As a reading play Sister Beatrice is ruined by the species of blank verse in which it is said to be written. Typographically it is arranged in prose form; but palpable verses of this kind madden the reader:
"Il est prudent et sage; et ses yeux sont plus doux Que les yeux d'un enfant qui se met à genoux."
One of the things that Maeterlinck had treated in Wisdom and Destiny was the principal of justice. In Le Temple Enseveli (The Buried Temple) he deals with the subject exhaustively. He asks whether there is a justice other than that organised by men, and he finds it where he found fate, in their own breast. He proves that there is no physical justice coming from moral causes. Excess and imprudence have often a cause which we call immoral; but excess and imprudence may have an innocent or even heroic cause. Drunkards and debauchees are not necessarily criminals; they may be drawn into excess because they are weak and amiable (we all know very charming men who like drink; and what excellent uncles city bachelors often make). You are imprudent if you jump into the water in very cold weather to save somebody, and the consequences, let us say consumption for yourself and your children, are the same for you as for the villain who falls into the water while trying to throw somebody in. There is the same ignorance of moral causes in nature, the same indifference in heredity.[4] Why should the offspring of amiable drunkards be punished while the children of parricides and poisoners go scot-free? As to debauch, justice strikes according as precautions are taken or not, and never takes account of the victim's state of mind.
But we should be wrong to complain of the indifference of the universe. We have no right to be astonished at an injustice in which we ourselves take a very active part. Look at poverty, for instance—we class it with ills that cannot be helped, such as pestilence and shipwreck, but it is surely a result of the injustice of our social organisation. We shudder from one end of the world to the other when a judicial error is committed (Dreyfus affair); but the error which condemns the majority of our fellowmen to wretchedness we attribute to some inaccessible, implacable power. Again (this argument is in the section "La Chance," Chapter VII), look at animals. Compare the fate of the pampered race-horse with that of the tortured cab-horse: for all your talk of predestination, it is a case of injustice. But to the animals we work to death we are as the powers behind Nature are to us. Should we then expect more justice from Nature than we mete out to animals? Let us not condone our culpability by any appeal to Nature: Nature is not concerned with justice; her one aim, as was shown in The Life of the Bee, is to maintain, renew, and multiply life. Nature is not just with regard to us; but she may be just with regard to herself. When we say that Nature is not just, it comes to the same thing as saying that she takes no notice of our little virtues; it is our vanity, not our sense of justice, that is wounded. But because our morality is not proportionate to the immensity of the universe, it does not follow that we ought to give it up; it is proportionate to our stature and to our restricted destiny. Justice is identical with logic. It is in himself, not in Nature, that man must find an approbation of justice.
The second part of the book, which has much in common with The Life of the Bee, is devoted to the "reign of matter." Maeterlinck here (Chapter V) takes the opportunity of praising vegetarianism, which he is said to have tried. He says:
"It is not my intention to go deeply into the question of vegetarianism, nor to meet the objections that can be made to it; but it must be recognised that few of these objections withstand a loyal and attentive examination; and it may be asserted that all those who have tried this diet have recovered or fortified their health, and felt their mind grow brighter and purer, as though they had been freed from an immemorial, nauseating prison."
The admirers of Maeterlinck's mysticism were more astonished when, in 1902, Monna Vanna appeared than they had been on reading those worldly-wise essays in Wisdom and Destiny. Why here was a real play! A play in the theatrical sense, with action, attempted murder, conflict, tension, "honour," and all the rest of it. A play with characterisation at least attempted; for, though Marco is that wise old man we know so well by this time (the most awful version of him was in reserve for Mary Magdalene), though Guido Colonna is Golaud redivivus; Prinzivalle is at all events a passable shadow of Othello, and Monna Vanna is a heroine who positively develops (let us admit that Selysette had developed too). A play rhetorical in style; pictorial even—a city lit up by fireworks, the Leaning Tower of Pisa all aflame "your Hugo-flare against the night," (William Watson might have jeered). A play with a situation which might have been written specially for that dear old lady, Mrs Grundy; a situation which makes a licence for its performance quite out of the question in Mrs Grundy's England.[5] And when the play proves a great success in Paris and Germany, and more especially when the great dramatist goes on tour with it and Mme Leblanc,[6] who plays the title-rôle, Maeterlinck's old guard call him a renegade to himself, to the Maeterlinck who had once held forth the exciting prospect of a stage without actors and without action. But why should a writer not change his views?
Monna Vanna is written, partly, in the same kind of blank verse as Sister Beatrice—very poor stuff considered as poetry, and very troublesome to read as prose. From the point of view of style it is quite impossible to consider it as a great work of art. Dramatically, however, it is one of the most interesting plays produced so far in the twentieth century.
This is the first of Maeterlinck's plays which has not some legendary Weisznichtwo for its scene. These are not shapes seen vaguely through a gloaming of romance; they move in the full light of reality. Monna Vanna, in short, is a historical drama, a species of drama which, as we shall see, Maeterlinck rejects in a chapter of The Double Garden.
Perhaps, however, those critics are right who deny to Monna Vanna the title of a genuine historical drama. It is at all events evident that the chief interest lies in the soul's awakening in love of Monna and of Prinzivalle. It is concerned, too, with truth: no marriage can be moral in which either party doubts anything the other party says—if you love, you must believe. Historically, the characters are untrue: Marco could not have read Maeterlinck at the time he lived, and, not having read Maeterlinck, he could not be so wise as he is; Monna Vanna could not have read either Maeterlinck or Ibsen, and therefore she could not have had such ideas as she has. But why should a modern play be truly historical? Friedrich Hebbel, a far greater dramatist than Maeterlinck, said something to the effect that a play may be historical if it keeps fresh long enough for our descendants to see from it how we, at our period of history, conceived the past.