MAURICE MAETERLINCK ON "HEROISM."
THE words "heroic," "heroism," "hero," "heroine," are supposed to look well in journalistic headlines, and their sound is no doubt vainglorious. Yet M. Maeterlinck has written about "Heroism" in an article printed some weeks ago in the Daily Mail. If he had chosen the word "Courage." which has a calm and strong modesty equal and similar to that of the bravest men and women, he would not have begun his work by making a rash concession to the noisy young lions of the newspaper Press. To choose "Heroism" was to strike a false keynote, the tonic of the scale in which a very difficult piece was to be conceived and brought to com- pletion. The piece, too, required for its treatment either a poetry as masculine as Browning's or a patient method of reconstructive research as versatile as Darwin's.
H. Maeterlinck's good genius has provinces of her own, with serene valleys and gentle hills, where a brooding mysticism end a very alert realism blend together, producing musical effects as charming as hushed echoes and as original as Nature's whims. Here is the poetry of a dream-world, and the dream is a wraith of our world.
In his new essay H. Maeterlinck is not at home ; he flurries into errors of judgment, like a nervous guest who wants to be very impressive. Much is said about death, and we are told that death is no longer what it was ; to-day "it is never still." As if death had ever been still anywhere in Nature, or had ever been unmysterious to the brave or less than fearful to the timid. " Every year," says Professor Fournier d'Albe, "sums 40,000,000 human corpses are consigned to the earth. A million tons of human flesh and blood and bone are discarded as of no further service to humanity." In civil life, as in war, death is never still ; and to the brave death should be a generous inspiration, being a momentary sleep between now and the hereafter. Great courage and death are companions, while cowardice and death are as hare and hound.
Though M. Maeterlinck broods over death, yet he forgets to put his subject into its own historic atmosphere. Not a word is said about the universal strife that encompasses all living creatures with war, and pain, and infinite uncertainty. Life everywhere feeds on lives ; something dies and suffers a resurrection of vitality, whenever appeased hunger renews health ; and, as a rule, even between the members of the same species there is continuous feud as well as competition, so that courage all day long is necessary in the twin drama of living and dying.
War being the condition of this world, the hypersensitive are apt to fail in courage, while the too ambitious may sink Into cruel egotiams like those which have harassed Europa
from the politics of Germany. Among civilized nations the useful and necessary, thing is to avoid with equal care a political creed of violence and the perils of sentimentality, which in British statecraft have been far too treacherous. Many persons believe that because they are timid and emotional, dreatuful and epicene, all strife ought to cease. As well quarrel with the law of gravitation or with floods, tempests, earthquakes, and volcanoes! A very earnest man brought up his only son in the faith of coddled supergoodness, hiding from him all the disenchantments and dangers of the struggle for bread in a large town; then the poor boy was turned loose among the greedy conflicts of industrialism, where his courage snapped like frayed elastic. It was murder, his wrong education, just as it would be murder to send a naked boy to sleep out of doors in the frost. Courage to recognize life as a wondrous varied war, whose civilian strife in a thousand ways needs much careful improvement, this we all need, and more than this we have no right to expect During a million years, perhaps more, strife has been the historian of all human effort ; and to-day the inborn fighting gifts of mankind are as virile as they have ever been. Nowhere is there a sign of peace, even the pacifieiste have courage enough to make war both against Nature's ordinance and against all combativeness that differs from their own. Evidently M. Maeterlinck lute chosen a subject thronged with debatm, but it does not suit his genius.
In little he might have done enough for one essay ; he failed, and failed badly, because in too much he gave far too little, offering as truth a vague hypothesis that offends the historic sense. That courage has had a wonderful evolution, adapting itself to every change in the needs and conditions of human society, is true, of course ; but M. Maeterlinck believes that our own generation is the bravest in all history. How is courage to be weighed and measured? It ie a spiritual thing, and its manifestations differ from age to age; they cannot be classed like schoolchildren at a prize-giving. What should we think if a writer tried to measure all the love or all the pain which has come busily to our race through centuries past and in our own times ?
Yet Id. Maeterlinck has tried to peas judgment on the past and present courage of mankind. In a few lines he reviews the Heroic Age of Greece, and decides that Homer's warriors, "the ancestors of all the heroes of our day," "are not really very brave." "They have a wholesome dread of being hit or wounded, and au ingenuous and manifest fear of death. Their mighty conflicts . . . inflict more noise than pain upon their adversaries, they deliver many more words than blows." Now, M. Maeterlinck is himself a boxer, and from boxing he ought to have learnt that hand-to-hand contests, round after round, not only produce a fatigue that pants and aches, but expose men to injury and swift defeat. The closer the fight in war, the easier it is to kill or to be killed. But Homer, being a humane poet, could not drench his art with blood, nor could be break the consoling law of contrasts. Words he needed much more than blows, and reposeful descriptions as much as victories and defeats. Routs and panics neither astonished nor angered him, for his age believed that mortal courage was governed by many troublesome gods. Besides, Homer knew, just as we know, that in most men courage and cowardice are as light and shade, twin opposites. A brave soldier may be a coward in a dangerous storm at sea, like Alan Break ; a brave sailor, whose courage would be alert in a typhoon, might be cowed by a contest against firearms. Never meet we forget the influence on bravery of habit and custom. Perfect courage, at ease in the company of all dangers, may bare been as uncommon among brave men as great colour has been among good painters.
These considerations cannot be rated at too high a level. They help us to interpret bravery and to be cool and just in criticiem. Let us not suppose, like M. Maeterlinck, that Grecian warriors were "the first masters of bravery "; for we have no right to forget the first men who bore with fortitude the great and grim battles that joined families into tribes and tribes into nations. To forget Primitive Man, the forefather of all other men, would be ridiculous, since from his courage a gradual progress crept into being and laid a secure founda- tion for the civilizations of antiquity. It was a courage that encountered awful perils. In Quaternary times, here in England. the Flint Man held his own against the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the bison, large bears and Eons, hyaenas, and sabre-toothed tigers. Add to these dangers the storms, inundations, earthquakes, perilous climates, famines, diseases, and tribal hostilities that the Flint Man in his migrations endured everywhere; then his courage will begin to come before your mind in a series of pictures. At first it seems to be a peerless courage, but soon we remember that it belonged to its own times. In to-day's London the Flint Man would be scared and useless, just as we should be among such dangers as he defeated. To every age its own courage and customs : and to every age let us grant a wondrous diversity of courage, since a habit of braving one particular danger is no sure proof of a courage ready and fit to bear all other perils. Tin-n the British Army of to-day into a mediaevalized host armed cap-a-pie with ponderous mail, and what would be the result P "Tommy Atkins "might lose his health, and his courage might droop with fatigue.
M. Maeterlinck takes a rapid half-glance at the mediaeval armies. He nays: "We will not delay to consider the battles of the Middle Ages or of the Renaissance, in which the fiercest hand-to-hand encounters of the mercenaries often left not more than half a dozen victims on the field." Gracious I At Agincourt the French lost in killed alone more than ten thousand men ; and at Flodden Field, in about sixty minutes, the Scotch lost most of their nobles as well as ten thousand privates. Nor is it difficult to understand this terrible slaughter. The English archers scattered the attack, then the hand-to-hand fight was a massacre rather than a contest. There is no reason for us to believe that our scientific war, when fought in a scientific manner, is more destructive than were English battles during the Middle Ages. Eight months of scientific war have not taken an overwhelming toll from our British troops ; and it should be remem- bered that as many as sixty per cent, of the wounded have recovered.* Farther, two things are terribly dia. tressing to German soldiers, and both have been inherited from primitive warfare : one is the attack in close formation and one is a counter-attack with cold steel. The Germans have omitted science from their drill and fire discipline from their one of rifles. Not even their dead lie in open order. Close formation is the defeated creed of their wild courage.
Even in his attitude to current events M. Maeterlinck is =historic. He forgets that the contests and crises of industrialism need all the qualities that make good soldiers, and he writes as follows :—
"At the very moment when man appeared most exhausted and enervated by the comforts and vices of civilization, at the moment when he was happiest and therefore most selfish . . he finds kimself suddenly confronted with an unprecedented danger, which lie is almost certain the most heroic nations of history would not have faced nor even have dreamt of facing; whereas he does not even dream that it is possible to do aught but face it."
Why should we pass away from the quietness of tenth? France, Russia, Germany, Austria, were drilled nations, and they knew that war was coming. Yes, and they knew that diplomacy and trade can achieve victories as harmful as defeats on stricken fields. German merchants and their finance held Antwerp securely, long before the war broke out, Then again, from the beginning of human life war has been terrible. Early tribes either enslaved or massacred after defeat, and later peoples harried and conquered, suffered all that they could suffer, and in many a way mercifully unknown now to our troops. At the beginning of the nineteenth century soldiers knew little about great surgery, nothing about anaesthetics; camp sanitation was very bad, good nursing was uneommon, and septic poisons ruled over unclean hospitals, for micro-organisms had not yet been discovered. Few comforts came to the firing-line by post, and very often the food was =wholesome. War has improved : and let us remember also that the present war, despite its noble tonic bravery, seems to have some humiliating lessons to impress on public opinion everywhere. Newspaper statements declare, let us hope with exaggeration, that about two million soldiers have been captured by the French, Russians, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and Serbs. If so, then the courage of Europe has been dishonoured by a great many men. Not all surrenders are cowardly, to be sure ; wounded men are left behind during retreats, and soldiers, like • it is a lemon in politics to compare our Iowa with the easoelty lists at (adularia enterprise. In 1913. acoording to the Board of Trade, no fewer then 2,099 persons were killed in road Ind street accliknte, and 42,344 were iwilared while runways is the United Kingdom injured AIN perseee and baled 1.194. Br this Peace 2
wrestlers, may be overcome by physical force. But the rule of honour is this : that unwounded soldiers, except singly or in small and isolated groups, or in fortresses after a great resistance, have no more right to surrender voluntarily than doctors who are well have a right to neglect their patients during a perilous epidemic. Both in war and in civil life the finest courage prefers death to surrender : and courage to be fine needs from early youth a patriotic education in the principles of unyielding self-respect.
Previous page
