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

Best Books Read in 2020

Near the top of my selections for best books read in 2020: Reinhard Hutter's John Henry Newman on Truth & Its Counterfeits: A Guide for Our Times. I devoted two posts to my review of it: here and here. As I summarized my impressions of the book and its impact on me:

The bibliography is excellent, and the footnotes, as I mentioned, are important to read. I recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the influence of Newman's teachings and writings on conscience, faith, ecclesiology and the Church's magisterium, and the idea of a university. I enjoyed and benefited from "hearing" Professor Hutter's voice of reason and experience throughout his discussion of these important subjects. It's a book I've had a hard time putting down even after I read the last word.

In contrast, Eamon Duffy's brief study of Newman was the most disappointing read of 2020. It could have been written by his brother Frank or Edwin Abbot.

Either a close second or tied for top spot: Robert R. Reilly's America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding. It also merited two posts for my review: here and here. For me, Reilly's survey of the influences on our countries founders as framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America was a great philosophical education:

Robert R. Reilly, whom I saw speak at the Midwest Catholic Family Conference in Wichita (cancelled this year by COVID of course) a few years ago on his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, in this book offers an exploration of the philosophical and intellectual sources that inspired the Founders of the United States of America in their quest for independence from Great Britain and the establishment of a new nation.

He goes all the way back to the pre-philosophical era, explores Greek philosophy focusing on Aristotle, Jewish monotheism, and the Latin/Roman Catholic synthesis of Greek philosophy and Revelation focusing on St. Thomas Aquinas, and continues his philosophical lessons through to the eighteenth century.

Other best non-fiction books: Lisa McClain's Lest We Be Damned; Maura Jane Farrelly's Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860; and Liturgical Mysticism by David Fagerberg.

I did not read much fiction last year, so Simon Tolkien's No Man's Land is my top pick in that category.

For the most entertaining book read last year: G.K. Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature. In his chapter on the Great Victorian Novelists, he shows a great appreciation for Jane Austen, which I appreciated:

Her [George Eliot's] originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power in fiction as  well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The latter comes into our present consideration only as that most exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know—like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished world before the great progressive age of which I write. (p. 35)

He later says of her in comparison to Eliot and the Brontës :

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. Jane Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small nationalities. (p. 37)

If you like, please cite your favorite books from last year in the comments. 

Happy New Year!!

Here Is the Little Door, Again

So yesterday I was on the Son Rise Morning Show talking with Matt Swaim about the Chestertons and Christmas. In my preview to the interview I mentioned that one of Frances Chesterton's poems, "Here is the Little Door" had been set to music by Herbert Howells.

Now he's not the only one. BBC Music commissions a new carol every year. This year, composer Owain Park chose to set Frances Chesterton's poem:

Here is the little door, lift up the latch, oh lift! 
We need not wander more but enter with our gift; 
Our gift of finest gold, 
Gold that was never bought nor sold; 
Myrrh to be strewn about his bed; 
Incense in clouds about his head; 
All for the child that stirs not in his sleep, 
But holy slumber holds with ass and sheep. 

Bend low about his bed, for each he has a gift; 
See how his eyes awake, lift up your hand, O lift! 
For gold, he gives a keen-edged sword 
(Defend with it thy little Lord!) 
For incense, smoke of battle red, 
Myrrh for the honoured happy dead; 
Gifts for his children, terrible and sweet, 
Touched by such tiny hands, and Oh such tiny feet.

Park comments:

One of my favourite carols [as a chorister at St Mary Redcliffe Church in Bristol] was Howells’s 1918 setting of Frances Chesterton’s poem Here is the little door. Howells’s music allows the words to resonate with both choir and congregation – at St Mary’s there was always an extra few seconds of quiet after we’d finished singing it. The poem consists of two stanzas: the first is reflective and subdued while the second is more colourful and lively.

Most lines seem to end strongly after a more questioning start, and so I’ve tried to express this using tension and release in the harmony. A lot of my choral music has been in many parts and is quite difficult to sing, so I wanted to sustain a simple idea over two verses without any divided parts. My hope is that I have captured something of the wonder I felt as a young singer.

The words are key to my setting of Here is the little door. I would encourage singers to be as expressive as possible with the text, even when everyone moves together. I’ve kept one set of words throughout to keep the score as uncluttered as possible, which sometimes means that the words aren’t vertically aligned with your part. Always move with your note, and with confidence. It would be a good idea for everyone to read through the poem together, to develop a collective interpretation.

The score is available here. A preview the Christmas 2019 issue is here.

As David Faberberg said in his 2013 book's title: Chesterton is everywhere!! Both of them!

By the way: David Faberberg may not be everywhere, but he is scheduled to be here in Wichita for the 10th annual Eighth Day Institute Symposium!

Happiness is Just a Thing Called Gilbert

I read David W. Fagerberg's The Size of Chesterton's Catholicism many years ago (it was published in 1989 by the University of Notre Dame Press):

English writer G. K. Chesterton was widely known not only for his newspaper columns, novels, poetry, plays, and detective stories, but also for his theological and Catholic apologetic works. This celebration of Chesterton’s passion for his faith builds on his own words to reveal the Catholic paradox he was so fond of exploring. David W. Fagerberg draws on Chesterton’s theological writings—avoiding secondary sources so that the reader can encounter his thought as directly as possible—to show how Chesterton championed an accessible Catholicism of great robustness.

Now Fagerberg has a new book about Chesterton, this time from Emmaus Road Publishing, and he writes in First Things about Chesterton and happiness:

Chesterton’s modesty would have prevented him from claiming sainthood. It is I, not he, who shall compare his salutary effect with a saint’s, but the point is true, nonetheless, that what he said about saints is perfectly and exactly applicable to himself: “The saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age. Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need . . . . Therefore it is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.” The way in which Chesterton contradicts us most is by being a happy man. By this trait he can serve as our antidote, exaggerating what we neglect, supplying what we need, even if we do not know we do.

The happiness that pervades every word Chesterton writes is occasioned both by things and by people. In his hands, as in the hands of an artist, something is done to the ordinary world that enables the viewer to see its landscape and its citizens anew. “At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence,” he said. “The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise or wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.” To Chesterton, all things appear as wonderful parts of a thrilling fairyland. He retains an innocent, original delight in things instead of succumbing to the monotony that assails most of us as we grow older.

Read the rest there.