Maurice Maeterlinck - The Wrack of the Storm
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Maurice Maeterlinck >> The Wrack of the Storm
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But all this power, which seemed so blindly released, was in reality
extremely circumspect, extremely subtle and marvellously disciplined.
The handling of those shy though excited crowds called for the utmost
prudence, as a certain French speaker, whom I will not name, but who
wished to make a like attempt, learnt to his cost. The Italian is
generous, courteous, hospitable, expansive and enthusiastic, but also
proud and susceptible. He does not readily allow another to dictate
his conduct, to reproach him with his shortcomings or to offer him
advice. He is conscious of his own worth; he knows that he is the
eldest son of our civilization and that no one has the right to
patronize him. It is necessary, therefore, beneath the appearance of
the most fiery and unbridled eloquence, to observe perfect
self-mastery, combined with infinite tact and discretion. It is often
essential to divine instantaneously the temper of the crowd, to bow
before the most varied and unexpected circumstances and to profit by
them. I remember, among others, a singularly prickly meeting at
Naples. The Neapolitans are hardly warlike people; but they none the
less felt on this occasion that they must not appear indifferent to
the generous movement which was thrilling the rest of Italy. At the
last moment, we were warned that we might speak of Belgium and her
misfortunes, but that any too pointed allusion to the war, any too
violent attack upon the Teutonic bandits would arouse protests which
might injure our cause. I, being no orator, had only my poor written
speech, which, as I could not alter it, became dangerous. It was
necessary to prepare the ground. Destree mounted the platform and, in
a masterly improvisation, began by establishing a long, patient and
scholarly parallel between Flemish and Italian art, between the great
painters of Florence and Venice and those of Flanders and Brabant; and
thence, by imperceptible degrees, he shifted his ground to the present
distress in Belgium, to the atrocities and infamies committed by her
oppressors, to the whole story, to the whole series of injustices, to
the whole danger of this nameless war. He was applauded; the barriers
were broken down. Anything added to what he had said was superfluous;
but everything was permissible.
3
For the rest, it must be admitted that a wonderful impulse of pity and
admiration for Belgium sustained the orator and lent his every word a
range and a potency which it could not otherwise have possessed. This
unanimous and spontaneous sympathy assumed at times the most touching
and unexpected forms. All difficulties were smoothed away before us as
by magic; the sternest prohibitions were ingeniously evaded or
benevolently removed. From the towns which we were due to visit the
hotel-keepers telegraphed to us, begging as a favour permission to
give us lodging; and, when the time came to settle our account, it was
impossible to get them to accept the slightest remuneration; and the
whole staff, from the majestic porter to the humblest boot-boy,
heroically refused to be tipped. If we entered a restaurant and were
recognized, the customers would rise, take counsel together and order
a bottle of some famous wine; then one among them would come forward,
requesting, gracefully and respectfully, that we would do them the
honour of drinking with them to the deliverance of our martyred
motherland. At the memory of what that unhappy country had suffered
for the salvation of the world, a sort of discreet and affecting
fervour was visible in the looks of all; it may be said that nowhere
was the heroic sacrifice of Belgium more nobly and more affectionately
admired and understood; and it will be recognized one day, when time
has done its work, that, although other causes induced Italy to take
upon her shoulders the terrible burden of what was not an inevitable
war, the only causes that really, in the depths of her soul, liberated
her resolve were the admiration, the indignation and the heroic pity
inspired by the spectacle, incessantly renewed, of our unmerited
afflictions. You will not find in history a nobler sacrifice nor one
made for a nobler cause.
* * * * *
ON REREADING THUCYDIDES
XIII
ON REREADING THUCYDIDES
1
At moments above all when history is in the making, in these times
when great and as yet incomplete pages are being traced, pages by the
side of which all that had already been written will pale, it is a
good and salutary thing to turn to the past in search of instruction,
warning and encouragement. In this respect, the unwearying and
implacable war which Athens kept up against Sparta for twenty-seven
years, with the hegemony of Greece for a stake, presents more than one
analogy with that which we ourselves are waging and teaches lessons
that should make us reflect. The counsels which it gives us are all
the more precious, all the more striking or profound inasmuch as the
war is narrated to us by a man who remains, with Tacitus, despite the
striving of the centuries, the progress of life and all the
opportunities of doing better, the greatest historian that the earth
has ever known. Thucydides is in fact the supreme historian, at the
same time swift and detailed, scrupulously sifting his evidence but
giving free play to intuition, setting forth none but incontestable
facts, yet divining the most secret intentions and embracing at a
glance all the present and future political consequences of the events
which he relates. He is withal one of the most perfect writers, one of
the most admirable artists in the literature of mankind; and from this
point of view, in an entirely different and almost antagonistic world,
he has not an equal save Tacitus. But Tacitus is before everything a
wonderful tragic poet, a painter of foul abysses, of fire and blood,
who can lay bare the souls of monsters and their crimes, whereas
Thucydides is above all a great political moralist, a statesman
endowed with extraordinary perspicacity, a painter of the open air and
of a free state, who portrays the minds of those sane, ingenious,
subtle, generous and marvellously intelligent men who peopled ancient
Greece. The one piles on the gloom with a lavish hand, gathers dark
shadows which he pierces at each sentence with lightning flashes, but
remains sombre and oppressed on the very summits, whereas the other
condenses nothing but light, groups together judgments that are so
many radiant sheaves and remains luminous and breathes freely in the
very depths. The first is passionate, violent, fierce, indignant,
bitter, sincerely but pitilessly unjust and all made up of magnificent
animosities; the second is always even, always at the same high level,
which is that which the noblest endeavour of human reason can attain.
He has no passion but a passion for the public weal, for justice,
glory and intelligence. It is as though all his work were spread out
in the blue sky; and even his famous picture of the plague of Athens
seems covered with sunshine.
2
But there is no need to follow up this parallel, which is not my
object. I will not dwell any longer--though perhaps I may return to
them one day--upon the lessons which we might derive from that
Peloponnesian War, in which the position of Athens towards Lacedaemon
provides more than one point of comparison with that of France towards
Germany. True, we do not there see, as in our own case, civilized
nations fighting a morally barbarian people: it was a contest between
Greeks and Greeks, displaying however in the same physical race two
different and incompatible spirits. Athens stood for human life in
its happiest development, gracious, cheerful and peaceful. She took no
serious interest except in the happiness, the imponderous riches, the
innocent and perfect beauties, the sweet leisures, the glories and the
arts of peace. When she went to war, it was as though in play, with
the smile still on her face, looking upon it as a more violent
pleasure than the rest, or as a duty joyfully accepted. She bound
herself down to no discipline, she was never ready, she improvised
everything at the last moment, having, as Pericles said, "with habits
not of labour but of ease and courage not of art but of nature, the
double advantage of escaping the experience of hardship in
anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as
those who are never free from them."[5]
For Sparta, on the other hand, life was nothing but endless work, an
incessant strain, having no other objective than war. She was gloomy,
austere, strict, morose, almost ascetic, an enemy to everything that
excuses man's presence on this earth, a nation of spoilers, looters,
incendiaries and devastators, a nest of wasps beside a swarm of bees,
a perpetual menace and danger to everything around her, as hard upon
herself as upon others and boasting an ideal which may appear lofty,
if it can be man's ideal to be unhappy and the contented slave of
unrelenting discipline. On the other hand, she differed entirely from
those whom we are now fighting in that she was generally honest, loyal
and upright and showed a certain respect for the gods and their
temples, for treaties and for international law. It is none the less
true that, if she had from the beginning reigned alone or without
encountering a long resistance, Hellas would never have been the
Hellas that we know. She would have left in history but a precarious
trace of useless warlike virtues and of minor combats without glory;
and mankind would not have possessed that centre of light towards
which it turns to this day.
3
What was to be the issue of this war? Here begins the lesson which it
were well to study thoroughly. It would seem indeed as if, with the
first encounters in that conflict, as in our own, the inexplicable will
that governs nations was favourable to the less civilized; and in fact
Lacedaemon gained the upper hand, at least temporarily and sufficiently
to abuse her victory to such a degree that she soon lost its fruits.
But Athens held the evil will in check for seven-and-twenty years; for
twenty-seven summers and twenty-seven winters, to use Thucydides'
reckoning, she proved to us that it is possible, in defiance of
probability, to fight against what seems written in the book of heaven
and hell. Nay more, at a time when Sparta, whose sole industry, whose
sole training, whose only reason for existence and whose only ideal
was war, was hugging the thought of crushing in a few weeks, under the
weight of her formidable hoplites, a frivolous, careless and
ill-organized city, Athens, notwithstanding the treacherous blow which
fate dealt her by sending a plague that carried off a third of her
civil population and a quarter of her army, Athens for seventeen years
definitely held victory in her grasp.
During this period, she more than once had Lacedaemon at her mercy and
did not begin to descend the stony path of ruin and defeat until after
the disastrous expedition to Sicily, in which, carried away by her
rhetoricians and bitten with inconceivable folly, she hurled all her
fleet, all her soldiers and all her wealth into a remote,
unprofitable, unknown and desperate adventure. She resisted the
decline of her fortunes for yet another ten years, heaping up her sins
against wisdom and simple common sense and with her own hands drawing
tighter the knot that was to strangle her, as though to show us that
destiny is for the most part but our own madness and that what we call
unavoidable fatality has its root only in mistakes that might easily
be avoided.
4
To point this moral was again not my real object. In these days when
we have so many sorrows to assuage and so many deaths to honour, I
wished merely to recall a page written over two thousand years ago, to
the glory of the Athenian heroes who fell for their country in the
first battles of that war. According to the custom of the Greeks, the
bones of the dead that had been burnt on the battlefield were
solemnly brought back to Athens at the end of the year; and the people
chose the greatest speaker in the city to deliver the funeral oration.
This honour fell to Pericles, son of Xanthippus, the Pericles of the
golden age of human beauty. After pronouncing a well-merited and
magnificent eulogium on the Athenian nation and institutions, he
concluded with the following words:
"Indeed, if I have dwelt at some length upon the character
of our country, it has been to show that our stake in the
struggle is not the same as theirs who have no such blessing
to lose and also that the panegyric of the men over whom I
am now speaking might be by definite proofs established.
That panegyric is now in a great measure complete; for the
Athens that I have celebrated is only what the heroism of
these and their like have made her, men whose fame, unlike
that of most Hellenes, will be found to be only commensurate
with their deserts. And, if a test of worth be wanted, it is
to be found in their closing scene; and this not only in the
cases in which it set the final seal upon their merit, but
also in those in which it gave the first intimation of their
having any. For there is justice in the claim that
steadfastness in his country's battles should be as a cloak
to cover a man's other imperfections, since the good action
has blotted out the bad and his merit as a citizen more than
outweighed his demerits as an individual. But none of these
allowed either wealth with its prospect of future enjoyment
to unnerve his spirit, or poverty with its hope of a day of
freedom and riches to tempt him to shrink from danger. No,
holding that vengeance upon their enemies was more to be
desired than any personal blessings and reckoning this to be
the most glorious of hazards, they joyfully determined to
accept the risk, to make sure of their vengeance and to let
their wishes wait; and, while committing to hope the
uncertainty of final success, in the business before them
they thought fit to act boldly and trust in themselves. Thus
choosing to die resisting rather than to live submitting,
they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face
and, after one brief moment, while at the summit of their
fortune, escaped not from their fear but from their glory.
"So died these men as became Athenians. You, their
survivors, must determine to have as unfaltering a
resolution in the field, though you may pray that it may
have a happier issue. And, not contented with ideas derived
only from words of the advantages which are bound up with
the defence of your country, though these would furnish a
valuable text to a speaker even before an audience so alive
to them as the present, you must yourselves realize the
power of Athens and feed your eyes upon her from day to day,
till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her
greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was
by courage, sense of duty and a keen feeling of honour in
action that men were enabled to win all this and that no
personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to
deprive their country of their valour, but they laid it at
her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could
offer. For by this offering of their lives made in common by
them all they each of them individually received that renown
which never grows old and, for a sepulchre, not so much that
in which their bones have been deposited, but that noblest
of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be eternally
remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story shall
call for its commemoration. For heroes have the whole earth
for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the
column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in
every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve
it, except that of the heart. These take as your model and,
judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of
valour, never decline the dangers of war. For it is not the
miserable that would most justly be unsparing of their
lives: these have nothing to hope for; it is rather they to
whom continued life may bring reverses as yet unknown and to
whom a fall, if it came, would be most tremendous in its
consequences. And surely, to a man of spirit, the
degradation of cowardice must be immeasurably more grievous
than the unfelt death which strikes him in the midst of his
strength and patriotism!
"Comfort, therefore, not condolence, is what I have to offer
to the parents of the dead who may be here. Numberless are
the chances to which, as they know, the life of man is
subject; but fortunate indeed are they who draw for their
lot a death so glorious as that which has caused your
mourning and to whom life has been so exactly measured as to
terminate in the happiness in which it has been passed.
Still I know that this is a hard saying, especially when
those are in question of whom you will be constantly
reminded by seeing in the homes of others blessings of which
once you also boasted; for grief is felt not so much for the
want of what we have never known as for the loss of that to
which we have been long accustomed. Yet you who are still of
an age to beget children must bear up in the hope of having
others in their stead: not only will they help you to forget
those whom you have lost, but they will be to the state at
once a reinforcement and a security; for never can a fair or
just policy be expected of the citizen who does not, like
his fellows, bring to the decision the interests and
apprehensions of a father. While those of you who have
passed your prime must congratulate yourselves with the
thought that the best part of your life was fortunate and
that the brief span that remains will be cheered by the fame
of the departed. For it is only the love of honour that
never grows old; and honour it is, not gain, as some would
have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.
"And, now that you have brought to a close your lamentations
for your relatives, you may depart."
These words spoken twenty-three centuries ago ring in our hearts as
though they were uttered yesterday. They celebrate our dead better
than could any eloquence of ours, however poignant it might be. Let us
bow before their paramount beauty and before the great people that
could applaud and understand.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: This and the later passage from Pericles' funeral oration
I have quoted from the late Richard Crawley's admirable translation of
Thucydides' _Peloponnesian War_, now published in the _Temple
Classics_.--A. T. de M.]
* * * * *
THE DEAD DO NOT DIE
XIV
THE DEAD DO NOT DIE
1
When we behold the terrible loss of so many young lives, when we see
so many incarnations of physical and moral vigour, of intellect and of
glorious promise pitilessly cut off in their first flower, we are on
the verge of despair. Never before have the fairest energies and
aspirations of men been flung recklessly and incessantly into an abyss
whence comes no sound or answer. Never since it came into existence
has humanity squandered its treasure, its substance and its prospects
so lavishly. For more than twelve months, on every battlefield, where
the bravest, the truest, the most ardent and self-sacrificing are
necessarily the first to die and where the less courageous, the less
generous, the weak, the ailing, in a word the less desirable, alone
possess some chance of escaping the carnage, for over twelve months a
sort of monstrous inverse selection has been in operation, one which
seems to be deliberately seeking the downfall of the human race. And
we wonder uneasily what the state of the world will be after the great
trial and what will be left of it and what will be the future of this
stunted race, shorn of all the best and noblest part of it.
The problem is certainly one of the darkest that have ever vexed the
minds of men. It contains a material truth before which we remain
defenceless; and, if we accept it as it stands, we can discover no
remedy for the evil that threatens us. But material and tangible
truths are never anything but a more or less salient angle of greater
and deeper-lying truths. And, on the other hand, mankind appears to be
such a necessary and indestructible force of nature that it has
always, hitherto, not only survived the most desperate ordeals, but
succeeded in benefiting by them and emerging greater and stronger than
before.
2
We know that peace is better than war; it were madness to compare the
two. We know that, if this cataclysm let loose by an act of
unutterable folly had not come upon the world, mankind would doubtless
have reached ere long a zenith of wonderful achievement whose
manifestations it is impossible to foreshadow. We know that, if a
third or a fourth part of the fabulous sums expended on extermination
and destruction had been devoted to works of peace, all the iniquities
that poison the air we breathe would have been triumphantly redressed
and that the social question, the one great question, that matter of
life and death which justice demands that posterity should face,
would have found its definite solution, once and for all, in a
happiness which now perhaps even our sons and grandsons will not
realize. We know that the disappearance of two or three million young
existences, cut down when they were on the point of bearing fruit,
will leave in history a void that will not be easily filled, even as
we know that among those dead were mighty intellects, treasures of
genius which will not come back again and which contained inventions
and discoveries that will now perhaps be lost to us for centuries. We
know that we shall never grasp the consequences of this thrusting back
of progress and of this unprecedented devastation. But, granting all
this, it is a good thing to recover our balance and stand upon our
feet. There is no irreparable loss. Everything is transformed, nothing
perishes and that which seems to be hurled into destruction is not
destroyed at all. Our moral world, even as our physical world, is a
vast but hermetically sealed sphere, whence naught can issue, whence
naught can fall, to be dissolved in space. All that exists, all that
comes into being upon this earth remains there and bears fruit; and
the most appalling wastage is but material or spiritual riches flung
away for an instant, to fall to the ground again in a new form. There
is no escape or leakage, no filtering through cracks, no missing the
mark, not even waste or neglect. All this heroism poured out on every
side does not leave our planet; and the reason why the courage of our
fighters seems so general and yet so extraordinary is that all the
might of the dead has passed into the survivors. All those forces of
wisdom, patience, honour and self-sacrifice which increase day by day
and which we ourselves, who are far from the field of danger, feel
rising within us without knowing whence they come are nothing but the
souls of the heroes gathered and absorbed by our own souls.
3
It is well at times to contemplate invisible things as though we saw
them with our eyes. This was the aim of all the great religions, when
they represented under forms appropriate to the civilization of their
day, the latent, deep, instinctive, general and essential truths which
are the guiding principles of mankind. All have felt and recognized
that loftiest of all truths, the communion of the living and the dead,
and have given it various names designating the same mysterious
verity: the Christians know it as revival of merit, the Buddhists as
reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, and the Japanese as
Shintoism, or ancestor-worship. The last are more fully convinced than
any other nation that the dead do not cease to live and that they
direct all our actions, are exalted by our virtues and become gods.
Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has most closely studied and understood
that wonderful ancestor-worship, says:
"One of the surprises of our future will certainly be a
return to beliefs and ideas long ago abandoned upon the mere
assumption that they contained no truth--beliefs still
called barbarous, pagan, mediaeval, by those who condemn them
out of traditional habit. Year after year the researches of
science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian,
the idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by
different paths, as near to some point of eternal truth as
any thinker of the nineteenth century. We are now learning
also, that the theories of the astrologers and of the
alchemists were but partially, not totally, wrong. We have
reason even to suppose that no dream of the invisible world
has ever been dreamed, that no hypothesis of the unseen has
ever been imagined--which future science will not prove to
have contained some germ of reality."[6]
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