74. Maurice Maeterlinck
A conference held on January 23, 1898 before the performance of "L'Intruse" (The Environs) at the Berlin Dramatic Society
People, who only know how to interpret what affects them in the usual, traditional way, felt nothing special when they first heard the language spoken by Maurice Maeterlinck seven years ago. They were unfamiliar with the world he was telling them about, and so his revelations from this world sounded strange to them. They attributed what came from a new way of feeling to a morbid, confused imagination.
But right from Maeterlinck's first appearance, there were a few fine connoisseurs in France and Germany who had a sense of the world from which the new prophet drew. These were the spirits with the beautiful ability to sense the great, even if they could not yet grasp it with complete clarity. They sensed that Maeterlinck was talking about things they had long had a dark longing to see. They did not know what they were longing for; they only knew that they were missing something. They did not realize what they were missing. And now, when Maeterlinck appeared, they realized that he was talking about what they were longing for. His words sounded familiar to them because they only had to ask their own souls about their meaning.
If these few enthusiasts had been asked at the time what words they would like to use to express Maeterlinck's essence, they would have fallen silent. A drunken enthusiasm had seized them, and they spoke of it in full-sounding words.
They, these drunken admirers, were the true Maeterlinck community. Because what he felt could not be communicated in words. Everything he wrote was there only to quietly hint at what lived in his soul. He could only give signs of what he felt; and through these signs he could not at first cause language to resonate, only people's minds.
Maeterlinck is not primarily an artist. The artistic means he uses are imperfect, almost childlike. Those who long for perfect art cannot derive any satisfaction from Maeterlinck's poetry. He has a religious nature. He believes that there are infinite depths to the human soul and that man can descend into these infinite depths. Then he finds within himself powers that enable him to embrace the great unknown, which all ages have worshipped as a divine.
Whoever awakens this soul force within himself, the most mundane things in life take on a mysterious, divine meaning.
As a poet, Maeterlinck only wants to express what he sees as a religious man; the beauty of external form is unimportant to him, he wants his poems to reveal the marvelous and sublime in the world, the great, unknown powers that are hidden in things.
The home of the soul is in the divine, and when it finds this home, it suddenly comes to life and lives the deepest life that makes man a true man. An unspeakable change happens to the soul that has found its home. Like a slumbering genius, the divine power rests in the soul, and whoever awakens the genius, all things respond to him in a divine language. The most insignificant phenomena suddenly shine in a new light; they announce the eternal.
Mankind is constantly striving to put the divine genius within itself to sleep. Maeterlinck believes that we are living in a time in which people are approaching a great awakening of their souls. People are already beginning to turn away from the infinite refinement of the senses and reason that the last few centuries have brought us.
This refinement has extinguished the divine light in the depths of the soul. Our eyes today - whether armed with microscope and telescope or not - see things that no one could have imagined centuries ago; our minds conceive of connections that only a short time ago everyone would have relegated to the realm of fables if a fantastic mind had spoken of them. An infinity penetrates us through our senses, through our reason.
But both the senses and reason deprive things of the splendor of the divine. To the clear-sighted, divinely sensitive soul, nature with all its things and phenomena is also divine. But the senses stand between the divinity of nature and the divinity of the soul. They show us the world in an undivine way. We ask of all things: where do they come from? - and let our senses, our intellect, give us the answer. Maeterlinck sees a time approaching in which souls will allow things to affect them without the mediation of the senses and the intellect. He believes that the realm of the soul will expand daily. The soul will rise again to the surface of humanity and will approach things directly. Man will live a more real, a fuller life again when he no longer clings to the undivine, but feels a divine in the smallest things, in the rustling of leaves, in the voice of birds, indeed in every sound and in the most insignificant word spoken by the simple, naive mind.
Souls will need neither words nor deeds to understand each other when they have freed themselves from the sole dominion of the senses and the intellect. Not the meaningful word, not the powerful deed will form a bond from person to person, but the unspeakable, the inaudible will pass from soul to soul. What must forever remain a secret to words will become manifest life. People will be closer to their brothers because no mediator will come between the souls, and they will be closer to nature because no cover will conceal its revealed secrets.
They will understand the babble of the child, the language of animals, plants and all things more deeply and more subtly when they have discovered the home of the soul.
A period of humanity Maeterlinck longs for, such as the ancient Egyptians went through at a certain time or the Indians.
He feels unsatisfied by times in which intelligence and external beauty prevail. At such times, he lacks something that man desires; secret connections are cut off. When Maeterlinck sits in our theaters today, he feels as if he has been transported among barbarians. There he sees the betrayed husband who kills out of jealousy, there he sees the citizen fighting for his honor, he sees all the crude things that irritate the senses and set the mind in motion, but he does not see the wonderful divine that flows towards us every moment from everyday things.
Jacob Boehme and other mystics come to mind when one hears Maeterlinck express his basic feelings.
Kill the senses and the inner power of the soul will open up to you: this is his most secret belief. Only people of his kind can understand that Jacob Boehme did not need God approaching with thunder and lightning to recognize the mystery of the world, but that this dawned on him at the sight of a pewter bowl. The great mystic saw the truly divine in the most mundane object, as it were, with his eyes closed.
The significant word spoken by the blind grandfather in the drama we will see today is drawn from deep within the religious essence of Maeterlinck's soul. The blind man will see because his senses do not prevent him from looking into the mysteries of nature: this is what the poet says. Where the others, sitting around the table with the blind grandfather, perceive a faint hint, a simple nightingale's song, the sound of scythes, the falling of leaves, the mysterious power of death is revealed to the one whose eyes are closed, creeping up to take his daughter. The blind man calls out to the sighted: "You are blind if you do not perceive the uninvited guest who is slowly entering our house. He, who no longer sees, and the child, whose senses have not yet opened up to the world: they perceive what those who see and those who understand do not recognize. At the moment when the mother dies, the child, whose birth has brought her death, cries out for the first time.
Those who want to understand Maeterlinck must be able to renounce the sobriety of the senses and the intellect for a short time. There is nothing to grasp here with reason. And the usual artistic judgment must be silenced. Everything rests on feeling the great unknown in nature and saying to oneself that a prophet wants to proclaim the divine here, not unfold the dramatic in the usual sense.
What Maeterlinck does not say, but only hints at, is what he actually wants to say.
He wants - according to his own admission - to awaken a completely different psychology than the ordinary one. In his opinion, this ordinary psychology has appropriated the beautiful name of the soul for endeavors that are only concerned with those phenomena of the soul that are closely related to matter. Maeterlinck wants to move people one degree higher. When we used to speak of all the mysterious things, of presentiments, of the treacherous impression that the first meeting of a person makes on us, of a decision made by an unknown, instinctive side of human nature, of inexplicable and yet existing sympathies and antipathies between people, these phenomena were easily passed by, only rarely did they arouse the interest of serious minds. One had no idea of the immeasurable force with which they weighed on life. One was only interested in the interplay of visible, pumping passions and external events.
Whoever seeks this familiar play of clumsy passions and external events that fall into the gross senses will remain unsatisfied with Maeterlinck.
Those to whom Maeterlinck is able to open the inner eye with which he himself sees will find in him the deeply religious personality who wants to proclaim to us in his own way the eternal powers in the world.