ANNOTATIONS BY THE WAY

I.  “Pelleas and Melisande”

“Pelleas and Melisande” is the most beautiful of Maeterlinck’s plays, and to say this is to say that it is the most beautiful contemporary play.  Maeterlinck’s theatre of marionettes, who are at the same time children and spirits, at once more simple and more abstract than real people, is the reaction of the imagination against the wholly prose theatre of Ibsen, into which life comes nakedly, cruelly, subtly, but without distinction, without poetry.  Maeterlinck has invented plays which are pictures, in which the crudity of action is subdued into misty outlines.  People with strange names, living in impossible places, where there are only woods and fountains, and towers by the sea-shore, and ancient castles, where there are no towns, and where the common crowd of the world is shut out of sight and hearing, move like quiet ghosts across the stage, mysterious to us and not less mysterious to one another.  They are all lamenting because they do not know, because they cannot understand, because their own souls are so strange to them, and each other’s souls like pitiful enemies, giving deadly wounds unwillingly.  They are always in dread, because they know that nothing is certain in the world or in their own hearts, and they know that love most often does the work of hate and that hate is sometimes tenderer than love.  In “Pelleas and Melisande” we have two innocent lovers, to whom love is guilt; we have blind vengeance, aged and helpless wisdom; we have the conflict of passions fighting in the dark, destroying what they desire most in the world.  And out of this tragic tangle Maeterlinck has made a play which is too full of beauty to be painful.  We feel an exquisite sense of pity, so impersonal as to be almost healing, as if our own sympathy had somehow set right the wrongs of the play.

And this play, translated with delicate fidelity by Mr. Mackail, has been acted again by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Martin Harvey, to the accompaniment of M. Faure’s music, and in the midst of scenery which gave a series of beautiful pictures, worthy of the play.  Mrs. Campbell, in whose art there is so much that is pictorial, has never been so pictorial as in the character of Melisande.  At the beginning I thought she was acting with more effort and less effect than in the original performance; but as the play went on she abandoned herself more and more simply to the part she was acting, and in the death scene had a kind of quiet, poignant, reticent perfection.  A plaintive figure out of tapestry, a child out of a nursery tale, she made one feel at once the remoteness and the humanity of this waif of dreams, the little princess who does know that it is wrong to love.  In the great scene by the fountain in the park, Mrs. Campbell expressed the supreme unconsciousness of passion, both in face and voice, as no other English