The Light Beyond - Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

Maurice Maeterlinck

Description

“The Light Beyond” - Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos on the subject of spiritualism, a religious movement based on the belief that spirits of the deceased exist and are able to communicate with living people. Contents include: “Our Injustice to Death”, “Annihilation”, “Communications with the Dead”, “The Fate of our Consciousness”, “Two Aspects of Infinity”, “Our Fate in those Infinities”, “Conclusions”, “The Knowledge”, “Heroism”, “On Reading Thucydides”, etc. Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (1862 – 1949) was a Belgian playwright, essayist, poet, and 1911 Nobel Prize winner. Other notable works by this author include: “Serres chaudes” (1889), “Douze chansons” (1896), and “Quinze chansons” (1900). Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Sujets

• From Beyond the Grave
• Avatar: The Last Airbender (season 1)

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 08 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528767811
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright 2018 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck was born on 29th August 1862. He was a Belgian playwright, poet and essayist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911.
Maeterlinck was born in Ghent, Belgium, to a wealthy, French-speaking family. His mother, Mathilde Colette Francoise (n e Van den Bossche), came from an aristocratic background, whilst his father, Polydore, was a notary who enjoyed tending the greenhouses on their property. In 1874, the young man was sent to the Jesuit College of Sainte-Barbe (Ghent), where the works of the French Romantics were scorned and only plays on religious subjects were permitted. His experiences at this school influenced Maeterlinck s life-long distaste for the Catholic Church and organized religion.
Maeterlinck had written poems and short novels during his studies, but his father wanted him to go into law. After finishing his law studies at the University of Ghent in 1885, he spent a few months in Paris, France, where he met some members of the new literary symbolist movement (a group holding that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly) - which would have a profound impact on Maeterlinck s later writing. Maeterlinck instantly became a public figure when his first play, Princess Maleine , received enthusiastic praise from Octave Mirbeau, the literary critic of Le Figaro in August 1890. In the following years, he wrote a series of symbolist plays characterized by fatalism and mysticism, most importantly Intruder (1890), The Blind (1890) and Pell as and M lisande (1892).
During this time, Maeterlinck forged a relationship with the singer and actress Georgette Leblanc from 1895 until 1918. Leblanc influenced his work for the following two decades, providing both artistic inspiration and actually performing the female characters on stage. In 1895, with his parents frowning upon his open relationship with an actress, Maeterlinck and Leblanc moved to the district of Passy in Paris. The Catholic Church was unwilling to grant her a divorce from her Spanish husband though, so the couple never married. They frequently entertained guests, including Mirbeau, Jean Lorrain, and Paul Fort, and spent their summers in Normandy. During this period, Maeterlinck published his Twelve Songs (1896), The Treasure of the Humble (1896), The Life of the Bee (1901), and Ariadne and Bluebeard (1902).
In 1906, Maeterlinck and Leblanc moved to a villa in Grasse. He spent his hours meditating and walking, but as he emotionally pulled away from Leblanc, Maeterlinck entered a state of depression. Diagnosed with neurasthenia, he rented the Benedictine Abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy to help him relax. By renting the abbey he rescued it from the desecration of being sold and used as a chemical factory, and thus received a blessing from the Pope. Leblanc would often walk around in the garb of an abbess, wearing roller-skates as he moved about the house. During this time, he wrote the essay The Intelligence of Flowers (1906), in which he expressed sympathy with socialist ideas.
Maeterlinck s greatest contemporary success came with the fairy play The Blue Bird (1908), followed by works such as Mary Magdalene (1910) which again provided lead roles for Leblanc. Critics have argued that Maeterlinck s later plays were notably inferior to their predecessors, and sometimes merely repeat an earlier formula. In 1910 he met the eighteen-year-old actress Ren e Dahon during a rehearsal of The Blue Bird . She became his romantic companion, alongside Leblanc. Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature further served to lighten his spirits, and by 1913, he was more openly socialist and sided with the Belgian trade unions against the Catholic party during a strike. Maeterlinck began to study mysticism and lambasted the Catholic Church in his essays for misconstruing the history of the universe. By a decree of 26th January 1914, his opera omnia were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by the Roman Catholic Church.
When Germany invaded Belgium in 1914, Maeterlinck wished to join the French Foreign Legion, but his application was denied due to his age. He and Leblanc decided to leave Grasse for a villa near Nice, where he spent the next decade of his life. He gave speeches on the bravery of the Belgian people and placed guilt upon all Germans for the war. Although his patriotism, and his indifference to the harm he was doing to his standing in Germany, do him credit, it severely damaged his reputation as a great sage who stood above current affairs. While in Nice he wrote The Mayor of Stilmonde , which was quickly labelled by the American press as a Great War Play and would be made into a British film in 1929.
On 15th February 1919, Maeterlinck left Leblanc for good, and married the young Ren e Dahon. After 1920 Maeterlinck ceased to contribute significantly to the theatre, but continued to produce essays on his favourite themes of occultism, ethics and natural history. The international demand for these fell off sharply after the early 1920s, but his sales in France remained substantial until the late 1930s. Dahon gave birth to a stillborn child in 1925. In 1926 Maeterlinck published La Vie des Termites (translated into English as The Life of Termites ), an entomological book that plagiarised the book The Soul of the Ant ; researched and written by the Afrikaner poet and scientist Eugene Marais. Maeterlinck s own words in The Life of Termites indicate that the possible discovery or accusation of plagiarism worried him:
It would have been easy, in regard to every statement, to allow the text to bristle with footnotes and references. In some chapters there is not a sentence but would have clamoured for these; and the letterpress would have been swallowed up by vast masses of comment, like one of those dreadful books we hated so much at school. There is a short bibliography at the end of the volume which will no doubt serve the same purpose.
Despite these misgivings, there is no reference to Eugene Marais in the bibliography. Another case of alleged plagiarism was that of Maeterlinck s play Monna Vanna which was alleged to have been based on Robert Browning s little-known play Luria . These episodes deeply troubled Maeterlinck and in 1930, he moved to Nice, France. Struggling to feel at home however, he arrived in the United States from Lisbon in 1940. He had fled to Lisbon in order to escape the Nazi invasion of both Belgium and France.
As with an earlier visit to America, Maeterlinck still found Americans too casual, friendly and Francophilic for his taste. He returned to Nice after the war on 10th August 1947, where he was appointed President of PEN International (the worldwide association of writers), from 1947 until 1949. In 1948, the French Academy awarded him the Medal for the French Language. Maeterlinck died in Nice on 6th May 1949, after suffering a heart attack (at the age of eighty-six). True to his moral convictions, there was no priest at his funeral.
THE LIGHT BEYOND
INTRODUCTION
IN the first act of The Blue Bird , the fairy B rylune send Mytyl and Tyltyl in search of happiness. Shepherded and protected by Light, they explore the Past and the Future, the Palace of Night, the Kingdoms of the Dead and of the Unborn. At one moment they find themselves in a graveyard; and Mytyl grows fearful at her first contact with the great mystery of Death. Yet the graveyard with its wooden crosses and grass-covered mounds is moonlit and tranquil; and of a sudden, as the revealing diamond is turned in Tylty s fingers, even the tombstones and all the grand investiture of death disappear, to be replaced by luxuriant, swaying clusters of Madonna lilies.
Where are the dead? asks Mytyl, in amazement, searching in the grass for traces of even one tombstone.
Her brother also looks:
There are no dead, is his reply.
Any one who was present on the first night of the play at the Haymarket Theatre, in 1909, will not easily forget the audience s little gasp of delighted surprise. Yet the two lines of dialogue were more than a stage effect, more than an aspect of mysticism; almost they may be regarded as the essence of Maeterlinck s later work. Since the Life of the Bee , since the earlier essays and such pure drama as Monna Vanna, The Blind and Pell s and M lisande , his mind seems to have been brooding more and more on the part which Death, the great twin mystery of the world, plays in the life of man and of the race. In The Death of Tintagiles there is a barred and studded door, through which, for all its studs and bars, there steals a miasma of dread. And, when the door opens, it is to release a spirit of annihilation which the concerted efforts of Tintagiles sisters can neither restrain nor force back.
In The Blue Bird we are shown that a man cannot die so long as he dwells in the memory of those who loved him. In his latest work Maeterlinck gives to the dead an objective existence. In part each generation survives its own death and transmits to its successors the heritage of aspiration and achievement, of knowledge and passion, which it has received from its predecessors; in greater part the objective existence is founded on new modes of communication, a new study of psychic relationship and a new belief in a subliminal state.
I have collected in the present volume a selection of essays illustrating the later stages of Maeterlinck s quest. Never in history have so many women and men, stricken suddenly and without warning, sought so unanimously and