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Jethro Bithell
Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck

Pelleas is very anxious to depart on a long journey to see a friend who is dying. If he had done so, the tragedy might have been, if not prevented, at all events retarded. But his father is lying dangerously ill in the Castle (the only use for this father in the economy of the play is to be ill); filial duty chains him there. This is in the nature of an accident; and by the canons of dramaturgy accidents must not precipitate tragedy, but Maeterlinck's plays proudly ignore the canons of dramaturgy. (Maeterlinck would say the accident was arranged by Fate.) Pelleas and Melisanda meet on a high place overlooking the sea. They watch a great ship – the ship that has brought Melisanda – sailing across the strip of light cast by the lighthouse, sailing out into the great open spaces where the soul is at home. A few words of common speech tell us what perilous life is awakening in these two sister souls that till now had not lived:

PELLEAS: Let us descend here. Will you give me your hand?

MELISANDA: You see I have my hands full of flowers and leaves…

PELLEAS: I will hold you by the arm, the path is steep, and it is very dark here… I am going away to-morrow perhaps…

MELISANDA: O, why are you going away?

We find them again under an old lime-tree in the dense, discreet forest, at the "Fountain of the Blind." (They are the blind.) Melisanda would like to plunge her two hands into the water … it seems to her that her hands are ill. Her hair, which is longer than her body (what poetry Maeterlinck has dreamed into hair and hands!) falls down, and touches the water (a Burne-Jones). She tosses her wedding-ring into the air (as the Princess at the fountain under the lime-tree in the dark forest near the King's castle in The Frog Prince⁵⁶ tosses a golden ball), and just as noon is striking it falls into the water. She had cast it too high towards the sunlight… We hear soon that at the twelfth stroke of noon Golaud's horse, taking fright in the forest, had dashed against a tree, and seriously injured its rider. While Melisanda is at her husband's bedside, he notices that her ring is gone. She lies to him; she has lost it in a cave, she says. Does she lie? Her union with Golaud is an external bond; but her soul knows nothing of things external, her soul is innocent of whatever her mouth may say to a man who is a stranger to her soul. He sends her to the cave to look for the ring, in the dark – with Pelleas. She is frightened by the noise of the cave – is it the noise of the night or the noise of silence? Later on Pelleas finds Melisanda combing her hair at the casement of a tower. She leans over; he holds her hand; her golden hair falls down and inundates him (another Burne-Jones):

PELLEAS: O! O! what is this?.. Your hair, your hair comes down to me!.. All your hair, Melisanda, all your hair has fallen from the tower! I am holding it in my hands, I am touching it with my lips… I am holding it in my arms, I am putting it round my neck… I shall not open my hands again this night…

Doves (the doves of the body's chastity, perhaps) come out of the tower and fly around them. Golaud surprises the pair, and tells them they are children. What he suspects, however, we know from a scene in the caverns under the Castle, when he is on the point of pushing his brother over a ledge of rock into a stagnant pool that stinks of death. But his jealousy has not yet grown sufficiently to force him to murder, and he contents himself with warning Pelleas. There follows a scene which brings the house down whenever the play is acted: Golaud questions his little son by a former marriage as to how the pair behave when they are alone; and lifts the little boy up so that he may peep in at the window of the tower and tell him what they are doing in the room. Golaud in his anguish digs his nails into the child's flesh, but he finds nothing to justify his suspicions; nevertheless in a following scene he loses his self-control, and, in the presence of his grandfather, ill-treats Melisanda. In the meantime the father is declared to be out of danger (Fate needs the father's recovery now to precipitate the tragedy); Pelleas is free to go away, and he asks Melisanda for a last meeting, by night, in the forest. She leaves her husband asleep, and the lovers meet in the moonlight. "How great our shadows are this evening!" says Melisanda. "They enlace each other to the back of the garden," replies Pelleas. "O! how they kiss each other far from us." Here Melisanda sees Golaud behind a tree, where their shadows end. They know they cannot escape; they fall into each other's arms and exchange their first guilty kiss. Golaud kills Pelleas, wounds Melisanda, and stabs himself. But Melisanda, ere she dies (of a wound which would not kill a pigeon) gives birth to a daughter, "a little girl that a beggar woman would be ashamed to bring into the world." On her death-bed Golaud implores her to tell him the truth – has she loved Pelleas with a guilty love? But she can only whisper vague words.

The child-wife dies; and King Arkel, the wise old man of the play, closes it by a few fatalistic sentences:

"She was so tranquil, so timid, and so silent a little being… She was a mysterious little being like everybody else… She lies there as though she were the big sister of her child… Come away, come away… My God! My God!.. I shall not be able to understand anything any more… Don't let us stay here. – Come away; the child must not stay in this room… It must live now, in its turn… It's the poor little one's turn now…"

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";⁵⁷[Pg 71] he was wise because nothing had happened to him, because hitherto he had lived

 
"In apathy of life unrealised,
And days to Lethe floating unenjoyed."
 

But now he stands on his turrets and summons the events which had avoided him. They come – and they overpower him. It is love that brings the events. "How beautiful she is," he says, bending over Alladine while she is asleep. "I will kiss her without her knowing it, holding back my poor white beard." He would fain make her his queen; but she returns the love which Palomides, untrue to Astolaine, conceives for her. Astolaine discovers the truth; but she, the first of Maeterlinck's strong, emancipated women, feels no jealousy. Her behaviour is similar to that of Selysette in a later play; but her character is identical with Aglavaine's in that play: the rôles of the women in Aglavaine and Selysette are reversed. It is Aglavaine's beautiful soul for the sake of which Méléandre is untrue to Selysette. Palomides recognises, when his love turns from the woman to the child, "that there must be something more incomprehensible than the beauty of the most beautiful soul or the most beautiful face"; and something more powerful too, for he cannot help obeying it. Palomides is quite aware that Astolaine is a type superior to Alladine. He loves her even when he is faithless. "I love you," he says to her, "more than her I love." (The situation is the same in Grillparzer's Sappho: Phaon prefers Melitta, also a little Greek slave, to the renowned and noble poetess.) "She has a soul," Palomides says of Astolaine, "that you can see round her, that takes you in its arms as though you were a suffering child, and which, without speaking, consoles you for everything…" This doctrine of the soul's fluidity appears in the scene in which Astolaine tells her father that she has ceased to love Palomides:

ABLAMORE: Come hither, Astolaine. It is not so that you were accustomed to speak to your father. You are waiting there, on the threshold of a door that is hardly open, as though you were ready to run away; and with your hand on the key, as though you wished to close the secret of your heart on me for ever. You know well that I have not understood what you have just said, and that words have no meaning when souls are not within reach of each other. Come nearer, and speak no more. (ASTOLAINE comes slowly nearer.) There is a moment when souls touch and know everything without there being any need of moving the lips. Come nearer… Our souls do not reach each other yet, and their ray ⁵⁸ is so dim around us!.. (ASTOLAINE holds still.) You dare not? – You know then how far one can go? Very well then, I will come to you… (With slow steps he comes near ASTOLAINE, then stops, and looks at her long.) I see you, Astolaine…

ASTOLAINE: My father!.. (She sobs and embraces the old man.)

ABLAMORE: You see that it was useless …

Palomides promises Alladine that he will take her away from this cold clime where the sky is like the vault of a cave to a land where Heaven is sweet, where the trees are not a wilderness of boughs blackening the steep hill-sides like carrion ribs, but a wind-waved sea of rustling shade… They are both poor little wandering souls aweary in exile. While they are preparing their flight, the events Ablamore has summoned drive him mad; and now, with golden keys in his hand (gold glinting against white walls, no doubt, another Pre-Raphaelite picture), he singing a dirge with a refrain which is Maeterlinck's best lyric line: Allez où vos yeux vous mènent. He thwarts the lovers' plans by shutting them up, blindfolded and pinioned, in the vast caverns under the castle. "These caverns," comments Mieszner, "are the place we all dream in, the place where our longing for the light leads us astray into strange, contradictory deeds." The symbolism of the play is concentrated in these scenes below the ground: the thought that life is sublimated in moments of enchantment which pitiless light soon dispels. The prisoners break their bonds. When their eyes get used to the light, it seems to them that they are in a great blue hall, whose vault, drunken with jewels, is held aloft by pillars wreathed by innumerable roses. They see below them a lake so blue that the sky might have flowed thither… It is full of strange and stirless flowers… They think they are embracing in the vestibules of Heaven… But suddenly they hear the din of iron ringing on the rock above them… Stones fall from the roof; and as the light pours in through the opening, "it reveals to them little by little the wretchedness of the cave they had deemed wonderful; the miraculous lake grows dull and sinister; the jewels lose their light; and the glowing roses are seen to be the stains of rubbish phosphorescent with decay."

 
"Wanders along the marble corridors
That interlace their soundless floors around
And to the centre of his royal home,"
 

Ablamore has fled raving into the land; and the good Astolaine (this woman of Maeterlinck we love) has come to rescue the forsaken lovers. She comes too late – they have been poisoned by the deadly reek of the unreal in the caverns they dreamed in; and they die moaning piteously to each other across the corridor that parts their beds:

ALLADINE'S VOICE: They were not jewels…

PALOMIDES' VOICE: And the flowers were not real…

The passion of love may break the bonds of custom, and for a swift space the world may seem lit by a magic light; but the awakening comes, and the poison works, and in the cold wretchedness of reality even love will die. Love (sensual love) is a short dream of fair things that fade…

Interior, which was performed at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in March, 1895, is better than The Intruder in so far as the coming of death is not indicated by suspicious signs (which turn out to be from natural causes) and dim forebodings (which might possibly be the drivelling of old age). Here everything is taken absolutely from life. Interior, too, shows a great mastery of "active silence": some of the scenes in Alladine and Palomides approach pantomime; in Interior we have actual pantomime – the family whom the tragedy befalls are seen sitting in the lamplit room of their house, mute characters, and the spectators, together with the speaking characters, see them, through the three windows, resting from their day's toil. There are three daughters in the family, as in The Intruder; but one of them has drowned herself.

"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.⁵⁹ "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.