"Pelléas and Mélisande" is the most beautiful of Maeterlinck's plays,
and to say this is to say that it is the most beautiful contemporary
play. Maeterlinck's theatre of marionettes, who are at the same time
children and spirits, at once more simple and more abstract than real
people, is the reaction of the imagination against the wholly prose
theatre of Ibsen, into which life comes nakedly, cruelly, subtly, but
without distinction, without poetry. Maeterlinck has invented plays
which are pictures, in which the crudity of action is subdued into misty
outlines. People with strange names, living in impossible places, where
there are only woods and fountains, and towers by the sea-shore, and
ancient castles, where there are no towns, and where the common crowd of
the world is shut out of sight and hearing, move like quiet ghosts
across the stage, mysterious to us and not less mysterious to one
another. They are all lamenting because they do not know, because they
cannot understand, because their own souls are so strange to them, and
each other's souls like pitiful enemies, giving deadly wounds
unwillingly. They are always in dread, because they know that nothing is
certain in the world or in their own hearts, and they know that love
most often does the work of hate and that hate is sometimes tenderer
than love. In "Pelléas and Mélisande" we have two innocent lovers, to
whom love is guilt; we have blind vengeance, aged and helpless wisdom;
we have the conflict of passions fighting in the dark, destroying what
they desire most in the world. And out of this tragic tangle Maeterlinck
has made a play which is too full of beauty to be painful. We feel an
exquisite sense of pity, so impersonal as to be almost healing, as if
our own sympathy had somehow set right the wrongs of the play.
And this play, translated with delicate fidelity by Mr. Mackail, has
been acted again by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Martin Harvey, to the
accompaniment of M. Fauré's music, and in the midst of scenery which
gave a series of beautiful pictures, worthy of the play. Mrs. Campbell,
in whose art there is so much that is pictorial, has never been so
pictorial as in the character of Mélisande. At the beginning I thought
she was acting with more effort and less effect than in the original
performance; but as the play went on she abandoned herself more and more
simply to the part she was acting, and in the death scene had a kind of
quiet, poignant, reticent perfection. A plaintive figure out of
tapestry, a child out of a nursery tale, she made one feel at once the
remoteness and the humanity of this waif of dreams, the little princess
who does know that it is wrong to love. In the great scene by the
fountain in the park, Mrs. Campbell expressed the supreme
unconsciousness of passion, both in face and voice, as no other English
actress could have done; in the death scene she expressed the supreme
unconsciousness of innocence with the same beauty and the same
intensity. Her palpitating voice, in which there is something like the
throbbing of a wounded bird, seemed to speak the simple and beautiful
words as if they had never been said before. And that beauty and
strangeness in her, which make her a work of art in herself, seemed to
find the one perfect opportunity for their expression. The only actress
on our stage whom we go to see as we would go to see a work of art, she
acts Pinero and the rest as if under a disguise. Here, dressed in
wonderful clothes of no period, speaking delicate, almost ghostly words,
she is herself, her rarer self. And Mr. Martin Harvey, who can be so
simple, so passionate, so full of the warmth of charm, seemed until
almost the end of the play to have lost the simple fervour which he had
once shown in the part of Pelléas; he posed, spoke without sincerity,
was conscious of little but his attitudes. But in the great love scene
by the fountain in the park he had recovered sincerity, he forgot
himself, remembering Pelléas: and that great love scene was acted with
a sense of the poetry and a sense of the human reality of the thing, as
no one on the London stage but Mr. Harvey and Mrs. Campbell could have
acted it. No one else, except Mr. Arliss as the old servant, was good;
the acting was not sufficiently monotonous, with that fine monotony
which is part of the secret of Maeterlinck. These busy actors occupied
themselves in making points, instead of submitting passively to the
passing through them of profound emotions, and the betrayal of these
emotions in a few, reticent, and almost unwilling words.