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.