Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck. Jethro Bithell

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CHAPTER I

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Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck[1] was born at Ghent on the 29th of August, 1862. It is known that his family was settled at Renaix in East Flanders as early as the fourteenth century; and the Maeterlincks are mentioned as burghers of Ghent in the annals of Flanders. The name is said to be derived from the Flemish word "maet" (Dutch "maat"), "measure," and is interpreted as "the man who measures out: distributor." In harmony with this interpretation the story goes that one of the poet's ancestors was mayor of his village during a year of famine, and that he in that capacity distributed corn among the poor. Maeterlinck's father was a notary by profession; being in comfortable circumstances, however, he did not practise, but lived in a country villa at Oostacker, near Ghent, on the banks of the broad canal which joins Ghent to the Scheldt at the Dutch town of Terneuzen.[2] Here through the paternal garden the sea-going ships seemed to glide, "spreading their majestic shadows over the avenues filled with roses and bees."[3]

Those bees and flowers in his father's garden stand for much in the healthy work of his second period. Over the fatalistic work of his first period lies, it may be, the shadow of the town he was born in. Maeterlinck was never absorbed by Ghent, as Rodenbach was by Bruges; but he was, as a young man, oppressed by some of its moods. Casual visitors to Ghent and Bruges may see nothing of the melancholy that poets and painters have woven into them; they may see in them thriving commercial towns; but poets and painters have loved their legendary gloom. "Black, suspicious watch-towers," this is Ghent seen by an artist's eyes, "dark canals on whose weary waters swans are swimming, mediaeval gateways, convents hidden by walls, churches in whose dusk women in wide, dark cloaks and ruche caps cower on the floor like a flight of frightened winter birds. Little streets as narrow as your hand, with bowed-down ancient houses all awry, roofs with three-cornered windows which look like sleepy eyes. Hospitals, gloomy old castles. And over all a dull, septentrional heaven."[4] That hospital on the canal bank which starts a poem in Serres Chaudes[5] may be one he knew from childhood; the old citadel of Ghent with its dungeons may be the prototype of the castles of his dramas.

One part of his life in Ghent is still a bitter memory to our poet. "Maeterlinck will never forgive the Jesuit fathers of the Collège de Sainte-Barbe[6] their narrow tyranny. … I have often heard him say that he would not begin life again if he had to pay for it by his seven years at school. There is, he is accustomed to say, only one crime which is beyond pardon, the crime which poisons the pleasures and kills the smile of a child."[7]

Out of twenty pupils in the highest class at Sainte-Barbe fourteen were intended to be Jesuits or priests. Such a school was not likely to be a good training-place for poets. Indeed, though Latin verses were allowed, it forbade the practice of vernacular poetry.[8] And yet this very school has turned out not less than five poets of international reputation. Emile Verhaeren (who may be called the national poet of Flanders, the most international of French poets after Victor Hugo) and Georges Rodenbach had been schoolboys together at Sainte-Barbe; and on its benches three other poets, Maeterlinck, Grégoire Le Roy, and Charles van Lerberghe, formed friendships for life. These three boys put their small cash together and subscribed to La Jeune Belgique, the clarion journal which, under the editorship of Max Waller, was calling Belgian literature into life; they devoured its pages clandestinely, as other schoolboys smoke their first cigarettes;[9] and Maeterlinck even sent in a poem which was accepted and printed. This was in 1883.

The fact that Maeterlinck was reading La Jeune Belgique shows that he was already spoilt for a priest. But he was essentially religious; and his career has proved that he was one of those poets Verhaeren sings of, who have arrived too late in history to be priests, but who are constrained by the force of their convictions to preach a new gospel. It was the religion inborn in him, as well as his monastic training, which made him a reader and interpreter of such mystics as Ruysbroeck, Jakob Boehme, and Swedenborg. As a schoolboy he did not feel attracted to poetry alone; he had a great liking for science, and his great wish was to study medicine.[10] Some time ago he wrote to a French medical journal as follows:

      "I never commenced the study of medicine. I did my duty in conforming with the family tradition, which ordains that the eldest son shall be an avocat. I shall regret to my last day that I obeyed that tradition, and consecrated my most precious years to the vainest of the sciences. All my instincts, all my inclinations, attached me to the study of medicine, which I am more than convinced is the most beautiful of the keys that give access to the great realities of life."

      It was in 1885 that he entered the University of Ghent as a student of law. Like Lessing and Goethe, he had no respect for his professors. He was again a fellow-student of van Lerberghe and Le Roy; they also were students of jurisprudence. He was twenty-four when, according to his parents' wish, he settled in Ghent as an avocat; to lose, as Gérard Harry puts it, "with triumphant facility the first and last causes which were confided to him." His shyness and the thin, squeaking voice in his robust peasant's frame were against him in a profession which in any case he hated. He practised for a year or so, and then—"il a jeté la toque et la robe aux orties."

      In 1886 he set out for Paris, ostensibly with the object of completing his legal education there. Grégoire Le Roy accompanied him; and each stayed about seven months. They had lodgings at 22 Rue de Seine. Grégoire Le Roy scamped painting at the Ecole St. Luc and the Atelier Gervex et Humbert; and the pair of them spent a great deal of time in the museums. But the important thing in their stay in Paris was that they came into contact with men of letters. In the Brasserie Pousset at the heart of the Quartier Latin they heard Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, "that evangelist of dream and irony," reciting his short stories before writing them down. "I saw Villiers de L'Isle-Adam very often during the seven months I spent at Paris," Maeterlinck told Huret. "All I have done I owe to Villiers, to his conversation more than to his works, though I admire the latter exceedingly." Villiers was twenty-two years older than Maeterlinck, having been born in 1840; but his masterpieces had not long been published, and it was only in the later 'eighties that the young poets who were to be known as symbolists began to gather round him, as they gathered round Mallarmé and Verlaine.

Villiers de L'Isle-Adam died in Paris in 1889. In the same year died, also in Paris, another writer who might be proved to have influenced Maeterlinck,[11] even if the latter had not placed on record his high admiration of him. This was Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (born 1808). Maeterlinck, after the banquet offered to him by the city of Brussels on the occasion of his receiving the Nobel prize, wrote despondently, expressing the good omen, seeing that men of real genius like Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and Barbey СКАЧАТЬ