International Yeats Studies Volume 2 Issue 1 Article 2 November 2017 Music, Setting, Voice: Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande and Yeats's The Countess Cathleen Michael McAteer Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/iys Recommended Citation McAteer, Michael (2017) "Music, Setting, Voice: Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande and Yeats's The Countess Cathleen," International Yeats Studies: Vol. 2 : Iss. 1 , Article 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.34068/IYS.02.01.01 Available at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/iys/vol2/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in International Yeats Studies by an authorized editor of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Music, Setting, Voice: Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen Michael McAteer aurice Maeterlinck’s Le trésor des humbles (1896) was first translated into English by Alfred Sutro in 1897 as The Treasure of the Humble. In one of the essays included in this volume, “The Awakening of the MSoul,” Maeterlinck writes of the arrival of a new spiritual epoch in his time, one in which the soul “in obedience to unknown laws, seems to rise to the very surface of humanity.”1 Later in the same essay, he observes this new moment in a transformation of the nature of silence itself, one he judges “strange and inexplicable.”2 As Katharine Worth has observed, Arthur Symons believed that Maeterlinck’s art itself had “come nearer that any other art to being the voice of silence.”3 In his review of The Treasure of the Humble for The Bookman in July 1897, Yeats felt that while Maeterlinck’s thought “lacks the definiteness of the great mystics,” still his book “shows us common arts and things, with the light of the great mystics, and a new light that was not theirs, beating upon them” (CW9 341).