_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 the _Ballad 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;-- _Tu ne me réponds pas? Je n'entends pas ton souffle... Et tes genoux fléchissent.... Viens, viens, n'attendons pas Que l'aurore envieuse tende ses pièges d'or Par les chemins d'azur qui mènent au bonheur._ That is perfectly regular twelve-syllable verse with the exception of the second line, where the final _ent of fléchissent_ is slurred. Twelve-syllable unrhymed verse is almost as disconcerting and unknown in English as in French, but it has been used, with splendid effect, by Blake, and it is a metre of infinite possibilities. The metre of _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_ (as Maeterlinck has finally decided to call it) is vaguer and more capricious; some of it is in twelve-syllable verse, some in irregular verse, and some in what can not be called verse at all. Take, for instance:-- _Il parait qu'on pleurait dans les rues.--Pourquoi est-elle venue? On m'a dit qu'elle avait son idée. Il n'aura pas celle-ci._