Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/76

Rh Joyzelle mark by still another sign the advent of a new phase in Maeterlinck's evolution; namely, by the characterization of the heroines. Previously, the women in his plays were hardly individualized and none of them can be said to possess a physiognomy strictly her own. Maeterlinck had returned with great partiality again and again to the same type of woman: languid and listless, without stamina and strength, yet at the same time full of deep feeling, and capable of unending devotion—pathetic incorporeal figures feeling their way along without the light of selfconsciousness, like some pre-raphaelite species of somnambulists. In the new plays, on the contrary, women of a courageous and venturesome spirit and with a self-possessive assurance are portrayed by preference and with unmistakable approval.

As the technique in the more recent creations of Maeterlinck, so the diction, too, accommodates itself to altered tendencies. Whereas formerly the colloquy was abrupt and fragmentary, it is now couched in cadenced, flowing language, which, nevertheless, preserves the old-time simplicity. The poet himself has criticized his former dialogue. He said it made those figures seem like