corridor flanked by impenetrable chambers, a lighted interior viewed from the garden, a landscape bodefully crêped with twilight—the list nearly exhausts his store of “sets.”

The works mentioned so far are hardly more than able exercises preparatory for the ampler and more finished products which were to succeed them. Yet they represent signal steps in the evolution of a new dramatic style, designed, as has already been intimated, to give palpable form to emotional data descried in moments anterior not only to articulation but even to consciousness itself; and for this reason, the plane of the dramatic action lies deep below the surface of life, down in the inner tabernacle where the mystic looks for the hidden destinies. In his style, Maeterlinck had gradually developed an unprecedented capacity for bringing to light the secret agencies of fate. A portion of the instructed public had already learned to listen in his writings for the finer reverberations that swing in the wake of the uttered phrase, to heed the slightest hints and allusions in the text, to overlook no glance or gesture that might betray the mind of the acting characters. It is true that art to be great must be plain, but that does not mean that the sole test of great art is the response of the simple and apathetic.

In Maeterlinck's first masterpiece, Pélléas et Mélisande, (1892), the motives again are drawn up from the lower regions of consciousness; once more the plot is born of a gloomy fancy, and the darkling mood hovering over scene and action attests the persistence of fatalism in the poet. The theory of old King Arkel, the spokesman of the author's personal philosophy, is that one should not seek to be active; one should ever wait on the threshold of Fate. Even the younger people in the play are infected by the morbid doctrine of an inevitable necessity for all things that happen to them: “We do not go where we would go. We do not do that which we would do.” Perhaps, however, these beliefs are here enounced for the last time with the author's assent or acquiescence.

In artistic merit “Pélléas and Mélisande” marks a nearer approach to mastery, once the integral peculiarities of the form and method have been granted. Despite a noticeable lack of force, directness, and plasticity in the characterization, the vie intérieure is most convincingly expressed. In one of the finest scenes of the play we see the principals at night gazing out upon a measureless expanse of water dotted with scattered lights. The atmosphere is permeated with a reticent yearning of love. The two young creatures, gentle, shy, their souls tinged with melancholy, are drawn towards one another by an ineluctable mutual attraction. Yet, though their hearts are filled to overflowing, not a word of affection is uttered. Their love reveals itself to us even as to themselves, without a loud and jarring declaration, through its very speechlessness, as it were. The situation well bears out the roi sage in Alladine et Palomides: “There is a moment when souls touch one another and know everything without a need of our opening the lips.” There are still other scenes in this play so tense with emotion that words would be intrusive and dissonant. There is that lovely picture of Mélisande at the window; Pélléas cannot reach up to her hand, but is satisfied to feel her loosened hair about his face. It is a question whether even that immortal love duet in “Romeo and Juliet” casts a poetic spell more enchanting than this. At another moment in the drama, we behold the lovers in Maeterlinck's beloved half-light, softly weeping as they stare with speechless rapture into the flames. And not until the final parting does any word of love pass their lips. In another part of the play Goland, Mélisande's aging husband, who suspects his young stepbrother, Pélléas, of loving Mélisande, conducts him to an underground chamber. We are not told why he has brought him there, and why he has led him to the brink of the pitfall from which there mounts a smell of death. If it be a heinous deed he is brooding, why does he pause in its execution? His terrible struggle does not reveal itself through speech, yet it is eloquently expressed in the wildness of his looks, the trembling of his voice, and the sudden anguished outcry: “Pélléas! Pélléas!”

Evidently Maeterlinck completely achieves the very purpose to which the so-called Futurists think they must sacrifice all traditional conceptions of Art; and achieves it without any brutal stripping and skinning of the poetic subject, without the hideous exhibition of its disjecta membra, and above all, without that implied disqualification for the higher artistic mission which alone could induce a man to limit his service to the dishing-up of chunks and collops, “cubic” or amorphous.

In recognition of a certain tendency towards mannerism that lay in his technique, Maeterlinck, in a spirit of self-persiflage, labeled the book of one-act plays which he next published, (1894), Trois Petits Drames pour Marionettes (“Three Little Puppet Plays”). They are entitled, severally: Alladine et Palomides, Intérieur, and La Mort de Tintagiles. While in motifs and materials as well as in the principal points of style these playlets present a sort of epitome of his artistic progression up to date, they also display some new and significant qualities. Of the three the first named is most replete with suggestive symbolism and at the same time most remindful of the older plays, especially of “Pélléas and Mélisande.” King Ablamore is in character and demeanor clearly a counterpart of King Arkel. To be sure he makes a temporary stand against the might of Fate, but his resistance is meek and futile, and his wisdom culminates in the same old fatalistic formula: “Je sais qu'on ne fait pas ce que l'on voudrait faire.”

L'Intérieur (“Home”) handles a theme almost identical with that of L'Intruse: Life and Death separated only by a thin pane of glass,—the sudden advent of affliction from a cloudless sky. In this little tragedy a family scene, enacted in “dumb show,” is watched from the outside. The play is without suspense in the customary use of the term, since after the first whispered conversation between the bringers of the fateful tidings the audience is fully aware of the whole story:—the daughter of the house, for whose return the little group is waiting, has been found dead in the river. The quiescent mood is sustained to the end; no great outburst of lamentation; the curtain drops the instant the news has been conveyed. But the poignancy of the tragic strain is only enhanced by the repression of an exciting climax.

“The Death of Tintagiles” repeats in a still more harrowing form the fearful predicament of a helpless child treated with so much dramatic tension in Maeterlinck's first tragedy. Again, as in “Princess Maleine,” the action of this dramolet attains its high point in a scene where murderous treachery is about to spring the trap set for an innocent young prince. Intuitively he senses the approach of death, and in vain beats his little fists against the door that imprisons him. The situation is rendered more piteous even than in the earlier treatment of the motif, because the door which bars his escape also prevents his faithful sister Ygraine from coming to the rescue.

We have observed in all the plays so far a marked simplicity of construction. Aglavaine et