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Maeterlinck, "I can assure him that, although 'barbarous Germans, we shall never be so cowardly as to massacre or martyr the Belgian women and children."
Then you wrote Culled Cowslips and Faded Fig-Leaves and you imitate Maeterlinck, and you Oh, I know lots of people that you know; she cried, with every symptom of relief; 'and you know my brother.
Madame Waddington wore a gray linen gown, with a red cross, and was working away very merrily, distributing materials to the women. She told me that her son had joined the colors as a sergeant in an infantry reservist regiment and was at the front. M. Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian writer and philosopher, is living at his quaint Abbaye de Sainte-Wandrille, on the Seine near Caudebec.
And it was through his "simple, tender, good," thoughts of, and love for his father that he kept to his task, and could not "withstand his complicated destiny." Maeterlinck is surely wrong, too, in saying Hamlet was moved by a fanatical impulse to revenge for he spent his life in weighing pros, and cons, and in combating the idea that he must fulfil the duty laid upon him.
In the end beauty revenged itself upon him by bringing him to a no-man's land where there were clouds and phantasms that he could no longer direct. Maeterlinck began by a marvellous instinct, with plays "for marionettes," and, having discovered a forgotten secret, grew tired of limiting himself within its narrow circle, and came outside his magic.
When the husband, with his ear at the telephone, hears his wife tell him that some one is forcing the window-shutters with a crowbar, we feel, it is true, a certain sympathetic suspense; but compare this crude onslaught on the nerves with the profound and delicious terror that we experience when, in "La Mort de Tintagiles" of Maeterlinck, an invisible force pushes the door softly open, a force intangible and irresistible as death.
"If OEdipus had had the inner refuge of a Marcus Aurelius, what could Destiny have done to him?" asks Maeterlinck. Fate we suppose would have had no power over him, if he had calmly reasoned over the terrible circumstances in which he found himself involved, and if he preserved his equanimity to the end, as M. Aurelius would have done.
The fortunes of the opera have not been altogether happy. There was much correspondence between composer and dramatist before Maeterlinck finally heard the music of Debussy at a rehearsal at the Opéra-Comique: so, at least, runs the legend. Just when or precisely how the famous and probably inevitable rupture occurred between them, tradition does not make altogether clear.
Maeterlinck consciously deprives nature of her passive rôle of a soulless accessory, he animates her, orders her to collaborate actively in the action of the drama, to speak mysteriously beside man and to man, to forecast future incidents and catastrophes, in a word, to participate in all the actions of that fragment of human life which is called a drama." This "rhythmic correspondence," as Mr.
Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling: John Eglinton, my jo, John, Why won't you wed a wife? He spluttered to the air: O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers' hall. Our players are creating a new art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey Theatre! I smell the pubic sweat of monks.
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