Firkens, O.W.--Dramas of Maeterlinck.--_Nation_ (New York), Sept. 14th,
+1911.
+
+Flat, Paul.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Revue Bleue_, Oct., 1903.
+
+Forest, K. de.--A Visit to Maeterlinck's Paris Home. _Harper's Bazar_,
+May, 1901.
+
+Fortebus, T.--Maeterlinck as Thinker.--_Argosy_, 1901, p. 86.
+
+Galtier, Joseph.--Maurice Maeterlinck raconté par lui-même. _Le Temps_,
+May 29th, 1903.
+
+Gerothwohl, M.A.--Monna Vanna.--_Monthly Review_ (London), 1902, p. 121.
+
+Gerothwohl, M.A.--Joyzelle. _Fortnightly Review_, 1903, p. 76.
+
+Gibson, A.E.--Maeterlinck and the Bees.--_Arena_, 1002, p. 381.
+
+Gilder, J.L.--The American Production of Maeterlinck's Blue
+Bird.--_Review of Reviews_ (New York), Dec., 1910.
+
+Gilman, L.--Maeterlinck in Music.--_Harper's Weekly_, Jan. 13th, 1906.
+
+Groth, C.D.--Madame Maeterlinck at Home.--_Harper's Bazar_, Nov., 1911.
+
+Guthrie, W.N.--The Treasure of the Humble. Study of Death. _Sewanee
+Review_ (Sewanee, Tenn.), 1898, p. 276.
+
+Hagemann, Dr. Karl.--Maeterlinck und Bölsche.--_Die Propyläen_, Munich,
+Nov. 1903.
+
+Hamel, A.G. van.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_De Gids_, Jan., 1900.
+
+Harris, Frank.--Maurice Maeterlinck, _The Academy_, June 15th and 22nd,
+1912.
+
+Hartmann, Anna von.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Deutsche Rundschau_, Jan.
+1003.
+
+Hassé.--L'âme philosophique de Maeterlinck.--_Ermitage_, May, 1896.
+
+Hauser, Otto.--Maeterlinck's Dramen.--_Nationalzeitung_, Aug., 1902.
+
+Heard, J., Jr.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Critic_, 1894, P. 354.
+
+Henderson, A.--Maeterlinck as a Dramatic Artist.--_Sewanee Review_,
+1904, p. 207.
+
+Henderson, A.--Maurice Maeterlinck, Symbolist and Mystic.--_Arena_
+(Boston), Feb., 1906.
+
+Hofmiller, Josef.--Maeterlinck (Deutsches Theater, ii).--_Monatshefte_,
+Munich and Leipzig, Oct., 1904.
+
+Holländer, Felix.--Criticism of various works.--_Literarisches Echo_,
+Oct., 1902.
+
+Hovey, Richard.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Nineteenth Century_, March,
+1895.
+
+Hovey, Richard.--Impressions of Maeterlinck and the Théâtre de
+l'Oeuvre.--_Poet-Lore_, 1895, p. 446.
+
+Hovey, Richard.--Translation from Maeterlinck--_Current Literature_,
+Mar., 1901.
+
+Huneker, James.--The Evolution of a Mystic.--_The Sun_, 12th April,
+1903.
+
+Huneker, James.--The Romance of Maeterlinck.--_The Sun_ (New York), 26th
+April, 1903.
+
+Huneker, James.--Joyzelle.--_The Lamp_ (New York), Jan., 1904.
+
+Jannasch, Lilly.--Monna Vanna im Lichte der sozialen Ethik.--_Ethische
+Kultur_, Berlin, 4th April, 1903.
+
+Jervey, H.--Maeterlinck versus the Conventional Drama.--_Sewanee
+Review_, 1903, p. 187.
+
+Keller, Adolf von.--Maeterlinck als Philosoph.--_Neue Zürcher Zeitung_,
+28-29th Dec, 1903.
+
+Keymeulen, van.--Maurice Maeterlinck et son Oeuvre.--_Revue
+Encyclopédique_, 15th Jan., 1893.
+
+Leblanc-Maeterlinck, Georgette.--Macbeth at Saint
+Wandrille.--_Fortnightly Review_, Oct., 1909.
+
+Leblanc-Maeterlinck, Georgette.--Later Heroines of
+Maeterlinck.--_Fortnightly Review_, Jan., 1910.
+
+Leblanc-Maeterlinck, Georgette.--Maeterlinck's Methods of Life and
+Work.--_Contemporary Review_, Nov., 1910.
+
+Lerberghe, Charles van.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_La Wallonie_ (Liège),
+31st July, 1889.
+
+Lord, W.F.--The Reader of Plays to the Rescue.--_Nineteenth Century and
+After_, 1902, p. 72. Reply: H.H. Fyfe, p. 282. Rejoinder: W.F. Lord, p.
+289.
+
+Lorenz, Max.--Der Naturalismus und seine überwindung. _Preuszische
+Jahrbücher_, vol. xcvi., p. 493 ff.
+
+Mattos, A.T. de.--A Notable Genius.--_American Magazine_ (New York),
+Feb., 1911.
+
+Mauclair, Camille.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Les Hommes d'aujourd'hui_,
+No. 434, Paris, Vanier.
+
+Mauclair, Camille.--Intérieur.--_Revue Encyclopédique_, 1st April, 1895.
+
+Mauclair, Camille.--La Belgique par un Français.--_Revue
+Encyclopédique_, 24th July, 1897.
+
+Maurras, Charles.--Le Trésor des Humbles--_Revue Encyclopédique_, 26th
+Sept., 1896.
+
+Merrill, Stuart.--Commentaires sur une Polémique.--_Le Masque_
+(Brussels), Série ii, Nos. 9 et 10.
+
+Mirbeau, Octave.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Figaro_, 24th Aug., 1890.
+
+Mockel, Albert.--Chronique littéraire.--_La Wallonie_, June and July,
+1890.
+
+Mockel, Albert.--Une âme de poète.--_Revue Wallonne_, Liège, June,
+1894.
+
+Mockel, Albert.--Les lettres françaises en Belgique.--_Revue
+Encyclopédique_, 24th July, 1897.
+
+Newman, E.--Maeterlinck and Music.--_Atlantic Monthly_ (Boston), 1901,
+p. 769.
+
+Norat, E.--Maeterlinck moraliste.--_Revue Bleue_, 11th June, 1904.
+
+Nouhuys, W.G. van.--Maeterlinck.--_Nederland_, 1897, L, p. 14.
+
+Oppeln-Bronikowski, F. von.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Die Gesellschaft_, 9
+and 10, 1898.
+
+Oppeln-Bronikowski, F. von.--Maurice Maeterlinck und der
+Mysticismus.--_Nord und Süd_, Dec., 1898.
+
+Oppeln-Bronikowski, F. von.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Bühne und Welt_, 1st
+and 15th Nov., 1902.
+
+Oppeln-Bronikowski, F. von.--Wie Maeterlinck arbeitet, _Berliner
+Tageblatt_, 19th Feb., 1904.
+
+Oppeln-Bronikowski, F. von.--Die Quellen von Monna
+Vanna--_Nationalzeitung, Sonntagsbeilage_ 44, 1904.
+
+Oppeln-Bronikowski, F. von.--Maeterlinck's neueste
+Werke--_Nationalzeitung_, 19th and 21st July, 1904.
+
+Osgood, H.--Maeterlinck and Emerson--_Arena_--1896, p. 563.
+
+Pastore, Annibale.--L'Evoluzione di M. Maeterlinck.--_Nuova Antologia_,
+16th March, 1903.
+
+Patrick, M.M.--The Belgian Shakespeare.--_Chautauquan_ (Meadville, Pa.),
+Oct., 1904.
+
+Phelps, William Lyon--Maeterlinck.--_Poet-Lore_ (Boston), 1899, p. 357.
+
+Phelps, William Lyon.--Maeterlinck and Robert Browning.--_Academy_,
+1903, p. 594. Same: _Independent_ (New York), March 5th, 1903.
+
+Phillips, R.--A Talk with Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Book Buyer_, New York,
+July, 1902.
+
+Picard, Gaston.--Enquête.--_L'Heure qui sonne_, April, 1911.
+
+Pidoux, M.--Maeterlinck at home.--_Bookman_ (New York), 1895, p. 104.
+
+Pilon, Edmond.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Mercure de France_, April, 1896.
+
+Pilon, Edmond.--Maurice Maeterlinck, _La Plume_, 1st May, 1902.
+
+Puttkamer, Alberta von.--Monna Vanna und der künstlerisch
+--philosophische Werdegang Maeterlincks.--_Beilage zur Allgemeinen
+Zeitung_, No. 236 f., 1902.
+
+Rava, Maurice.--Maurice Maeterlinck, Poeta Filosofo.--_Nuova Antologia_,
+1st Feb., 1897.
+
+Rency, Georges.--Maurice Maeterlinck et Louis Dumont-Wilden.--_La Vie
+Intellectuelle_ (Brussels), 15th Oct., 1912.
+
+Rency, Georges.--Review of La Mort. _La Vie Intellectuelle_, March,
+1913.
+
+Reuter, Gabriele.--Rhodope und Monna Vanna.--_Der Tag_, Berlin, 5th
+April, 1903.
+
+Richter, Helene.--Das Urbild der Monna Vanna.--_Neue Freie Presse_
+(Vienna), 29th April, 1904.
+
+Rod, E.--Maeterlinck's Essay on The Life of the Bee.--_International
+Monthly_ (Burlington, Vt.), April, 1902.
+
+Ropes, A.R.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Contemporary Review_, March, 1900.
+
+Rose, G.B.--Monna Vanna.--_Sewanee Review_ (Sewanee, Tenn.), 1902, p.
+458.
+
+Ruhl, A.--The Blue Bird.--_Collier's National Weekly_ (New York), Oct.
+22nd, 1910.
+
+Sanborn, A.F.--Maeterlinck out of doors.--_Harper's Weekly_, Oct. 15th,
+1910.
+
+Scott-James, R.A.--Review of "Death" and Mr Edward Thomas's "Maurice
+Maeterlinck." _Daily News_ (London), Oct. 20th, 1911.
+
+Serrano, M.J.--Three Songs of Maeterlinck translated.--_Critic_, Dec.
+1902.
+
+Sharp, W.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Academy_, 1892, p. 270.
+
+Sherwood.--Later Philosophy of Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Atlantic Monthly_,
+Sept. 1911.
+
+Sholl, A.M.--Maeterlinck's Philosophy.--_Gunton's Magazine_ (New York),
+Jan., 1904.
+
+Silver, Ednah C.--Maeterlinck and Swedenborg.--_New Church Review_
+(Boston), 1905, p. 416.
+
+Slosson, E.E.--Twelve Major Prophets of To-day.--_Independent_, May 4th,
+1911.
+
+Soissons, Count S.C. de.--Bluebeard and Aryan.--_Fortnightly Review_,
+Dec. 1900. Same: _Littell's Living Age_ (Boston), Jan. 1901.
+
+Soissons, Count S.C. de.--Maeterlinck as Reformer of the
+Drama.--_Contemporary Review_, Nov. 1904.
+
+Soissons, Count de.--The Modern Belgian Poets.--_English Review_, Aug.
+1911.
+
+Souza, Robert de.--Littérature.--_Mercure de France_, 1898.
+
+Steiner, E.A.--A visit to Maeterlinck.--_Outlook_ (New York), 1901, p.
+701.
+
+Stoddart, J.T.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Bookman_ (New York). 1895, p.
+246.
+
+Sylvestre, M.--Maeterlinck.--_Open Court_ (Chicago), 1903, p. 116.
+
+Symons, Arthur.--Maeterlinck as a Mystic.--_Contemporary Review_, 1897,
+p. 349.
+
+Tadema, L. Alma.--Monna Vanna.--_Fortnightly Review_, 1902, p. 153.
+
+Thorold, Algar.--Maeterlinck as Moralist.--_Independent Review_
+(London), 1906, p. 184.
+
+"_Thyrse, Le,_" Brussels, Jan., 1912.--Maeterlinck et le prix Nobel.
+Enquête.--(Contains opinions of eminent men of letters on Maeterlinck.)
+
+Uzanne, Octave.--La Thébaïde de Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Echo de Paris_,
+7th Sept., 1900.
+
+Vallete, Alfred.--Pelléas et Mélisande et La Critique
+Officielle.--_Mercure de France_, July, 1893.
+
+Weekes, C--Maeterlinck as Artist.--_Argosy_, 1901, p. 77.
+
+Winter, W.--The Blue Bird.--_Harper's Weekly_, Oct. 29th, 1910.
+
+Zangwill, Israel--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Critic_, 1895, p. 451.
+
+Zieler, Gustav.--Maurice Maeterlinck.--_Velhagen und Klasings
+Monatshefte_, Aug., 1902.
+
+
+
+
+CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF MAETERLINCK'S WORKS
+
+
+  1889  Serres Chaudes
+        La Princesse Maleine
+  1890  Les Aveugles
+  1891  L'Ornement des Noces spirituelles de Ruysbroeck l'Admirable
+        Les sept Princesses
+  1892  Pelléas et Mélisande
+  1894  Alladine et Palomides
+        Intérieur
+        La Mort de Tintagiles
+  1895  Annabella
+        Les Disciples à Saïs et les Fragments de Novalis
+  1896  Le Trésor des Humbles
+        Aglavaine et Selysette
+        Douze Chansons
+  1898  La Sagesse et la Destinée
+  1901  La Vie des Abeilles
+        Théâtre I & III
+  1902  Théâtre II
+        Le Temple Enseveli
+        Monna Vanna
+        Théâtre de Maurice Maeterlinck
+  1903  Joyzelle
+  1904  Le double Jardin
+        Das Wunder des Heiligen Antonius
+  1907  L'Intelligence des Fleurs
+  1909  L'Oiseau Bleu
+  1910  Macbeth
+        Mary Magdalene
+  1911  Death
+  1913  La Mort
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Life and Writings of Maurice
+Maeterlinck, by Jethro Bithell
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