Maeterlinck fervently studied the English dramatic classics. The result was wild ferment. In 1889 he published Princess Maleine, and such an impression did its whirling words create that Octave Mirbeau wrote his famous article in the Paris Figaro, August 24, 1890, in the course of which he made this statement, "M. Maurice Maeterlinck nous a donné l'œuvre la plus géniale de ce temps, et la plus extraordinaire et la plus naïve aussi, comparable et—oserai-je le dire?—supérieure en beauté à ce qu'il y a de plus beau dans Shakespeare ... plus tragique que Macbeth, plus extraordinaire en pensée que Hamlet."
Either M. Mirbeau, who has often played the rôle of poet-anarchist, had not read Shakespeare reasonably, or else he was indulging in a pleasing mystification. Ah, that fatal plus, the uncritical overplus, how it does jump up from the page smiting the optics with rude humour! As a matter of sheer fact, Princess Maleine is an undigested compound of Macbeth, Hamlet, Leaf, and, as Arthur Symons sagely remarks, with more of the Elizabethan violence we find in Webster and Tourneur than in Shakespeare. And its author was only a youth in his twenties.
However, with all its crudities, its imitations, its impossible mélange of blood, lust, tears, terror, there are several elements in the crazy play that indicate latent gifts of a high order. The range, is narrow and Poe-like. Fear is the theme, and a strange repetition the method of expression. There is a young prince, a Hamlet, who has fed on the art of the modern decadents. He is a spiritual half-brother to Laforgue's Hamlet, shorn of that ironist's humour. Never could Prince Hjalmar of the Maeterlinck tragedy utter such a sublimely ironic soliloquy as Laforgue's, more Shakespearian than Shakespeare.
"Alas! poor Yorick! As one seems to hear, in one little shell, all the multitudinous roar of the ocean, so I here seem to perceive the whole quenchless symphony of the universal soul, of whose echoes this box was as the cross-roads. And do you imagine a human race that would look no farther, that would abide by this vaguely, immortal sound, which one hears in a hollow skull, by way of explanation of death, by way of religion?... They also had their time, all these small folk of history; learning to read, paring their nails, illuminating the unsavoury lamp, loving every night, gormandizing, vain, crazy for compliments, kisses.... But yet—no longer to be, no longer to be in it, no longer to be of it! Not even to be able to strain against one's human heart, any afternoon in the week, the melancholy of centuries compressed into one little chord upon the piano!..."
Maeterlinck's hero, too, is oppressed by the mystery of life. Throughout the drama the Fate of ancient tragedy marches remorselessly through the doomed palace of the king. Thanks to Maeterlinck, this Fate takes on a new countenance. A disquieting attack is made upon the nerves by the repercussive repetitions, the dense pall of melancholy hanging over the place. A madhouse is a cheerful place by comparison. One king has slain another and made a beggar outcast of the Princess royal, Maleine. She is loved by and loves Prince Hjalmar—an odd transposition of the sunny passions of Romeo and Juliet. The beggar girl becomes maid in the palace of her father's murderer. It is not a happy habitation. The old King is senile and debauched by Anne, Queen of Jutland. This mis-creant, a hideous combination of Lady Macbeth, Messaline, and Phædra, has a daughter bearing the pretty name of Uglyane. Poor Uglyane! She is beautiful, unloved. The one assignation of her life is defeated by Maleine, who plays a cruel trick upon her. Going to the fountain—later we shall find that fountains assume important rôles in these plays—Maleine meets Hjalmar. Then we get the true Maeterlinck atmosphere. And this is where it may come from:—
I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant, eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees.... I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling and gazed down.... About the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity; an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn; a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
Pestilent and mystic is the atmosphere of Princess Maleine. The quotation is from The Fall of the House of Usher. There is much of Poe's dark tarn, of Auber, and the misty mid-region of Weir in the early Maeterlinck.
The dénouement is horrible. Maleine is strangled by the Queen, who also loves Hjalmar, and to the accompaniment of a lunar eclipse, thunderbolts, a cyclone, meteors that explode, wounded swans that fall from stormy skies, this night of strange portents comes to an end after the prince avenges Maleine by stabbing the queen and killing himself. There is a dog that sniffs, scratches, and howls at the locked door of the murdered princess. Its name is Pluto. There are chanting and spectral nuns, lewd beggars, an old Shakespearian nurse, a freakish boy, and the usual scared courtiers. The scenes do not hang together at all—there is no sequence of action, only of moods; or rather the same mood persists throughout. Yet the lines bite at times, and there are great fissures of silence, pauses as deep and as sinister as murky midnight pools.
These pauses are always pregnant,—like the pauses in strange pages of Schumann or those mysterious empty bars at the beginning of a Chopin tragedy in tone,—empty, forbidding vestibules to woful edifices.
"There is a little kitchen maid's soul at the bottom of her green eyes;" "I am sick to die of it one of those twenty thousand nights we have to live;" "How dark? how dark? Is a forest lit up like a ball room?" "The poor never know anything;" "Will she not have a little silence in her heart?" "She is as cold as an earthworm;" "Oh! look, look at their eyes. They will leap out upon me like frogs;" "My God! My God! She is waiting now on the wharves of hell;" "How unhappy the dead look!" These and many more, with gasps and ejaculations, make up a dialogue that is at least original, though bizarre. Naturally it is all the fruit of green, immature genius.