<<  -- 4 --  Wilfrid Mellers    SECOND SIGHT

So to speak of failure, in this twilight of humanism, is hardly relevant. To some degree we are all, like Mélisande, deluded by our innocence and, like Golaud, corrupted by our experience, so that, like Pelléas, we cannot distinguish sufficiently between truth and falsehood to be able to recognise love when we arbitrarily light on it. If a revelation may be at hand for dying Mélisande -- a very open question -- what we are left with is Arkel's stunned fortitude. The finally funereal tolling bell (a rare Christian echo) is a ritual elegy on European humanism, and Pelléas et Mélisande, offering the quintessence of Debussyian theme and technique, is a key-work of the 20th century, germinal because its passion and its relinquishment are alike uncompromising. It offers no heroic apotheosis (like Tristan), and no refuge in nostalgia (like A Village Romeo and Juliet), but it does leave us purged, and therefore ready to go on living. The beauty of the music is its only necessary justification; because its moments of passion are as exquisite as they are painful we rejoice in, rather than deplore, the fact that its moments of sensation have no before or after of which we can have certain knowledge.

This is why Pelléas et Mélisande, offering so gloomy a view of human destiny, is not a depressing work. As with the impressionist painters, the acceptance of Nature's disorder becomes itself a kind of order. Both find light amid the mists of certainty wherein we, like Maeterlinck's sheep, have gone astray; both discover a quietude, if not happiness, in their humility in face of the natural world, and their admission of human limitation. I came away from this experience -- thanks mainly to the magical ministrations of Paul Daniel's orchestra -- wondrously annealed, if not entirely healed.