^ Maeterlinck's cardinal doctrine will, I conjecture, prove to be something like this. What should be of most account for us all is not external fact, but the supra-sensuous world. " What we know is not interesting"; the really interesting things are those which we can only divine — the veiled life of the soul, the crepuscular region of sub-consciousness, our " borderland " feelings, all that lies in the strange " neutral zone " between the frontiers of consciousness and unconsciousness. The mystery of life is what makes life worth living. " 'Twas a little being of mystery, like every one else," says the old King Arkel of the dead Melisande. We are such stuff as dreams are made of might be the " refrain " of all M. Maeterlinck's plays, and of most of his essays. He is penetrated by the feeling of the mystery in all human creatures, whose every act is regulated by far-off influences and obscurely rooted in things unexplained. Mystery is within us and around us. Of reality we can only get now and then the merest glimpse. Our senses are too gross. Between the invisible world and our own there is doubtless an intimate concordance; but it escapes us. We grope among shadows towards the unknown. Even the new conquests of what we vainly suppose to be " exact " thought only deepen the mystery of life.^
I cannot find Thee ! Still on restless pinion
My spirit beats the void where Thou dost dwell;
I wander lost through all Thy vast dominion, And shrink beneath Thy light ineffable.
' Tolstoy, Thoughts mi God ( Works, xvi. 410).
- A. B. Walkley, in Maeterlinck's Treasure of the Humlle, xii.
28 THE DEEPS OF GOD
I cannot find Thee ! E'en when most adoring, Before Thy throne I bend in lowliest prayer;
Beyond these bounds of thought, my thought upsoaring, From farthest quest comes back : Thou art not there.
Yet high above the limits of my seeing,
And folded far within the inmost heart, And deep below the deeps of conscious being.
Thy splendour shineth : there, 0 God ! Thou art.
I cannot lose Thee ! Still in Thee abiding, The end is clear, how wide soe'er I roam;
The Hand that holds the worlds my steps is guiding. And I must rest at last in Thee, my home.^
2. God is incomprehensible in His Providence. — How small and insignificant are the mysteries of Nature in comparison with the problems of human life ! Almost every month sees some fresh triumph of scientific research. It looks as if, by persistent and certain processes, man were to wrench from Nature her most precious secrets, as if in the end matter must confess itself beaten, as if all physical forces would ultimately bow before the dominion of the intellect and the mind. How different it is in the sphere of human experience ! Sin remains ; sorrow remains ; pain remains ; death remains. What more do we know about any one of them than the world knew in its infancy and childhood ? They, too, like the earth and the air, the rocks and the seas, have their own secrets, but they hold them fast.
Sin — why upon this man does it swoop down with over- mastering might, and hold him in its relentless clutches, and crush and lacerate his soul, till it passes out of shape and festers and dies ? And why does it leave that other man alone or touch him so rarely and gently that the wound heals up almost at once ?
Sorrow — here is some polished voluptuary, whose life is one stream of apparent happiness, who never feels the cankerworm of care and weariness and desolation, to whom remorse and bitter- ness and anguish are strangers, and there is some simple, pious, reverent soul from whose mind perplexities and griefs and dis- tresses are never absent.
1 Eliza Scudder.
JOB XL 7 29
Pain — how wayward, how partial, how erratic is its empire ! This man with his magnificent physique and indomitable strength has neither been chastened by its discipline nor has smarted under its sting, while that poor body, lying in uncomplaining solitude in some cheerless back-room, remembers hardly anything else.
And Death, vastest, richest, final mystery of all — look at it from which standpoint you like, on the one hand "the grisly Terror," on the other
That golden key That opens the palace of eternity
— need one of us travel beyond a very small and solemn circle to realize the strange scope and cruel incidence of its grim visita- tions ?
If I could answer you — , If I could give you any light
On this dark question, true, I should have more than human sight
I cannot understand
The strange, sad mystery to-day,
Here in the shadowland,
Where knowledge only leads astray.
I also sometime trod
This path where hidden danger lies,
And sought to find out God
Where heights of human wisdom rise.
But now I only see. Though all around is cold and dim, One Light that shines on me. And as I look away to Him —
Lo ! in the Light divine —
Wherever falls its living ray —
I see thac all things shine
Undimmed, and night is changed for day.^
3. God is incomprehensible in His Grace. — Grace is more than pity with tearful eye ; more than mercy with outstretched hand ;