Chapter XV: Act II: Tent of Prinzevalle. We have admirable opportunities to study

the man's character, virile, upright, fearless, poetic, melancholy, through his interviews with his faithful secretary and Trivulzio, the emissary of the Florentine government. The siege has lasted too long; Prinzevalle has waxed too powerful, a conspiracy has been formed against him. He is to be deposed, assassinated. He finds all this in his conversation with the lying, base Trivulzio. The episode has an antique quality. Trivulzio attempts an attack, but is easily repulsed, though he receives a slight wound in the face, warning Prinzevalle meanwhile that by daybreak he will be deposed, ruined. There is nothing left then but the improbable acceptance by Guido Colonna and his virtuous spouse of the hard condition he has imposed upon them.

She approaches. She has been saluted by the sentries. Prinzevalle is amazed. She is enveloped in a long cloak--beneath it she is a Lady Godiva. The meeting is one of the most curious in dramatic literature. Gustave Flaubert had anticipated it in Salammbô, but the daughter of Hamilcar was a barbarian, after all, and Mâtho's love for her brutal. The souls of Maeterlinck's pair are set before us with clearness, force, and solemnity. The aptitude for dissection of motive displayed by the poet in his previous work is revealed here with splendid results. It is all natural--as natural as such a situation can be--and the dismay of the noble woman is mitigated somewhat when she discovers Prinzevalle has known her, has always loved her, that he means her no harm. By degrees she extorts the truth from him.

He is the playmate of her happiest hours; for her he has moved mountains. Fresh from the insulting insinuations of her husband, her head aflame with her exalted mission, she begins to see her life as it really is. No, she does not precipitate herself into his arms! The transition is infinitely more subtle than could be accomplished by most modern playwrights. It is atmospheric. The dialogue leads us through the avenues of this strangely reunited couple. _He_ is all passion and tenderness. _She_--curiosity has given way to remembrance. At the end he goes to Pisa with her, her captive; while radiant, unharmed, she hastes to her husband and fellow-countrymen. The promised stores have been sent; Prinzevalle deserts the cause of Florence--he is not a Florentine, and as his life is in danger his defection may be pardoned. And he loves. Stella Hohenfels in this scene quite surpassed herself at the Hofburg Theatre, Vienna, where I witnessed a capital performance of the play in 1903, with Joseph Kainz, Reimers, and others in the cast.

Daring as is this act, the next outgenerals it in surprises. Vanna marches through the rejoicing city, lighted as for a feast. She is conducted as a conqueror to her husband. Then begins the struggle. He repulses her, heaping upon her vile phrases. Yes, she has saved Pisa, but how? Where is the honour of the Colonna? She implores, explains, denies, affirms. But when Guido learns the name of the silent warrior who has accompanied her, his rage is boundless. It is her lover that she hales back as a slave to show her triumph. There is enough meat in this act to furnish forth a gross of modern nerveless, boneless, bloodless abortions of drama now before the footlights. As a specimen of the romantic drama with the accompaniment of a profound psychology, Monna Vanna makes modern French works of the papier-maché type droop like fresh flowers in a thunderstorm.

Incredulously the infuriated husband hears that Prinzevalle has made no advances to Vanna. It is too much. Why, then, is he here? he demands. He claims the head of Prinzevalle. Vanna jumps into the mob of soldiers, crying that she has lied, lied abominably. Prinzevalle seized her, she declares, and to defend herself she has wounded him. Behold his face--which shows the marks of his struggle with the Florentine emissary, Trevulzio.

It is a striking situation. In the heyday of his glory Sardou never devised anything more theatrically effective--setting aside consideration of the psychologic imbroglio. Vanna then claims Prinzevalle as her spoils of war. To the victor belongs the vanquished. Colonna, despite Prinzevalle's assertion that Vanna's lie is another lie, is handed over to the care of Vanna's people. In a swift "aside" she commands silence. She loves him, she whispers. Marco understands--understands the manner in which Vanna will be revenged upon Prinzevalle and also upon her husband for his disbelief. The latter now disclaims his former doubts. Let her work her vengeance upon the man she has captured. But for her all that has gone before in her entire life is as a bad dream. The real, the beautiful life, the dream, is at hand. It will be her revenge. She must go at once to her prisoner, to Prinzevalle in his cell--the curtain falls.

There are weak spots in the scheme which tax one's credulity. Something of the improbable must be granted a dramatist be he never so logical. The rapid mental change of Vanna hints at a nature naturally casuistical, as were no doubt many Italians of the Renascence. Her love for Colonna could never have been deep-rooted. But she did not betray him, and yet she has been adjudged profoundly immoral--in a word, not to put too fine an edge upon the sophistries of the situation, this heroine committed an imaginative infidelity as well as telling a falsehood. The madness of the finale is but the logical outcome of her love for Prinzevalle. Few plays, however, reveal their complete essence in the mere reading. And the cryptic stammering, the arrested spasms, of Maeterlinck's earlier style vanish quite in the action of Monna Vanna.

I have dwelt perhaps to lengths upon the spiritual development of the man,--those who run may follow his material progress,--but the reason is simple: the soul of Maeterlinck is in his plays. That he is a creative thinker is not asserted. He has studied deeply the wisdom of the ancients, of the moderns. He knows Emerson and Molière. He knows Saint Teresa and John of the Cross. Conceive an artistic temperament that seeks the phrase for itself as did Walter Pater; that loves the soul of humanity as did Robert Browning; that seeks a dramatic synthesis for his poetry, philosophy, rhetoric--and you have this man. His Flemish _fond_ may account for his mystic temperament, for his preoccupation with things of the spirit, and yet how difficult it is to place the critical finger on this quality and that quality, as if on the bumps of the phrenologist, and say--here is the real Maurice Maeterlinck!

VI

Passers-by on the Boulevard, the summer of 1903, stared at the Gymnase Theatre, which bore the inscription: Le Théâtre Maeterlinck. Certainly such an institution as the Maeterlinck Theatre was undreamed of a decade ago by the poet's most fanatical adherents.

However, there it stood, this _affiche_; and there it stood the night I stumbled through the semi-obscurity of the well-known house to my _loge._ The criticisms of the new play had not been reassuring; a second Monna Vanna was not to be expected; a return to Maeterlinck's earlier manner was unthinkable, so I confess that I awaited the parting of the curtains with a fair amount of curiosity. I was not disappointed when the first scene disclosed a _loggia_ of a Renascence _palazzo_. This setting sounded the keynote--and a very beautiful, delicate note it was, for the author has been as careful in the mounting of this play as he was indifferent in his first essays. Signor Rovescalli of Milan had carried out the designs of Charles Doudelet with fidelity and taste. The Pinturicchio costumes are all from the same hands. Nothing--except the lighting--has been omitted that might add to the incarnation of this dream--for a dream play Joyzelle is, full of strange hypnotic action and phrases that haunt.

The piece, which is called a Conte d'Amour, is in five short acts. It is confined to four characters, two of which carry the slight thread of story. In style it is midway between Maeterlinck's earlier manner and Monna Vanna. It might, if considered in historic sequence, have been written before Monna Vanna, and thus could have furnished the link between the static and the dynamic theatre of this poet. Coming after the Italian tragedy of hot blood, it seems like a casting back to an earlier manner. But it is not. There is more action than in any play,--Vanna excepted,--more than in Pelléas and Mélisande. There are passion and climax that come perilously nearer theatricalism than anything Maeterlinck has yet written, though he steers around the banal, avoiding it by a hair-breadth. Admirers of the dramatist's repressed style must have taken a deep breath as the episode of the attempted assassination developed into something quite unexpected.

Joyzelle is little more than a series of situations, in which the heroine is tested by the stern old enchanter Merlin. When I called upon the poet at his picturesque little house in Passy, I asked him about The Tempest, which the critics one and all saw in his play. He smiled and replied that Shakespeare was a good point of departure. Could there be a better one? The resemblance is rather superficial. Prospero and Miranda are, in the mysterious island of Maeterlinck, Merlin and Lanceor--the latter the magician's son; and Joyzelle is, if you will, a female Ferdinand come to woo the youth.

The changes to be rung on such a theme are not a few. But Maeterlinck has elected to introduce a new and more disturbing element. It is Arielle, the subconscious nature of Merlin, who always warns him of impending danger. Instead of the old-fashioned soliloquy, we are given, because of this dualism, dialogues between Merlin and his subliminal self. This sounds terribly metaphysical, but as treated by Maeterlinck Merlin's _alter ego_--his _doppelgänger_, as the German mystics have it--is a charming young woman attired in gray and purple, minor in key. If she is his constant mentor, he has also the power of projecting her into the visible world--materializing, the spiritualists call it; and as Klingsor tempted Parsifal by transforming Kundry into a seductive shape, so Merlin uses Arielle as an agent of temptation against his son, his weak and handsome Lanceor.

The plot is slight. Love, a very passionate, earthly love, is the theme. Doubtless Maeterlinck intends the entire _conte_ as a symbol; theatre-goers will be more interested in its external garb. Briefly, Merlin interrogates the sleeping Arielle and learns that his son Lanceor, who has just arrived on the island, is at the crisis of his life. "Le destin de ton fils est inscrit tout entier dans un cercle d'amour." He is condemned by the Fates to die within the month if he does not find a perfect love, and to this love all is permitted, even crime. If the girl upon whom he casts his eyes will sacrifice all for her love, then happiness will be his portion. We are plunged into a fairy land at the first words of Merlin. This gift of evoking an atmosphere in a few phrases is Maeterlinck's own. All resemblance to Shakespeare's folk vanishes as the scheme is unfolded. At first we see Merlin addressing Arielle. When she sleeps he loses his force and so he awakens her. After learning Lanceor's destiny, he resolves to be on his guard. Joyzelle is cast up by the sea, and, encountering Lanceor, the inflammable pair fall madly in love with each other. Nothing can come between, or if any one does--! Lanceor is more assured than Joyzelle that this is his first, his perfect passion. But Merlin, who pretends anger, as does Prospero, resolves to test the newly kindled flame. He threatens to kill Joyzelle if she meets Lanceor, but she defies him, and refuses to bind herself to any promise imposed upon her. To a sonorous and emphatic _Non_! the curtain intervenes.

Merlin now devises a series of tests for his son. Like Marco Colonna in Monna Vanna, he would be cruel only to be kind. The first is the trial by separation. In a lonely tower Lanceor is found by Joyzelle. The place is as forbidding as the country of Browning's Childe Roland. Joyzelle calls to Lanceor, who rushes to her arms. As they embrace each other, trees put on full bloom, flowers carpet the ground, and all nature bursts into life--only the order of decay and bloom is reversed. Then Merlin has Lanceor bitten by a serpent, and falling into a magic slumber Arielle appears, and he finds her instead of Joyzelle, who has been sternly sent away. She returns only to find her lover desperately enamoured of a strange woman. Even this does not shake her faith. She refuses to believe the treachery of Lanceor. After Arielle has departed, in a scene of singular power he drives forth his patient Griselidis. It is almost brutal in its intensity.

In Act III Arielle bids Merlin leave Lanceor and seize Joyzelle for himself,--a genuine subconscious suggestion this! In the security of her wonderful love he may find safety from that Viviane, who later saps his soul in the old-world wood of Broceliande. Joyzelle is proof against the most insidious temptations, and in the trial by faith she emerges triumphantly. Merlin suddenly commands her to look around, and she will see Lanceor held captive in the arms of another. She moves away without turning her head, thus averting the fate of a second Lot's wife. The spectator, drugged by this time, begins to wonder if this paragon has an Achilles heel. Merlin is quite as envious, for in the next trial he causes Lanceor--poor Lanceor!--to be brought nigh death's door, and Joyzelle, rendered desperate, throws herself at the cruel parent's feet. She promises to fulfil any condition he may see fit in his caprice to impose. Impose one he does. If Lanceor is restored to health, will she become Merlin's bride instead of the son's? This, it must be admitted, is a very ingenious form of torture, and yet, when in the bigness of her soul Joyzelle acquiesces, we feel that another bead has been touched in this rosary of pain.

How to extricate the girl from her grave position? Lanceor's good looks have been spoiled by his illness--a mere trifle for this insatiable creature. In the last act Merlin lies sleeping, Arielle on guard. Joyzelle approaches, her face set in despair, yet firm in her purpose to fulfil her destiny. She has promised. Lanceor has been saved. She will pay. As she reaches the couch of the magician she plucks forth a dagger and would have bloody murder. This is the supreme test--rather a disquieting doctrine to the passivists and gentle persons who feed on Maeterlinck's balmy philosophies. Love that does not flinch at crime is the keystone to this little arch of a play. Merlin is satisfied. Joyzelle has undergone his tests. She is the perfect woman for Lanceor's perfect love. The two are united, and the lovely landscape fades from our view like the misty pictures in a Chopin Ballade.

Ideal love is the motive of this new play, love that will march to the jaws of hell, if needs be, for the beloved one; Orpheus and Eurydice, Hero and Leander, or any other enamoured couple come to your memory as the ingenuous Joyzelle, who has not a faint trace of humour in her, proceeds gravely to the unpleasant tasks set her by Merlin. I could not help recalling that Princess Istar,--set to music by d'Indy,--who goes down into Hades and at each of its seven gates casts away a part of her belongings. At the seventh and last gate she has remaining only her nakedness. Maeterlinck removes leaf after leaf from the flower-like soul of Joyzelle until its very core is reached.

While she bears a sisterly resemblance to many of his narve infantile women, she is nearer related to Monna Vanna in her affirmative nature. She is very full-blooded for a dream maiden, and at times she showed something of Sardou's tigress-like creatures. Possibly one received this impression because Georgette Leblanc, who originated the title rôle, has evidently been a close student of Sarah Bernhardt's methods. As is the case with modern _féministe_ writers--were there ever ancient ones?--the woman is enthroned, she is the Eternal Womanly, and she has the final word in the destiny of things, as in Goethe's poem. Lanceor does not appear in an undesirable light, while Merlin represents Wisdom and makes very Maeterlinckian speeches. His final words are full of the sober dignity we expect from the author of Wisdom and Destiny.

In Joyzelle the words count for something, no matter what the author intends them to convey by the "second intention." He once wrote "Les hommes out je ne sais quelle peur étrange de la beauté." This strange fear the young Belgian Merlin evokes of his own accord. We sense the beauty, but are uncomfortable in its presence. Human beings or semi-humans must act to reveal themselves. This they do in Joyzelle. There can be no reproach here of the abuse of the "static," only the action and words--couched in harmonious prose--do not quite summon reality to us.

The disembodied thoughts of the poet are given a local habitation and a name, and still they remain thoughts, abstractions; they are not of our flesh and blood, but seem to inhabit that "Third Kingdom" Ibsen has foretold. More "interior" than Monna Vanna, Joyzelle is hardly apt to be appreciated. I feel quite sure that many of the adjectives lavished upon it by the Parisian press were not sincere. As a race the French cannot be in sympathy with the gray, slow, poetic images of this Belgian mystic.

I had read Walkley's capital book on Dramatic Criticism, and after the performance of Joyzelle I opened its pages and saw this: "So, says Coleridge, stage presentations are to produce a sort of temporary half faith, which the spectator encourages in himself and supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part, because he knows that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is. Thus the true stage illusion as to a forest scene consists--not in the mind's judging it to be a forest, but in its remission of the judgment that it is not a forest."

Joyzelle, then, would be the negation of the drama did we not allow for Coleridge's "remission." If we can shut our eyes to the pure idealism of Arielle, and see, as the poet intends us to do, a little love tale, our enjoyment would be materially heightened. Theories hamper; so does criticism. And the unhappiest critic of the drama is he who approaches his author consciously. As in music, so in much of the Maeterlinckian drama, nothing happens, and if we could be content to abandon ourselves on the waves of the dramatist's fantasy, our pleasure would be tenfold enhanced. This is the attitude in which one receives music. Why not adopt its receptivity in Maeterlinck's case? for his plays are as near the inarticulateness of music as they dare to be and still retain sober lineaments.

The performance was a delight throughout. Every person in the cast is an artist, and as Joyzelle I had an excellent opportunity to study the personality and art of Georgette Leblanc,--now Mme. Maeterlinck,--for whom Monna Vanna was written. A versatile woman, Leblanc was originally in opera. She has sung Thaïs, Sapho, Navarraise, Carmen, Françoise in L'Attaque au Moulin, the Bruneau-Zola music drama, and has played over Europe with unbounded success Charlotte Corday and Monna Vanna. As an interpreter of the _lieder_ literature of Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, and the new Frenchmen and Belgians, Gabriel Fauré, d'lndy, Claude Debussy, Georgette Leblanc has also won praise. And her voice was never a great one. She has sung by the grace of God, as our German brethren say, and as a _diseuse_ she has won more success than as a singer. She is distinctly a personality. Her hair is wonderfully red, the mask of her face a peculiarly expressive one. You recall those old portraits by the masters, of some unknown woman, whose eyes follow you from the canvas, eyes that peer beneath tumbled tresses, surmounted by an imperial Gainsborough hat of velvet. She is given to the picturesque in daily life, and has written a clever volume of essays all her own in style and idea.

As an actress, I should say that Leblanc was halfway in her methods between Sarah Bernhardt and--Georgette Leblanc. She has great facility of speech, is plastic in her poses, indulges in those serpentine, undulating movements we have long since recognized as Sarah's own. Do not mistake; Mme. Leblanc has a pronounced individuality. She is herself. Her intonations are her own. But she has such velocity and clarity of diction, has such temperamental energy, plays a rôle with such swiftness, that Bernhardt is inevitably suggested. As Monna Vanna she is more successful than as Joyzelle. The abundant nervous energy of the woman ill brooks long periods of repose, and Joyzelle is more like a Burne-Jones maiden than the fiery lover of Prinzevalle. Leblanc was intense in all the climaxes, and her denotements of joy, love, hatred, and overwhelming desolation were alike admirable. She has expressive features, though they are irregular--few women would call her good-looking. (Note the discrimination of sex!) She nevertheless made a charming Joyzelle, and spoke her husband's cadenced lines with the exact feeling for their exquisite rhythms.

VII

Experience of a saddening sort taught me that a man and his works are twain; that a poet never looks like a poet; a composer is seldom harmonious in private life. Yet I could not be but tempted when a brief, courteous note from the author of Monna Vanna informed me that he would give me an evening hour for an informal interview. Maeterlinck lives on the Rue Reynouard in a small house, the garden of which overlooks the Seine from the moderate heights of Passy. To reach his apartments I had to traverse a twisted courtyard, several mysterious staircases built on the corkscrew model, and finally was ushered into an ante-chamber full of screens, old engravings, fans, much ornamental brass, and reproductions of Mantegna, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and other symbolistic painters.

But I was not to abide there long. A maid with doubting eyes piloted me across a narrow hallway, through a room where sat a tirewoman altering theatrical costumes--and at last I was not in M. Maeterlinck's presence. Not yet. Down another staircase, and the great man loomed up in cycling costume, cordial, grave, a handsome fellow with big, Flemish bones, a small, round head, and wavy hair dappling at the temples. A man past forty, a gentle, pensive sort of man, Maurice Maeterlinck does not look like his photographs for the reason that they were taken nearly a decade ago. He is much older, much more vigorous, than I pictured him. The general race characteristics are Flemish or Belgian--that is, Germanic and not Gallic. This he knows well and realizes that his work must ever be exotic to the logical mind of the Frenchman, for whom the form is ever paramount to the idea.

Maeterlinck's eyes are what the French call flowers of the head. A gray blue, with hints of green, they are melancholy eyes, these, with long, dark lashes. He is extremely modest, even diffident, though touch him on his favourite theme and he responds readily. A devourer of English literature, he will not venture into conversation in our tongue, for he has had little practice. German he speaks, and he knows Italian. He told me that in composing Monna Vanna, he read Sismondi for a year so as to get historical colour. He was quite frank about the conception of this play.

"I wrote it for Mme. Maeterlinck," he remarked simply, which disposed of my theory that the piece was written to prove he knew how to make a drama on conventional lines. Joyzelle was also written for the same actress, a woman who has played an important rôle in the poet's life. Then I brought up Browning's Luria and the opinion of Professor Phelps of Yale that Maeterlinck had profited by reading the English poet when he composed Monna Vanna. M. Maeterlinck smiled.

"Naturally I read Browning; who does not?" he said, with the naïve intonation that becomes him so well. "Luria I have known for a long time, but Luria is not a stage play;" which, coming from the author of Les Aveugles, I considered sublime. He is quite right--Monna Vanna and Luria have little in common except that the scenes of both are laid at Pisa, and that both Luria and Prinzevalle were treated badly by an ungrateful country. But then, so was Coriolanus and a host of other historical patriots. Maeterlinck spoke of Shakespeare as other men mention their deity. He knows Poe very well, and also Walt Whitman.

A study of Maeterlinck's art reveals the evolution of a mystic, the creation of a dream theatre, the master of a mystic positivism. In Edgar Quinet's romance, Merlin, we read of a visit made by the magician to Prester John at his abbey. This abbey is an astounding conglomeration of architectures--pagoda, mosque, basilica, Greek temple, synagogue, cathedral, Byzantine and Gothic chapels, turrets, minarets, and towers in bewildering array. Prester John is a venerable man with a long, white beard. "Upon his head he wore a turban enriched with a sapphire cross At his neck hung a golden crescent, and he supported himself upon a staff after the manner of a Brahman. Three children followed him, who carried each upon the breast an open book. The first was the collection of the Vedas, the second was the Bible, the third the Koran. At certain moments Prester John stopped and read a few lines from one of the sacred volumes; after which he continued his walk, his eyes fixed upon the stars."

Maurice Maeterlinck recalls this type of eclectic culture. Eclectic is his taste in creeds and cultures. And in this he is the true man of the twentieth century, summing up in himself the depths and shallows, virtues and defects, of cultured eclecticism.

The greater part of the foregoing essays, now completely revised, first appeared in the columns of the New York _Sun_ at the time the author was dramatic editor of that journal. He wishes to acknowledge here the courtesy of William M. Laffan, Esq. in the matter of their republication.