Stumbling Upon Words from Maeterlinck in a Book about Chesterton

As I was reading a selection ("Destiny's Pursuit") from David Fagerberg's Chesterton is Everywhere (which I bought at Eighth Day Books of course) I was surprised to see a quotation from the Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck about happiness.(Well, he did write The Blue Bird about happiness but that's not what I think of first when I see the name Maeterlinck.)

Fagerberg is discussing Chesterton and happiness and suggests that "happiness is not so passive; perhaps happiness even has the power to influence destiny." Then he suggests that Maeterlinck offers an insight: "that wise persons know in advance" . . .

how events will be received in their soul. The event itself is pure water that flows from the pitcher of fate, and seldom has it either savour or perfume or color. (from Wisdom and Destiny by Maeterlinck)

Maeterlinck cites the examples of Oedipus and Hamlet: they are not wise enough to respond well to events and yet remain happy: other wiser characters could, but "Hamlet is unhappy because he moves in unnatural darkness." (p. 24)

Immediately I thought one of the unhappiest characters on any stage: Maeterlinck's Mélisande in his play Pelléas et Mélisande and in Debussy's opera of the same name. Her key phrase is some variation on "I am not happy":

Melisande
Je suis...
Je suis malade ici...

Golaud
Tu es malade?
(pause)
Qu'as-tu donc, qu'as-tu donc, Mélisande?

Melisande
Je ne sais pas...
Je suis malade ici.
Je préfére vous le dire aujourd'hui;
Seigneur, je ne suis pas heureuse ici...

And the kingdom of Allemonde is very dark as her husband Golaud admits: so many forests, famine in the land, dark caverns and deep wells, storms off the coast of the dark sea that obscure the beacon lights . . .

Golaud
Qu'est-ce donc?
Ne peux-tu pas te faire à la vie qu'on mêne ici?
Il est vrai que ce château est très vieux et très sombre...
Il est très froid et très profond.
Et tous ceux qui l'habitent sont déjà vieux.
Et la campagne peut sembler triste aussi,
avec toutes ces forêts, toutes ces vieilles forêts sans lumière.
Mais on peut égayer tout cela si l'on veut.
Et puis, la joie, la joie, on n'en a pas tous les jours:
Mais dis-moi quelque chose;
n'importe quoi, je ferai tout ce que tu voudras...

Melisande
Oui, c'est vrai...on ne voit jamais le ciel ici.
Je lai vu la première fois ce matin...

She's just been able to see the sky that day. And when she leaves Golaud on a fruitless errand, she repeats "Oh! Oh! Je ne suis pas heureuse, Je ne suis pas heureuse" and weeps.

There are lots of opinions about Melisande and Debussy's opera is an acquired taste: one either loves it or leaves it (after a couple of acts in the opera house). 

It's one of my favorite operas from listening to recordings and opera broadcasts. It's not going to be in a regional or local opera company's repertoire: too risky. Not even the Met in Manhattan stages it that often (119 performances between 1925 and 2019; compare that to another French opera, Gounod's Faust: 752 from 1883-2013. The most performed opera at the Met: La Boheme, 1,440 times from 1900 to 2025.) Yes, there's an online database! (It's not even performed that often at the Paris Opera; it debuted at the Opera-Comique.)

Melisande is not wise (she never knows anything and she'll lie without reason), she lives in darkness, the darkness of Maeterlinck's symbolist world, and she's not happy. Instead of "Hamlet is unhappy because he moves in unnatural darkness" would Maeterlinck say that Melisande is unhappy for the same reason?

At the end of the opera, she wants the windows opened so she can see, see the sun:

Melisande
Ouvrez la fenêtre...ouvrez la fenêtre...

Arkel
Veux-tu que j'ouvre celle-ci, Mélisande?

Melisande
Non, non, la grande fenêtre...c'est pour voir...

Arkel
Est-ce que l'air de la mer n'est pas trop froid ce soir?

Le medecin
Faites, faites...

Melisande
Merci...
Est-ce le soleil qui se couche?

Arkel
Oui; c'est le soleil qui se couche sur la mer; il est tard.
Comment te trouves-tu, Mélisande?

But of course the sun is setting. And it gets in her eyes so she can't see Golaud.

Can you imagine G.K. Chesterton at a performance of Pelléas et Mélisande? It was performed at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden in 1909. If he had seen and heard it, would he have agreed with Arkel in an earlier scene, “si j’étais Dieu, j’aurais pitié du coeur des hommes”. (If I were God, I would pity the hearts of men.)*? Or would he have left at the first intermission?

*Which makes one think of “Behold this Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to consuming itself to witness its love."

Image Source (Public Domain): Photograph of Act 5 of the original 1902 production of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, published in Le Théâte, June 1902

The Triangle Factory Fire

On Labor Day (or to be at least a little British on my blog, Labour Day), even though it's off topic, I'd like to highlight a historical event that really fascinates me, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Cornell University hosts this great website with details about the factory, the fire, the survivors, the trials, and the reforms that took effect after that terrible day. One hundred and forty six (146) factory workers died that day, most of them young immigrant women aged 16 to 23. Many of them died jumping from the building to the sidewalks of New York, with people watching in horror.

A few years ago I read Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle:

Triangle is a poignantly detailed account of the 1911 disaster that horrified the country and changed the course of twentieth-century politics and labor relations.

On March 25, 1911, as workers were getting ready to leave for the day, a fire broke out in the Triangle shirtwaist factory in New York’s Greenwich Village. Within minutes it spread to consume the building’s upper three stories. Firemen who arrived at the scene were unable to rescue those trapped inside: their ladders simply weren’t tall enough. People on the street watched in horror as desperate workers jumped to their deaths. The final toll was 146 people—123 of them women. It was the worst workplace disaster in New York City history.

This harrowing yet compulsively readable book is both a chronicle of the Triangle shirtwaist fire and a vibrant portrait of an entire age. It follows the waves of Jewish and Italian immigration that inundated New York in the early years of the century, filling its slums and supplying its garment factories with cheap, mostly female labor. It portrays the Dickensian work conditions that led to a massive waist-worker’s strike in which an unlikely coalition of socialists, socialites, and suffragettes took on bosses, police, and magistrates. Von Drehle shows how popular revulsion at the Triangle catastrophe led to an unprecedented alliance between idealistic labor reformers and the supremely pragmatic politicians of the Tammany machine.

David Von Drehle orchestrates these events into a drama rich in suspense and filled with memorable characters: the tight-fisted “shirtwaist kings” Max Blanck and Isaac Harris; Charles F. Murphy, the shrewd kingmaker of Tammany Hall; blue-blooded activists like Anne Morgan, daughter of J. P. Morgan; and reformers Frances Perkins and Al Smith. Most powerfully, he puts a human face on the men and women who died on March 25. Triangle is an immensely moving account of the hardships of New York City life in the early part of the twentieth century, and how this event transformed politics and gave rise to urban liberalism.

I thought Von Drehle's book was a riveting version of the story, with particularly great details about how the Democratic Party evolved at the time from one that at first backed the factory bosses to one that supported the workers in their quest for safety, fair wages, and common human decency.