Maeterlinck’s Bees

 

 

      My thrift store copy is a 35 cent Mentor New American Library book translated by Albert Sutro and with an introduction by Edwin Way Teale..

 

     Numbers in parentheses refer to the book’s sections; those in brackets indicate endnotes.

 

 

     Maurice Maeterlinck is primarily remembered for his Symbolist drama, notably The Blue Bird and Pelléas and Mélisande, but he wrote as well poetry, translations, a memoir, and a number of mn0onfiction books, mostly on philosophic topics and on nature.  The most successful of this last category is The Life of the Bee (La Vie des Abeilles) [1]. 

     Maeterlinck makes clear in his first pages that his book is neither a scientific treatise nor a practical guide to apiculture, but it is also not a work of pure poetry.  He says he wishes to speak as a passionate amateur, “very simply, as one speaks of a subject one knows and loves to those who know it not.” (1)  The book has proven consistently popular since its appearance in 1901.  The author was a lifelong apiarist, raising bees for their honey, and was consistently informed by his own experience, often writing at a table while observing the insects’ activities in a glass hive.  He describes in fascinating detail their highly organized society and the extraordinary round of their life.  In addition, he seems to have studied the chief authorities on the subject and often comments on the previous findings of experts. 

     Maeterlinck does not simply observe his bees; he marvels at them.  To him their behavior is more wondrous than what a reader might find in “the most miraculous fairy stories.”  To students who watch a hive closely, “astonishment becomes so habitual to us that we almost cease to wonder.”  (111)  He assumes a sort of Darwinism, saying that improvement is a consequence of “the triumph of the stronger,” (112) though he tends toward the unscientific assumption that evolution creates ever more sophisticated organisms (rather than simply those that better fit an ecological niche), an attitude best viewed as an  expressive reflection of his enthusiasm.  Seeking to come face to face with “the intelligent will of a life” (112) in the “stupendous incident” of the insects’ daily lives is for him a technique for “amusing the darkness” through receiving “some revelation, a message, for instance, from a planet more ancient, more luminous, than ours” which might reveal the secrets of “the obscure forces of life” (164).

     He might equally have sought such intelligence in any biological phenomenon, but he has the energetic dedication of the amateur bee-keeper.  To him the insects’ cognitive skills are scarcely inferior to those of humans, indeed, while undeniably different, he finds the bees perfect in their own way.  “Other beings may possess an intellect that differs from ours, and produces different results, without being therefore inferior.” (34)  He insists that “the habits and the policy of the bees are by no means narrow, or rigidly predetermined; and that their actions have motives far more complex than we are inclined to suppose” (48).  To him they have “more confidence and courage than man” (43)  Human intervention is inevitably a disturbance in their lives.  “It is not chance that controls them, but a wisdom whose deep loyalty, gravity, and unsleeping watchfulness man alone can betray” (55). 

     For him the bees display not wisdom alone, but even a sort of  morality.  “When we, in our study of human history, endeavour to gauge the moral force or greatness of a people or race, we have but one standard of measurement – the dignity and permanence of their ideal, and the abnegation with which they pursue it.  Have we often encountered an ideal more conformable to the desires of the universe, more widely manifest, more disinterested or sublime: have we often discovered an abnegation more complete and heroic?” (36)  The patterns of their lives limns out not the “unconquerable duty of a being” (165) alone, but glows with a kind of holiness, “the god that the bees obey” (36).  He envies the bees their perfect adjustment to this difficult world, the fact that the hive has been able to  “create its own little triumphant and permanent place in the midst of the stupendous inert forces of nothingness and death” (56).  They seem to him more satisfied, more enlightened in a way, than people.

     Yet he does not shrink from  anthropomorphizing the bees.  When he hears the sounds of a frustrated queen it is to him a war-song, or angry complaint . . . resembling somewhat the note of a distant trumpet of silver” (106).  Since their adaptation is so successful, though, their sounds are more frequently joyful.  A swarm is lit by a “spirit of holiday”; they enjoy the “blind happiness” of acting perfectly in accordance with their nature (58).  Their work of gathering nectar is form a series of “blissful journeys,” leading ordinarily to “peaceful abundance,” though he senses – and it is here that the most obvious projection occurs – that “underlying the gladness . . .  there reposes a sadness as deep as the eye of man can behold” (92).  Nonetheless, it is primarily what he sees as their profound pleasure in being alive from which he wishes to learn.  To him their most “precious gift still is their summoning him to the gladness of June, to the joy of the beautiful months . . .They teach us to tune our ear to the softest, most intimate whisper of these good natural hours.” (38)

     For Maeterlinck the apparently superior analytic abilities of the human mind may be in fact a hindrance, a disadvantage.  “There are intentions in nature that it is dangerous to understand too clearly, fatal to follow with too much ardor, and that it is one if her desires that we should not divine, and follow, all her desires” (114).  Thus lack of knowledge may be the greater wisdom, and moderns recognize the potential of self-consciousness to generate disabling anxiety, the fruit of too much reflection.  The model that the bees offer “as they go from flower to flower” resembles the human mind as it flits “from reality to reality seeking food for the incomprehensible flame.  This flame, which represents vitality itself must recall the “hard, gem-like flame” of which Pater spoke.  If people, like bees, might only follow their own natural inclinations, without striving for mastery, without feeling dissatisfaction, “a time will then  come when all things will turn so naturally to good in a spirit that has given itself to the loyal desire of this simple human duty, that the very suspicion of the possible aimlessness of its exhausting effort will only rebnder the duty the clearer, will only add more purity, power, disinterestedness, and freedom to the ardor wherewith its seeks” (166).  Maeterlinck recommends a state of mind that has much in common with the Buddhist ideal of non-attachment [2].  Thus the bees point the way, first toward following one’s essential nature and living the life for which nature designed every creature, but even beyond that, toward an acceptance that lies beyond questioning and acting, that finds rest and perfection in simple being.

 

 

 

1.  Twenty-five years after his book on bees, Maeterlinck published a study of termites, largely copied from a volume by a South African Eugene Marais.  No accusations of plagiarism have been made against La Vie des Abeilles.

2.  In Chinese, wú niàn (無念), “no thought,” which refers to non-attachment, not in fact to an utterly blank mind.  The concept is rooted in the Hindu ideal of vairāgya (वैराग्य), “dispassionateness.”