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.
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,[22 - The famous Wagner tenor.] Edmond Deman,[23 - The Brussels publisher.] and others) put their heads together and founded a bantam magazine, La Semaine des Etudiants.[24 - The first number is dated Saturday, the 18th October, 1879, and begins with "rimes d'avant poste" by "Rodolphe" (=Verhaeren).] 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.[25 - Iwan Gilkin, Quinze années de littérature.] 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,"[26 - Albert Giraud, Hors du Siècle.] the most discussed, the most suggestive literature in Europe.[27 - 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."]
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;[28 - Cf. Rodenbach's;"Je vis comme si mon âme avait étéDe 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."] 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."[29 - G. van Hamel, Het Letterkundige Leven van Frankrijk, pp. 127-8.]
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.
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[30 - Cf. Rodenbach, Le Règne du Silence, p. 1:"Mais les choses pourtant entre le cadre d'orOnt un air de souffrir de leur vie inactive;Le miroir qui les aime a borné leur essorEn un recul de vie exigüe et captive…"] 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[31 - 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."] 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.[32 - "Chambres pleines de songe! Elles vivent vraimentEn des rêves plus beaux que la vie ambiante,Grandissant toute chose au Symbole, voyantDans chaque rideau pâle une CommunianteAux falbalas de mousseline s'éployantQui communie au bord des vitres, de la Lune!"– Le Règne du Silence, p. 4.] 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[33 - 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."] appeared to some people who are ardent Maeterlinckians that they assume he may, for a period, have been mentally ill.[34 - 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.] 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.[35 - 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."] 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.[36 - See Tancrède de Visan's interpretation in L'Attitude du Lyrisme contemporain, pp. 119 ff.] Perhaps, elsewhere (Tancrède de Visan suggests the Song of Solomon) this method has been applied successfully. The poems in Serres Chaudes are experiments.
CHAPTER IV
Some of the most eminent symbolists were strongly influenced by the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer[37 - Maeterlinck told Huret that he had been influenced by Schopenhauer "qui arrive jusqu'à vous consoler de la mort."] 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."[38 - Figaro, 24th August, 1890.]
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.[39 - Pronounced in German like the French Maleine.] 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[40 - Preface to Théâtre, p. 2.] 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.[41 - 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?"] 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."[42 - Schlaf's Maeterlinck, p. 31.]
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.