Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck. Jethro Bithell

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СКАЧАТЬ and poverty. Both men, indeed, had been hostile to cheap popularity. Barbey lived, to quote Paul Bourget, "in a state of permanent revolt and continued protest." He had written scathing attacks on the Parnassians. Both poets were idealists among the naturalists; their idealism is a bridge spanning naturalism and joining the romanticists with the symbolists or neo-romanticists.

Villiers was a king in exile on whom the young squires attended. But they themselves had their spurs to win; and it was the greatest good fortune for Maeterlinck that he was able to join their company and take part in their campaign. Several of them, Jean Ajalbert, Ephraïm Mikhaël, Pierre Quillard, had already been contributing to La Basoche, a review published at Brussels. There was Rodolphe Darzens, who, two years later, was to anticipate Maeterlinck in writing a play on Mary Magdalene. There was Paul Roux, who, as time went on, blossomed into "Saint-Pol-Roux le Magnifique"—he who founded "le Magnificisme," the school of poetry which had for its programme "a mystical magnificat to eternal nature." It was in Pierre Quillard's rooms one evening that Grégoire Le Roy read to this circle of friends a short story by Maeterlinck: Le Massacre des Innocents. On the day following he introduced the author of the tale. On the 1st March, 1886, these young writers founded La Pléiade,[12] a short-lived review—six numbers appeared—which nevertheless played an important part. Beside the authors mentioned, it published contributions from René Ghil. It had the glory of printing the first verses of Charles van Lerberghe, and, in addition to several poems which were to appear in Serres Chaudes, Maeterlinck's Massacre des Innocents (May, 1886).

Le Massacre des Innocents was signed "Mooris Maeterlinck." The author discarded it; but it was reprinted in Gérard Harry's monograph (1909). A translation by Edith Wingate Rinder appeared at Chicago in 1895.[13]

      It is a story which reproduces the delightful quaintness of early Dutch and Flemish painting:

      "There were thirty horsemen or thereabouts, covered with armour, round an old man with a white beard. On the croup of their horses rode red or yellow lansquenets, who dismounted and ran across the snow to stretch their limbs, while several soldiers clad in iron dismounted also, and pissed against the trees they had tied their horses to.

      "Then they made for the Golden Sun Inn, and knocked at the door, which was opened reluctantly, and they went and warmed themselves by the fire while beer was served to them.

      "Then they went out of the inn, with pots and pitchers and loaves of wheaten bread for their companions who had stayed round the man with the white beard, he who was waiting amid the lances.

      "The street being still deserted, the captain sent horsemen behind the houses, in order to keep a hold on the hamlet from the side of the fields, and ordered the lansquenets to bring before him all infants of two years old or over, that they might be massacred, even as it is written in the Gospel of Saint Matthew."

      Maeterlinck in this story has simply turned an old picture, or perhaps several pictures, into words. The cruelty of the massacre does not affect us in the least; the style is such that anyone who has seen the Breughels' paintings understands at once that a series of fantastic pictures, which have no relation whatever to fact, or logic, or history, are being drawn; not dream-pictures, but scenes drawn with the greatest clearness, and figures standing out boldly in flesh and blood:

      "But he replied in terror that the Spaniards had arrived, that they had set fire to the farm, hanged his mother in the willow-trees, and tied his nine little sisters to the trunk of a great tree."

      (You are to see the woman hanging in the willow-trees, the deep green and any other colours you like. … Never mind about the pain the little girls must be suffering.)

      "They came near a mill, on the skirts of the forest, and saw the farm burning in the midst of the stars." (This is a flat canvas, remember.) "Here they took their station, before a pond covered with ice, under enormous oaks. …

      "There was a great massacre on the pond, in the midst of huddling sheep, and cows that looked on the battle and the moon."

      This transposition of the mood (Stimming) of old paintings (not by any means word-painting or descriptive writing) is the secret of much of the verse of two other Flemings—Elskamp and Verhaeren. It is an immense pity that Maeterlinck did not write more in this fashion; many of us would have given some of his essays for this pure artistry. Not that he threw his gift of seeing pictures away; he made good use of it even when he had' given up the direct painting of moods for the indirect suggestion of them (or, in other words, when from a realist he had become a symbolist).

      Maeterlinck, at the time he wrote The Massacre of the Innocents, must have been trying his hand at various forms of literature. Adolphe van Bever in his little book publishes a letter from Charles van Lerberghe to himself which shows that the two young poets corrected each other's efforts. The letter, too, draws a portrait of Maeterlinck as he appeared at this time:

      "Maeterlinck sent me verses, sonnets principally in Heredia's manner, but Flemish in colour, short stories something like Maupassant's, a comedy full of humour and ironical observation, and other attempts. It is characteristic that he never sent me any tragedy or epic poem, never anything bombastic or declamatory, never anything languorous or sentimental either. Neither the rhetorical nor the elegiac had any hold on him. He was a fine handsome young fellow, always riding his bicycle or rowing, the kind of student you would expect to see at Yale or Harvard. But he was a poet besides being an athlete, and his robust exterior concealed a temperament of extreme sensitiveness. … "

      It was certainly van Lerberghe's own idea that it was he who had trained Maeterlinck; and Maeterlinck would certainly admit it. It was van Lerberghe, too, more than any other, who won Maeterlinck over to symbolism. But Maeterlinck met Mallarmé personally during his stay in Paris; in short, various influences worked upon him to turn him from Heredia's and Maupassant's manner to that of Mallarmé's disciples.

      The tide was flowing in that direction. Verhaeren was soon to desert the Parnassian camp.[14] Henri de Régnier was on the point of doing so.[15] Two years before Jean Moréas had published his first book: Les Syrtes (December 1884). In 1885 René Ghil's Légendes d'âmes et de sangs and Jules Laforgue's Les Complaintes came out; in 1886, René Ghil's Le Traité du Verbe, Jean Moréas's Les Cantilènes, Rimbaud's Les Illuminations, Vielé-Griffin's Cueille d'Avril. In the pages of La Vogue, launched on the 11th of April, 1886, were appearing some of the poems which Gustave Khan was to publish in 1887, as Les Palais Nomades. All these books are landmarks in the onward path of symbolism;[16] not because they are all, technically, symbolistic, but because each is in a new manner.

      Closely associated with the birth and growth of symbolism is the question of the origin of vers libres. French authorities differ: some credit Jules Laforgue with its invention; others a Polish Jewess, Marie Kryzinska, who seems to have attempted to write French poetry; and two of the French poets who were the first to use the medium, Francis Vielé-Griffin and Gustave Kahn, might dispute the glory of being its originators. As to Francis Vielé-Griffin, he is said to have introduced it by translations of Walt Whitman;[17] or, in other words, the French vers libre is an imitation of Whitman's lawless line. Now this is a matter which, as we shall see, directly concerns Maeterlinck; so it will not be extraneous to our subject to discuss here the question of the origin of vers libres.

      Marie Kryzinska may СКАЧАТЬ