Emerson's gospel of everyday life harmonises admirably with the theory of the tragic advanced in another essay of the book, "_Le Tragique Quotidien_" ("Everyday Tragedy").
"Is it really dangerous to assert," asks the essayist, "that the veritable tragedy of life ... only begins the moment what are called adventures, griefs, and dangers are passed?... Are there not other moments when one hears more permanent and purer voices?... Nearly all our writers of tragedies only perceive the life of olden time; and one may assert that our whole theatre is an anachronism.... I admire Othello, but he does not seem to me to live the august, everyday life of a Hamlet, who has the time to live because he does not act. Othello is admirably jealous. But may it not be an ancient error to think that it is at the moments when we are possessed by such a passion, or by others of equal violence, that we really live? I have come to think that an old man sitting in his arm-chair, simply waiting in the lamplight, listening without knowing it to all the eternal laws which reign around his house, interpreting, without understanding it, all that there is in the silence of the doors and the windows and in the low voice of the light, undergoing the presence of his soul and of his destiny, inclining his head a little, without suspecting that all the powers of this world intervene and hold watch in the room like attentive servants, not knowing that the sun itself sustains the little table on which he leans his elbows over the abyss, and that there is not one star of the sky nor one power of the soul which is indifferent to the movement of an eyelid that falls down or of a thought that rises--I have come to think that this motionless old man is living, in reality, with a deeper, more human, and more general life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who wins a victory, or 'the husband avenging his honour.'"
This eloquent passage has made many critics shake their heads. "Put a vivisectional rabbit in the arm-chair," says one, "and all that is said still holds good."
It is in Emerson's "spiritual brother," Carlyle, that Maeterlinck finds his mainstay in the opening essay of the book, that on "Silence." This chapter is perhaps the most famous of his essays; and it must be understood if much in Maeterlinck's other work is not to remain obscure. He distinguishes between active silence and passive silence. The latter is only the reflex of sleep, death, or non-existence: