Maurice Maeterlinck - The Wrack of the Storm
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Maurice Maeterlinck >> The Wrack of the Storm
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9 THE WRACK OF THE STORM
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| THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK |
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| ESSAYS |
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| The Treasure of the Humble |
| Wisdom and Destiny |
| The Life of the Bee |
| The Buried Temple |
| The Double Garden |
| The Measure of the Hours |
| On Emerson, and Other Essays |
| Our Eternity |
| The Unknown Guest |
| The Wrack of the Storm |
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| PLAYS |
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| Sister Beatrice, and Ardiane and Barbe Bleue |
| Joyzelle, and Monna Vanna |
| The Blue Bird, A Fairy Play |
| Mary Magdalene |
| Pelleas and Melisande, and Other Plays |
| Princess Maleine |
| The Intruder, and Other Plays |
| Aglavaine and Selysette |
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| HOLIDAY EDITIONS |
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| Our Friend the Dog |
| The Swarm |
| The Intelligence of the Flowers |
| Death |
| Thoughts from Maeterlinck |
| The Blue Bird |
| The Life of the Bee |
| News of Spring and Other Nature Studies |
| Poems |
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The
Wrack of the Storm
BY
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
_Translated by_
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
The reader taking up this volume will, for the first time in the work
of one who hitherto had cursed no man, find words of hatred and
malediction. I would gladly have avoided them, for I hold that he who
takes upon himself to write pledges himself to say nothing that can
derogate from the respect and love which we owe to all men. I have had
to utter these words; and I am as much surprised as saddened at what I
have been constrained to say by the force of events and of truth. I
loved Germany and numbered friends there, who now, dead or living, are
alike dead to me. I thought her great and upright and generous; and to
me she was ever kindly and hospitable. But there are crimes that
obliterate the past and close the future. In rejecting hatred I
should have shown myself a traitor to love.
I tried to lift myself above the fray; but, the higher I rose, the
more I saw of the madness and the horror of it, of the justice of one
cause and the infamy of the other. It is possible that one day, when
time has wearied remembrance and restored the ruins, wise men will
tell us that we were mistaken and that our standpoint was not lofty
enough; but they will say it because they will no longer know what we
know, nor will they have seen what we have seen.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK.
NICE, 1916.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
The present volume contains, in the chronological order in which they
were produced, all the essays published and all the speeches delivered
by M. Maeterlinck since the beginning of the war, upon which, as will
be perceived, each one of them has a direct bearing. They are printed
as written; and they throw an interesting light upon the successive
phases of the author's psychology during the Titanic and hideous
struggle that has affected the mental attitude of us all.
_In Italy_ forms the preface to M. Jules Destree's book, _En Italie
avant la guerre, 1914-15_. Of the remaining essays, some have appeared
in various English and American periodicals; others are now printed in
translation for the first time.
I have also had M. Maeterlinck's leave to include in this volume his
first published work, _The Massacre of the Innocents_. This powerful
sketch in the Flemish manner saw the light originally in the
_Pleiade_, in 1886, and may at the present time, to use the author's
own words in a note to myself, be regarded as "a sort of vague
symbolic prophecy." An English version by Mrs. Edith Wingate Rinder
was printed in the _Dome_ in 1899; another has since been issued by an
English and by an American firm of publishers; but the only authorized
translation to appear in book form is that now added as an epilogue to
_The Wrack of the Storm_.
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS.
CHELSEA, 1916.
CONTENTS
PAGE
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 5
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 7
I AFTER THE VICTORY 11
II KING ALBERT 21
III THE HOSTAGE CITIES 31
IV TO SAVE FOUR CITIES 37
V PRO PATRIA: I 45
VI HEROISM 59
VII PRO PATRIA: II 75
VIII PRO PATRIA: III 89
IX BELGIUM'S FLAG DAY 109
X ON THE DEATH OF A LITTLE SOLDIER 117
XI THE HOUR OF DESTINY 131
XII IN ITALY 147
XIII ON REREADING THUCYDIDES 161
XIV THE DEAD DO NOT DIE 179
XV IN MEMORIAM 191
XVI SUPERNATURAL COMMUNICATIONS IN WAR-TIME 197
XVII EDITH CAVELL 217
XVIII THE LIFE OF THE DEAD 229
XIX THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS 241
XX THE WILL OF EARTH 257
XXI FOR POLAND 271
XXII THE MIGHT OF THE DEAD 279
XXIII WHEN THE WAR IS OVER 291
XXIV THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS 303
* * * * *
AFTER THE VICTORY
THE WRACK OF THE STORM
I
AFTER THE VICTORY[1]
1
At these moments of tragedy, none should be allowed to speak who
cannot shoulder a rifle, for the written word seems so monstrously
useless, so overwhelmingly trivial, in front of this mighty drama
which shall for a long time, it may be for ever, free mankind from the
scourge of war: the one scourge among all that cannot be excused, that
cannot be explained, since alone among all it issues entire from the
hands of man.
2
But it is while this scourge is upon us, while we have our being in
its very centre, that we shall do well to balance the guilt of those
who have committed this inexpiable crime. It is now, while we are in
the thick of the horror, undergoing it, feeling it, that we have the
energy, the clear-sightedness needed to judge it; from the depths of
the most fearful injustice justice is best perceived. When the hour
shall have come for settling accounts--and it will not long delay--we
shall have forgotten much of what we have suffered and a blameworthy
pity will creep over us and cloud our eyes. This is the moment,
therefore, for us to frame our inexorable resolution. After the final
victory, when the enemy is crushed--as crushed he will be--efforts
will be made to enlist our sympathy, to move us to pity. We shall be
told that the unfortunate German people were merely the victims of
their monarch and their feudal caste; that no blame attaches to the
Germany we know, which is so sympathetic and so cordial--the Germany
of quaint old houses and open-hearted greeting, the Germany that sits
under its lime-trees beneath the clear light of the moon--but only to
Prussia, hateful, arrogant Prussia; that the homely, peace-loving,
Bavarian, the genial and hospitable dwellers on the banks of the
Rhine, the Silesian and Saxon and I know not who besides--for all
these will suddenly have become whiter than snow and more inoffensive
than the sheep in an English fold--that they all have merely obeyed,
have been compelled to obey orders which they detested but were unable
to resist. We are face to face with reality now; let us look at it
well and pronounce our sentence; for this is the moment when we hold
the proofs in our hands, when the elements of crime are hot before us
and shout out the truth that soon will fade from our memory. Let us
tell ourselves now, therefore, now, that all that we shall be told
hereafter will be false; and let us unflinchingly adhere to what we
decide at this moment, when the glare of the horror is on us.
3
It is not true that in this gigantic crime there are innocent and
guilty, or degrees of guilt. They stand on one level, all those who
have taken part in it. The German from the North has no more special
craving for blood and outrage than he from the South has special
tenderness or pity. It is, very simply, the German, from one end of
his country to the other, who stands revealed as a beast of prey which
the firm will of our planet finally repudiates. We have here no
wretched slaves dragged along by a tyrant king who alone is
responsible. Nations have the government which they deserve, or
rather, the government which they have is truly no more than the
magnified and public projection of the private morality and mentality
of the nation. If eighty million innocent people select and support a
monstrous king, those eighty million innocent people merely expose the
inherent falseness and superficiality of their innocence; and it is
the monster they maintain at their head who stands for all that is
true in their nature, because it is he who represents the eternal
aspirations of their race, which lie far deeper than their apparent
and transient virtues. Let there be no suggestion of error, of having
been led astray, of an intelligent people having been tricked or
misled. No nation can be deceived that does not wish to be deceived;
and it is not intelligence that Germany lacks. In the sphere of
intellect such things are not possible; nor in the region of
enlightened, reflecting will. No nation permits herself to be coerced
to the one crime that man cannot pardon. It is of her own accord that
she hastens towards it; her chief has no need to persuade, it is she
who urges him on.
4
We have forces here quite different from those on the surface, forces
that are secret, irresistible and profound. It is these that we must
judge, these that we must crush under our heel, once and for all; for
they are the only ones that will not be improved or softened or
brought into line by experience or progress, or even by the bitterest
lesson. They are unalterable and immovable, their springs lie far
beneath hope or influence; and they must be destroyed as we destroy a
nest of wasps, since we know that these never can change into a nest
of bees. And, even though individually and singly the Germans were all
innocent and merely led astray, they would be none the less guilty in
the mass. This is the guilt that counts, that alone is actual and
real, because it lays bare, underneath their superficial innocence,
the subconscious criminality of all.
5
No influence can prevail on the unconscious or the subconscious. It
never evolves. Let there come a thousand years of civilization, a
thousand years of peace, with all possible refinements of art and
education, the subconscious element of the German spirit, which is its
unvarying element, will remain absolutely the same as it is to-day and
would declare itself, when the opportunity came, under the same
aspect, with the same infamy. Through the whole course of history, two
distinct willpowers have been noticed that would seem to be the
opposed, elemental manifestations of the spirit of our globe, the one
seeking only evil, injustice, tyranny and suffering, while the other
strives for liberty, the right, radiance and joy. These two powers
stand once again face to face; our opportunity is now to annihilate
the one that comes from below. Let us know how to be pitiless that we
may have no more need for pity. It is a measure of organic defence. It
is essential that the modern world should stamp out Prussian
militarism as it would stamp out a poisonous fungus that for half a
century had disturbed and polluted its days. The health of our planet
is in question. To-morrow the United States of Europe will have to
take measures for the convalescence of the earth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Translated by Alfred Sutro.]
* * * * *
KING ALBERT
II
KING ALBERT
1
Of all the heroes of this stupendous war, heroes who will live in the
memory of man, one assuredly of the most unsullied, one of those whom
we can never love enough, is the great young king of my little
country.
He was indeed at the critical hour the appointed man, the man for whom
every heart was waiting. With sudden beauty he embodied the mighty
voice of his people. He stood, upon the moment, for Belgium, revealed
unto herself and unto others. He had the wonderful good fortune to
realize and bestow a conscience in one of those dread hours of tragedy
and perplexity when the best of consciences waver.
Had he not been at hand, there is no doubt but that all would have
happened differently; and history would have lost one of her fairest
and noblest pages. Certainly Belgium would have been loyal and true to
her word; and any government would have been swept away, pitilessly
and irresistibly, by the indignation of a people that had never,
however far we probe into the past, played false. But there would have
been much of that confusion and irresolution inevitable in a host
suddenly threatened with disaster. There would have been vain talking,
mistaken measures, excusable but irreparable vacillations; and, above
all, the much-needed words, the precise and final words, would not
have been spoken and the deeds, than which we can picture none more
resolute, none greater, would not have been done at the right moment.
Thanks to the king, the peerless act shines forth and is maintained
complete, unfaltering; and the path of heroism is straight and
clearly defined and splendid as that of Thermopylae indefinitely
extended.
2
But what he has suffered, what he suffers day by day only those can
understand who have had the privilege of access to this hero: the most
sensitive and the gentlest of men, silent and reserved; a man of
controlled emotions, modest with a timidity that is at once baffling
and delightful; loving his people less as a father loves his children
than as a son loves his adoring mother. Of all that cherished kingdom,
his pride and his joy, the seat of his happiness, the centre of his
love and his security, there is left intact but a handful of cities,
which are threatened at every moment by the foulest invader that the
world has ever borne.
All the others--so quaint or so beautiful, so bright, so serene, happy
to be there, so inoffensive--jewels in the crown of Peace, models of
pure and upright family life, homes of loyal and dutiful industry, of
ready, ever-smiling geniality, with the natural welcome, the
ever-proffered hand and the ever-open heart: all the others are dead
cities, of which not one stone is left upon another; and the very
country-side, one of the fairest in this world, with its gentle
pastures, is now no more than one vast field of horror.
Treasures have perished that were numbered among the noblest and
dearest possessions of mankind; monuments have disappeared which
nothing can replace; and the half of a nation, among all nations the
most attached to its old simple habits, its humble homes, is at
present wandering along the roads of Europe. Thousands of innocent
people have been massacred; and of those who remain nearly all are
doomed to poverty and hunger.
But that remainder has but one soul, which has taken refuge in the
spacious soul of its king. Not a murmur, not a word of reproach! But
yesterday a town of thirty thousand inhabitants received the order to
forsake its white houses, its churches, its ancient streets and
squares, the scene of a light-hearted and industrious life. The thirty
thousand inhabitants, women and children and old men, set forth to
seek an uncertain refuge in a neighbouring city, which is threatened
almost as directly as their own and which to-morrow, it may be, must
in its turn set forth, but whither none can say, for the country is so
small that its boundaries are quickly reached, its shelter soon
exhausted.
No matter: they obey in silence and one and all approve and bless
their sovereign. He did what had to be done, what every one in his
place would have done; and, though they are all suffering as no
people has suffered since the barbarous invasions of the earliest
ages, they know that he suffers more than any of them, for in him all
their sorrows find a goal; in him they are reflected and enhanced.
They do not even harbour the idea that they might have been saved by a
sacrifice of honour. They draw no distinction between duty and
destiny. To them that duty, with its frightful consequences, seems as
inevitable as a natural force against which we cannot even dream of
struggling, so great is it and so invincible.
3
Here is an example of the collective bravery of nameless heroes, an
ingenuous and almost unconscious courage, which rivals and at times
exceeds the most exalted deeds in legend and history, for since the
days of the great martyrs men have never suffered death more simply
for a simple idea.
And, if amid the anguish of our struggle it were seemly to speak of
aught but tears and lamentations, we should find a magnificent
consolation in the spectacle of the unexpected heroism that suddenly
surrounds us on every side. It may well be said that never in the
memory of mankind have men sacrificed their lives with such zest, such
self-abnegation, such enthusiasm; and that the immortal virtues which
to this day have uplifted and preserved the flower of the human race
have never shone more brilliantly, never manifested greater power,
energy or youth.
* * * * *
THE HOSTAGE CITIES
III
THE HOSTAGE CITIES
1
Thanks to the heroism of the Allies, the hour is approaching when the
hordes of William the Madman will quit the soil of afflicted Belgium.
After what they have done in cold blood, what excesses, what disasters
must we not expect of the last convulsions of their rage? Our anguish
is all the more poignant in that they are at this moment fighting in
the most ancient and most precious portion of Flanders. Above all
countries, this is historic and hallowed land. They have destroyed
Termonde, Roulers, Charleroi, Mons, Namur, Thielt and more besides;
happy, charming little towns, which will rise again from their ashes,
more beautiful than before. They have annihilated Louvain and
Malines; they have but lately levelled Dixmude; their torches, their
incendiary squirts and their bombs are about to attack Brussels,
Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres and Furnes, which are like so many
living museums, forming one of the most delightful, delicate and
fragile ornaments of Europe. The things which are beginning here and
which may be completed would be irreparable. They would mean a loss to
our race for which nothing could atone. A quite peculiar
aspect--familiar, kindly, racy of the soil and unique--of that beauty
which a long series of comely human lives is able to acquire and to
hoard would disappear for ever from the face of the earth; and we
cannot, in the trouble and confusion of these too tragic hours,
realize the extent, the meaning or the consequences of such a crime.
2
We have made every sacrifice without complaining; but this would
exceed all measure. What can be done? How are we to stop them? They
seem to be no longer accessible to reason or to any of the feelings
which men hold in honour; they are sensible only to blows. Very soon,
as they must know, we shall have the power to strike them shrewdly.
Why do not the Allies, this very day, swiftly, while yet there is
time, name so many hostage cities, which would be answerable, stone
for stone, for the existence of our own dear towns? If Brussels, for
example, should be destroyed, then Berlin should be razed to the
ground. If Antwerp were devastated, Hamburg would disappear. Nuremburg
would guarantee Bruges; Munich would stand surety for Ghent.
At the present moment, when they are feeling the wind of defeat that
blows through their tattered standard, it is possible that this
solemn threat, officially pronounced, would force them to reflect, if
indeed they are still at all capable of reflection. It is the only
expedient that remains to us and there is no time to be lost. With
certain adversaries the most barbarous threats are legitimate and
necessary, for these threats speak the only language which they can
understand. And our children must not one day be able to reproach us
with not having attempted everything--even that which is most
repugnant--to save the treasures which are theirs by right.
* * * * *
TO SAVE FOUR CITIES
IV
TO SAVE FOUR CITIES
1
First Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Lierre, Dixmude, Nieuport (and I am
speaking only of the disasters of Flanders); now Ypres is no more and
Furnes is half in ruins. By the side of the great Flemish cities,
Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges, those vast and incomparable
living museums which have been watchfully preserved by a whole people,
a people above all others attached to its traditions, they formed a
constellation of little towns, delightful and hospitable, too little
known to travellers. Each of them wore its own expression, of peace,
pleasantness, innocent mirth, or meditation. Each possessed its
treasures, jealously guarded: its belfries, its churches, its canals,
its old bridges, its quiet convents, its ancient houses, which gave
it a special physiognomy, never to be forgotten by those who had
beheld it.
But the indisputable queen of these beautiful forsaken cities was
Ypres, with its enormous market-place, bordered by little
dwelling-houses with stepped gables, and its prodigious
market-buildings, which occupied one whole side of the immense oblong.
This market-place haunted for ever the memory of those who had seen
it, were it but once, while waiting to change trains; it was so
unexpected, so magical, so dream-like almost, in its disproportion to
the rest of the town. While the ancient city, whose life had withdrawn
itself from century to century, was gradually shrinking all around it,
the Grand'Place itself remained an immovable, gigantic, magnificent
witness to the might and opulence of old, when Ypres was, with Ghent
and Bruges, one of the three queens of the western world, one of the
most strenuous centres of human industry and activity and the cradle
of our great liberties. Such as it was yesterday--alas, that I cannot
say, such as it is to-day!--this square, with the enormous but
unspeakably harmonious mass of those market-buildings, at once
powerful and graceful, wild, gloomy, proud, yet genial, was one of the
most wonderful and perfect spectacles that could be seen in any town
on this old earth of ours. While of a different order of architecture,
built of other elements and standing under sterner skies, it should
have been as precious to man, as sacred and as intangible as the
Piazza di San Marco at Venice, the Signoria at Florence or the Piazza
del Duomo at Pisa. It constituted a peerless specimen of art, which at
all times wrung a cry of admiration from the most indifferent, an
ornament which men hoped was imperishable, one of those things of
beauty which, in the words of the poet, are a joy forever.
2
I cannot believe that it no longer exists; and yet in this horrible
war we have to believe everything and, above all, the worst. Now,
fatally and inevitably, it will be the turn of the Belfry of Bruges;
and then the tide of barbarians will rise against Ghent and Antwerp
and Brussels; and there will forthwith disappear one of those portions
of the world's surface in which was hoarded the greatest wealth of
beauty and of memories and of the stuff of history. We did what we
could to preserve it; we could do no more. The most heroic of armies
are powerless to prevent the bandits whom they are driving back from
murdering the women and children or from deliberately and uselessly
destroying all that they find along their path of retreat. There is
only one hope left us: the immediate and imperious intervention of
the neutral powers. It is towards them that we turn our tortured gaze.
Two great nations notably--Italy and the United States--hold in their
hands the fate of these last treasures, whose loss would one day be
reckoned among the heaviest and the most irreparable that have been
suffered in the course of long centuries of human civilization. They
can do what they will; it is time for them to do that which it is no
longer lawful to leave undone. By its frantic lies, the beast from
over the Rhine, standing at bay and in peril of death, shows plainly
enough the importance which it attaches to the opinion of the only
nations which the execration of all that lives and breathes have not
yet armed against it. It is afraid. It feels that all is crumbling
under foot, that it is being shunned and abandoned. It seeks in every
direction a glance that does not curse it. It must not, it shall not
find that glance. It is not necessary to tell Italy what our
imperilled cities are worth; for Italy is preeminently the land of
noble cities.
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