Daring as is this act, the next outgenerals it in surprises. Vanna marches through the rejoicing city, lighted as for a feast. She is conducted as a conqueror to her husband. Then begins the struggle. He repulses her, heaping upon her vile phrases. Yes, she has saved Pisa, but how? Where is the honour of the Colonna? She implores, explains, denies, affirms. But when Guido learns the name of the silent warrior who has accompanied her, his rage is boundless. It is her lover that she hales back as a slave to show her triumph. There is enough meat in this act to furnish forth a gross of modern nerveless, boneless, bloodless abortions of drama now before the footlights. As a specimen of the romantic drama with the accompaniment of a profound psychology, Monna Vanna makes modern French works of the papier-maché type droop like fresh flowers in a thunderstorm.
Incredulously the infuriated husband hears that Prinzevalle has made no advances to Vanna. It is too much. Why, then, is he here? he demands. He claims the head of Prinzevalle. Vanna jumps into the mob of soldiers, crying that she has lied, lied abominably. Prinzevalle seized her, she declares, and to defend herself she has wounded him. Behold his face—which shows the marks of his struggle with the Florentine emissary, Trevulzio.
It is a striking situation. In the heyday of his glory Sardou never devised anything more theatrically effective—setting aside consideration of the psychologic imbroglio. Vanna then claims Prinzevalle as her spoils of war. To the victor belongs the vanquished. Colonna, despite Prinzevalle's assertion that Vanna's lie is another lie, is handed over to the care of Vanna's people. In a swift "aside" she commands silence. She loves him, she whispers. Marco understands—understands the manner in which Vanna will be revenged upon Prinzevalle and also upon her husband for his disbelief. The latter now disclaims his former doubts. Let her work her vengeance upon the man she has captured. But for her all that has gone before in her entire life is as a bad dream. The real, the beautiful life, the dream, is at hand. It will be her revenge. She must go at once to her prisoner, to Prinzevalle in his cell—the curtain falls.
There are weak spots in the scheme which tax one's credulity. Something of the improbable must be granted a dramatist be he never so logical. The rapid mental change of Vanna hints at a nature naturally casuistical, as were no doubt many Italians of the Renascence. Her love for Colonna could never have been deep-rooted. But she did not betray him, and yet she has been adjudged profoundly immoral—in a word, not to put too fine an edge upon the sophistries of the situation, this heroine committed an imaginative infidelity as well as telling a falsehood. The madness of the finale is but the logical outcome of her love for Prinzevalle. Few plays, however, reveal their complete essence in the mere reading. And the cryptic stammering, the arrested spasms, of Maeterlinck's earlier style vanish quite in the action of Monna Vanna.
I have dwelt perhaps to lengths upon the spiritual development of the man,—those who run may follow his material progress,—but the reason is simple: the soul of Maeterlinck is in his plays. That he is a creative thinker is not asserted. He has studied deeply the wisdom of the ancients, of the moderns. He knows Emerson and Molière. He knows Saint Teresa and John of the Cross. Conceive an artistic temperament that seeks the phrase for itself as did Walter Pater; that loves the soul of humanity as did Robert Browning; that seeks a dramatic synthesis for his poetry, philosophy, rhetoric—and you have this man. His Flemish fond may account for his mystic temperament, for his preoccupation with things of the spirit, and yet how difficult it is to place the critical finger on this quality and that quality, as if on the bumps of the phrenologist, and say—here is the real Maurice Maeterlinck!
VI
Passers-by on the Boulevard, the summer of 1903, stared at the Gymnase Theatre, which bore the inscription: Le Théâtre Maeterlinck. Certainly such an institution as the Maeterlinck Theatre was undreamed of a decade ago by the poet's most fanatical adherents.
However, there it stood, this affiche; and there it stood the night I stumbled through the semi-obscurity of the well-known house to my loge. The criticisms of the new play had not been reassuring; a second Monna Vanna was not to be expected; a return to Maeterlinck's earlier manner was unthinkable, so I confess that I awaited the parting of the curtains with a fair amount of curiosity. I was not disappointed when the first scene disclosed a loggia of a Renascence palazzo. This setting sounded the keynote—and a very beautiful, delicate note it was, for the author has been as careful in the mounting of this play as he was indifferent in his first essays. Signor Rovescalli of Milan had carried out the designs of Charles Doudelet with fidelity and taste. The Pinturicchio costumes are all from the same hands. Nothing—except the lighting—has been omitted that might add to the incarnation of this dream—for a dream play Joyzelle is, full of strange hypnotic action and phrases that haunt.
The piece, which is called a Conte d'Amour, is in five short acts. It is confined to four characters, two of which carry the slight thread of story. In style it is midway between Maeterlinck's earlier manner and Monna Vanna. It might, if considered in historic sequence, have been written before Monna Vanna, and thus could have furnished the link between the static and the dynamic theatre of this poet. Coming after the Italian tragedy of hot blood, it seems like a casting back to an earlier manner. But it is not. There is more action than in any play,—Vanna excepted,—more than in Pelléas and Mélisande. There are passion and climax that come perilously nearer theatricalism than anything Maeterlinck has yet written, though he steers around the banal, avoiding it by a hair-breadth. Admirers of the dramatist's repressed style must have taken a deep breath as the episode of the attempted assassination developed into something quite unexpected.