). _Pelleas et Melisande_,
dedicated to Octave Mirbeau "in token of deep friendship, admiration,
and gratitude," was first performed at the Bouffes-Parisiens, Paris, on
May 17, 1893, with this cast: _Pelleas_, Mlle. Marie Aubry; _Melisande_,
Mlle. Meuris; _Arkel_, Emile Raymond; _Golaud_, Lugne-Poe; _Genevieve_,
Mme. Camee; _Le petit Yniold_, Georgette Loyer.

"Take care," warns The Old Man in that most simply touching of
Maeterlinck's plays, _Interieur_; "we do not know how far the soul
extends about men." It is a subtle and characteristic saying, and it
might have been used by the dramatist as a motto for his _Pelleas et
Melisande_; for not only does it embody the central thought of this
poignant masque of passion and destiny, but it summarizes Maeterlinck's
attitude as a writer of drama. "In the theatre," he says in the
introduction to his translation of Ruysbroeck's _l'Ornement des Noces
Spirituelles_, "I wish to study ... man, not relatively to other people,
not in his relations to others or to himself; but, after sketching the
ordinary facts of passion, to look at his attitude in presence of
eternity and mystery, to attempt to unveil the eternal nature hidden
under the accidental characteristics of the lover, father, husband....
Is the thought an exact picture of that something which produced it? Is
it not rather a shadow of some struggle, similar to that of Jacob with
the Angel?" Art, he has said, "is a temporary mask, under which the
unknown without a face puzzles us. It is the substance of eternity,
introduced ...by a distillation of infinity. It is the honey of eternity,
taken from a flower of eternity." Everywhere, throughout his most deeply
characteristic work, he emphasizes this thought--he would have us
realize that we are the unconscious protagonists of an overshadowing,
vast, and august drama whose significance and _denouement_ we do not and
cannot know, but of which mysterious intimations are constantly to be
perceived and felt. The characters in his plays live, as the old king,
Arkel, says in _Pelleas et Melisande_, like persons "whispering about a
closed room," This drama--at once his most typical, moving, and
beautiful performance--swims in an atmosphere of portent and bodement;
here, as Pater noted in the work of a wholly different order of artist,
"the storm is always brooding;" here, too, "in a sudden tremor of an
aged voice, in the tacit observance of a day," we become "aware suddenly
of the grea