Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck

hent. A new light had come into his life. The Treasure of the Humble had been dedicated to a Parisian lady, G

nstrained to imagine painfully the resolutions and the actions of an ideal sage, or to draw from my heart the moral of a beautiful dream perforce a little vague. It has sufficed me

osophy is directly contradicted.[1] Whereas in The Treasure of the Humble we read of "the august, everyday life of a Hamlet ... who has the time to live because he does not act," we now hear of "the miserable blindness of Hamlet," who, though he had more intelligence than all those around him,

: "When shall we give up the idea that death is more important than life, and that misfortune is greater than happiness?...

read his works consecutively. He himself wrote to G. van Hamel, soon after the publication of Sagesse et Dest

him. But the many mysteries which have dominated the mind and the life of men, and which possess no sufficient reality, he would now banish from art as well. Fate, divine ju

he above (these words

is that I want to express things more and more simple, things mor

. He has himself drawn her portrait in a chapter of a later book, Le double Jardin. In 1904

ght to have doctors for human misery, just as we have doctors for illness. Because illness is common, it does not follow that we ought never to talk of health;

n number of exterior events; but we have a very powerful action on what these events become in ourselves. It is what happens to most men that darkens or lightens their life; but the interior life of good men itself lightens all that happens to them. If you have been b

ch souls that have grown nobler than itself. That is why tragic poets rarely permit a sage to appear on the scene; no drama ever happens among sages, and the presence of the sage paralyses destiny. There is not a single tragedy in which fatality re

in darkness, and in this shadow we are born; but many men can travel beyond it;

in different directions. Reason gives birth to justice; wisdom gives birth to goodness. There is no love in reason; there is much in wisdom. Not reason, but love, must be the glass in which th

ust avoid, but the discouragement-it brings to those who receive it like a master. People suffer little by suffering its

or life, which has formed our soul. Nothing is more just than grief; and our life wa

he sage? When we put unhappiness in one side of the scales, each one of us lays down in the other the idea he has of happiness. The savage will lay alcohol, gunpowder, and feathers there; t

e renounces, the happiness of his renunciation is born of pride. The supreme end of wisdom is not to renounce, but to find the fixed point of happiness in life. It is not by renouncing joys that we shall become wise; but by becoming wise we shall renounce, without knowing it, the joys that cannot rise to our level. Certain ideas on renunciation,[4] resignation, and sacrifice exhaust

his very negation a higher moral law is born immediately. With the suppression of punishme

l that grows is a soul that comes nearer to truth." Death and the other mysteries are now only the points where our present knowledge ends; but we may hope that science will dispel our ignorance. In the meantime if we seclude ourselves from

m their course and force them into a stagnant pool. The saints were egotists, because they fled from life to shelter in a narrow cell; but it is contact with men which teaches us how to love God.[6]

great German poets, with Nietzsche and Dehmel-tends, not to the limi

qui vivent d'amour vivent d'éternité," Maeterlinck might have said with Verhaeren.[9] The main difference between Maeterlinck's final philosophy and that of his great countryman is this: that whereas Maeterlinck, like Goet

to fight destiny. Louis XVI. is given as an example of a victim of destiny. He was the victim of destiny because of his feebleness, blindness, and vanity. But why was he weak, blind, and vain? According to the creed abandoned by Maeterlinck, it was his fate to be weak, blind, and vain. In Wisdom and Destiny the argument is: If he had been wise ... But how can a weak, bli

al which might well have suggested Maeterlinck's La Vie des Abeilles (The Life of the Bee). It appeared in 1901. Maeterlin

mple account of the bees' short year from April to the last days of September, told by one who loves and knows them to those who, he assum

an observation hive, have the most mysterious and fatiguing task of all, to secrete and form the wax; just as there are

that dwell in the same soul; they have a collectivist policy. This was not always so; and even to-day there are savage bees who live in lonely wretchedness. The hive of to-day is perfect, though pitiless; it merges the individual in the republic, and the republic itself is regularly sacrificed to the abstract, immortal city of the future. The will of Nature clearly tends to the imp

the bees is the future. To this future everything is subordinated, with astonishing foresight, co-operation, and inflexibility. It is clear that the bees have will-power. You may see where this will-power, which is the "spirit of the hive," resides, if you place the careworn head of a virgin worker under the microscope: within this little head are the circumvolutions of the vastest and the most ingenious brain of the hive, the most be

ot fear them. They are inoffensive because they are happy, and they are happy without knowing why: they are fulfilling the law. All creatur

ld, would be to a superhuman observer trying to fix the limits of human intelligence. And then, think of the situation of the bee in the world: by the side of an extraordinary being who is always upsetting the laws of its nature. How should we behave if some Higher Being should foil o

sland. When we study the intelligence of bees we study what is most precious in our own substance, an atom of that extraordinary matter which has the property of transfiguring blind necessity, of organisi

r instance, will profit, for life constantly profits by the ills it surmounts. A trifle may be discovered to-morrow which will make them innocuous. Confidence in life is the first of our duties. We have everything to hope from evolution. It will less

Just as it is written on the tongue, in the mouth, and in the stomach of the bee that its duty is to produce honey, so it is written in our eyes, our ears, our marrow, in every lobe of our head, in the whole nervous system of our body, that we have

e same goal as Verhaeren. The "futurists" have based their manifesto on what these two Flemings teach; and though the futurists go to scandalous

ui bout de sang

----------------

r, venu de l'i

ien dont les am

e para?t

uveau à son

ff., collects passages in The Treasure

122. Cf. Verhaeren, "Un Mati

jusqu'à ce jou

urir et non

pp. 180-181. Cf. also Chapter VII of "L'Ev

rlinck says: "Nature rejects renunciation in

we have recognised that the work of the flesh, cursed during twenty centuries, is natural and legitimate. We no longe

ciety and not in solitude that he finds numerous opportunities

nguishes between virtue and vice: they are the same forces, he

haeren,

eures d'a

and Destin

La Foule" (Les Vi