Hulsman thinks that Maeterlinck must have thought of the Buddhistic idea, according to which the human soul consists of: the breath of God, the word, the thought, Psyche, the power of living, appearance, and the body.
"Ursula, the middle sister, is Psyche, that is, the real self, the deepest, the essential in our being. This real self is unconscious and unknowable. Let the ideal come, no ideal can unveil the deepest. It is dead to us."
Maeterlinck's imagination has been compared "to a lake with desolate and stagnant waters, unceasingly reflecting the same black landscapes, on whose banks the same suffering personages for ever come to sit." The same old castle, the same subterranean caverns, the same dark forests, another old tower, are the scenes of _Pelléas et Mélisande_ (Pelleas and Melisanda) which was published at Brussels in 1892, and performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in Paris on the 16th May, 1893. The scene is the same; but there is a difference between this play and those which preceded it--here for the first time we have characters almost of flesh and blood; "the asphodelic shadows and marionettes begin to colour themselves with blood-warm humanity."[2] We have personages who represent the same ideas as those of the previous plays--Melisanda is again the soul--but here the puppets are moved by Love, not Death. In _Princess Maleine_ love is one of the means by which Fate moves the puppets to death; in Pelleas and Melisanda death is the bourne to which Love drives his sheep. The sheep do not know whither they are being driven; when they come to cross-roads they do not know which to take; but they do feel, dimly, that they are not on the road to the fold. Hence the tragedy of their emotions; and it is the state of the soul filled with love, as tragic and as mystical a consciousness or subconsciousness as that of the soul in the clutch of fate or in the shadow of death, that Maeterlinck projects into _Pelleas and Melisanda_ as into _Alladine and Palomides_ and _Aglavaine and Selysette_.
We have nothing to do here with morality or the laws which regulate marriage. The soul knows nothing of such things; is unconscious even of the sins of the body.[3] The soul is subject only to such laws as are inherent in itself: "the secret laws of antipathy or of sympathy, elective or instinctive affinities."[4] The soul, remembering the fair sunny clime from which it came, pining in the cold air of the marshlands, groping about helplessly in the dark, always meeting closed doors, always gazing through glass at the unattainable, is an eternal searcher for the light; and if it meets a comrade who has the key to the closed door of its happiness, or who holds the lamp to light its path, it will follow the gleam blindly. It must do, for that is the law of its being. The tragedy lies in this: that it follows the gleam blindly, and the gleam leads it--at all events at present, because alien souls come athwart the path it is following--into the abyss of night.