fe, in which
there was little action, little effective dramatic speech, but in which
people thought about action and talked about action, and discussed the
morality of things and their meaning, very beautifully.

"Monna Vanna" is a development out of "Aglavaine et Selysette," and in
it for the first time Maeterlinck has represented the conflicts of the
inner life in an external form, making drama, while the people who
undergo them discuss them frankly at the moment of their happening.

In a significant passage of "La Sagesse et la Destinee," Maeterlinck
says: "On nous affirme que toutes les grandes tragedies ne nous offrent
pas d'autre spectacle que la lutte de l'homme contre la fatalite. Je
crois, au contraire, qu'il n'existe pas une seule tragedie ou la
fatalite regne reellement. J'ai beau les parcourir, je n'en trouve pas
une ou le heros combatte le destin pur et simple. Au fond, ce n'est
jamais le destin, c'est toujours la sagesse, qu'il attaque." And, on the
preceding page, he says: "Observons que les poetes tragiques osent tres
rarement permettre au sage de paraitre un moment sur la scene. Ils
craignent une ame haute parce que les evenements la craignent." Now it
is this conception of life and of drama that we find in "Monna Vanna."
We see the conflict of wisdom, personified in the old man Marco and in
the instinctively wise Giovanna, with the tragic folly personified in
the husband Guido, who rebels against truth and against life, and loses
even that which he would sacrifice the world to keep. 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