Prophets of Dissent Part 1

Prophets of Dissent.

by Otto h.e.l.ler.

Preface

The collocation of authors so widely at variance in their moral and artistic aims as are those a.s.sembled in this little book may be defended by the safe and simple argument that all of these authors have exerted, each in his own way, an influence of singular range and potency. By fairly general consent they are the foremost literary expositors of important modern tendencies. It is, therefore, of no consequence whether or not their ways of thinking fit into our particular frame of mind; what really matters is that in this small group of writers more clearly perhaps than in any other similarly restricted group the basic issues of the modern struggle for social transformation appear to be clearly and sharply joined. That in viewing them as indicators of contrarious ideal currents due allowance must be made for peculiarities of temperament, both individual and racial, and, correspondingly, for the purely "personal equation" in their spiritual att.i.tudes, does not detract to any material degree from their generic significance.

In any case, there are those of us who in the vortical change of the social order through which we are whirling, feel a desire to orient ourselves through an objective interest in letters among the embattled purposes and policies which are now gripped in a final test of strength.

In a crisis that makes the very foundations of civilization quake, and at a moment when the salvation of human liberty seems to depend upon the success of a united stand of all the modern forces of life against the destructive impact of the most primitive and savage of all the instincts, would it not be absurdly pedantic for a critical student of literature to resort to any artificial selection and co-ordination of his material in order to please the prudes and the pedagogues? And is it not natural to seek that material among the largest literary apparitions of the age?

It is my opinion, then, that the four great authors discussed in the following pages stand, respectively, for the determining strains in a great upsetting movement, and that in the aggregate they bring to view the composite mental and moral impulsion of the times. Through such forceful articulations of current movements the more percipient cla.s.s of readers have for a long time been enabled to foresense, in a manner, the colossal reconstruction of society which needs must follow this monstrous, but presumably final, clash between the irreconcilable elements in the contrasted principles of right and might, the ma.s.ses and the monarchs.

However, the gathering together of Maeterlinck, Nietzsche, Strindberg, and Tolstoy under the hospitality of a common book-cover permits of a supplementary explanation on the ground of a certain fundamental likeness far stronger than their only too obvious diversities. They are, one and all, radicals in thought, and, with differing strength of intention, reformers of society, inasmuch as their speculations and aspirations are relevant to practical problems of living. And yet what gives them such a durable hold on our attention is not their particular apostolate, but the fact that their artistic impulses ascend from the subliminal regions of the inner life, and that their work somehow brings one into touch with the hidden springs of human action and human fate.

This means, in effect, that all of them are mystics by original cast of mind and that notwithstanding any difference, however apparently violent, of views and theories, they follow the same introspective path towards the recognition and interpretation of the law of life. From widely separated ethical premises they thus arrive at an essentially uniform appraisal of personal happiness as a function of living.

To those readers who are not disposed to grant the validity of the explanations I have offered, perhaps equality of rank in artistic importance may seem a sufficient criterion for the a.s.sociation of authors, and, apart from all sociologic and philosophic considerations, they may be willing to accept my somewhat arbitrary selection on this single count.

O. H.

April, 1918.

I

THE MYSTICISM OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Under the terrific atmospheric pressure that has been torturing the civilization of the entire world since the outbreak of the greatest of wars, contemporary literature of the major cast appears to have gone into decline. Even the comparatively few writers recognized as possessing talents of the first magnitude have given way to that pressure and have shrunk to minor size, so that it may be seriously questioned, to say the least, whether during the past forty months or so a single literary work of outstanding and sustained grandeur has been achieved anywhere. That the effect of the universal embattlement upon the art of letters should be, in the main, extremely depressing, is quite natural; but the conspicuous loss of breadth and poise in writers of the first order seems less in accordance with necessity,--at least one might expect a very superior author to rise above that necessity. In any case it is very surprising that it should be a Belgian whose literary personality is almost unique in having remained exempt from the general abridgment of spiritual stature.

It is true that Maurice Maeterlinck, the most eminent literary figure in his sadly stricken country and of unsurpa.s.sed standing among the contemporary masters of French letters, has, since the great catastrophe, won no new laurels as a dramatist; and that in the other field cultivated by him, that of the essay, his productiveness has been anything but prolific. But in his case one is inclined to interpret reticence as an eloquent proof of a singularly heroic firmness of character at a time when on both sides of the great divide which now separates the peoples, the cosmopolitan trend of human advance has come to a temporary halt, and the nations have relapsed from their laboriously attained degree of world-citizens.h.i.+p into the homelier, but more immediately virtuous, state of traditional patriotism.

It is a military necessity as well as a birthright of human nature that at a time like the present the patriot is excused from any pharisaical profession of loving his enemy. Before the war, Maeterlinck's writings were animated by humanitarian sympathies of the broadest catholicity. He even had a peculiar affection for the Germans, because doubtless he perceived the existence of a strong kins.h.i.+p between certain essential traits in his spiritual composition and the fundamental tendencies of German philosophy and art. But when Belgium was lawlessly invaded, her ancient towns heinously destroyed, her soil laid waste and drenched with the blood of her people, Maeterlinck, as a son of Belgium, learned to hate the Germans to the utmost of a wise and temperate man's capacity for hatred, and in his war papers collected in _Les Debris de la Guerre_, (1916),(1) which ring with the pa.s.sionate impulse of the patriot, his outraged sense of justice prevails over the disciplined self-command of the stoic.

(1) "The Wrack of the Storm," 1916.

He refuses to acquiesce in the lenient discrimination between the guilty Government of Germany and her innocent population: "It is not true that in this gigantic crime there are innocent and guilty, or degrees of guilt. They stand on one level, all those who have taken part in it....

It is, very simply, the German, from one end of his country to the other, who stands revealed as a beast of prey which the firm will of our planet finally repudiates. We have here no wretched slaves dragged along by a tyrant king who alone is responsible. Nations have the government which they deserve, or rather, the government which they have is truly no more than the magnified and public projection of the private morality and mentality of the nation.... No nation can be deceived that does not wish to be deceived; and it is not intelligence that Germany lacks....

No nation permits herself to be coerced to the one crime that man cannot pardon. It is of her own accord that she hastens towards it; her chief has no need to persuade, it is she who urges him on."(2)

(2) "The Wrack of the Storm," pp. 16-18.

Such a condemnatory tirade against the despoilers of his fair homeland was normally to be expected from a man of Maeterlinck's depth of feeling. The unexpected thing that happened not long after was that the impulsive promptings of justice and patriotism put themselves into harmony with the guiding principles of his entire moral evolution. The integrity of his philosophy of life, the sterling honesty of his teachings, were thus loyally sealed with the very blood of his heart.--"Before closing this book," he says in the Epilogue,(3) "I wish to weigh for the last time in my conscience the words of hatred and malediction which it has made me speak in spite of myself." And then, true prophet that he is, he speaks forth as a voice from the future, admonis.h.i.+ng men to prepare for the time when the war is over. What saner advice could at this critical time be given the stay-at-homes than that they should follow the example of the men who return from the trenches?

"They detest the enemy," says he, "but they do not hate the man. They recognize in him a brother in misfortune who, like themselves, is submitting to duties and laws which, like themselves, he too believes lofty and necessary." On the other hand, too, not many have sensed as deeply as has Maeterlinck the grandeur to which humanity has risen through the immeasurable pathos of the war. "Setting aside the unpardonable aggression and the inexpiable violation of the treaties, this war, despite its insanity, has come near to being a b.l.o.o.d.y but magnificent proof of greatness, heroism, and the spirit of sacrifice."

And from his profound anguish over the fate of his beloved Belgium this consolation is wrung: "If it be true, as I believe, that humanity is worth just as much as the sum total of latent heroism which it contains, then we may declare that humanity was never stronger nor more exemplary than now and that it is at this moment reaching one of its highest points and capable of braving everything and hoping everything. And it is for this reason that, despite our present sadness, we are ent.i.tled to congratulate ourselves and to rejoice." Altogether, Maeterlinck's thoughts and actions throughout this yet unfinished mighty fate-drama of history challenge the highest respect for the clarity of his intellect and the profoundness of his humanity.

(3) In the English translation this is the chapter preceding the last one and is headed "When the War Is Over," p. 293 ff.; it is separately published in _The Forum_ for July, 1916.

The appalling disaster that has befallen the Belgian people is sure to stamp their national character with indelible marks; so that it is safe to predict that never again will the type of civilization which before the war reigned in the basins of the Meuse and the Scheldt reestablish itself in its full peculiarity and distinctiveness which was the result of a unique coagency of Germanic and Romanic ingredients of culture. Yet in the amalgam of the two heterogeneous elements a certain compet.i.tive ant.i.thesis had survived, and manifested itself, in the individual as in the national life at large, in a number of unreconciled temperamental contrasts, and in the fundamental unlikeness exhibited in the material and the spiritual activities. Witness the contrast between the bustling aggressiveness in the province of practical affairs and the metaphysical drift of modern Flemish art. To any one familiar with the visible materialism of the population in its external mode of living it may have seemed strange to notice how sedulously a numerous set among the younger artists of the land were facing away from their concrete environment, as though to their over-sensitive nervous system it were irremediably offensive. The vigorous solidity of Constantin Meunier, the great plastic interpreter of the "Black Country" of Belgium, found but few wholehearted imitators among the sculptors, while among the painters that robust terrestrialism of which the work of a Rubens or Teniers and their countless disciples was the artistic upshot, was almost totally relinquished, and linear firmness and colorful vitality yielded the day to pallid, discarnately decorative artistry even, in a measure, in the "applied art" products of a Henri van de Velde.

It is in the field of literature, naturally enough, that the contrast is resolved and integrated into a characteristic unity. Very recently Professor A. J. Carnoy has definitely pointed out(4) the striking commixture of the realistic and imaginative elements in the work of the Flemish symbolists. "The vision of the Flemings"--quoting from his own _precis_ of his paper--"is very concrete, very exact in all details and gives a durable, real, and almost corporeal presence to the creations of the imagination. All these traits are exhibited in the reveries of the Flemish mystics, ancient and modern. One finds them also no less plainly in the poetic work of Belgian writers of the last generation: Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Van Lerberghe, Le Roy, Elskamp, etc."

(4) In a paper read by t.i.tle before the Modern Language a.s.sociation of America at Yale University, December 29, 1917.

If we take into account this composite att.i.tude of the Flemish mind we shall be less surprised at the remarkable evolution of a poet-philosopher whose creations seem at first blush to bear no resemblance to the outward complexion of his own age; who seems as far removed temperamentally from his locality and time as were his lineal spiritual ancestors: the Dutchman Ruysbroeck, the Scandinavian Swedenborg, the German Novalis, and the American Emerson--and who in the zenith of his career stands forth as an ardent advocate of practical action while at the same time a firm believer in the transcendental.

Maeterlinck's romantic antipathy towards the main drift of the age was a phenomenon which at the dawn of our century could be observed in a great number of superior intelligences. Those fugitives from the dun and sordid materialism of the day were likely to choose between two avenues of escape, according to their greater or lesser inner ruggedness. The more aggressive type would engage in multiform warfare for the reconstruction of life on sounder principles; whereas the more meditative professed a real or affected indifference to practical things and eschewed any partic.i.p.ation in the world's struggle for progress. And of the quiescent rather than the insurgent variety of the romantic temper Maurice Maeterlinck was the foremost exponent.

The "romantic longing" seems to have come into the world in the company of the Christian religion with which it shares its partly outspoken, partly implied repugnance for the battle of life. Romantic periods occur in the history of civilization whenever a sufficiently influential set of artistically minded persons have persuaded themselves that, in quite a literal sense of the colloquial phrase, they "have no use" for the world; a discovery which would still be true were it stated obversely.

The romantic world-view, thus fundamentally oriented by world-contempt, entails, at least in theory, the repudiation of all earthly joys--notably the joy of working--and the renouncement of all worldly ambition; it scorns the cooperative, social disposition, invites the soul to a progressive withdrawal into the inner ego, and ends in complete surrender to one sole aspiration: the search of the higher vision, the vision, that is, of things beyond their tangible reality. To such mystical constructions of the inner eye a certain group of German writers who flourished in the beginning of the nineteenth century and were known as the Romantics, darkly groped their way out of the confining realities of their own time. The most modern spell of romanticism, the one through which our own generation was but yesterday pa.s.sing, measures its difference from any previous romantic era by the difference between earlier states of culture and our own. Life with us is conspicuously more a.s.sertive and aggressive in its social than in its individual expressions, which was by no means always so, and unless the romantic predisposition adapted itself to this important change it could not relate itself at all intimately to our interests. Our study of Maeterlinck should help us, therefore, to discover possibly in the new romantic tendency some practical and vital bearings.

We find that in the new romanticism esthetic and philosophical impulses are inextricably mixed. Hence the new movement is also playing an indispensable role in the modern re-foundation of art. For while acting as a wholesome offset to the so-called naturalism, in its firm refusal to limit inner life to the superficial realities, it at the same time combines with naturalism into a complete recoiling, both of the intellect and the emotions, from any commonplace, or pusillanimous, or mechanical practices of artistry. This latter-day romanticism, moreover, notwithstanding its sky-aspiring outstretch, is akin to naturalism in that, after all, it keeps its roots firmly grounded in the earth; that is to say, it seeks for its ulterior sanctions not in realms high beyond the self; rather it looks within for the "blue flower" of contentedness.

Already to the romantics of old the mystic road to happiness was not unknown. It is, for instance, pointed by Novalis: "Inward leads the mysterious way. Within us or nowhere lies eternity with its worlds; within us or nowhere are the past and the future." Viewed separately from other elements of romanticism, this pa.s.sion for retreating within the central ego is commonly referred to as mysticism; it has a strong hold on many among the moderns, and Maurice Maeterlinck to be properly understood has to be understood as the poet _par excellence_ of modern mysticism. By virtue of this special office he deals mainly in concepts of the transcendental, which puzzles the ordinary person accustomed to perceive only material and ephemeral realities. Maeterlinck holds that nothing matters that is not eternal and that what keeps us from enjoying the treasures of the universe is the hereditary resignation with which we tarry in the gloomy prison of our senses. "In reality, we live only from soul to soul, and we are G.o.ds who do not know each other."(5) It follows from this metaphysical foundation of his art that instead of the grosser terminology suitable to plain realities, Maeterlinck must depend upon a code of subtle messages in order to establish between himself and his audience a line of spiritual communication. This makes it somewhat difficult for people of cruder endowment to appreciate his meaning, a grievance from which in the beginning many of them sought redress in facile scoffing. Obtuse minds are p.r.o.ne to claim a right to fathom the profound meanings of genius with the same ease with which they expect to catch the meaning of a bill of fare or the daily stock market report.

(5) Maeterlinck, "On Emerson."

It must be confessed, however, that even those to whom Maeterlinck's sphere of thought is not so utterly sealed, enter it with a sense of mixed perplexity and apprehension. They feel themselves helplessly conducted through a world situated beyond the confines of their normal consciousness, and in this strange world everything that comes to pa.s.s appears at first extremely impracticable and unreal. The action seems "wholly dissevered from common sense and ordinary uses;" the figures behave otherwise than humans; the dialogue is "poised on the edge of a precipice of bathos." It is clear that works so far out of the common have to be approached from the poet's own point of view. "Let the reader move his standpoint one inch nearer the popular standpoint," thus we are warned by Mr. G. K. Chesterton, "and his att.i.tude towards the poet will be harsh, hostile, unconquerable mirth." There are some works that can be appreciated for their good story, even if we fail to realize the author's moral att.i.tude, let alone to grasp the deeper content of his work. "But if we take a play by Maeterlinck we shall find that unless we grasp the particular fairy thread of thought the poet rather lazily flings to us, we cannot grasp anything whatever. Except from one extreme poetic point of view, the thing is not a play; it is not a bad play, it is a ma.s.s of clotted nonsense. One whole act describes the lovers going to look for a ring in a distant cave when they both know they have dropped it down the well. Seen from some secret window on some special side of the soul's turret, this might convey a sense of faerie futility in our human life. But it is quite obvious that unless it called forth that one kind of sympathy, it would call forth nothing but laughter. In the same play, the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword, the wife remarking at intervals, 'I am not gay.' Now there may really be an idea in this; the idea of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon the opportunism of innocence; that the lonely human heart says, like a child at a party, 'I am not enjoying myself as I thought I should.' But it is plain that unless one thinks of this idea, and of this idea only, the expression is not in the least unsuccessful pathos,--it is very broad and highly successful farce!"

And so the atmosphere of Maeterlinck's plays is impregnated throughout with oppressive mysteries, and until the key of these mysteries is found there is very little meaning to the plays. Moreover, these mysteries, be they never so stern and awe-inspiring, are irresistibly alluring. The reason is, they are our own mysteries that have somehow escaped our grasp, and that we fain would recapture, because there dwells in every human breast a vague a.s.sent to the immortal truth of Goethe's a.s.sertion: "The thrill of awe is man's best heritage."(6)

(6) "_Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil._"

The imaginative equipment of Maeterlinck's dramaturgy is rather limited and, on its face value, trite. In particular are his dramatis personae creatures by no means calculated to overawe by some extraordinary weirdness or power. And yet we feel ourselves touched by an elemental dread and by an overwhelming sense of our human impotence in the presence of these figures who, without seeming supernatural, are certainly not of common flesh and blood; they impress us as surpa.s.singly strange mainly because somehow they are instinct with a life fundamentally more real than the superficial reality we know. For they are the mediums and oracles of the fateful powers that stir human beings into action.

The poet of mysticism, then, delves into the mystic sources of our deeds, and makes us stand reverent with him before the unknowable forces by which we are controlled. Naturally he is obliged to shape his visions in dim outline. His aim is to shadow forth that which no naked eye can see, and it may be said in pa.s.sing that he attains this aim with a mastery and completeness incomparably beyond the dubious skill displayed more recently by the grotesque gropings of the so-called futurist school. Perhaps one true secret of the perturbing strangeness of Maeterlinck's figures lies in the fact that the basic principle of their life, the one thoroughly vital element in them, if it does not sound too paradoxical to say so, is the idea of death. Maeterlinck's mood and temper are fully in keeping with the religious dogma that life is but a short dream--with Goethe he believes that "all things transitory but as symbols are sent," and apparently concurs in the creed voiced by one of Arthur Schnitzler's characters,--that death is the only subject in life worthy of being pondered by the serious mind. "From our death onwards,"

so he puts it somewhere, "the adventure of the universe becomes our own adventure."

It will be useful to have a bit of personal information concerning our author. He started his active career as a barrister; not by any means auspiciously, it seems, for already in his twenty-seventh year he laid the toga aside. Experience had convinced him that in the forum there were no laurels for him to pluck. The specific qualities that make for success at the bar were conspicuously lacking in his make-up. Far from being eloquent, he has at all times been noted for an unparalleled proficiency in the art of self-defensive silence. He shuns ba.n.a.l conversation and the sterile distractions of promiscuous social intercourse, dreads the hubbub of the city, and has an intense dislike for travel, to which he resorts only as a last means of escape from interviewers, reporters, and admirers. Maeterlinck, it is seen, is anything but _multorum vir hominum_. In order to preserve intact his love of humanity, he finds it expedient to live for the most part by himself, away from the throng "whose very plaudits give the heart a pang;" his fame has always been a source of annoyance to him. The only company he covets is that of the contemplative thinkers of bygone days,--the mystics, gnostics, cabalists, neo-Platonists. Swedenborg and Plotinus are perhaps his greatest favorites. That the war has produced a mighty agitation in the habitual calm of the great Belgian poet-philosopher goes without saying. His love of justice no less than his love of his country aroused every red corpuscle in his virile personality to violent resentment against the invader. Since the war broke out, however, he has published nothing besides a number of ringingly eloquent and singularly pathetic articles and appeals,--so that the character portrait derived from the body of his work has not at this time lost its application to his personality.

In cast of mind, Maeterlinck is sombrously meditative, and he has been wise in framing his outer existence so that it would accord with his habitual detachment. The greater part of his time used to be divided between his charming retreat at _Quatre Chemins_, near Gra.s.se, and the grand old abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy, which he managed to s.n.a.t.c.h in the very nick of time from the tightening clutch of a manufacturing concern. With the temperament of a hermit, he has been, nevertheless, a keen observer of life, though one preferring to watch the motley spectacle from the aristocratic privacy of his box, sheltered, as it were, from prying curiosity. Well on in middle age, he is still an enthusiastic out-of-doors man,--gardener, naturalist, pedestrian, wheelman, and motorist, and commands an extraordinary amount of special knowledge in a variety of sports and sciences. In "The Double Garden" he discusses the automobile with the authority of an expert watt-man and mechanician. In one of his other books he evinces an extraordinary erudition in all matters pertaining to the higher education of dogs; and his work on "The Life of the Bee" pa.s.ses him beyond question with high rank among "thirty-third degree" apiculturists.

One of the characteristics that seem to separate his books, especially those of the earlier period, from the literary tendencies of his age, is their surprising inattention to present social struggles. His metaphysical bias makes him dwell almost exclusively, and with great moral and logical consistency, on aspects of life that are slightly considered by the majority of men yet which he regards as ulteriorly of sole importance.

When men like Maeterlinck are encountered in the world of practical affairs, they are bound to impress us as odd, because of this inversion of the ordinary policies of behavior. But before cla.s.sing them as "cranks," we might well ask ourselves whether their appraisal of the component values of life does not, after all, correspond better to their true relativity than does our own habitual evaluation. With the average social being, the transcendental bearing of a proposition is synonymous with its practical unimportance. But in his essay on "The Invisible Goodness" Maeterlinck quite properly raises the question: "Is visible life alone of consequence, and are we made up only of things that can be grasped and handled like pebbles in the road?"

Throughout his career Maeterlinck reveals himself in the double aspect of poet and philosopher. In the first period his philosophy, as has already been amply hinted, is characterized chiefly by aversion from the externalities of life, and by that tense introversion of the mind which forms the mystic's main avenue to the goal of knowledge. But if, in order to find the key to his tragedies and puppet plays, we go to the thirteen essays representing the earlier trend of his philosophy and issued in 1896 under the collective t.i.tle, "The Treasure of the Humble,"

we discover easily that his cast of mysticism is very different from that of his philosophic predecessors and teachers in the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular from the devotional mysticism of the "Admirable" John Ruysbroeck, and Friedrich von Hardenberg-Novalis.

Maeterlinck does not strive after the so-called "spiritual espousals,"

expounded by the "doctor ecstaticus," Ruysbroeck, in his celebrated treatise where Christ is symbolized as the divine groom and Human Nature as the bride glowing with desire for union with G.o.d. Maeterlinck feels too modernly to make use of that ancient sensuous imagery. The main thesis of his mystical belief is that there are divine forces dormant in human nature; how to arouse and release them, const.i.tutes the paramount problem of human life. His doctrine is that a life not thus energized by its own latent divineness is, and must remain, humdrum and worthless. It will at once be noticed that such a doctrine harmonizes thoroughly with the romantic aspiration. Both mystic and romantic teach that, in the last resort, the battlefield of our fate lies not out in the wide world but that it is enclosed in the inner self, within the unknown quant.i.ty which we designate as our soul. The visible life, according to this modern prophet of mysticism, obeys the invisible; happiness and unhappiness flow exclusively from the inner sources.