[THE CURTAIN.]

THE INTRUDER
By
MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, to give him his full baptismal name, was born in Ghent on August 29, 1862. He was sent to the Jesuit College de Sainte-Barbe, the institution which another great Belgian, Emile Verhaeren, also attended. In 1885, Maeterlinck entered the University of Ghent to study law, but his practice of this profession was confined to a scant year or two. Maeterlinck's chief interest in his college years seems to have been the modern movement in Belgian literature. But the frequency of his visits to Paris increased in the years between 1886 and 1896, and finally in the latter year he settled there.

The following word picture supplements the photographs of Maeterlinck that are so frequently reproduced in our magazines and newspapers: "Maeterlinck is easily described: a man of about five feet nine in height, inclined to be stout; silver hair lends distinction to the large round head and boyish fresh complexion; blue-gray eyes, now thoughtful, now merry, and an unaffected off-hand manner. The features are not cut, left rather 'in the rough,' as sculptors say, even the heavy jaw and chin are drowned in fat; the forehead bulges and the eyes lose color in the light and seem hard; still, an interesting and attractive personality."

Maeterlinck's fame rests on his poetry and his essays no less than on his plays. L'Intruse, The Intruder, reprinted here, belongs to the early years of his activity as a playwright. It was printed in 1890 in a Belgian periodical, La Wallonie, and was acted for the first time a year later at Paul Fort's ThÉÂtre d'Art in Paris, at a performance given for the benefit of the poet, Paul Verlaine, and the painter, Paul Gauguin. Maeterlinck, though publishing volumes of essays from time to time, continues to write for the theatre.[52] In 1908 The Blue Bird, dramatizing the quest for Truth, one of the most popular of modern plays, was given for the first time in Moscow, to be followed ten years later by the premiÈre in New York of a sequel, The Betrothal, similarly dramatizing the search for Beauty. In 1910 came his translation of Macbeth into French. A year later he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature.

The Intruder, the theme of which is the mysterious coming of death, is an illustration of one of Maeterlinck's pet theories in regard to the subject matter of the drama. He expresses it in this way in his famous essay on The Tragic in Daily Life: "An old man, seated in his armchair, waiting patiently with his lamp beside him—submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny—motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more human, more universal life than ... the captain who conquers in battle." To plays based on this theory has been given the name "static drama." The Intruder illustrates also Maeterlinck's use of symbols. The Grandfather in the play is blind, for instance; blind characters in Maeterlinck's plays are symbols of the spiritual blindness of the human race; the gardener sharpening his scythe stands for death; the mysterious quenching of the lamp—it may have gone out because there was no oil in it—signifies the going out of life.

The problem in the staging of this play is the "creation of a mood or atmosphere, rather than the unfolding of an action." One of the settings used in this country is here reproduced. It was designed for the Arts & Crafts Theatre of Detroit. Sheldon Cheney, whose description of Sam Hume's plastic units for the stage of this Little Theatre is given in the Introduction on page xxxi, has described the rearrangement of this equipment and the additions that can be made to it for the production of this play as follows: "For Maeterlinck's The Intruder, which demanded a room in an old chÂteau, one important addition was made, a flat with a door. At the left was the arch, then a pylon and curtain, and then the Gothic window with practicable casements added. The rest of the back wall was made up of the new door-piece flanked by curtains, while the third wall consisted of two pylons and curtains. Stairs and platforms were utilized before the window and under the arch. A small two-stair unit was added, leading to the new door. This arrangement afforded exactly that suggestion of spaciousness and mystery for which the play calls." When the play was given at the Independent Theatre in London in 1895, it was played behind a blue gauze curtain.

On one of Maeterlinck's visits to London, he was taken by Alfred Sutro, the dramatist, to call on Barrie in his flat at the Adelphi. Maeterlinck was asked to write his name on the whitewashed wall of Barrie's studio. He did so and added above the signature: "Au pÈre de Peter Pan, et au grandpÈre de L'Oiseau Bleu."