remains in continual communication, in mutual union with all the other
links.... In Maeterlinck's dramas the whole of nature vibrates with man,
either warning him of coming catastrophes or taking on a mournful
attitude after they have happened. He considers man to be a great,
fathomless mystery, which one cannot determine precisely, at which one
can only glance, noting his involuntary and instinctive words,
exclamations and impressions. Maeterlinck consciously deprives nature of
her passive rôle of a soulless accessory, he animates her, orders her to
collaborate actively in the action of the drama, to speak mysteriously
beside man and to man, to forecast future incidents and catastrophes, in
a word, to participate in all the actions of that fragment of human life
which is called a drama." This "rhythmic correspondence," as Mr. James
Huneker calls it, between man and his environment, is nowhere more
effectively insisted upon by Maeterlinck than in _Pelléas et Mélisande_.
Note the incident at the conclusion of the first act, where the
departure of the ship and the gathering of the storm are commented upon
by the two lovers in a scene which is charged with an inescapable
atmosphere of foreboding; note the incident of the fugitive doves in the
scene at Mélisande's tower window; or the episodic passage near the end
of the third act, during the tense and painful scene of Golaud's
espionage: "Do you see those poor people down there trying to kindle a
little fire in the forest?--It has rained. And over there, do you see
the old gardener trying to lift that tree that the wind has blown down
across the road?--He cannot; the tree is too big ... too heavy; ... it
will lie where it fell." Note, further on (in the third scene of the
fourth act), just in advance of the culmination of the tragedy, the
strange and ominous scene wherein Little Yniold describes the passing of
the flock of sheep:

"Why, there is no more sun.... They are coming, the little sheep.