Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck. Jethro Bithell
banality of the flattest everyday speech, which, however, in the midst of this second, inner dialogue, is invested with an indefinable magic."42
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 scene43 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.44
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…
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."45 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 preface46 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.47 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
Schlaf's
Suggested, perhaps, by the strangling of Little Snow-white in Grimm's story.
Preface to
"Les Avertis" (in
Cf. also "L'Evolution du Mystère" (in
See Chapter XXVIII. of