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When the husband, with his ear at the telephone, hears his wife tell him that some one is forcing the window-shutters with a crowbar, we feel, it is true, a certain sympathetic suspense; but compare this crude onslaught on the nerves with the profound and delicious terror that we experience when, in "La Mort de Tintagiles" of Maeterlinck, an invisible force pushes the door softly open, a force intangible and irresistible as death.
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.
And so I find my puppets, where the extremes meet, ready to interpret not only the "Agamemnon," but "La Mort de Tintagiles"; for the soul, which is to make, we may suppose, the drama of the future, is content with as simple a mouthpiece as Fate and the great passions, which were the classic drama.
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.
Meantime I padded lightly through the village, at first calling on the dogs by English names, but later using such wisps as I had of French. "Aucassin, mon pauvre chien. Voici, Tintagiles, alors donc mon cherie. Je suis votre ami," but with little effect. But the dogs that one meets in the Canadian woods are of the fiercest breed. They border on the wolf.
"La Mort de Tintagiles" was a masterpiece of a tiny, too deliberate kind; but it did something which no one had ever done before. We must still, though we have seen "Monna Vanna," wait, feeling that Maeterlinck has not given us all that he is capable of giving us. The letter of protest which appeared in the Times of June 30, 1903, signed by Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Meredith, and Mr.
Alwyn Schroeder; a divertimento for violin and orchestra, and a symphonic poem, "La Mort de Tintagiles." Besides these large works he has written a number of songs, of which five are with viola obligato.
His compositions include: Suite for violin and orchestra, "Les Viellées de l'Ukraine," 1891; Concerto for cello, 1894; Divertissement for orchestra, 1895; "La Mort de Tintagiles," 1897; "Divertissement espagnol" for orchestra and saxaphone; "La Villanelle du Diable"; "A Pagan Poem"; "Hora mystica"; "Psalm 137"; "To One Who Fell in Battle"; Two rhapsodies for oboe, viola and pianoforte; String-sextet; String-quartet; Music for Four Stringed Instruments; Songs on poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Yeats, Rossetti, Lodge, Kahn, etc.
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