BY BENJAMIN DE CASSERES
There is a fourth dimension of thought. There are rare moments in life when the latencies of the soul converge and blend in a transient state of consciousness; when the trickling stream of thought gushes over the obstructing deltas of Space, Time and Circumstance, and mingles with the infinite sea beyond. It is at such moments that we catch glimpses, or it may be but a half-glimpse, of things too bright for human ken. We are dazzled by an influx of light, of knowledge. Personality dwindles to a point. We see ourselves objectively, as independent objects in space and time, like the clock ticking on the shelf or the moon in the sky. We have a feeling that we have been everywhere but no particular where. We grope back to the terrestrial, glad to perform the most humble task, rejoicing that the Ego has not been lost in that momentary vision of infinite Being.
In that shining ether world whose pulsing waves flow through the brain cells like light passing through crystal, dwell the gods of life, the Fates that dominate our lives. Inflexible, imperturbable, seeing but not feeling, holding within their grasp the threads of human destiny—the silken threads that hold our souls in leash—these ghosts of Law and shadows of impurpled life rule for aye. They understand, but mock. They hear, but their lips are curled in scorn. The Greeks placed them on Olympus, the Scandinavians in Asgard, and the modern mystic places them in the fourth dimension of thought.
There are some choice spirits who seem to have lived all their [140] lives in this subtle sphere. They walk the earth and their feet are clay, but their heads are ranged with the stars. Their lungs are forever inflated with a divine ether. We little beings who run around their legs like mice around the base of Colossus of Rhodes draw in the miasmatic vapors of planetary life and are content. We sit in chairs and stare at a blank wall; they sit before an open door. Our vision is bounded by the horizon; for them there is no horizon. We listen to the guttural of external life; they catch the vibrations of Law and report the ebb and flow of æons.
The materialist places his mind in the universe; the mystic places the universe in his mind. Plotinus, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Maeterlinck, we can hardly think of as ordinary mortals. They seem with us, but not of us. To come under the influence of their clairvoyant gaze; to follow them in their vertiginous flights above the striated world of matter and motion, is to experience simultaneously those sensations of exaltation and depression which one feels in rising in a balloon—a sinking at the heart, a lightness of the head. There is a sundering of the ligatures that bind us to the commonplace. The centripetal forces tug at our feet and the centrifugal forces tug at our head. The clogging clay wars against the stars that summon from above. The welding Relative is lost in a mantling and solvent Absolute. The individual withers and his soul is more and more. As a particle of salt is dissolved in water, so is a particular fact dissolved in its eternal idea, in such hours. The succession of days and nights collapses like a portable drinking cup. Time dwindles to a point, matter runs to fluid wastes, the stable unmoors and drifts away like fleecy clouds over a level summer sea.
The world is my thought, is the message of “Wisdom and Destiny.” The Belgian’s soul has been touched by some divine despair. But surcease he has found within. He has diked [141] his soul against the encroaching, flooding days, and reclaimed from the wild and lawless sea of Circumstance a verdant land of beauty and sunshine. Like Kubla Khan, he has decreed a lordly pleasure house in a mystic Xanadu. From the granite wall of limitations he has hewn a castle with turrets bathed forever in an opiate moonshine, and around which the eagles circle and call.
The world passes through his brain and even the dross is purified. He will see beauty in a beetle on a wall. He will catch the days with their griefs and the nights with their wailings and extract the beauty as gold is extracted from the mud in the pan. The soul of the seer is alchemic. He will turn compost into beaten gold. He will refine smudge and smut. From the less of the wine of pleasure he will brew an older vintage. He has an elfin band at his beck and call. They labor by day and night in the smithy of his unconscious being. There they forge the weapons for his conscious hours. There they mould helmet and shield and panoply. His mind is a dragnet, and all is fish that comes to it.
We are bolder than we know, and our actions ride us to the stars. We are wiser than we know, and our wisdom outruns the centuries. Each man is an epitome of all men. Every bottom is a false bottom. What we call limitation is lack of perception, and when we say we are undone we mean we have capitulated. For the seer—for Maeterlinck, Plotinus and Emerson—there are no limitations, and capitulation they do not know. They build the world anew every day. Each night they slough off a limitation. Each day they build a house, but they move perpetually. They overturn the best laid plans of devils and gods by meeting devil and god halfway. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune pierce their souls, but the tips are anointed with chrism of wisdom. They dice with life-in-death, as does the grief-crazed mortal, but they play [142] with loaded dice. They have lived imaginatively all men’s lives, and fear no disaster.
Maeterlinck would have us know we cannot escape the predestined. To-morrow is a curtained seduction, but it stands sure. The last day shall reveal what the first day said. The years walk a lockstep. Each thing breeds its own manner of death. And the trump of doom shall reveal the meaning of the prelude in Chaos. The individual is held in the rigid grooves of fate, and what is to be will come. We are gibbeted on Law. We are spitted on the Inevitable and our souls dangle over Chaos. The individual is held in the rigid grooves of fate, and what is to be will come. We are gibbeted on Law. We are spitted on the Inevitable and our souls dangle over Chaos.
The one conclusive proof that we are not perfect lies in the fact that we cannot divine the future. It is good that to most of us it is as a sealed book. The past is ever changing; the future alone is irrevocable. The day of our death is appointed. Death is but a sequence that flows from life, and life itself is but an oblation to death. On the altars of the Hours we offer ourselves up. So many acts spend so much force. And when there is no more force, there is an end on’t. The soul is but an eddy in the great world-stream, and the eddy has its appointed end as surely as the stream. A mind that could have grasped the links in the chain of causation of which Lincoln, the Civil War and Wilkes Booth were but the shadows, could have predicted, at Lincoln’s birth, the tragedy in Ford’s Theatre.
History is force dressed up. The curvetings of Law are beyond the individual stay, and the manner of the death of neations is dependent on the manner of their birth. We are puppets in an unknown stage, infusoria gyrating aimlessly in an unsounded sea, midges sporting our day in the sun of thought, atoms of desire, motes of the Eternal Energy. And Man bloweth where God listeth.
[143]
The great problem of human evil confronts Maeterlinck, as it has confronted Tolstoi and Ibsen. But the demands of the Sphinx cannot ruffle the feathers of the Belgian as it has that of the Norwegian and the Russian. A mild but effulgent serenity swims from the pages of “Wisdom and Destiny” and “The Treasure of the Humble.” The misery, the evil, the injustice of the world trouble him as the winds trouble the wave. They may lash the surface into huge, tumbling billows, but in the depths there reigns a tense placidity. Serenity is born of insight, and insight must beget a contempt of the temporal order—that order begun in Desire and which is destined to end in Despair.
“To-day misery is the disease of mankind, as disease is the misery of mankind,” says Maeterlinck. Man tosses around on his bed of pain and his prayers are hurled back in echo from the stars. He builds and he builds and his work is swept away like the beaver’s dam. His soul, impounded in clay, wriggles toward freedom only to discover that it has been wriggling into a winding-sheet. He builds a grandiose to-morrow on the ruins of to-day, and when to-morrow has come and gone and turned ghost, he builds again. His Golden Age always lies in the future. He builds altar and capitol, and dedicates his soul to prayer. He skulks and begs and defies and grovels, and death circles like a kite above his carrion clay. He believes he is going straight to his goal, straight to that far-off divine event which Hope has builded in the azure future. But there is no forward or backward in life. Nature has no straight lines. Rhythm, undulation, periodicity are the laws that govern motion. The history of one day is the history of all days, and he who builds on the shifting sands of the temporal builds futilely.
It is this Heraclitean vision of human life that has obscessed [sic] the mind of Maeterlinck. It is this incubus that has gripped [144] his soul in its lean and icy fingers. In those strange little dramas that he has given us, and which are a fitting introduction to his “Wisdom and Destiny,” we read the rending conflicts that have cleft the soul of this transcriber of visions. Are they human, these peaked and emaciated figures that he has silhouetted on his background of night?
The moral world is but a thin crust that has formed over the rolling lava streams of elemental passion. The wan, drawn figures of the plays sport upon this dangerous surface unmindful of the intoning flood beneath. Is it play?—or are the antics of these creatures the death-squirmings of a decadent race? A dank and fetid air blows from the surface of life. Is this endless and purposeless gambol in Being an illusion, a dream in the mind of a fallen god who sates himself in sleep while his brain-puppets play out the farce? The wilful days, that but image our despairs, bring no answer. Those pallid lights set in a naked, frosty heaven have no word. The soul of man preserves a cryptic silence. His heart wreathes Hope with the bayleaf and crowns Memory with thorns. But it has no answer. The brain-cells are the catacombs where lie our ancestors embalmed in silence. They answer not.
The web of life is woven of contingency and necessity, and the inevitable and the unknown ambuscade us at every turn in life’s road. This endless willing, this eternal upswirl of souls from the pits of non-being into the glare of a frowsy day; this ceaseless regalvanizing of corpses; these ambling, jigging mummies that are tossed from Eternity into Time and from Time back into Eternity; these sweating pack-mules saddled with the rubbish of decayed cycles and ancient durations; these crumbling tabernacles of clay, some demons, striated with sin; some saints, dragging ball and chain of ancestral crime up the steep Cordilleras of aspiration; young gods with unexpanded wings, predestined for Walhalla, toiling in the galleys at Tou[145]lon; Calibans sliming in the gutters that rut their imaginations; and never an end—the same, the same and ever the same—how shall we fend ourselves ’gainst this “wreckful siege?” asks Maeterlinck.
It is in his soul that he has found the refuge agaist the world of fell circumstance. The problem is individual. Social schemes for the regeneration of mankind but aggraavate the disease from which mankind is suffering. The deep-rooted ills of the soul cannot be cured by poultice. “We suffer but little from suffering itself; but from the manner wherein we accept it overwhelming sorrow may spring.” This is the keynote of his message. Mental attitude is everything. The gale that wrecks the sneak-box fills the sails of the barkentine and drives her toward her goal. The trifles of the day unnerve most of us. The wise man quietly ignores them. Suffering is one-half self-love and one-half hallucination. Hallucination is the normal state of man. He makes up his mind in youth to whimper, and whimper he does to the end of his days. It is the future that affrights him! he puts into a hypothetical to-morrow all the ills that flesh is not heir to. From the murk of his dreams he weaves strange and lurid figures of evil. What is this future we fear? Is it anything but a psychic jack-o’-lantern? The future is the avatar of the past, yesterday resurrected and expanded, Old Time with a visor on his cap to hide his identity.
For the seer there is but an eternal present that canopies both the past and the future. What didn’t happen yesterday never can happen. What is not feared never comes. He drains the minutes of their contents as they pass. He substitutes the abstract for the concrete, and plashes in generalizations. No time, nor place, nor circumstance can hold him. He knows that, like Faust, he shall be lost if he bid any one thing stay.
[146]
The vision of Maeterlinck is cosmic. He doesn’t contend against evil; he rejects it by accepting it. He lives above the stews. From his citadel of spiritual power he sends forth his doves and they come back laden with precious secrets. His essential soul paces the ramparts of Time and Space. He will partake of all things, but nothing shall claim him. He is receptive, but unallied. There is in the soul of each of us, Maeterlinck tells us, a repellent center, a magic light ’round which the moths of circumstance circle but to singe their wings or be consumed. Gusty change but flings the first that burns in the chalice of the soul farther and farther into the encircling gloom. The wise man stands upon the marge of the great ocean of life and fixes his gaze upon the tumbling, seething, undulating waters that stretch away to an illusive horizon. His ear catches the hoarse callings of expectancy and the deep gutturals of defeat, and at his very feet there circle and surge the spent leavings of a futile labor. He is not disturbed. He sees, as no man sees, the tragedy, the comedy, the inutility of it all. Darkness he sublimes to light, despair he transmutes into a dogged defiance. The world sees from the angle of personality. The sage sees from an impersonal center. This world will fawn at his feet when he calls. The wise man is Nature’s chef-d’oeuvre.
In the august and significant silences of the souls, says Maeterlinck, is born the wisdom that baffles destiny. Physical pain itself must cower before the emancipated mind. Was it not Socrates who discoursed on immortality while he was stiffening in death? Did not Epicurus in his mortal agony preach the summum bonum to his disciples? These silent refuges that disease and death stormed in vain were wrought out in the spirit-sweat of Cloistral hours; it is here, in these darkling recesses of the soul, in the encelled silences, that the real work of the world is done; it is here that rest is won from the [147] clangorous days, and the balm that was not in Gilead is found. We reach these uplands of the spirit by infinite petty exertions, by threading our way through the labyrinth passes of whim and impulse. All things pay tribute to the sheeted, slumbering dead. Yet there is within us the spark that will not be snuffed out. It is the I, the resistant center, the undying defiant. It is by developing the instinct, by an insistent coddling of Me, that we attain to a sort of Buddhahood. The adolescent Homonculus of Faust was Nietzsche’s Overman in the ovum. God is hidden behind an atom, and the freeman lies quiescent in the slave. Housed and kennelled in our brains there is a cosmic Self, a greater, grander, universal Self, distinct and other than the hallunicated [sic] microcosm that skulks and whimpers through the bogey-bogus days of life.
Maeterlinck gives us no coward’s message. Flight is not self-mastery, and the world cannot be subdued to the individual’s will by shunning its blows. We master fate as the Japanese wrestler bests his opponent—by giving way at every point. We should not battle; we should absorb. There is no way yet found of escaping the ills of life. The world is a counsel of imperfection. The trammel and the bond are not rejected by the seer. He must have ballast. There is no back-stairs entrance to the seventh-heaven of complacency. He knows the crepuscular mood, and the whirring pinions of the Black Bird have brushed his soul. Recomposition is the law of life, and from remorse and despair we compound the nectars of wisdom. Evil is a brigand, but he carries a torch. Snatch the torch, and turn it on his face. Beneath the visor which has [148] frightened you there is a smile. And scuttle the past, says Maeterlinck. In the measure that a man allows the past to dominate his life, in that measure will the future obsess him. To sit down by the stream of Time and weep over the gone-by is worse than tragic; it’s comic. Embalm the past in a smile.
Fate is a state of consciousness. Spinoza said: “Nothing shall disturb me,” and nothing did. Pyrrho said: “Nothing is true; nothing is untrue,” and nothing did. “The world is divine,” chanted Emerson, and he was right. “The world is evil and smells of grave-mould,” said Schopenhauer, and he was right. “Life is like a comedy by Molière,” said George Meredith, thereby paying Life the greatest compliment it ever received in its career. And Meredith is right.
Each brain is a premise. Everything depends on the point of view. The message of Maurice Maeterlinck, like Walt Whitman’s, is whatever you choose to red into it. We know him for a great spiritual scout.
Publication History
Mind, Feb. 1904, Vol. XIII No. 2, pp. 139-148
Citations
“Magazine Notes,” New York Times Review of Books, Jan. 30, 1904, p. 66
A suggestive yet mystifying article in the February number of Mind, “ the leading exponent of new thought,” is that by Benjamin de Casseres, entitled “ Maeterlinck and the Cosmic View.” The writer’s conclusion is that Maeterlinck’s message, like Walt Whitman’s, is “whatever you choose to read into it.” Here is an illuminative paragraph:
[Quotes paragraph beginning, “Fate is a state of consciousness…”]