In his earlier plays Maeterlinck invented a world of his own, which was a sort of projection into space of the world of nursery legends and of childish romances.  It was at once very abstract and very local.  There was a castle by the sea, a “well at the world’s end,” a pool in a forest; princesses with names out of the “Morte d’Arthur” lost crowns of gold; and blind beggars without a name wandered in the darkness of eternal terror.  Death was always the scene-shifter of the play, and destiny the stage-manager.  The people who came and went had the blind gestures of marionettes, and one pitied their helplessness.  Pity and terror had indeed gone to the making of this drama, in a sense much more literal than Aristotle’s.

In all these plays there were few words and many silences, and the words were ambiguous, hesitating, often repeated, like the words of peasants or children.  They were rarely beautiful in themselves, rarely even significant, but they suggested a singular kind of beauty and significance, through their adjustment in a pattern or arabesque.  Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was everything; and in an essay in “Le Tresor des Humbles” Maeterlinck told us that in drama, as he conceived it, it was only the words that were not said which mattered.

Gradually the words began to mean more in the scheme of the play.  With “Aglavaine et Selysette” 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.

“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.