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Thus his evil Destiny would have been averted and we should have had no tragedy of Hamlet. This explanation sounds rather conventional and tract-like put into ordinary language, but, indeed, Maeterlinck's doctrine might be compressed into a syllogism: All the wise are serene, Hamlet was not serene, Hamlet was not wise. That is the simple syllogism by which Maeterlinck tests human nature.
It may be that my affection for the "narrow ego" is too violent, but, for myself, I do not find M. Maeterlinck's consolations more genuinely consoling than other philosophy. On the second and far more poignant terror that still survives in the very nature of death, he hardly touches. I mean the severance of love, the disappearance of the beloved.
Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion of the intelligence of the bee; he thought the dog, the monkey, and the majority of other animals possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed, of free intelligence the bee possesses very little. The slave of an overmastering instinct, as our new nature poet, McCarthy, says, She makes of labor an eternal lust.
Therefore the family was relieved when the vicar's daughter undertook the reformation of Reginald. Her name was Amabel; it was the vicar's one extravagance. Amabel was accounted a beauty and intellectually gifted; she never played tennis, and was reputed to have read Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee.
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."
From the castle of Tancarville to the abbey of Jumièges you can read the story of their doings; or when you stand in the Roman circus at Lillebonne, or enter the ancient cloister of M. Maeterlinck's modern residence at St. Wandrille, see plainly enough the writing of a still older legend, such as appeared, once, on the wall of a palace in Babylon.
A woman who is a bee-keeper writes as follows of how a woman may acquire skill in this country employment. "A good beginning for the woman who is to keep bees is to read Maeterlinck's 'Life of the Bee. If after reading such a book the girl or woman who thinks she would like to be a bee farmer is still further interested in bees, then she may decide to go into bee culture.
Isabeau, having finished her work, had departed with Teddy to see a friend in West One Hundredth Street; John had sent Martie Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," and a fat, inviting brown book, "All the Days of My Life." She had planned to go to the hospital next week, Wallace coming home on Sunday to act as escort, and she determined to keep the larger book for the stupid days of convalescence.
The result would have been as inconceivable before Maeterlinck undertook the writing of drama as, to-day, it is inimitable and untouched. Maeterlinck's play, as adapted by Debussy for musical setting, becomes a "lyric drama in five acts and twelve tableaux."
Maeterlinck says somewhere in substance that our universe is as tightly sealed as a sphere of steel and that whatever happens inside must be explained in terms of its own resident forces, and, in general, the whole of science and the weight of experience are on Maeterlinck's side. Of course this assumes that a good many things have been put inside this sphere to begin with.
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