MAETERLINCK'S MYSTICAL PLAYS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3247, 7 June 1916, Page 70

MAETERLINCK'S MYSTICAL PLAYS.

By Edith Searle Grossman's - , M.A.

; Maeterlinck’s “Pelleas and Mehsande,” i “Princess Maleine,” “Aglavaine and Selysette,” “Alladine and Paloniides,” “The Death of Tintagiles” belong to a group of romanticist mystical plays. In another I group (“An Interior,” ‘The Blind,” etc.), ! the scene is that of the actual world, ! an -d the persons are no longer Royal | Princes, but peasants, priest, blind men i and women. Yet the atmosphere is still i that of a ghostly other world. The most i familiar objects have the strangest look. )■ Dead leaves and faded daffodils, yews and I willows are symbols of some surrounding mystery. Two short plays of this group are tiro most perfect productions of Maeterlinck’s art. “An Interior” (“LTnterieur”) and “The Blind” (“Les Avengles”). In “In- | torior” it is night, and we see an old i garden planted with willow trees. In the i garden is a cottage with three lighted | windows, showing the interior of a room i in which a family are sitting near the j lamp. The mother, with vacant eyes, holds | a baby on one arm, two girls in white are embroidering; the father is seated in the chimney corner; outside in tho dark an old man and a stranger come into the garden. They have found the body of a third daughter drowned in the brook. The old man has come before the bearers to tell her parents, but when he sees them, he stops and watches their every movement “as if from the attitude of another world.” The sisters inside come to the window and look out into the darkness but see nothing. Outside first one and then another of the old man's little grandchildren—Marie and Martha—arrive thinking those within must have been told by now. They talk together of the dead girl. The old man remembers that when he saw her last she smiled as people smile who want to bo silent, or who fear that they will not be understood. “You live for months by the side of one who is no longer of this world, and whose soul cannot, stoop to it. You answer her unthinkingly. Last evening she was there, sitting in the lamplight like her- sisters.” As they stand watching and whispering, they hear the murmur of the crowd who are combi" near, with those who are bearing the body. They are coming into the garden. The old man goes to the door. Still watching, Martha and the stranger see him at last enter. Then ho is in the room. Those within have been told. The crowd draws nearer. Father, mother, and sisters are seen coming out of the door. That is all; but it is told with marvellous art. We got a wonderful impression of unconsciousness and death, but strangely dissociated from persons. Tho characters are nothing. The personality disappears, the feeling is almost disembodied. “The Blind” (“Les Avengles”) shows a transition between ! the romanticism of “Pelleas and Melisande” and the realism of “An Interior.” The scene is an ancient northern forest in an island of the sea. Above is a deep sky full of stars. There are great funereal trees, yews, willows, cypresses. On one side are sitting a group of six blind men facing another group of blind women, but separated from them by an uprooted tree and a rock. In the midst, a little apart, sits an old priest, wrapped in a black cloak, his eyes “fixed on Eternity.” He has brought them out from a home to walk in the forest, sat flown with them to rest, and been struck ,by death. But the blind can only wonder | why lie has loft them there, and where I he has gone, and what will become of | them. Amongst the women is one without j wits, suckling an infant. They hear the sound of the sea. One speaks of a distant country that she came from, where, before her sight was lost, she saw beautiful ! things. They listen to the wind, to the I rustle of leaves; they feel the chill of 1 night. At last one of the blind men j follows a clog, and groping his way to the priest, finds him dead. All sit lost and alone, wondering what they will do. They j hear a footstep. It stops near them. They cry out. But there is no answer except [ the crying of the infant. There have been many poems and tales written about the blind or about blindness—from Milton’s sonnet on his own blindness, and from his “Samson” to Bulwer Lytton’s Nydia in “The Last Days of Pompeii,” and the verses of the blind poet Philip Bourke Marston; but perhaps nothing has ever been written that so powerfully conveys the impression of sightlessness as this play of Maeterlinck’s. As in “LTnterieur” there is an overpowering sense of impersonal abstractions, or essences that wo can abstract, but which to Maeterlinck are more real than the human beings who generate them or are touched by them. What we feel in every sentence is blindness and all that it means. These two plays are on a higher level than the romantic cycle. The, latter are largely wilful inventions, these are realities of common life, but revealed through spiritual insight as unfathomable mysteries. The last of these multiplex Maeterlinck’s is the Maeterlinck of the great war, whose themes are patriotism, death, and the deathlessness of the spirit that acts or suffers great things and passes from the corpse of one human being to animate the body of its fellow-men or women.