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Updated: May 6, 2025
But in treating the first two terrors to which he applies his comfortable arguments, Maeterlinck's reasoning appears to me almost irrelevant, almost obsolete. He attributes the terrified apprehension of death, first, to the fear of pain in dying, and, secondly, to the fear of anguish hereafter. In neither fear, I think, does the essential horror of death now lie.
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.
Maeterlinck's theatre of marionettes, who are at the same time children and spirits, at once more simple and more abstract than real people, is the reaction of the imagination against the wholly prose theatre of Ibsen, into which life comes nakedly, cruelly, subtly, but without distinction, without poetry.
Maeterlinck's doctrine of the soul and its power over Destiny is very captivating, but it is doubtful if he was fortunate in his choice of Hamlet as an example of ignorance and blindness, and of failure to conquer fate, through lack of soul-power. How Hamlet should have acted is not told us, but that it was his duty to have given up revenge is clearly suggested.
Saleeby and Haeckel indorsed and defended "The Shame of the Sun," for once finding themselves on the same side of a question. Crookes and Wallace ranged up on the opposing side, while Sir Oliver Lodge attempted to formulate a compromise that would jibe with his particular cosmic theories. Maeterlinck's followers rallied around the standard of mysticism.
They talk with that straightforward and simple kind of innocency which makes strange and impressive the dialogue of Maeterlinck's earlier plays. Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw the subject-matter of his art "with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting eyes and he preserved the innocence of good art in an age of reasons and purposes."
Maeterlinck's theory is sound, that this war is the visible reflection of a vast, invisible conflict, what a gigantic battle of the unseen forces of good and evil must have been raging throughout the universe when Europe rose on the morning of August 5, 1914! Think what had happened.
Maeterlinck's ideas are very beautiful, and he writes delightfully, but his test of wisdom is questionable, for Hamlet's thoughts have captured and invaded and influenced the best minds and experiences of thinkers for centuries, How many a Shakespearean reader has felt that Hamlet is one of the very wisest of men as well as one of the most lovable and attractive!
Colonel de Rochas appears to have paralleled this achievement in the West. Certain of his experiments have been admirably reported by Maurice Maeterlinck in the eighth chapter of Our Eternity. Maeterlinck's account, somewhat condensed, is given here, because it so well illustrates the liberation of consciousness from the tyranny of time as we conceive it.
However much one may hesitate to subscribe to Debussy's generalities, the final justification for his procedure is in the fact that it is ideally suited to its especial purpose, the tonal utterance of Maeterlinck's rhymeless, metreless, and broken phrases. To have set them in the sustained arioso style of Tristan und Isolde would have been as impossible as it would have been inept.
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