3 1822022474951
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORN A 
 
 (I 
 
 SAN DIEGO 
 
 3 1822 02247 4951 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT 
 OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF 
 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 AND OTHER SKETCHES OF 
 FOREIGN WRITERS 
 
 BY 
 
 W. L. COURTNEY 
 
 LONDON 
 GRANT RICHARDS 
 
 1904
 
 *** These sketches, in other forms, 
 appeared in " The Daily Telegraph" 
 and I have to thank the Proprietors 
 for allowing me to reproduce them.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAOB 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK . 1 
 
 GKOROES RODENBACH 67 
 
 HUYSMANS' "THE CATHEDRAL" ... 76 
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 85 
 
 TURGENIEFF 110 
 
 TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST . . .119 
 
 MAXIM GORKY 129 
 
 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 144 
 
 ANTON TCHEKHOFF 164 
 
 A REACTIONARY STATESMAN . . . 163 
 
 vii
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF 
 MAETERLINCK 
 
 I 
 AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE 
 
 THE English Edition of M. Maeterlinck's 
 " Aglavaine and Selysette," to which a grace- 
 ful introduction was furnished by Mr J. W. 
 Mackail, has called fresh attention to the 
 claims of the interesting Belgian writer who 
 has been somewhat rashly styled " the Flemish 
 Shakespeare." He has never, perhaps, received 
 in this country the consideration which is his 
 due, partly because extravagant pretensions 
 were made for him by injudicious friends, partly 
 for the reason that his dramas have been classed 
 as part of the Scandinavian movement inaugu- 
 rated by the social plays of Henrik Ibsen. It 
 is not M. Maeterlinck's fault that flattery has 
 accorded him a position which he would never 
 aspire to hold ; nor yet is the comparison very 
 happy which associates his work with the 
 Gothic splendour and variety of Shakespeare, 
 or the Norwegian eccentricity and bizarrerie of 
 A i
 
 2 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 the author of "The Master Builder" and 
 " Hedda Gabler." Maeterlinck only touches 
 Ibsen on one side the absence of action in his 
 dramas. For the rest his theory and his 
 thoughts lie in a different plane. For instance, 
 it is no part of his task to display on the stage 
 the scientific doctrine that disease is hereditary, 
 nor yet are his women formed in that modern 
 mould which is illustrated by the feverish 
 irresponsibility of Hedda Gabler and Hilda 
 Wangel. What Ibsen is always trying to paint 
 is the peculiar result on the feminine organisa- 
 tion of a modern culture, which calls in question 
 alike the foundations of morality and religion. 
 A woman who tries to live on pure intellect 
 alone is rarely a lovable creature, and the 
 quickness of her apprehensions and the clear- 
 ness of her rational judgments with difficulty 
 take the place of that emotional sensibility on 
 which both sympathy and love are based. But 
 Maeterlinck has nothing to do with these 
 modern monsters, who, if they were not realistic 
 would be inexcusable. It is to another world 
 that he transports alike his heroes and his 
 heroines a world of shadows, where nothing 
 tangible happens and where silence is more 
 powerful than speech.
 
 AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE 3 
 
 It was not till he wrote the series of essays 
 called " Le Tresor des Humbles " that we could 
 any of us understand M. Maeterlinck. In his 
 earlier moods he seemed to be trying to copy 
 the Elizabethan drama, especially in its sugges- 
 tions of vague horror and crude, soul-subduing 
 crime. As a matter of fact, the Belgian writer 
 translated into French one of the most charac- 
 teristic of John Ford's plays ; another of the 
 Belgian school reproduced Webster's " Duchess 
 of Malfi " ; and the whole of " Princess Maleine " 
 is a pale and ineffective version of what Shake- 
 speare achieved so triumphantly in " Hamlet " 
 and " Macbeth." But though the attractiveness 
 of the supernatural always remained as an over- 
 powering interest for our author, he ceased to care 
 for the crude and the morbid forms of tragedy. 
 
 We know him not as a disciple of Edgar 
 Allan Poe, but as a mystical thinker, trained 
 on the ideas of Plotinus and Swedenborg. Or, 
 perhaps, it is rather Emerson to whom he 
 should be likened Emerson, with his gracious 
 dreams of a soul that remains untouched by 
 the corporeal frame, and a region of real 
 spiritual life with which the existence domi- 
 nated by the senses has nothing to do. To this 
 extent the feeling for the supernatural, which
 
 4 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 is found both in " L'Intruse " and " Les 
 Aveugles," holds permanent sway with our 
 author ; but it becomes part and parcel of a 
 definite theory that the true human existence 
 is not to be found in the conditions of time 
 and space, but in a sphere of its own, where 
 shines the light that never was on sea or land, 
 the home of the spirit where it connects itself 
 with all the deep mysterious forces which both 
 explain and hold together the universe. 
 
 Mysticism is one of the most curious, but 
 also one of the most steadily recurrent phases 
 of thought and belief. Always it makes its 
 appearance at the end of a great intellectual 
 period, when thought has grown weary, and is 
 in love with images rather than logic. We do 
 not find mysticism when art was at its best in 
 Athens, nor yet when philosophy was at its 
 best in the Greek schools. The highest art 
 demands clear and definite expression, and 
 therefore rejects the intrusion of symbols. 
 Nevertheless, mysticism invaded the Greek 
 schools when the Hellenic spirit had run its 
 course, and when the breakdown of the 
 Hellenic state system forced every man to be 
 a solitary and self-dependent thinker. Aris- 
 totle did well enough for the keen-witted
 
 AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE 5 
 
 Athenians ; but Plotinus was the natural 
 creation of Alexandria. The same phenomena 
 are repeated much later towards the close of 
 the eighteenth century in Germany ; and once 
 again they re-appear as the nineteenth cen- 
 tury drew to its close amidst spiritualism, 
 ghost-hunting, the Psychical Society, and all 
 the marvels of modern thaumaturgy. But the 
 one thing that history seems to prove is that 
 mysticism is not the strength but the failure of 
 human thought. As long as a man can think 
 definitely and clearly, he does not have 
 recourse to images and symbols. Nor yet can 
 it be said that the mystical spirit is ever 
 congenial to plastic and pictorial art or to 
 theatrical representation. When painting, for 
 instance, becomes pre-Raphaelite in its char- 
 acter, it attempts to associate with its own 
 province the vague suggestiveness of music, 
 as though conscious that canvas and paint can 
 no longer convey its message. In similar 
 fashion. M. Maeterlinck's mystical dramas are 
 never dramatic in the proper sense of the term. 
 They are an attempt to represent under the 
 scenic conditions of the stage a life which is 
 never external nor expressed in definite actions, 
 but remote, mysterious, and transcendental.
 
 6 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 The whole action of " Aglavaine and 
 Selysette " is transacted in a spiritual region 
 where soul acts on soul and the bodily presence 
 has no part whatever to play. There could be 
 no greater disillusionment, one would think, 
 than to see this creation of M. Maeterlinck 
 paraded before the footlights, for the appear- 
 ance of the dramatis persona;, when they utter 
 their characteristic sentiments, is of abso- 
 lutely no importance. One of them begins 
 by looking beautiful, the other gets more beau- 
 tiful as the play proceeds the second being a 
 process which exceeds the powers of the most 
 skilful theatrical artist who ever breathed. The 
 beauty is not, in other words, that which pre- 
 sents itself to the eye, but that which is recog- 
 nised by the mind. 
 
 Selysette, the wife of Meleander, though she 
 has arrived at woman's estate, is only a child, 
 hardly removed in mental stature from her 
 younger sister, Yssaline, who, be it observed, 
 never addresses her without using the adjec- 
 tive "little." Married to Meleander, she lives 
 the innocent, self-concentrated, unconscious life 
 of one who knows nothing neither what love 
 means, nor all that life may include of the 
 sorrowful or the tender. The task of awakening
 
 AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE 7 
 
 her is in the hands of Aglavaine, a woman more 
 beautiful than herself, the widow of her dead 
 brother, who comes to live in the castle, and, 
 apparently, comes to stay. Meleander finds in 
 her mature and developed nature a satisfaction 
 which his child-wife could never give him, 
 while Aglavaine is herself conscious that till 
 she met Meleander she had scarcely lived at 
 all. This is the spiritual tragedy which is 
 worked out in the drama before us, a tragedy 
 not of action, but of mental feeling, the educa- 
 tive process of sorrow and disappointment, the 
 enlargement of a woman's soul at the cost of 
 her material happiness. Theoretically there 
 may be no reason why this trio should not go 
 on living together; practically the problem is 
 insoluble. Of two things, one must happen. 
 Either Aglavaine, discovering that her presence 
 brings unhappiness in its train, must go away, 
 or else Selysette, realising that life contains 
 greater capacities, both of joy and sorrow, than 
 she ever dreamed, must by a rare act of self- 
 sacrifice, leave the field open to her fortunate 
 rival. It is the second of these two alternatives 
 that the author chooses, because all our sym- 
 pathy has to be centred on the education of 
 Selysette. She knows now that the quiescent,
 
 8 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 apathetic existence of her unawakened state is 
 possible for her no more : she has learnt her 
 lesson and accepts her burden. Only an acci- 
 dent, a fall from the tower, is needed, and the 
 situation is closed by the death of Selysette. 
 
 Here is no story for the stage, but a true 
 drama for the psychologist. Shakespeare might 
 have made it scenic as well as philosophical, 
 as, indeed, he made his peculiarly spiritual 
 tragedy of "Hamlet." But the "Flemish 
 Shakespeare " cannot do this, amongst other 
 reasons because he is burdened with his own 
 mystical theory. Aglavaine does nothing but 
 talk the language of " Le Tresor des Humbles," 
 especially of that singularly striking little essay 
 on "Silence." All the deep transactions of life 
 are carried on without words, still more without 
 acts, the arena being those levels of subcon- 
 sciousness which underlie our own active and 
 conscious states. The theory is true no doubt 
 as a matter of mental science, but, meanwhile, 
 what becomes of the drama ? Listen to 
 Aglavaine explaining to Selysette the reasons 
 which, indeed, the child-wife has discovered 
 with almost poignant truth for herself why 
 " la vie a trois " can no longer be sustained. 
 " Is it not strange, Selysette ? I love you, I
 
 AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE 9 
 
 love Meleander, Meleander loves us both, you 
 love Meleander and myself: and for all that, 
 we cannot live happily together, because the 
 hour has not yet come when mankind can be 
 thus united." A simple truth, one would 
 think, on which worldly experience has already 
 made up its mind a situation which is almost 
 ludicrous, were it not that the problem is by 
 M. Maeterlinck transferred from the jarring 
 influence of bodily presence to the interaction 
 of mind on mind. Was it a good thing that 
 Aglavaine ever came to the castle ? Yes, for 
 without it Selysette would never have at- 
 tained to the full measure of her development. 
 No, because without it Selysette would have 
 never fallen off the tower into the sea. The 
 problem, like all truly mental problems, is 
 not answered, although the question is touched 
 on every side. 
 
 Observe, however, that for M. Maeterlinck 
 himself, so far as one can see, there is some 
 kind of answer, just because he is a mystic, 
 because he does not think but dreams. If, in 
 the spirit of Emerson, the true existence for 
 each of us lies within the shadowy region where 
 soul can speak to soul without words and 
 without activities, then the drama of Selysette
 
 10 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 is fully justified. She knew nothing before and 
 now she knows and that is all that can be said. 
 To speak of other and more commonplace 
 elements in such a situation is to insult the 
 mystical spirit. To ask whether Aglavaine 
 is happy now that she has brought to pass 
 the death of her rival ; to speculate on the 
 feelings of Meleander himself, too, in no small 
 measure guilty or even to inquire what 
 further chances of happiness still remain to the 
 principal agents in the drama, is to talk 
 the language of the everyday, commonplace, 
 phenomenal world, where men and women are 
 judged by what they do, and not by their pos- 
 session, or their want, of beautiful souls. And 
 this is why M. Maeterlinck, so far, is neither a 
 dramatist nor a moralist. He is not a drama- 
 tist, because drama depends on what we see 
 before us, on the actions by which alone we can 
 judge of motives. He is not a moralist, because 
 mysticism has no ethics, any more than those 
 passive and quiescent forms of belief and 
 theory which begin by the assumption that 
 man has to be removed from the conditions of 
 time and space in order to achieve his true 
 ideal.
 
 II 
 
 THREE EARLY PLAYS 
 
 " DRAMAS of unconsciousness and instinct/' this 
 is the description which Mr Alfred Sutro gives 
 of three plays of Maeterlinck which he and Mr 
 William Archer have translated "Alladine 
 and Palomides," "Interior," and "The Death 
 of Tintagiles." The expression is almost a 
 contradiction in terms ; but we must not mind 
 that, nor, indeed, any other species of paradox 
 in dealing with M. Maurice Maeterlinck. His 
 own title for them is at once more just and 
 more condemnatory, " Three Little Dramas for 
 Marionettes," as though a man were to tell us 
 plainly that he is writing not for grown-up men 
 and women, but for spasmodic and wire-hung 
 dolls. Whether, however, we are to take the 
 one description or the other, the meaning is 
 clear enough. We have not to deal with real 
 life as we know it, but with a fantastic scene 
 full of the imagination of a child. The curtain 
 
 rises on old castles, with wonderful subterranean 
 
 11
 
 12 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 chambers, winding staircases, secret passages, 
 endless corridors, and, never far away, the sound 
 of the restless sea. Sometimes we look down 
 from a circle of mountains upon some old-world 
 dungeon or keep, where the shadows which 
 gather round the walls are emblematic of danger 
 of evil, and the air of the valley is tainted with 
 miasmatic odours. If the scenery is thus of 
 that primitive type which appears in the draw- 
 ings of a romantic child, the figures of the 
 drama are equally remote from experience and 
 life, pale, bloodless phantoms, hovering between 
 the world we see and the world of which we 
 dream, pure abstractions, whose names are of 
 such little account that to all intents and pur- 
 poses they can remain nameless, being called 
 "a king," or "a servant," or "a doctor," or "a 
 queen," or, still more vaguely, an "old man," 
 or "the stranger." It is not Maeterlinck's 
 fault if we go wrong in discussing dramas of 
 this kind. He has told us as clearly as he 
 possibly could that the sphere of his plays is a 
 place of dreams, and the atmosphere such as 
 never was on sea or land. 
 
 The first of the plays, " Alladine and Palo- 
 inides," is very like that which was not long ago 
 enacted in London, " Pelleas and Melisande."
 
 THREE EARLY PLAYS 13 
 
 Indeed all three pieces belong to an early 
 stage in Maeterlinck's development, being 
 written before " Aglavaine and Selysette," and 
 before his prose-essays, " The Treasure of the 
 Humble " and " Wisdom and Destiny." The 
 odd charm which surrounded " Pelleas and 
 Melisande " assuredly clings round both 
 " Alladine and Palomides " and " The Death of 
 Tintagiles." The peculiar aroma which it ex- 
 hales, the quality which arrests our imagination, 
 are not analysable things, being partly depen- 
 dent on the crudity of the treatment, partly 
 on the singular remoteness from the hard, in- 
 sistent life of our age. Directly we begin to 
 think, we are struck with painful absurdities or 
 blank defects of humour, such as we discovered 
 when in the still earlier play of Maeterlinck, 
 "The Princess Maleine," the heroine's nose 
 began to bleed at the crisis of her fate. There 
 are ludicrous things enough in the present 
 volume for instance, the pet lamb of Alladine, 
 which tumbles down into the castle moat, and 
 whose death is gravely declared by the doctor 
 to have fatally compromised the purity of the 
 water. But the very conditions of enjoyment 
 in the case of Maeterlinck absolutely preclude 
 the exercise of thought. Odd paradoxical
 
 14 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 things happen in one's dreams, but the dreamer 
 is never surprised at them. Strange ridiculous 
 speeches and events are everywhere to be found 
 in Maeterlinck's plays, but the spectator is not 
 for a moment astonished. The whole scene 
 is too far removed from his customary mood to 
 make any calls upon his critical judgment. 
 Logical and reasonable people who carried their 
 reason and their logic with them into the 
 theatre when " Pelleas and Melisande " was 
 being played, were either cynically amused or 
 indignantly vituperative, according to their 
 especial temperament. But he who saw it in 
 the spirit of a child found in it a real fascination 
 which was not easily forgotten. Even in read- 
 ing the present play the memory is haunted 
 with the sound of Mr Martin Harvey's voice, and 
 the picture of Mrs Patrick Campbell as she 
 might appear in a piece of old Gobelins tapestry 
 or in the pages of a monk's " Book of Hours." 
 What matters the story ? There is a foolish 
 old king who falls in love with the young girl 
 Alladine. There is Mr Martin Harvey, who in 
 this case is called Palomides, who comes to the 
 castle engaged to the old king's daughter, and 
 straightway falls in love with Alladine. There 
 is the vengeance of the king, who shuts the
 
 THREE EARLY PLAYS 15 
 
 lovers up in subterranean dungeons, where the 
 sea looks at them through windows of glimmer- 
 ing green. And afterwards come the wonted 
 death and dispersion into space of all the un- 
 happy persons of the drama. Notice, however, 
 in passing that Maeterlinck has drawn one 
 character, the king's daughter, Astolaine, who, 
 though she sees her happiness slipping from her 
 hands, and the allegiance of her young lover 
 transferred to her rival, has yet attained so 
 much to the stature of a self-respecting woman 
 that she does not weep or frantically tear her 
 hair or even think of committing suicide. A 
 really unselfish character like this is a very rare 
 creation in Maeterlinck, most of the figures 
 which he draws being naive, unconscious, in- 
 stinctive children, with all the wilful selfishness 
 which we are always discovering and always 
 forgiving in children. " The Death of Tinta- 
 giles" belongs to the same type as "Alladine 
 and Palomides." Once more there is a castle, 
 but, instead of a king, a dim, mysterious, wicked 
 old queen, who is never seen though she makes 
 her poisonous influence everywhere visible. 
 Tintagiles is a little boy, the heir to the throne, 
 pursued with undying hatred by the queen, 
 for reasons not explained to us, and passionately
 
 16 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 protected by his sister, Ygraine. The sister is 
 so determined to keep her brother safe that in 
 the night she ties her own hair round him, and 
 when the child is torn from her arms by the 
 servants of the queen, he is dragged to the 
 central keep encumbered with locks of shining 
 gold. Here the device of weaving hair, which 
 was used also in Pelleas, is employed for another 
 purpose. But no links of human affection and 
 love can resist the attacks of destiny, and at 
 the last we see Ygraine beating herself in 
 vain against the gloomy door through which 
 her brother has passed to his doom. 
 
 The little piece, called " Interior," is of 
 another description, more like " L'Intruse " 
 and "Les Aveugles." It is much the most 
 successful of the three so-called plays ; indeed, 
 alone amongst them it shows the marks of real 
 genius. The scene takes place outside a house 
 with three of the ground-floor windows lighted 
 up. Inside we can see father, mother, two 
 young girls and a child, sitting in all the peace- 
 ful tranquillity of home. Outside there is an 
 old man and a stranger, who are come to reveal 
 to the inmates the death of the eldest daughter, 
 who has been found drowned. In the distance 
 we hear the tramp of the crowd, who are escort-
 
 THREE EARLY PLAYS 17 
 
 ing the dead girl back to the house. So vivid 
 and true is the scene, so pathetic the situation 
 it reveals, that we share the hesitation of the old 
 man, who cannot make up his mind to break in 
 upon domestic peace until the nearer approach 
 of the crowd makes it absolutely imperative for 
 him to enter. Then through the windows we 
 see his first reception, the easy welcome, the 
 subsequent pause, the look of pained anxiety, 
 the horror of the revelation. Rarely has a 
 simple, commonplace story been treated with 
 such originality ; the suspense is almost painful 
 in its intensity, the tragedy is drawn with so 
 few and such convincing strokes. In this case 
 the very simplicity of the language adds to the 
 effect; it seems to make the pathos more 
 poignant. We are no longer dealing with 
 dream figures, but see before our very eyes one 
 of those obscure and everyday stories of sorrow 
 and death with which the newspaper is full. 
 Maeterlinck himself is said to have thought 
 " The Death of Tintagiles " one of his most 
 successful pieces. No reader of this volume will 
 have any hesitation in fixing upon " Interior " 
 as his favourite. Of this singular Belgian 
 dramatist, who has caused so many heart-burn- 
 ings amongst different schools of critics, there
 
 18 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 is nothing to be said which has not been 
 repeated a score of times. What to some 
 people appears an affectation, a conceit, a pose, 
 to others seems full of a vague and wayward 
 charm. It is only a device of interpretation to 
 lay stress on what is called his symbolism, for 
 when the meaning is not very obvious and 
 the superficial explanation involves a patent 
 absurdity, it is a pleasant exercise of wit to 
 suppose some recondite form of allegory. Still 
 there is undoubtedly symbolism in Maeterlinck's 
 work. There is one passage in " Alladine and 
 Palomides " which is clearly symbolical. It is 
 where the two lovers in prison, in their sub- 
 terranean dungeon, only lit by windows against 
 which the sea is dashing, imagine themselves 
 to be surrounded by strange flowers, and curious, 
 precious stones, which, when the real light of 
 day is thrown upon them, are found to be 
 merely seaweed and splinters of the rock. Yet 
 even here the allegory is so primitive that it 
 need not be forced, and " dramas of uncon- 
 sciousness and instinct " are far more adequately 
 to be judged in simpler and less abstruse ways. 
 The other noticeable point concerns Maeter- 
 linck's management of the idea of Destiny. 
 For a piece like "The Death of Tintagiles,"
 
 THREE EARLY PLAYS 19 
 
 fate is some monstrous, external, irresistible 
 force, which compels and enslaves human 
 beings from the outside. But the Belgian 
 dramatist has been slowly but steadily de- 
 veloping in the course of his writings, and in 
 his prose essays has won for himself a truer 
 philosophy. When he wrote "Wisdom and 
 Destiny " his conception of fate was far differ- 
 ent. It is not something which storms at us 
 from the outside, it is rather that to which we 
 open the doors of our souls, and which we make 
 part of ourselves. " Whether you climb up the 
 mountain or go down the hill to the valley, 
 whether you journey to the end of the world 
 or merely walk round your house, none but 
 yourself shall you meet on the highway of 
 fate."
 
 Ill 
 
 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 
 
 ONCE before, and, so far as I know, only once, 
 has any one attempted the particular task 
 which M. Maurice Maeterlinck has assigned to 
 himself in " The Life of the Bee." His is not a 
 scientific manual, although it is full of scientific 
 observations, nor is it a philosophical treatise, 
 although it includes many philosophical specula- 
 tions. It is from beginning to end sheer poetry 
 that is to say, the poetical rendering of facts 
 elucidated by science, which remains as the 
 most serious duty of the poetry of the future. 
 We have often idly wondered whether science 
 with her victorious analysis and her somewhat 
 ruthless disdain of fancy and imagination is 
 cutting at the roots of the poetic instinct. The 
 answer is that a wonderful world is opening 
 before the poet, which it will take him all his 
 time to assimilate and render musical. When 
 Mr Rudyard Kipling chose such a rugged and 
 unwieldy subject as steel machinery and made
 
 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 21 
 
 his Scotch engineer sing a triumphal chant in 
 honour of steam, he was exactly and properly 
 true to the modern mission. For there is no 
 real dulness in facts. The dulness only lies in 
 our lack of appreciation and comprehension. 
 M. Maeterlinck in taking one little chapter of 
 natural science, that which deals with the 
 history of the bee, and treating it in poetic 
 and meditative fashion, is doing precisely the 
 same sort of work as Kipling. He is the 
 interpreter of the known and the imaginative 
 artist who suggests the unknown. He gives 
 to the bare, well-ascertained facts of this world 
 the poetic vesture and the romantic glory 
 which nature herself gives them for those 
 who have the eyes to see. And in this matter 
 the dramatist and essayist who showed us his 
 poetic quality in " Pelleas and Melisande " 
 and " Aglavaine and Selysette," and his meta- 
 physical skill in "Wisdom and Destiny," has 
 only had one real predecessor, the Roman poet 
 Virgil. 
 
 Of course Virgil in his well-known Fourth 
 Georgic did not know very much about bees. 
 His acquaintance with the subject was on 
 the level of that of Aristotle, Pliny, and 
 other early inquirers. But he gives a poetic
 
 22 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 treatment to his theme, so that it becomes the 
 Romance of the Bee, and he suggests certain 
 deductions which are pretty well what M. 
 Maeterlinck draws. What, in point of fact, 
 is the value to us of a whole series of dis- 
 connected and unrelated data ? We want to 
 see how they all hang together in an intelli- 
 gible theory : we like to understand their bear- 
 ing on kindred and analogous phenomena ; 
 above all, we wish to see what contribution 
 they make to our general understanding of 
 the great laws of our world. It is only about 
 a hundred years ago that any one attempted to 
 understand the nature of bees scientifically. 
 Their veritable life-history only dates from the 
 time of the somewhat fantastic Reaumur and 
 the blind, unwearied student, Hiiber. But the 
 details no longer remain prosaic, and as treated 
 in the charmingly imaginative way in which 
 M. Maeterlinck addresses himself to his subject 
 they form a true romance, a marvellous little 
 drama of beings who are not wire-hung puppets, 
 like some of those whom the Belgian dramatist 
 has hitherto put on his stage, but intelligent 
 agents in a common purpose. 
 
 What is the romance of the bee ? It is that 
 which alone we are likely to find in a modern
 
 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 23 
 
 democratic world, the romance of co-operative 
 industry, the glorification of labour. There is a 
 chapter in it of the older-fashioned romance, to 
 which we shall come presently, but the true 
 essence is the gospel of work. The hive is a 
 community of self-denying labourers, presided 
 over by a constitutional sovereign, whose 
 authority is strictly limited. Emotional rever- 
 ence the queen will have in plenty. She has 
 her retinue of guards, her attendants, her ladies 
 of the bed-chamber, her court officials. But 
 let her try to exert herself in a wilful act of 
 authority, let her attempt to kill the rival 
 queens before it is quite certain whether a new 
 swarm will take place, and she will find her 
 faithful attendants turn into quietly resolute 
 champions of the public safety. Or, supposing 
 that it is ordained that she should fight a single 
 combat with her rival, it is no good her 
 attempting to decline the contest. The duel 
 has to take place, and the ring of specta- 
 tors will not permit any dereliction of duty 
 through faintness of heart. All titular glories 
 of sovereignty shall belong to the queen, but 
 on the sole condition that she is fulfilling her 
 part in the small commonwealth. 
 
 The odd thing is that in this strange little
 
 24 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 republic it is the males who do nothing and the 
 females who do all the work. From the queen 
 down to the smallest and humblest of her 
 virgin sisters there is not one who has not got 
 her extremely onerous labour to fulfil for the 
 good of the hive. Like all self-sacrificing,, co- 
 operative creatures, these young Amazons, who 
 are literally afraid of nothing except smoke, 
 are the most orderly and therefore the most 
 cleanly creatures alive. But the males, the 
 drones, have precisely opposite character- 
 istics. They are very untidy, slovenly, dirty, 
 and they do nothing but eat. Nature has told 
 the energetic female bee just as the wise 
 woman of the world tells the young married 
 wife to "feed the brute," and the brute is 
 consequently kept in idleness and sloth, with 
 his head constantly thrust into the honey-cells. 
 Even in the Indian communities where the 
 squaw does all the household work, her lord 
 and chief at least does the hunting and the 
 shooting. In the hive the drones do nothing 
 except live like the suitors of Penelope, wasting 
 the goods which do not belong to them until 
 the day of reckoning comes. 
 
 What, then, is the use of this element in a 
 community which has no other end or object
 
 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 25 
 
 but ceaseless industry ? Here we touch on 
 one of the most curious of Nature's provisions, 
 as well as on a chapter of old-fashioned romance 
 in the life of the queen-bee. Nature con- 
 stantly keeps thousands of agents for one single 
 act, absolutely wasteful of her means, uncon- 
 cernedly prodigal of her resources. She never 
 cares, she never has cared, for the individual ; 
 she wastes a thousand seeds for one ear of 
 corn, a thousand flowers for one fruit, a thousand 
 drones for one momentary love-making. Once, 
 when the proper time comes, the queen-bee 
 celebrates her nuptials, and, like the airy, 
 ethereal, wild creature she is, under ideal, 
 cerulean, poetic circumstances. On some 
 beautiful spring morning she issues from the 
 hive and flies straight up into the air. In- 
 stantly swarms of drones follow her, but the 
 race is only to the swift, and the prize to the 
 strong. The queen must fly high, for else 
 there is more than the common danger of birds, 
 and out of the thousands of followers there is 
 just one who wins the victory. And he, too, 
 has to suffer the doom of successful love, dying 
 in the very moment of his triumph. This is 
 the romance, the single, indubitable romance 
 of the queen-bee's life, for the sake of which
 
 26 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 Nature has kept a whole army of useless drones, 
 and has adorned them besides with all kinds of 
 valuable gifts, splendid eyes, splendid antennae, 
 big muscular frames, which but one out of every 
 nine hundred and ninety-nine will turn to some 
 purpose. Nature is always magnificently partial 
 to the lover, while to the worker she is only 
 a grudging, niggardly mother. The little 
 worker bee has not half the advantages of the 
 drones, and she does all the work. Neverthe- 
 less, the day of vengeance is not far off. As 
 the season advances, the time comes when the 
 prudent little commonwealth has to bethink 
 itself of its winter sleep. The general order 
 goes forth to massacre the males. Then the 
 dull, sluggish creatures, who have lived on the 
 fat of the land, a wasteful encumbrance and a 
 certain source of future impoverishment, find 
 themselves in the midst of a popular insurrection 
 sweeping them away into nothingness, just as 
 though they were French nobles in a wild 
 popular revolution. The Odyssey of bee-life 
 ends like that portrayed by Homer in the killing 
 of the suitors ; and the community, having care- 
 fully disposed of all traces of its brief orgy of 
 blood, contentedly goes to sleep till the following 
 spring.
 
 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 27 
 
 These are only two or three phases of the 
 bee drama, a page torn here and there from a 
 wonderful book full of interesting episodes. 
 The point where natural science ends and 
 philosophy begins is when we ask the inevit- 
 able questions which these humble annals 
 suggest. Here is Nature solving in one de- 
 partment of her animal kingdom the precise 
 problems which man has had to solve in his 
 long evolution. The bees have learnt, as men 
 are obliged to learn, that the old rule of every- 
 one for himself has to be superseded by the new 
 rule of every one for his fellows. The theory of 
 individualism has no place in such an economy 
 as this. Everywhere there is socialism, com- 
 munism, co-operation, division of labour, abso- 
 lute obliteration of the individual for the sake 
 of the general good. In one sense it is a mon- 
 archy, but only a monarchy in name. In reality 
 it is a republic. It has learnt that a titular head 
 to the State is an excellent thing, emotionally 
 and sentimentally. But there is no other kind 
 of sentimentality. The bee is never moved by 
 the death of a comrade, except within the hive 
 itself. It does not prate about the value of 
 life as such ; it only cares for the useful life. 
 If the fellow-worker has been killed, even on
 
 28 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 the very threshold of the hive, the others will 
 take no more notice of it than to remove its 
 useless carcase out of the way. Moreover, as 
 we have seen, while the commonwealth will 
 tolerate the existence of an army of drones 
 until their virgin queen has been impregnated, 
 they will ruthlessly destroy them afterwards. 
 There is only one rule to which every interest 
 is subordinated the common good. And, so 
 far as we can see, the bees have attained to 
 that sage political maxim which Thucydides 
 puts into the mouth of Pericles that indi- 
 viduals are happier in the bosom of a prosperous 
 city, even though they suffer themselves, than 
 when they are individually prosperous in the 
 midst of a languishing State. To ask whether 
 this marvellous co-operative industry involves 
 the possession of intelligence is to ask an idle 
 question. We may call it instinct, or we may 
 call it reason, but either name is only the cover 
 of our ignorance. Virgil expressly notes that 
 observers in his time thought that bees were 
 inspired by the soul of the world, the cosmic 
 spirit. M. Maeterlinck, unless I gravely mis- 
 understand him, comes to much the same con- 
 clusion.
 
 IV 
 SISTER BEATRICE AND ARDIANE 
 
 Two unexpected plays by Maurice Maeterlinck 
 illustrate the versatility of the Belgian poet. 
 We have seen him in many disguises the same 
 idyllic, dreaming, imaginative individuality, 
 although the external form and show were dif- 
 ferent in each case. First, as the somewhat 
 crude and unpractised manipulator of veritable 
 puppets, as in the " Princess Maleine " ; then as 
 the weaver of delicate spiritual symbolisms, as 
 in " Pelleas and Melisande" and " Aglavaine 
 and Selysette." We have known his suggestive 
 mysticism, his tender sense of beauty, his odd 
 power of realising the shadowy and seeing the 
 insubstantial, as in " L'Intruse." Again, we 
 have seen him as the Essayist, the author of 
 studies by no means always successful some- 
 what after the manner of Emerson, in " The 
 Treasure of the Humble," and achieving a man- 
 ner of his own in " Wisdom and Destiny." Once 
 more he has appeared before us as the poetical
 
 30 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 interpreter of Nature, the inheritor of Virgil's 
 mantle in the wonderfully beautiful study, 
 "The Life of the Bee." And now he is "the 
 writer of librettos to be set to music," or, rather, 
 because his own description of his work falls 
 manifestly short of the truth, the dramatist, no 
 longer making his own legends, but trying to 
 breathe new life and meaning into ancient 
 myths. Of the two little plays to which I 
 allude, the first is on the story of Beatrice, 
 already treated by Miss Adelaide Proctor, and 
 by Mr John Davidson in his well-known " Ballad 
 of a Nun " ; the second on the famous tale which 
 we know as " Blue Beard," and which exists, in 
 some shape or other, in almost every country 
 where bards sing songs and nurses amuse the 
 children by terrifying them. It is the same 
 Maeterlinck as of old, but disguised, and hardly 
 improved. Before he gave us mysticism with- 
 out miracles, and now he gives us miracles with 
 little enough of poetic mysticism. Both of the 
 two dramas are full of wonders garments 
 which shine with an inner radiance, chapels 
 which become bowers of blossoming flowers, 
 rooms full of radiant gems and strange, unearthly 
 light; for apparently he is writing mediaeval 
 mystery-plays for his musical setting. But the
 
 SISTER BEATRICE AND ARDIANE 31 
 
 poetry is somewhat to seek. It seems to belong 
 to the stories themselves rather than to his 
 manner of treating them. That haunting im- 
 pression of certain significant lines, which 
 appears to come to Maeterlinck quite naturally 
 when he is imaginatively constructing his own 
 nebulous plots, is not often found in these two 
 plays ; indeed, it is to a large extent conspicuous 
 by its absence. 
 
 So, after all, it is not versatility which is 
 illustrated here so much as the uncertain 
 handling of a man who tries to make alien 
 material his own. Take, for example, the case 
 of Sister Beatrice. The legend of Sister 
 Beatrice, which the translator of these plays 
 speaks of as existing in its original form in 
 Dutch folk-lore, is entirely conceived in the 
 Renaissance spirit the spirit of " Aucassin and 
 Nicolette," signifying the revolt of ordinary 
 humanity against an iron monastic system and 
 the alleged unforgivableness of sin. Aucassin, 
 it will be remembered, when asked whether he 
 desires to go to heaven, replies that it is no 
 part of his wish to renew hereafter acquaintance 
 found undesirable on earth, and that, whatever 
 may be the precise locality of his soul in the 
 future world, he would rather be with Nicolette
 
 32 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 " ma mie." Sister Beatrice is a bolder exempli- 
 fication of the same temper, for in this case 
 heaven itself is supposed to wink at human 
 frailties and peccadilloes. The nun, Beatrice, 
 runs away from the convent with her lover, and 
 during her absence the Virgin Mary discharges 
 all her mundane tasks, so that her dereliction 
 of duty is never discovered. The essence of a 
 story like this is that it should be the mere 
 suggestion of an idea, and that there should be 
 no details. Quite rightly, therefore, it is treated 
 by Mr John Davidson in ballad form, where the 
 vagueness of atmosphere and circumstance 
 makes the history at least plausible. But when 
 it is turned into a three-act play ; when it is 
 shown us how the Virgin took the runaway's 
 place and what miracles she performed to prove 
 that Beatrice was veritably a saint ; when, in 
 the last place, Beatrice herself returns and suc- 
 ceeds in hookwinking the abbess and her sister 
 nuns, the realism of such treatment verges on 
 the borders of the ridiculous, and the moral 
 becomes a little too paradoxical. The outlines 
 ought to have been left shadowy. When the 
 fable is clothed so obviously in human flesh, 
 we are tempted to ask too many awkward 
 questions.
 
 SISTER BEATRICE AND ARDIANE 33 
 
 " There is no sin that lives 
 If love hath vigil kept ; 
 There is no soul that dies 
 If love but once have wept." 
 
 So sings the Virgin when she commences her 
 daily conventual duties in the guise of the nun. 
 It is a pretty moral, but we must not examine 
 it too closely. Yet this is precisely what we 
 are invited to do when the simple story is 
 protracted over three acts. All the passion 
 of Beatrice in the arms of her lover, all the 
 wonderful festival of miracle which ensues 
 during her long absence in the wicked world, 
 all the miserable squalor of the prodigal's 
 return when she has found that there is no 
 single rose without a multiplicity of thorns, are 
 but the rich embroidery, the wealth of figura- 
 tive detail, which spoil a simple pattern. 
 Moreover, it becomes necessary to prove, for 
 the edification of the reader, that the primrose 
 path inevitably leads to the everlasting bonfire. 
 There is no such moral in the original myth. 
 In Maurice Maeterlinck's play, the Virgin, 
 apparently, forgives ; but the iron laws which 
 govern the world do not forgive. If Beatrice 
 comes home, heartbroken and dying, the cle- 
 mency of the Queen of Heaven is valueless. 
 c
 
 34 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 The fact is, of course, that the modern mind, 
 working on these simple old stories, destroys 
 the primitive charm by its latter-day and 
 artificial refinements. Take the second of 
 these dramas the one that is called " Ardiane 
 and Barbe Bleu." Notice especially the second 
 title which our author gives us, " The Useless 
 Deliverance," for that suggests at once the treat- 
 ment. A wicked ogre makes away with his wives, 
 one after the other, until at last he finds more 
 than his match, and is righteously destroyed. 
 So, too, did the polygamist, Henry VIII., dis- 
 cover at last that there was a limit to his royal 
 amours, and that the sixth wife was too much 
 for him. But how does Maeterlinck work? 
 Ardiane, a poetical variant on the name of the 
 versatile lady whom we knew as Sister Anne, 
 is an emblem of the modern woman absolutely 
 without disguise. She comes to Bluebeard's 
 castle, inspired with all the latest feelings of 
 chivalry for her much-tormented sex. She 
 knows something about Women's Rights. She 
 hates the tyranny of mere man. What is her 
 mission ? It is to preach deliverance to the 
 imprisoned wives who had not been killed, 
 but held captive in a subterranean cavern. 
 Ardiane, the liberator, the nreacher of Femin-
 
 SISTER BEATRICE AND ARDIANE 35 
 
 ism, the platform woman, throws open the 
 doors, releases the prisoners, calls her sisters 
 to the higher life of liberty and independence 
 and self-control. These poor, shrinking, blear- 
 eyed wretches, the victims of masculine des- 
 potism, are bidden to come up into the light of 
 day, to stretch their cramped limbs, and realise 
 that their destiny is in their own hands. What 
 is the result ? They come up, it is true, from 
 the dungeon ; they breathe the fresh air ; but 
 when Barbe Bleu is brought in, a wounded 
 prisoner, they are the first to surround him 
 with tender solicitude, eager to undo the cords 
 which keep him helpless. Ardiane sweeps them 
 with her imperious glances, and asks them if 
 they will not abandon their old foe to his fate. 
 Not they ! The years of servitude have been 
 too much for them. They are left, when the 
 curtain falls, binding up the ogre's wounds, and 
 pouring in oil and wine. Which things are a 
 parable. It is all very clever and ingenious, 
 but it is hardly a characteristic example of the 
 Maeterlinckian drama. One is reminded of 
 Mark Twain's American in the Court of King 
 Arthur, which, like the diary of Adam in Eden, 
 is an exceedingly flagrant instance of Trans- 
 atlantic humour. We get neither the simplicity
 
 36 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 of the ancient story nor the cleverness of the 
 latter-day intelligence. And though there may 
 be poetry in the details of the Belgian poet's 
 workmanship, we feel that the graceful primi- 
 tive beauty of the old story is gone for ever. 
 It is much better for Maurice Maeterlinck to 
 invent his own themes. When he writes 
 marginal notes on old parchments, when he 
 dresses up folklore to suit the modern mind, 
 much of the virtue goes out of him. These are 
 not mediaeval miracle plays, despite all the 
 magic and the marvels and the music. They 
 represent rather the acute analytic spirit of our 
 contemporary period rummaging old chests to 
 deck itself out in the full light of day with rich, 
 beautiful, but faded and outworn brocades.
 
 THE BURIED TEMPLE 
 
 IT is not easy to say what cryptic meaning 
 is involved in the title which our author 
 has chosen for his essays, nor probably is 
 the precise signification of any great con- 
 sequence. " The Buried Temple " has no 
 obvious connection with any of the subjects 
 which M. Maeterlinck discusses, neither with 
 Justice, nor the Past, nor Matter, nor Luck, nor 
 even with the Evolution of Mystery. Neverthe- 
 less, if we must assign some meaning to it, the 
 simplest method will be to assume that it bears 
 a reference to the underlying conception of the 
 book. For these essays are not disconnected 
 studies, taken at random out of the author's 
 commonplace books. They are not the occa- 
 sional work of studious hours, with some chance 
 topic guiding the treatment and dictating the 
 conclusion. They have a vital connection, one 
 with the other, which the order in which they 
 
 37
 
 38 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 are presented does not indicate, and are written 
 under the dominion of one central idea. To 
 this central idea the title " The Buried Temple " 
 must bear witness. For if we ask what is the 
 key by which M. Maeterlinck tries to unlock 
 the secrets of life and conduct, what is the 
 ultimate solution of such problems as are in- 
 volved in the range of Chance, the oppression 
 of Destiny, the meaning of that human Justice 
 which is so often contradicted by natural laws, 
 and of the strange and freakish dominion of 
 Good Luck and Bad Luck, the answer is in 
 every case the same. We must look below the 
 exterior and superficial elements of our person- 
 ality our intellect, our will, our loves, and our 
 hates to that deeper ground and basis of self, 
 which some philosophers have called " The 
 Unconscious," and which M. Maeterlinck him- 
 self calls the Unconscious in his last and most 
 enigmatic essay on Luck. If the "Buried 
 Temple" means anything, it means this obscure 
 basis and foundation of Self, underlying our 
 conscious states, our volitions, our thoughts, 
 our affections. What we think and will and 
 feel is plain, for such things come into the open 
 light of day, and can be estimated by ordinary 
 tests. The inner fountain from which they
 
 39 
 
 flow up into the daylight, the buried temple of 
 humanity which sends out these emissaries and 
 ministers of its secret rites in a word, the 
 ultimate elements of consciousness are more 
 difficult to gauge, and can only be judged of by 
 their effects and results. 
 
 Phrased in such fashion, our author's main 
 idea seems obscure enough, and, perhaps, a 
 little fantastic and mystical. Yet we can 
 approach it from different standpoints, and, 
 whether we agree or disagree, it should be fairly 
 easy to understand. It is worth a little trouble, 
 for whatever may be the view we take of the 
 Belgian writer as dramatist or seer, he is one 
 of the few fresh and original thinkers in our 
 age who can clothe his thoughts in delightful 
 and picturesque language who can thus insinu- 
 ate himself into our minds, not with the arid 
 style of a philosopher, but in the garb and 
 vesture of a poet. " The Life of the Bee " was 
 not prose, but poetry ; " The Treasure of the 
 Humble," " Wisdom and Destiny," were not so 
 much scientific treatises as essays full of 
 imagination and fancy, touched with the grace 
 of an artist in words. And one fashion in 
 which we can seek to appreciate M. Maeter- 
 linck's new point of view in the " Buried
 
 40 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 Temple " is to approach him from the side of 
 his own development, to note the change that 
 has come over him since he wrote such early 
 pieces as " L'Intruse " and " Pelleas et Meli- 
 sande." What is the atmosphere we breathe 
 in these "plays for marionettes"? A vague 
 terror of unknown forces, an apprehension of 
 something coming we know not what, a dread 
 of fate and death such as would appeal to very 
 simple and primitive human beings, a life lived 
 timorously and furtively because haunted by 
 obscure and threatening phantoms thronging 
 the horizon of each day as it passes, the futility 
 of action, the inescapableness of Destiny such 
 are the keynotes of the Maeterlinckian drama. 
 Once it was in " Aglavaine and Selysette "- 
 the author tried to represent death as conquered 
 by love, or wisdom, or happiness. But the 
 attempt was, by his own confession, a failure. 
 In the preface to the first volume of his 
 "Theatre," published in Brussels, he says that 
 " death refused to comply with his wishes," and 
 that he, like other poets of his time, is waiting 
 for the revelation of some new power. In much 
 the same fashion, for the majority of unthinking 
 minds such words as accident, and luck, and 
 fortune, and fatality represent great external
 
 THE BURIED TEMPLE 41 
 
 forces, coming upon man from the outside and 
 overpowering his will. We dread their oncom- 
 ing, because we believe that they are at once 
 arbitrary and irresistible ; we live in perpetual 
 fear, like M. Maeterlinck's marionettes, like 
 Melisande and Maleine and little Selysette, 
 shrinking away, hoping to avoid what neverthe- 
 less we know to be unavoidable. 
 
 Now what is the change of attitude indicated 
 in "Wisdom and Destiny" and "The Buried 
 Temple " ? Shortly, it is a change from the 
 outside to the inside, from the semblance of 
 an external phantom to the analysis of our 
 own consciousness. It is as though a prophet, 
 describing the terrors or the joys of a world 
 to come, were suddenly to turn round and tell 
 us that the kingdoms both of heaven and hell 
 are not outside us at all, but within us. It is 
 as though a poet were to affirm that there 
 is neither Good nor Evil, but thinking made 
 them so that it is in ourselves that we are 
 thus or thus. We should be relieved of some 
 dreaded ghosts, because they are not objective, 
 but, in a sense, the creation of our own brains. 
 On the other hand, we should enormously in- 
 crease the range of our responsibility, inasmuch 
 as we should be proved the authors of our own
 
 42 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 duties, the initiators of our own conceptions 
 of right and wrong, the framers of our own 
 heavens and hells. Perhaps the striking phrase 
 may be remembered which, as it were, summed 
 up the discussion. " If Judas goes forth to- 
 night it is towards Judas that his steps will 
 tend." We must get rid of the idea that 
 the betraying apostle is under some compulsion 
 of fate, that he is driven by the author of all 
 evil and forsaken by his good angel. These 
 are primitive conceptions, adapted to the simple 
 folk of a marionette theatre. The only thing 
 that drives Judas is the character which he 
 has allowed to grow up out of his circum- 
 stances and opportunities, the fixed disposition 
 of his mind, the settled bent of his will. Such 
 is the doctrine of " Wisdom and Destiny." It 
 is not wholly satisfactory or convincing mainly 
 because we are not altogether responsible for 
 our characters. Let us see how M. Maeter- 
 linck tries to supplement it by the argument of 
 " The Buried Temple." 
 
 There is something bigger than our charac- 
 ters, as we appear to others, and sometimes to 
 ourselves. The obvious and apparent person- 
 ality is one thing : but it has its roots in 
 something vaster, more profound, more obscure.
 
 THE BURIED TEMPLE 43 
 
 How can we phrase to ourselves this necessary 
 background to the self, these ultimate elements 
 out of which our present work-a-day lives are 
 lived? M. Maeterlinck puts the matter before us 
 in these essays in different ways. Sometimes it 
 is the past which has made us what we are, all 
 that is involved in heredity, for instance, all the 
 outcome of what we and our fathers and our 
 grandfathers have done and felt and thought. 
 Sometimes, as in the Essay on Justice, this 
 background comes to mean the species to 
 which we belong, and which is more com- 
 prehensive and important than we are. Thus, 
 for example, when our author is considering 
 the old problem whether the destinies of a 
 people should be confided to a few leading 
 spirits such as Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and 
 Goethe, or whether it is safer to trust to the 
 dumb but effective instincts of a developing 
 democracy, he practically decides for the latter 
 alternative, because the species is greater than 
 the individual. But the most characteristic 
 exhibition of M. Maeterlinck's newer attitude 
 is to be found in the concluding essay on 
 "Luck." Here the question to which he 
 addresses himself is one in which we are all 
 concerned and equally interested. How comes
 
 44 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 it that A, an ordinary, perhaps stupid, man, 
 succeeds, while B, with much greater clever- 
 ness and ability, constantly fails ? How can 
 we explain to ourselves that some men are 
 certainly born under a happy star, while others 
 are as certainly doomed and we do not know 
 why to perpetual mischance and disaster ? 
 The solution of this question does not depend 
 upon what we know of men's characters. There 
 is no reason in the nature of things, so far 
 as our observation and experience go, why 
 Lesurques and the representatives of the Stuart 
 dynasty, and the Colignis, and many other 
 historic examples we could quote, should, time 
 after time, be unfortunate. Something, but 
 not much, is to be attributed to character, 
 but character does not give all the explana- 
 tion we desire. What is the something more ? 
 In the essay we are considering, M. Maeter- 
 linck no longer talks of the past or of the 
 species, but of what he calls "the uncon- 
 scious," the obscure basis of our personality, 
 lying beneath our conscious states of willing, 
 and thinking, and feeling. Here is a significant 
 passage : 
 
 " I hold, therefore, that it is in this uncon- 
 scious life of ours, in this existence that is so
 
 THE BURIED TEMPLE 45 
 
 vast, so divine, so inexhaustible and unfathom- 
 able, that we must seek for the explanation of 
 fortunate or contrary chances. Within us is a 
 being that is our veritable ego, our first-born, 
 immemorial, illimitable, universal, and probably 
 immortal. Our intellect, which is merely a 
 kind of phosphorescence that plays on this 
 inner sea, has as yet but faint knowledge of it. 
 But our intellect is gradually learning that 
 every secret of the human phenomena it has 
 hitherto not understood must reside there, and 
 there alone. This unconscious being lives on 
 another plane than our intellect, in another 
 world. It knows nothing of time and space, 
 the two formidable but illusory walls between 
 which our reason must flow if it would not be 
 hopelessly lost. It knows no proximity, it 
 knows no distance ; past and future concern it 
 not, or the resistance of matter. It is familiar 
 with all things ; there is nothing it cannot do. 
 To this power, this knowledge, we have indeed 
 at all times accorded a certain varying recog- 
 nition ; we have given names to its manifesta- 
 tions, we have called them instinct, soul, un- 
 consciousness, sub-consciousness, reflex action, 
 presentiment, intuition, etc. We credit it 
 more especially with the indeterminate and
 
 46 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 often prodigious force contained in those of 
 our nerves that do not directly serve to 
 produce our will and our reason : a force 
 that would appear to be the very fluid of 
 life." 
 
 If the unconscious is alert and awake, it 
 saves us from disaster. If it is obtuse and 
 .sluggish, it brings down upon us a series of 
 woes. Possibly not very much is gained by an 
 explanation of this kind, for by the very term 
 we assign to it, " the unconscious," we remove 
 it from our ordinary modes of analysis and 
 comprehension. Still, this is the main con- 
 tribution that M. Maeterlinck's new volume 
 makes to the Problems of Life and Fate with 
 which he is concerned. And perhaps it need 
 not be added that a good many philosophers 
 besides von Hartmann have based their 
 schemes on such an hypothesis. The chief 
 point is that in each book which our author 
 gives us he leads us one step further in his 
 speculative inquiries. The step may be veri- 
 tably an advance, a progress, or it may be 
 merely a process of marking time. Some 
 people will call it growth in the direction of 
 mysticism, others especially those who study 
 the pathology of nerves may hail M. Maeter-
 
 THE BURIED TEMPLE 47 
 
 linck as both an industrious and intelligent 
 disciple. But, at all events, he is not stand- 
 ing still. He has advanced fast and far from 
 the simple standards and ideals of his early 
 dramas.
 
 VI 
 MONNA VANNA 
 
 MAURICE MAETERLINCK'S book, "The Buried 
 Temple," enabled us to see how the author, 
 in his philosophical work, is advancing step 
 by step towards a rational interpretation 
 of the universe. His play, " Monna Vanna," 
 produced by M. Lugne-Poe at the Theatre 
 de 1'CEuvre, Paris, shows us a correspond- 
 ing evolution on the dramatic side an 
 advance not quite so satisfactory or resolute 
 as the revolution which is taking place in his 
 thoughts, but, nevertheless, in the highest 
 degree interesting and suggestive. Briefly, the 
 progress might be represented thus. There is 
 an early stage in which human beings appear as 
 puppets, swayed hither and thither by the 
 mysterious influences of a destiny which they 
 cannot understand, but only obey. Secondly, a 
 period in which we get some recognition of the 
 value of spiritual forces, of heartfelt devotion 
 
 48
 
 MONNA VANNA 49 
 
 and self-sacrifice, such as is dimly presented 
 to our eyes in a piece like " Aglavaine and 
 Selysette." To this succeeds the discovery 
 that what we call Fate is not an external 
 arbitrary power, but something to do with 
 ourselves and our own character. Bravely 
 the poet advances to the thesis that " destiny 
 is character" in "Wisdom and Destiny" a 
 doctrine which without doubt is true, but 
 contains only a part of the truth. Next 
 appears " The Buried Temple," which adds 
 the important contribution that beyond the 
 reasonable, emotional, and conscious elements 
 of the human individuality there is a vague un- 
 conscious substratum, an element which, though 
 obscure, is real, and which, if we like, we may 
 describe as that part of us which is inherited 
 from our forefathers, or the residuum of the 
 animal within us, or the unknown basis of our 
 will. It is necessary to remember all this in 
 dealing with M. Maeterlinck, because otherwise 
 we shall go very wrong indeed in passing any 
 judgment on his play. " Monna Vanna " is a 
 beautifully written piece of literature. It is 
 also an extremely vivid page of drama. But it 
 is not a mere chance product of the creative 
 powers of its author ; it has its place in that 
 D
 
 50 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 definite scheme of life-interpretation to which 
 M. Maeterlinck is devoting his intense and 
 careful study. 
 
 Let us begin with the story. It is a chapter 
 out of the Renaissance, the period which George 
 Eliot also treated in " Romola." The town of 
 Pisa, commanded by Guido Colonna, is being 
 straitly besieged by Prinzivalle, the captain of 
 the forces of Florence. Pisa is on the point of 
 surrender ; it has no food and no ammunition. 
 Guide's father, Marco, goes out to Prinzivalle's 
 camp as an envoy to discover possible terms of 
 peace. In the play Marco represents, as it were, 
 the author's own mature mind, a man to whom 
 is revealed a knowledge of the human heart and 
 the discovery that there are bigger forces in it 
 than love and jealousy. Marco comes back with 
 the news that Prinzivalle will not only forego 
 his assault on Pisa, but supply it with 300 
 waggons of food and warlike material, on one 
 appalling condition. The condition is that 
 Monna Vanna, Guido's wife, shall go that even- 
 ing to Prinzivalle's tent, clad only in a mantle, 
 and return next dawn. Here is obviously a 
 variety of the old " Lady Godiva " legend a 
 cruel and brutal demand on a woman's capacity 
 for self-sacrifice in the interests of a com-
 
 MONNA VANNA 51 
 
 munity. Guido, her husband, is, of course, 
 sure that she will not consent. Marco, the 
 father, who has already communicated the 
 news to Monna Vanna, is equally sure that 
 she will. The heroine appears at the end of 
 the first act, and briefly announces her deter- 
 mination to visit the Florentine general, and 
 save Pisa. 
 
 There follows an act of no little beauty, as 
 well as dramatic skill, the scene being laid in 
 the tent of Prinzivalle. The man who com- 
 mands the forces of Florence is, it appears, 
 under a wrongful suspicion of treachery to the 
 State he serves, and on the very evening when 
 he is expecting Giovanna he has had a brief 
 interview with a commissary of the Republic 
 of Florence, who, in an access of rage, wounds 
 him in the face. The blood is streaming from 
 his forehead when Monna Vanna appears, while 
 she on her part has been wounded in the breast 
 by a shot from one of the outposts. Under 
 these extraordinary conditions, both the man 
 and the woman stricken and bleeding, occurs 
 a vividly dramatic interview, by far the most 
 eloquent portion, the most vividly conceived, 
 the most effectively written, of the play. There 
 is no question, of course, of brutal violence. No
 
 52 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 sooner does Prinzivalle see Monna Vanna than 
 he reveals to her a fact of which she was 
 ignorant that as a boy of twelve, in Venice, 
 he had played with her and loved her, cherish- 
 ing from that early experience a lasting tender- 
 ness and an unalterable devotion. There is 
 nothing but a chivalrous respect on the part 
 of the lover. On the side of the lady there 
 is first surprise, then a slowly awakened remi- 
 niscence ; finally, after several moments of 
 doubt, a growing admiration for the man who, 
 under such conditions, can show at one and 
 the same moment his passionate adoration and 
 his loyal reticence and self-control. And so, 
 in the Third Act, we pass back again into Pisa 
 and find the denouement of this strange little 
 narrative. Pisa has been relieved. Prinzivalle, 
 to whom nothing now remains but the enmity 
 of Florence, accompanies the heroine as her 
 honoured guest into the city she had saved. 
 Of course, Guido has yet to be reckoned with, 
 and it is his conduct which regulates the issue. 
 When Monna Vanna tells him that she has 
 returned as innocent and pure as when she 
 left the city the preceding night, Guido 
 refuses to believe her. He appeals to his 
 immediate attendants, to the crowd, and out
 
 MONNA VANNA 53 
 
 of the whole number there is only one, Marco, 
 the father, who immediately puts confidence 
 in Giovanna's tale. Then Guido declares that 
 if she will only confess what he believes to be 
 the truth he will set Prinzivalle free. For a 
 moment she persists in the truth ; afterwards, 
 seeing the growing exasperation of Guido, and 
 his determination to execute vengeance on 
 the man he deems to be his rival, she falls 
 back on the desperate resource of a splendid 
 falsehood, and publicly proclaims her guilt. 
 By this means she secures the right of being 
 Prinzivalle's gaoler, in order, as she tells us 
 in her final sentence, to get rid of a nightmare, 
 and commence a new and beautiful dream 
 with him. Probably few will accept or admire 
 a conclusion like this. It is as though the 
 author, having satisfactorily completed his 
 psychological problem, then ceased to care 
 how the story ended. 
 
 Whatever we may think of the final act, 
 nothing can alter the clear impression which 
 the first two acts make on our minds. M. 
 Maeterlinck, it must be remembered, is dealing 
 with that picturesque Renaissance period, so 
 full of vivid contrasts, so replete with annals 
 of brutality, so inspired now and again with
 
 54 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 visions of intellectual beauty. His Prinzivalle 
 is a man of low origin, a barbarian, as he is 
 called, who yet has intellectual sympathies and 
 spiritual yearnings. Monna Vanna is by no 
 means an ideal heroine, but extremely human. 
 She is capable of great enthusiasms ; she can 
 sacrifice herself for her country; she can, like 
 Lady Godiva, care less for her personal modesty 
 than for the interests of her city. Then she 
 makes the discovery which touches one of the 
 intricate and profound problems with which 
 M. Maeterlinck interests himself. There is a 
 higher love and there is a lower love. The 
 higher love rests on perfect sincerity and trust- 
 fulness, as well as on a capacity for self- 
 sacrifice. Quite prepared to take up her life 
 again, and live it to its close with Guido, she 
 is appalled by his inability to believe in her. 
 The very foundation of her affection for him 
 has been violently overthrown. But whether 
 this fact relieves her from all the ordinary 
 duties of a wife is another question, and it 
 is on this side that M. Maeterlinck's play 
 exposes itself to the keenest criticism. A 
 strong character like Monna Vanna's, which 
 has found out the hollowness of one kind of 
 affection, and turns instinctively to another, is
 
 MONNA VANNA 55 
 
 not likely to accept the rash courses to which 
 M. Maeterlinck condemns her at the end of 
 the play. The man or the woman who has 
 realised the truth that what we call destiny 
 is in reality the total weight and range of all 
 the forces within us, is the last person in the 
 world to be reckless or passionate in the 
 exchange from one kind of life to another. 
 But, perhaps, in saying this, we are judging 
 the drama not from the proper historical stand- 
 point. After all, it is a story of the Renais- 
 sance, and Renaissance heroes and heroines are 
 apt to be somewhat spasmodic and emotional. 
 The real point for criticism is that in the play 
 of " Monna Vanna," M. Maeterlinck has boldly 
 invented a truly dramatic theme, in which men 
 and women of veritable flesh and blood are 
 involved. He has also composed two acts of 
 singular grace and felicity, the second act 
 especially being treated with a delicacy and 
 reserve which make it the supreme part of a 
 fascinating play.
 
 VII 
 JOYZELLE 
 
 "JOYZELLE," M. Maeterlinck's new play, is in 
 one sense a return to his earlier work; in 
 another sense it represents a definite stage in 
 the progress of his philosophical thought. 
 When M. Maeterlinck wrote " Monna Vanna," 
 some of his admirers noted with surprise that 
 he had deliberately composed a piece of sheer 
 melodrama. " Monna Vanna " was a study of 
 Italian mediaevalism, frankly human and 
 romantic, as full of red blood as those earlier 
 works, " Pelleas and Melisande," and the rest, 
 were devoid of it. The development of M. 
 Maeterlinck is indeed one of the most interest- 
 ing themes to trace out in its entirety. Clearly, 
 the evolution is not yet complete, but so far as 
 it has gone it has been the slow discovery of 
 the real worth and value of the human person- 
 ality in the face of natural laws and natural 
 forces, superior in brute strength but deficient 
 in moral worth. A young and thoughtful 
 student looks out upon a world in which it 
 
 56
 
 JOYZELLE 57 
 
 seems to him there is nothing but the dreary 
 reign of an imperious Fate, which ordains 
 every detail in the lives of the animal and of 
 the human races. That is the stage at which 
 Maeterlinck wrote "The Princess Maleine,' 
 " Pelleas and Melisande," and, in a certain 
 sense, " Aglavaine and Selysette." But further 
 thought altered the conditions of the problem. 
 The startling and significant thing is that human 
 beings, impotent as they presumably are, can 
 carve and have carved out for themselves in 
 their moral code and in their social life some- 
 thing which is peculiarly their own handiwork. 
 Full of this idea, M. Maeterlinck writes his play, 
 " Monna Vanna," in which, with a background 
 of all the turmoil and bloodshed of the Middle 
 Ages, we have two characters, Prinzivalle and 
 Monna Vanna herself, calmly assuring to them- 
 selves their future existence in virtue of the 
 strength and purity of the love between them. 
 Looked at from the outside, " Monna Vanna " 
 is a melodramatic stage play ; but viewed from 
 the inside, in relation to the author's own 
 mental development, it represents the full and 
 entire recognition of the value of human 
 personality, and its power to sway attendant 
 circumstances and conditions as it wills.
 
 58 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 And now we come to M. Maeterlinck's 
 "Joyzelle," hardly a drama in the ordinary 
 sense mystical, insubstantial, dreamlike. It 
 is easy to say that by its form and nature 
 "Joyzelle" is not actable ; but that is not the 
 point of view from which it is worth while to 
 study it. What had happened to the author 
 in the interval between " Monna Vanna " and 
 " Joyzelle " ? In the earlier play he had fully 
 comprehended the truth that what we call 
 Fate is that which the hands of ourselves and 
 our forefathers have wrought. But it is not 
 enough to say that Destiny is character, for 
 how is character itself built up? How comes 
 it that the individual, such as he is, is carried 
 this way and that by forces which are none the 
 less arbitrary because they must be called part 
 of his own personality ? The answer is that 
 beyond the individual man and woman there is 
 all that we include under the name " heredity," 
 that which past ages have bequeathed, the 
 environment into which an individual is born, 
 the burden he takes up from those who have 
 gone before him. Nor yet is this all. There 
 is a conscious life ; there is also an unconscious 
 or subconscious life, which psychologists have 
 slowly begun to recognise, and which the
 
 JOYZELLE 59 
 
 spiritualists have taken up and, perhaps, tra- 
 vestied for their own purposes as the " sub- 
 liminal self." It is an undoubted truth that 
 outside the region of our conscious impressions, 
 thoughts, and ideas, there exists a vague inde- 
 finite realm of unrealised thoughts, unfelt 
 emotions, unwilled volitions. Scenes which we 
 are apparently seeing for the first time strike 
 us with an odd sense of familiarity. Experiences 
 which are new to us we strangely seem to have 
 experienced before. The waking life of active 
 thought has round it a floating atmosphere of 
 dreamland just as the actual sphere of vision 
 on which the eye is focused is surrounded by 
 a shadowy, half-seen world. M. Maeterlinck 
 seized upon this conception with avidity, and 
 made it explain all sorts of problems. I should 
 imagine that he was immensely interested by 
 the phenomena of spiritualism, thought-reading, 
 clairvoyance ; at all events, in a notorious essay 
 he tried to explain the clairvoyant's prevision 
 of the future by means of the subliminal 
 consciousness. 
 
 "Joyzelle" stands as the latest illustration of 
 the position which M. Maeterlinck has now 
 reached. It is full of two ideas. First, the vic- 
 torious power of the personality to win its way
 
 60 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 to happiness which, naturally enough, with his 
 romantic instincts, the author expounds as the 
 power of love. The second idea, more difficult 
 to seize because to a large extent vague and 
 mystical, is the notion that it is given to some 
 men, or rather that it is given to all men if only 
 they were aware of it, to foresee and, within 
 limits, to control the future in virtue of all those 
 mysterious powers which lie dormant and im- 
 plicit in the subconscious self. The story of 
 the play only exists for the sake of these ideas. 
 Never so resolutely before has M. Maeterlinck 
 set himself to carry out his thoughts in a quasi- 
 dramatic form, caring not so much for the actual 
 stage-presentation as for the exhibition of the 
 thoughts of which his mind was full. When he 
 wrote " Monna Vanna " we now know that he 
 had been reading Browning's "Luria." When 
 he composed "Joyzelle" he had obviously been 
 dipping into Shakespeare's " Tempest." There 
 is something of the relations of Ferdinand and 
 Miranda in those of his hero and heroine, 
 Lanceor and Joyzelle. The two meet on an 
 enchanted island and fall in love at first sight. 
 As ruler of the island we have not Prospero, 
 but Merlin. It is the Merlin of the Arthurian 
 legend, the Merlin who is a wizard and en-
 
 JOYZELLE 61 
 
 chanter, bound afterwards by that fate which 
 no one can avoid, to be a victim to the wiles of 
 Vivien, or, as she is here called, Vivianne. 
 Merlin has an attendant sprite, who, after 
 Shakespeare's heroine, is called Arielle, a 
 beautiful slave, bound to do the behests of her 
 master, although sometimes in her love for him 
 she offers advice running counter to his projects. 
 We must stop for a moment over this last figure. 
 The Ariel whom we know, the Ariel who could 
 fly on a bat's back and lie in a cowslip bell, is 
 a perfectly intelligible fairy, with no mystical 
 meaning hidden under her sweet, fantastic per- 
 sonality. Her namesake, Arielle, is a thoroughly 
 Maeterlinckian conception. She stands for the 
 subconscious or subliminal self already referred 
 to that part of Merlin which has not yet come, 
 or which only comes spasmodically into the 
 active, conscious life. She is related to the 
 wizard as at one and the same time himself 
 and not himself, detached because to Arielle is 
 given the prevision of events hidden from Mer- 
 lin's eyes, and yet closely intimate as his ally, 
 his agent, his accomplice. Sometimes Arielle is 
 visible, sometimes she is invisible ; sometimes 
 she loyally assists Merlin in his plans, sometimes 
 she dissents and begs him to think more of him-
 
 62 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 self and his own interests. But by the curious 
 suggestion involved in Arielle's knowledge of 
 the future we recognise M. Maeterlinck's ex- 
 cursions into spiritualistic psychology, and his 
 recent explanation of the phenomena of clair- 
 voyance and prediction by means of the action 
 of the subliminal self. To bring so abstruse a 
 conception as this on the stage obviously re- 
 quires some courage, and, of course, renders it 
 proportionately difficult to regard "Joyzelle" 
 as a practicable drama. 
 
 But when once we have mastered this abstruse 
 element the rest of the story is comparatively 
 plain sailing. It deals with the successive trials 
 to which human love may be subjected in 
 order that its true redeeming and revivifying 
 power may be manifested. Merlin has a son, 
 Lanceor, to whom he is devoted, and who has 
 reached a critical turning-point in his career. 
 If he can become all that his father hopes, it can 
 only be by the self-sacrificing love of a woman 
 who can educate him up to his proper stature. 
 For this purpose Arielle, at Merlin's bidding, 
 brings both Lanceor and Joyzelle, hitherto 
 strangers to one another, as shipwrecked 
 voyagers to the enchanted island where they 
 meet and forthwith fall in love. Then begins
 
 JOYZELLE 63 
 
 the series of trials, which come principally on 
 the head of Joyzelle for in all questions of love 
 it is the woman who saves and the man who is 
 saved. If she can withstand the trials through 
 the force and simplicity of her character, if love 
 can win its way past every obstacle, then to her 
 is it truly given to ennoble Merlin's son. The 
 lovers are separated, Lanceor being kept a 
 prisoner ; but they meet by stealth in a garden 
 which, hitherto barren and desolate, springs 
 into vernal beauty and luxuriance at the de- 
 claration of their love. The passage is the 
 most beautiful in the drama. 
 
 Joyzelle : There were here only poor dead 
 flowers. 
 
 Lanceor : There are none but living flowers 
 now. Look, they are tumbling upon us from 
 all sides, bursting into branches, making the 
 trees bend with their weight, entangling our 
 steps, crushing and crowding together, blinding 
 the foliage, dazzling the grass. The spring is 
 drunk with joy. I have never seen such 
 prodigal disorder, such brilliant splendour. 
 
 Joyzelle : Where are we ? 
 
 Lanceor: We are in the garden which just 
 now you would not open to my love.
 
 64 DEVELOPMENT OF MAETERLINCK 
 
 Joyzelle : What have we done ? 
 
 Lanceor : I have given the kiss that one gives 
 but once, and you have said the word that no 
 one says twice. 
 
 This beautiful interlude is succeeded by a 
 fresh trial. Lanceor is beguiled by Arielle 
 to fall in love with her, but Joyzelle, through 
 her absolute and perfect faith, saves him 
 from the temptation. He is stung by a 
 poisonous animal, he is afflicted with a deadly 
 illness, and Joyzelle is told that she can only 
 save his life on condition that she shall first give 
 herself to Merlin. She consents at last, driven 
 desperate by Lanceor's sufferings, but she arms 
 herself with a dagger to pierce Merlin to the 
 heart rather than undergo any dishonour to her 
 love. Of course, before the climax can be 
 reached Merlin reveals himself; and so, in the 
 sequel, Joyzelle wins her way to the haven 
 where she would be, carrying Lanceor with her, 
 in virtue of her innocence, her faith, her daunt- 
 less courage ; while Merlin, recognising that she 
 is indeed the predestined consort for his son, 
 proves himself to be both father and friend. 
 He goes to the mysterious doom which awaits 
 him, but Lanceor and Joyzelle are radiantly
 
 JOYZELLE 65 
 
 happy. So this curious drama ends, a compound 
 of philosophy and romance, a dream charged 
 with spiritualistic ideas. It is not a play in any 
 ordinary sense of the word, but it is certainly 
 written in the best of Maeterlinckian prose, and 
 contains several beautiful passages of lyrical 
 grace and sweetness. I have quoted one, let 
 me finish with another excerpt. Lanceor, it 
 must be understood, is ill and near the grave ; 
 Joyzelle is watching him. 
 
 Lanceor : What is left of me ? Not these 
 hands, which have lost their force ; not these 
 eyes, which have no longer their brightness; 
 not this heart, which has betrayed love ! 
 
 Joyzelle : It is you, and always you, and only 
 you. What matter what you are, now that I 
 find you again ? . . . When one loves as I love 
 you, it is not what a man says or does or what 
 he is that one loves in the loved one. It is 
 himself, and only himself, who remains the 
 same through all the years and all the woes 
 which chance . . . 
 
 Lanceor : Joyzelle ! 
 
 Joyzelle : Yes, yes ; kiss me, hold me close to 
 you. We have to struggle, we shall have to 
 suffer, we are in a world which seems full of 
 
 E
 
 66 JOYZELLE 
 
 snares. We are only two, but we are the whole 
 of Love. 
 
 That is a stronger and deeper human note 
 than Maeterlinck had touched before, even in 
 " Pelleas and Melisande " or " Aglavaine and 
 Selysette."
 
 GEORGES RODENBACH 
 
 ONE of the new literary movements best worth 
 studying is the native school of Belgium, which 
 has only existed for the last quarter of a 
 century. The publication of an English version 
 of Georges Rodenbach's " Bruges-la-Morte," 
 which has been edited by Mr Thomas Duncan, 
 gives me an opportunity to say something of 
 this curious development of letters, which is at 
 once so like and so unlike its French models. 
 The principal writers are only some four or five, 
 and their literary activity dates from about 
 1880. All come, more or less, under the 
 influence of such writers as Zola, Baudelaire, 
 and the school of French Decadents. Their 
 work is full of a subtle analysis of moods 
 and emotions ; they cultivate more or less a 
 spirit of elegant pessimism ; they are inspired 
 rather by the beauty of autumnal decay than 
 they are by the hues of youth and Spring. 
 Lemonnier is one of these ; so is Verhaeren, 
 and Eekhoud, and Rodenbach ; but the greatest 
 
 7
 
 68 GEORGES RODENBACH 
 
 is undoubtedly Maurice Maeterlinck, at once 
 the youngest and most successful of the group. 
 They are poets, and novelists, and dramatists, 
 although in some the dramatic instinct is 
 subordinate to the novelistic, and in others the 
 poetic impulse is the main thing in their lives. 
 But the odd thing about them all is that they 
 combine two extremely different characteristics. 
 They are at once Mystics and Animalists if 
 the latter term can be permitted. They seem 
 to be equally inspired by the most refined, 
 spiritual creed and by suggestions of a rude 
 carnalism, such as we find, in another depart- 
 ment of work, in a painter like Rubens. The 
 explanation is simple enough. There are two 
 strains from which the modern Belgian race 
 comes, the Walloon and the Flemish. The 
 Walloon is full of a most delicate sensibility, 
 a mental energy at once nervous and refined ; 
 while the Flemish, being more akin to what we 
 generally stigmatise as Dutch, is slow, medi- 
 tative, simple, gross, and fervid. A mixture of 
 races has curious effects when we deal with 
 literary work. In the case of the English 
 stock, it is strange to see how there exist 
 equal propensities to Scandinavian Mysticism 
 and French alertness and practicality.
 
 GEORGES RODENBACH 69 
 
 Georges Rodenbach is not well known in 
 England. Indeed, I imagine that Mr Duncan's 
 translation of " Bruges-la-Morte " is the first 
 version of any of his works which has appeared 
 in an English guise. Rodenbach was born in 
 1855 and died in 1898; a man who appears 
 to have said all that was in him to say, albeit 
 that his decease was deplored as premature. 
 His is a frail, anaemic talent, with little that is 
 virile. He is a lover of things shadowy and 
 remote from ordinary interests in life, an 
 amateur of exquisite sensations, a dreamer, an 
 analyst of the soul, with characteristic qualities 
 which belong to what is usually called the 
 Decadent School. But he "found himself" 
 early. The seed-plot, the germinating soil of 
 all his work, is his intense understanding and 
 appreciation of those old Belgian cities, es- 
 pecially Bruges, which were ruined by the 
 decay of the Hanseatic League, the withdrawal 
 of the sea and the consequeut disappearance 
 of obvious commercial opportunities. At the 
 background of a great many of Maeterlinck's 
 pieces we find fantastic castles, dungeons, 
 subterranean passages, iron doors the fan- 
 tastic mise-en-scene connecting the puppets 
 of his drama with medievalism. But the
 
 70 GEORGES RODENBACH 
 
 background of which Rodenbach is fond is 
 nearly always Bruges Bruges with its old 
 cathedrals, its convents, its canals, its bells, its 
 bridges, and its simple primitive religious life. 
 It is as though a man in England were to lay 
 the scenes of his novels perpetually in the 
 older portions of Oxford, or better still, 
 perhaps, in Wells. A cloistral life which goes 
 back to the Middle Ages, the influence of 
 ancient buildings and hoary walls, the atmos- 
 phere of beautiful decay, the spirit of a life 
 which knows nothing of the strain and stress 
 of modern civilisation, but cultivates simple 
 austerities of its own these are the things 
 which Rodenbach loves, and which he is 
 perpetually suggesting to our mind. In 
 " Bruges-la-Morte," for instance, one of his 
 chief aims is to show how the old Belgian city 
 has a sort of intangible personality entering 
 into all the fluctuating conditions of the human 
 soul. As he puts it himself in the preface to 
 his romance, " An indefinable spiritual ascen- 
 dancy establishes itself over the souls of all 
 those who dwell within its walls. Uncon- 
 sciously they become assimilated into harmony 
 with the languors of its waters and its bells." 
 Hughes Viane, in the story with which we
 
 GEORGES RODENBACH 71 
 
 are concerned, had made Bruges his home after 
 his wife died. He was a disconsolate widower, 
 always wearing mourning, always living in com- 
 plete solitude, roaming about at eventide through 
 roadways with which he was perfectly familiar, 
 breathing every day the air of a dead city. 
 This mood of pensive melancholy is exquisitely 
 traced by Rodenbach, with a terseness of phrase 
 and a delicate, intuitive perception which put 
 him high in the ranks of the cultivators of style 
 such as Mr Walter Pater or Mr Arthur Symons. 
 And now suddenly, and almost without warning, 
 comes in that other element in Belgian civilisa- 
 tion to which allusion has already been made. 
 This lonely and heart-broken widower, pacing 
 day after day the well-worn streets, and hearing 
 the bells which seem to be perpetually tolling 
 the ruin of his life, becomes a sensualist of a 
 quite ordinary and vulgar type. One day in 
 his walks he sees what appears to him to be 
 the living embodiment of his dead wife, a 
 woman with just the same auburn hair, the 
 same large and expressive eyes, the same 
 appealing tones of the voice. In reality, this 
 new idol of Hughes Viane, called Jane Scott, 
 is only a dancer who comes now and again with 
 a theatrical company to Bruges, an ordinary
 
 72 GEORGES RODENBACH 
 
 commonplace creature of accommodating morals. 
 Nevertheless, under the hallucination that Jane 
 Scott is the " doppel-ganger " of his dead wife, 
 our hero does not hesitate to scandalise the 
 whole of Bruges by an unblushing liaison with 
 the dancing-girl. As the news slowly per- 
 meates through the narrow provincialisms of 
 an ecclesiastical city, Viane finds himself the 
 target of laughter and scorn. Even his old 
 servant, Barbara, much troubled in conscience, 
 is forced to get from her confessor detailed 
 orders as to how she ought to behave. As 
 long as the hero visits the lady, she is told to 
 close her eyes to any infraction of social 
 etiquette, but if once Jane Scott enters Viane's 
 house, then Barbara's soul can only be saved by 
 instant and incontinent departure. 
 
 Of course the inevitable happens. A great 
 procession is to take place through the streets 
 of Bruges, and Jane Scott is keen to see what 
 is to be seen of it from the windows of the 
 hero's house, before which the procession 
 passes. Meanwhile, however, other strains of 
 feeling have entirely altered Viane's attitude 
 towards the new amour. He has become a 
 Mystic. He wanders through the cathedral, 
 and everywhere hears voices that proclaim his
 
 GEORGES RODENBACH 73 
 
 doom. Moreover, he is disgusted by the 
 vulgarity of Jane Scott, who at once lies to 
 him and wastes his money. From this point 
 George Rodenbach's romance suddenly bursts 
 into melodrama. The dancing-girl comes into 
 Viane's house ; Barbara, the old servant, in- 
 dignantly departs ; and the agonised hero finds 
 that even the relics of his dead wife are not 
 safe against the desecrating hands of her repre- 
 sentative on earth. She may, indeed, be very 
 like the dead lady, but, after all, her auburn 
 hair is not real, but dyed; her face is powdered; 
 her cheeks are rouged. Even all these depress- 
 ing things might be endured by anyone who 
 is still a victim to a foolish infatuation, but 
 when Jane Scott seizes the hair, kept religiously 
 in a glass case, which was all that was left to 
 Viane from his earlier married life, then mad- 
 ness seems to seize upon his soul, and he 
 strangles the dancing-girl with the yellow curls 
 of his dead wife. Now, at last, he is thoroughly 
 alone. Barbara has departed. Jane Scott is 
 murdered. His wife is more dead than ever. 
 So the romance abruptly ends on this final 
 smash. " Bruges-la-Morte " had become not 
 only an old-world city full of dead memories, 
 but nothing more nor less than a charnel house.
 
 74 GEORGES RODENBACH 
 
 It is not a pleasant story, nor, indeed, would 
 it be worth much attention were it not for 
 those elements which make Georges Rodenbach 
 himself remarkable. We can dismiss the whole 
 personality of Jane Scott ; we can get rid of the 
 melodramatic denouement, which in itself is a 
 surprise, and an unwelcome one. But what 
 remains is the extraordinary skill with which 
 the author not only traces the lineaments of a 
 city which he obviously loves, but induces us 
 to partake in no small measm*e of his enthu- 
 siastic admiration. Bruges becomes alive for 
 us in this romance. We see with a new in- 
 tensity what the place, with all its associations, 
 signifies. It has a veritable personality of its 
 own ; it exercises an influence over every scene 
 in the narrative. Indeed, Georges Rodenbach 
 tells us as much himself. " Towns," he says, 
 "in particular, have a distinctive personality of 
 their own, and an exterior character which 
 corresponds to the cravings of our souls for 
 such needs as joy, love, sorrow, or renunciation. 
 Each town represents a condition of soul that 
 unconsciously enters into our own life like a 
 fluid which emanates imperceptibly into the 
 atmosphere." Rodenbach wrote a drama, "Le 
 Voile," which was performed at the Theatre
 
 GEORGES RODENBACH 75 
 
 Fran9ais in 1894, but his principal claims to 
 recognition will be found in two of his novels, 
 " The Carillonneur " and " Bruges-la- Morte," in 
 both of which the scene is laid in the city im- 
 mortalised by the paintings of Van Eyck and 
 Memling.
 
 HUYSMANS' "THE CATHEDRAL" 
 
 IT is melancholy to reflect on the fate which 
 has overtaken M. Zola's School of Naturalism. 
 There was once a band of ardent young writers 
 who accepted as their literary task the descrip- 
 tion of things as they are the production of 
 human documents steeped in all their original 
 vulgarity and narrated without pity and without 
 remorse. Of course, M. Zola was in the front 
 rank of this movement, but under his orders 
 were several talented French novelists, pre- 
 pared to carry on the crusade to its furthest 
 length. 
 
 Anyone can see who takes up the little book, 
 "Soirees de Medan," that, at that time, some 
 fifteen years ago, men like Maupassant and 
 Huysmans, Henry Ceard and Paul Alexis wore 
 the colours of the regiment, and were prepared 
 to march wherever they were told. But what 
 has now become both of the leader and his 
 followers ? M. Zola wrote a book on " Paris " 
 which, if it meant anything, assuredly illus- 
 
 76
 
 HUYSMANS' "THE CATHEDRAL" 77 
 
 trated the ruinous effect of Anarchism both 
 in politics and in literature. Maupassant 
 well, we know the doom which awaited that 
 bright but ill-regulated genius; and as to Loris 
 Karl Huysmans, we have in " The Cathedral/' 
 excellently translated by Miss Clara Bell, a 
 characteristic example of the course of his 
 mental evolution. Of naturalism, as a literary 
 theory, there remains in this last writer nothing 
 but a passionate love for detail, applied no 
 longer to the sordid elements of Parisian or 
 provincial life, but to the minutiae of a mystical 
 devotion to our Lady of Chartres. The man 
 who graduated as a materialist has caught 
 the fine flavour of mediaeval spiritualism, has 
 become a symbolist, an allegorist, and I know 
 not what else besides that is vague, elusive, and 
 baffling. 
 
 The history of L. K. Huysmans is itself a <J. 
 parable which he who runs may read. In it 
 are depicted all the oscillations of a highly 
 nervous sentimentalism, perpetually in ex- 
 tremes either at one end of the scale or the 
 other. He will give you at the outset pictures 
 of Dutch-like fidelity, as, indeed, befits the race 
 from which he springs. His acuteness of 
 vision, his appreciation of light and shade,
 
 78 HUYSMANS' "THE CATHEDRAL" 
 
 his resolute realism, remind us, as M. Mourey 
 has recently suggested, of a Teniers or an 
 Ostarde. But, in obedience to a particular 
 theory of his own, in such works as " En 
 Menage," and " Les Soeurs Vatard," he will 
 be intensely interested in the vulgar, the 
 mean, and the sordid, or rather he will seek 
 to make himself so, for the predominant 
 impression is theory or no theory one of 
 immeasurable disgust. Only fifteen years ago 
 he signed a sort of profession of materialism, 
 possibly under the influence of Zola, perhaps 
 because one of the strongest characteristics in 
 him was a passion to understand, an insatiable 
 and unwearied curiosity. At this stage the 
 Prodigal Son was filling himself with the 
 husks which the swine do eat; there had not 
 yet dawned for him a sudden and overmaster- 
 ing illumination, a wild desire to return to 
 his father. 
 
 The change begins in the latter part of 1884, 
 although at first it assumes a curiously repellent 
 form. Of few books of our contemporary era 
 can it be said that they reveal the evolution or 
 the conversion of a soul, in the simplest sense 
 of the term, more vividly and picturesquely 
 than those three novels, " La Bas," " En Route,"
 
 HUYSMANS' "THE CATHEDRAL" 79 
 
 and "La Cathedral e," which will be always 
 associated with the strange history of Huys- 
 mans a nervous, subtle, highly sensitive, 
 and excitable nature, passionately relapsing 
 from one ideal to its exact opposite, and 
 throughout with the one predominant attri- 
 bute of intense curiosity. If Naturalism and 
 Materialism have failed him, why should he 
 not see whether they could not be refined, 
 or, perhaps, symbolised, by some kind of 
 spiritualism? You cannot eat swine's husks 
 for ever without your stomach rising at 
 such food. You must pretend that the 
 husks stand for and represent something 
 else, some wonderful caricature of bread and 
 wine, or even ambrosia and nepenthe. And 
 so the storm-driven artist depicts a hero 
 called Durtal, who, in the first stage of his 
 progress, revels in black magic, and tries to con- 
 nect mediaeval superstition in its basest forms 
 with that curious product of nineteenth century 
 magic called, in Paris, Satanism or Diabolism. 
 " L Bas " is one of the most hideous books 
 that has ever been composed on a repulsive 
 theme, for in it is drawn for us the deliberate 
 attempt which a baffled sensualist makes to 
 provide himself with new and exquisite sensa-
 
 80 HUYSMANS' "THE CATHEDRAL" 
 
 tions, not only by an apparatus of scents and 
 sights, pictorial art and music, but by recourse 
 to hidden and obscene rites of magic. In a 
 simpler and less terrible way one can see much 
 the same characteristics in modern society. 
 Fashionable people, with some profession of 
 scepticism and much devotion to the material- 
 istic idea of wealth, seek to satisfy the imagina- 
 tive and romantic side of their nature by going 
 to seances, consulting spiritualistic mediums, 
 or lending an attentive ear to the attractive 
 theories of Esoteric Buddhism or the glowing 
 pages of Mr Myers' " Human Personality." 
 
 Perhaps some of them, or at least the more 
 earnest of them, will accompany Huysmans' 
 hero Durtal in his further transformations. 
 When once the mystical dream has com- 
 menced, when the hunger for imaginative 
 symbols, for something, at all events, different 
 from the dry bones of materialism, has taken 
 them captive, men and women who are senti- 
 mental and emotional will be led somewhere 
 near the portals of " The Cathedral." After 
 "L4 Bas " comes "En Route/' one of the 
 most striking pictures ever penned of the 
 struggles of a vacillating and self-tormented 
 soul between the competing claims of reason
 
 HUYSMANS' "THE CATHEDRAL" 81 
 
 and faith. But as Madame de Montespan 
 long ago declared, " reason is for reasonable 
 people/' not for dreaming sentimentalists. 
 Durtal engages in a tremendous conflict, 
 renewing within himself the contrast between 
 the life he means to leave, the life of the 
 senses, and the existence which he intends to 
 try, the refuge of a convent. It may be 
 called a combat between Reason and Faith, 
 but in reality it is nothing of the kind. 
 The man has never attempted to guide 
 his life in accordance with an intellectual 
 standard. He has always been the victim of 
 his senses and his emotions ; if he had been 
 a reasonable human creature he would not 
 have attempted to find satisfaction in mediaeval 
 black magic, just as if he had been a true 
 artist he would have discovered long ago the 
 essential ugliness of Naturalism. The real 
 battle for such a man is between two kinds 
 of sensationalism the one which is occupied 
 with his bodily senses, the other which is en- 
 grossed with his emotional moods. And when 
 the one ideal fails him he naturally turns to 
 the other. Reason has nothing to do with 
 the question, because the essence of the 
 rational life is self-control, which the hero of 
 
 F
 
 82 HUYSMANS' "THE CATHEDRAL" 
 
 "En Route" possesses no more than the hero 
 of " La Bas." 
 
 Least of all does J. K. Huysmans himself 
 possess the saving grace of self-control or its ex- 
 ternal equivalent, a sense of humour, when he 
 introduces us to " The Cathedral." Durtal, 
 who has tried La Trappe and found the 
 discipline too austere, goes to Chartres, and 
 in that gorgeous example of Gothic art, the 
 Cathedral of Chartres, discovers the gentle 
 and appealing mediaevalism which suits his 
 dreamy temperament. Never has there been 
 a more wonderful picture given, complete in 
 all its details, of the inner meaning of Gothic 
 architecture, than is portrayed for us in the 
 pages of " The Cathedral." It is not so much, 
 however, archaeology and architecture which 
 interest the author, it is the symbolic meaning 
 of ecclesiastical decoration and ritual, the 
 hidden signification of beasts and birds, of 
 glass windows and crypts, which run riot in 
 this curious book. There are only four 
 characters, Durtal himself, the Abbe Gevresin, 
 the Abbe Plomb, and Madame Celeste Bavoil, 
 the housekeeper of one of the priests. Just 
 as the hero, filling page after page, pours out 
 before us the most extraordinary stores of know-
 
 HUYSMANS' "THE CATHEDRAL" 83 
 
 ledge, dealing with every phase and stage 
 of mediaeval architecture, so, too, does the 
 artist, forgetting that the first characteristic of 
 art is selection, overpower us with a mass of 
 detail, presenting the most incongruous and 
 shapeless work which a reader has ever been 
 invited to study. There is an immense power 
 of description, picturesque passages here and 
 there, a scrupulous literary style, a boundless 
 curiosity, a great apparent sincerity, and a 
 seemingly intense conviction of the truth of 
 it all ; but the sovereign conception which 
 should guide the artist's hand in subordinat- 
 ing all his profuse data to one paramount end 
 this is what is wholly lacking. 
 
 Doubtless to a man interested in mediaeval 
 lore, or to a writer seeking to recommend the 
 claims of the Roman Catholic Church as the 
 one panacea for human ills, such faults as 
 these are not patent or are obscured by the 
 excellence of the author's intentions. Others 
 will apply to this work a different standard 
 from that of the devout mystic. It is incon- 
 testably an eloquent hymn to the beauty of 
 holiness, but holiness only of one kind. We 
 have nothing here to do with the religion 
 which helps our daily life of struggle and
 
 84 HUYSMANS' "THE CATHEDRAL" 
 
 stress ; we are bidden to accept the religion 
 which begins by turning its back on mundane 
 problems, and telling us at all hazards to save 
 our individual souls. Durtal himself, recom- 
 mended to the care of Our Lady of the Pillar 
 and Virgin of the Crypt, is going to be shown 
 us in a succeeding volume as an oblate at 
 the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, where, of 
 course, the existence of a gentle, weak, and 
 worn-out creature, who has not conquered the 
 world, but allowed the world to drive him 
 into exile is delineated with all the author's 
 skill. But for the English reader the in- 
 terest of M. Huysmans' work does not lie in 
 the fact that he gives us the solution of a 
 world-problem, but that he paints the only 
 kind of solution open to the modern neuro- 
 path. When the whirligig of time brings in 
 its revenges it will be found almost universally 
 true that the sentimental libertine, who has 
 imagination and is tormented by nerves, does 
 exceedingly well for himself and for the world 
 by hiding himself in a cloister. Durtal is a 
 poor creature. Let him leave to stouter 
 hearts that arena in which he has not the 
 strength and masculine fibre to wage war.
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 I. THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH 
 
 " THE burden which a great man lays upon his 
 contemporaries is the effort to understand him." 
 It is an old phrase, capable of many interpre- 
 tations, but never so true as when there comes 
 into the ordinary business of comprehension 
 the added difficulty of an alien nationality. 
 Germans have understood Shakespeare almost 
 as well as Englishmen not better, as some of 
 their literary prophets suppose ; but our great 
 Elizabethan dramatist has ever been a sealed 
 book to the majority of Frenchmen. We on 
 our side have done our best to understand 
 Sudermann, Victor Hugo, De Maupassant, with 
 not altogether satisfactory results. Similar 
 phenomena have happened with regard to both 
 Ibsen and Maeterlinck ; the latter, being nearer 
 the French genius, is more readily accepted in 
 Paris, the former receives perhaps a fuller meed 
 of recognition in Berlin. But when in this 
 country we are confronted not only with the 
 problem of an author who writes in Italian, and 
 
 86
 
 86 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 Italian of a very special type, but also with the 
 great and radical divergence which exists be- 
 tween the Latin spirit and that of Teutonic 
 peoples, the task of a not inadequate criti- 
 cism becomes greater. In France the Italian 
 author was accepted readily. As far back as 
 1895 that distinguished French critic, the 
 Vicomte de Vogue, published an article in 
 the Revue des Deux Mondes in which he hailed 
 D'Annunzio as a sort of incarnation of the 
 modern Latin genius, a renaissance of those 
 particular gifts and that criticism of life 
 which we associate with the southern races 
 of Europe. For a time all France went 
 mad about the Italian writer. M. Herelle 
 translated him with grace and elegance, and 
 besides De Vogue another well-known French 
 critic, Rene Doumic, sang his praises. Never 
 was a foreign writer's entrance into the citadel 
 of Parisian literature welcomed with a more 
 liberal blowing of trumpets, and from that 
 time to this D'Annunzio has held his pride 
 of place among our Gallic neighbours. His 
 reception in England was more doubtful : the 
 recognition of his genius has been more tardy. 
 Our national temperament is out of sympathy 
 with the form in which it finds expression. The
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 87 
 
 man is still young, comparatively speaking, and 
 for this reason, perhaps, we can understand, 
 even if we do not altogether forgive some of 
 his most salient characteristics. He has no 
 pity, not much humour ; he describes his 
 scenes and analyses his characters with all that 
 merciless severity which we associate with young 
 and triumphant science in a dissecting-room. 
 Nor do the infinite play and change of life, the 
 odd incongruities of person and circumstance, 
 the stray visitations of the comic Muse to 
 the domain guarded by her severer sister, 
 Tragedy, make any appeal to him. But humour 
 is the device by means of which middle-age 
 wards off the shocks of fate ; and compassion, 
 too, only comes with the advancing years which 
 learn to understand and to forgive. It is not 
 the gift of youth to be either merciful or 
 humorous ; the judgments of young people, if 
 not always truer, are at least more direct, more 
 uncompromising, and more serious than those 
 of their elders. In the aftermath of his genius 
 D'Annunzio may discover that the artist who 
 catches the lights and shadows as they flit 
 across the surface of our human world, requires 
 also, to save him from despair, the boon of a 
 sovereign pity.
 
 88 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 Other traits in this Italian novelist are more 
 difficult to deal with. De Vogue, an enthusi- 
 astic upholder of D'Annunzio and all his work, 
 contrasts him with Zola, as a man who, though 
 he deals in indecencies, is never indecent in a 
 vulgar, bourgeois, parochial way. It is no doubt 
 the truth that D'Annunzio never descends to 
 the horrid squalor of " La Terre " or "Nana," 
 or even " L' Assommoir " ; there are no irre- 
 deemable elements in his naturalism, or realism, 
 or by whatever other name the tendency to 
 explore the basenesses of life may be described. 
 The Italian deals with coarse subjects in the 
 spirit of an artist. Nevertheless, for most 
 of us who do not belong to the Latin races, 
 the coarseness remains a great broad stigma, 
 lying across the eloquent or picturesque page. 
 One finds the same thing in Catullus, in 
 Juvenal, here and there in Horace ; the scholar 
 is well acquainted with similar traits, running 
 riot among the chief names of Greek literature. 
 If the fact cannot be denied, however much we 
 may excuse it, in Plato, in the Greek dramatists, 
 as well as in their Roman imitators, it is absurd 
 to attempt to disguise its obvious and explicit 
 influence in some of the best and brightest 
 specimens of modern European literature.
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 89 
 
 In the French edition of D'Annunzio's 
 " Triumph of Death," nearly the whole book 
 entitled " La Vita Nuova " is omitted ; much 
 of it in the English edition is preserved, 
 although throughout the novel has been very 
 carefully edited. Yet no one who tries to read 
 the " Triumph of Death " can possibly avoid 
 the feeling that the author, with all his brilliant 
 gifts in psychological analysis, in constructive 
 skill, and in power of vivid realisation and 
 description, will not spare himself, and assuredly 
 will not spare his readers, the most careful and 
 serious study of those phases of our .common 
 humanity which are sensual, discreditable, and 
 repulsive. 
 
 The truth is, of course, that we are dealing 
 here with a particular theory of novel-writing, 
 which even to this day is unfamiliar and uncon- 
 genial to British tastes. Many of us still think 
 that the end and object of a novel is to amuse, 
 to be the pastime of an idle hour, or to serve as 
 an anodyne for anxious or disturbing thoughts. 
 It was not so regarded by Richardson, nor even 
 by Fielding ; it is surely not so regarded, to 
 take a modern instance, by George Meredith. 
 Poetry was defined by Matthew Arnold as a 
 " criticism of life " ; still more is it true that
 
 90 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 that which we negligently call a romance has 
 been, by many of its manipulators, conceived 
 rather as a living page, torn out of the annals 
 of human existence. 
 
 When both Flaubert and Turgenieff described 
 themselves as " onlookers/' they meant that 
 they were students, scientifically trained ob- 
 servers, prepared if need be to use the scalpel 
 on the shrinking nerves and tissues of their 
 subject; and the modern disciples of Flaubert 
 have carried these tendencies to much greater 
 lengths. No longer, such was their view, are 
 we to have romances, dealing in delightfully 
 vague and imaginative fashion with ideal men* 
 and women in ideal circumstances, but, rather 
 actual " slices of life " carved out of the history 
 of actual men and women, by means of hard 
 analytic study, without pity and without regret. 
 Turgenieff indeed, as is shown in the recent 
 collection of his letters, edited by Halperine- 
 Kaminsky, seems to have drawn back from the 
 consequences which inevitably followed from 
 this artistic attitude. He found it difficult to 
 tolerate some of the excesses of the brothers 
 De Goncourt and Zola, which gave him, he 
 confesses, " a kind of indefinable discomfort." 
 But art does not forgive her votaries because
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 91 
 
 they misapprehend her nature and her aims. 
 If art ceases to be selection, then it becomes a 
 minute and a wearisome catalogue of incidents 
 thrown together pell-mell, such as we find it 
 in the work of Zola and other French realists. 
 In such a promiscuous assortment of un- 
 digested material, brutality, we may be quite 
 sure, will come to the top. 
 
 To say as much as this, however, of Gabrielle 
 D'Annunzio is to do him injustice. He is not 
 always so pervadingly brutal ; when he describes 
 scenes like those of the pilgrimage to Casal- 
 bordino, he seems to drive himself into details, 
 to omit no touch of the base and the sordid, 
 in the spirit of a man who thought it to 
 be a solemn duty. He gives us, besides, 
 numerous delightful pictures, pictures of 
 Italian scenery above all, of the sea and the 
 seashore simple sketches, too, of ordinary, 
 commonplace, innocent lives. The range 
 of his female portrait-gallery is almost as 
 wide and varied as that of George Meredith. 
 His Ippolita, his Marie Feries, his Giuliana 
 Hermel, live as strong and vivid present- 
 ments of real and skilfully contrasted women. 
 It is Ippolita who is the heroine of "The 
 Triumph of Death," a great sensuous animal
 
 92 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 abounding in physical vigour, full of a joyous 
 sense of life, cruel and tender, beautiful and 
 yet gross, gay and sombre by turns. But it 
 is clear that D'Annunzio has no equal faith 
 in the variety or complexity of men. His 
 heroes run to a single type refined, sensitive, 
 polished creatures, but entirely devoid of 
 ordinary virility and strength. Giorgio, who 
 appears side by side with Ippolita in "The 
 Triumph of Death," is a feeble libertine, 
 groaning under the fatal curse of premature 
 age, of barren and cynical pessimism. He is 
 alternately attracted and repelled by the 
 heroine ; he envies her that frank enjoyment 
 of life to which he can never attain. He can 
 live neither with her nor without her, and 
 because she seems slipping from his fingers, 
 he can only retain his mastery of her fate by 
 killing her and himself in a desperate plunge 
 over the cliffs into the sea below. 
 
 "The Triumph of Death" thus ends with 
 a tragedy, as it also begins with one in the first 
 chapter. Between the two extremes are to be 
 found many pages of poetry, of tender apprecia- 
 tion of nature, of rare artistic skill, of subtle 
 and penetrative analysis ; but also from the first 
 sentence to the last, a perpetual touch, if not of
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 93 
 
 cruelty, at least of callousness an utter and 
 careless disregard whether the humanity he 
 draws suffers without hope and perishes without 
 chance of redemption. 
 
 II. THE FLAME OF LIFE 
 
 IT is believed that D'Annunzio's work is 
 designed on a large scheme in accordance 
 with which the Romances of the Rose and the 
 Romances of the Lily end in the Romances of 
 the Pomegranate, as the natural and joyous 
 sequel to periods of doubt and ugliness and 
 despair. While the scheme is as yet imperfect, 
 it is useless to speculate how the various pieces 
 will contribute to the general result. Among 
 those which belong to the third of the series, 
 the Romances of the Pomegranate the series 
 which is to end with "The Triumph of Life," 
 in contrast to the already written " Triumph of 
 Death," is "II Fuoco," or, as we call it in 
 England, " The Flame of Life." The image of 
 the pomegranate, with its bursting seeds and its 
 red life, runs indeed through this latest of 
 D'Annunzio's novels. It is the symbol of the 
 hero's art and of its ultimate victory. Because
 
 94 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 Stelio Effrena is a great constructive poet and 
 dreamer, he carries into his personality all the 
 living forces which belong to the modern 
 Italian life, transcending them in some special 
 apotheosis of his own inspiring and prophetic 
 power. The acts which he does, the persons 
 with whom he associates, above all, the great 
 tragic actress, La Foscarina, the partner of his 
 exuberant ecstasies, are but instruments in his 
 self-development. He uses them and he throws 
 them aside. They are stepping-stones to a 
 fuller life hereafter, because, apparently, they 
 belong to the present while the poet possesses 
 the promise and potency of the future. 
 
 Gabriele D'Annunzio, whatever one may 
 think of the man himself or the virtue of his 
 aims, is one of the great artistic energies of the 
 age. He is, as we have been told, the incarna- 
 tion of the Latin genius at all events in its 
 latest forms just as Rudyard Kipling is the in- 
 carnation of the latest type of the Anglo-Saxon 
 genius. Each is representative of a certain 
 phase, not necessarily durable or permanent. 
 The one consecrates the violence, the turbidity, 
 the great naked elemental force which shines 
 in battle and is arrogantly conscious of latent 
 possibilities of victorious rapacity. The other,
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 95 
 
 more difficult for us Northerners to realise or 
 describe, is the artist pure and simple, in- 
 toxicated with sounds and scents and colours 
 a wholly unethical power, with pregnant ideas, 
 unashamed sensuality, recklessly greedy of the 
 richer and more gorgeous life, snatching out of 
 the very corruption in which he revels a grace 
 and glory all his own. With rare self-appreci- 
 ation and insight, D'Annunzio paints himself 
 under the image of Stelio Eifrena, the latter 
 name significant of that unbridled audacity 
 with which the artist claims to possess his own 
 peculiar world. In the impassioned speech 
 which he makes on the occasion of a great 
 ceremony in Venice, Stelio describes himself 
 as the great interpreter of the old Italian art 
 and the inspirer of the new the man who 
 revivifies drama and music and dancing, and 
 blends all the rhythmic arts into a unity of irre- 
 sistible beauty. He is the true successor to 
 Richard Wagner, and, in order to carry out 
 this idea, the novelist makes his hero one of 
 the pall-bearers at Wagner's funeral. He is 
 not the lineal successor, but the inheritor of 
 the same vague, chaotic, artistic impulse not a 
 barbarian, but a polished Italian, utilising for 
 his own purposes the dim ideas which Wagner
 
 96 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 dreamed, and refining their Teutonic quality 
 into purer essences. 
 
 All this sounds vague enough except to 
 those who have read D'Annunzio. It is 
 impossible to approach the man with his 
 extraordinary qualities, so imperfect, so faulty, 
 so emotional and yet so masterly, unless one 
 tries, as best one may, to saturate oneself with 
 the atmosphere of the South. Otherwise all 
 criticism becomes a beating of the air, an idle, 
 cold, academic exercise of unilluminating fault- 
 finding. Those who know Italian will tell us 
 that the style of the artist is itself one of the 
 most wonderful things about him. He has 
 invented new harmonies of prose in words 
 which, like a rich variegated garment, cloak, 
 but do not conceal the movement of his 
 thoughts. Take the first hundred pages of 
 "The Flame of Life" even in their English 
 setting, and you will feel that you are at home 
 with Pindar's magniloquent phrases, that you 
 are dreaming once more with Agathon and 
 Plato in a new version of "The Symposium," 
 while Dante has lent the young writer some of 
 his strength, and Petrarch some of his luscious 
 sweetness. Such at least is the verdict on the 
 purely artistic side, moving in a world of its
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 97 
 
 own and finding beauty even in the madden- 
 ing inconsistencies of the end of one century, 
 and the beginning of another. From every 
 other side the judgment is different. " The 
 Flame of Life is a fugue or a rhapsody 
 on the old theme of "Elle et Lui," the 
 endlessly interesting subject of two artists 
 conjoined by momentary passion. Stelio 
 Effrena, the poet and dramatist, lives with 
 La Foscarina, the great tragic actress. The 
 man is young, the woman is aging. We know 
 that it is only one halting-place in the different 
 developments of the pair ; that the poet is 
 going to fresh woods and pastures new after 
 his brief intoxication. One gorgeous image 
 runs through the book the image of autumn, 
 like a beautiful woman laid to rest in an 
 opalescent grave beneath the waters of the 
 Venetian canals, where she can see above her 
 the moving waters and the floating seaweed. 
 It is the tragedy of La Foscarina's soul, shame- 
 lessly laid bare for us in these pages. 
 
 Two points more may be referred to before 
 we close these glowing and grandiose pages of 
 "The Flame of Life." Ouida, in one of the 
 best of her essays, says that D'Annunzio 
 exhibits a most conspicuous error of modern 
 o
 
 98 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 literature its verbiage. One has only to read 
 a quarter of this book to be convinced that this 
 judgment is true. There is no effort at con- 
 ciseness and concentration. There is none of 
 the supreme ability of "conveying immeasur- 
 able suggestion in a single word." What have 
 we instead? Brilliant phrases repeated over 
 and over again with tiresome echoes ; gorgeous 
 periods, such as Disraeli might have written in 
 his political novels if he had been touched with 
 modern Italian genius ; pages and pages of 
 turgid description, too rich, too opulent, 
 enervating us, making us yearn for one breath 
 of the east wind. This perpetual feast of 
 colour and sound is too much for our normal 
 healthy state ; full of Greek culture as 
 D'Annunzio is, he gives us too much of the 
 later phase, he is too Byzantine in his tastes. 
 The second point is psychological. What has 
 come over the manhood of modern Italy that 
 its youths are so nerveless, so flaccid, so 
 unrestrained, so sentimental ? Why is it that 
 over and over again you have the portrait of a 
 great big elemental woman side by side with 
 some puling specimen of a degenerate hero ? 
 Sperilli, Hermil, Aurispa, all belong to the 
 same type of man, all refined, scholarly,
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 99 
 
 susceptible, but steeped in voluptuous self- 
 indulgence. And the women, whether they 
 be Ippolita or La Foscarina, are so much 
 greater, so much nearer the heart and truth 
 of things, so much more inspired with what 
 Schopenhauer called "the will to live," that 
 they have to be gibbeted and derided and 
 put to scorn in order to preserve in some small 
 measure the equality of the sexes. I know not 
 how it comes that D'Annunzio seems to know 
 the feminine nature so well and treat it so 
 irreverently. Of the two contrasted characters 
 which form the staple of " The Flame of Life," 
 La Foscarina will live the longer, because 
 more gifted with those imperishable qualities 
 which make her belong to the great stream of 
 heroic life, big even in her faults, and, not like 
 Stelio, faulty even in the best gifts. 
 
 III. THE DRAMAS 
 
 THANKS to the enthusiasm of Eleonora Duse, 
 who seems to find in D'Annunzio's work a 
 supreme expression for her histrionic genius, 
 some of the Italian author's dramas have been 
 presented to us in London. But how many of 
 us can hope to get the best out of D'Annunzio ?
 
 100 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 Here is a dramatist who is known to us in 
 English translations published by Mr Heine- 
 mann of "La Gioconda," "La Citta Morta," 
 and " Francesca da Rimini." Not one of these 
 works can we instinctively accept as something 
 which appeals to us, and to which our own 
 sympathies readily respond. It is easy, of 
 course, to string together sentences of blame 
 or praise ; we may comment upon his wholly 
 unethical attitude towards life ; we may de- 
 ride his heroes ; we may say glib and facile 
 things about his heroines ; we may not " like " 
 the subjects which he chooses a favourite 
 phrase of current English criticism. But mean- 
 while, what this artist is, what is his especial 
 genius, what he is driving at, and what gives him 
 his significant place in European literature 
 these are the points which it would be useful to 
 discover, and in the absence of which much of 
 our criticism is absurdly wide of the mark. 
 
 Fortunately enough, both for D'Annunzio 
 and for ourselves, we have an interpreter at 
 least the equal of the author himself in sensitive 
 and creative genius. It is not very easy to 
 say what we could make of "La Gioconda," 
 if it were not for Eleonora Duse; we should 
 perhaps have understood more what the dra-
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 101 
 
 matist meant by writing " La Citta Morta " 
 if the authorities had permitted the incompar- 
 able Italian actress to present it before our eyes. 
 In the latter instance, the action of the Licenser 
 of Plays may be defended or may be arraigned 
 according to the standard we choose to adopt. 
 Obviously, there is all the difference in the world 
 between reading a book in one's study and see- 
 ing its subject treated on the stage. No one, 
 for instance, would think of sanctioning in our 
 modern days a performance of that terrible 
 masterpiece of Ford, the very title of which is 
 unmentionable to ears polite. And there is a 
 further point which bears directly upon the 
 present topic. It seems almost impossible for 
 an English audience to occupy itself with the 
 aesthetic interest of a thing and disregard for 
 the nonce its ethical import. Very few indeed 
 of our English writers have ever been able to 
 keep the two points of view separate. If we take 
 any characteristic examples of our best literary 
 men and women who have composed novels 
 or plays for the edification of their contempo- 
 raries, at least nine out of every ten have in 
 the execution of their artistic task kept an eye 
 on a didactic goal. Thackeray is, of course, 
 an example ready to hand, but so too are George
 
 102 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 Eliot and Mrs Humphry Ward. They are quite 
 right, because they are English, speaking to 
 Englishmen, and it has been at once the prac- 
 tical strength and the artistic weakness of our 
 countrymen that they view everything in rela- 
 tion to the provisions of the Decalogue. But 
 when we are called upon to estimate the work 
 of a purely unethical genius like Heine or De 
 Maupassant or D'Annunzio, we naturally find 
 ourselves very much embarrassed, and try to 
 fence ourselves, with no little indignation, 
 behind the forbidding barriers of the Noncon- 
 formist conscience. 
 
 Take two of the plays of D'Annunzio already 
 referred to, "La Gioconda" and "La Citta 
 Morta." In the first of these not a very good 
 play dramatically considered the author has 
 before him a very subtle theme. He has as his 
 hero Lucio Settala, a man whose real reason for 
 existence is the production of sensitive and 
 emotional pieces of art. He works in marble, a 
 hard, uncompromising material which the artist 
 has strenuously to master and subdue before it 
 can yield him those shapes of beauty which 
 haunt his imagination. He finds inspiration in 
 a woman Gioconda Dianti, whose every move- 
 ment of limb and gesture, every changing look,
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 103 
 
 every moment, whether of rapture or depres- 
 sion, is perpetually giving him ideas, making 
 him tingle with dreams of hitherto unrealised 
 beauty. Gioconda, as a human being, may be, 
 probably is, worthless; her virtue consists in 
 the fact that she is able to communicate an 
 inspiration which to Lucio Settala, at all events, 
 no other woman alive can give. Silvia Settala, 
 the artist's wife, is incomparably a finer woman, 
 sweeter, nobler, juster, purer. But that is not 
 the question for Lucio as an artist, the sole prob- 
 lem being how best to keep alive within him 
 the sacred fire of his own genius. As an 
 ordinary individual, living in a home of his own, 
 the whole position for him is altered, and we 
 see at once the menacing shadow of the inevit- 
 able tragedy. The better Silvia is, the more 
 certain is her doom. As a matter of fact, with 
 the most heartless cruelty, D'Annunzio not 
 only deprives her of the beautiful hands which 
 were her chief charm, but spares us not a single 
 jot of horror in bringing her at the last face to 
 face with her child, who yearns for the fostering 
 touch, and wonders why the wonted embrace 
 is withheld. Horrible, tragic, melodramatic, if 
 you will. But if you are going to judge the 
 hero merely as a respectable householder, who
 
 104 GABRIELS D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 pays his taxes to the State and is probably con- 
 siderably in debt, you will never put yourself 
 at the point of view from which the author 
 composes his drama. 
 
 The case is really the same with " La Citta 
 Morta," although in this instance the license 
 which the author allows himself is more difficult 
 to forgive. In an ancient city of the Pelopidae 
 there are gathered together a certain number 
 of modern folk, a blind woman Anna and her 
 husband, a beautiful girl Bianca Maria, and her 
 brother Leonardo. Some taint, it may be, of 
 old Greek crime exhales from the tombs which 
 the explorers are rifling, or possibly the only 
 interest of the author is the contrast between 
 the modern generation eager to recover the 
 lost treasures of its youth, and the old civilisa- 
 tion whose relics are brought up to the gaze of 
 those who with difficulty understaad their 
 meaning. The theme of the play is terrible 
 enough, if we isolate it, as perhaps we are bound 
 to do, from its context, and regard it as an 
 actual fact ; but in the treatment of the author 
 it is not terrible at all it is managed with a 
 grace and delicacy which, despite our reasonable 
 exasperation, must not be overlooked. Why ? 
 Because D'Annunzio in this, as in the other parts
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 105 
 
 of his work, is an artist pure and simple, who 
 regards his subject not as it would affect the 
 social and domestic conditions of our ordinary 
 life, but purely as a theme on which to em- 
 broider his literary and artistic fancies. Judge 
 him as severely as you will, but at least judge 
 him with intelligence. He is not writing as a 
 moralist, and he never pretended to do so, any 
 more than Shakespeare did in " Measure for 
 Measure" and "Antony and Cleopatra," or 
 Ford or Webster or Marlowe did in the great 
 flowering times of Elizabethan art. 
 
 So far as " Francesca da Rimini " is con- 
 cerned, we move on much easier and more 
 intelligible ground, for here our author is quite 
 as much historian as anything else. He is 
 painting a picture of the thirteenth century in 
 Italy, with all its riotous strength, its passionate 
 cruelty, its lust of blood, its quick sensitiveness 
 to beauty. If revolting things happen in the 
 course of the drama, if a prisoner is killed in 
 cold blood in a dungeon while his cries come 
 up to the ears of the principal personages of 
 the play, if the heroine herself is so intoxicated 
 with the strong wine of battle that she wants 
 to scatter Greek fire broadcast and shoot down 
 her foes, there is the ready reason for all these
 
 106 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 things in the fact that they, or something 
 like them, actually occurred. There are many 
 considerations to be borne in mind before 
 we venture to pass judgment on this play. 
 It is only part of a large scheme, a first 
 instalment in a trilogy which, from the 
 modern poet's point of view, is to do for the 
 family of the Malatesti what ^Eschylus did for 
 the family of the Atreidae. Just as D' Annunzio 
 has composed his novels in a series of groups, 
 under the titles, " Romances of the Rose," 
 " Romances of the Lily," " Romances of the 
 Pomegranate," so, too, he thinks that he has 
 found in the house of the tyrants of Rimini 
 materials for a chain or sequel of plays, of 
 which the second and the third are to be called 
 respectively " Parisina " and " Sigismondo 
 Malatesta." The author, because he takes 
 himself and his task quite seriously, is deter- 
 mined to set before our eyes a historical picture, 
 full of erudite, archaeological details. Naturally it 
 is a picture of war, of bloodshed, of treachery, of 
 accusations of treason ; in each act there is the 
 recurrent note of savagery as well as romance, 
 of fraternal discord quite as much as the passion 
 of a man for a maid. It is no smooth tale of 
 love, simple, sensuous, passionate, such as Mr
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 107 
 
 Stephen Phillips gave us in his version. It is 
 rather a great historical panorama, where each 
 scene as it passes before our gaze has to be 
 illustrated out of the annals and records of the 
 time. The instinct of the scholar is at work 
 here ; and the scholarly instinct is not neces- 
 sarily dramatic. 
 
 It is not, however, the historical detail alone 
 which overpowers and smothers the main in- 
 terest of the story. There are also the pleasant 
 bypaths of poetry, the irresistible inclination to 
 embroider and adorn each theme and element 
 of a theme, the love of riotous, unrestrained, 
 impassioned speech, which, instead of pre- 
 senting an episode simply and directly, sets 
 it in a framework of prodigal and luxuriant 
 verbiage. When Rostand wrote his " Cyrano 
 de Bergerac," or still more his " L'Aiglon," it 
 was open to any critic to remark that the 
 author had been more careful about truth in 
 the accessory parts of his drama than in the 
 principal lines of dramatic action. Something 
 of the same kind must be said about D' Annun- 
 zio's " Francesca," except that the Italian is 
 a better poet than the Frenchman, and that 
 his musical ear for language leads him from the 
 theatrical point of view still further astray.
 
 108 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 Macbeth could not hear the word " sleep " 
 mentioned without stringing together some 
 beautiful lines on the gentle offices of sleep, 
 because each incident as it came touched the 
 springs of an innately poetical temperament, 
 bound to bubble forth even on seemingly in- 
 congruous occasions. Yet Shakespeare, while 
 drawing a particular character, was careful to 
 make every detail subordinate to the rush and 
 swing of an enthralling catastrophe. This is 
 precisely what D' Annunzio cannot do ; we are 
 always wandering among bypaths, charmed by 
 the bloom of the tree, the odour of the flower, 
 the sweet smells of a kindly earth, as we pro- 
 ceed ; or sometimes, with a still more dis- 
 turbing effect, hearing all the imaginative 
 echoes aroused in sensitive minds while the 
 main action is for the time impotently arrested. 
 For those who know Italian well D'Annunzio's 
 " Francesca " provides a perpetual feast of 
 colour and sound ; but, however much endowed 
 with the grace of words, a man who composes 
 a play must keep his own and our attention 
 fixed on the development of his subject. If 
 his poetical luxuriance be too rich and prodigal, 
 he must ruthlessly cut it off; if his historical 
 interest be too strong, he must remember that
 
 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 109 
 
 archaeology is one thing and a dramatic story 
 another. Look at the mere length of the 
 play, and compare it with those brief, salient 
 episodes on which the genius of ^Eschylus con- 
 centrates our attention in his treatment of a 
 similar trilogy. The virtues of brevity and 
 conciseness, in order to strike home with un- 
 erring dramatic effect, have obviously never 
 been realised by D'Anmmzio. And from all 
 this it follows that his "Francesca" is that 
 paradoxical curiosity, a literary play that can 
 only with difficulty be played, a thing to read 
 and enjoy in the study much more than a piece 
 to be seen on the stage.* 
 
 * D' Annunzio's " La Figlia di Jorio " has just 
 been published too late to be referred to in the 
 foregoing sketch.
 
 TURGENIEFF 
 
 IT is now twenty years since Turgenieff died, 
 and his fame is, to a large extent, superseded 
 by that of his great successor, Tolstoi, who, in 
 some respects, corresponds more exactly with 
 the prevailing tendencies of the day. Turge- 
 nieff was, above all, a literary artist, a man of 
 selective power and insight, able, in a few 
 strokes in which every touch tells, to delineate 
 either a character or a scene. Tolstoi is far 
 more elaborate and photographic in his descrip- 
 tions ; a realist, in the modern sense of the 
 term ; a writer who loves to pile up incident on 
 incident, laboriously constructing a situation 
 out of a mass of sometimes irritating details. 
 No one who has read the scene is likely to 
 forget how he paints the arrival of the train 
 at the platform, in front of which his hapless 
 heroine, Anna Karenina, commits suicide. Not 
 a single detail is spared us. We see the engine 
 arriving first, and then the luggage waggon, 
 and then the compartments in which the 
 
 travellers are seated. To some minds this 
 no
 
 TURGENIEFF 111 
 
 strenuous accuracy produces a strong sense of 
 reality ; to others it is simply wearisome. 
 It may be that Tolstoi, as we are so often told, 
 is a unique expression of Russia's native force, 
 but one turns, it must be confessed, with 
 considerable relief to the earlier and equally 
 characteristic Russian writer, Turgenieff, who 
 represents certain of the dim aspirations of his 
 country under the control of a wide cosmopolitan 
 culture. Turgenieff is always an artist, while 
 Tolstoi is only artistic by fits and starts. Cer- 
 tainly he went to work in a different fashion. 
 Take for instance the death of Rudin in the 
 famous novel which bears the hero's name. Rudin 
 is a man with a temperament which probably 
 belongs to all classes and all ages, but which is 
 especially characteristic of Russian civilisation. 
 He is the thinker, the speculative genius, the 
 orator, whose whole energy is expended in 
 theories and words, and who becomes absolutely 
 incapable of decisive action. In all the crises 
 of life he fails, despite the excellence of his 
 principles, just because his character is dreamy 
 and meditative, and preponderatingly intellec- 
 tual, to the absolute exclusion of the emotional 
 element. Such a man, of course, is bound to 
 die miserably, and, inasmuch as he belongs to
 
 112 TURGENIEFF 
 
 that ardent brotherhood who desire to see 
 Russia converted from her evil ways of stagnant 
 despotism, he sympathises with revolutionary 
 movements in all parts of the world. The 
 author tells us that he died on a barricade in 
 Paris, in 1848. But one half-page is enough; 
 the picture remains in our mind, both because 
 it is suggestively treated and because it is so 
 absolutely appropriate to the life and character 
 of the hero. It is treated, in short, from the 
 point of view of art, and not of photography. 
 
 While he did not belong to the ultra-realistic 
 school, Turgenieff's temperament and method 
 were essentially analytic. For example, in " On 
 the Eve," one of the most successful and touch- 
 ing of his works, we get a heroine as modern 
 as any of those with whom the novelists of 
 revolt have supplied us. Elena is a kind of 
 Marie Bashkirtseff, only with more softness and 
 tenderness of nature ; she is in every respect 
 a more lovable and more gracious creature. 
 She sets to work to analyse her own moods 
 with the same restless ferocity ; she calls in 
 question all her feelings, and wonders what the 
 future may have in store for her; she is capable 
 of the same strange enthusiasms, depending 
 largely for their substance on the unknown, and
 
 TURGENIEFF 113 
 
 is face to face, at times, with the same senti- 
 mental despair. 
 
 Nevertheless, Elena, in spite of her modern- 
 ity, does not trouble her head with the mission 
 of her sex she only pays an emotional pen- 
 alty for an intellectual cultivation far beyond 
 the range of her family life. Her father is a 
 pompous man of the world, with many of the 
 peccadilloes which peres de fa-mile possess and 
 exhibit in St Petersburg and Moscow, quite as 
 much as in Paris, or, for the matter of that, in 
 London. Her mother is a lackadaisical lady, 
 much given to attacks of the nerves, and totally 
 unable to comprehend her daughter's stronger 
 individuality. When Elena is left to herself 
 she records in her diary this exalted feminine 
 twaddle ; " I gave a penny to-day to a beggar- 
 woman, and she said to me, ' Why are you so 
 sorrowful ? ' I never suspected that I looked 
 sorrowful. I think it must come from being 
 alone, always alone, for better, or worse. 
 There is no one to stretch out a hand to me ; 
 those who come to me I don't want, and those 
 I would choose pass me by. ... I don't know 
 what's the matter with me to-day. My head is 
 confused ; I want to fall on my knees and beg 
 and pray for mercy. . . . 
 H
 
 114 TURGENIEFF 
 
 " I don't know by whom or how, but I feel 
 as if I were being tortured, and inwardly I am 
 shrieking in revolt ; I weep, and can't be 
 quiet. ... I should like to go out as a 
 servant somewhere that would do me good. 
 What is my youth for? What am I living 
 for ? Why have I a soul ? What is it all for ? " 
 It might be a page out of the BashkirtsefF 
 confessions. 
 
 Elena, however, very quickly discovers what 
 she is living for. There are three men in love 
 with her. One is a giddy and irresponsible 
 artist, another is a serious and thoughtful 
 philosopher, the third is a man of iron, a 
 patriot, a Bulgarian, who has no other mission 
 in life but to release his native country from 
 the tyranny of the Turk. In the preface to 
 the English Edition of TurgeniefFs novel, Mr 
 Edward Garnett expresses his disbelief in 
 the reality of this last character, Insarov, the 
 Bulgarian hero. We are not told, it is true, 
 much about his inner life; he seems to be a 
 piece of clockwork, duly wound up to register 
 the best patriotic sentiments on behalf of an 
 oppressed nationality. But as Mr Garnett 
 himself remarks, it is just these stiff men of 
 action and great will-power, with a capacity
 
 TURGENIEFF 115 
 
 for moving straight towards a certain goal, 
 who impress sensitive, idealistic girls possessing 
 a tendency to self-analysis and a proneness to 
 emotional abandon. What I am, however, 
 more concerned with, is the fact that in the 
 novel of an artist like Turgenieff we are 
 not presented with a monstrously eccentric 
 heroine, like many of those who have formed 
 a season's discussion. As a matter of fact, 
 it is quite an arguable point whether art as 
 such ought to deal with purely exceptional 
 oddities. They belong to the domain of 
 comedy pure and simple ; there they have a 
 perfect justification for their existence, for in 
 such a case the author of their being does 
 not wish them to be taken seriously; they 
 are but the exaggerations of a single senti- 
 ment or quality, disentangled from the ordinary 
 complex character for purposes of laughter. 
 Serious art, however, must give us real types, 
 not far removed from our common humanity, 
 yet touched and ennobled everywhere by higher 
 issues. Elena is the analytic, thoughtful, self- 
 investigating modern heroine, who too often has 
 her finger on the pulse of her changing moods ; 
 but she is true woman for all that, and her love 
 for her Bulgarian hero, Insarov, is of that kind
 
 116 TURGENIEFF 
 
 which from ages immemorial has made the 
 world go round. 
 
 Apart from and beyond all this, she is the 
 embodiment of her country's stern and inarticu- 
 late hopes. " On the Eve " was written more 
 than forty years ago, and the Russia of which 
 Turgenieff treats is the great northern king- 
 dom of the early 'fifties, before the Crimean 
 War. It is part of the novelist's art not to 
 preach a definite moral, for that is alien to 
 the artistic nature, but so to contrive the 
 characters of his tale and the incidents through 
 which they move, as to give us a wider outlook 
 over history and extend the horizons both of 
 our sympathy and of our knowledge. Even 
 now, so many years later, it is doubtful how 
 and by what methods Russia will attain the 
 goal of her aspirations whether the Slavonic 
 race will ever wake to the consciousness of its 
 true mission among the peoples of the West. 
 According to Turgenieft's method of thinking, 
 Russia must not depend either upon her artists 
 or her philosophers. Her easily acquired and 
 superficial culture will not stand her in good 
 stead when the time comes for her to realise her 
 own destiny. It is men whom she needs men 
 of action, heroes full of the national idea, not
 
 TURGENIEFF 117 
 
 so much cultured as patriotic. Certain lessons 
 were to be learnt from the upraising of the 
 Danubian principalities, and this no doubt 
 was TurgeniefFs thought when he made his 
 Elena marry a Bulgarian ; but, after all, Russia's 
 true salvation must come from herself, and 
 from the men she is able to breed. 
 
 Turgenieff himself came of an aristocratic 
 line, and his mother belonged to the old school 
 which despised ideas, and treated the serfs with 
 conspicuous cruelty. It was a shock to the old 
 lady that her son should write. " How," she 
 asked, "could a Turgenieff possibly submit to 
 be criticised ? " But the author had his revenge, 
 for in one of the most characteristic of his short 
 tales he describes a tall, gaunt, dumb porter, 
 who was actually his mother's servant, and a 
 signal illustration of her powers of quiet despot- 
 ism. Some day or other a proper study of the 
 Russian novel may be produced in English, and 
 then it will be found, I think, that although not 
 so dramatic as Dostoieffsky, nor so deliberate as 
 Tolstoi, Turgenieff is far and away the greatest 
 artist. I remember when, in 1879> he was 
 given an honorary degree in Oxford, and 
 appeared in the gardens of Wadham College 
 in the red and pink gown of the Doctor of
 
 118 TURGENIEFF 
 
 Civil Law, wearing a somewhat incongruous 
 tall hat a man with grey hair, and deeply 
 lined face, and sad eyes, which at once ex- 
 plained and made interesting that distinct vein 
 of pessimism which runs through all his work. 
 Pessimism never was, and never will be a 
 systematic body of philosophic thought, despite 
 Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. It is some- 
 thing that belongs to some men and is absent 
 in others. You find it in Thackeray, and you do 
 not find it in Dickens ; it exists in Lord Byron 
 and not in Sir Walter Scott. It is an emotion, 
 a constitutional predisposition to melancholy, a 
 trick of the nerves, a something in the blood, a 
 weakness wherever it is found, but an amiable 
 and sympathetic one, which makes men at once 
 more human and less effective, but which, for 
 good or for evil, at all events pulsed in the 
 veins of Ivan Turgenieff.
 
 TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST 
 
 A CURIOUS parallelism exists between the con- 
 temporary conditions of Russian literature and 
 our own. Many critics amongst ourselves are 
 inclined to think that the great men ceased 
 some thirty or forty years ago, and that when 
 we have mentioned Thackeray and Dickens 
 we have to pause, in our inability to discover 
 their proper and legitimate successors. It 
 is never wise to run a tilt against one's own 
 age. But it is interesting to observe that 
 in Russia also they are deploring the absence 
 of great writers since Dostoieffski died, 
 and Tolstoi took to writing religious tracts. 
 Perhaps some one interested in later develop- 
 ments of Russian literature might put forward 
 the names of three men, Maxim Gorky, 
 Dmitri Merejkowski, and Anton Tchekhoff, 
 writers of originality and power, who are 
 carrying on the tradition of Russian letters 
 to new and unimagined goals. The truth in 
 both cases is probably the same. In order to 
 
 119
 
 120 TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST 
 
 discover the real stature of a writer one ought 
 to be at the safe distance of a generation from 
 him. After thirty years or, still better, after 
 half a century the question of an artist's 
 worth can be decided with some confidence. 
 But in dealing with contemporaries one lacks 
 the true perspective, and critical judgments 
 are apt to become a little vacillating and 
 tentative. 
 
 The Russian author whom I have just men- 
 tioned, Dmitri Merejkowski, has written an 
 extremely interesting criticism on Tolstoi, 
 which has been reproduced in English form. 
 Of all things which are to be desired, a criti- 
 cism of Russian writers by themselves holds a 
 prominent place, for, despite the most conscien- 
 tious efforts, the ordinary occidental intelligence 
 finds it extremely difficult to comprehend the 
 limits and nature of the Muscovite genius. We 
 vaguely accept Pushkin as a considerable author. 
 We can understand Turgenieff, mainly because he 
 was not wholly representative of Russia, but the 
 product, rather, of European civilisation. Tolstoi 
 is a more difficult task. DostoiefFski is frankly 
 impossible. We talk superficially about Gorky, 
 while as to Merejkowski himself, in two novels, 
 " The Death of the Gods " and " The Fore-
 
 TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST 121 
 
 runner," we are only conscious of something 
 vague and unknown and mythical, which may 
 have a meaning for other ears and other intelli- 
 gences than our own. Nevertheless, when 
 Merejkowski talks about Tolstoi, he throws 
 light on a good many dark places, and also 
 helps us to apprehend the meaning of his own 
 books. He speaks like a Russian to begin with, 
 inspired with Russian ideas, and, having learnt 
 the language of culture, he is able to expound 
 his inner mind in words familiar to ourselves. 
 It is something, for instance, to discover that in 
 the brooding, chaotic imagination of that great 
 northern kingdom, full of pessimistic complaint, 
 inspired, too, with a mystic imaginativeness 
 which is far more Eastern than Western, there 
 is a dimly conceived idea of the approaching 
 development of Russia as the great potential 
 influence of the future. They are very fond of 
 symbolism, these Russian authors, and they 
 interpret to themselves the progress of their 
 country by illustrations derived from their own 
 capital cities. Moscow was the old capital, 
 representing the dim, formless age which did 
 not know its own strength or its own possibili- 
 ties. St Petersburg was the second capital, an 
 artificial piece of civilisation, planted in Russia,
 
 122 TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST 
 
 as it were, from the outside. But what is the 
 third capital, the capital of the future ? St 
 Petersburg is merely spectral and transitional. 
 The third Imperial and final Russian Rome will 
 be Constantinople, and the OZcumenical Russian 
 Cathedral the Church of St Sophia. Merej- 
 kowski tells us this quite plainly ; and it is a 
 valuable indication of the kind of expansion 
 which looms large in the minds of intelligent 
 native thinkers not an expansion eastwards 
 towards the vast plains of Asia, but a formal 
 entrance into the life of Europe at the great 
 gateway of the East. 
 
 Merejkowski is a discerning and able critic, 
 who seems to understand Tolstoi a great deal 
 better than most of us who look at him from 
 the outside. A very talented Frenchman, the 
 Comte Melchior de Vogue, wrote, in 1888, a 
 clever account of the Russian novelists, by no 
 means devoid of sympathy, but representative 
 of the kind of wondering awe with which ordi- 
 nary Europeans regard the works of Slavonic 
 genius. To turn from De Vogue to Merej- 
 kowski is to put away superficial criticism, 
 however intelligent, and arrive at that more 
 intimate acquaintance which lifelong associa- 
 tions and hereditary tendencies can alone pro-
 
 TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST 123 
 
 duce. What is our ordinary view of Tolstoi as 
 a novelist ? It might be roughly resumed as 
 follows. Tolstoi used to be a real artist when 
 he wrote such wonderful novels as " Anna 
 Karenina" and "Peace and War." Then a 
 sort of religious crisis supervened. He sud- 
 denly decided to surrender all the privileges of 
 his rank, to live as a simple peasant, and to be 
 a Christian in the earliest sense of the word, a 
 Christian of the first or second century. We 
 admire, it may be, the religious fervour of the 
 man ; we deplore the loss of the artist. Such a 
 judgment is true, so far as it goes. Indeed, it 
 is endorsed to some extent by our Russian critic. 
 But what he adds is infinitely more valuable. 
 He takes the earlier works of Tolstoi seriatim, 
 and shows us wherein lay their peculiar excel- 
 lence. Tolstoi was, above all, an artist, occu- 
 pied with the changing beauty of the animal 
 structure of men and women. He was Greek in 
 his sympathies a Russian Phidias or Praxiteles. 
 His principal heroes, his chief heroines, are 
 modelled faultlessly in their external forms. 
 They are, to speak plainly, splendid animals. 
 But the one thing they do not possess is the 
 higher intellectual nature, while in some cases 
 they are actually soulless.
 
 124 TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST 
 
 Take the great novel of "Anna Karenina." 
 The heroine is a magnificent woman, whose 
 external personality we get to know, whose 
 tricks with her hands, or her hair, or her eye- 
 lids we become entirely familiar with, but who 
 either does not possess, or does not care to 
 show us, that inner nature of hers which is 
 called the soul. Her lover, Vronski, is, in his 
 turn, a splendid animal. And just because the 
 author is so interested in the animal portraiture, 
 so to speak, of those with whom he seeks to 
 concern us, he is equally careful to delineate the 
 relations between Vronski and his horse Frou- 
 Frou. The same qualities which dominated 
 Frou-Frou also dominated Anna. The fate of 
 Frou-Frou, killed by the recklessness of her 
 master, is also the fate of Anna. Throughout 
 we are moving in an animal world of beautiful, 
 artistic forms. Now, when later on, Tolstoi 
 suddenly changed his course, gave up that 
 kind of novel-writing in which he had made 
 a reputation, chose to live in his country home 
 of Yasnaia Poliana among his peasants, the 
 man was not really changed, but only his 
 surroundings. What strikes us about Tolstoi's 
 new Christianity is that either it is too new 
 or not Christian enough Does Tolstoi live
 
 TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST 125 
 
 the life of a peasant? Yes, but throughout 
 as a kind of pastime. Does he believe in 
 poverty, the absence of money, the sacrifice 
 of worldly goods ? Theoretically, yes. But 
 meanwhile he lives in a comfortable study, 
 and his wife, who apparently has gauged 
 him and his character to a nicety, scents his 
 clothes and sees that he is not disturbed. 
 Let us do him justice. He certainly in- 
 tended to get rid of his worldly possessions ; 
 but there the practical instincts of the wife 
 intervened. She explained to him that, with 
 their large family, it was impossible to live on 
 the uncovenanted mercies of mankind. She 
 took care that his fortune was not dissipated. 
 She discovered the enormous pecuniary value 
 of his books, so that, while he preached his 
 Christianity, the publishers of his tracts poured 
 their money into the family treasury. The 
 artist can no more change his skin than an Ethio- 
 pian. Tolstoi can call himself what he likes. 
 He is still the man who rejoices in the external 
 aspect of things, who loves simplicity so long 
 as it is beautiful, who has a primitive but still 
 cultured home, who does not, it is true, live the 
 life of cities, but is least of all a rustic in heart 
 and sympathy. Such, at all events, is the verdict
 
 126 TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST 
 
 of Merejkowski, who speaks with that inside 
 knowledge which we cannot pretend to possess. 
 It is rather a bitter criticism, and, stated in this 
 bald way, probably includes some injustice. 
 Nevertheless, it gives us the key to a good deal 
 in Tolstoi which we have not hitherto under- 
 stood, and it suggests that we have here a not 
 uncommon instance of a man who mistakes his 
 real nature, who is in reality a literary artist 
 of the first rank, and chooses to pose as a neo- 
 Christian hermit. 
 
 Throughout, our Russian critic compares and 
 contrasts Tolstoi with Dostoieffski, practically 
 his contemporary, albeit that the author of 
 "Crime and Punishment" has been dead for 
 some years. In Merejkowski's judgment, 
 Dostoieffski is the exact antithesis of Tolstoi. 
 He as clearly represents men's minds and 
 souls as the other represents their external 
 shapes and outside life. But here it is almost 
 impossible to follow the critic. That curious 
 mysticism, that imaginative metaphysic which 
 seems to belong to the Russian nature, leads 
 Merejkowski into abstract speculations which 
 are certainly ingenious, but are by no means 
 easy to comprehend. The extraordinary writer 
 who was sent to Siberia, who lived a life
 
 TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST 127 
 
 of humiliating poverty, and was subject to 
 constant epileptic attacks, is a man who, more 
 than all others, makes one tremble at the 
 narrow boundary dividing an acute, penetrat- 
 ing intelligence from absolute insanity. We 
 have not got much of Dostoieffski's work in 
 English, but " Crime and Punishment " has 
 been, I believe, translated, and his books are 
 readily accessible in French. He is an acute 
 and penetrating psychologist, so far as the 
 morbid forms of human intelligence are con- 
 cerned. He is an analyst of idiotcy, of " pos- 
 session," of madness. Perhaps not unaptly 
 our Russian critic brings him very near in 
 nature and range of thought to that philo- 
 sophic madman Nietzsche. Merejkowski does 
 this by way of illustrative encomium, but the 
 analogy can be taken in an opposite sense. 
 For Nietzsche too, with his dreams of a future 
 " Over-man," and that coming hero of the 
 human race, the "man-god," as distinct from 
 the " God-man," who was the inspirer of 
 Christianity, unfortunately suggests precisely 
 the same problems of the kinship of genius 
 with madness which the writings of Dostoieffski 
 bring to the mind. Be all this as it may, 
 "Tolstoi as Man and Artist," interpreted by
 
 128 TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST 
 
 Dmitri Merejkowski, is an excessively inter- 
 esting volume, which throws more light on 
 the aims and character of modern Russian 
 literature than any other book with which I 
 am acquainted.
 
 MAXIM GORKY 
 
 HE may be condemned or he may be praised. 
 He may be quoted as a representative writer 
 of our age, or treated as a mere accidental 
 product of certain exceptional circumstances 
 in the social life of Russia. But, however 
 we may choose to regard him, Maxim Gorky 
 is a strong and growing literary influence. We 
 feel ourselves in the presence of a strange, 
 unfamiliar force, which, nevertheless, exercises 
 a very potent attraction a queer, unconven- 
 tional anarchical writer who, though he startles 
 and shocks, has at least that vivid energy and 
 sense of life which we recognise as one of 
 the ground notes, the permanent and para- 
 mount quality of all literature. 
 
 It is a curious study for us, living in an 
 Europe already grown old, and with a long 
 literary history behind us, to observe the new 
 and disturbing apparitions which are making 
 us revise all our old artistic canons. The 
 precise and ordered intelligence of the Latin
 
 130 MAXIM GORKY 
 
 races, the classical examples, the orthodox 
 formulae, are giving way on all sides, and, 
 indeed, their future would be more hazardous 
 were it not for the existence of a living French 
 literature guided by and permeated with the 
 ancient standards and ideals. In England and 
 in Germany, in spite of the brilliant conquest 
 of the Renaissance which has left such deep 
 traces in all the great epochs of literature, 
 there has always been another element, naive, 
 mystical, profound, or, at all events, dreamy 
 and imaginative, belonging to what we may 
 call either the Gothic or the Scandinavian or 
 possibly the Celtic blood in a Northern race. 
 It has never been overpowered by the classical 
 invasion, although temporarily obscured. It 
 accepted the Romance elements of Chaucer, it 
 was dominated by the classicalism of Spenser 
 and Milton, as, indeed, later, by Keats and 
 Shelley. But it showed its indomitable per- 
 sistence in Marlowe and Shakespeare, Webster 
 and Ford. Even at the present day it proves 
 its vitality in the somewhat frail and perhaps 
 fugitive popularity of what is called the Celtic 
 Renaissance. The great signs and evidences of 
 its persistence, however, are to be found in such 
 names as Ibsen and Maeterlinck. Whatever
 
 MAXIM GORKY 131 
 
 our attitude may be to these puissant invaders 
 of our literary realm, the range of their in- 
 fluence is incontestable, especially for the 
 reason that deep down in our own nature, as 
 a nation compounded of Saxon and Danish 
 and Celtic strains, there exists an obscure 
 but unmistakable sympathy with what these 
 preachers of the vague and the unconscious, 
 these high priests of occult forces not hitherto 
 analysed by science, have to tell us. Then 
 from the other end of Europe there come 
 across us other new and powerful influences. 
 For some time Russian literature was essen- 
 tially imitative, and, admirable artist that he 
 is, Turgenieff is not so new to us that we find 
 any difficulty in the process of assimilation. 
 Dostoieffski is another matter. So, too, is 
 Tolstoi ; so, too, is Maxim Gorky. These 
 bring us tidings of something novel and un- 
 familiar and strange ; they suggest to us ideas 
 of another race, of a different national feeling, 
 of a temperament with which we have little 
 or nothing in common. And the most start- 
 ling of all, although assuredly not the highest 
 or the best, is the man who is really called 
 Alexei Maximovitch Peshkoff, but who pre- 
 ferred to sign himself Maxim Gorky.
 
 132 MAXIM GORKY 
 
 In one sense we can disentangle his elements 
 and sum him up for ourselves under convenient 
 categories. If we look at his mature work we 
 shall see constant references to Schopenhauer ; 
 we shall realise that he is full of the scientific 
 conceptions of the struggle for existence and the 
 survival of the fittest in whatever way the 
 fittest may be defined ; above all, we shall be 
 aware that we have here the most complete 
 illustration, absolutely naked and unashamed, 
 of the doctrines of Nietzsche. He preaches, 
 for instance, the Gospel of Force ; of the right 
 of the strong man to master his world, and not 
 to be too careful of the means ; of the natural 
 and inevitable slavery of the weak. Or, as 
 there is nothing really new in the world, we 
 may, instead of referring to Nietzsche, go back 
 to the crude teaching of Hobbes, or to the still 
 cruder teaching of Thrasymachus and the 
 Sophists, as expounded in Plato's " Republic." 
 These are, however, the trappings with which 
 Gorky adorns his primitive and unadulterated 
 nature. What he is and stands for is another 
 matter. He is the mouthpiece of a particular 
 section of Russian society, of which there are 
 many analogies elsewhere. He voices the 
 aspirations of the tramp, with his odd notions
 
 MAXIM GORKY 133 
 
 of humanity , of freedom, of rights and wrongs, 
 of good and evil. He is the Russian gipsy, a 
 race that always has stood, and always will 
 stand, aloof from the rest of the world. The 
 gipsy is a rebel and an outcast, not devoid of a 
 certain nobility, which comes out in the most 
 unexpected ways. But, of course, he has no 
 place in any ordered state, for he is an Ishmae- 
 lite, with his hand against every other man. 
 He is at once mean and generous. He will not 
 hesitate to steal and kill. But he will squander 
 his money with princely carelessness, and, al- 
 though he has imperilled his life in the making 
 of it, he will give it away to the first man or 
 woman who comes along. Gorky's writings are 
 throughout the glorification of the tramp ; but 
 only gradually did he realise his mission. He 
 began by being simply the voice of the sub- 
 merged and down-trodden. As he phrases it 
 himself, " I have come from below, from the 
 nethermost ground of life, where is naught but 
 sludge and murk. I am the harsh cry of those 
 who still abide down there, and who have let me 
 come up to bear witness to their suffering." 
 This is the spirit of that touching little story, 
 " Twenty-six Men and a Girl," which has been 
 recently translated into English twenty-six
 
 134 MAXIM GORKY 
 
 men, who lived in an underground bakery, and 
 who had just one poignant moment in the twenty- 
 four hours, when a bright girl came to buy their 
 confectionery. But, as our author went on in 
 his development, he began to draw a hard and 
 fast line between the men who are broken by 
 their servitude, and the men who never forfeit 
 the proud independence of their souls. Cease- 
 less, grinding poverty and toil have different 
 effects on different natures. Unending drudgery 
 will make a certain class both slaves and dupes. 
 Others it will keep in slavery, but with a 
 wide-eyed consciousness of what they are and 
 what they are doing, with an invincible spirit of 
 hopeless but still undefeated rebellion. Thus, 
 for instance, Gorky has no sympathy with the 
 Russian peasant, living his slavish life with a 
 sort of humdrum apathy ; but to the man who 
 now and again throws up his employment, goes 
 out on the steppes, and lives as best he can, 
 often by brigandage, the tramp, in short, who 
 dares to be free to such a hero the heart of 
 Gorky goes out. 
 
 The difference between the two types of char- 
 acter is often exhibited. Take, for instance, 
 the story of " Chelkash." Here you have a con- 
 trast between the hero Chelkash himself, psychic-
 
 MAXIM GORKY 135 
 
 ally energetic, self-centred, freedom - loving, 
 man-scorning, " with a flaw somewhere in his 
 nature, but over whose soul heroic impulses 
 still pass like waves," and a being of commoner 
 mould, coarse fibre, full of petty fears and 
 anxieties, a slavish nature, called in this story 
 Gavrila. Chelkash hires Gavrila to join him in 
 a theft involving a good deal of difficulty and 
 peril. The exploit is duly achieved, and the 
 one man is confident throughout, and the other 
 a prey to oft-recurrent feai-s. Then a dispute 
 takes place between the two accomplices, and 
 Gavrila tries to murder Chelkash. In utter 
 scorn, while his life seems fast ebbing away, 
 the Byronesque hero throws the money which 
 has caused all the trouble to the cowardly 
 assassin. Gorky's stories are mainly of this 
 stamp sordid sketches of primitive passions, 
 illustrating in various ways the characteristics 
 of the tramp, and now and again touched with 
 a certain delicacy of treatment, and replete 
 with fine psychological traits. The ethics of the 
 tramp are of the simplest kind. He worships 
 force, brutality, strength. Is a particular act 
 moral or immoral ? one of his heroes asks him- 
 self. " Well, at any rate, it's a strong deed. 
 Yes, above all else, it is strong, and therefore
 
 136 MAXIM GORKY 
 
 it is moral and good." So, too, the wicked 
 father, in the tale entitled " On a Raft/' who 
 has done the gravest injustice to his son and to 
 his son's wife, glories in his iniquity, and knows 
 that his world is subject to him in virtue of his 
 strength. Here, too, is a significant passage in 
 the study called " Emelyan Pilyai." Emelyan 
 is told by his comrade that nobody has the right 
 to purchase his happiness at the cost of another 
 man's life. This is his answer : " ' Ho, ho ! yes, 
 in books that is properly said, but only for con- 
 science sake. Rights, indeed ! These are the 
 rights/ and close to my nose was held Emelyan's 
 impressive, sinewy fist. ' Every man, only in 
 different ways, is guided only by this right.' " 
 
 If this were all, if we had nothing else in 
 Gorky's writings but the illustration of this 
 anarchical, rebellious temper, there would be 
 little or nothing to prove the artist, or exercise 
 any attraction over students of literature. But 
 this is by no means all. Even in the glorified 
 tramp there are exhibited characteristics which 
 sometimes make him almost lovable. One of 
 these is an extraordinary sensitiveness to scenery. 
 In nearly every one of Gorky's writings you have 
 the most unforgettable pictures drawn of the 
 changing aspects of Nature, while the man who
 
 MAXIM GORKY 137 
 
 at one moment can rob and lie and kill is at 
 another moment dreamily conscious of the 
 panorama of the sea, or the wonderful lights 
 and shadows playing on the levels of a great 
 river, or the brilliant effects which succeed 
 each other, as day fades into night or the dawn 
 quickens into the sunshine, on the great plains. 
 Another feature is the sudden susceptibility to 
 tenderness, a limpid fount of human pitifulness 
 welling up to the surface even in the most 
 abandoned character. You find it in the strik- 
 ing little sketch where two outcasts, a man and 
 a woman, shelter together under an overturned 
 boat, in the vivid story called " It Happened 
 Once in Autumn " ; you find it in " Twenty-six 
 Men and a Girl," in "The Procession of 
 Shame," even here and there in Gorky's novel, 
 " Foma Gordyeeff." This very Emelyan Pilyai, 
 of whom mention has just been made, goes 
 down to a bridge by the wayside, intending to 
 do some desperate deed, and the first thing 
 that comes along the road is a miserable woman. 
 " Pity crept over me, brother," says the hero, 
 and the two unhappy things solace one another 
 for their mutual sufferings. "She kissed me 
 here on the forehead, brother ; she really did. 
 Do you grasp it ? Do you know that nothing
 
 138 MAXIM GORKY 
 
 better ever once happened to me during all the 
 forty-seven years of my life?" That is the 
 secret of Gorky. His heroes and his heroines 
 are often base and brutal animals, wolves, 
 brigands, murderers. But, oddly enough, 
 humanity is not quenched in them, and that is 
 why they make a strange and wistful appeal 
 even at the worst and cruellest moment of their 
 lives. 
 
 In "The Lower Depths " we have had an op- 
 portunity of seeing Gorky as a dramatist, though 
 whatever else " The Lower Depths " may be, 
 it assuredly is not a play. It has no plot, no 
 construction, no consecutive threads of interest, 
 no cumulative action, no formal denouement. 
 It begins nowhere and ends nowhere. Its 
 episodes are heterogeneous and haphazard. Its 
 personages are, indeed, all of a type, in so far as 
 they are found collected in a Russian "shelter" 
 or " doss-house," and have sunk to what they 
 are, or continued to be what they are, through 
 listlessness, despair, crime, or misfortune. They 
 are thieves and vagabonds, fallen women and 
 fallen men, actors who have seen better days, 
 noblemen who have tampered with Government 
 money, a Mohammedan who has committed 
 some piece of wrongdoing, thieves who have
 
 MAXIM GORKY 139 
 
 done their time, wanderers who have never 
 done anything but loafed aimlessly through 
 life. Belonging to one type for are they not 
 so many illustrations of Gorky's favourite theme, 
 the tramp or " bossiak " ? they have no vital 
 intercommunication save what comes from the 
 four walls of the wretched night-house in which 
 they are assembled. Once there is a glimmer 
 of a story a story of a woman's jealousy and 
 its consequences but it is only discovered 
 towards the end of the third act, and finishes 
 when the curtain of the third act falls. Accord- 
 ing to any rules of art or dramatic construction, 
 " The Lower Depths " is mere confusion and 
 chaos, a jumble of disconnected incidents and 
 persons, without any presiding unity of idea or 
 principle. Yet it was so successful in the 
 Russian capital that its performance, we under- 
 stand, was interdicted in the provinces ; while 
 in Berlin it was witnessed night after night 
 by large audiences. It is quite artless, crude, 
 horrible, immature. Nevertheless it has, ap- 
 parently, the power to elicit interest, attention, 
 and sympathy. How can such a paradox be 
 maintained ? 
 
 The explanation is not really difficult to find. 
 For, although it is not a play, and never appeals
 
 140 MAXIM GORKY 
 
 to our artistic instincts, it gives us powerful 
 studies of character, and its personages are 
 alive. In some strange ways we are drawn to 
 such figures as those of Luke or Lookha, the 
 wandering philosopher ; to Vaska Pepel, the 
 stormy, dissolute youth, who yet can love ; to 
 the broken-down actor, whose " organism has 
 been poisoned by alcohol " ; to Satine, the 
 thief ; to the Baron, who was once an aristocrat ; 
 to Nastya, the sentimental girl, who devours 
 novels ; to Anna, who is dying on a miserable 
 pallet-bed before our eyes. It is not a pretty 
 picture, by any means ; but it strikes us as born 
 of a real and vivid perception ; something 
 which Maxim Gorky has seen and known, not 
 something which he has invented or read about. 
 It is a vigorous piece of realistic painting, 
 dashed on to the canvas with bold, picturesque 
 strokes. After all, these creatures belong to 
 our common humanity ; they are specimens of 
 the submerged classes, whom we cannot, if we 
 would, disown. But there is much more than 
 mere realism here and it is this, if we are not 
 much mistaken, which awakens the response of 
 our sympathy. A thing has no right to be por- 
 trayed, either in a novel or on the stage, simply 
 because it is true. Realism, naked and un-
 
 MAXIM GORKY 141 
 
 ashamed, has no artistic appeal. But realism, 
 suffused with emotion, realism with some sug- 
 gestion, however vague and fleeting, of an ideal 
 this is what holds and constrains, keeps our 
 attention from wandering, and saves our taste 
 from disgust. And the odd point is that Gorky, 
 in this play, deserts his savage, uncompromising 
 attitude, and momentarily, by fits and starts, 
 seems to believe in the possibility of a spiritual 
 regeneration. Strange as it may seem to those 
 who have read " Foma Gordyeff" and "Twenty 
 Men and a Girl/' Maxim Gorky is here almost 
 persuaded to be an Idealist. He is all but on 
 the side of the angels. 
 
 It comes about in this wise. The night- 
 shelter is visited by Luke, who has had a stormy 
 past, but also by reason of his curious and mani- 
 fold experiences has won his way into a serene 
 philosophy of his own. He talks to these 
 wastrels, and as he talks some of the dim, hope- 
 less eyes those, at all events, of the younger 
 folk are inspired with a gleam of brightness. 
 He soothes the dying pains of Anna and makes 
 her believe that beyond these fierce, turbulent 
 voices there is peace. He half persuades the 
 broken-down actor to give up his drink. To 
 Vaska Pepel he points the better way of really
 
 142 MAXIM GORKY 
 
 loving Natasha and going away with her to 
 Siberia or anywhere out of this den of squalor 
 and lust. Satine he fills with a vague desire of 
 reform. He even sympathises with poor, senti- 
 mental Nastya, while as to Klesshtsh, Anna's 
 callous husband, he at least makes him ashamed 
 and relatively peaceable. What is Luke's 
 secret in this process of tentative reform ? He 
 preaches no, he never preaches, but at least he 
 suggests that a man should believe in himself, 
 that he should try to win self-respect, to know 
 that whatever thing happens to him, terrible or 
 strange, he, at all events, remains a man. The 
 curse of Russian vagrant life is its listlessness. 
 Well, let us find some aim or object of existence. 
 Another curse is its scepticism, its hopeless dis- 
 belief. And if we ask how this is to be cured, 
 the answer, however unexpected from Luke's 
 lips, is the old theory obviously false in many 
 respects, and yet profoundly true that what- 
 ever a man believes to be does veritably exist. 
 Nastya believes in her faded sentimental heroes 
 and heroines. They exist for her. The actor 
 believes that if he gives up drink he can get 
 back his memory and live cleanly. Well, then, 
 it is possible, if he only believes it strongly 
 enough. The crucial test is the sudden query
 
 MAXIM GORKY 143 
 
 propounded to Luke by one of the personages. 
 " Is there a God " ? And Luke's answer comes 
 clear. " If you believe that there is a God, 
 there is one. But, if you don't believe, for you, 
 at any rate, there is none." No wonder that in 
 the last act, after Luke has gone his ways, 
 Satine, one of his disciples, discovers that a 
 man's object in life should be "to find the 
 better man." It is a quaint reminiscence in a 
 new context of Nietzsche's theory of "the Over- 
 man," but, so far as this play is concerned, that 
 has nothing to do with the matter. The great 
 point is that Luke has given these wastrels an 
 idea, and, like all ideas, it produces fermentation 
 in the cold, inert mass of scepticism and hope- 
 lessness. Can these dead bones live ? Yes. If 
 the spirit passes over them, the sapless bones 
 will come together, and the corpses will stand 
 upright on their feet.
 
 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 
 
 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI is less well known to 
 English readers than his illustrious predeces- 
 sors, but yet he is a worthy successor to Tolstoi 
 and Dostoieffski. French critics have seen in 
 him a kind of rival to the celebrated Pole, 
 Sienkiewicz, and there is, indeed, a certain 
 likeness between "The Death of the Gods" 
 and " Quo Vadis," for both books are inspired 
 by the same kind of historical imagination, 
 while, as artists, both authors have to struggle 
 with similarly difficult and indigestible material. 
 It is not easy to get through " Quo Vadis " from 
 the first page to the last, nor yet is the perusal 
 of the whole of " The Death of the Gods " a 
 simple task. The times of which both writers 
 treat are so confused, so remote from contem- 
 poraneous interests, that it is only with a certain 
 effort that we can realise, under the high- 
 sounding names of Roman history, the linea- 
 ments more or less familiar of ordinary human 
 beings. Assuredly the Russian novelist is not
 
 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 145 
 
 less ambitious than the Polish, for the subject 
 of the first of his trilogy of romances is occupied 
 with no less a person than Julian the Apostate 
 the Emperor whose character has been vari- 
 ously treated by Pagan friend and Christian foe, 
 extolled by Libanius, abused by Gregory Nazi- 
 anzen, weighed in the balances and found 
 wanting by Gibbon, critically and indulgently 
 reviewed by Neander. To make Julian an 
 intelligible and interesting human being is 
 obviously the task which Merejkowski sets 
 before himself. 
 
 It has been often noticed that Russian litera- 
 ture is more or less imitative, and Merejkowski, 
 like Gorky, writes under the strong influence of 
 the German philosopher, Nietzsche. The doc- 
 trines of that remarkable man, who at times 
 seems to be hardly sane, and is always extrava- 
 gant, constitute a worship of Force, naked and 
 unashamed a seriously conceived but amus- 
 ingly written Gospel of Power and Lordship and 
 Despotism based on superiority of muscle and 
 will power. I need scarcely repeat how strongly 
 Gorky's novels reek of this worship of the 
 intolerant fist, and the braggadocio of simple 
 Force. Nietzsche's effect on Merejkowski is 
 more indirect, depending mainly on the tenet of 
 
 K
 
 146 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 
 
 the " Over-man/' the future ideal man, who is 
 to sum up all the best tendencies of present 
 mankind and complete them in some masterly 
 synthesis of still greater qualities. Merejkowski 
 adopts the idea not in a physical, but in a quasi 
 religious sense. For he has projected a trilogy 
 of novels, dealing with the general subject of 
 " Christ and Antichrist " in which he seeks to 
 trace the history of various forerunners of the 
 final spiritual man who is to be neither Christ 
 nor Antichrist, but a being transcending and 
 completing both. Thus, the first of the trilogy 
 entitled " The Death of the Gods " deals with 
 the fortunes and career of Julian the Apostate, 
 who sought to revive Paganism. The second, 
 called either " The Resurrection of the Gods " 
 or " The Forerunner " contains a highly melo- 
 dramatic but also spiritualised account of 
 Leonardo da Vinci. The third, on the eve of 
 publication, will have as its hero Peter the 
 Great. Each of these three men is supposed 
 to represent one phase or other of the future 
 Ideal character who, by the way, is defined 
 not as the Man-God but as the God-Man. The 
 Emperor Julian, for instance, saw that there was 
 an imperishable element in Paganism, which the 
 victories of Christianity tended to obliterate : he
 
 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 147 
 
 therefore set himself to educate and evolve this 
 side of human nature as necessary for the 
 coming synthesis or fusion of all valuable factors 
 in the world's history. Leonardo da Vinci, the 
 world-famous Italian painter, saw better and 
 knew more. Paganism was dead, Christianity, 
 after its triumph, was growing indolent, com- 
 monplace, degraded. The more philosophical 
 minds, becoming dissatisfied, asked for the fire 
 and might of earlier days, the revival of antique 
 motives and springs of thought and action. 
 This was, of course, the great epoch of the 
 Renaissance, exhibited in various forms and 
 modes of energy, but all alike engaged in their 
 respective ways with the task of raising again 
 the dead. To Merejkowski the typical figure 
 of the Renaissance was not Luther, or Leo X. 
 or Savonarola. The real " Forerunner " is the 
 man who thinks for himself, the scientist, the 
 painter, the philosopher, modern alike in his 
 aims and his methods Leonardo da Vinci. 
 
 I do not know how all this may strike most 
 readers. To me, I confess, despite its grandiose 
 air, it is more than a little mystical, vague, 
 illusive. Perhaps we shall understand better 
 when we get the third member of this fanciful 
 and allegorical trilogy, the life of Peter the
 
 148 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 
 
 Great, I suppose, the typical Antichrist. But 
 if any one were to take up " The Forerunner " 
 and regard it simply as an account of the 
 actual man, Leonardo da Vinci, he would be 
 exceedingly bewildered. Most of the facts are, 
 it is true, duly recorded ; but the general treat- 
 ment is entirely symbolical. The great desire 
 of the painter was to " provide man with wings, 
 to equip him for flight." We must not take 
 such a sentence literally : it is a figurative 
 statement, designed to keep before us the 
 notion of a great Forerunner of a coming Over- 
 man. 
 
 Many qualities, however, serve to make the 
 book remarkable. Merejkowski is a great 
 descriptive writer, and the pictures of Leon- 
 ardo's workshop, the burning of the Vanities 
 (under Savonarola's preaching), the destruc- 
 tion of Leonardo's Colossus, and the freeing of 
 the wild birds, caught and caged to serve as 
 models for the painter, are excellent examples 
 of a gift which the Russian novelist shares with 
 some of his greatest and most literary country- 
 men. His study of Julian the Apostate is for 
 many reasons the more interesting of the two, 
 though here as in the later novel the characters 
 tend to become typical rather than individual,
 
 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 149 
 
 and Julian himself, Julian the Apostate, the 
 enemy of the Church, appears at one time as a 
 fourth century Socrates, at another as a belated 
 Stoic, now a Roman Emperor trying to recover 
 for himself the virtues of the ancient world, and 
 anon a sort of modern decadent, with an eye 
 constantly turned on Mediaevalism, an artist 
 loving the past, preferring sunset to sunrise, 
 and the hues of autumn to the brilliant tints of 
 spring. 
 
 In one passage of Merejkowski's novel, Julian 
 sets himself to describe his own inspirations. 
 " I love all that is fleeting," he says, " even the 
 perfume of flowers that have faded. What 
 would you have, my friend ? The gods shaped 
 me so. ... That pleasant melancholy, that 
 golden faery twilight, are necessary to me. In 
 the depth of antiquity there is to me something 
 ineffably gracious and fair, such as I find in 
 no other region the shining of sunset on 
 marble mellowed by time. Do not rob me of the 
 mad love of what is no more. Everything that has 
 been is fairer than the thing that is. Remem- 
 brance has more power over my soul than hope." 
 An eloquent passage, truly; but we rub our 
 eyes and wonder whether we are not reading a 
 passage from some contemporary writer, whose
 
 150 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 
 
 scene of literary industry is the French capital. 
 We turn to the stately periods of Gibbon, and 
 find ourselves in another world : " The mild 
 disposition of the younger brother " Gibbon is 
 contrasting Julian with his elder brother Gallus 
 " was less repugnant to the precepts of the 
 Gospel ; and his active curiosity might have 
 been gratified by a theological system which 
 explains the mysterious essence of the Deity 
 and opens the boundless prospect of invisible 
 and future worlds. But the independent 
 spirit of Julian refused to yield the passive and 
 unresisting obedience which was required in 
 the name of Religion by the haughty ministers 
 of the Church. . . . Instead of listening to the 
 proofs of Christianity with that favourable 
 attention which adds weight to the most 
 respectable evidence, he heard with suspicion, 
 and disputed with obstinacy and acuteness 
 the doctrines for which he already entertained 
 an invincible aversion. ... A devout and 
 sincere attachment for the gods of Athens and 
 of Rome constituted the ruling passion of 
 Julian ; the powers of an enlightened under- 
 standing were betrayed and corrupted by the 
 influence of superstitious prejudice ; and the 
 phantoms which existed only in the mind of the
 
 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 151 
 
 Emperor had a real and pernicious effect on the 
 government of the Empire." This is the judg- 
 ment of a historian, while the other, no doubt, 
 is the appreciation of a poet ; but there is a 
 considerable interval between the two. Gibbon 
 did not like Julian because he was superstitious. 
 Merejkowski looks upon him as a Hellenist who 
 was paving the way for the Renaissance. 
 
 The novel, however, ought to be judged on 
 its own merits, and as such it is, without doubt, 
 a fine piece of work. Out of the perplexed 
 chapters of Julian's career, Merejkowski has 
 constructed something which might almost be 
 called a drama, full of episodes, lurid, intense, 
 passionate, not possessed of much charm, but 
 still with a power to enlist and hold the atten- 
 tion of the reader. The Russian writer is 
 evidently a close and unwearied student, and he 
 has followed his texts with conscientious indus- 
 try. The early life of Julian in Cappadocia, 
 the brief and charming episode of his stay in 
 Athens, the extraordinary vigour with which he 
 conducted his campaign against the Alemanni 
 and other German tribes, the residence in 
 Paris, the ancient Lutetia which he loved, the 
 call to Constantinople, the odd life which the 
 Emperor led at Antioch, the attempt to restore
 
 152 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 
 
 the Pagan temples, especially the sacred Grove 
 of Daphne, the invasion of Persia, and the 
 mortal wound which finished his career all 
 these things are traced with loving fidelity very 
 much as they have been narrated by the various 
 authorities. Sometimes the author has made 
 use of Julian's own writings, as when he 
 describes how the priest of Daphne had only a 
 single goose to offer as sacrifice to Apollo. 
 Sometimes he makes use of the history of 
 Ammianus Marcellinus, as in the dying speech 
 of the Emperor. And throughout he is a 
 diligent student of the incomparable Gibbon. 
 
 But Merejkowski treats his materials in his 
 own way and uses them for his own ends. 
 Now and again he invents a character like 
 that of Arsinoe, a Greek girl whose primitive 
 and Spartan gymnastics the hero is supposed 
 to have witnessed in Athens. Helena, the 
 real wife of Julian, he brings into the course 
 of his narrative, not wholly on historic lines ; 
 but Arsinoe is evidently designed to be the real 
 love of Julian's heart, although from this point 
 of view it is a question whether the novelist 
 has made enough of her personality. Of course 
 he is sympathetic with Julian's character ; 
 perhaps he is something more than just to him.
 
 DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 153 
 
 Yet Gibbon, too, could in his cold way say of 
 him, as he surveys his short and troubled 
 career, that although "something seems want- 
 ing to the grace and perfection of the whole 
 figure," he was " an Emperor who made no dis- 
 tinctions between his duties and his pleasures, 
 who laboured to relieve the distress and to 
 revive the spirit of his subjects, and who en- 
 deavoured always to connect authority with 
 merit, and happiness with virtue." Even a 
 Christian poet was forced to confess that Julian 
 was a lover of his country and deserved the 
 Empire of the World. Perfidus Hie Deo quamvis 
 non perfidus orbi, says Prudentius he was an 
 Apostate, but a true statesman.
 
 ANTON TCHEKHOFF 
 
 PROBABLY few people in England have heard 
 of the name of Anton Tchekhoff, a man whose 
 writings, nevertheless, strike a distinctive note 
 in Russian literature. Maxim Gorky, thanks 
 to one or two vigorous translations, has gained 
 a certain amount of attention, but the two 
 writers, Tchekhoff and Korolenko, who stand 
 between Tolstoi and Gorky, are not well known, 
 for reasons which are not difficult to recognise. 
 Both Tchekhoff and Korolenko are primarily 
 concerned with literature, and only in a 
 secondary degree with the elementary facts of 
 Russian life. It is not for nothing that 
 Tchekhoff has been called the De Maupassant 
 of Russian letters, because he has to a very 
 large extent the genius of the short story and 
 paints unforgettable pictures. But it certainly 
 is not unjust that Gorky should have obtained 
 the larger amount of fame. Here is a man 
 who presents us with new types, who sees 
 whither Russian Society is developing, who has 
 
 154
 
 ANTON TCHEKHOFF 155 
 
 a personal acquaintance with what he describes, 
 and who often cares more to be vigorous than 
 artistic. Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that 
 all these writers, from Turgenieff downwards, 
 are pessimists, representing in other words that 
 curious and significant travail of the spirit 
 which is born, partly from the effects of 
 Western culture filtering into Russian brains, 
 and partly through the rise of the [hitherto 
 unconsidered classes and the emancipation of 
 the serf. Some time ago we were all talking 
 about the Russian moujik ; now we are ac- 
 quiring an interest in the Russian bossiak. 
 The difference between the two terms marks 
 a change taking place in the ordinary peasant 
 class of the great Northern kingdom a change 
 to which Gorky, at all events, pays eloquent 
 tribute in his novels. When a dull, uncompre- 
 hending creature, very submissive and humble, 
 very religious, with an enormous belief in his 
 Tsar, and a child-like ignorance of most of the 
 facts of life, secures his emancipation, what is 
 likely to follow ? First, no doubt, a strange 
 feeling of dismay, vacillation, discomfort, as 
 though the man had lost all his ordinary bear- 
 ings and was moving about in worlds un- 
 realised. Then, with the gradually-awakening
 
 156 ANTON TCHEKHOFF 
 
 consciousness that he has to depend upon 
 himself for his own salvation, instead of having 
 everything done for him by his pastors and 
 masters, comes a change in the quality of his 
 intelligence. Having before been a slave, he 
 now learns to no small extent to be a rogue. 
 Add to this the change in his occupations : 
 he leaves agriculture, and struggles towards 
 the towns. He gives up the simple duties 
 of a limited and easily-understood life, and 
 becomes a hanger-on of great cities, a wastrel, 
 a loafer, a bossiak. 
 
 In one respect, however, he is not like the 
 loafers with whom we are familiar in our Western 
 civilisation, because he retains no small measure 
 of that fine, healthy physique which was his 
 birthright as a peasant. He is generally a 
 strong, athletic man, who does his spell of work, 
 and then goes off wherever the fancy takes him 
 for a spell of idleness, and, being brought into 
 contact with the sharpened wits of townsmen, 
 picks up one or two disconnected theories of 
 life, generally tending in the direction of a low 
 and sordid utilitarianism, variegated and par- 
 tially redeemed by a queerly humorous cynicism. 
 At least this is the kind of bossiak whom Gorky 
 is fond of describing a man who repeats little
 
 ANTON TCHEKHOFF 157 
 
 sentences out of Schopenhauer or out of 
 Nietzsche. But Gorky was a man who had 
 managed to read a good deal under the most 
 unfavourable circumstances, and perhaps he 
 does not always give us a representative 
 bossiak. At all events, he makes us see 
 with almost terrible clearness the rise of a 
 most dangerous class in Russian life men 
 whose wits have become sharpened by the 
 base necessities of existence, who have lost 
 their ancient reverence and picked up shreds of 
 most sceptical philosophy, and who believe in 
 very little except the rights of the strong and 
 the needs of an empty stomach creatures 
 whom the official classes in Russia still ignore, 
 but who may yet live to make a revolution in 
 the State comparable with that which upset the 
 Court of Louis XVI. 
 
 When we turn to Tchekhoff we are at once 
 conscious that we have nothing so character- 
 istic, so significant in the types with which the 
 author deals. The general attitude of the dis- 
 gusted and disappointed man in Gorky reduces 
 itself to the old familiar cry, " Cui bono ? " 
 what is the good of anything ? " I am a shoe- 
 maker ; what is the good of eternally making 
 shoes ? I am a timber merchant ; how do I help
 
 158 ANTON TCHEKHOFF 
 
 myself by perpetually sawing logs of wood?" 
 In a very masterful little sketch of Tchekhoff, 
 we have a figure who has much in common with 
 the ordinary feckless and despairing individual 
 of Gorky's tales. Yacob Ivanoffis a coffin-maker, 
 and pursues his gruesome trade in the same 
 spirit of unmitigated discontent as Orloff and 
 Foma Gordyeff, who are heroes of Gorky. He 
 spends his evening in counting up his losses ; 
 the paucity of people who die in his native town 
 constitutes a perfect scandal, and the coffin- 
 maker has no chance. There is something 
 revoltingly cynical in the way in which Yacob, 
 discovering that his wife is dying, measures her 
 for her coffin. The man, one would think, was 
 a hopeless and unredeemable barbarian, for he 
 goes out of his way to be cruel to a wretched 
 Jew who plays on the flute. Gorky would pro- 
 bably have left him in his existing condition, 
 after painting, with all that picturesque detail 
 of which he is a master, the various strands of 
 the base and the cowardly and the ignoble 
 which are wrought into the web of his character. 
 But observe how TchekhofF goes to work. 
 Yacob is a musician, and he loves his fiddle. 
 When he is unhappy he plays on it in order to 
 get relief from his savage moods ; and as we
 
 ANTON TCHEKHOFF 159 
 
 understand the tale, a man who believes in any 
 form of art, or admits the possibility of any 
 softening influences, is not quite hopeless. 
 Strange to say, his thoughts wander back to 
 the earlier time, when he was courting his wife, 
 and there comes upon him the miserable con- 
 sciousness of how badly he had treated her for 
 years. Then, when his own hour of death 
 approaches, Yacob commits himself to quite a 
 noble piece of self-sacrifice. He loathed the 
 little Jew flute-player ; nevertheless, he sends 
 for him and gives him his own fiddle, in some 
 sort of reparation for his past brutality. 
 
 Or take again, as another illustration of 
 TchekhofF's prevailing temper, a characteristic 
 little sketch entitled " On the Way." Here, 
 at an inn, is found a real wanderer a man 
 who had run through his money, and probably 
 never could stick to any honest calling for 
 long, a creature predestined to go steadily 
 down in the scale of being. Though ap- 
 parently he might also be described as a 
 Russian bossiak, he has not yet attained to 
 that indignant scepticism, that reckless doubt 
 about the value of goodness, faith, and the rest 
 of it, which we find in Gorky's bossiaks. The 
 personage whom Tchekhoff describes has not
 
 160 ANTON TCHEKHOFF 
 
 yet got rid of his original faith. Listen to his 
 talk. " Faith is a quality of the soul ; it is the 
 same as talent it is congenital. As far as I 
 can judge from my own case, from those whom 
 I have met in life, from all that I see around me, 
 this congenital faith is inherent in all Russians 
 to an astonishing degree. Russian life presents 
 itself as a continuous series of faiths and infatua- 
 tions, but unbelief or negation it has not if I 
 may so express it even smelt. That a Russian 
 does not believe in God, is merely a way of say- 
 ing that he believes in something else." How 
 then, with all this heritage from the simple, 
 unquestioning existence of the moujik, has our 
 hero become so useless in the world ? Here is 
 the answer : " Nature has set in every Russian 
 an inquiring mind, a tendency to speculation, an 
 extraordinary capacity for belief, but all these 
 are broken into dust against our improvidence, 
 indolence, and fantastic triviality." Tchekhoff 
 is, of course, a pessimist, for, indeed, we cannot 
 find a Russian writer who is not. He is a pessi- 
 mist because he sees how hopeless is the task of 
 the intellect in a world bound and fettered by 
 such a cast-iron social system as that of Russia. 
 He is fond of painting the hopelessness of the 
 intellectual man, for instance, in the first of
 
 ANTON TCHEKHOFF l6l 
 
 these tales, " The Black Monk/' or in " Ward 
 No. 6." But his pessimism has not yet attained 
 to that height of dangerous anarchical revolt 
 which is not obscurely illustrated in Gorky. 
 
 Even in the case of Gorky himself, there are 
 signs that the fierce revolt is giving way to a 
 more philosophic temper. Art in all its many 
 forms, if it does not solve our doubts, at least 
 soothes our angry mood, whether our country 
 be Russia or some Western State. Yacob loved 
 his fiddle, and it helped him. Gorky, I should 
 imagine, loves his literary art, and it, too, comes 
 to him now and then with- healing in its wings. 
 In Looka, the protagonist of his strange 
 play, " The Lower Depths," we find a tem- 
 porary abandonment of that utterly barren, 
 utterly sardonic view of things which makes one 
 rise from the writings of Gorky, and, indeed, of 
 most of his brethren, with a feeling of blank 
 despair. Let us grant that everything is for the 
 worst in the worst of possible worlds. Let us 
 grant that society is all wrong, and that its laws 
 are made in the interest of the well-to-do and 
 official classes. Still, from the point of view of 
 the emancipated serf, slowly awakening to the 
 meaning of that humanity which is his birth- 
 right, there remains one permanent duty, the 
 L
 
 162 ANTON TCHEKHOFF 
 
 duty of developing his own personality, of re- 
 specting himself. Some of the creatures in 
 TchekhofF's stories seem, as we have seen, to 
 realise this. The rights and claims of the 
 individual consciousness, the slow discovery 
 of what it means to be a man, living amongst 
 other men, with desires and passions checked 
 and controlled out of regard for those of 
 fellow-creatures these are the better lessons. 
 Or, in other words, instead of exclusively re- 
 garding existence on its physical side, the side 
 which comes nearest to the brute, we arrive 
 at some glimpse of the saving truth that life 
 has its spiritual aspect, that a man's existence 
 does not depend either on the abundance of the 
 things which he possesses or the total lack of 
 them, but on the character, as we vaguely term 
 it, of his spirit or soul.
 
 A REACTIONARY STATESMAN 
 
 PoBYEDONOSTSEFF 
 
 WHEN a man has been the guide, counsellor, 
 and friend of two emperors ; when he controls 
 the spiritual interests of a vast empire ; and 
 when he is supposed to supply inspiration and 
 advice to the greatest autocrat of the day, his 
 views on political, social, and religious subjects 
 are worth some consideration. As a matter of 
 fact few books more curiously interesting and 
 important have been produced within the 
 modern period than the essays of M. Pobyedo- 
 nostseff, the Procurator of the Holy Synod of 
 Russia. They have been translated into 
 German and French, and made their appear- 
 ance in English form, under the title of " The 
 Reflections of a Russian Statesman." They 
 have all the significance of the land which gave 
 them birth that vast, obscure, and terrible 
 region, which seems to contain within itself so 
 many indefinite possibilities, so many latent 
 powers, such tremendous energies for the 
 future. But beyond their purely national and 
 local importance M. PobyedonostsefTs essays 
 
 168
 
 164 A REACTIONARY STATESMAN 
 
 represent something more critical and more 
 impressive still. They are the thoughts of a 
 man holding a high position in the State, a 
 man of affairs, a man of the world, who repre- 
 sents that great reaction against liberal and 
 democratic principles which has not left itself 
 without evidence in the literatures of England, 
 France, and Germany. We have been advanc- 
 ing very far and very fast in our modern state ; 
 Liberalism, Radicalism, Socialism, have been 
 progressing by leaps and bounds. But for a 
 variety of reasons, either logical or historical, 
 the old keenness has departed, the ancient 
 liberal faith has grown cold, and here and 
 there have arisen men even out of the ranks of 
 erstwhile progressive champions, who have 
 dared to call in question the very principles of 
 social evolution, and have asked us to recon- 
 sider dogmas associated with the meaning and 
 essence of the nineteenth century. After 
 rapid progress comes reaction, energy gives 
 place to inertia ; and it is because M. Pobyedo- 
 nostseff presents the old conservative and 
 reactionary principles in their most acute and 
 extravagant form, that his studies possess such 
 singular weight and deserve such serious study. 
 What is the matter with the times in which
 
 A REACTIONARY STATESMAN 165 
 
 we live ? The bare truth is that the conditions 
 of social prosperity are not so simple as they 
 appeared to be to Adam Smith, to Jeremy 
 Bentham, and to John Stuart Mill. The secret 
 of success was by these thinkers held to be 
 the triumph of democracy, the sovereignty 
 of the people, a commonwealth of intelligent 
 units, each educated to understand and appre- 
 ciate scientific and industrial problems. We 
 have done something towards the carrying out 
 of this ideal, and to the unbounded surprise of 
 some of us, a millennium has not yet arrived. 
 Each of the institutions in turn, which modern 
 political philosophy has established, has been 
 found to be not so operative for good as we 
 anticipated. Nothing is more theoretically 
 perfect than the idea of a truly representative 
 government. But Parliamentarism as a fact is 
 not found to give expression to the voice of 
 the people, but only to that of a few dominant 
 sections. After all, the people do not govern 
 themselves ; there is an inner ring of statesmen 
 and diplomatists who govern quite autocratically 
 and with practically no responsibility. Or take 
 the question of national education. Nothing 
 seemed so simple as to cure vice by instruction 
 and training. The man who knows would, it
 
 166 A REACTIONARY STATESMAN 
 
 was thought, be the man who could exercise 
 self-control. The defects of baseness and 
 coarseness would inevitably be remedied by the 
 raising of the general level of culture. But, as 
 a matter of fact, the issue is other than we 
 thought ; by supplying elementary instruction 
 we seem on the one hand to have debased all 
 literature to the stage of the penny novelette, 
 and on the other hand to have produced a kind 
 of unscrupulous sharpness, a wayward clever- 
 ness which have reinforced the ranks of our 
 thieves, our burglars, our criminal classes. Once 
 more, the old democratic ideal was largely 
 to enhance the public happiness, but what- 
 ever else we may be in the contemporary 
 period, we are assuredly not happy. Rarely 
 has there been more widely diffused through 
 all sections of society a spirit of discontent, 
 disillusionment, misery. In some way that we 
 do not understand our hopes have been mocked ; 
 we seem to be the victims of a delusion. 
 Liberty has not given us a greater equality ; 
 independence has not brought with it content. 
 Our daily work does not minister to our joy ; 
 it is done in sorrow and weariness. 
 
 Such are some of the thoughts which have 
 inspired the Russian statesman as he surveys
 
 A REACTIONARY STATESMAN 167 
 
 the contemporary conditions of Europe. To 
 his mind the great mistake has been the 
 practical supersession of the old mediaeval ideas. 
 Men want to be governed, and therefore auto- 
 cracy is the only real political form. Faith in 
 the unseen is the one thing which preserves 
 morality, and keeps men's minds sound and 
 healthy, and therefore the Church should be 
 omnipotent, interfering and advising in every 
 concern of life. We do not want to educate 
 the majority of mankind ; they are much 
 happier if you leave them alone in their con- 
 genital ignorance. Do not give men the 
 poison of the syllogism and logical demonstra- 
 tion ; there are more things in heaven and 
 earth than can be proved by rationalistic pro- 
 cesses. Science is, after all, hypothetical ; sim- 
 plicity of heart is essential. Nothing is more 
 destructive and desolating in its effects than 
 a belief in abstract ideas. Does all this sound 
 like a caricature ? On the contrary it is 
 illustrated in every paragraph of M. Pobyedo- 
 nostseff's pages. Listen to him as he speaks 
 of " the great falsehood of our time " : 
 
 " Among the falsest of political principles is 
 the principle of the sovereignty of the people, 
 the principle that all power issues from the
 
 168 A REACTIONARY STATESMAN 
 
 people a principle which has unhappily be- 
 come more firmly established since the time 
 of the French Revolution. Thence proceeds 
 the theory of Parliamentarism^ which has up to 
 the present day deluded much of the so-called 
 ' intelligence ' and unhappily infatuated certain 
 foolish Russians. It continues to maintain its 
 hold on many minds with the obstinacy of a 
 narrow fanaticism, although every day its false- 
 hood is exposed more clearly to the world. . . . 
 Parliamentarism is the triumph of egoism, its 
 highest expression." 
 
 There is no want of vigour in this language, 
 no lack of clearness in the thought. Or else 
 take these sentences on the subject of public 
 instruction : 
 
 " Infinite evil has been wrought by the pre- 
 valent confusion of knowledge and power. 
 Seduced by the fantasy of universal enlighten- 
 ment, we misname education a certain sum of 
 knowledge acquired by completing the courses 
 of schools skilfully elaborated in the studies of 
 pedagogues. But we ignore or forget that the 
 mass of the children whom we educate must 
 earn their daily bread, a labour for which the 
 abstract notions on which our programmes are 
 constructed will be vain."
 
 A REACTIONARY STATESMAN 169 
 
 But all this pales in comparison with what 
 our author has to say on the subject of the 
 modern Press. He calls it the most incon- 
 gruous product of modern culture incongruous 
 because, according to liberal principles, every 
 institution ought to rest on the authority of 
 the popular will, whereas the Press is practi- 
 cally independent and irresponsible. He 
 thinks that one of the reasons why our age 
 brings forth so few complete individuals, so 
 few men of character, is because for most of 
 us the newspaper is the only source of educa- 
 tion, a "contemptible, pretended education." 
 Public opinion is nothing but an ignis fatuus, 
 a delusion. So far as the Press is concerned 
 we only deal with the opinions of not neces- 
 sarily well-educated individuals. Naturally, 
 the journalist comes in for small mercy at the 
 Russian statesman's hands : 
 
 " The journalist is ready at a moment's 
 notice to decide any imaginable political ques- 
 tion ; and by his position he is bound to 
 consider and decide it immediately, for he 
 is a servant not of thought, or of reason, but a 
 servant of the actual day. No sooner does the 
 thought occur than it flies to paper, thence to 
 the printing press ; there must be no delay, no 
 time is allowed for the ripening of his thought.
 
 170 A REACTIONARY STATESMAN 
 
 You ask these men whether they are ashamed. 
 Not at all. They would laugh in your face at 
 such a question ; they are persuaded that they 
 render great services to society. They resemble 
 in this the ancient augurs who make merry 
 both over themselves and over their dupes." 
 
 Here is an indictment which in all its details 
 will be perused partly, perhaps, with astonish- 
 ment, by some with a secret pleasure, by 
 others with derision. M. Pobyedonostseff is so 
 occupied with the elaboration of his own thesis 
 that it never seems to occur to him that the 
 first argument with which he will be met is 
 " Physician heal thyself." Whatever may be 
 the evils of a modern democratic State, they 
 at all events are not worse than those which 
 beset autocracy and despotism. The sover- 
 eignty of a people may be, as our Russian 
 critic says, the great falsehood of our time, 
 but what are we to say of the sovereignty of 
 an individual ? The Emperor Alexander I. him- 
 self remarked one day to Madame de Stael that 
 "an intelligent and benevolent despot is only 
 a lucky accident." What have we ourselves 
 known in our past history of the mournful 
 effects on our country of Court intrigues ? 
 Public policy even in the time of the Georges, 
 \vas, as often as not, dependent on the caprices
 
 A REACTIONARY STATESMAN 171 
 
 of a king's mistress. On the whole, one would 
 rather be governed by a Parliament with all 
 its faults than by a Madame de Walmoden or a 
 Marchioness of Conyngham. And in the mere 
 matter of happiness, or unhappiness, it is quite 
 a question whether our present age is any worse 
 than its predecessors, or whether it is not truer 
 to say that the standard of human felicity and 
 welfare has steadily increased. At all events, 
 there are few who would exchange a position 
 in a Republic for one under the autocracy 
 of the Tsars, despite the simple virtues and 
 religious faith of the Russian rustic. 
 
 But the one-sidedness and partiality of M. 
 Pobyedonostseff's criticisms lie deeper than his 
 forgetfulness of the fact that each nation must 
 be viewed according to the limiting conditions 
 of its past history and its congenital aptitudes. 
 If it be wrong to metamorphose Russia into 
 the semblance either of America or France, 
 it would be equally absurd to imprison the 
 energies of England within the Imperial and 
 ecclesiastical despotism of the great Northern 
 Empire. But, beyond this, our Russian states- 
 man would appear to be too much " a man of 
 affairs," too little a philosopher. He seems 
 to have forgotten that all civil and political 
 society develops according to a law of its own,
 
 172 A REACTIONARY STATESMAN 
 
 which we can only adapt to our uses, but are 
 unable to alter in its essence. Of the two 
 necessary elements of the social state, order 
 and progress, M. Pobyedonostseff will only 
 have the first, while many of our revolutionary 
 theorists will only have the second. The true 
 commonwealth depends alike on both factors. 
 You cannot advance unless you also co-ordinate ; 
 movement ought to be balanced by inertia. I 
 daresay that if the majority of our political 
 thinkers were to be questioned they would be in- 
 clined to admit that democracy is not so much an 
 ideal to be welcomed as an experiment which 
 must inevitably be tried. We cannot help 
 ourselves in these matters. The great forces 
 of the world's development carry us along. 
 If it is Utopian to expect that the sovereignty 
 of the people and national education will bring 
 about universal felicity, it is surely equally 
 Utopian to believe that you can for ever keep 
 people innocent and simple. To all nations 
 and to all individuals in due course the 
 necessary enlightenment comes ; and, although 
 much that is valuable may be lost in the 
 awakening, it is alike foolish and impossible 
 to remain perpetually asleep.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Analysis in art, 112. 
 Anarchism in literature, 129, 
 
 132, 157, 161. 
 Artistic nature, the, 94, 97, 
 
 102. 
 Atmosphere, sense of, 16, 69, 
 
 74, 136. 
 
 Browning and Maeterlinck, 60. 
 
 Censorship of plays, 101. 
 
 Character as destiny, 19, 42, 
 49, 58, 111, 143, 162. 
 
 Christ and Anti-Christ, 146. 
 
 Christianity in Tolstoi, 124. 
 
 Comedy, treatment of char- 
 acter in, 115. 
 
 Consciousness, nature of, 39, 
 41. 
 
 Criticism of other nation- 
 alities, 85, 96, 100, 102, 
 120, 122, 129. 
 
 Decadents, 67. 
 
 Democracy, failure of, 165, 
 
 170. 
 Destiny, idea of, 18, 40, 48, 
 
 55, 58. 
 Drama, true nature of, 10, 11. 
 
 historical treatment in, 
 
 106. 
 
 myths as subjects for, 
 
 30, 34, 50. 
 
 poetical treatment in, 
 
 107. 
 
 Education a mistake, 165. 
 
 Emerson and Maeterlinck, 
 
 3, 9. 
 Ethical import of art, 101, 
 
 105. 
 Externality of treatment in 
 
 Tolstoi, 123, 126. 
 
 Feminine portraits 91, 99, 
 
 112, 124. 
 Feminism, 2, 34. 
 
 | Gospel of Force, 132, 145. 
 Government, true nature of, 
 167. 
 
 j Heredity, influence of, 43, 58. 
 Human personality, worth of, 
 
 56, 59, 138, 142, 162. 
 Humour and middle-age, 87. 
 
 Ibsen, influence of. 1, 130. 
 
 Latin genius, the, 94, 129. 
 Love, development of idea in 
 Maeterlinck, 8, 15, 40, 48, 
 54, 57, 60, 62. 
 
 ; treatment by D'Annun- 
 
 zio, 97. 
 
 i as a redeeming element 
 
 in Gorky, 137, 141. 
 
 i Marionettes, plays for, 11, 
 
 29, 40. 
 
 Medisevalism of Belgian 
 
 school, 11, 30, 34, 69, 82. 
 
 Mysticism, true nature of, 3, 
 
 8, 9, 29, 59. 83, 121, 126. 
 
 173
 
 174 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Mysticism, connection with 
 sensualism, 68, 72, 77, 79. 
 
 inherent in Northern 
 
 races, 130. 
 
 Naturalism, decay of, 76. 
 
 interpreted as study of 
 
 detail, 77, 82, 91, 110, 140. 
 
 degenerates into coarse- 
 ness, 79, 88. 
 
 Nietzsche, influence of, 127, 
 
 132, 143, 145, 157. 
 Novel, true function of the,- 
 
 89, 116. 
 
 Personality of places, 70, 74. 
 Pessimism, true nature of, 
 118. 
 
 a Russian characteristic, 
 
 121, 160. 
 
 Poetic treatment of scientific 
 
 fact, 20, 30. 
 Power of the Press, 169. 
 
 Reaction in politics, 164. 
 Roman Catholicism, 80, 83. 
 Russian aspirations, 116, 121, 
 155, 160. 
 
 Schopenhauer and Russian 
 
 literature, 118, 132, 157. 
 Sensationalism, double nature 
 
 of, 81. 
 Shakespeare and Maeterlinck, 
 
 1, 8, 60. 
 
 Silence, power of, 8. 
 Spiritualism, 59, 79. 
 Subliminal Self, the, 60. 
 Supernatural, treatment of, 
 
 3, 17, 29, 82. 
 Symbolism, 4, 18, 29, 148. 
 
 Tramp, the, in literature, 
 132, 134, 139, 156, 159. 
 
 " Unconscious." the, 38, 44. 
 49, 58, 60. 
 
 Verbiage of modern litera- 
 ture, 97. 
 
 Virgil and Maeterlinck, 20. 
 
 Virility, decay of, in Italy, 
 92, 98. 
 
 Wagner and D'Annunzio 95.
 
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