t stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of
the world." Mystery and sorrow--these are its keynotes; separately or in
consonance, they are sounded from beginning to end of this strange and
muted tragedy. It is full of a quality of emotion, of beauty, which is
as "a touch from behind a curtain," issuing from a background vague and
illimitable. One is aware of vast and inscrutable forces, working in
silence and indirection, which somehow control and direct the shadowy
figures who move dimly, with grave and wistful pathos, through a no less
shadowy pageant of griefs and ecstasies and fatalities. They are little
more than the instruments of a mysterious will, these vague and
mist-enwrapped personages, who seem always to be unconscious actors in
some secret and hidden drama whose progress is concealed behind the
tangible drama of passionate and tragic circumstance in which they are
ostensibly taking part.

"Maeterlinck's man," says S.C. de Soissons in a penetrating study of the
Belgian's dramatic methods, "is a being whose sensuous life is only a
concrete symbol of his infinite transcendental side; and, further, is
only a link in an endless change of innumerable existences, a link that
remains in continual communication, in mutual union with all the other
links.... In Maeterlinck's dramas the whole of nature vibrates with man,
either warning him of coming catastrophes or taking on a mournful
attitude after they have happened. He considers man to be a great,
fathomless mystery, which one cannot determine precisely, at which one
can only glance, noting his involuntary and instinctive words,
exclamations and impressions. Maeterlinck consciously deprives nature of
her passive role of a soulless accessory, he animates her, orders her to
collaborate actively in the action of the drama, to speak mysteriously
beside man and to man, to forecast future incidents and catastrophes, in
a word, to participate in all the actions of that fragment of human life
which is called a drama." This "rhythmic correspondence," as Mr. James
Huneker calls it, between man and his environment, is nowhere more
effectively insisted upon by Maeterlinck than in _Pelleas et Melisande_.
Note the incident at the conclusion of the first act, where the
departure of the ship and the gathering of the storm are commented upon
by the two lovers in a scene which is charged with an inescapable
atmosphere of foreboding; note the incident of the fugitive