ITS QUALITIES
Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, published in 1892, stands fifth in the chronological order of his dramatic works. It was preceded by La Princesse Maleine (1889); L'Intruse, Les Aveugles (1890); and Les sept Princesses (1891). Since its appearance Maeterlinck has published these plays: Alladine et Palomides; Intérieur; La Mort de Tintagiles: Trois petits drames pour Marionnettes (1894); Aglavaine et Selysette (1896); Ariane et Barbe-Bleue; Soeur Béatrice (1901); Monna Vanna (1902); Joyzelle (1903). Pelléas et Mélisande, dedicated to Octave Mirbeau "in token of deep friendship, admiration, and gratitude," was first performed at the Bouffes-Parisiens, Paris, on May 17, 1893, with this cast: Pelléas, Mlle. Marie Aubry; Mélisande, Mlle. Meuris; Arkël, Émile Raymond; Golaud, Lugné-Poë; Geneviève, Mme. Camée; Le petit Yniold, Georgette Loyer.
"Take care," warns The Old Man in that most simply touching of Maeterlinck's plays, Intérieur; "we do not know how far the soul extends about men." It is a subtle and characteristic saying, and it might have been used by the dramatist as a motto for his Pelléas et Mélisande; for not only does it embody the central thought of this poignant masque of passion and destiny, but it summarizes Maeterlinck's attitude as a writer of drama. "In the theatre," he says in the introduction to his translation of Ruysbroeck's l'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, "I wish to study ... man, not relatively to other people, not in his relations to others or to himself; but, after sketching the ordinary facts of passion, to look at his attitude in presence of eternity and mystery, to attempt to unveil the eternal nature hidden under the accidental characteristics of the lover, father, husband.... Is the thought an exact picture of that something which produced it? Is it not rather a shadow of some struggle, similar to that of Jacob with the Angel?" Art, he has said, "is a temporary mask, under which the unknown without a face puzzles us. It is the substance of eternity, introduced ...by a distillation of infinity. It is the honey of eternity, taken from a flower of eternity." Everywhere, throughout his most deeply characteristic work, he emphasizes this thought—he would have us realize that we are the unconscious protagonists of an overshadowing, vast, and august drama whose significance and dénouement we do not and cannot know, but of which mysterious intimations are constantly to be perceived and felt. The characters in his plays live, as the old king, Arkël, says in Pelléas et Mélisande, like persons "whispering about a closed room," This drama—at once his most typical, moving, and beautiful performance—swims in an atmosphere of portent and bodement; here, as Pater noted in the work of a wholly different order of artist, "the storm is always brooding;" here, too, "in a sudden tremor of an aged voice, in the tacit observance of a day," we become "aware suddenly of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world." Mystery and sorrow—these are its keynotes; separately or in consonance, they are sounded from beginning to end of this strange and muted tragedy. It is full of a quality of emotion, of beauty, which is as "a touch from behind a curtain," issuing from a background vague and illimitable. One is aware of vast and inscrutable forces, working in silence and indirection, which somehow control and direct the shadowy figures who move dimly, with grave and wistful pathos, through a no less shadowy pageant of griefs and ecstasies and fatalities. They are little more than the instruments of a mysterious will, these vague and mist-enwrapped personages, who seem always to be unconscious actors in some secret and hidden drama whose progress is concealed behind the tangible drama of passionate and tragic circumstance in which they are ostensibly taking part.
"Maeterlinck's man," says S.C. de Soissons in a penetrating study of the Belgian's dramatic methods, "is a being whose sensuous life is only a concrete symbol of his infinite transcendental side; and, further, is only a link in an endless change of innumerable existences, a link that remains in continual communication, in mutual union with all the other links.... In Maeterlinck's dramas the whole of nature vibrates with man, either warning him of coming catastrophes or taking on a mournful attitude after they have happened. He considers man to be a great, fathomless mystery, which one cannot determine precisely, at which one can only glance, noting his involuntary and instinctive words, exclamations and impressions. Maeterlinck consciously deprives nature of her passive rôle of a soulless accessory, he animates her, orders her to collaborate actively in the action of the drama, to speak mysteriously beside man and to man, to forecast future incidents and catastrophes, in a word, to participate in all the actions of that fragment of human life which is called a drama." This "rhythmic correspondence," as Mr. James Huneker calls it, between man and his environment, is nowhere more effectively insisted upon by Maeterlinck than in Pelléas et Mélisande. Note the incident at the conclusion of the first act, where the departure of the ship and the gathering of the storm are commented upon by the two lovers in a scene which is charged with an inescapable atmosphere of foreboding; note the incident of the fugitive doves in the scene at Mélisande's tower window; or the episodic passage near the end of the third act, during the tense and painful scene of Golaud's espionage: "Do you see those poor people down there trying to kindle a little fire in the forest?—It has rained. And over there, do you see the old gardener trying to lift that tree that the wind has blown down across the road?—He cannot; the tree is too big ... too heavy; ... it will lie where it fell." Note, further on (in the third scene of the fourth act), just in advance of the culmination of the tragedy, the strange and ominous scene wherein Little Yniold describes the passing of the flock of sheep:
"Why, there is no more sun.... They are coming, the little sheep. How many there are! They fear the dark! They crowd together! They cry! and they go quick! They are at the crossroads, and they know not which way to turn!... Now they are still.... Shepherd! why do they not speak any more?
THE SHEPHERD (who is out of sight)
"Because it is no longer the road to the fold.
YNIOLD
"Where are they going?—Shepherd! Shepherd!—where are they going?—Where are they going to sleep to-night? Oh! oh! it is too dark!—I am going to tell something to somebody."
Always the setting, the accessories, reflect and underscore the inner movement of the drama, and always with arresting and intense effect.
It tempts one to extravagant praise, this heart-shaking and lovely drama; this vieille et triste légende de la forêt, with its indescribable glamour, its affecting sincerity, its restraint, its exquisite and unflagging simplicity. The hesitant and melancholy personages who invest its scenes—Mélisande, timid, naïve, child-like, wistful, mercurial, infinitely pathetic; Pelléas, dream-filled, ardent, yet honorable in his passion; old Arkël, wise, gentle, and resigned; the tragic and brooding figure of Golaud; Little Yniold, artless and pitiful, a figure impossible anywhere save in Maeterlinck; the grave and simple diction, at times direct and homely in phrasing and imagery, at times rapturous, subtle, and evasive; the haunting mise-en-scène: the dim forest, the fountain in the park, the luminous and fragrant nightfall, the occasional glimpses, sombre and threatening, of the sea, the silent and gloomy castle,—all these unite to form a dramatic and poetic and pictorial ensemble which completely fascinates and enchains the mind. The result would have been as inconceivable before Maeterlinck undertook the writing of drama as, to-day, it is inimitable and untouched.