Gleanings from Maeterlinck

In the first act of The Blue Bird, the fairy Bérylune sends Mytyl and Tyltyl in search of happiness. Shepherded and protected by Light, they explore the Past and the Future, the Palace of Night, the Kingdoms of the Dead and of the Unborn. At one moment they find themselves in a graveyard; and Mytyl grows fearful at her first contact with the great mystery of Death. Yet the graveyard with its wooden crosses and grass-covered mounds is moonlit and tranquil; and of a sudden, as the revealing diamond is turned in Tyltyl’s fingers, even the tombstones and ‘all the grand investiture of death’ disappear, to be replaced by luxuriant, swaying clusters of Madonna lilies.

“Where are the dead?” asks Mytyl, in amazement, searching in the grass for traces of even one tombstone.

Her brother also looks:

“There are no dead,” is his reply.

Any one who was present on the first night of the play at the Haymarket Theatre, in 1909, will not easily forget the audience’s little gasp of delighted surprise. Yet the two lines of dialogue were more than a stage effect, more than an aspect of mysticism; almost they may be regarded as the essence of Maeterlinck’s later work. Since the Life of the Bee, since the earlier essays and such pure drama as Monna Vanna, The Blind and Pelléas and Mélisande, his mind seems to have been brooding more and more on the part which Death, the great twin mystery of the world, plays in the life of man and of the race. In The Death of Tintagiles there is a barred and studded door, through which, for all its studs and bars, there steals a miasma of dread. And, when the door opens, it is to release a spirit of annihilation which the concerted efforts of Tintagiles’ sisters can neither restrain nor force back.

In The Blue Bird we are shown that a man cannot die so long as he dwells in the memory of those who loved him. In his latest work Maeterlinck gives to the dead an objective existence. In part each generation survives its own death and transmits to its successors the heritage of aspiration and achievement, of knowledge and passion, which it has received from its predecessors; in greater part the objective existence is founded on new modes of communication, a new study of psychic relationship and a new belief in a subliminal state.

I have collected in the present volume a selection of essays illustrating the later stages of Maeterlinck’s quest. Never in history have so many women and men, stricken suddenly and without warning, sought so unanimously and painfully to penetrate the veil wherein the world’s oldest mystery is shrouded. The finality of death was a challenge flung down and eagerly taken up by all whom the loss of son or brother had taken unawares. To Maeterlinck the war has brought in great part the annihilation of a people, his own people; it has inspired him to a splendour of indignation and pity; but, more gravely and urgently than ever before, it has demanded of him an answer to the question of the Sadducees, who “say there is no resurrection.”

Readers wishing to study the complete series of essays from which the sixteen in this volume are taken will find them in the three books entitled, Our Eternity, The Unknown Guest and The Wrack of the Storm, all of which are issued by the present publishers.

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

CHELSEA, 9 April 1917

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION vii

I. OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 13

II. ANNIHILATION 31

III. COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD 37

IV. OUR ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS 63

V. THE TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY 75

VI. OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES 89

VII. CONCLUSIONS 105

VIII. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 115

IX. HEROISM 181

X. ON RE-READING THUCYDIDES 193

XI. THE DEAD DO NOT DIE 205

XII. IN MEMORIAM 213

XIII. THE LIFE OF THE DEAD 217

XIV. THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS 225

XV. THE WILL OF EARTH 237

XVI. WHEN THE WAR IS OVER 247

I

OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH

1

It has been well said:

“Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some vague future or survival, where we shall not be. It is our own end; and everything happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me—to me who am to die outright—of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death!”[1]