"She was perhaps one of those who won't say anything, and everybody has in his mind more than one; reason for ending his life.... You can't see into the soul as you see into that room. They are all the same.... They only say the usual things; and nobody suspects anything.... They look like dolls that don't move, and such a lot of things are happening in their souls.... They don't know themselves what they are.... No doubt she lived as the others live.... No doubt she went on saying to the day of her death: 'It's going to rain to-day'; or, it may be: 'The fruit isn't ripe yet.' They talk with a smile of flowers that have withered, and in the dark they cry...."
"The Stranger" has waded into the river, and brought the body to the shore; and now he, with "The Greybeard," a friend of the family, is in the old garden planted with willows. The Greybeard is to tell the bad news before the crowd arrives with the corpse. But while he looks at the peaceful idyll in the lamplight—the mother with the baby sleeping on her left shoulder, not moving lest it should awake, the sisters embroidering, the father by the fire—his courage sinks, and it is only when the crowd with the body arrive that he enters the house. We see the father rising to greet the visitor, and one of the girls offering him a chair. By his gestures we know he is speaking. Suddenly the mother starts and rises. She questions the Greybeard. The whole family rush out at the door. The room is left empty, except for the baby, which sleeps on in the arm-chair where the mother has put it down.
Interior needs no interpretation. It is one of the simplest, as it is one of the most terrible, masterpieces in all literature. Some critics consider it the best thing Maeterlinck has written.
In The Death of Tintagiles the tragedy takes place behind a closed door. ("Victor Hugo said that nothing is more interesting than a wall behind which something is happening," Jules Lemaître reminds us.[3] "This tragic wall is in all M. Maeterlinck's poems," he continues; "and when it is not a wall, it is a door; and when it is not a door, it is a window veiled with curtains.") Behind the closed door, in an enormous tower which still withstands the ravages of time when the rest of the castle is crumbling to pieces, dwells the Queen (Death). The castle is stifled by poplars. It is sunk deep down in a girdle of darkness. They might have built it on the top of the mountains that take all the air from it.... One might have breathed there, and seen the sea all round the island. The Queen never comes down from her tower, and all the doors of it are closed night and day. But she has servants who move with noiseless feet. The Queen has a power that none can fathom; "and we live here with a great pitiless weight on our soul." "She is there on our soul like a tombstone, and none dares stretch out his arm." Ygraine explains this to her little brother Tintagiles, whom the Queen has sent for from over the sea. There is some talk of the boy's golden crown, as there was of Melisanda's; every soul is royal, and comes from far away, you remember. Bellangère, the boy's other sister, has heard the Queen's servants whispering. They know that the Queen has sent for the boy to kill him. The only friend the two sisters and the boy have is Aglovale, a greybeard, who, like Arkel, has long since renounced the vanity of resisting fate and having a will of his own. "All is useless," he says; but now he is willing to defend the boy, since they hope. He sits down on the threshold with his sword across his knees. The Queen's servants come with stealthy feet, and Aglovale's sword snaps when he tries to prevent them from opening the door. But this time the servants, meeting resistance, withdraw, only to return when Aglovale and the sisters are asleep. Tintagiles is sleeping too, between the sisters, with his arms round their necks; and their arms are round him. His hands are plunged deep into their hair; he holds a golden curl tight between his teeth. The servants cut the sisters' hair, and remove the boy, still sleeping, with his little hands full of golden curls. At the end of the corridor he screams; Ygraine awakes, and rushes in pursuit. Bellangère falls in a dead faint on the threshold. The fifth act is a picture of unendurable anguish. "A great iron door under very dark vaults." Ygraine enters with a lamp in her hand. Faint knocking is heard on the other side of the door; then the voice of Tintagiles. Ygraine scratches her finger-nails out on the iron door, and smashes her lamp on it. The boy cries out that hands are at his throat. "The fall of a little body is heard behind the iron door." Ygraine implores, curses, sinks down exhausted.
It is probably wrong to look on The Death of Tintagiles as, principally, a picture of physical anguish. That would be dramatic, and therefore, in Maeterlinck's idea at the time he wrote the play, vulgar. The play is rather based, like The Sightless, on the sensations of fear we have when we awaken from the poisoned apathy, which is the safeguard of the peace of mind of most people, in the stifling air of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. (The Queen's Tower overshadows all the rest of the castle.) Everything is plunged in darkness here.... Only the Queen's Tower is lit.... We know, but we do not understand....
TINTAGILES: What do you know, sister Ygraine?
YGRAINE: Very little, my child.... My sister and I, since we were born, have trailed our existence here without daring to understand anything of all that happens.... I have lived for a very long time like a blind woman in this island; and everything seemed natural to me.... I saw no other events here except a bird that was flying, a leaf that was trembling, a rose that was opening.... Such a silence reigned here that a ripe fruit falling in the park called faces to the windows.... And nobody seemed to have any suspicions ... but one night I found out that there must be something else.... I wanted to run away and I couldn't....
We cannot flee from our exile; and "we have got to live while we wait for the unexpected," as Aglovale says.
[1] Ablamore was not really wise, according to the theories propounded in Wisdom and Destiny. A wise man is one who knows himself; but he is not wise if he does not know himself in the future as well as in the present and in the past. He knows a part of his future because he is himself already a part of this future; and, since the events which will happen to him will become assimilated to his own nature, he knows what these events will become (Chapter VIII).
[2] Cf. in Strindberg's Legends, "The soul's irradiation and dilatability": "The secret of a great actor lies in his inborn capacity to let his soul ray out, and thereby enter into touch with his audience. In great moments there is actually a radiance round a speaker who is full of soul, and his face irradiates a light which is visible even to those who do not believe." The idea is more or less of a commonplace.