[6] M.G.M. Rodrigue, of Le Thyrse tells me (and Grégoire Le Roy told him) that Maeterlinck at the time he wrote his early dramas drew inspiration from Walter Crane's picture-books. The Frog Prince was one of them. Perhaps Maeterlinck had Grimm's Household Stories, done into pictures by Walter Crane (Macmillan, 1882).
CHAPTER VII
It is natural that an artist should wish to recreate something he has attempted and not completed to his satisfaction, or which, when his mind is more mature, he thinks he could do better. The three plays which Maeterlinck published together in 1894 are such attempts at reconstruction. Alladine and Palomides is a love story which has much in common with Pelleas and Melisanda: "both dramas are dominated by the idea of the enigmatic in our deeds" (van Hamel), and in both the love that is given is taken from its lawful owner. Interior is clearly a version of The Intruder. In The Death of Tintagiles we have again, but more concentrated, the physical anguish of The Princess Maleine.
The three plays had for their secondary title "trois petits drames pour marionettes" (three little dramas for marionettes). But we have seen that Maeterlinck had described his very first play as a drama for a marionette theatre; and the three 1894 plays are not a whit less adapted for the ordinary stage than those which preceded them. Perhaps in deliberately ticketing his plays with this ironic label Maeterlinck wished to indicate that they were unsuited for the garish light and the artificial voices of the present-day tragedy style on the stage. It is more probable, however, that he would not have dreamt of suggesting a slight on his actor friends. The characters are described as marionettes, it is likely, because the scene is spiritualised by distance. We look down on the movements of the puppets as from a higher world—we are richer by an idea than they are: we see what Player is pulling the strings, the strings of which they are only half conscious. Our position in all these plays is the same as that of the greybeard, the stranger, the two girls, and the crowd in The Interior, and the acting of the family in this play is an example of the "active silence" which Maeterlinck in his essay, "Everyday Tragedy," was to suggest for the theatre when the actor is become an automaton through which the soul speaks more than words can say.
"In Alladine and Palomides there is more than one scene in which silence is the principal speaker; so, for instance, when Alladine and Palomides meet on the bridge over the castle moat, and the girl's pet lamb escapes from her hands, slips, and rolls into the water:
ALLADINE: What has he done? Where is he?
PALOMIDES: He has slipped! He is struggling in the middle of the whirlpool. Don't look at him; there is nothing we can do....
ALLADINE: You are going to save him?
PALOMIDES: Save him? Why, look at him; he is already in the suck of the whirlpool. In another minute he will be under the vaults; and God himself will not see him again....
ALLADINE: Go away! Go away!
PALOMIDES: What is the matter?
ALLADINE: Go away! I don't want to see you any more!...
[Enter ABLAMORE precipitately; he seizes ALLADINE and drags her away roughly without saying a word.]
Perhaps such a scene as this, with its prattling as of children, would be better in perfect than active silence, that is, as pantomime. (That pantomime may fascinate a modern audience has been proved by Max Reinhardt.) But to relate our story: Alladine's pet lamb, a symbol of her peace of mind or maiden apathy, had been frightened by Palomides' charger when the two first met. He had come to the castle (gloomy, etc.) of King Ablamore, to wed the latter's daughter Astolaine. Here he finds Alladine, who has come from Arcady.
Ablamore has been surnamed "The Wise";[1]] he was wise because nothing had happened to him, because hitherto he had lived