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In the preface to the first volume of the collected edition, which should be read with attention by all who are interested in knowing Maeterlinck's opinion of his own work, we are told:—

Quant aux deux petites pièces... je voudrais qu'il n'y eut aucun malentendu à leur endroit. Ce n'est pas parce qu'elles sont postérieures qu'il y faudrait chercher une évolution ou un nouveau désir. Ce sont, à proprement parler, de petits jeux de scène, de courts poèmes du genre assez malheureusement appelé "opéra-comique" destinés à fournir, aux musiciens qui les avaient demandés, un thème convenable à des développements lyriques. Ils ne prétendent à rien d'avantage, et l'on se méprendrait sur mes intentions si l'on y voulait trouver par surcroit de grandes arrière-pensées morales ou philosophiques.

Maeterlinck may be taken at his word, and, if we take him at his word, we shall be the less disappointed. The two new plays are slight; they have neither the subtlety of meaning nor the strangeness of atmosphere which gives their quality of beauty and force to Pelléas et Mélisande and to Les Aveugles. Soeur Béatrice is a dramatic version of the legend which Davidson told effectively in theBallad of a Nun; Ariane et Barbe-Bleue is a new reading of the legend of Blue-Beard. Both are written in verse, although printed as prose. It may be remembered that Maeterlinck once admitted that La Princesse Maleine was meant to be a kind of verse libre, and that he had originally intended to print it as verse. As it stands now it is certainly not verse in any real sense, where—as Soeur Béatrice is written throughout on the basis of the Alexandrine, although without rhyme. The mute e is, as in most modern French verse, sometimes sounded and sometimes not sounded; short lines are frequently interspersed among the lines of twelve syllables. Here are a few lines, taken at random, and printed as verse;—