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.