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Updated: May 6, 2025
He understood now Maeterlinck's expression, to sink to the very eyelids in sorrow. When that Intruder, who is ever mowing grass beneath life's windows, came for that little girl, Maryan had the question in mind continually: "Why do the lamps go out?" Now, like Hjalmar in "Princess Malenia," he feels every moment like exclaiming: Someone is weeping here near us!
If there be any reader who is unacquainted with M. Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," let him or her study that instructive book. Let him ask why the queen is the End of the hive, why all is for her.
In Maeterlinck's earlier plays, in "Les Aveugles," "Intérieur," and even "Pelléas et Mélisande," he is dramatic after a new, experimental fashion of his own; "Monna Vanna" is dramatic in the obvious sense of the word. The action moves, and moves always in an interesting, even in a telling, way. But at the same time I cannot but feel that something has been lost.
And there were many parts of the immortal essay from which the man gleaned no more sense than did the collie. It began with a promising account of a puppy named Pelleas. But midway it branched off into something else. Something Link could not make head nor tail of. Then, on second reading, bits of Maeterlinck's meaning, here and there, seeped into Ferris's bewilderedly groping intellect.
Among innumerable sketches and stories with canine heroes may be mentioned Bret Harte's extraordinary portrait of Boonder: M. Maeterlinck's essay on dogs: Richard Harding Davis's The Bar Sinister: Jack London's The Call of the Wild: and best of all, Alfred Ollivant's splendid story Bob, Son of Battle which has every indication of becoming an English classic. It is a pity that dogs cannot read.
And even so, it will have been better for that man if he had never been born. He will have done his best to destroy or to deface the loveliness of a figure unique in literature. And he will have ignored the one perfect, the one essentially true picture of Emily Brontë, which is to be found in Maurice Maeterlinck's Wisdom and Destiny.
I feel sure he copied Maeterlinck's simplicity of style because it served to disguise his imperfect knowledge of French and yet this very artlessness adds to the weird effect of the drama. The lust that inspires the tragedy was characteristic, but the cruelty was foreign to Oscar; both qualities would have injured him in England, had it not been for two things.
In such a play as Maeterlinck's "Aglavaine and Selysette" there is no movement, and even the conflict is subterranean; yet, as all the characters are in their way noble, and in their way justified, we find it among the most poignant of his plays.
But to the greater part of thinking mankind, Maeterlinck's reassurances upon the subject, even if they could be established, would appear a little out-of-date, and I do not believe that, even where they linger, such terrors form the basis of the fear of death.
We cannot reason about Maeterlinck's thought that if expressed "would have arrested all the forces of murder" because we do not know what the thought was, nor can any one gauge or estimate rightly the power of Hamlet's soul to conquer external events, without taking into careful account that the Vision from another world came to Hamlet, when he was outraged at the re-marriage of his mother and full of emotion that the sudden death of his father called forth in his meditative mind.
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