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.
Act II: Tent of Prinzevalle. We have admirable opportunities to study
the man's character, virile, upright, fearless, poetic, melancholy,
through his interviews with his faithful secretary and Trivulzio,
the emissary of the Florentine government. The siege has lasted too
long; Prinzevalle has waxed too powerful, a conspiracy has been formed
against him. He is to be deposed, assassinated. He finds all this in
his conversation with the lying, base Trivulzio. The episode has an
antique quality. Trivulzio attempts an attack, but is easily repulsed,
though he receives a slight wound in the face, warning Prinzevalle
meanwhile that by daybreak he will be deposed, ruined. There is nothing
left then but the improbable acceptance by Guido Colonna and his
virtuous spouse of the hard condition he has imposed upon them.
She approaches. She has been saluted by the sentries. Prinzevalle is
amazed. She is enveloped in a long cloak--beneath it she is a Lady
Godiva. The meeting is one of the most curious in dramatic literature.
Gustave Flaubert had anticipated it in Salammbô, but the daughter of
Hamilcar was a barbarian, after all, and Mâtho's love for her brutal.
The souls of Maeterlinck's pair are set before us with clearness,
force, and solemnity. The aptitude for dissection of motive displayed
by the poet in his previous work is revealed here with splendid
results. It is all natural--as natural as such a situation can be--and
the dismay of the noble woman is mitigated somewhat when she discovers
Prinzevalle has known her, has always loved her, that he means her no
harm. By degrees she extorts the truth from him.
He is the playmate of her happiest hours; for her he has moved
mountains. Fresh from the insulting insinuations of her husband, her
head aflame with her exalted mission, she begins to see her life as
it really is. No, she does not precipitate herself into his arms! The
transition is infinitely more subtle than could be accomplished by most
modern playwrights. It is atmospheric. The dialogue leads us through
the avenues of this strangely reunited couple. _He_ is all passion
and tenderness. _She_--curiosity has given way to remembrance. At the
end he goes to Pisa with her, her captive; while radiant, unharmed,
she hastes to her husband and fellow-countrymen. The promised stores
have been sent; Prinzevalle deserts the cause of Florence--he is not a
Florentine, and as his life is in danger his defection may be pardoned.
And he loves. Stella Hohenfels in this scene quite surpassed herself
at the Hofburg Theatre, Vienna, where I witnessed a capital performance
of the play in 1903, with Joseph Kainz, Reimers, and others in the cast.
Daring as is this act, the next outgenerals it in surprises. Vanna
marches through the rejoicing city, lighted as for a feast. She is
conducted as a conqueror to her husband. Then begins the struggle. He
repulses her, heaping upon her vile phrases. Yes, she has saved Pisa,
but how? Where is the honour of the Colonna? She implores, explains,
denies, affirms. But when Guido learns the name of the silent warrior
who has accompanied her, his rage is boundless. It is her lover that
she hales back as a slave to show her triumph. There is enough meat
in this act to furnish forth a gross of modern nerveless, boneless,
bloodless abortions of drama now before the footlights. As a specimen
of the romantic drama with the accompaniment of a profound psychology,
Monna Vanna makes modern French works of the papier-maché type droop
like fresh flowers in a thunderstorm.
Incredulously the infuriated husband hears that Prinzevalle has made
no advances to Vanna. It is too much. Why, then, is he here? he
demands. He claims the head of Prinzevalle. Vanna jumps into the mob of
soldiers, crying that she has lied, lied abominably. Prinzevalle seized
her, she declares, and to defend herself she has wounded him. Behold
his face--which shows the marks of his struggle with the Florentine
emissary, Trevulzio.
It is a striking situation. In the heyday of his glory Sardou
never devised anything more theatrically effective--setting aside
consideration of the psychologic imbroglio. Vanna then claims
Prinzevalle as her spoils of war. To the victor belongs the vanquished.
Colonna, despite Prinzevalle's assertion that Vanna's lie is another
lie, is handed over to the care of Vanna's people. In a swift
"aside" she commands silence. She loves him, she whispers. Marco
understands--understands the manner in which Vanna will be revenged
upon Prinzevalle and also upon her husband for his disbelief. The
latter now disclaims his former doubts. Let her work her vengeance
upon the man she has captured. But for her all that has gone before in
her entire life is as a bad dream. The real, the beautiful life, the
dream, is at hand. It will be her revenge. She must go at once to her
prisoner, to Prinzevalle in his cell--the curtain falls.
There are weak spots in the scheme which tax one's credulity.
Something of the improbable must be granted a dramatist be he never so
logical. The rapid mental change of Vanna hints at a nature naturally
casuistical, as were no doubt many Italians of the Renascence. Her love
for Colonna could never have been deep-rooted. But she did not betray
him, and yet she has been adjudged profoundly immoral--in a word,
not to put too fine an edge upon the sophistries of the situation,
this heroine committed an imaginative infidelity as well as telling a
falsehood. The madness of the finale is but the logical outcome of her
love for Prinzevalle. Few plays, however, reveal their complete essence
in the mere reading. And the cryptic stammering, the arrested spasms,
of Maeterlinck's earlier style vanish quite in the action of Monna
Vanna.
I have dwelt perhaps to lengths upon the spiritual development of the
man,--those who run may follow his material progress,--but the reason
is simple: the soul of Maeterlinck is in his plays. That he is a
creative thinker is not asserted. He has studied deeply the wisdom of
the ancients, of the moderns. He knows Emerson and Molière. He knows
Saint Teresa and John of the Cross. Conceive an artistic temperament
that seeks the phrase for itself as did Walter Pater; that loves
the soul of humanity as did Robert Browning; that seeks a dramatic
synthesis for his poetry, philosophy, rhetoric--and you have this man.
His Flemish _fond_ may account for his mystic temperament, for his
preoccupation with things of the spirit, and yet how difficult it is
to place the critical finger on this quality and that quality, as if
on the bumps of the phrenologist, and say--here is the real Maurice
Maeterlinck!
VI
Passers-by on the Boulevard, the summer of 1903, stared at the Gymnase
Theatre, which bore the inscription: Le Théâtre Maeterlinck. Certainly
such an institution as the Maeterlinck Theatre was undreamed of a
decade ago by the poet's most fanatical adherents.
However, there it stood, this _affiche_; and there it stood the night
I stumbled through the semi-obscurity of the well-known house to my
_loge._ The criticisms of the new play had not been reassuring; a
second Monna Vanna was not to be expected; a return to Maeterlinck's
earlier manner was unthinkable, so I confess that I awaited the parting
of the curtains with a fair amount of curiosity. I was not disappointed
when the first scene disclosed a _loggia_ of a Renascence _palazzo_.
This setting sounded the keynote--and a very beautiful, delicate note
it was, for the author has been as careful in the mounting of this
play as he was indifferent in his first essays. Signor Rovescalli of
Milan had carried out the designs of Charles Doudelet with fidelity
and taste. The Pinturicchio costumes are all from the same hands.
Nothing--except the lighting--has been omitted that might add to
the incarnation of this dream--for a dream play Joyzelle is, full of
strange hypnotic action and phrases that haunt.
The piece, which is called a Conte d'Amour, is in five short acts. It
is confined to four characters, two of which carry the slight thread
of story. In style it is midway between Maeterlinck's earlier manner
and Monna Vanna. It might, if considered in historic sequence, have
been written before Monna Vanna, and thus could have furnished the
link between the static and the dynamic theatre of this poet. Coming
after the Italian tragedy of hot blood, it seems like a casting back
to an earlier manner. But it is not. There is more action than in any
play,--Vanna excepted,--more than in Pelléas and Mélisande. There
are passion and climax that come perilously nearer theatricalism than
anything Maeterlinck has yet written, though he steers around the
banal, avoiding it by a hair-breadth. Admirers of the dramatist's
repressed style must have taken a deep breath as the episode of the
attempted assassination developed into something quite unexpected.
Joyzelle is little more than a series of situations, in which the
heroine is tested by the stern old enchanter Merlin. When I called upon
the poet at his picturesque little house in Passy, I asked him about
The Tempest, which the critics one and all saw in his play. He smiled
and replied that Shakespeare was a good point of departure. Could
there be a better one? The resemblance is rather superficial. Prospero
and Miranda are, in the mysterious island of Maeterlinck, Merlin and
Lanceor--the latter the magician's son; and Joyzelle is, if you will, a
female Ferdinand come to woo the youth.
The changes to be rung on such a theme are not a few. But Maeterlinck
has elected to introduce a new and more disturbing element. It is
Arielle, the subconscious nature of Merlin, who always warns him of
impending danger. Instead of the old-fashioned soliloquy, we are given,
because of this dualism, dialogues between Merlin and his subliminal
self. This sounds terribly metaphysical, but as treated by Maeterlinck
Merlin's _alter ego_--his _doppelgänger_, as the German mystics have
it--is a charming young woman attired in gray and purple, minor in key.
If she is his constant mentor, he has also the power of projecting her
into the visible world--materializing, the spiritualists call it; and
as Klingsor tempted Parsifal by transforming Kundry into a seductive
shape, so Merlin uses Arielle as an agent of temptation against his
son, his weak and handsome Lanceor.
The plot is slight. Love, a very passionate, earthly love, is the
theme. Doubtless Maeterlinck intends the entire _conte_ as a symbol;
theatre-goers will be more interested in its external garb. Briefly,
Merlin interrogates the sleeping Arielle and learns that his son
Lanceor, who has just arrived on the island, is at the crisis of his
life. "Le destin de ton fils est inscrit tout entier dans un cercle
d'amour." He is condemned by the Fates to die within the month if he
does not find a perfect love, and to this love all is permitted, even
crime. If the girl upon whom he casts his eyes will sacrifice all
for her love, then happiness will be his portion. We are plunged into
a fairy land at the first words of Merlin. This gift of evoking an
atmosphere in a few phrases is Maeterlinck's own. All resemblance to
Shakespeare's folk vanishes as the scheme is unfolded. At first we see
Merlin addressing Arielle. When she sleeps he loses his force and so he
awakens her. After learning Lanceor's destiny, he resolves to be on his
guard. Joyzelle is cast up by the sea, and, encountering Lanceor, the
inflammable pair fall madly in love with each other. Nothing can come
between, or if any one does--! Lanceor is more assured than Joyzelle
that this is his first, his perfect passion. But Merlin, who pretends
anger, as does Prospero, resolves to test the newly kindled flame. He
threatens to kill Joyzelle if she meets Lanceor, but she defies him,
and refuses to bind herself to any promise imposed upon her. To a
sonorous and emphatic _Non_! the curtain intervenes.
Merlin now devises a series of tests for his son. Like Marco Colonna
in Monna Vanna, he would be cruel only to be kind. The first is the
trial by separation. In a lonely tower Lanceor is found by Joyzelle.
The place is as forbidding as the country of Browning's Childe Roland.
Joyzelle calls to Lanceor, who rushes to her arms. As they embrace
each other, trees put on full bloom, flowers carpet the ground, and
all nature bursts into life--only the order of decay and bloom is
reversed. Then Merlin has Lanceor bitten by a serpent, and falling
into a magic slumber Arielle appears, and he finds her instead of
Joyzelle, who has been sternly sent away. She returns only to find her
lover desperately enamoured of a strange woman. Even this does not
shake her faith. She refuses to believe the treachery of Lanceor. After
Arielle has departed, in a scene of singular power he drives forth his
patient Griselidis. It is almost brutal in its intensity.
In Act III Arielle bids Merlin leave Lanceor and seize Joyzelle for
himself,--a genuine subconscious suggestion this! In the security of
her wonderful love he may find safety from that Viviane, who later
saps his soul in the old-world wood of Broceliande. Joyzelle is proof
against the most insidious temptations, and in the trial by faith she
emerges triumphantly. Merlin suddenly commands her to look around, and
she will see Lanceor held captive in the arms of another. She moves
away without turning her head, thus averting the fate of a second Lot's
wife. The spectator, drugged by this time, begins to wonder if this
paragon has an Achilles heel. Merlin is quite as envious, for in the
next trial he causes Lanceor--poor Lanceor!--to be brought nigh death's
door, and Joyzelle, rendered desperate, throws herself at the cruel
parent's feet. She promises to fulfil any condition he may see fit in
his caprice to impose. Impose one he does. If Lanceor is restored to
health, will she become Merlin's bride instead of the son's? This, it
must be admitted, is a very ingenious form of torture, and yet, when in
the bigness of her soul Joyzelle acquiesces, we feel that another bead
has been touched in this rosary of pain.
How to extricate the girl from her grave position? Lanceor's good looks
have been spoiled by his illness--a mere trifle for this insatiable
creature. In the last act Merlin lies sleeping, Arielle on guard.
Joyzelle approaches, her face set in despair, yet firm in her purpose
to fulfil her destiny. She has promised. Lanceor has been saved. She
will pay. As she reaches the couch of the magician she plucks forth a
dagger and would have bloody murder. This is the supreme test--rather a
disquieting doctrine to the passivists and gentle persons who feed on
Maeterlinck's balmy philosophies. Love that does not flinch at crime
is the keystone to this little arch of a play. Merlin is satisfied.
Joyzelle has undergone his tests. She is the perfect woman for
Lanceor's perfect love. The two are united, and the lovely landscape
fades from our view like the misty pictures in a Chopin Ballade.
Ideal love is the motive of this new play, love that will march to the
jaws of hell, if needs be, for the beloved one; Orpheus and Eurydice,
Hero and Leander, or any other enamoured couple come to your memory as
the ingenuous Joyzelle, who has not a faint trace of humour in her,
proceeds gravely to the unpleasant tasks set her by Merlin. I could
not help recalling that Princess Istar,--set to music by d'Indy,--who
goes down into Hades and at each of its seven gates casts away a part
of her belongings. At the seventh and last gate she has remaining only
her nakedness. Maeterlinck removes leaf after leaf from the flower-like
soul of Joyzelle until its very core is reached.
While she bears a sisterly resemblance to many of his narve infantile
women, she is nearer related to Monna Vanna in her affirmative nature.
She is very full-blooded for a dream maiden, and at times she showed
something of Sardou's tigress-like creatures. Possibly one received
this impression because Georgette Leblanc, who originated the title
rôle, has evidently been a close student of Sarah Bernhardt's methods.
As is the case with modern _féministe_ writers--were there ever ancient
ones?--the woman is enthroned, she is the Eternal Womanly, and she has
the final word in the destiny of things, as in Goethe's poem. Lanceor
does not appear in an undesirable light, while Merlin represents Wisdom
and makes very Maeterlinckian speeches. His final words are full of the
sober dignity we expect from the author of Wisdom and Destiny.
In Joyzelle the words count for something, no matter what the author
intends them to convey by the "second intention." He once wrote "Les
hommes out je ne sais quelle peur étrange de la beauté." This strange
fear the young Belgian Merlin evokes of his own accord. We sense
the beauty, but are uncomfortable in its presence. Human beings or
semi-humans must act to reveal themselves. This they do in Joyzelle.
There can be no reproach here of the abuse of the "static," only the
action and words--couched in harmonious prose--do not quite summon
reality to us.
The disembodied thoughts of the poet are given a local habitation and
a name, and still they remain thoughts, abstractions; they are not of
our flesh and blood, but seem to inhabit that "Third Kingdom" Ibsen
has foretold. More "interior" than Monna Vanna, Joyzelle is hardly
apt to be appreciated. I feel quite sure that many of the adjectives
lavished upon it by the Parisian press were not sincere. As a race the
French cannot be in sympathy with the gray, slow, poetic images of this
Belgian mystic.
I had read Walkley's capital book on Dramatic Criticism, and after the
performance of Joyzelle I opened its pages and saw this: "So, says
Coleridge, stage presentations are to produce a sort of temporary half
faith, which the spectator encourages in himself and supports by a
voluntary contribution on his own part, because he knows that it is at
all times in his power to see the thing as it really is. Thus the true
stage illusion as to a forest scene consists--not in the mind's judging
it to be a forest, but in its remission of the judgment that it is not
a forest."
Joyzelle, then, would be the negation of the drama did we not allow for
Coleridge's "remission." If we can shut our eyes to the pure idealism
of Arielle, and see, as the poet intends us to do, a little love tale,
our enjoyment would be materially heightened. Theories hamper; so does
criticism. And the unhappiest critic of the drama is he who approaches
his author consciously. As in music, so in much of the Maeterlinckian
drama, nothing happens, and if we could be content to abandon ourselves
on the waves of the dramatist's fantasy, our pleasure would be tenfold
enhanced. This is the attitude in which one receives music. Why not
adopt its receptivity in Maeterlinck's case? for his plays are as near
the inarticulateness of music as they dare to be and still retain sober
lineaments.
The performance was a delight throughout. Every person in the cast is
an artist, and as Joyzelle I had an excellent opportunity to study the
personality and art of Georgette Leblanc,--now Mme. Maeterlinck,--for
whom Monna Vanna was written. A versatile woman, Leblanc was originally
in opera. She has sung Thaïs, Sapho, Navarraise, Carmen, Françoise
in L'Attaque au Moulin, the Bruneau-Zola music drama, and has played
over Europe with unbounded success Charlotte Corday and Monna Vanna.
As an interpreter of the _lieder_ literature of Schumann, Schubert,
Brahms, and the new Frenchmen and Belgians, Gabriel Fauré, d'lndy,
Claude Debussy, Georgette Leblanc has also won praise. And her voice
was never a great one. She has sung by the grace of God, as our German
brethren say, and as a _diseuse_ she has won more success than as a
singer. She is distinctly a personality. Her hair is wonderfully red,
the mask of her face a peculiarly expressive one. You recall those old
portraits by the masters, of some unknown woman, whose eyes follow you
from the canvas, eyes that peer beneath tumbled tresses, surmounted by
an imperial Gainsborough hat of velvet. She is given to the picturesque
in daily life, and has written a clever volume of essays all her own in
style and idea.
As an actress, I should say that Leblanc was halfway in her methods
between Sarah Bernhardt and--Georgette Leblanc. She has great facility
of speech, is plastic in her poses, indulges in those serpentine,
undulating movements we have long since recognized as Sarah's own.
Do not mistake; Mme. Leblanc has a pronounced individuality. She is
herself. Her intonations are her own. But she has such velocity and
clarity of diction, has such temperamental energy, plays a rôle with
such swiftness, that Bernhardt is inevitably suggested. As Monna Vanna
she is more successful than as Joyzelle. The abundant nervous energy
of the woman ill brooks long periods of repose, and Joyzelle is more
like a Burne-Jones maiden than the fiery lover of Prinzevalle. Leblanc
was intense in all the climaxes, and her denotements of joy, love,
hatred, and overwhelming desolation were alike admirable. She has
expressive features, though they are irregular--few women would call
her good-looking. (Note the discrimination of sex!) She nevertheless
made a charming Joyzelle, and spoke her husband's cadenced lines with
the exact feeling for their exquisite rhythms.
VII
Experience of a saddening sort taught me that a man and his works
are twain; that a poet never looks like a poet; a composer is seldom
harmonious in private life. Yet I could not be but tempted when a
brief, courteous note from the author of Monna Vanna informed me that
he would give me an evening hour for an informal interview. Maeterlinck
lives on the Rue Reynouard in a small house, the garden of which
overlooks the Seine from the moderate heights of Passy. To reach his
apartments I had to traverse a twisted courtyard, several mysterious
staircases built on the corkscrew model, and finally was ushered into
an ante-chamber full of screens, old engravings, fans, much ornamental
brass, and reproductions of Mantegna, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and other
symbolistic painters.
But I was not to abide there long. A maid with doubting eyes piloted
me across a narrow hallway, through a room where sat a tirewoman
altering theatrical costumes--and at last I was not in M. Maeterlinck's
presence. Not yet. Down another staircase, and the great man loomed
up in cycling costume, cordial, grave, a handsome fellow with big,
Flemish bones, a small, round head, and wavy hair dappling at the
temples. A man past forty, a gentle, pensive sort of man, Maurice
Maeterlinck does not look like his photographs for the reason that they
were taken nearly a decade ago. He is much older, much more vigorous,
than I pictured him. The general race characteristics are Flemish or
Belgian--that is, Germanic and not Gallic. This he knows well and
realizes that his work must ever be exotic to the logical mind of the
Frenchman, for whom the form is ever paramount to the idea.
Maeterlinck's eyes are what the French call flowers of the head. A gray
blue, with hints of green, they are melancholy eyes, these, with long,
dark lashes. He is extremely modest, even diffident, though touch him
on his favourite theme and he responds readily. A devourer of English
literature, he will not venture into conversation in our tongue, for
he has had little practice. German he speaks, and he knows Italian. He
told me that in composing Monna Vanna, he read Sismondi for a year so
as to get historical colour. He was quite frank about the conception of
this play.
"I wrote it for Mme. Maeterlinck," he remarked simply, which disposed
of my theory that the piece was written to prove he knew how to make a
drama on conventional lines. Joyzelle was also written for the same
actress, a woman who has played an important rôle in the poet's life.
Then I brought up Browning's Luria and the opinion of Professor Phelps
of Yale that Maeterlinck had profited by reading the English poet when
he composed Monna Vanna. M. Maeterlinck smiled.
"Naturally I read Browning; who does not?" he said, with the naïve
intonation that becomes him so well. "Luria I have known for a long
time, but Luria is not a stage play;" which, coming from the author of
Les Aveugles, I considered sublime. He is quite right--Monna Vanna and
Luria have little in common except that the scenes of both are laid
at Pisa, and that both Luria and Prinzevalle were treated badly by an
ungrateful country. But then, so was Coriolanus and a host of other
historical patriots. Maeterlinck spoke of Shakespeare as other men
mention their deity. He knows Poe very well, and also Walt Whitman.
A study of Maeterlinck's art reveals the evolution of a mystic, the
creation of a dream theatre, the master of a mystic positivism.
In Edgar Quinet's romance, Merlin, we read of a visit made by the
magician to Prester John at his abbey. This abbey is an astounding
conglomeration of architectures--pagoda, mosque, basilica, Greek
temple, synagogue, cathedral, Byzantine and Gothic chapels, turrets,
minarets, and towers in bewildering array. Prester John is a venerable
man with a long, white beard. "Upon his head he wore a turban enriched
with a sapphire cross At his neck hung a golden crescent, and he
supported himself upon a staff after the manner of a Brahman. Three
children followed him, who carried each upon the breast an open book.
The first was the collection of the Vedas, the second was the Bible,
the third the Koran. At certain moments Prester John stopped and read a
few lines from one of the sacred volumes; after which he continued his
walk, his eyes fixed upon the stars."
Maurice Maeterlinck recalls this type of eclectic culture. Eclectic is
his taste in creeds and cultures. And in this he is the true man of
the twentieth century, summing up in himself the depths and shallows,
virtues and defects, of cultured eclecticism.
The greater part of the foregoing essays, now completely revised,
first appeared in the columns of the New York _Sun_ at the time the
author was dramatic editor of that journal. He wishes to acknowledge
here the courtesy of William M. Laffan, Esq. in the matter of their
republication.