Maurice Maeterlinck

“ On the ground thus cleared and at the portal of this unlooked-for riddle, which comes to disturb our peace in a region which we thought to be finally explored and conquered, there are only two ways, if not of explaining, at least of contemplating the phenomenon: to admit purely and simply the almost human intelligence of the horse, or to have recourse to an as yet very vague and indefinite theory which, for lack of a better designation, we will call the mediumistic or subliminal theory and of which we will strive presently—and no doubt vainly—to dispel the grosser darkness. ”

“ We discover with uneasiness that time, on which we based our whole existence, itself no longer exists. It is no longer the swiftest of our gods, known to us only by its flight across all things: it alters its position no more than space, of which it is doubtless but the incomprehensible reflex. It reigns in the centre of every event; and every event is fixed in its centre; and all that comes and all that goes passes from end to end of our little life without moving by a hair's breadth around its motionless pivot. ”

“ It has been likened to an immense block of which our personality is but a diminutive facet; to an iceberg of which we see a few glistening prisms that represent our life, while nine-tenths of the enormous mass remain buried in the shadows of the sea. According to Sir Oliver Lodge, it is that part of our being that has not become carnate; according to Gustave Le Bon, it is the "condensed" soul of our ancestors, which is true, beyond a doubt, but only a part of the truth, for we find in it also the soul of the future and probably of many other forces which are not necessarily human. ”

“ It is obvious: to whichever side we turn, we find nothing but the incomprehensible. On the one hand, the preestablished, unshakable, unalterable future which we have called destiny, fatality or what you will, which suppresses man's entire independence and liberty of action and which is the most inconceivable and the dreariest of mysteries; on the other, intelligences apparently superior to our own, since they know what we do not, which, while aware that their intervention is always useless and very often cruel, nevertheless come harassing us with their sinister and ridiculous predictions. ”

“ It is not surprising therefore that eyes sharper than ours and ears open to other vibrations should see and hear it without knowing what it represents, what it implies or from what prodigious mass of figures and operations it merges. The problem itself speaks; and the horse but repeats the sign which he hears whispered in the mysterious life of numbers or deep down in, the abyss where the eternal verities hold sway. He understands none of it, he has no need to understand, he is but the unconscious medium who lends his voice or his limbs to the mind that inspires him. ”

“ Our intelligence, which is really lethargy and which keeps us imprisoned in a little hollow of space and time, would there be replaced by intuition, or rather by a sort of imminent knowledge which would forthwith make us sharers in all that is known to a universe which perhaps knows all things. Unfortunately, we have not, or at least, unlike the horses, we are not acquainted with a superior being who interests himself in us and helps us to throw off our torpor. We have to become our own god, to rise above ourselves and to keep ourselves raised by our unaided strength. ”

“ If it deceives us, why does it do so? We can see no object: it asks for nothing, not for alms, nor prayers, nor thoughts, on behalf of those whose mantle it assumes for the sole purpose of leading us astray. What is the use of those mischievous and puerile pranks, of those ghastly graveyard pleasantries? It must lie then for the mere pleasure of lying; and our unknown guest, that infinite and doubtless immortal subconsciousness in which we have placed out last hopes, is after all but an imbecile, a buffoon or a rank swindler! ”

“ But it is within ourselves, in the silence of the darkness of our being, where it is ever in motion, guiding our destiny, that we should strive to surprise that mystery and to discover it. And I am not speaking only of the dreams, the presumptions, the vague intuitions, the room or less brilliant inspirations which are so many more manifestations, specific as it were and analogous with those that have occupied us. There is another, a more secret and much more active existence which we have scarcely begun to study and which is, if we descend to the bed-rock of truth, our only real existence. ”

“ From the darkest corners of our ego it directs our veritable life, the one that is not to die, and pays no heed to our thought or to anything emanating from our reason, which believes that it guides nor steps. It alone knows the long past that preceded our birth and the endless future that will follow our departure from this earth. It is itself that future and that past, all those from whom we have sprung and all those who will spring from us. ”

“ If we cultivate this or that faculty which we think that we possess or which we would like to possess, it hides it under some other which we did not expect and did not wish for. It saves us from a danger by imparting to our limbs unforeseen and unerring movements and actions which they had never made before and which are contrary to those which they had been taught to make: it knows that the hour has not yet come when it will be useless to defend ourselves. It chooses our love in spite of the revolt of our intelligence or of our poor, ephemeral heart. ”

“ In short, it cannot be denied that we are in the presence of faculties or senses, more or less latent but at the same time universally distributed, which form part of the general and unvarying inheritance of mankind. But have these faculties or senses undergone evolution, like most of the others? And, if they have not done so on our earth, do they show traces of an extraplanetary evolution? Is there progress or reaction? Are they withered and useless branches, or buds swollen with sap and promise? Are they retreating before the march of intelligence or invading its domain? ”

“ A steamship coming from another hemisphere, one in which men's minds had taken, unknown to ourselves, the road which our own has actually taken, would have seemed to us as wonderful, as incredible as the phenomena of our subconsciousness seem to us to-day. We should have gone very far in what at present we call the unknown or the occult; but we should have known hardly anything of physics, chemistry or mechanics, unless, which is very probable, we had come upon them by another road as we travelled round the occult. ”

“ We think that we are directing them and they enslave us. We become weary and breathless following them into their uninhabitable spaces. When we touch them, we let loose a force which we are no longer able to control. They do with us what they will and always end by hurling us, blinded and benumbed, into blank infinity or upon a wall of ice against which every effort of our mind and will is shattered.
It is possible, therefore, in the last resort, to explain the Elberfeld mystery by the no less obscure mystery that surrounds numbers. ”

“ His whole subliminal being is probably superior to one, of greater range, younger, fresher, more alive and less heavy, since it is not incessantly attacked, coerced and humiliated by the intelligence which gnaws at it, stifles it, cloaks it and relegates it to a dark corner which neither light nor air can penetrate. His subliminal consciousness is always present, always alert; ours is never there, is asleep at the bottom of a deserted well and needs exceptional operations, results and events before it can be drawn from its slumber and its unremembered deeps. ”

“ How can we picture to ourselves, for instance, a point in eternity at which our little procession already exists, while it is not yet and although it is no more? Add to this the thought that it is necessary and inevitable, from the millenaries which had no beginning, that, at a given moment, at a given place, the little procession should leave the little church in a given manner and that no known or imaginable will can change anything in it, in the future any more than in the past; and we begin to understand that there is no hope of understanding. ”

“ Our unknown guest does not deceive itself any more than it deceives us; but it is we who deceive ourselves. It has not the stage to itself; and its voice is not the voice that sounds in our ears, which were never made to catch the echoes of a world that is not like ours. If it could speak to us itself and tell us what it knows, we should probably at that instant cease to be on this earth. But we are immersed in our bodies, entombed prisoners with whom it cannot communicate at will. It roams around the walls, it utters warning cries. ”

“ It owes nothing to the latest acquirements of our knowledge. It springs from the humblest idea which the most primitive man might have conceived in the first days of the earth's existence. It is simply a matter of having a little more patience, confidence and respect for all that which shares our lot in a world whereof we know none of the purposes. It is simply a matter of having a little less pride and of looking a little more fraternally upon existences that are much more fraternal than we believed. There is no secret about the almost puerile ingenuousness of Von Osten's methods and Krall's. ”

“ We should then have to admit that them is in the horse—and hence most probably in everything that lives on this earth—a psychic power similar to that which is hidden beneath the veil of our reason and which, as we learn to know it, astonishes, surpasses and dominates our reason more and more. This psychic power, in which no doubt we shall one day be forced to recognize the genius of the universe itself, appears, as we have often observed, to be all-wise, all-seeing and all-powerful. ”

“ Let it be the medium or myself that discovers the unknown personality in the object or tracks it across time and space: all that we do is to widen the scope of our riddle, while leaving it no less obscure. Nevertheless, there is some interest in knowing whether we have to do with a general faculty latent in all men or an inexplicable privilege reserved to rare individuals. The exceptional should always be eliminated, if possible, and not left to hang over the abyss like an unfinished bridge leading to nothing. ”

“ In other words and speaking without metaphor, it is the medium who draws from his habitual language and from that suggested to him by his audience the wherewithal to clothe and identify the strange presentiments, the unfamiliar visions that come from some unknown region. If he believes that the dead survive, he will naturally imagine that it is the dead who speak to him. If he has a favourite spirit, angel, demon or god, he will express himself in its name; if he has no preconceived opinion, he will not even allude to the origin of the revelations which he is making. ”

“ Those who give these warnings must know that they will be useless, because they manifestly foresee the event as a whole; but they must also know that one last word, which they do not pronounce, would be enough to prevent the misfortune that is already consummated in their prevision. They know it so well that they bring this word to the very edge of the abyss, hold it suspended there, almost let it fall and recapture it suddenly at the moment when its weight would have caused happiness and life to rise once more, to the surface of the mighty gulf. ”

“ This brings us back once more to the omniscience and perhaps the omnipotence of our hidden guest, to the brink of the mysterious reservoir of every manner of knowledge which we shall meet with again when we come to speak of the future, of the talking horses, of the divining-rod, of materializations and miracles, in short, in every circumstance where we pass beyond the horizon of our little daily life. ”

“ Is this once more an unexpected character of the eccentric physiology of our unknown guest? Here are faculties more precious than the most precious faculties that have made us what we are, faculties whose magic buds sprout on every side underneath our intelligence but have never burst into flower, as though a wind from another sphere had killed them with its icy breath. Is it because it occupies itself first and foremost with the species that it thus neglects the individual? ”

“ Does our fate depend on the happy solution of some petty enigma or childish conundrum, even as our salvation, in most of the so-called revealed religious, is settled by a blind and stupid cast of the die? Is all the liberty that we are granted reduced to the reading of a more or less ingenious riddle? Can the great soul of the universe be the soul of a great baby? ”

“ It lives under our reason, in a sort of invisible and perhaps eternal palace, like a casual guest, dropped from another planet, whose interests, ideas, habits, passions have naught in common with ours. If it seems to have notions on the hereafter that are infinitely wider and more precise than those which we possess, it has only very vague notions on the practical needs of our existence. It ignores us for years, absorbed no doubt with the numberless relations which it maintains with all the mysteries of the universe ”

“ But it is well in spite of everything to seek an explanation of the inexplicable; it is by attacking it on every side, at all hazards, that we cherish the hope of overcoming it; and we may therefore say to ourselves that our subconsciousness, when it warns us of a calamity that is about to fall upon us, knowing all the future as it does, necessarily knows that the calamity is already accomplished. As our conscious and unconscious lives blend in it, it distresses itself and flutters around our overconfident ignorance. ”

“ One might in fact believe that a shudder which we have not yet experienced is passing over everything that breathes; that a new activity, a new restlessness is permeating the spiritual atmosphere which surrounds our globe; and that the very animals have felt its thrill. One might say that, by the side of the niggardly private spring which would only supply our intelligence, other streams are spreading and rising to the same level in every form of existence. ”