Octave Mirbeau’s passionate 1902 tribute to Maurice Maeterlinck, celebrating the Belgian playwright’s genius through reviews of The Buried Temple, Pelléas et Mélisande (with Debussy’s music), and Monna Vanna. A masterpiece of Belle Époque theatrical criticism.
This week belongs to Maurice Maeterlinck. And the noble ferment his name shall stir in minds and souls will soon drown out the vulgar clamour of politics – with its electoral crudities, its lying posters, its howling meetings that plague the poor people of France. Oh! Were I Jules Lemaître, how I should rue trading my orchestra seat for a wicker chair at public rallies!… This week we shall have the sweet and powerful joy – not of loving Maurice Maeterlinck more, which would be impossible – but of admiring him amidst universal acclaim, celebrating the triple splendour of his delightful and mighty genius as poet, philosopher, and dramatist.
The Buried Temple – a book in which, with gentle, caressing hand yet steadfast heart, he ventures through the obscurities of human consciousness, illuminating our innermost depths… A visionary’s book, drawn to mystery yet troubled by it, marvelling at nature whilst pursuing truth with passion… It takes its glorious place alongside those already glorious works: The Treasure of the Humble, Wisdom and Destiny, and that miraculous Life of the Bee, where the miracle is that the most rigorous science and scrupulous naturalist’s observation have, for once, borrowed the form and language of the highest poetry!
On Wednesday, at the Opéra-Comique, we shall have Pelléas and Mélisande – a legend as beautiful and sorrowful as Paolo and Francesca’s, a poem of such fresh, moving, and simple lyricism that M. Debussy paraphrases in adorable music, whilst M. Albert Carré frames it in staging that marries the utmost picturesqueness and artistry with understanding and respect for the work… Twice a masterpiece! I was privileged to attend a rehearsal of Pelléas and Mélisande, and three days later, I remain utterly shaken… haunted by it, yet also suffused with a light, brilliant and gentle, which rather than fading, enters me more deeply each moment, bathing me, penetrating me… Will Maurice Maeterlinck permit my friendship – as jealous of his happiness as of his glory – to defend him against himself and those recently published letters, to tell him with that easy prophetic tranquillity born of dazzling certainty in realised beauty… that Pelléas and Mélisande shall be a great and deserved triumph? I cannot recall hearing anything more absolutely exquisite, more absolutely heartrending… Were it not for my scruple against spoiling a work not yet mine to share, since it hasn’t been given to the public, with what joy would I express all the new, profound, infinitely pure and truly human sensations I felt listening to these poor little souls sing – painful and charming creatures whose stammering contains all the charm of dreams and all life’s sorrow!
That evening, perhaps thirty people sat in the hall, all different in sensibility and ideas… some even given to irony, apt to consider emotion a defect or weakness… Well! All were under the same anguished spell; all felt the same emotion in their hearts, and during the final three tableaux, all wept the same tears… Therefore, I was not wrong to be so moved… My admiration and emotion weren’t duped by friendship… It was simply thus. And your heroism, dear Maeterlinck – which extends to hatred of your own work, which so ardently, with such fervent injustice, wishes this admirable work to fail – cannot hold out much longer against this evidence, against these tears from your dearest friends who, believe me, aren’t in the habit of weeping at little nothings and sentimental poverty of the sort heard in so many theatres! Nothing can prevent M. Debussy’s name – in whom you have found the sole interpreter of your genius, more than an interpreter, a creative soul fraternally matched to yours – from shining beside your name like that of a glorious master!
Leaving that rehearsal, dazzled, so proud to be your friend and that you have done me the honour of dedicating this work to me, I thought: “How sad that Maurice Maeterlinck must publicly disown his genius, so peacefully pure, so harmoniously beautiful!” And I was tempted to cry out, like one of your poem’s characters, whilst loving you all the more: “If I were God, I would pity the poor hearts of men!”
Finally, a few days after Pelléas and Mélisande, we shall have Monna Vanna, which M. Lugné-Poë will have the honour of presenting, just as he had the honour – against all the pedants’ hostility and fools’ mockery – of presenting Ibsen’s principal masterworks for our joy. Let this be said, lest we forget what we owe to M. Lugné-Poë’s enlightened and generous initiative… We owe him too this unforgettable evening of Monna Vanna, which he prepares with such scrupulous care and such selflessness…
Between Princess Maleine, which I reread yesterday, and which remains as delightful a masterpiece as in our first days of enthusiasm, and Monna Vanna, another masterpiece but quite different, something considerable has occurred in Maurice Maeterlinck’s life – something not as commonplace amongst men as one might think… He has lived. It’s still the same Maeterlinck, enamoured of the unknown, who loves to descend into the soul’s unexplored depths, but a Maeterlinck developed, enlarged, matured by life and by all the as-yet-unfelt joys and sorrows that life can bring to an imagination as vivid, tender and ardent as his, and to a heart as great as his.
In Princess Maleine, which has the soft, imprecise grace of ancient tales, beings and things sometimes fade, become impersonal against legendary backgrounds, amongst dreamlike landscapes and architectures. In Monna Vanna, beings and things concretise, take shape clearly, in vivid strokes against backgrounds of reality. It’s a woman and men grappling with love and its contradictions, truly giving off the scent of flesh. The passion that stammers little plaints in Princess Maleine and Pelléas now argues, cries, roars and wills in Monna Vanna… Monna Vanna is a full, strong work that no longer has the faded sweetness of fresco and tapestry but shows the roughness of relief. It’s circumscribed in a precise epoch, a specific place. Its action unfolds upon a fold of history… It has the scope, severe bearing, solidarity, and clarity of classical tragedies. And it attains, through many scenes, through violent and profound beauty, through passion’s fierce sumptuousness, the splendour of the greatest masterworks… But here again, I’m bound to frustrating reserve, to crying my admiration without adding all the testimony and examples that might, in the eyes of unbelievers – for you have them, like Hugo, like Shakespeare – justify it…
And I have wanted nothing else, dear Maeterlinck, at the threshold of this week that will ring with your name and be beautified by your works – I have wanted nothing but to salute with friendly and fervent words The Buried Temple, which you have dedicated to me, Pelléas and Mélisande, to which you once gave me the great joy of associating my name, and this red and superb Monna Vanna, which you have allowed me to read before others, and which, if the cult of beauty still exists amongst us, will be frantically acclaimed as a victory.
Here is a great, noble, triple joy we owe you, whilst awaiting all those your genius reserves for the future… that future we needn’t ask fortune-tellers to divine from palms, cards, or coffee grounds…
1902.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 