grasp the particular fairy thread of thought the poet rather lazily flings to us, we cannot grasp anything whatever. Except from one extreme poetic point of view, the thing is not a play; it is not a bad play, it is a mass of clotted nonsense. One whole act describes the lovers going to look for a ring in a distant cave when they both know they have dropped it down the well. Seen from some secret window on some special side of the soul's turret, this might convey a sense of faerie futility in our human life. But it is quite obvious that unless it called forth that one kind of sympathy, it would call forth nothing but laughter. In the same play, the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword, the wife remarking at intervals, ‘I am not gay.’ Now there may really be an idea in this; the idea of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon the opportunism of innocence; that the lonely human heart says, like a child at a party, ‘I am not enjoying myself as I thought I should.’ But it is plain that unless one thinks of this idea, and of this idea only, the expression is not in the least unsuccessful pathos,—it is very broad and highly successful farce!”

And so the atmosphere of Maeterlinck's plays is impregnated throughout with oppressive mysteries, and until the key of these mysteries is found there is very little meaning to the plays. Moreover, these mysteries, be they never so stern and awe-inspiring, are irresistibly alluring. The reason is, they are our own mysteries that have somehow escaped our grasp, and that we fain would recapture, because there dwells in every human breast a vague assent to the immortal truth of Goethe's assertion: “The thrill of awe is man's best heritage.”(6)

The imaginative equipment of Maeterlinck's dramaturgy is rather limited and, on its face value, trite. In particular are his dramatis personae creatures by no means calculated to overawe by some extraordinary weirdness or power. And yet we feel ourselves touched by an elemental dread and by an overwhelming sense of our human impotence in the presence of these figures who, without seeming supernatural, are certainly not of common flesh and blood; they impress us as surpassingly strange mainly because somehow they are instinct with a life fundamentally more real than the superficial reality we know. For they are the mediums and oracles of the fateful powers that stir human beings into action.

The poet of mysticism, then, delves into the mystic sources of our deeds, and makes us stand reverent with him before the unknowable forces by which we are controlled. Naturally he is obliged to shape his visions in dim outline. His aim is to shadow forth that which no naked eye can see, and it may be said in passing that he attains this aim with a mastery and completeness incomparably beyond the dubious skill displayed more recently by the grotesque gropings of the so-called futurist school. Perhaps one true secret of the perturbing strangeness of Maeterlinck's figures lies in the fact that the basic principle of their life, the one thoroughly vital element in them, if it does not sound too paradoxical to say so, is the idea of death. Maeterlinck's mood and temper are fully in keeping with the religious dogma that life is but a short dream—with Goethe he believes that “all things transitory but as symbols are sent,” and apparently concurs in the creed voiced by one of Arthur Schnitzler's characters,—that death is the only subject in life worthy of being pondered by the serious mind. “From our death onwards,” so he puts it somewhere, “the adventure of the universe becomes our own adventure.”

It will be useful to have a bit of personal information concerning our author. He started his active career as a barrister; not by any means auspiciously, it seems, for already in his twenty-seventh year he laid the toga aside. Experience had convinced him that in the forum there were no laurels for him to pluck. The specific qualities that make for success at the bar were conspicuously lacking in his make-up. Far from being eloquent, he has at all times been noted for an unparalleled proficiency in the art of self-defensive silence. He shuns banal conversation and the sterile distractions of promiscuous social intercourse, dreads the hubbub of the city, and has an intense dislike for travel, to which he resorts only as a last means of escape from interviewers, reporters, and admirers. Maeterlinck, it is seen, is anything but multorum vir hominum. In order to preserve intact his love of humanity, he finds it expedient to live for the most part by himself, away from the throng “whose very plaudits give the heart a pang;” his fame has always been a source of annoyance to him. The only company he covets is that of the contemplative thinkers of bygone days,—the mystics, gnostics, cabalists, neo-Platonists. Swedenborg and Plotinus are perhaps his greatest favorites. That the war has produced a mighty agitation in the habitual calm of the great Belgian poet-philosopher goes without saying. His love of justice no less than his love of his country aroused every red corpuscle in his virile personality to violent resentment against the invader. Since the war broke out, however, he has published nothing besides a number of ringingly eloquent and singularly pathetic articles and appeals,—so that the character portrait derived from the body of his work has not at this time lost its application to his personality.

In cast of mind, Maeterlinck is sombrously meditative, and he has been wise in framing his outer existence so that it would accord with his habitual detachment. The greater part of his time used to be divided between his charming retreat at Quatre Chemins, near Grasse, and the grand old abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy, which he managed to snatch in the very nick of time from the tightening clutch of a manufacturing concern. With the temperament of a hermit, he has been, nevertheless, a keen observer of life, though one preferring to watch the motley spectacle from the aristocratic privacy of his box, sheltered, as it were, from prying curiosity. Well on in middle age, he is still an enthusiastic out-of-doors man,—gardener, naturalist, pedestrian, wheelman, and motorist, and commands an extraordinary amount of special knowledge in a variety of sports and sciences. In “The Double Garden” he discusses the automobile with the authority of an expert watt-man and mechanician. In one of his other books he evinces an extraordinary erudition in all matters pertaining to the higher education of dogs; and his work on “The Life of the Bee” passes him beyond question with high rank among “thirty-third degree” apiculturists.

One of the characteristics that seem to separate his books, especially those of the earlier period, from the literary tendencies of his age, is their surprising inattention to present social struggles. His metaphysical bias makes him dwell almost exclusively, and with great moral and logical consistency, on aspects of life that are slightly considered by the majority of men yet which he regards as ulteriorly of sole importance.

When men like Maeterlinck are encountered in the world of practical affairs, they are bound to impress us as odd, because of this inversion of the ordinary policies of behavior. But before classing them as “cranks,” we might well ask ourselves whether their appraisal of the component values of life does not, after all, correspond better to their true relativity than does our