Jethro Bithell

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.) ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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." ”

“ 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...." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 22] 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”