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In such a play as Maeterlinck's "Aglavaine and Selysette" there is no movement, and even the conflict is subterranean; yet, as all the characters are in their way noble, and in their way justified, we find it among the most poignant of his plays.
But Aglavaine herself is strange: this woman who has lived and suffered; this queenly, majestic creature, calmly conscious of her beauty and her power; she whose overpowering, overwhelming love is yet deliberate and thoughtful.
It was preceded by La Princesse Maleine ; L'Intruse, Les Aveugles ; and Les sept Princesses . Since its appearance Maeterlinck has published these plays: Alladine et Palomides; Intérieur; La Mort de Tintagiles: Trois petits drames pour Marionnettes ; Aglavaine et Selysette ; Ariane et Barbe-Bleue; Soeur Béatrice ; Monna Vanna ; Joyzelle . Pelléas et Mélisande, 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: Pelléas, Mlle.
In future I am going to try and answer your letters as soon as I have read them. Warmest greetings. MELIHOVO, July 12, 1897. ... I am reading Maeterlinck, I have read his "Les Aveugles," "L'Intrus," and am reading "Aglavaine et Selysette." They are all strange wonderful things, but they make an immense impression, and if I had a theatre I should certainly stage "Les Aveugles."
It was followed by three little plays "for marionettes," he describes them on the title-page; among them being La Mort de Tintagiles, the play he himself prefers of all that he has written. And then came a curious change: he wrote Aglavaine et Selysette. The setting is familiar to us; the sea-shore, the ruined tower, the seat by the well; no less than the old grandmother and little Yssaline.
With "Aglavaine et Sélysette" we got a drama of the inner life, 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.
For there will probably be no more plays like Pelleas et Melisande, or even like Aglavaine et Selysette. Real men and women, real problems and disturbance of life it is these that absorb him now.
"Monna Vanna" is a development out of "Aglavaine et Sélysette," 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.
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