The mad apostrophe to the hair of Mélisande is in key with the entire setting of this moving tableau. "I have never seen such hair as thine, Mélisande. I see the sky no longer through thy locks.... They are alive like birds in my hands." Even the surprising of the lovers by the sleepless husband has nothing theatric in it. He tells them that they are children—"what children!"—and bids Mélisande not to lean so far out of her window. In the next scene we see him with Pelléas in the vaults of the castle. There is something evil in his heart; in the brain of Maeterlinck there was Poe when he wrote this episode. Golaud leads Pelléas through the vault. Pelléas almost stumbles into an abyss—his brother has made a misstep. We feel ourselves listening here on the brink of a catastrophe that does not happen. It recalls Poe's Cask of Amontillado.
A painful scene is the questioning of little Yniold by his father. He asked the boy what Mélisande and Pelléas talked of when together; asked of their movements. Then he lifts his son to the window and bids him look on and report. It is masterly in its cruel directness. "Are they near each other?" he demands. "No, little father." Other even more searching questions follow, and when the unfortunate spy is clutched in a fierce grip he cries, "Ah, ah! little father, you have hurt me." Unconsciously Golaud has betrayed his woful agitation.
Mélisande is pitied by Arkël. She replies that she is not unhappy. He responds, "Perhaps you are of those who are unhappy without knowing it." Golaud enters and reproaches her, seizes her hair. Her consternation is great. She gives vent to that sentence which in England convulsed a matter-of-fact audience. "I am not happy. I am not happy!" The foredoomed lovers meet in the park. It is the great scene of the piece. Again one must go to Tristan and Isolde, for the lyric passion has the quality of intense music; that Tristan and Pelléas, of which Jean Marnold wrote so acutely in the Mercure de France:—
Tristan est l'œuvre maîtresse du musicien Wagner. C'est le défi de son génie au temps. Il eût pu disparaître après sans craindre l'oubli ou diminuer sa gloire. Mais ce type idéal du drame wagnérien, de l'aveu même du réformateur, ce modèle de l'œuvre d'art de l'avenir apparaît quasiment impossible au théâtre. S'il y assomme les dévots de l'opéra conventionnel, son poème ahurit, lasse ou blesse les réceptivités plus exigeantes. Nous savons, depuis Pelléas, que la vraie vie n'est pas forcément incompatible avec la scène lyrique; qu'un drame poignant y peut s'enrober de quelque symbole et s'atourner de romantisme, sans cesser d'être humain. Nous y vîmes une action simple emplir une soirée sans chevilles, des amants s'énoncer sans boursouflure, s'aimer sans philtre et sans charades, et mourir sans grandiloquence. Le pathos de Tristan vient trop tard; si tard, qu'il semble aujourd'hui à sa place adéquate en notre Opéra toulousain.
What Claude Debussy has done with this meeting in his music drama Paris knows. Speech here in its rhapsodic rush becomes music. And it is all poetic drama of the loftiest character, dealing with material as old as Eve. The husband enters, slays his brother, and the curtain falls on Mélisande fleeing, pursued by Golaud, sword in hand.
The fifth act of this play with its depiction of agony in the stern soul of Golaud, its death of Mélisande, who dies of a broken heart, is the tragedy of souls distraught. Even on cold paper it is emotion-breeding. Arkël, as the spokesman for Fate, bids his son not to trouble the last moments of Mélisande. She has given birth to a tiny image of herself, and, quite frightened by the world she has lived in, she leaves it like a bird scared to sudden flight. She has loved, though it is not with the "guilty" love her husband supposed. He hovers over her couch, awaiting the words that will satisfy his egotistic passion.
"She must not be disturbed," urges the venerable Arkël. "The human soul is very silent.... The human soul likes to depart alone.... It suffers so timorously.... But the sadness, Golaud.... The sadness of all we see.... 'Twas a little being, so quiet, so fearful, and so silent. 'Twas a poor little mysterious being like everybody." ...
Aglavaine and Sélysette is more shadowy in its treatment than Pelléas and Mélisande, and no doubt to the lovers of the "precious" in Maeterlinck more interesting than Monna Vanna. It deals with the love of two women, Aglavaine and Sélysette, for Méléandre. The delicacy of technic displayed is almost inconceivable, and the note of irony, faint as it is, enters a new element in this spiritual duel. To be brief, Aglavaine is the mouthpiece for Maeterlinck in his Treasure of the Humble. She is an esprit fort, who attracts the husband of Sélysette by her beauty of soul, vigour of brain, and temperamental intensity. Poor Sélysette is crushed between the upper and nether millstone of the man and woman. They both love her devotedly, but being of the Mélisande type, in her sweet, submissive nature, she fades away until death, self-sought, comes. She has a fragrant soul, and its fragrance exhales itself on her deathbed. The dynamics of love prove too much for this creature. There is tragic pathos in her taking off, and Maeterlinck is at his best in delineating the tower, with its crumbling walls, the wheeling birds frightened by the apparition of a falling body, and the terror and alarm of the little sister. Less, much less, fitted for theatrical representation than Pelléas and Mélisande, this drama is charged with symbolism and with rather too severe strain for its poetic build—too much intellectual freightage. It was composed after the essays, and it is because of this, perhaps, that I find Aglavaine just a trifle doctrinaire. There is wise and charming talk, the action nil. We get instead états d'âmes. The two women expand before our eyes; it is a rare spiritual growth, psychology in the veritable sense of that overworked word. Yet the friendship of Aglavaine slays Sélysette. There is mystery, beauty, of a high order in the play, and in some things it betrays a distinct advance upon its predecessors.
Sister Beatrice and Ardiane and Barbe Bleu are librettos for music. The first is a delightful setting of that old Dutch legend made familiar to English readers by John Davidson in his The Ballad of a Nun. There are homely pathos and mystic exaltation in Maeterlinck's interpretation of this nun, who left her convent for the love of man, only to return, decades later, wrecked in body and soul. But her absence has not been missed, for the Virgin Mary has stepped down from her niche in the hall and played the rôle of porteress disguised as the runaway.
Ardiane married Bluebeard and falls, like the rest of his wives, into the trap set for them. She defies the monster, and with the help of the peasants rescues them all from the marvellous dungeons under the castle. But she goes forth into the world alone—oh, irony of ironies!—the others do not care to be rescued. The story is told with charm and brilliancy. The author discovers himself as a conteur with a light, graceful, humorous touch. It is an ideal libretto—for an ideal composer. The Miracle of Saint Antony is a comedy which was first seen at Brussels, October, 1903. It is a "satire of bourgeois society," and was well received.