Wisdom and Destiny | Page 5

Austerity holds no place in
his philosophy; he finds room even "for the hours that babble aloud in
their wantonness." But all those who follow him are led by smiling
wisdom to the heights where happiness sits enthroned between
goodness and love, where virtue rewards itself in the "silence that is the
walled garden of its happiness."
It is strange to turn from this essay to Serres Chaudes and La Princesse
Maleine, M. Maeterlinck's earliest efforts--the one a collection of vague
images woven into poetical form, charming, dreamy, and almost
meaningless; the other a youthful and very remarkable effort at
imitation. In the plays that followed the Princesse Maleine there was
the same curious, wandering sense of, and search for, a vague and
mystic beauty: "That fair beauty which no eye can see, Of that sweet
music which no ear can measure." In a little poem of his, Et s'il revenait,
the last words of a dying girl, forsaken by her lover, who is asked by
her sister what shall be told to the faithless one, should he ever seek to
know of her last hours:
"Et s'il m'interroge encore Sur la derniere heure?--
Dites lui que j'ai souri De peur qu'il ne pleure ..."
touch, perhaps, the very high-water mark of exquisite simplicity and
tenderness blent with matchless beauty of expression. Pelleas et
Melisande was the culminating point of this, his first, period--a simple,
pathetic love-story of boy and girl--love that was pure and almost
passionless. It was followed by three little plays--"for marionettes," he
describes them on the title-page; among them being La Mort de

Tintagiles, the play he himself prefers of all that he has written. And
then came a curious change: he wrote Aglavaine et Selysette. The
setting is familiar to us; the sea-shore, the ruined tower, the seat by the
well; no less than the old grandmother and little Yssaline. But
Aglavaine herself is strange: this woman who has lived and suffered;
this queenly, majestic creature, calmly conscious of her beauty and her
power; she whose overpowering, overwhelming love is yet deliberate
and thoughtful. The complexities of real life are vaguely hinted at here:
instead of Golaud, the mediaeval, tyrannous husband, we have
Selysette, the meek, self- sacrificing wife; instead of the instinctive,
unconscious love of Pelleas and Melisande, we have great burning
passion. But this play, too, was only a stepping-stone--a link between
the old method and the new that is to follow. For there will probably be
no more plays like Pelleas et Melisande, or even like Aglavaine et
Selysette. Real men and women, real problems and disturbance of
life--it is these that absorb him now. His next play will doubtless deal
with a psychology more actual, in an atmosphere less romantic; and the
old familiar scene of wood, and garden, and palace corridor will be
exchanged for the habitual abode of men.
I have said it was real life that absorbed him now, and yet am I aware
that what seems real to him must still appear vague and visionary to
many. It is, however, only a question of shifting one's point of view, or,
better still, of enlarging it. Material success in life, fame, wealth--these
things M. Maeterlinck passes indifferently by. There are certain ideals
that are dear to many on which he looks with the vague wonder of a
child. The happiness of which he dreams is an inward happiness, and
within reach of successful and unsuccessful alike. And so it may well
be that those content to buffet with their fellows for what are looked on
as the prizes of this world, will still write him down a mere visionary,
and fail to comprehend him. The materialist who complacently defines
the soul as the "intellect plus the emotions," will doubtless turn away in
disgust from M. Maeterlinck's constant references to it as the seat of
something mighty, mysterious, inexhaustible in life. So, too, may the
rigid follower of positive religion, to whom the Deity is a power
concerned only with the judgment, reward, and punishment of men,
protest at his saying that "God, who must be at least as high as the
highest thoughts He has implanted in the best of men, will withhold His

smile from those whose sole desire has been to please Him; and they
only who have done good for sake of good, and as though He existed
not; they only who have loved virtue more than they loved God
Himself, shall be allowed to stand by His side." But, after all, the
genuine seeker after truth knows that what seemed true yesterday is
to-day discovered to be only a milestone on the road; and all who value
truth will be glad to listen to a man who, differing from them perhaps,
yet tells them what seems