MAETERLINCK ON DEATH

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1307, 9 December 1911, Page 9

MAETERLINCK ON DEATH

If you take a piece of chalk and draw a long straight line, upon the floor of a barn for instance, and then lay a hen at one end of it with its teik to the ground so that its eyes follow the line, tho unhappy creature remains fixed there (at least so I have been told) iiv a hypnotic, mesmerised condition, and must bo knocked sideways to be set. free. One says instinctively the "unhappy," but perhaps one ought rather to nave said the "happy," creature; for free it is but a hen again, and while it was tethered in that inexplicable trance who shall say that it was not or was, and in what strange felicities tho fates were not indulging it? Let me add that I have not made the experiment, and should have been ; ready to think there must be a catch in it somewhere, that one must begin by sprinkling, as it were, a little salt on the hen's tail, but for the experience of reading M. Maeterlinck's philosophical essays. In thi-> essay on Death, for example, which he has latch- written, ho draws the white line to infinity, no less, and the tone and style of the work (not forgetting its sympathetic division into chapters averaging in length four hundred words apiece) give me exactly tho impression of being lifted from the ground with significant tenderness (to avoid disturbing my feathers—it is, of course, essential to'the experiment that you should not ruffle the hen), of being gently carried to the field of operation, and placed and at last left, plants la as the French would say, with my beak to the floor. Tho methc<l has naturally a peculiar appropriateness when tho subject under consideration is in itself negative. When you have shown that everything that precedes', death is really a part of life and everything that follows it of tho imagination, death itself becomes unseizable. Now it is with the fear of death and possible processes'of overcoming it thai M. Maeterlinck's mind is exercised in the main; he tells us, for example, that' what wo really fear i 3 not death, but last illnesses, or cemeteries, and that, so far as survival goes, either felicity must bo awaiting us or annihilation. There is, he convinces himself,' though ho will hardly, we think, convince anyone else, no other alternntiv(y»o:rcepfc-'indeed*'that the universe is mad, and this he thinks, and here wo agree with him, imlikelv. But tho paradise, to which his mind -in-, _clincs," v a:sort/of merged impersonal state if we rightly apprehend him, strikes us as an acutely terrifying possibility; indeed he seems to offer us for our consolation the very thing which we most fear. And then in tho meantime we are growing gap-toothed, wrinkled, bald, blind. Mystic logic may assure us, if it will, that these aro life not death processes; we shall continue to find something sophistical and insipid about such an assurance. Nor is it cveu as if these things were happening' or could happen to onrselvos only; they happen also to others, to those whom'wo love, and what is bur security that our loved ones wiil not bo separated from us or we from them? Strangely enough, .the word love occurs only once in M. Maeterlinck's essayi and the idea docs not occur at all. The omission is indicative. There is, we feel sure, and surer after than before reading what M. Maeterlinck has written, onlv" oiio method of approaching this subject from which any satisfaction, even for the intellect, can be derived; (he method, that is, which proceeds, not by belittling tho hutaan emotions, love and fear (even in his treatment of fear the author strikes us as quite superficial and unconvincing), but by taking them as the foundation, the salient facts of the inquiry, tho only possible avenue to truth, and the probable avenue to it. Dread of the moment of death and a passionate protest of the soul against the idea of its finality aro probably normal as well among the higher as among tho lower tynes of. men. All that M. Maeterlinck omits or is unaware of is given in a beautiful stanza of tho Manx poet T. E. Brown:

But when I think if we must part And all this persona! dream be fled, O.then, my heart! .0 then, my useless heart! Would God (hat thou wort dead— A clod insensible to joys or ills, A stone Tomote. in some far gully of the hills!

No philosophising is of the smallest value or of the slightest interest unless, in passing beyond. these feelings (if (hat is possible), it shows that it has not passed them by. —Basil de Selincourt, reviewing Maeterlinck's "Death."