THOSE who think of M. Maeterlinck primarily as a philosopher
with a philosophy in the making, and search each new volume
from his pen for signs of growth in definiteness and con- sistency, will lay down The Double Garden with a certain amount of disappointment. In The Buried Temple there was a distinct and important advance in the direction of recogni- tion of a probable controlling Force among the " forces " and " fluids " and " stars " and " fates " and " gods " and " demi- gods " who occupy the Pantheon of M. Maeterlinck's imagina- tion with such curious contempt of all the laws of sequence, precedence, and coherence of thought. There was also the expression of something like a hope that out of the depths of man's subconsciousness there might one day be evolved a sort of ladder of connection with some corresponding Supernal Consciousness pervading the Unseen and the Unknown. In The Double Garden this promise or hope is not confirmed. One might almost say that it is explicitly revoked. None the less, the book contains a considerable number of very remarkable passages that make implicitly for truths denied by its overt assumptions. However, it was M. Maeterlinck who, in an earlier work, drew attention to the too much forgotten truism that it is not in his clearly defined thoughts, but in those thoughts which have not yet cleared themselves, that the riches of a man's nature are stored, and that we may learn more by pondering in our hearts the mysteries we cannot unravel and the paradoxes we cannot harmonise than by developing the thin logic of a well-selected handful of self-evident and mutually dependent propositions. And, after all, it is as the poet rather than the philosopher of the subconsciousness that M. Maeterlinck's distinction is unquestioned, and in this character he is at his best in many chapters of The Double Garden ; best of all in that delightful study—so full of tender and affectionate insight—of the bulldog puppy that died before it had learned the many difficult lessons of duty and policy which distressed its little brain on the threshold of life. Poor little Pelleas, with " his bonny fat paws, shapeless and not yet stiffened, carrying through the unexplored pathways of his new existence his huge and serious head, flat-nosed and, as it were, rendered heavy with thought," must be taken at once into the innermost heart of every reader who is not a churl. And the whole race of dogs ought to reap benefit in more respectful consideration for their ways and their wants from this expo- sition of one little puppy's silent observations of the world of man and matter in which, had he not died young, he would have been called to take a responsible part :—
"This thankless and rather sad head, like that of an over- worked child, was beginning the overwhelming work that oppresses every brain at the start of life. He had, in less than five or six weeks, to get into his mind, taking shape within it, an image and a.satisfactory conception of the universe. Man, aided by all the knowledge of his own elders and his brothers, takes thirty or forty years to outline that conception, but the humble dog has to unravel it for himself in a few clays It was a question, then, of studying the ground, which can be scratched and dug up and which sometimes reveals surprising things ; of casting at the sky which is uninteresting, for there is nothing there to eat, one glance that does away with it for good and all; of discovering the grass, the admirable and green grass, the springy and cool grass, a field for races and sports, a friendly and boundless bed, in which lies hidden the good and wholesome couch-grass."
But besides " Nature," there was his master's house, and a whole code of mysterious and seemingly arbitrary laws, to explore and understand
"To recognise that the kitchen is the privileged and most agreeable spot in that divine dwelling, although you are hardly • The Double Garden. By Maurice Maeterlinck. Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattes. London: George Allen. Ds.]
allowed to abide in it because of the cook, who is a considerable, but jealous, power; to learn that doors are important and capricious volition, which sometimes lead to felicity, but which most often, hermetically closed, mute and stern, haughty and heartless, remain deaf to all entreaties ; to admit once for all, that the essential good things of life, the indisputable blessings, generally imprisoned in pots and stewpans, are almost always inaccessible
But the list of things to be learned by an industrious and affectionate puppy is far too long to be transcribed in full. And the wonder of it all is that every good puppy seems to have an intuitive comprehension of his duty to man, and to know that there is a world-old alliance between the canine and the human races which he is bound by a birthright of honour to observe.
Some beautiful chapters on flowers show us another side of M. Maeterlinck's sympathetic genius. But these, charming as they are, are not much more than the padding of the volume. The substance is in the chapters about chance, the illness of the King, "the Modern Drama," "the Foretelling of the Future," the " praise of the sword." One reads with a smile
of amusement that "it is, in certain respects, quite inexplicable that we should not know the future." To M. Maeterlinck it
is staggering that " a singular infirmity, a curious limitation of our intellect causes us not to know what is going to happen to us, when we are fully aware of all that has befallen us." But to the average intelligence the oddness would seem to lie In the fact that so subtle a thinker as M. Maeterlinck should not grasp the essential difference between the knowableness of accomplished facts and the unknowableness of events not yet shaped. He has consulted clairvoyants and come to much the same conclusion in regard to their art as have the majority of level-beaded inquirers :—
" In this ill-balanced world, I met with much knavery, simula- tion and gross lying. But I had also the occasion to study certain incontestable phenomena close at hand. These are not enough to decide whether it be given to man to rend the tissue of illusions that hides the future from him : but they throw a some- what strange light upon that which passes in the place which to us seems the most inviolable. I mean the holy of holies of the Buried Temple' in which our most intimate thoughts and the forces that lie beneath them and are unknown to us go in and out without our knowledge and grope in search of the mysterious road that leads to future events."
Like the clairvoyants he consulted, M. Maeterlinck is an expert in the business of discovering and interpreting the secrets of the subconsciousness ; and, like them again, he loses the clue as soon as he comes out of the "buried temple." One detects this in the verbiage about groping "in search of the mysterious road that leads to future events." The road to future events lies through the wills by which they are shaped. And the reason why we cannot see them is that they are not yet there to be seen. But M. Maeterlinck, like his little bull- dog, has for the present cast one glance at the sky " that does away with it for good and all." He will have nothing in the universe but a self-developing automatic machine corre- sponding to the subconsciousness of man, in which he finds everything that makes human nature interesting. All the ideas covered by such a phrase as "the dayspring from on high bath visited us" he dismisses as illusions, and—denying the possibility of new departures initiated by a Supreme Creative - Will persisting within and without the material universe—be goes on to ignore as a factor in life the free will of the individual human being. And yet, most obviously, it is by the one will or the other, or by both, that the future we cannot foretell is continually being fashioned ; while the fact that so much can be, and often is, accurately foretold by clairvoyants means only that a very large number of human beings renounce the use of their free will, and allow their destinies to work themselves out upon the lines of tempera- ment. In such cases the so-called future can be read in the present, for it is nothing more than the natural development of conditions that are present. It is, in short, a calculable function of qualities and defects under actual observation. The future we cannot know is the real future. That remains to be discovered—in the process of making it—by men of faith and action. Oddly enough, M. Maeterlinck gives us an excellent illustration of the manner in which man may divert the course of Nature by the exercise of reason, wit, and skill in the chapter on " Death and the Crown." But he does not seem to see the true bearing of his illustration. His theme is the illness of King Edward VII. interrupting the Coronation
pageant, and suggesting to the minds of the religious a judgment of God; and he asks us to divest our minds of all thoughts of the supernatural, and fix our eyes on "the really human and certain parts of that great accomplished drama." The King is approaching— "the essential moment of his life. Suddenly, an unseen enemy attacks him and lays him low. Forthwith, other men run up. They are the princes of Science. They do not ask if it be God, Destiny, Chance, Justice that comes to obstruct the road of the victim whom they raise. Believers or unbelievers in other spheres or at other moments, they put no questions to the murky cloud. They are here the qualified envoys of the reason of our kind, of naked reason, abandoned to itself as it wanders alone in a monstrous universe. Deliberately they cast off from it senti- ment, imagination, all that does not properly belong to it. They use only the purely human, almost animal portion of its flame, as though they had the certainty that every being can vanquish a force of nature only by the, so to speak, specific force which nature has set within him. 'Thus handled, this flame is perhaps narrow and weak, but precise, exclusive, invincible as that of the blow- pipe of the enameller or the chemist. It is fed with facts, with minute, but sure and innumerable observations. It lights only in- significant and successive points in the immense unknown ; but it does not stray, it goes where it is directed by the keen eye that guides it, and the point which it reaches is screened from the influence once called supernatural. Humbly it interrupts or diverts the order pre-established by nature. Scarce two or throe years ago it would have been deranged or scattered before the same enigma. Its luminous ray had not yet settled with sufficient rigidity and obstinacy on that dark point ; and we should once more have said that Fatality is invincible. But now it [human reason embodied in the skilful surgeon] held history and destiny in suspense for several weeks and ended by casting them without the brass-bound track which they reckoned to follow to the end."
Now this is a very remarkable description of a battle between the reason and skill and will of man and the blind forces of Nature, or " Fatality." But we fail to see why it should be assumed to be a battle between man and God, except in the sense in which prayer is a battle, and has so often been called a wrestling with God ; still less why the victory of the surgeons should prove that there is no God. There is absolutely no ground for assuming that God is always on the side of Nature against reason, nor is there ground for the assumption which follows that in that particular battle with Nature the prayers and the wishes which went up from a whole people played no effectual part. And, indeed, we can imagine that some day M. Maeterlinck himself will tell us exactly how those prayers—inasmuch as they came out of the subconscious- ness of thousands of sympathetic human beings—acted upon the subconsciousness of the Royal patient and contributed to his recovery. But these little inconsistencies are never absent from M. Maeterlinck's arguments. And they do not much matter. For they do not make his manner of putting things less striking or suggestive, nor do they interfere with the exquisite harmonies of his delightful style. And it is for his style and his suggestiveness, not for his conclusions, that the wise study his books.
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