"Gabriele d'Annunzio," writes M. Huret, "is of medium height, slender, not to say frail, with short, reddish hair which is growing thin on the top of his finely shaped head, and this he brushes straight back at the temples; his back already somewhat bent, he has the air of one of those aristocratic beings who have begun life too soon. His ruddy mustache is trimmed close to the lip, and the points are turned up sharply at the corners, while the chin ends in a little pointed beard. The nose is regular and shows strength; the division between the nostrils extends below in a prominent lobe. His eyes, of pale blue, like a faded violet, are half veiled by his heavy lids. Beneath these eyes the network of fine lines tells the story of precocious weariness. The finely shaped mouth opens widely in a smile over carefully tended teeth. And one may search in vain in that face for any trace of the overwhelming, almost savage, sensuality which his privileged hero manifests in all his novels. The appearance of his physiognomy as a whole is rather self-contained and cold. He is a thinker, assuredly quite master of himself, much more given to enthusiasm over a beautiful verse than capable of a real emotion over another's grief. Besides, has he not written, 'One must keep one's liberty complete at any cost, even in intoxication'?"
D'Annunzio has ever been a spoiled darling of the Muses. At the age of sixteen, after he had published that turbulently erotic book of verse, Primo Vere, Marc Monnier, the critic, wrote of him in the Revue Suisse, "If I were one of his masters I should give him a medal and the stick."
It is to be hoped that with increasing age and experience he will pierce beneath the vesture of things and seek for the message spiritual. He is now the poet of the fleshly, albeit an interpreter of its beauties. The poet in him celebrates the joy of living, the joys of love, of death,—oh, he can pipe you many sweet lays of Death the Triumpher!—of wine, of art. He has just begun to write for the stage, and is unduly preoccupied with the sumptuousness of externals, with the bravery of words, with the torturing complexities of character.
Gabriele d'Annunzio's La Gioconda is a four-act tragedy of power, beauty, and horror. Despite the reputation of the poet-dramatist and his undeniable qualities of copious invention, skilful characterization, and prime literary ability, this piece was not warmly received in Italy. Its unrelieved analysis, its slowly accumulating burden of misery, and the cruelty of the climax do not allure the average listener. And the poet in D'Annunzio shows at every line—there are many gorgeous ones spoken in La Gioconda.
Duse possesses the subtle hands of that painter's Lisa Gioconda, and as the motive of D'Annunzio's play springs from a pair of hands—its original title was The Tragedy of the Beautiful Hands—Signora Duse makes of her fingers ten eloquent signals.
The opportunity for theatric climax is rare in La Gioconda; but when it does come the effect is strong. A wife, whose love and devotion are slighted, dares to face her rival in the studio of the sculptor-husband. He has endeavoured desperately to wean himself from his passion for the model who posed as his masterpiece, a Sphinx. Attempted suicide before the action of the play proved how deeply sunk in his imagination is this crazy infatuation. His wife meets the woman, who is young, beautiful, strange, and absolutely enamoured of the sculptor. Of her sincerity there is no doubt. Then the dramatist throws wire-drawn analysis to the winds and in a scene of peculiar brutality the women duel for the possession of the gifted, worthless man.
Here Duse's imagination and technic are revealed. She must remain the refined woman, though her brain is afire, her soul up in arms. In acrid terms of reproach and irony she defies the temptress of her husband, knowing full well that he is lost to her; in the very flush of defeat she would pluck victory by the sleeve. Startled by the ready assurance, enraged by the seemingly triumphant wife, Gioconda, the model, rushes into the atelier, bent upon destroying her counterfeit in clay,—that figure she so lovingly guarded during the sculptor's illness.
She had watched the work of his soul, while his wife nursed only his sick body. With this she taunts the other. In despair before the looming catastrophe, Duse, the wife, cries that she has lied, that her husband still loves his model. But it is too late. The struggle of the women is heard. A crash and a scream announce that the statue has been overthrown. Then an ugly Sardou motive is obtruded.
With the shadow of eternal regret in her eyes, her hands wrapped in the wet cloths that bound the clay, Duse staggers from behind the draperies of the atelier. She has saved her husband's statue, but her beautiful hands are hopelessly maimed. This scene is hideously cruel. And to top the crescendo of woe, the vacillating man runs in. "You, you, you!" sobs his wife; "it is saved," and the curtain blots the agonizing situation from our eye, not from our memory.
The play might be truthfully called The Triumph of Art, for, if it poses any problem at all, it is this: What will an artist, a sensuous, weak decadent, do when confronted by the choice of relinquishing his wife or his mistress? The latter is surpassingly beautiful, and, as he tells his friend, the painter, in Act I, she is his sole inspiration, the guiding pillar of flame for his art. "She has a thousand statues in her," in that marvellous body that "is like a look." He loves his wife, too, but she does not reveal to him his entire creative self. She is a staff to lean upon, not an electric impulse in his life. To the everyday observer all this seems a variation of an old story. Lucio is tired of Silvia, his wife, and dazzles himself with the sophistries of art—base sensuality being the real reason for his behaviour.
But this supposition is only a half-truth. Lucio has a species of accursed temperament that needs must feed upon the exquisite surfaces of beautiful things. He is a true artist of mediæval times, loving colour and form for their own sake; art for art is his motto, as it was Benvenuto Cellini's, as it was George Eliot's Tito Melemo. Lucio's most eloquent speech describes the appeal Gioconda makes to his artistic nature, the creative ardour she arouses. This speech is of much significance.
Despicable as is the man,—and we never doubt his ultimate desertion of his wife,—there is no denying the grim truth with which he is depicted. That he is not sympathetic is hardly our affair. It is bad art to preach, and that D'Annunzio never does. He simply sets before us, with consummate address, a few episodes in the life of an unhappy family, leaving us to draw our own inferences. His men and women are genuinely alive, and, given their various temperaments, they act as they inevitably would in the world of the living.
The character of the wife, Silvia, is beautiful despite the dissonance of the fatal untruth she utters. Without mawkish sentimentality, she divines the eternal child that is the basis of every artist, and so she forgives her husband. As portrayed by Duse, one feels that lurking in the sanctuary of her innermost being there is the sad, bitter suspicion that her sacrifice will be in vain.
But she stops not to count the cost, and, at the end of Act I, when the emotional, weak-spined fellow, touched by her sacrifice, casts himself sobbing at her knees, her great heart surrenders, and she pets and pities him. The exquisite tenderness, soft credulity, and suppressed sweetness of Duse here sound like a strain of marvellous music. The chords of human sympathy sing melodiously. And her every movement has the actuality of life.
After the third act any dramatist would have cried quits. Not so D'Annunzio. He wishes to tell us that Silvia is deserted forever. Pathos, poetic in its quality, contrasts with the horror of the preceding scene. We are shown Silvia at the seaside, her crushed hands concealed. To her comes La Sirenetta, an elfin creature of the sea, a tiny, fantastic fisher maid, who sings the delightful ballad of the Seven Sisters and consoles the sorrowful wife and mother. Yes, Silvia has a daughter, Beata, who is kept in ignorance of her mother's misfortune.
It is now that the spectator feels the remorseless grip of the poet. La Sirenetta offers a star-fish to Silvia and wonders why she does not accept it. She is the solitary shaft of sunshine in the play. Beata runs in with flowers for her mother. It is a poignant touch. The chilly indifference of the dramatist to the suffering of his characters, his complete detachment, is art of a rarefied sort, though not the art that will endear him to all. "Beata!" exclaims the poor mother, making a futile gesture with her mutilated arms. "You are crying! You are crying!" sobs the child, throwing herself upon her mother's breast. The flowers slip to earth.
A trait of Duse is the stifling of her tears when her sister visits her. She involuntarily lifts her arms, and then, checking herself with an indescribable movement, she rests her face upon her sister's shoulder. There the tears fall. There she dries them. It is characteristic Duse. Her entire assumption is on the plane of exalted realism. We know that Silvia has a beautiful, strong soul, that she succumbs to the awful pressure of temptation; and the lie she tells is henceforth a memory never lifted from her life. In a measure she accepts with resignation physical torture and loss of her husband. D'Annunzio has not before created such a noble woman. Lucio is only a variant of his typical man: George Aurispa, Andrea Sperelli, and the rest of his amateurs in corruption and artistic hunters of morbid sensation. Silvia is unique. Silvia is adorable as Duse presents her. Throughout this most human among actresses is in constant modulation; her very silence is pregnant with suggestion. She is the exponent of an art that is baffling in its coincidence with nature. From nature what secret accents has this Italian woman not overheard?—secrets that she embodies in her art.
There are many beauties in the play, beauties of style, though the dialogue in the early acts is in excess of the movement This is quite in consonance with continental ideas of playwriting. In Europe the art of elocution is not a lost one, as it is on the English stage. The Italians and the French often speak for the sheer beauty of their expressive tongues. So the action halts and there are some amateurish strokes betrayed in the bringing on of his characters by D'Annunzio. But the burning rhetoric of the young poet lends fascination to several scenes—notably the interview of painter and sculptor in Act II. His brother-poet, Arthur Symons, has Englished D'Annunzio's prose and has accomplished his task with rare distinction.
D'Annunzio's Francesca da Rimini is glorified melodrama. It is unnecessary to revert to the plays, poems, books, pictures, symphonies, that have been made with the unhappy loves of Francesca and Paolo as a theme. From the day when the great Florentine exile sang in Canto V of his Hell, "In its leaves that day we read no more," Dante inspired painters, poets, sculptors,—Rodin not among the least,—musicians, and playwrights. Leigh Hunt wrote The Story of Rimini; there is George Boker's commonplace play, in which Lawrence Barrett, Louis James, Otis Skinner, and others have appeared; there is an old play by Silvio Pellico, and the two new settings of the story by Stephen Phillips and Marion Crawford—the latter's version prepared for Sarah Bernhardt—are of yesterday's doings. Both Liszt and Tschaïkowsky have composed symphonic poems on the subject.
And now D'Annunzio, as if he wished to demonstrate his fitness in the handling of any dramatic form, conceived and executed a species of poetic melodrama in which the life of a feudal period is unrolled before us in five glowing tableaux. Prodigality of colour, bloody war, horrid lusts, are mingled artistically with the processional attitudes of tirewomen, sweet singing, and interludes of lyric passion. As in a mirrored dream of Burne-Jones, Francesca moves slowly from rapt maidenhood to forced marriage; from unhappy marriage to deception and death. Not content to follow the bare lines of the ancient chronicle, the playwright weaves into his symphony of adulterous passion historic episodes and pictures of manners. It is one epoch of strange, repellent contrasts. Souls are danced to the tune of graceful madrigals, and roses often dyed a deeper hue by blood. In the sphere of action the play mostly lives, though there are some halting moments of poetic delicacy and introspection set over against operatic episodes. We first assist at a scene of jester and damsels which recalls Bandello or Boccaccio. It is gay and humorous, with the coarse, unseemly humour of the time. Alberich, teased by the three mermaids in Rheingold, is recalled. Two brothers of Francesca indulge in fierce recriminations during which a veiled accusation of attempted parricide is made, with the result that murder is barely escaped.
Francesca is deliberately betrayed by her brother, Ostasio Polenta, into the arms of the "Lamester" Giovanni Malatesta. She believes that she is wedding his brother Paolo, called the handsome one, skilled in the fine arts, of goodly presence, a warrior and a lover of sport. By a device near the close of Act I he is made to pass and be seen by Francesca. She goes to her doom willingly. She loves, but does not know that Paolo is a married man.
In the second act, a year later, Francesca, in a Saracenic headdress, seems to have aged ten years. On the battlement of her husband's fortress, amid the enginery of war, Greek fire boiling in the caldron, darts flaming, missiles, catapults, ballista, and outlandish weapons that crowd the summit of the tower, she stands. There is a terrific din; crossbows twang, shoutings and tocsins are heard. Francesca, displaying true mediæval immobility at all these sights and sounds, hovers about the platform, questioning, curious.
She insists on tampering with a torch of the deadly Greek fire, and it evokes from the poet a flock of his flaming images that Swinburne alone might parallel. As Paolo enters, eager for the fight, Francesca's attitude shifts. At once we see her aroused interest. She loved him, loves him. Their interview contains some striking speeches. "And then I saw your face, silent between the spears of the horsemen," she tells him, and adds that then she longed for death. He replies in a like exalted strain. He exposes himself at the open portcullis, and she trembles but is brave.
Her Pater Noster is an outlet for her overcharged feelings. It was delivered by Duse with shivering eloquence. The intensity of the scene is heightened by the entrance of her husband, surnamed Gianciotto. He limps, but is a mighty warrior in the land. The characters of the two brothers are exposed in a few lines. Still another brother appears, Malatestino. He is the youngest. His eye has just been destroyed during this battle. Malevolent, cruel, he too loves Francesca. In a later act he plays the part of Iago to his elder brother.
Act III is in the earlier half both a picture and a promise. Little happens. We see Francesca in a rare room, with the Adriatic Sea glimpsed through the open windows. This scene is beautifully presented. Upon a unique lectern is placed a tome, The History of Launcelot of the Lake, the very book mentioned by Dante as the fatal one. There are girlish jesting and chattering. Francesca reads aloud. It may be noticed that at the beginning of Act I the old romance of Tristan and Isolde is alluded to, thus suggesting the ultimate ending of Francesca and Paolo.
Throughout there are these delicate loops of leading motives binding firmly the somewhat loosely built dramatic tale. Francesca relates her dream to her slave, Smaragdi. It is of a pursuit through dim woods of a naked woman by a savage knight and his mastiffs. The vision always ends in the same manner. The knight cuts out her heart and throws it to the hungry dogs; they devour it.
The entrance of a voluble merchant and later an astrologer and the jester relaxes the tense melancholy of the love-lorn lady. A scene of bright foolery follows. It is touched by no little fancy. And then the slave whispers that Paolo is without. Sending away her people, she receives him. There is the inevitable duo of amorous despair and the fateful reading. Here D'Annunzio handles a foreseen situation with poetic skill. He manages to create an atmosphere of suspense from the beginning. The final cry of Francesca, "No, Paolo!" is worth a page of overwrought adjectives and writhing embraces.
Act IV, the cruellest of the five, is devoted to the arousing of Giovanni's suspicions. This is easily accomplished by Malatestino, the wicked younger brother. Jealous of Paolo, he shocks Francesca with his hints, his hot advances, and the hideous cruelty he exhibits in cutting off the head of a prisoner. He drags on the stage the head, enveloped in a bag. It is heavy, he remarks. Oddly enough, D'Annunzio manages matters so that we sympathize with the deceived husband—rather an un-Latin proceeding.
In the final act D'Annunzio, we feel, has Shakespeare before him. The scene of Othello is evoked at once, not in incident, but because of the spiritual, tragic atmosphere. Francesca is asleep; she moans, for she dreams. Her maidens are sent away. Her slave is called, but comes not. Tricked by this plotted absence, Paolo enters. The lovers are soon caught and slain by Giovanni, who breaks his sword across his knee. Every detail is admirably managed.
Not the least potent factor is the absence of all remorse shown by Francesca. The victim of deceit, she does not hesitate to deceive in return. In her love passages, Duse was truthful to a degree. She invested Francesca with just the proper poise, dignity, and suppressed melancholy.
Francesca da Rimini is the first of D'Annunzio's dramatic efforts that attracted popular favour. It is an interesting rather than a great play, though full of inspiring poetry. It was first given, December 9, 1901, at Teatro Costanzi, Rome, by the Duse Company, with the exception that Gustavo Salvini was the Paolo on that occasion.
IV
Compared to La Gioconda, The Dead City is a highly polished specimen of the static drama; there is little that is dynamic until the scene before the last. And the theme, thunder-charged as it is with symbolism, is fitter for reading than for publication before the footlights. The play is literature first, drama afterward. Sarah Bernhardt produced it in Paris.
Incest as a subject for dramatic treatment is no new thing. The Greeks employed it as a leit-motive of horror, and in the Œdipus of Sophocles, the Hippolytus of Euripides—we recall with grateful memories Bernhardt's puissant Phèdre in Racine's paraphrase of the Greek dramatist—and in the Bible itself this dire theme may be encountered, though no modern has had the courage to set the episode of Tamar and Amnon in the Book of Samuel. Later, in the flush of the seventeenth-century dramatic renascence, John Ford wrote his masterpiece, The Brother and Sister.
In that play, admired of Charles Lamb, is set forth with a wealth of realism undreamed of by D'Annunzio and the Greeks the details of a lamentable passion, and so cunning is the art of Ford that we find ourselves pitying the unhappy pair, Giovanni and Annabella, poor play-things of the gods. Of Wagner's Die Walküre it is unnecessary to speak. Music, as Henry James remarks, is a great solvent.
But mark the handling of the young Italian poet. Obsessed by the Greeks, he has constructed his tragedy on antique lines. Crime is hinted at; we even see an adulterous love—for evil passions hunt in couples throughout this dream-like story—in development; almost is a catastrophe precipitated. The incest, however, is potential. It is only an idea. It scourges the two men like whips in the hands of the avenging Furies. And it finally dooms an innocent creature, hopelessly involving at the same time the happiness of three survivors.
It is then a crime contemplated, not accomplished, this love of a brother for a sister. A critic might show that the Italian poet's form is a replica of the Greek with several variations; there is a breach of unity of place in the last act, and no "false catastrophe" is hinted at in the fourth act. This W. F. Apthorp has pointed out. It is not the sole departure. Instead of presenting us with a frozen imitation of Grecian tragedy, like most writers who have attempted to cope with the classics, D'Annunzio frankly filled the antique mould with modern feeling.
His men and women are modern; they are of to-day, neurotic, morbid, febrile souls. And this modern atmosphere is a jangling dissonance to them that prefer their tragedy unadulterated. Without an ounce of John Ford's lusty Elizabethan animalism, D'Annunzio so contrives his play of character and shock of incident that we are disquieted, dismayed, not so much by the theme as by its insidious music.
With his customary audacity he places his action in Greece, on the plain of Argolis; archæology is the background. Four friends are engaged in excavating the dead city of Mycenæ, where Schliemann discovered, or thought he discovered, the tombs and dusty bones of the Homeric heroes. From these tainted remains is exhaled the moral malaria that sets in action D'Annunzio's piece. It is a genuinely original and morbid idea.
The house of the men of Atreus is dug up, and from it comes spiritual pollution. Like a master of string-quartet writing the author has manipulated his four characters so skilfully that the melody worked is ever mysterious, ever melancholy. Anna is blind; she is the wife of Alessandro, a poet and scholar. Alessandro is morally blind, for he loves the younger Bianca, the sister of his friend Leonardo. Leonardo, the successful explorer and rifler of Homeric tombs, loves his own sister,—that ancient poison working in his veins,—and with this uncanny combination D'Annunzio plays his sinister tunes, evokes his strange harmonies.
There is no necessity of disputing the daring of this scheme, and just as inutile would be a discussion of its ethics. It seems that in his three plays, La Gioconda, La Citta Morta, and Francesca da Rimini, D'Annunzio has tried his 'prentice hand at modern realism, ancient tragedy, and historical melodrama. They are all three largely experimental, and, it must not be forgotten, the works of a beginner.
It is the externals of the drama with which we are more concerned. Of five acts three were placed in the loggia of Leonardo's house; Act II is the interior of the same house; Act V a fountain not far away. It is then a soul tragedy that is enacted, and one cannot quite escape the feeling that much study of Maeterlinck has been responsible for the sullen, depressing atmosphere. There is in the dialogue, with its haunting repetitions, the same electric apprehension sensed in the Belgian's poems. Gestures, movements, the music of sonorous speech, slow glances, and pauses—the pause is a big factor in Maeterlinck—are woven into a sort of incomprehensible symphony.
Seemingly subordinate, Eleonora Duse is the real protagonist. Blind, though not from birth, because of her exquisite tactile sensibility she understands the love of her husband for her friend. An exalted sentiment of renunciation prompts her to probe this secret passion, and when she discovers that Bianca is languishing, too, her mind is made up. She will efface herself. She will slay her useless life, So that two souls may thrive in happiness. More than this, she tempts her husband with the ripe beauty of Bianca. Here is an un-Greek idea at once. It is altruism gone mad. From Anna is mercifully kept the unholy love of the brother; nor is it revealed to Bianca. Therein lies another deviation from antique models. A story in classical literature is never told obliquely.
Duse, who has extraordinary powers of intuition, the logic of her temperament, impersonated Anna with unvarying truth and veiled sweetness, indicating by shades almost too fine for the frame of the theatre her mental attitudes toward her companions. There are few climaxes for her, the part being a passive one, the action being buried in the text. But she has opportunities. Her cry for "Light!" is one; and almost at the drop of the last curtain she finds her way to the fountain where, lured by the brother Alessandro, Bianca, his hapless victim, is murdered by being drowned in the murmuring waters which the pair have so often watched.
Anna utters the names in the terrified accents of the lost blind. She seeks, too, her husband. All the day she anticipated tragedy. It hung over her soul like a smoky pall. She feels her way to the fountain and there touching with her feet the body of the dead girl she distractedly searches for signs of life. It is a dramatic moment. Then arising with a shudder she shouts, joyfully:—
"Vedo! Vedo!" ("I see! I see!"). Her physical sight is restored and her own hold on life becomes at once intensified; her unselfishness is shed. And it is at this hopeless moment that the dramatist unseals her vision and closes his play, leaving the wretched woman to face the loss of Bianca and possibly the lunacy of her husband and his friend. If they do not go mad it is because their nerves have become dulled to the hideousness of life. They are abnormal; every one in the play, excepting the girl Bianca, is abnormal. Even the nurse does not escape the taint. She is a figure out of Maeterlinck, and doubtless knows the madness that lurks in moon-haunted corridors!
That Duse triumphed was to be expected. She awed rather than astonished us, her skill taking on new meanings, new colours. All together, her art was a unique something that closely bordered on the clairvoyant. Her helpless silences were actually terrifying; her poses most pathetic. Bianca Maria was admirably played by Signorina Civani, the Sirenetta of La Gioconda. She noted most fluently the loving, healthy nature of the girl who falls a victim to the shafts of Eros. It is with Sophocles's Antigone that the action begins; it is with a motto from Antigone, Eros, unconquered in strife, that the play is overshadowed.
D'Annunzio's new play, The Daughter of Jorio, has achieved some success in Italy, despite the absence of Eleonora Duse from the cast, and despite the reaction against the enthusiasm of its première. When the drama was produced at Milan it was put on for a "run," or the European equivalent of one. There was severe criticism, but the consensus seems to be that in his latest work that extraordinary creature, D'Annunzio, has outshone his earlier dramatic efforts.
The chief quality that impresses itself upon the reader of La Figlia di Jorio is its superior dramatic movement as compared, for example, with The Dead City or Francesca da Rimini by the same writer. The first act is full of vitality, its characterization excellent; the cuts in Acts II and III made by D'Annunzio for the first performance greatly benefit the somewhat sluggish tempi of these scenes. The old rhetorician and lover of beautiful phrases has not been killed in the Italian poet, merely "scotched." For one thing, he has struck that theatrical vein of gold, a new background, new methods of speech, new costumes, new ideas—or, rather, most ancient ones, though novel to the stage. Travelling with his friend, the painter Michetti, one summer in the savage mountainous country of the Abruzzi, D'Annunzio saturated himself with his accustomed receptivity to a strange people and environment, which has resulted in a powerful tragedy. Like Verga's discovery of the Sicilian peasant in Cavalleria Rusticana—a veritable treasure-trove for that poet and also for Mascagni—D'Annunzio in his encounter with the curious customs and pagan personalities of the hardy, superstitious Abruzzi, was enabled to lay up a stock of images for his new work. I doubt, however, if he has succeeded as well as Verga in getting close to the skin and soil of this peasantry. There is more than one awkward hiatus in The Daughter of Jorio, and an almost epileptic intensity in the development of the witch girl's character.
The first act is the best, because the simplest and most sincere. It shows us a living room in a rustic house. The background and "properties" are said to be wonderfully realistic. Aligi, the shepherd, is to marry. His bride's name is Vienda. He does not love her, for she was chosen by his parents—and in this old Italian land the father's command is law. The betrothal ceremonies are beginning. The groom's sisters are near by. He is ill at ease, for he has been dreaming strange dreams. Vienda spills the broken bread of betrothal from her lap upon the floor. It is a maleficent sign. Suddenly there comes a noise of shouting and music. The harvesters, crazy with drink and the torrid heat of the sun, rush in. They have come to celebrate. They are also chasing a human being, a miserable hunted girl of bad repute, the daughter of Jorio, the magician. Hunted down, she claims sanctuary in the household. Although she is of ill-fame, although Aligi's father, Lazaro, has been wounded in a squabble about this girl, Mila di Codra, she is sheltered by the woman. Aligi is for turning her away; her coming spells more bad luck; the infuriated mob without demand admittance. Enraged, the shepherd raises his staff to strike the unhappy fugitive. As he does this he is overtaken by fresh visions; he thinks he sees Mila guarded by a weeping angel. He falls at her feet begging her pardon. A cross is laid over the threshold, a litany sung by his sisters, and the angry reapers are hypnotized. They enter singly, kiss the cross, and dissolve homeward. Lazaro enters with his head in a bandage and Mila escapes. Another ill omen—the father and son both love the same woman.
The second act discovers Aligi and Mila in a mountainous cave where they have lived for six months—in a state of innocence. Here the credulity of the spectator is taxed, and the lyric ecstasy of the poet waxes. It is nevertheless an idyllic episode. One kiss is exchanged, the first and the last, for Lazaro eventually finds his now disgraced son, and with a pair of sturdy rustics comes to carry away the witch. In the conflict that ensues the son murders the father. Act III brings us back to the old home of Aligi. His father's corpse lies in the garden, according to custom. The son is condemned to the awful death of the parricide—after his offending hand is cut off he is to be tied in a sack with a fierce dog and then thrown into the river. The end may be surmised. One consolation is not denied him—a cup of drink to induce forgetfulness. As the preparations are about completed Mila bursts upon the crowded scene—an impressive one, according to printed reports—and takes upon herself the blame of the affair. She it was, she declares, who murdered Lazaro. Aligi curses her in his delirium, as she is dragged away to be burnt alive, she the witch, the daughter of Jorio. Her triumphant voice is heard to the last, while for a background there is the chanting of the requiem and the triumphant yelling and imprecations of the shepherds, the Abruzzi lusting for a human sacrifice. Then the curtain falls. Several critics discern in all this the triumph of religion over the senses—a solution that does their ingenuity credit, though far from convincing.
It may be seen that there is real dramatic worth in the play, love and sacrifice being its very pith. Better still, the poet has become less self-absorbed and consequently more objective. The human note predominates in this wild and highly coloured music. In his plays and novels and verse he has himself been the artistic and sterile hero—as Eleonora Duse, in the plays and one novel, their heroine. A German critic declares that Mila is only a sister of the crazy woman in A Spring Morning's Dream—as she, Duse, also is related to Silvia in Gioconda, to the blind wife in The Dead City, and Francesca, as well as La Foscarina in Fuoco, Duse, Eleonora Duse, always Duse. Lucky, thrice happy poet, to have been inspired by such a model! To have had the opportunity of studying such a sublime, unhappy soul as is Duse's!
A German critic speaks slightingly of Das Geklingel der schönen Phrasen—the jingling of dulcet phrases—as a drawback to the action. Doubtless this is true. Often we cannot hear the play because of the words. The chief thing to be remarked, however, is the improvement in dramatic spirit and rhythm and the gratifying supremacy of the dramatic over the lyric and literary qualities—the latter hitherto anti-dramatic elements in the plays of D'Annunzio.
The poet is now working on a new three-act tragedy, The Ship,—in which Duse is to appear at La Scala this spring. The theme is Venetian—that Venice which both Duse and D'Annunzio love so well; and also on a modern drama entitled, The Light Under the Bushel.
"In life," said Barbey d'Aurevilly, "we are strangled between two doors, of which the one is labelled Too Soon and the other Too Late." The brilliant Beau Brummel of French literature who uttered this fatidical speech was a contemporary of the unhappy, impulsive man of genius, poet, mystic, and dramatist, who set Paris agog with his novels, short stories, plays, his half-crazy conduct, his epigrams, his fantastic litigations, and his cruel death—Villiers de l'Isle Adam. The bosom friend of Charles Baudelaire and Richard Wagner, petted at Bayreuth, feted in Paris, nevertheless he died in want, was buried by his friends, and was proud, lonely, aristocratic to the very end—a death from cancer.
His life furnishes material for one of his ironic, bitter, disturbing tales. Born in Brittany, November 28, 1838, he died at Paris in a religious hospital, August 19, 1889. A fierce, even militant, Roman Catholic—he dedicated a book to the Pope—he shocked his co-religionists by the confusing mixture of fanatical piety and fantastic blasphemy which winds through his bizarre works. He is best known to Americans by the story in his Contes Cruels, entitled, The Torture by Hope, which recalls Poe at his best, the Poe of The Pit and the Pendulum. His little play, The Revolt, was translated and first appeared in the Fortnightly Review, December, 1897. Arthur Symons has translated a poem, Aveu, and Vance Thompson, in the defunct pages of Mlle. New York, wrote often of the celebrated Frenchman.
The critical bibliography of Villiers de l'Isle Adam is not a vast one. There is, besides his principal works, only his life by his cousin Vicomte Robert du Pontavice de Heussey; Rémy de Gourmont's brief, sympathetic notice in his inimitable Le Livre des Masques; Anatole France in La Vie Littéraire has dealt with the poet most subtly, as is his wont; Arthur Symons's study; Mallarmé's lecture; a few caricatures and a sketch by Paul Verlaine; a historic consideration by Alexis von Kraemer, translated from the Finnish; a charming and extended étude by Gustave Kahn; short essays by the lamented Hennequin, by J. K. Huysmans, in A Rebours, by Sarcey, Gustave Guiches, Henry Bordeaux, Teodor de Wyzewa, Georges Rodenbach, Catulle Mendès; and fragmentary accounts in the ever valuable Mercure de France—and there the list is snuffed out.
Not precisely dissolute, rather disorganized, the life of Adam could be transformed into an object sermon by the wily educator and moral-monger. But that would be a poor way of viewing it. Born without average will power, except the will to imagine beautiful and strange things, Villiers, as he is generally called, all his years fought the contending impulses of his dual nature; fought bravely sometimes in the open air with the blue sky smiling down on him; fought as if facing an ambuscade at dark, and under the lowering clouds when all the powers of evil were abroad and at his elbow. Then, he was what Bayard Taylor called Edgar Poe—a bird of the night; a prowling noctambulist; a feverish being, whose violent gestures, burning eyes, and irresolute somnambulistic gait told the tale, the damnable and thrice-told tale, of wasted genius.
Poe is the literary ancestor of nearly all the Parnassian and Diabolic groups—ah, this mania for schools and groups and movements in Paris! Poe begat Baudelaire and Baudelaire begat Barbey d'Aurevilly and Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and the last-named begat Verlaine and Huysmans—and a long chain of other gifted men can claim these two as parents, even to Mallarmé, De Maupassant, and Henri de Régnier (who has read the Horla of Guy de Maupassant will feel that therein the unhappy disciple of Flaubert has raised to a terrifying degree the methods of Poe; nor must Régnier's La Canne de Jaspe be forgotten). But they all come from Poe; Poe, who influenced Swinburne through Baudelaire; Poe, who nearly swept the young Maeterlinck from his moorings in the stagnant fens and under the morose sky of his lowlands. If we have no great school of literature in America, we can at least point to Poe as the progenitor of a half-dozen continental literatures.
Villiers can be traced to Poe on one side, just as Chateaubriand is another of his ancestors. M. de Gourmont deplores the criticism which would detach Villiers from his time and isolate him as a species of intellectual monster. There is much that is fantastic, even bizarre, in his work, and he never escaped the besetting sin of his associates, headed by Baudelaire, the childish desire to épater le bourgeois, to shock conventional morality and manners by eccentric behaviour, outrageous speech, and paradoxical writings. This legacy of the romantic movement of 1830 really came across the water in Byron's poses of wickedness and heroic mystifications. It was, in reality, the Byronic attitude transposed to the Paris boulevards. Gautier wore a pink doublet (not scarlet, he says), and it was elevated to a symbol. Let us be scarlet, said these wild, young fellows, let our sins be splendid! And then the crew would wander abroad, making the night resound with their lyric outbursts, happy if a respectable citizen were scandalized, and in their pockets, a world too wide for their money, hardly the price of a bottle!
It was glorious, and it was art. But who cared, who knew? If a man of Baudelaire's intellectual powers, a profound critic, genius, and poet, could dye his hair green, simply to attract attention in the cafés why should not men of lesser abilities follow suit and commit all manner of extravagant pranks? Leconte de Lisle, impeccable poet and a prim sort of person, impatiently exclaimed: "Oh, ces jeunes gens! Tous fumistes!" And Thiers allowed to escape him the one mot of his complacent life worth remembering, "The Romanticists—that's the Commune!" Perhaps the pink doublets and strange oaths of Ernani and 1830 were transformed into the grim figures of that later lurid epoch.
Villiers was in the very core of this artistic Paris. He slept all day—or dreamed. At nightfall he stepped across the sill of his door, and when he had friends, money, glory, he dined at Brébant's; when he was shabby, he remained on the exterior boulevard. There, in some modest café, seated at a table surrounded by disciples eager for his ideas, his poetry, his scintillating wit,—eager to steal it and sell it as their own,—the Master spoke, his vague blue eyes gleaming, his long white hand waving aloft like a flag of revolt. What dreams, what eloquence, what a soul, went under on this ignoble battle-field! What slain ideals and poetry wasted in the very utterance, and what inroads on a nervous, sickly constitution! But Villiers lived the life he had elected. He was poor, always poor, and poverty makes extraordinary bedfellows. But—his room-mates were the most intellectual spirits of modern France. If Baudelaire could not drop in on him at his dusty lodgings, Richard Wagner would. And so there was talk—such talk—and there was that feeling of expansion, of liberation, which comes when a man like Turgenev could say to Flaubert: "Cheer up, old fellow! After all you are Flaubert!"
Villiers never forgot that he was Villiers. His pride, like his piety, was Luciferian. Nobly descended, he almost fought a duel with a distant cousin who doubted his birth. He claimed to spring from the ten times blue blood of a Grand Master of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, who defended Rhodes against the Turks in the time of Charles V. With this thought he often wandered into a café and had his absinthe charged on the slate of the ideal, the reckoning of which no true poet listeth.
A mystic among mystics, yet his linen was not always impeccable. Verlaine, another son of the stars and sewers, wrote, "I am far from sure that the philosophy of Villiers will not one day become the formula of our century." "Know, once and for all, that there is for thee no other universe than that conception which is reflected at the bottom of thy thoughts"—this utterance of Villiers is the keystone of his system. In Elën (1864), his greatest drama, another idea comes to the surface in the dialogue of Samuel and Goetze. Samuel speaks: "Science will not suffice. Sooner or later you will end by coming to your knees." Goetze: "Before what?" Samuel: "Before the darkness."
His life long, Villiers traversed the darkness which encompasses with the sure, swift step of a nyctalops, one who can pierce with his glance the deepest obscurity. So it is that in his plays and stories we are conscious of the great mystery of life and death hemming us about. Sometimes this atmosphere is morbidly oppressive, sometimes it is relieved by gay, maniacal bursts of laughter. Again it lifts and reveals the mild heavens streaked with menacing irony. There is a lugubrious undercurrent in the buffooneries of Villiers. Philip Hale has translated the cruel story of the swans massacred by fear. This poet slew his soul by his evocation of terror.
He is a mystic, a spiritual romantic, and only a realist in his sardonic pictures of Paris life, tiny cabinet pictures, etchings, bitten out with the aqua fortis of his ghastly irony. There is the irony, a mask behind which pity, sympathy, lurk; Shakespeare wore this mask at times. And there is the irony that withers, that blasts. This is Villiers.
Axel is both difficult and illuminative reading. It is in four acts with nine scenes. Each act or part is respectively entitled: The Religious World, The Tragic World, The Occult World, The Passional World. The poet had not known Wagner and his Tetralogy for naught. Sara is a superb creation—but not on the boards, in the disillusioning, depoetizing, troubled, and malarial air of the stage! It was a mistake to play Axël in Paris. Its solemn act of rejection of life al the moment "when life becomes ideal" is hardly fitting for the theatre. A drama to be played by poets before a parterre of poets! Arthur Symons has noticed with his accustomed acuity that "the modern drama under the democratic influence of Ibsen, the positive influence of Dumas fils, has limited itself to the expression of temperaments in the one case, of theoretic intelligences in the other, in as nearly as possible the words which the average man would use for the statement of his emotions and ideas. The form, that is, is degraded below the level of the characters whom it attempts to express."
It is a point well taken, though I feel inclined to rebel at the pinning down of form to language alone. Ibsen's terseness—and remember we only see him in the cold light of Mr. Archer's translations—is one of his merits; but his form, his dramatic form, is not alone in his text, but in the serene and ordered procession of his dramatic action. Villiers is more poetically eloquent than the Ibsen of the prose dramas. But as logical or as dramatic—!
Mr. Symons adds, "La Révolte, which seems to anticipate A Doll's House, shows us an aristocratic Ibsen, touching reality with a certain disdain, certainly with far less skill, certainly with far more beauty." For me in a play of character the beauty that appeals is not purely verbal. It is the beauty of character quâ character, and the beauty of events marshalled like a great sequence of mysterious music, humming with the indefinable harmonies of life. Ibsen makes this music; so does Gerhart Hauptmann. Axël is noble drama, despite its formal shortcoming, its dream-like quality. Many went begging to Villiers, and few came away empty-handed. Prodigal in genius, he was prodigal in giving.
This poet, like most poets, loathed mediocrity. He sought the exceptional, the complex soul. "A chacun son infini," he said; and in Axel he cries: "As for living, our servants will do that for us! As at the play in a central stall, one sits out so as not to disturb one's neighbours—out of courtesy, in a word—some play written in a wearisome style of which one does not like the subject, so I lived, out of politeness." Here is the gauge cast disdainfully to those who forever pelt us with sweet phrases about loving our neighbour, about altruism, sympathy, and social obligations—all the self-illuding, socialistic cant, in a word, that rankles in the breast of the solitary proud man and poisons the mind of the weak. Villiers is the exorcist of the real, the bearer of the ideal, wrote De Gourmont, himself a poetic individualist. And he sums up, "Villiers knew all forms of intellectual intoxication."
Villiers associated much with Richard Wagner, and with Baudelaire was an ardent upholder of the new music during the troubled times of the Tannhäuser fiasco. He played the piano, knew the Ring by heart—no mean feat—and set Baudelaire's poems to music, anticipating Charles Martin Loeffler by nearly a half-century. Of one of them the music is said to be still extant. It is the poem with this couplet:—
Our beds shall be scented with sweetest perfume, Our divans be as cool and dark as the tomb.
Probably the most lifelike, verbal portrait of Wagner is that of Villiers's. In a memorable passage, which I commend to Mr. Finck as testimony with which to snub recalcitrant clergymen and others, Villiers notes Wagner's violent disclaimer that his Parsifal was merely the work of the artist and not of the believing Christian. "Why, if I did not feel in my inmost soul the living light and love of that Christian faith, my works ... would be the works of a liar and an ape. My art is my prayer." Thus Villiers reports Wagner—Wagner, whose marvellous soul changed colour every moment, like one of those exquisite flying fishes which paint the air and waters of the tropics.
In 1861, at Baudelaire's home, Villiers met Richard Wagner. It was at a period of great depression for that master. Villiers speaks of the interview as the most memorable of his life. "Wagner, with his high, remarkable forehead, almost terrifying in its development; his deep blue eyes, with their slow, steady, magnetic glance; his thin, strongly marked features, changing from one shade of pallor to another; his imperious hooked nose; his delicate, thin-lipped, unsatisfied, ironic mouth; his exceedingly strong, projecting, and pointed chin—seemed to Villiers like the archangel of celestial combat." A rare little band, composed of Wagner, Villiers, Baudelaire, and Catulle Mendès, often walked the town after midnight. Once they were down along a dreary street which ends at the Quai Saint-Eustache, and there Wagner pointed out to them the window of a garret at the top of a very high house. In it he said he almost starved, despaired, even meditated suicide. Villiers was a Wagnerian among Wagnerians. He paraphrased in words his impressions of the German's music, and some of these were published in Catulle Mendès's Revue Fantaisiste. He visited Wagner at Triebchen, near Lucerne, in Switzerland, although he was so poor that he had to walk part of the distance.
One of Villiers's characters was Triboulat Bonhomet. This was the man who was so avid of new sensations in music that he cruelly slew swans. During the autumn of 1879 Villiers was at Bayreuth in company with Judith Gautier and Catulle Mendès, and gave a reading from his works before a lot of crowned heads, Wagner and Liszt included. He read some of the curious adventures of Bonhomet, and was surprised to hear his audience laugh, at first quietly, at last unrestrainedly. At last the tempest of laughter rose so high that the reader ceased and cast a glance full of vague suspicion round his, audience. The Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, who sat beside him, touched his shoulder and pointed to a person sitting just opposite them. Villiers, with a little sharp cry, dropped the manuscript from his trembling fingers and gave evident signs of lively terror. There in front of him, surrounded by a bevy of beautiful women, gazing at him with shining eyes, his enormous mouth opened in stentorian laughter, his huge hands leading applause, was Dr. Triboulat Bonhomet himself, flesh and bone. It was Franz Liszt!
From the very first line of the manuscript, in which Villiers had minutely described the doctor, the whole audience had been struck by the resemblance between the great pianist and Triboulat Bonhomet, and as the description went on the likeness increased—dress, gestures, habits, all bore a striking similarity. One person alone did not perceive the identity, and he laughed louder than the rest—Liszt himself. Finally the reading had to be stopped on account of the general hilarity, but Liszt was never told of the joke.
The most curious episode in the life of Villiers was when he won a prize with his five-act play, The New World. A dramatic competition was announced by the theatrical press of Paris. A medal of honour and ten thousand francs were offered to the French dramatic author who would "most powerfully recall in a work of four or five acts the episode of the proclamation of the independence of the United States, the hundredth anniversary of which fell on July 4, 1876. The two examining juries were composed as follows: the first, of the principal critics of the French theatrical press; the second, of Victor Hugo, honorary president; Emile Augier, Octave Feuillet, and Ernest Legouvé, members of the French Academy; Mr. Grenville Murray, representing the New York Herald, and M. Perrin, administrator-general of the Théâtre Français."
Villiers's play conquered. His New World was passed by both juries. But through some sort of official devilry he received neither money nor medal; nor was his play produced. He had the mortification of seeing a second-rate piece by Armand d'Artois given while his own work collected dust in the manuscript box of the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre. Naturally he raised a hubbub. He bearded the venerable Hugo at his home and there insulted not only the poet, but also the aged Legouvé. Conflict was the very breath of this visionary's nostrils. Did he not institute a ridiculous lawsuit against the author of a play because it vilified, so he claimed, a very remote ancestor? After interminable processes he was non-suited. And The New World was his favourite drama! Villiers had long dreamed of becoming the Richard Wagner of the drama.
His cousin says: "His idea was that the characteristics of the nation, or of the event which was to be portrayed, should be imported into the framework of some personal intrigue, in which each individual of the dramatis personæ should personify in his language, attitude, or actions some one of the numerous elements produced by the friction of the incidents of the play." Here is the leading motive idea of Wagner—a dangerous idea in the drama, where the pattern must not be too regular or too persistent. Villiers dreamed of a symphonic drama with a densely woven web. Poets seldom realize the bigness of that hollow frame, the theatre, on the background of which they must paint in bold, splashing colours, or else pay the penalty of not being seen at all. It is scene, not miniature, painting which is the real art of the drama.
In sooth, The New World is a play that would puzzle the most sanguine manager. It has been called "one of the best constructed, deepest, and most passionate dramas of the present day," by a prejudiced witness, the cousin of the poet. Against the wishes of his true friends, Villiers allowed a representation, with dire results. Sarcey fairly peppered it with his wit; so bad were the actors and actresses that the author himself hissed furiously at every performance. This was at the Théâtre des Nations, 1883. There were six representations. And such an America as this poet depicts! It is as illusory, in another way, as Victor Hugo's England. Villiers had evidently read Chateaubriand's Atala—Chateaubriand, who cajoled his countrymen men into the belief that he lived for years in Louisiana!—and so we are given some odd characters, odd happenings, odder history. Mistress Andrews, the heroine, is a sort of an American Melusina. Can any one in his most exalted mood picture an American Melusina?
And so this "hybrid, complex, contradictory being, by turns mysterious, terrible, cynical, innocent, loving, tragic, grotesque" poet, rolled down the hill of life. Is it not Pascal who says: "The last act is always tragedy, whatever fine comedy there may have been in the rest of life. We must all die alone"? Villiers was lonely and dying from his youth. Death was his intimate companion, sometimes a boon one, but oftener a consoling friend. The death's-head adorns his wassail time. Yet this poet actually went into politics, was a candidate at the elections of the Conseil Général, and was, luckily enough, defeated. One trembles at the idea of this aristocratic anarch among the bleating law-makers. It is characteristic of him that he accepted his defeat calmly because his opponent was De Hérédia the poet. Noblesse oblige!
Villiers, like most European poets, had formed a mighty ideal of America and the Americans. He believed this country and its institutions to be what Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and a few other genuine patriots hoped it would be. He entertained for Thomas Edison the deepest admiration. His novel, a grotesque book, The Eve of the Future, contains a fanciful account of Menlo Park and its "terrifying proprietor." When Edison went to the Paris exhibition in 1889 he became acquainted with Villiers's novel. He read it at a sitting and expressed himself thus: "That man is greater than I. I can only invent. He creates." He did not meet the author, who was mortally ill, though an attempt was made to bring the Frenchman and American together. The leading motive of The Eve of the Future, pushed to an ingenuity bordering on insanity, is the construction of an artificial woman which when wound up imitates in every respect the daily life of a cultivated lady!
J. K. Huysmans became known to Villiers, and his critical recognition of his genius, tardy though it was, was one of the few consolations accorded this unhappy man by fate. Huysmans it was who gently persuaded Villiers to make a deathbed marriage and legitimize his son. His agony was intensified by the fact that his wife could not sign her name to the marriage contract, she could only make a cross. The artist in this dying man persisted to the last. Huysmans with his omnivorous eye has noted the sigh that escaped from the semi-moribund poet.
Thus he lived, thus he died, a stranger in a strange world. His plays may be better appreciated some day. If Ibsen profited by The Revolt, then the seed of Villiers has not been sown in vain. Nothing reveals Ibsen's mastery of the dramatic form so completely as his treatment of the woman who revolts and leaves her home, when compared to Villiers's handling of the same idea. Elizabeth goes away in despair, but to return. Nora departs, and the curtain quickly severs us from her future, her "miracle" speech being a faint prophecy that may be expanded some day into a fulfilment. Villiers was perhaps the pioneer; though revolting women abound in Dumas, abound in the Bible, for that matter; but the specific woman who puts up the shutters of the shop, and declares the dissolution of the matrimonial firm, is the creation of Villiers. Ibsen developed the idea, and, great artist that he is, made of it a formal drama of beauty and dramatic significance—which The Revolt is not. There are many loose psychologic ends left untied by the Frenchman, and his conclusion is dramatically ineffectual.
What is the value of such a life, what its meanings? may be asked by the curious impertinents. Why select for study the character and career of a half-mad mystic? Simply because Villiers is a poet and not a politician. It is because Villiers is Villiers that he interests the student of literature and humanity. And the bravery, the incomparable bravery, of the man who like Childe Roland blew his slug-horn, dauntless to the last! In his Azrael he uses as a motto Hassan-ben-Sabbah's "O Death! those who are about to live, salute thee." All the soul of Villiers de l'Isle Adam is in that magnificently defiant challenge!
The dramatical evolution of Maurice Maeterlinck.
When this Belgian poet, dramatist, mystic, became known in America, his plays, avowedly written for marionettes, were received with open-eyed wonder or prolonged laughter. Any idea that he be taken seriously was scouted by serious critics, and the usual fate befell them-well-meaning amateurs seized them as legitimate prey. There is no denying the fact that at one time Maeterlinck meant for most people a crazy crow masquerading in tail feathers plucked from the Swan of Avon.
But caricature and critical malignity did not retard the growth of this very remarkable young man—he was born in 1862—and presently we heard more of him. After we had finished The Treasure of the Lowly, Wisdom and Destiny, The Buried Temple, and The Double Garden, it was conceded that a mistake had been made just as in Browning's case. A mystic—yes, and one who had adjusted his very sensitive scheme of thought to the practical work-a-day work. A Belgian Emerson, rather than a Belgian Shakespeare; but an Emerson who had in him much of Edgar Allan Poe. Toujours Poe, in any consideration of modern continental poets.
Maeterlinck began with a volume of poems entitled Serres Chaudes, often compared to the unrhymed, loose rhythmic prose of Walt Whitman. They do bear a certain superficial resemblance to Whitman's effusions, though not in idea. It is rather a cataloguing, aimless apparently, of widely disparate subjects. But the substance derives more from that extraordinary book of an extraordinary poet, Les Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, than from the ragged, epical lines of Whitman. Take, for example, the following specimen of Maeterlinck's âme in Serres Chaudes:—
"One day there was a poor little festival in the suburbs of my soul. They mowed the hemlock there one Sunday morning, and all the convent virgins saw the ships pass by on the canal one sunny fast day, while the swans suffered under a poisonous bridge. The trees were lopped about the prison; medicines were brought one afternoon in June and meals for the patients were spread over the whole horizon."
Now read Rimbaud, translated admirably by Aline Gorren: "As soon as the Idea of the Deluge had sunk back into its place, a rabbit halted amid the sainfoin and the small swinging bells and said its prayers to the rainbow, through the spider's web.... The caravans started. And the splendid hotel was erected upon the chaos of ice and night at the Pole.... In hours of bitterness I imagine balls of sapphire, of metal. I am master of the silence. Why should the semblance of a vent-hole seem to pale up there at the corner of a vault?"
Both these hallucinations illustrate what Rémy de Gourmont would call disassociation of ideas.
Maeterlinck fervently studied the English dramatic classics. The result was wild ferment. In 1889 he published Princess Maleine, and such an impression did its whirling words create that Octave Mirbeau wrote his famous article in the Paris Figaro, August 24, 1890, in the course of which he made this statement, "M. Maurice Maeterlinck nous a donné l'œuvre la plus géniale de ce temps, et la plus extraordinaire et la plus naïve aussi, comparable et—oserai-je le dire?—supérieure en beauté à ce qu'il y a de plus beau dans Shakespeare ... plus tragique que Macbeth, plus extraordinaire en pensée que Hamlet."
Either M. Mirbeau, who has often played the rôle of poet-anarchist, had not read Shakespeare reasonably, or else he was indulging in a pleasing mystification. Ah, that fatal plus, the uncritical overplus, how it does jump up from the page smiting the optics with rude humour! As a matter of sheer fact, Princess Maleine is an undigested compound of Macbeth, Hamlet, Leaf, and, as Arthur Symons sagely remarks, with more of the Elizabethan violence we find in Webster and Tourneur than in Shakespeare. And its author was only a youth in his twenties.
However, with all its crudities, its imitations, its impossible mélange of blood, lust, tears, terror, there are several elements in the crazy play that indicate latent gifts of a high order. The range, is narrow and Poe-like. Fear is the theme, and a strange repetition the method of expression. There is a young prince, a Hamlet, who has fed on the art of the modern decadents. He is a spiritual half-brother to Laforgue's Hamlet, shorn of that ironist's humour. Never could Prince Hjalmar of the Maeterlinck tragedy utter such a sublimely ironic soliloquy as Laforgue's, more Shakespearian than Shakespeare.
"Alas! poor Yorick! As one seems to hear, in one little shell, all the multitudinous roar of the ocean, so I here seem to perceive the whole quenchless symphony of the universal soul, of whose echoes this box was as the cross-roads. And do you imagine a human race that would look no farther, that would abide by this vaguely, immortal sound, which one hears in a hollow skull, by way of explanation of death, by way of religion?... They also had their time, all these small folk of history; learning to read, paring their nails, illuminating the unsavoury lamp, loving every night, gormandizing, vain, crazy for compliments, kisses.... But yet—no longer to be, no longer to be in it, no longer to be of it! Not even to be able to strain against one's human heart, any afternoon in the week, the melancholy of centuries compressed into one little chord upon the piano!..."
Maeterlinck's hero, too, is oppressed by the mystery of life. Throughout the drama the Fate of ancient tragedy marches remorselessly through the doomed palace of the king. Thanks to Maeterlinck, this Fate takes on a new countenance. A disquieting attack is made upon the nerves by the repercussive repetitions, the dense pall of melancholy hanging over the place. A madhouse is a cheerful place by comparison. One king has slain another and made a beggar outcast of the Princess royal, Maleine. She is loved by and loves Prince Hjalmar—an odd transposition of the sunny passions of Romeo and Juliet. The beggar girl becomes maid in the palace of her father's murderer. It is not a happy habitation. The old King is senile and debauched by Anne, Queen of Jutland. This mis-creant, a hideous combination of Lady Macbeth, Messaline, and Phædra, has a daughter bearing the pretty name of Uglyane. Poor Uglyane! She is beautiful, unloved. The one assignation of her life is defeated by Maleine, who plays a cruel trick upon her. Going to the fountain—later we shall find that fountains assume important rôles in these plays—Maleine meets Hjalmar. Then we get the true Maeterlinck atmosphere. And this is where it may come from:—
I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant, eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees.... I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling and gazed down.... About the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity; an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn; a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
Pestilent and mystic is the atmosphere of Princess Maleine. The quotation is from The Fall of the House of Usher. There is much of Poe's dark tarn, of Auber, and the misty mid-region of Weir in the early Maeterlinck.
The dénouement is horrible. Maleine is strangled by the Queen, who also loves Hjalmar, and to the accompaniment of a lunar eclipse, thunderbolts, a cyclone, meteors that explode, wounded swans that fall from stormy skies, this night of strange portents comes to an end after the prince avenges Maleine by stabbing the queen and killing himself. There is a dog that sniffs, scratches, and howls at the locked door of the murdered princess. Its name is Pluto. There are chanting and spectral nuns, lewd beggars, an old Shakespearian nurse, a freakish boy, and the usual scared courtiers. The scenes do not hang together at all—there is no sequence of action, only of moods; or rather the same mood persists throughout. Yet the lines bite at times, and there are great fissures of silence, pauses as deep and as sinister as murky midnight pools.
These pauses are always pregnant,—like the pauses in strange pages of Schumann or those mysterious empty bars at the beginning of a Chopin tragedy in tone,—empty, forbidding vestibules to woful edifices.
"There is a little kitchen maid's soul at the bottom of her green eyes;" "I am sick to die of it one of those twenty thousand nights we have to live;" "How dark? how dark? Is a forest lit up like a ball room?" "The poor never know anything;" "Will she not have a little silence in her heart?" "She is as cold as an earthworm;" "Oh! look, look at their eyes. They will leap out upon me like frogs;" "My God! My God! She is waiting now on the wharves of hell;" "How unhappy the dead look!" These and many more, with gasps and ejaculations, make up a dialogue that is at least original, though bizarre. Naturally it is all the fruit of green, immature genius.
The ideas, hysterical and few as they are, begin to assume some coherence if compared with the emotional and disconnected experiments of the poems.
Maeterlinck has defined his æsthetic in his prose essays. He played queer pranks upon the nerves with these shadows, these spiritual marionettes, which are pure abstractions typifying various qualities of the temperament. The iteration of his speech is like the dripping of water upon the heads of the condemned. It finally stuns the consciousness, and then, like a performer upon some fantastic instrument with one string, this virtuoso executes variations boasting a solitary theme—the fear of Fear.
Speech, says Maeterlinck, is never the medium of communication of real and inmost thoughts. Silence alone can transmit them from soul to soul. We talk to fill up the blanks of life. Silence is so truth-telling, so illuminative, that few have the courage to face it. Mankind fears silence more than the dark. (Poe again; Silence.) The most illuminating silence of all, the most irresistible, is the Silence of Death. It is the unspoken word that reveals our inner self. "We do not know each other; we have not yet dared to be silent together." Modern thought and literature lack this mystic element, lack the atmosphere of the spiritual, perfect as is its technic and its intellectual equipment. The Russians have it in their fiction—a fiction of epilepsy and burning spiritual crises. The Middle Ages had it. Men stood nearer to nature, to God. They understood children, women, animals, plants, inanimate objects, with greater tenderness and greater depth. "The statues and paintings they have left us may not be perfect, but a mysterious power and secret charm that I cannot define are imprisoned within them, and bestow upon them perpetual youth. Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, are filled with the mysterious chant of the infinite, the threatening silence of souls and of gods, eternity thundering on the horizon, fate and fatality perceived interiorly without any one being able to say by what signs they have been recognized."
Here we recognize the true mystic, the feeder upon the writings of Emerson, Novalis, the Admirable Ruysbroeck; Plato, Plotinus, St. Bernard, Jacob Boehme, and Coleridge. And while he achieves astonishing flights into the blue, he always returns to mother earth. There is spiritual lift in his words,—lift and ofttimes intoxication. Generations of Flemish ancestors have dowered this young thinker with solid nerves and a saner intellectual apparatus than his early critics imagined. And he never exhibits what old Chaucer called "the spiced conscience." Neither hell's flames nor the joys of heaven appear in his pages. He preaches only of man and the soul of man.
Without the mystery of life, life is not worth the living. The static opposed to the dynamic theatre is his ideal mood, not action; the immaterial, not the obvious. Hamlet is not awake—at every moment does he advance to the very brink of awakening. The mysterious chant of the Infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon, the destiny or fatality that we are conscious within us, though by what tokens none may tell—do not all these underlie King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet? Are there not elements of deeper gravity and stability in happiness in a single moment of repose than in the whirlwind of passion? Does the soul only flower on nights of storm? "But to the tragic author, as to the mediocre painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote that appeals ... whereas it is far away from bloodshed, battle-cry, and sword thrust that the lives of most of us flow on, and men's tears are silent to-day, and invisible, and almost spiritual."
Maeterlinck goes to the modern theatre and feels as if he had spent a few hours with his ancestors, who conceived life as something that was primitive, arid, and brutal. He sees murder, hears of deceived husbands and wives instead of being shown some act of life "traced back to its sources and to its mystery by connecting links." He yearns for one of the strange moments of a higher life that flit unperceived through his dreariest hours. "Othello does not appear to live the august daily life of Hamlet, who has the time to live, inasmuch as he does not act. Othello is admirably jealous. But is it not perhaps an ancient error to imagine that it is at the moment when this passion, or others of equal violence, possess us that we live our truest lives? I have grown to believe that an old man, seated in his arm-chair, waiting patiently with his lamp beside him; giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about the house, interpreting, without comprehending, the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice of light, submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny—an old man, who conceives not that all the powers of this world, like so many heedful servants, are mingling and keeping vigil in his room, who suspects not that the very sun is supporting in space the little table against which he leans or that every star in heaven and every fibre of the soul are directly concerned in the movement of an eyelid that closes, or a thought that springs to birth—I have grown to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the husband who avenges his honour."
This excerpt (translated by Alfred Sutro) shows the real Maeterlinck, the man whose mind is imbued by the strangeness of common life, the mystic correspondences, the star in the grain of wheat. The philosophy is akin to certain passages executed in the allegoric pictures of Albrecht Dürer, William Blake, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones.
Each century, he argues, has its own near sorrow. It is well that we should sally forth in search of our sorrows—the value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and disquiets. The tragic masterpieces of the past are inferior in the quality of their sorrow compared to the sorrows of to-day. To-day it is fatality that we challenge; and this is perhaps the distinguishing note of the new theatre. It is no longer the effects of disaster that arrest our attention; it is disaster itself; and we are eager to know its essence and its laws. It is the rallying point of the most recent dramas, the centre of light with strange flames gleaming, about which revolve the souls of women and men. And a step has been taken toward the mystery so that life's mysteries may be looked in the face. Between past and future man ("What is man but a god who is afraid?") stands trembling on the tiny oasis of the present. It is the disaster of our existence that we fear our soul; did we but allow it to smile frankly in its silence and its radiance, we should be already living an eternal life. O for those "reservoirs of certitudes" on the other side of night, "whither the silent herd of souls flock every morning to slake their thirst."
"To every man there come noble thoughts that pass his heart like great white birds." Then is recalled Browning and his similitude of the meanest soul that has its better side to show its love. "In life there is no creature so degraded but knows full well which is the noble and beautiful thing he must do." A life perceived is a life transformed. To love one's self is to love thy neighbour in thyself! Maeterlinck's attitude toward woman—the true touchstone of philosopher, poet, priest, and artist—is beautiful. "I have never met a single woman who did not bring to me something that was great."
The spiritual renascence may be at hand. It is the theatre that last feels its approach. Poetry, painting, sculpture, music, all have met it halfway; only the stage lags in the rear. Plot, action, trickeries, cheap illusions, must be swept away into the limbo of things used up. Atmosphere, the atmosphere of unuttered emotions, arrested attitudes, ideas of the spiritual subconscious, are to usurp the mechanical formulas of to-day. The ideal is music—music, the archetype of the arts. (Walter Pater preached this platonic doctrine.) "It is only the words that at first sight seem useless that really count in a work." But to realize, to exteriorize the mystery, the significance of the soul life, what a strange and symbolic web must be woven by the poet-dramatist! He must break with the conventions of the past and create something that is not quite painting, not quite drama, something that is more than poetry, less than music—full of ecstasies, silent joys, luminous pauses, and the burning fever of the soul that sometimes slays.
It is very beautiful, very ideal—bard, poet, mystic, moralist, and playwright, that Maeterlinck dared to become. He practised before he preached—unlike most men; and he had the slow fortitude of the brave. We know now that artistically he springs from the loins of Poe and Hoffmann; that Villiers de l'Isle Adam was his spiritual godfather; that by the Belgian's artful scale of words he evoked images in our mind which recall the harmonies of unheard music; that the union of mysticism and freedom of thinking lends to his work peculiar eloquence; that his device is "Within me there is more," a mediæval inscription borrowed from an old doorway in Bruges. He is more revolutionary than Ibsen in the matter of technic. Maeterlinck writes a play about an open door, a closed window, or the vague and disheartening twilights of cloudy gardens. That he is quite sane in his early work we must not assert—since when shall art and sanity be driven in easy harness?