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 and not only passionately, in which it is not only the cry of the heart and of the senses which takes the form of drama.

In Maeterlinck’s earlier plays, in “Les Aveugles,” “Interieur,” and even “Pelleas et Melisande,” he is dramatic after a new, experimental fashion of his own; “Monna Vanna” is dramatic in the obvious sense of the word.  The action moves, and moves always in an interesting, even in a telling, way.  But at the same time I cannot but feel that something has been lost.  The speeches, which were once so short as to be enigmatical, are now too long, too explanatory; they are sometimes rhetorical, and have more logic than life.  The playwright has gained experience, the thinker has gained wisdom, but the curious artist has lost some of his magic.  No doubt the wizard had drawn his circle too small, but now he has stepped outside his circle into a world which no longer obeys his formulas.  In casting away his formulas, has he the big human mastery which alone could replace them?  “Monna Vanna” is a remarkable and beautiful play, but it is not a masterpiece.  “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 QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP.

The letter of protest which appeared in the Times of June 30, 1903, signed by Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Meredith, and Mr. Hardy, the three highest names in contemporary English literature, will, I hope, have done something to save the literary reputation of England from such a fate as one eminent dramatic critic sees in store for it.  “Once more,” says the Athenaeum, “the caprice of our censure brings contempt upon us, and makes, or should make, us the laughing-stock of Europe.”  The Morning Post is more lenient, and is “sincerely sorry for the unfortunate censor,” because “he has immortalised himself by prohibiting the most beautiful play of his time, and must live to be the laughing-stock of all sensible people.”