act to perfection a part in which the soul is left out of the question,
in which nothing happens according to nature, and in which life is
figured as a long attack of nerves, relieved by the occasional interval
of an uneasy sleep.




ANNOTATIONS BY THE WAY

I. "PELLÉAS AND MÉLISANDE"


"Pelléas and Mélisande" 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