Jethro Bithell - Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck

"Then he would fain descend into this unknown world, seek through the dark deeps, dive for the treasures which slumber there perhaps… But it remains a longing, a wish, a dream:

"And so Rodenbach remains standing on the surface, staring at the deeps, but without seeing anything in them other than the trembling reflection of the things around him." 29 29 G. van Hamel, Het Letterkundige Leven van Frankrijk , pp. 127-8.

Maeterlinck, as we shall see, is also the poet of the soul; he sees it under a bell-jar as Rodenbach saw it in an aquarium; but Maeterlinck does not stand gazing at the unknown waters: he dives into the deeps, and brings back the treasures which Rodenbach surmised.

In 1889 Maeterlinck published his first book: Serres Chaudes (Hot-houses). We have seen that several of the poems which compose it had already appeared in La Pléiade and in Le Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique .

The subject of this collection of verse, as, indeed, of the dramas and the essays which were to follow, is the soul . Rodenbach, we remember, saw the soul prisoned in an aquarium, "at the bottom of the ponds of dream," reflected in the glass of mirrors; Maeterlinck sees it languid, and moist, and oppressed, and helplessly inactive 30 30 Cf. Rodenbach, Le Règne du Silence , p. 1: "Mais les choses pourtant entre le cadre d'or Ont un air de souffrir de leur vie inactive; Le miroir qui les aime a borné leur essor En un recul de vie exigüe et captive…" in a hot-house whose doors are closed for ever. The tropical atmosphere is created by pictures (seen through the deep green windows of the hot-house) as of lions drowned in sunshine, or of mighty forests lying with not a leaf stirring over the roses of passion by night. But of a sudden (for it is all a dream) we may find ourselves in the reek of the "strange exhalations" of fever-patients in some dark hospital glooming a clogged canal in Ghent… Evidently not a book for the normal Philistine. In Ghent it made people look askance at Maeterlinck. It branded him as a decadent.

And that was a dreadful thing in Belgium. Nay, in that country, at that time, and for long after, even to be a poet was a disgrace. It is only by remembering this fact that one can understand the brutality of the fight waged by the reviews, and by the poets in their books; and it is perhaps owing to the hostility of the public that such a great mass of good poetry was written. Year after year Charles van Lerberghe renewed his futile application to the Government for a poor post as secondary teacher, and on account of his first writings 31 31 Gérard Harry, p. 19. Le Masque , Série ii, No. 5: "jeune encore, il avait sollicité les fonctions de juge de paix, mais le gouvernement belge, prévoyant son destin de poète, les lui avait généreusement refusées, et pour reconnaître ce service, Maeterlinck ne lui rend que mépris et dédain et refuse même les distinctions honorifiques les plus hautes, celles qu'on n'accorde généralement qu'aux très grands industriels ou aux très vieux militaires ou politiciens." Maeterlinck was refused some modest public office for which he applied.

The contempt of the Belgians for young poets may be condoned to a certain extent when one appreciates the absurdities in which some of them indulged. It was not the gaminerie of such poets as Théodore Hannon and Max Waller which shocked the honest burghers; they were rather horrified at the absurdities of the new style. Rodenbach, who was a real poet, wrote crazy things; as, for instance, when he compared a muslin curtain to a communicant partaking of the moon. 32 32 "Chambres pleines de songe! Elles vivent vraiment En des rêves plus beaux que la vie ambiante, Grandissant toute chose au Symbole, voyant Dans chaque rideau pâle une Communiante Aux falbalas de mousseline s'éployant Qui communie au bord des vitres, de la Lune!" – Le Règne du Silence , p. 4. Even when the absurdity is an application of the theories of the symbolists it is often apt to raise a laugh, e.g., when Théodore Hannon, extending the doctrine that perfumes sing, makes a perfume blare:

A goodly list of absurdities could be collected from Serres Chaudes also, if the collector detached odd passages from their context:

And a scientist of Lombroso's type could easily, by culling choice quotations, draw an appalling picture of a degenerate:

So incoherent and strange have these poems 33 33 They make one think of what Novalis wrote: "poems unconnected, yet with associations, like dreams; poems, melodious merely and full of beautiful words, but absolutely without sense or connection – at most individual sentences intelligible – nothing but fragments, so to speak, of the most varied things." appeared to some people who are ardent Maeterlinckians that they assume he may, for a period, have been mentally ill. 34 34 See Schlaf's Maeterlinck , p. 12; ibid. , p. 30; and Monty Jacobs' Maeterlinck , p. 39. But Maeterlinck's brain was always as healthy as his body. At the time he wrote Serres Chaudes disease was fashionable, that is all; and, beside the main influence of Baudelaire, there was the fear of death instilled by the Jesuits. If he had been, it would have been historically significant. Verhaeren went through such a period of mental illness. It might be asserted that the modern man must be mad. The life of to-day, especially in cities, with its whipped hurry, its dust and noises, is too complex to be lived with the nerves of a Victorian. But the human organism is capable of infinite assimilation; and the period we live in is busy creating a new type of man. 35 35 Verhaeren, in his monograph on Rembrandt (1905), has suggested that the man of genius may, "in specially favourable conditions, create a new race, thanks to the happy deformation of his brain fixing itself first, by a propitious crossing, in his direct descendants, to be transmitted afterwards to a whole posterity." It is the glory of Verhaeren to have sung the advent of this new man; it is the glory of Maeterlinck, as we shall see, to have proved that a species forcibly adjusts itself to existing conditions.

To a Victorian the poems in Serres Chaudes must of necessity seem diseased; just as the greater part of Tennyson's poetry must of necessity seem ordinary to us. How many "Dickhäuter" have called Hoffmansthal's poetry diseased? If it is, so is Yeats's. Turn from Robert Bridges's poems of outdoor life – the noble old English style – to Yeats's dim visions, or to Arthur Symons's harpsichord dreaming through the room, and you have the difference between yesterday and to-day.

At all events Serres Chaudes , whether mad or not, is bathed in the same atmosphere as the dramas soon to follow. As to the relative value of the book from the point of view of art, opinion differs. Some good critics who are not prone to praise think highly of it; but the general impression seems to be that these poems are chiefly of interest as marking a stage in the author's development. If Maeterlinck had written nothing more he would have been quite forgotten, or only remembered because, for instance, Charles van Lerberghe wrote some poetry in the form of a criticism of the book. Compared with other Belgian lyric verse, Verhaeren's, or Charles van Lerberghe's, or Max Elskamp's, it is inferior work. Not that there are no good poems; some of them, indeed, are excellent, and not seldom the poet is on the track of something fine: