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It exalts material phenomena and the external order, issues in a glorification of elemental impulses, an attempted return to childlike spontaneous living, the identifying of man's values with those of primitive nature. The other is an emotional naturalism, of which Maeterlinck is at the moment a brilliant and lamentable example.
He avowed that he was envious of Maeterlinck on account of his poetic "Life of the Bee." "I ought to have written that," he said; "I know the bee well enough, but I could never do anything so exquisite." Parts of Maeterlinck's "Treasures of the Humble," and "Wisdom and Destiny," he "couldn't stand." I timorously mentioned his chapter on "Silence."
Stand for half an hour in the morning at any of the main termini of London's traffic-ways, and you will see them in their thousands. They little know the law they are obeying; they little realize the cause for which they are working, or the effect it will produce. In another book from this pen it has been declared that the words of Maeterlinck "the spirit of the hive" are an inspired phrase.
Each man's preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him. It was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee. I mean, in the psychical and in the poetical way. I had had a business introduction earlier. It was when I was a boy. It is strange that I should remember a formality like that so long; it must be nearly sixty years.
One short afternoon is enough for any two book-lovers, though they may have met for the first time in the morning, to make up their minds whether or not they have been born for each other. If you are agreed, say, in admiring Meredith, Hardy, Omar Khayyam, and Maeterlinck, to take four particularly test-authors, there is nothing to prevent your marrying at once.
We might, perhaps, sum up Hamlet's right course, from the hints Maeterlinck has given us, in a sentence. Had he relinquished all idea of revenge and forgiven his uncle and mother, he would have ennobled his soul, gained inward happiness, spread a gracious calm around and have so deeply influenced his wicked relations, that they would have become repentant and reformed.
Maeterlinck, like Shakespeare, was simply dallying with the idea of a squalid heroism so squalid, indeed, that neither he nor his predecessor had the courage to carry it through. Pray observe that the defect of these two themes is not merely that they are "unpleasant." It is that there is no possible way out of them which is not worse than unpleasant: humiliating, and distressing.
But Maeterlinck never refers to anything of this sort. He does not seem to realise what the effects of the vision must have been on a complicated character on "a great gentleman in whom the courtier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, were all united." Hamlet was not an example of the normal type of the irresolute man but the mandate laid upon his nature, it could not perform.
The popularity of such writers as Meredith and Hardy, Ibsen and Nietzsche, Maeterlinck and Walt Whitman, constitutes a writing on the wall the significance of which cannot be gainsaid. The vogue alone of Mr. Bernard Shaw, apostle to the Philistines, is a portent sufficiently conclusive. To regard Mr. Shaw either as a great dramatist or an original philosopher is, of course, absurd.
From the outset, Maeterlinck has been an amateur of death. In a little volume that bears Death's name, he utters his meditation upon death's nature and significance. Like other philosophers and all old wives, he also attempts our consolation. Mankind demands a consolation, for without it, perhaps, the species could hardly have survived their foreknowledge of the end.
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