Chapter XIV: Act IV: , the cruellest of the five, is devoted to the arousing of (2)

Without the mystery of life, life is not worth the living. The static opposed to the dynamic theatre is his ideal mood, not action; the immaterial, not the obvious. Hamlet is not awake--at every moment does he advance to the very brink of awakening. The mysterious chant of the Infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon, the destiny or fatality that we are conscious within us, though by what tokens none may tell--do not all these underlie King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet? Are there not elements of deeper gravity and stability in happiness in a single moment of repose than in the whirlwind of passion? Does the soul only flower on nights of storm? "But to the tragic author, as to the mediocre painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote that appeals ... whereas it is far away from bloodshed, battle-cry, and sword thrust that the lives of most of us flow on, and men's tears are silent to-day, and invisible, and almost spiritual."

Maeterlinck goes to the modern theatre and feels as if he had spent a few hours with his ancestors, who conceived life as something that was primitive, arid, and brutal. He sees murder, hears of deceived husbands and wives instead of being shown some act of life "traced back to its sources and to its mystery by connecting links." He yearns for one of the strange moments of a higher life that flit unperceived through his dreariest hours. "Othello does not appear to live the august daily life of Hamlet, who has the time to live, inasmuch as he does not act. Othello is admirably jealous. But is it not perhaps an ancient error to imagine that it is at the moment when this passion, or others of equal violence, possess us that we live our truest lives? I have grown to believe that an old man, seated in his arm-chair, waiting patiently with his lamp beside him; giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about the house, interpreting, without comprehending, the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice of light, submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny--an old man, who conceives not that all the powers of this world, like so many heedful servants, are mingling and keeping vigil in his room, who suspects not that the very sun is supporting in space the little table against which he leans or that every star in heaven and every fibre of the soul are directly concerned in the movement of an eyelid that closes, or a thought that springs to birth--I have grown to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the husband who avenges his honour."

This excerpt (translated by Alfred Sutro) shows the real Maeterlinck, the man whose mind is imbued by the strangeness of common life, the mystic correspondences, the star in the grain of wheat. The philosophy is akin to certain passages executed in the allegoric pictures of Albrecht Dürer, William Blake, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones.

Each century, he argues, has its own near sorrow. It is well that we should sally forth in search of our sorrows--the value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and disquiets. The tragic masterpieces of the past are inferior in the quality of their sorrow compared to the sorrows of to-day. To-day it is fatality that we challenge; and this is perhaps the distinguishing note of the new theatre. It is no longer the effects of disaster that arrest our attention; it is disaster itself; and we are eager to know its essence and its laws. It is the rallying point of the most recent dramas, the centre of light with strange flames gleaming, about which revolve the souls of women and men. And a step has been taken toward the mystery so that life's mysteries may be looked in the face. Between past and future man ("What is man but a god who is afraid?") stands trembling on the tiny oasis of the present. It is the disaster of our existence that we fear our soul; did we but allow it to smile frankly in its silence and its radiance, we should be already living an eternal life. O for those "reservoirs of certitudes" on the other side of night, "whither the silent herd of souls flock every morning to slake their thirst."

"To every man there come noble thoughts that pass his heart like great white birds." Then is recalled Browning and his similitude of the meanest soul that has its better side to show its love. "In life there is no creature so degraded but knows full well which is the noble and beautiful thing he must do." A life perceived is a life transformed. To love one's self is to love thy neighbour in thyself! Maeterlinck's attitude toward woman--the true touchstone of philosopher, poet, priest, and artist--is beautiful. "I have never met a single woman who did not bring to me something that was great."

The spiritual renascence may be at hand. It is the theatre that last feels its approach. Poetry, painting, sculpture, music, all have met it halfway; only the stage lags in the rear. Plot, action, trickeries, cheap illusions, must be swept away into the limbo of things used up. Atmosphere, the atmosphere of unuttered emotions, arrested attitudes, ideas of the spiritual subconscious, are to usurp the mechanical formulas of to-day. The ideal is music--music, the archetype of the arts. (Walter Pater preached this platonic doctrine.) "It is only the words that at first sight seem useless that really count in a work." But to realize, to exteriorize the mystery, the significance of the soul life, what a strange and symbolic web must be woven by the poet-dramatist! He must break with the conventions of the past and create something that is not quite painting, not quite drama, something that is more than poetry, less than music--full of ecstasies, silent joys, luminous pauses, and the burning fever of the soul that sometimes slays.

It is very beautiful, very ideal--bard, poet, mystic, moralist, and playwright, that Maeterlinck dared to become. He practised _before_ he preached--unlike most men; and he had the slow fortitude of the brave. We know now that artistically he springs from the loins of Poe and Hoffmann; that Villiers de l'Isle Adam was his spiritual godfather; that by the Belgian's artful scale of words he evoked images in our mind which recall the harmonies of unheard music; that the union of mysticism and freedom of thinking lends to his work peculiar eloquence; that his device is "Within me there is more," a mediæval inscription borrowed from an old doorway in Bruges. He is more revolutionary than Ibsen in the matter of technic. Maeterlinck writes a play about an open door, a closed window, or the vague and disheartening twilights of cloudy gardens. That he is quite sane in his early work we must not assert--since when shall art and sanity be driven in easy harness?

In giving a bare abstract of Maeterlinck's theories, spiritual and æsthetic, their beauty and nobility, we but clear the way for a better, because wider, appreciation of the plays. Let us consider them all from The Intruder to Monna Vanna and Joyzelle.

II

"By mysticism we mean, not the extravagance of an erring fancy, but the concentration of reason in feeling, the enthusiastic love of the good, the true, the one, the sense of the infinity of knowledge, and of the marvel of the human faculties. When feeding upon such thoughts the 'wing of the soul is renewed and gains strength, she is raised above the manikins of earth' and their opinions, waiting in wonder to know and working with reverence to find out what God in this or in another life may reveal to her."

This is not from Maurice Maeterlinck; it was written by a hard-headed man and lovable teacher, the late Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of Balliol. Not intended as a text, but merely to show that the lift of spirit, which is the sign manual of mysticism, does not prelude the practical. It is a fresh visual angle from which are viewed the things of heaven and earthly things.

In his youth, possibly to escape the sterilities of the code--for he was an advocate by profession---Maeterlinck took up the mystic writers though the drama pulled him hard, as it ever does with the preëlected. Little danger of this ardent young man weighing, as do many, the theatre in the scales of commerce. As with Ibsen, the stage was an escape for Maeterlinck; it liberated ideas, poetic, dramatic, mystic, which had become intolerable, ideas which turned his brain. That art of which Pinero so eloquently writes, "The great, the fascinating, and most difficult art,... compression of life without falsification," could never have signified a gold mine for Maeterlinck as it did for Robert Louis Stevenson. To the Belgian it was not a speculation, but a consecration. To it he brought that "concentration of thought and sustained intensity" which Pinero deems imperative in the curriculum of a dramatic artist.

Upon the anvil of his youthful dreams did Maeterlinck forge his little plays for marionettes. Shadowy they are, brief transcripts of emotion, but valuable in illustrating unity of purpose, of mood, of _tone_. Herein lies their superiority to Browning's more elaborate structures. Before he ventured into the maze of plotting, Maeterlinck was content with simple types of construction. The lyric musician in this poet, the lover of beauty, led him to make his formula a musical one. The dialogue of the first plays seems like new species of musical notation. If there is not rhyme there is rhythm, interior rhythm, and an alluring assonance. Hence we get pages burdened with repetitions and also the "crossing fire" of jewelled words. Apart from their spirit the lines of this poet are sonorously beautiful. In the "purple" mists of his early manner a weaker man might have perished. Not so Maeterlinck. He is first the thinker--a thinker of strange thoughts independent of their verbal settings. He soon escaped preciosity in diction; it was monotony of mood that chained him to his many experimentings.

And therein the old ghost of the Romantics comes to life asserting its "claims of the ideal," as Ibsen has the phrase. Crushed to dust by the hammers of the realists, sneered at in the bitter-sweet epigrams of Heine, Romance returns to us wearing a new mask. We name this mask Symbolism; but joyous, incarnate behind its shifting shapes, marches Romance, the Romance of 1830, the Romance of--Before the Deluge. The earth-men, the Troglodytes, who went delving into moral sewers and backyards of humanity, ruled for a decade and a day; then the vanquished reconquered. In this cycle of art it is Romance that comes to us more often, remains longer when it does come.

Maurice Maeterlinck employs the symbol instead of the sword; the psyche is his _panache._ His puppets are all poetic--the same poetry as of eld informs their gestures and their speech. He so fashions them of such fragile pure stuff that a phrase maladministered acts as the thrust of a dagger. The Idea of Death slays: the blind see; bodies die, but the soul persists; voices of expiring lovers float through vast and shadowy corridors--as in Alladine and Palomides--children speak as if their lips had been touched by the burning coal of prophecy; their souls are laid bare with a cruel pity; love is strangled by a hair; we see Death stalk in the interior of a quiet home, or rather _feel_ than see; or in our ears is whispered a terrible and sweet tale of the Death of Tintagiles--it is all moonlight music, mystery with a nightmare _finale_; or a tender original soul is crushed by the sheer impact of a great love hovering near it--Aglavaine and Sélysette. Then we get fantasy and miracle play, librettos, full of charm, wonder, and delicious irony. Maeterlinck recalls life, beckons to life, and in Monna Vanna smashes the stained-glass splendours hemming him in from the world; and behold--we are given drama, see the shock of character, and feel the mailed hand of a warrior-dramatist. In a dozen years he has traversed a kingdom, has grown from _wunderkind_ to mature artist, from a poet of few moods to a maker of viable drama.

The chronology of the Maeterlinckian dramatic works is this: Princess Maleine (1889); The Intruder, The Blind (1890); The Seven Princesses (1891); Pelléas and Mélisande(1892); Alladine and Palomides, Interior, The Death of Tintagiles (1894); Aglavaine and Sélysette (1896); Ariane and Barbe-Bleu, Sister Beatrice (1901); Monna Vanna (1902); Joyzelle (1903).

Though the first attempts are emotional presentations of ideas, though the dramatic form is, from a Scribe standpoint, amateurish, yet the unmistakable _flair_ of the born dramatist is present. In the beginning Maeterlinck elected to mould poetic moods; later on we shall see him a moulder of men and women.

A thinker may view the visible universe as a symbol, as the garment wherewith the gods conceal themselves; this Goethe did. Or this globe, upon the round of which move sorrowful creatures whirled through space from an unthinkable past to an unthinkable future, may be apprehended as a phantasmagoria, shot through with misery, a cage of dreams, a prison wherein the echoes of what has been thought and done meet in cruel confluence within the walls of the human brain. All pessimistic cosmogonists, poets, dramatists, dwell, with the obsession of an _idée fixe_, upon this scheme of things terrestrial. And then there is De Maupassant, an _eye,_ which photographed the salient profiles of his fellow-beings; or Poe, who, suffering from an incurable disease, felt the horror of the pulse-beat, the hideous drama of mere sentience. Charles Darwin, with pitiless objectivity, displays a map of life whereon the struggle is eternal--a struggle from protoplasm to Super-Man (the latter a mad idea in a poet's skull). Carlyle thunders at the Sons of Belial and we shrivel up in the fiery furnace of his eloquent wrath; or John Henry Newman wooes us to God with beautiful, gentle speech. To every man his illusion. Maeterlinck's is the apprehension of the helplessness of mankind, though not its hopelessness. His optimism, the germ of which is in the poems, has grown steadily with the years. And the tinge of pessimism, of morbidity, in his earlier productions has vanished in the dialectic of his prose.

Maeterlinck first saw his drama as music--this is a contradiction in terms, but it best expresses the meaning intended. As in music there are ebb and flow, rhythmic pulse, so his little landscapes unroll themselves with iteration to the accompaniment of mournful voices. No dramatist, ancient or modern, so depends upon vocal _timbre_ to embody his dreams as this one. In reality his characters are voice or nothing. From the deeps of haunted gardens come these muffled voices, voices suffocated by sorrow, poignant voices and sinister. Allusion has been made to the Poe-like machinery of Maeterlinck--atmosphere. It is, however, only external. He works quite differently from Poe, and the _dekoration_ with its dreamy forests, skies lowering or resonant with sunshine, parks and fountains, stretch of sea and dreary moats, is but a background for his moods. He pushes much farther than Ibsen and Wagner the rhythmic correspondences of man and his artistic environment. But the voice dominates his drama, the human voice with all its varied intonations, its wealth of subtle _nuance_.

Instead of the idea-complexity we find in Browning, in Maeterlinck the single motif is elaborated. He is not polyphonic,--to borrow a musical metaphor,--but monophonie. Where he is a psychologist of the most modern stamp lies in his perception of the fact that there is no longer an autonomous _I_, the human ego is an orchestra of collective egos. _We,_ not _I_, is the burden of our consciousness. Through countless ages the vast chemistry of the Eternal retort has created a bubble, an atom, which says _I_ to itself in daylight, when looking in mirrors, but in the dark when the inutile noise of life is ceased then the _I_ becomes a multitudinous _We_. All the head hums with repercussive memories of anterior existences. Some call it dreaming; others nerve-memory; others again--recollection of anterior life.

Other dramatists have hinted this pantheism before Maeterlinck. Shakespeare was a symbolist; so was Ibsen when he penned his The Master Builder. But the younger man makes a formula of the idea. His is the dramaturgy of the subconscious. His people say things and thereby reveal their multiple personalities, even the colour of their souls. Here, then, is the symbolist. To put the case more clearly, let Aline Gorren be heard,--a writer who is imbued with the beauty of symbolic ideas:--

"Your documents, details, verified facts, are precisely
the least worth considering," says, in effect, the
Symbolist. "They are appearances; impalpable shadows of
clouds. Nothing ye think to see is what it seems." Nothing
outside of our representation exists. All visibilities are
symbols. Our business is to find out what these symbols
are. Any book that does not directly concern itself with
the hints concealed beneath the diversified masks and
aspects of matter is a house built out of a boy's toy
blocks. Science, after promising more things than it could
fulfil, has many hypotheses just now that float about one
central idea--the existence of one essence, infinite in
moods, by reference to which alone anything whatsoever can
be understood. Those of our creed only and solely have a
philosophic basis for their art.

Emil Verhaeren, Belgian mystic, anarchist, poet, sings of The Forest of Numbers in his hate-saturated chants, Les Flambeaux Noirs.

Je suis l'halluciné de la forêt des Nombres.

And was not the greatest mystic of all one who saw the image in the fiery bush, one who, "in the midway of this our mortal life," found himself in a gloomy wood astray--was not Dante a supreme symbolist? Life for a man of Maeterlinck's temperament is ever a "forest of numbers"; with its strange arithmetic he hallucinates himself. What is The Intruder but a symbol, and one that has enchained the attention of man from before the time when the Brachycephalic and the Dolichocephalic waged war with the cave-bear and murder was celebrated in tribal lays? Through the ages Death, either as a shadowy obstruction or a skeleton with scythe and hour-glass, has marched ahead of men. Epic and anecdote, canvas and composition, have celebrated his ineluctable victories. Why then call Maeterlinck morbid for embroidering the _macabre_, fascinating theme with new variations!

Death the Intruder! Always the Intruder. In his first little dramatic _plaque_, it is the venerable grandfather who is clairvoyant: Death, protagonist. Almost imperceptibly the shadow steals into the room with the lighted lamp and big Dutch clock. The spiritual evidence is cumulative; a series of cunningly worded affirmations, and lo! Death the Intruder. It is a revelation of the technic of atmosphere. Voice again is the chief character.

The Blind takes us out of doors, though one senses the atmosphere of the charnel-house under the blue bowl of the unvarying sky. This is the most familiar and the most derided of the Maeterlinckian plays. It is hardly necessary to describe that "ancient Nordland forest," with its "eternal look under a sky of deep stars." The stage directions of these poems are matchless. How depict an "eternal look"? These exalted pictures are but the verbal instrumentation of Maeterlinck's motives. They may be imagined, never realized. Yet how the settings enhance the theme! These blind old men and women, with the lame, the halt, the mad and the sad, form a painful tableau in the centre of which sits the dead priest, their keeper, their leader, without whom they are destined to stumble into the slow waters about the island.

Death the Intruder! But in this instance an intruder who has sneaked in unperceived. The discovery is made in semi-tones that mount solemnly to the apex of a pyramid of woe. This little drama is more "arranged" than The Intruder; it does not "happen" so inevitably. Interior, called Home by the English translator, the lamented poet Richard Hovey, is of similar _genre_ to The Intruder. From a coign in an old garden planted with willows we see a window--a symbol; through this window the family may be viewed. Its members are seated. All is vague, dreamy. The dialogue occurs without. An old man and a stranger discuss the garden, the family and--the catastrophe. Most skilfully the poet marshals his facts--hints, pauses, sighs, are the actors in the curious puppet-booth. One phrase occurs that is the purest Maeterlinck:--

"Take care," says the old man; "we do not know how far the soul extends about men...." The dénouement is touching.

From Holbein to Saint-Saëns art shows a procession of dancing Deaths--always dancing with bare bones that creak triumphantly. In Maeterlinck's mimings there is something of the spirit of Walt Whitman's threnody.

The Belgian translates the idea of Death into phrases more hypnotic than Whitman's. His "cool-enfolding Death" is not always "lovely and soothing" for the survivors. His cast of mind is mediæval, and presently comes sailing into the critical consciousness memories of the Pre-Raphaelitic Brotherhood with its strained attitudes, its glories of illuminated glass, its breathless intensity and concentration upon a single theme--above all its apotheosis of the symbol and of Death the Intruder. It is one more link in the development of our young dramatist. He knew Poe and Emerson; he appreciated Rossetti both as poet and painter. In the next group of plays under consideration a step nearer life may be noted, a stronger element of romance betrays itself. We are approaching, though deliberately, Maeterlinck, the Romantic.

III

Israel Zangwill told a story once about Maeterlinck that is curious even if not true. He said the Belgian poet, when a young fellow, was on one of his nocturnal prowls, and while sitting in a café overheard a man explain a new dramatic technic to his friend. In it was the germ of the Maeterlinck plays. Possibly the plays for marionettes, Les Flaireurs, of Charles van Lerberghe were a starting-point. The growth of the poet on the technical side, as well as the evolution from vague, even nebulous thinking to the calm, solid philosophy of Wisdom and Destiny, is set before us in the order of his composition. Nor is a laconic dialogue so amazingly new. Dumas employed it, and also Hugo.

The romantic in Maeterlinck began to show itself plainly in The Seven Princesses. Death is still the motive, but the picture is ampler, the frame more decorative. Presently we shall see meads and forests, maidens in distress, fountains and lonely knights. Movement, though it be a mere sinister rustling of dead leaves, is more manifest in this transitional period. The Seven Princesses is like some ancient morality, with the nervous, sonorous, musical setting of a latter-day composer. It has a spacious hall of marble, with a flight of seven white marble steps; there are seven sleeping maidens; a silver lamp sheds its mysterious glow upon the seven of mystic number (the poet unconsciously recalls those other seven sleepers of the early chroniclers), and the landscape without the palace--through the windows of the terrace is seen the setting sun; the country is dark, marshy, and between the huge willows a gloomy canal stretches to the horizon. Upon its stagnant waters a man-of-war slowly moves. The old King and Queen in the terrace note its approach. Here we have a prologue full of atmosphere, an enigmatic story awaiting its solution.

We learn from the disjointed dialogue that the Prince, the heir apparent, is expected. He comes upon the ship. He is welcomed by the aged couple--"people are too old without knowing it," says the Queen--and the ship leaves. Its departure is managed poetically. The far-away voices of the sailors are heard in monotonous song: "The Atlantic, the Atlantic," evokes a feeling of the remote which we feel when Vanderdecken's vessel vanishes in The Flying Dutchman. This refrain of "The Atlantic, the Atlantic, we shall return no more, the Atlantic," sets vibrating certain chords of melancholy. In the meantime the Prince has been regarding the sleepers through the glass windows. The Queen, whose premonitions of approaching evil are quite Maeterlinckian, points out the beautiful girls, names them. The most beautiful of all is Ursula. The Prince notices that this Princess does not sleep like her sisters. "She is holding one of her hands strangely,..." he remarks. "Why has she not bound up her hair?" asks the Queen, distractedly. Gradually the little evidences accumulate. Something is wrong below, there in the great hall, where breathlessly sleep the seven Princesses on the cushions of pale silk strewn upon the marble steps.

The Prince, after trying to force the window, goes through a secret passage and reaches the sleepers. The action is supplied by the Queen at the window above. She weeps, she beats the glass, she says frantic things in the gloom to the old King. "Seven little open mouths!... Oh, I am sure they are thirsty," she cries. The Prince awakens the Princesses--all save one. Ursula lies singularly still. "She is not asleep! She is not asleep!" screams the frantic Queen. There is a hurrying to and fro of servitors with torches. "Open, open," is the piteous plaint of the old woman. Beyond, in the night, is heard the chant of the seamen as they fade away into the darkness. "The Atlantic, the Atlantic, we shall return no more."

What does it all mean? What is the hidden symbol? The scene suggests Holland; yet it is no man's land. These dolorous people with burning eyes and agitated, feverish gestures--who are they? Poets all. Despite the decoration, despite the skilful handling of the element of suspense, this little fantasy is not for the footlights. It is too literary. There is mastery revealed in the dialogue. The entire piece recalls a wan Burne-Jones picture with the symphonic accompaniment of Claude Debussy.

Perhaps it is well that a dramatist is more chained to the planet than his brethren, the poet, composer, _prosateur_. Like the sculptor and the architect, the dramatic poet must deal with forms that can be apprehended by the world. All art is a convention in the last analysis; theatrical art contains more conventions than the rest. Men of an original cast of mind revolt at the checks imposed upon their imagination by the theatre. But Shakespeare submitted to them and, a lesser man, Maeterlinck, has had to suffer the pangs of defeat. But he has left his imprint upon the page of the French drama in his disregard of the stage carpentry of Scribe and Sardou. Above all, he has imparted to the contemporaneous theatre new poetic ideas. A new technic--on the material side--is of less importance than the introduction of new modes of expression, of atmosphere, of ideas.

Maeterlinck, after his early essays in a domain that is more poetical than dramatic, we find longing for the romantic. He tires of single figures painted upon a small canvas. (Faguet once called him the "Henner of literature.") He longs for more space, more characters, more action--in a word--variety. We get it in his next attempt, Alladine and Palomides. In it there is less music, but more action--withal, it is naïvely childish. Alladine is loved by Ablamore. He is an old king, reigning over a castle surrounded by crazy moats. His beloved is very young. When the knightly Palomides appears, they mutually love. The King is a philosopher. Listen: "Now I have recognized that misfortune itself is of better worth than sleep, and that there must be a life more active and higher than waiting...." There is an avenue of fountains that unfolds before the windows--wonderful, weariless. Ablamore interrogates Alladine after she has encountered Palomides. Does she regard the weariless fountains alone? He soon lays bare the child soul of this maiden. Ablamore wishes Palomides to marry his daughter Astolaine. He goes mad with jealousy and casts the lovers into a dungeon, a trick dungeon, where marvels occur: a sea that is a sky, move-less flowers. The pair embrace. Death is nigh--"there is no kissing twice upon the heart of death." Finally they are engulfed. Rescued, they die in separate chambers of the palace, from which the aged King has fled. Voices are the only actors in the last scene.

Mediæval, too, in its picturesque quality is The Death of Tintagiles with its five short acts of despairing sister love. The little Tintagiles is the king that is to be. His grandmother, a demented old woman, suffers from a mania which takes the form of aggressive jealousy. She is ancient on her throne--in what strange land does she reign?--and she seeks to assassinate the poor little boy. Ygraine and Bellangère, his sisters, thwart her desires for a time--but only for a short time. He is eventually kidnapped and murdered. This simple, old-world fairy story--all Maeterlinck has a tang of the supernatural--is treated exquisitely. The arousing of pity for the doomed child is almost Shakespearian. These children of Maeterlinck are his own creation. No one, with the exception of Dostoïevsky and Hauptmann, approaches him in unfolding the artless secrets of the childish heart. Like plucked petals of a white virginal flower, the little soul is exposed. And there is no taint of precocious sexuality as in Dostoïevsky's studies of childhood (Les Précoces and others). Hauptmann's Hannele, among modern figures of girlhood, alone matches the Belgian. Hannele is nearer the soil than Tintagiles or the little Yniold.

"There seems to be a watch set for the approach of the slightest happiness," laments Ygraine as she holds Tintagiles by the hand. They live in a tower that stands in an amphitheatre of shadows. It is in the valley. The air does not seem to go down so low. The walls of the tower are cracking. "You would say it was dissolving in the shadows." There the grandmother Queen resides. "They say she is not beautiful and that she is growing huge." There is something monstrous in this hint of her size--as though a black, dropsical spider sat in the dark weaving the murderous webs for passing flies. Only the fly in this case is her grandson. Into the "sickening castle" go the "little sad King" and his sisters. Bellangère relates that smothered voices reached her in one of the strange corridors. They spoke of a child and a crown of gold. She did not understand, "for it was hard to hear, and their voices were sweet." Enough, however, to put the sisters on their guard.

In their sleeping room they bar the doors. An old retainer is with them. At the end of the act a door is slowly pushed open. They exert all their force to keep it closed. The old man puts his sword through the opening; it snaps. The room grows colder as the door, worked by unseen means, opens. Then Tintagiles utters a piercing cry. The door closes. They are saved--for a time. Act IV gives us the corridor in front of the room wherein hide the boy and his sisters. The handmaids of the vile old Queen chatter. It is near midnight. Sleep has overtaken the hapless victims. The handmaids steal Tintagiles, and the scene ends in screams. But the last act gives us sensations of the direst sort, because its terrors are felt and not seen. It is nearly all monologue. Only an actress of superior tragic power could do justice to this intense episode. A great iron door is seen. Ygraine, haggard, dishevelled, enters, lamp in hand. She has tracked her darling to this awful spot. "I found all these golden curls along the steps and along the walls; and I followed them. I picked them up.... Oh! oh! They are very beautiful.... They say the shadows poison.... Ah! Still more golden curls shut in the door.... Tintagiles!"

Then a tiny knock is heard--the bruised fists of Tintagiles on the other side of the massive door. "Sister Ygraine, sister Ygraine," he calls. He tells her he escaped from the monster. He struck her--struck her! Poe-like he exclaims, "Open quickly ... for the love of dear God, sister Ygraine." You feel the hideous woman approaching. "She is breathing behind me," moans the child as the fat, panting devil reaches him, an obscene shape of terror. "She ... is taking me by the throat...." Ygraine, frantic, without, hears the fall of a little body and bursts into despairing invectives. "Let me be punished some other way.... There are so many things that could give me more pain ... if thou lovest to give pain."

I confess that the condensed bitterness and woe and cruelty of this last act border on the pathologic if we do not consider the symbol. I would rather hear the beautiful symphonic poem of Charles Martin Loeffler based upon the poetic impressions of this piece--the art of music gives us the "pathos of distance." Yet Maeterlinck's Death of Tintagiles is in form and style far above his previous efforts. His marionettes are beginning to modulate into flesh and blood, and, like the mermaid of the fairy story, the transformation is a painful one.

We note this modulation particularly in Pelléas and Mélisande. First played in English by Forbes Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the play made a mixed impression in London; though it may be confessed that, despite the scenic splendour, the translation and the acting transposed to a lower, realistic key this lovely drama of souls. There is no play of Maeterlinck's so saturated in poesy, so replete with romance. The romantic in Maeterlinck has here full sway. There are episodes as intense as the second act of Tristan and Isolde. One expects to hear King Marke's distant, tremulous hunting horns in the forest scene of the fourth act, where Pelléas and Mélisande uncover their secret.

The plot is not a densely woven one. In the woods while hunting in a land east of the sun and west of the moon, Golaud, a king's son, comes upon Mélisande sitting disconsolate at the brink of a spring. She is timid and would flee. Something has happened to her which she does not explain, perhaps remember. She is lost, she declares, with the passionate iteration which has become a fixed pattern in the Maeterlinck dialogue. She has dropped into the pool the gold crown some one gave her--who it was she never tells. A forlorn little princess out of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Golaud marries her offhand and brings her to his home, the castle of his grandfather, Arkël, King of Allemonde. There his father lies dying--we never see this shadowy invalid--and his brother Pelléas lives. Also Little Yniold, son of Golaud, by a former marriage. The castle is malarial, rickety, like many of Maeterlinck's buildings. Nearly all his people seem to suffer from swampy emanations or the mephitic gas of ancient dungeons. The evil odours of Arkël's abode are even alluded to in this play.

Pelléas and Mélisande love. Golaud suspects it, and his jealousy, mixing with his love for brother and wife, is delineated masterfully. We now begin to see the fruits of the dramatist's careful study of moods. Evanescent as are the moods of the previous plays, they served as spiritual gymnastics. With them he proved his ability to portray the finer shades of terror, remorse, love, despair. In the jealousy of Golaud he takes a step nearer the concrete. Golaud is a hunter, a man whose temples are touched by gray. He adores his child-wife and trusts her. He begs the moody Pelléas to wait upon her. His marriage with her has surprised all, save his grandfather. Arkël says:--

"He has done what he probably must have done. I am very old, and nevertheless I have not yet seen clearly for one moment into myself; how would you that I judge what others have done?" A wonderful man, indeed. Pelléas wishes to visit his dying friend Marcellus--the Shakespeare nomenclature persists--but Arkël begs him to stay at home, where death approaches.

Mélisande is well received by the King and Queen. She is astonished at the gloom of the gardens, and is pleased with the spectacle of the sea. In the ending of Act I we get a faint premonition of disaster. Pelléas and Mélisande watch the departure of the ship that brought Mélisande. (Maeterlinck here borrows an early effect from The Seven Princesses.) It flies away under full sail.

_Pelléas_. Nothing can be seen any longer on the sea....

_Mélisande_. I see more lights.

_Pelléas_. It is the other lighthouses.... Do you hear the sea? It is the wind rising. Let us go down this way. Will you give me your hand?

_Mélisande_. See, see, my hands are full.

_Pelléas_, I will hold you by the arm; the road is steep and it is very gloomy there.... I am going away, perhaps, to-morrow....

_Mélisande_. Oh! ... Why do you go away?

[_Curtain_.

Much sport has been made of the first scene in this play. Yet it only displays the poet's worship of Shakespeare. Maid-servants are discovered at the castle gate. They gabble as they knock for admission. It is as prosaic as the rest of the work is poetic. A porter of the "Anon, anon, I come" type holds parley. He is borrowed from Macbeth. However, it does not demand a close reading of this episode to discover that it sounds the keynote to music--always symbolical--of the drama that follows.

IV

The second act of Pelléas and Mélisande begins at an immemorial fountain in the royal park. Here the young Prince sits with the wife of his brother. Mélisande is one of the poet's most successful full-length portraits. She is exquisitely girlish, is charming with her strange Undine airs, and is touched by a singular atmosphere of the remote. Hauptmann has realized the same ethereal type in Rautendelein. Mélisande is very romantic. At times she is on the point of melting into the green tapestry of the forest. She is a woodland creature. More melancholy than Miranda, she is not without traces of her high-bred temperament; less real than Juliet, she seems quite as passion-smitten. Not altogether a comprehensible creation, Mélisande piques one at every reading, with her waywardness, her infantile change of moods.

At the spring the two converse of the water and its healing powers --"You would say that my hands were sick to-day," she murmurs as she dips her hand into the pool. She loses her wedding ring. The conversation is all as indirect, as elliptical, as Robert Browning or Henry James. Let it be said that the affectation of understanding Browning at all points is not so banal as the pretence of _not_ understanding Maeterlinck. The symbol floats like a flag in his dramas.

In the interim Golaud has been wounded while hunting. It is not serious, but it unlooses the heart of Mélisande, who confesses that she, too, is ill. With her habitual avoidance of the definite, she does not, or will not, tell her husband the cause of her vague unrest and spiritual nostalgia. The interview is affecting. Golaud, the middle-aged, cannot overhear the shell-like murmurings of this baby soul. She recounts the loss of her wedding ring, but prevaricates. Golaud bids her go search for it in company with Pelléas--always Pelléas. In a grotto the two again meet. The cave is full of "blue darks," and outside the moon has "torn through a great cloud." Suddenly three sleeping beggars are discovered (again a recurrence to the earlier style). They mean something, of course, though they do not awaken. In certain pages of Maeterlinck it is well to let sleeping symbols lie undisturbed. The action now moves apace. Pelléas, fearing danger, wishes to fly, but is dissuaded by his grandfather.

In Act III Pelléas and Mélisande sit and converse. Little Yniold, with his curious child's brain and child's candour, really discovers to the lovers their mutual love. It is done captivatingly.

"You have been weeping, little mother," he says to his mother, in his father's presence. "Do not hold the lamp under their eyes so," responds Golaud. Then follows the poetic and famous scene of Mélisande on the tower combing her unbound locks and singing in the moonlight. It is a magical picture. One recalls Lilith, that first wife of Adam, painted by Rossetti, who also combed dangerous silken tresses. Pelléas enters, and the ensuing duologue is rich in tenderness and amorous poetry. One in vain endeavours to recall so intensely vivid a scene in literature since Romeo and Juliet. The romance of the French Romantics always verged on the melodramatic and artificial, and the stately classics are not happy in moments of this kind. The similar scene in Cyrano, when compared to Pelléas and Mélisande, is mere rococo pasteboard, though theatrically effective. Rostand is, at his best, Orientally sentimental, as befits his blood; he is never truly poetic, for he is a winning rhetorician, a "rhyming Sardou," rather than a dramatic poet.

The mad apostrophe to the hair of Mélisande is in key with the entire setting of this moving tableau. "I have never seen such hair as thine, Mélisande. I see the sky no longer through thy locks.... They are alive like birds in my hands." Even the surprising of the lovers by the sleepless husband has nothing theatric in it. He tells them that they are children--"what children!"--and bids Mélisande not to lean so far out of her window. In the next scene we see him with Pelléas in the vaults of the castle. There is something evil in his heart; in the brain of Maeterlinck there was Poe when he wrote this episode. Golaud leads Pelléas through the vault. Pelléas almost stumbles into an abyss--his brother has made a misstep. We feel ourselves listening here on the brink of a catastrophe that does not happen. It recalls Poe's Cask of Amontillado.

A painful scene is the questioning of little Yniold by his father. He asked the boy what Mélisande and Pelléas talked of when together; asked of their movements. Then he lifts his son to the window and bids him look on and report. It is masterly in its cruel directness. "Are they near each other?" he demands. "No, little father." Other even more searching questions follow, and when the unfortunate spy is clutched in a fierce grip he cries, "Ah, ah! little father, you have hurt me." Unconsciously Golaud has betrayed his woful agitation.

Mélisande is pitied by Arkël. She replies that she is not unhappy. He responds, "Perhaps you are of those who are unhappy without knowing it." Golaud enters and reproaches her, seizes her hair. Her consternation is great. She gives vent to that sentence which in England convulsed a matter-of-fact audience. "I am not happy. I am not happy!" The foredoomed lovers meet in the park. It is the great scene of the piece. Again one must go to Tristan and Isolde, for the lyric passion has the quality of intense music; that Tristan and Pelléas, of which Jean Marnold wrote so acutely in the _Mercure de France_:--

Tristan est l'œuvre maîtresse du musicien Wagner. C'est
le défi de son génie au temps. Il eût pu disparaître
après sans craindre l'oubli ou diminuer sa gloire. Mais
ce type idéal du drame wagnérien, de l'aveu même du
réformateur, ce modèle de l'œuvre d'art de l'avenir
apparaît quasiment impossible au théâtre. S'il y assomme
les dévots de l'opéra conventionnel, son poème ahurit,
lasse ou blesse les réceptivités plus exigeantes. Nous
savons, depuis Pelléas, que la vraie vie n'est pas
forcément incompatible avec la scène lyrique; qu'un drame
poignant y peut s'enrober de quelque symbole et s'atourner
de romantisme, sans cesser d'être humain. Nous y vîmes une
action simple emplir une soirée sans chevilles, des amants
s'énoncer sans boursouflure, s'aimer sans philtre et sans
charades, et mourir sans grandiloquence. Le pathos de
Tristan vient trop tard; si tard, qu'il semble aujourd'hui
à sa place adéquate en notre Opéra toulousain.

What Claude Debussy has done with this meeting in his music drama Paris knows. Speech here in its rhapsodic rush becomes music. And it is all poetic drama of the loftiest character, dealing with material as old as Eve. The husband enters, slays his brother, and the curtain falls on Mélisande fleeing, pursued by Golaud, sword in hand.

The fifth act of this play with its depiction of agony in the stern soul of Golaud, its death of Mélisande, who dies of a broken heart, is the tragedy of souls distraught. Even on cold paper it is emotion-breeding. Arkël, as the spokesman for Fate, bids his son not to trouble the last moments of Mélisande. She has given birth to a tiny image of herself, and, quite frightened by the world she has lived in, she leaves it like a bird scared to sudden flight. She has loved, though it is not with the "guilty" love her husband supposed. He hovers over her couch, awaiting the words that will satisfy his egotistic passion.

"She must not be disturbed," urges the venerable Arkël. "The human soul is very silent.... The human soul likes to depart alone.... It suffers so timorously.... But the sadness, Golaud.... The sadness of all we see.... 'Twas a little being, so quiet, so fearful, and so silent. 'Twas a poor little mysterious being like everybody." ...

Aglavaine and Sélysette is more shadowy in its treatment than Pelléas and Mélisande, and no doubt to the lovers of the "precious" in Maeterlinck more interesting than Monna Vanna. It deals with the love of two women, Aglavaine and Sélysette, for Méléandre. The delicacy of technic displayed is almost inconceivable, and the note of irony, faint as it is, enters a new element in this spiritual duel. To be brief, Aglavaine is the mouthpiece for Maeterlinck in his Treasure of the Humble. She is an _esprit fort_, who attracts the husband of Sélysette by her beauty of soul, vigour of brain, and temperamental intensity. Poor Sélysette is crushed between the upper and nether millstone of the man and woman. They both love her devotedly, but being of the Mélisande type, in her sweet, submissive nature, she fades away until death, self-sought, comes. She has a fragrant soul, and its fragrance exhales itself on her deathbed. The dynamics of love prove too much for this creature. There is tragic pathos in her taking off, and Maeterlinck is at his best in delineating the tower, with its crumbling walls, the wheeling birds frightened by the apparition of a falling body, and the terror and alarm of the little sister. Less, much less, fitted for theatrical representation than Pelléas and Mélisande, this drama is charged with symbolism and with rather too severe strain for its poetic build--too much intellectual freightage. It was composed after the essays, and it is because of this, perhaps, that I find Aglavaine just a trifle _doctrinaire._ There is wise and charming talk, the action _nil._ We get instead _états d'âmes_. The two women expand before our eyes; it is a rare spiritual growth, psychology in the veritable sense of that overworked word. Yet the friendship of Aglavaine slays Sélysette. There is mystery, beauty, of a high order in the play, and in some things it betrays a distinct advance upon its predecessors.

Sister Beatrice and Ardiane and Barbe Bleu are librettos for music. The first is a delightful setting of that old Dutch legend made familiar to English readers by John Davidson in his The Ballad of a Nun. There are homely pathos and mystic exaltation in Maeterlinck's interpretation of this nun, who left her convent for the love of man, only to return, decades later, wrecked in body and soul. But her absence has not been missed, for the Virgin Mary has stepped down from her niche in the hall and played the rôle of porteress disguised as the runaway.

Ardiane married Bluebeard and falls, like the rest of his wives, into the trap set for them. She defies the monster, and with the help of the peasants rescues them all from the marvellous dungeons under the castle. But she goes forth into the world alone--oh, irony of ironies!--the others do not care to be rescued. The story is told with charm and brilliancy. The author discovers himself as a _conteur_ with a light, graceful, humorous touch. It is an ideal libretto--for an ideal composer. The Miracle of Saint Antony is a comedy which was first seen at Brussels, October, 1903. It is a "satire of bourgeois society," and was well received.

V

Monna Vanna was produced at the Nouveau Théâtre, Paris, May 17, 1902. In the cast were Georgette Leblanc, Jean Froment, Darmont, Lugné-Poé, and others. The drama had an immediate success and has been played over the continent. In London, which will stand any amount of coarseness, so it be forthright and brutal, a public performance was forbidden to Monna Vanna.

The action of this sombre, fascinating drama is laid at Pisa near the close of the fifteenth century. The city is beleaguered by the army of Prinzevalle sent from Florence. Within, the city has made desperate but ineffectual resistance; ammunition and food have given out.

A few hours and the city will be in the hands of the enemy, will be subject to sack, rapine, slaughter. Guido Colonna is at his wits' ends. In the first act we find him in consultation with his lieutenants. His father, Marco Colonna, scholar, virtuoso, and philosopher, has been sent to the camp of Prinzevalle. Thence he returns, and in a scene of power and suspense he informs his son of the terms set forth by the conqueror. There is but one way out of the trouble. With rage, horror, incredulity, Guido Colonna hears that if his wife, the high-born beauty, Giovanna (Monna Vanna), goes to the tent of the barbarian captain, Prinzevalle, the siege will be terminated.

His Vanna? Why? Who is this demon out of the nethermost hell that can formulate such a vile condition? The father calmly explains. Prinzevalle is not a barbarian, but a Hercules in strength and beauty. He is cultivated. He has never seen Vanna. He desires the unknown. He has the thirst for the infinite which characterizes great dreamers, poets, generals, madmen of the ideal. If Monna Vanna is sent to his tent, a living sacrifice, in return he will give bread, meat, wine, gunpowder, arms, to the starving, vanquished city. Guido laughs at such an insane offer. Marco tells him that the city council knows of it--that--yes, Vanna has heard it. She is at that moment coming to speak to her husband. He is stupefied to learn that the council has spurned the offer. But Vanna has to be counted with.

Her decision that, Judith-like, she will go forth to this Holophernes, maddens her husband beyond endurance. In an exciting scene he accuses her of knowing Prinzevalle, of being unfaithful to her marriage vows in thought. He loads his father with opprobrium. The curtain falls on Vanna as she leaves, Guido telling her that she will never return to him the same.