The play is full
of lessons in life, and its deepest lesson is a warning against the too
ready acceptance of this or that aspect of truth or of morality. Here is
a play in which almost every character is noble, in which treachery
becomes a virtue, a lie becomes more vital than truth, and only what we
are accustomed to call virtue shows itself mean, petty, and even
criminal. And it is most like life, as life really is, in this: that at
any moment the whole course of the action might be changed, the position
of every character altered, or even reversed, by a mere decision of the
will, open to each, and that things happen as they do because it is
impossible, in the nature of each, that the choice could be otherwise.
Character, in the deepest sense, makes the action, and there is
something in the movement of the play which resembles the grave and
reasonable march of a play of Sophocles, in which men and women
deliberate wisely and not only passionately, in which it is not only the
cry of the heart and of the senses which takes the form of drama.
In Maeterlinck's earlier plays, in "Les Aveugles," "Interieur," and even
"Pelleas et Melisande," he is dramatic after a new, experimental fashion
of his own; "Monna Vanna" is dramatic in the obvious sense of the word.
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