The Later Philosophy of Maeterlinck

IT has often occurred to me, as one of those innumerable Shakespeare meanings that Shakespeare undoubtedly did not mean, that Hamlet, if he had survived his sharp youthful bewilderment about the issues of life and death, might have grown into another Polonius, as all-wise, as glib in explaining the universe. One can almost hear him as, with the added sonorousness of voice that means greater girth, he expounds the reasons why there is no question at all about to be or not to be, showing convincing reasons why to be a bit elderly, to be perfectly comfortable, and all but omniscient, —because the vision of one’s eyes has narrowed from the far horizon to the safe section bounded by drawing-room and kitchen, where one can really see what is going on, — is a vastly fine thing. Polonius we have always with us. He makes up a great company of elderly successful folk, who do God the honor to see through the universe, and to give, what He has never as yet chosen to do, a really intelligible account of it.

It is perhaps because I am half way between the Hamlet and the Polonius stage, and have begun to feel twinges of senile omniscience, evincing a readiness to explain to the young what it is all about, and to pity them because they have not had my experience, that I resent a little, in my better moments, the later philosophy of M. Maurice Maeterlinck. The author of those youthful symbolic dramas, — whose wistful questionings take us to the dim confines of things, —

challenge the depths within us, — has grown strangely reassured of late. The sensitive young thinker, who seemed at times an instrument whereon all the mystery and pain and sorrow of the world were playing, has narrowed his utterance to a triumphant expression of his own good time. It is almost as if one of the groping characters in that appealing drama, The Blind, had grown suddenly content over a pot of honey, stumbled upon in his groping, and had ceased his quest, settling down with the expression of one whose wanderings are over.

It is not that one would deride optimism; surely the strong win to it, but the strong win through struggle. In this case the optimism is too sudden, too passive; the author hits upon it as if by lucky accident. In a flash, the later thought reveals the weakness of the dramas even more fully than they reveal it themselves, and we realize anew how undramatic they are, how free from that struggle of the human will which is the essence of drama. In them the soul is but a helpless toy in the hands of sad fate; in the essays, the soul has ceased to trouble, and the human being is a toy in the hands of physical powers which are in some way beneficent because indifferent. A passive mood of physical content has succeeded the old mood of longing. Here is none of the fighting power of Maeterlinck’s early master, Carlyle, grim teacher of the reality of things unseen, who left his body by the rough stone wall of that green kirkyard in the north, when the last blow had been given and taken. I distrust M. Maeterlinck’s sudden content with things as they are. We should achieve optimism if we can, but we should come honestly by it, should earn it by the travail of our souls. One sits upon the threshold and howls while Stepdame Life thwacks one soundly over head and ears; one sits inside upon the easy chair, and smiles between the bites, as Mother Life, grown kind, drops plums into one’s mouth. But is it philosophy?

If M. Maeterlinck had traced for us the successive stages of his development in optimism we should find it, perhaps, more convincing; as it is, the basis is too alien from the basis of the earlier doubt and pain to let one think that it rests on a strong foundation. Mystery has dropped out of his consciousness; he has suddenly discovered, not only that the tangible things of life are very real, but that there is nothing beyond them. He derives strange comfort from the fact that there is no God; to us he would seem a wiser teacher if, instead of repeating so often that this is fact, he told us how he found it out. We want to share, if share we must, the stages that lead to this conclusion; but of the stages our philosopher says nothing. In taking the great leap, in deciding, for instance, that the earthquake is the result only of forces dumb and blind, it is well not to leap too far. That it is the action of the earth’s crust, we recognize; but what may lie back of the earth’s crust is, for all of science, as deep and real a mystery as it ever was. It is perhaps because in reading the symbolic dramas, we used to feel that, to such poignant questioning, some answer must be vouchsafed, that we are saddened by M. Maeterlinck’s smiling assurance that he has been behind the veil of things, and that there really is nothing there. I do not believe him! It is he that seeks who finds, and this gifted author has dropped out of the ranks of the seekers. He deplores his early work, because of its sadness, but I would give all his later bland insistence that the honey-pot is enough, for the sense which the symbolic dramas give that great doors may suddenly open wide.

One’s mind instinctively wanders back again to the earlier and greater questioner. What would have been the dramatic effect if Hamlet had lighted upon something among the funeral baked meats,— or even in Ophelia’s presence, — that gave him sudden, absolute content with the world as it is, with all its problems unsolved? One is glad that he did not live to explain to the young the ultimate meanings of the world and of life. Surely, in reading Hamlet, we feel anew that mere death is not tragedy. To pass while our sense of the greatness of the issue, the depth of the mystery, is unabated is a boon to be desired. There is a fine and subtle meaning in Shakespeare’s words that, over the body of this thinker and doubter shall sound

Happy he, to die while still ‘a fighter in the noblest fight.’ Reading the later essays of the young Belgian questioner, whose philosophy has grown so stout and prosperous, one realizes that there are worse things wherewith to make one’s quietus than the bare bodkin.