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.
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