7 - Clpdigital.org

10 CARNEGIE LIBRARY OF PITTSBURGH
the one shining brightly out of this passage: "Light, though so fragil
is perhaps the one thing of all that yields naught of itself as it faces
immensity." Here we have infinity of time and space confined within
a few words, spoken "without the air of having said anything more
than the simplest observation."
And his work abounds with thoughts that are equally sublime in
aspect and in scope. Yet he never lets himself be tempted beyond
poetic suggestiveness into scientific exhaustiveness. The sense of
things still unuttered always remains the final impression. And perhaps
it is in this implied abundance, this limitless reserve power, that his
main appeal lies. For it is this side of his nature that has enabled him
to look at life and death with such imperturbable eyes. Through that
quiescent power, reaching beyond the spoken word into the one not
yet breathed, he has carried peace to a time fatigued beyond endurance
by an over-long struggle.
For more than one hundred years, up to the closing decade of the
last century, the cry was for action, and for ever more action. From
Maeterlinck came the first truly inspired call to rest...Not inaction,
but action properly determined, is his gospel. If we follow him, then
conflict, which is hastened action, will be reduced to a minimum, while
combination and cooperation, which stand for action more fully prepared,
will take more and more of the world's energy.
Maeterlinck has been called a poet of the subconscious. . .But his
main discovery and most significant revelation concerning the subconscious
rests in the intimate connection which he has established between
certain mysterious powers within ourselves and certain equally
mysterious powers on the outside. What he shows—or tries to show
—is that these two sets of powers are at bottom identical.
Poetically he has accomplished what Bergson has achieved philosophically.
Life, so threatening while lying wholly beyond our own
selves, becomes homely and familiar when found at work within those
same selves. The fear with which man has regarded fate tends thus to
change into happy faith—the unknown becomes the partly known—
and in dealing with life, destiny, providence, man begins at last to feel
as if he were but dealing with another self. But by opening up these
new vistas into the heart of being, where our own image comes back
to us asif mirrored in the pupil of a loved one's eye, Maeterlinck has
done his share, and a large one at that, toward preparing a religious
re-formulation for which some of the best men on both sides of the
ocean are now working ardently. When that formulation has been attained,
I think it will be seen that Maeterlinck has contributed not
only a conception of life as trustworthy, but of death as an integral
part of life—and not the unkindliest at that.
Like Tolstoy, like Zola, like so many other men of strong physique
and vivid imagination, this dreamer from the Lowlands has been
largely preoccupied with the inevitable moment of dissolution that
forms the interrogation point at the end of every career. But while
Tolstoy sought to scare men into righteousness by enhancing the