Maurice Maeterlinck: A Dramatic Impressionist

I.

THE literary movement in the modern drama has become a marked and interesting one. Steadily gaining ground during the past dozen years, it has now reached a degree of self-assertion and activity which begins to demand and attract critical attention. More and more men of literary attainment are devoting their time and strength to dramatic production ; more and more plays are being staged, which call for consideration as art-product, and are published in book form as well, thereby making a direct appeal as literature. Henrik Ibsen is, as much as one man may be, the originative cause of all this development; more than any other playwright he has been potent in effecting the union of the stage and letters after their century-long divorce. Various emanations and influences have gone forth from the Norwegian ; influences which, as they widened from the disturbing cause, displayed themselves in very different shapes, until the father was hardly to be recognized in his children. Thus, in this sense, and so far as their dramatic work goes, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck. and Oscar Wilde are begotten of Ibsen ; while such an English play-maker as Pinero, if he be not of kin, has certainly gone to school to the northern master.

Of these names, Maeterlinck’s is the most striking and provocative of study. The restless, probing spirit of the age is exemplified in such a man : its deification of art for art’s sake : its Alexander-like desire to conquer new worlds of thought and expression ; its drift towards pessimism, and fondness for exploration in the dark domains of psychological horror ; and its literary method, with a substitution of experiment and suggestion for personal creeds.

Ibsen, a pessimist in his later interpretations of the social complex, differs widely from those who preach the gospel of despair. He is too stalwart, too truly a descendant of the Norse heroes of his native land, to moan forth his Weltschmerz in weak impotence. If his be a sombre individuality, there is tonic in his writings for those who read him aright. But Maeterlinck is of another stripe. He does, it is true, carry on the psychologic method of the elder master; but he colors it with an entirely different personality, and pushes it to an extreme. More than this, Maeterlinck is end-ofthe-century, as the phrase goes, and he substitutes mystical poetry and a phantasmal dreamland for the mind-drama of Ibsen, with its realistic dialogue and superb stagecraft. Maeterlinck is rather poet than playwright, in his intense preoccupation with subjective states, and in creating the dramatic fantasy has shown himself a literary impressionist, vaguer than a Corot in his landscapes, believing in the efficacy of premier coup and in the validity of moods. Ibsen cannot be classed, in justice, with the decadents ; one thinks not so much of the Twilight of the Gods in commerce with him as of personal regeneration and freedom. But Maeterlinck does belong to that school ; he is of the fellowship of Verlaine and Mallarmé. Cnrducci and Stechette, Henley, George Moore, and Oscar Wilde, workers in literary art whose stimulation is considerable, whose technique is for the admiration of the nations, but whose atmosphere has nightshade in it, and whose impulses are not those of the open air. Yet the contribution of these younger men can neither he overlooked nor belittled ; they have done bold and exquisite work, and have broadened our conception of artistic possibilities. Moreover, in Maeterlinck we meet with a member of the guild who is free of its by no means infrequent grossnesses and its besetting sin of unideality ; whose natural walk, in sooth, is among the diaphanous clouds of Fancy, through the thin air of legend, and in the dim domain of No Man’s Land. He is far away from realism, in the usual acceptation of that word, yet, paradoxically, ill one aspect of his work — the dialogue — makes a striking use of that popular latter-day method. Another proof of this young dramatist’s affiliations with the Parisian décadents is the fact that, though a Belgian, he writes in the French of Paris, and his plays are such as are in demand at the Théâtre Libre. This, too, when the main current of national life and thought in Belgium expresses itself in Flemish,—a distinct linguistic reaction towards the homespun, a strong bias for an independent social and political activity, being there noticeable. Maeterlinck turns his back on all this, and, with a sort of instinct for a sophisticated capital, displays his marionettes to the frequenters of the boulevards Of Ibsen it may be said that he is only to be thoroughly comprehended in the light of his personal history and that of his nation ; we may apply to him the words of Voltaire on Swift: “ Pour le bien entendre, il faut faire un petit, voyage dans son pays.” Not so with Maeterlinck ; he is cosmopolitan, and his local color is of the most indefinite.

The question whence our dramatist derived his particular genre, the drama of atmosphere and symbolism, may well be set aside for the more practical query, What has he made of this form of the drama, now that it has become his own ? Has he justified his method ? Has he inspiration, originality ? Is he a master hand in technique ? These inquiries may be met best by a discussion of the quality and drift of his plays, with some consequent conclusions as to his claim and true position in contemporary stage literature.

II.

It is still easy to get at the man directly. since little of critical value has yet been written. Here again Maeterlinck contrasts sharply with a veteran like Ibsen, about whom already lies a bibliography of alarming proportions. So far, with the Belgian, there is no danger of not seeing the forest for the leaves. For so young a man, the amount of his work suggests industry and oneness of purpose. Ignoring his other literary product in the way of verse, essay, and translation, eight plays from a writer in the neighborhood of thirty years of age are no mean record in respect of quantity ; but the question here is of quality. For the purpose of illustrating Maeterlinck’s method and idiosyncrasy, some of the leading soi-disant dramas may be passed in review, not by way of cataloguing, but because they display his personality. Concerning his latest volume, Trois Petits Drames pour Marionettes, which contains three pieces, Alladine et Palomides. La Mort de Tintagiles, and Intérieur, it may be dismissed at the outset as offering an effect of sameness when the earlier work is in mind; no new note is struck in it, and hence analysis would be wearisome, if undertaken, although necessary, of course, if a complete survey of Maeterlinck were the object.

It is fair to take for illustrative material the three slight one-act plays, The Intruder, Blind, and The Seven Princesses; and the two remaining pieces, The Princess Maleine, and Pelleas and Melisande, written in the heavier, more conventional five-act form, which, from the days of the Greeks, has been looked upon as a norm of dramatic construction. These dramatic productions reveal Maeterlinck’s main characteristics, and by them he stands or falls.

Curiously enough, — and herein lies food for the thought that Maeterlinck is less playwright than impressionist and mystic poet, — the very compositions which have attracted most attention and applause are those departing furthest from the stereotyped canon. The Intruder and Blind, not The Princess Maleine and Pelleas, are the dramas which have made their author famous. Possibly, the same influence which in fiction brings about the apotheosis of the short story as against the full-length novel is at work in giving the preference to the curtailed play. It is not too much to say of this group of dramatic productions that it; embraces as gruesomely unique a collection of literary documents as the stage has taken under its ample wings. The present writer is skeptical whether they had ever been included in the acting drama were it not for the current tendency toward giving the stage a literary complexion. Maeterlinck’s work rode into the playhouse, as it were, on the shoulders of this movement. Frankly conceding all this, as closet productions, even as stage spectacles, their power is indubitable, though not dramatic, if by that name we would denominate the effects secured by Augler, Sardou, and Zola. This strong impression comes by gradual induction into individual plays with a sort of cumulative influence upon the student. If he chance to begin with The Intruder, he will, little by little, be conscious of the dramatist’s spell.

The situation, showing a commonplace family sitting in a room of their house, and conversing in a homely, realistic way while they await the issue of the illness of a member of the household who, lying in a room hard by, has given birth to a child, is not one which offers dramatic interest in itself, it would seem. There is a lack of incident and action which, when contrasted with a briskmoving, romantic play like the version of Dumas’s Three Musketeers, is fairly laughable. Nor can the simple announcement of the woman’s death to the group of very ordinary folk, by the nun who enters and makes a mournful gesture for sign of the human life snuffed out by the wind of Fate, be regarded as a dramatic dénoûment, in the conventional sense. Yet few, in reading or seeing this scene, will deny to it the element of sensation, holding the attention, and exercising a peculiar influence upon the nerves and the imagination. This is secured, in one way, by the skillful use of a prosaic background for psychologic dread and intensity. The spectacle is uuheroie, natural ; so are the personages. But the stress of feeling is suggested and cunningly accentuated in such wise that the most, matter-of-fact externals become surcharged with inward excitation. The sound of a shutting door, the sough of the night wind in the park outside, the shifting of the lamp with its redistribution of shadows, the impotence of the blind old grandfather roused by the mysterious Somewhat, but only groping his way to an understanding of it, — all these phenomena as mirrored in the minds of the dramatis personœ make a blend of excitement held in leash which is curiously startling. Everything has its value as symbol rather than as fact. The catastrophe, so bare and simple when set forth in detached fashion, is immensely heightened by the subtle way it is lecl up to, and so comes to have in it all the reverberations of human tragedy. The play is a lesson in “values,"’ which are quite as important to literature as to painting. The French landscapist Lacroix is credited with saying that if you gave him a free hand as to values, he would make a dab of mud as effective as the flesh-tint of an angel.

For the securing of this effect Maeterlinck uses language in a definite and remarkable way. Read a single one of his dramas, and you are cognizant of this. He obtains a result of strength and of poetry by the marshaling of simple, sonorous words and idioms with a repetition which has in it a rhythmic charm. The repetition, or refrain, is one of the artistic traits of verse, lying at the base of its power : the repet end, in a broad sense, is what is meant, including rhyme, alliteration, the recurrence of phrases (as with Poe), and the beat and beat of like stanzas. This well-defined rhythmic repetition, which is so all-important to poetry as music, Maeterlinck endeavors to press into the service of prose: he has declared explicitly that he writes vers libre, — an attempt at a looser metric form which suggests the dubious experiments of Walt Whitman, and after him of W. E. Henley and William Sharp. Maeterlinck, reversing these efforts to give more latitude to verse, would steal from it one. of its methods, to the end of enriching prose style. And whatever our theory as to the advisability, or even possibility, of a more constrained prosaic music than tradition allows to prose, some success in the attempt may be granted him. A sympathetic reader once in the atmosphere of a play like The Intruder experiences a sort of strange, lulling fascination in this peculiarity. It tends to put him in touch with the whole eerie affair: he would not, an he could, have the medium of expression other than it is. A brief bit of dialogue may be given by way of illustration. The old grandfather, unable to see the faces of the rest of the family, yet nervously sure that their countenances reflect the vague dread of the hour, is speaking.

“ Grandfather. How many of us are there here?

Eldest Daughter. We are six sitting around the table, grandfather.

“ Grandfather. You are all around the table ?

“ Eldest Daughter. Yes, grandfather.

“ Grandfather. Are you there. Paul ? “ The Father. Yes.

“ Grandfather. Are you there, Oliver ?

“ The Uncle. Why, yes : I am in my usual place. You must be making fun of us.

“ Grandfather. Are you there, Genevieve ?

“ The Third Daughter. Yes, grandfather.

“ Grandfather. And you, Gertrude?

“ The Second Daughter. Yes, grandfather.

“ Grandfather. And you. Ursula ?

“ Eldest Daughter. Yes, grandfather ; close beside you.

“ Grandfather. And who is that seated there ?

“Eldest Daughter. Where, grandfather? There is no one else present.

“ Grandfather. Here, in the midst of us.

“Eldest Daughter. But there is no one else, grandfather.

“ The Uncle. We have assured you of that over and over again.

“ Grandfather. Then it is you others who are blind.”

The person “ in the midst,” seen alone by the sightless eyes of the aged blind man, is of course Death, and the laconic commonplace of the dialogue quoted has its value in contrast with, and in forming a background for, this gruesomeness, as a blank white wall sets off a mysterious figure in black ; and it immensely heightens the pathetic soliloquy that follows :

“ Grandfather. It is so long since I have seen my daughter! I took her hands in mine yesterday, and yet I could not see her. I know not how she looks now, — her face has grown unfamiliar to me ; she must have changed in all these weeks. I felt the bones of her cheeks beneath my fingers ! There is a gulf of darkness between her and me, and between all the rest of the world also. . . . You are sitting near me, with your open eyes watching my dead eyes, and no one of you has any mercy on me. . . . Why have you stopped talking?”

Wide associations and implications, an important theory, indeed, lie behind Maeterlinck’s tentative essay in language-use. The mere matter of verbal simplicity, an insistence on the avoiding of the flowery and the circuitous in speech, he has; but herein is nothing novel, Ibsen being a master hand in this aspect of style, which is a tendency of the time. But the endeavor to make a sort of prose poetry for dramatic purposes is something which, by so much, constitutes our writer an original. Looking to his language in its broadest significance, a phrase of George Meredith’s occurs to mind. That unique novelist says, in reference to the social interrelations of the Pole family in Sandra Belloni, “ This is the game of Fine Shades and Nice Feelings.’" With some fitness may this be applied to Maeterlinck’s manipulation of the tongue of his choice. It is veritably a game of fine shades and nice feelings, played by vowels and liquids and speech tunes, where a nuance counts for more than color, and sound and suggestion outweigh sense. A rhetorician would describe him as a stylist whose connotation was greatly in excess of his denotation. One other characteristic, running through all his work, is marked in The Intruder, to wit, the conception of death as a constant factor in human thought and action. Modern Christianity tends to regard the last enemy as a negative thing, its terror and power being minimized as much as may be, and made use of in art and literature chiefly as serving to heighten the dramatic value of life by the introduction of elements of danger, uncertainty, and pathos. Not so Maeterlinck. With him it assumes the rôle of a positive and potent entity : it is the most real force in The Intruder, the motif and mainspring of the piece, and a quasi-originality is thereby imparted to the drama ; and this central part is played by Death throughout his work. Here is a new note, sombre, unhealthy, very typical of the pessimist mood of the day, yet, when all is said, a comparatively fresh application of hackneyed material.

The modernity and realism which mark The Intruder are not (save in the matter of dialogue) so apparent in the other plays. The allegory grows more insistent, the mystic atmosphere deepens, less stress is laid on the contrast between externals and subjective states ; far-away locale and dim fantasy usurp all else, only related to us because of their psychologic adumbrations. The other one-act piece, called Blind (also Englished as The Sightless), affords a text for these statements. The baldness of plot here quite equals that of the play already described; there is no shift of action or stage-setting ; it is one scene, and the situation of a bewilderingly simple sort. We are now fairly within the domain of the dramatic fantasy, Maeterlinck’s peculiar stamping-ground. Dialogue, personages, spectacle, are full of suggestion, atmosphere, uncannily symbolic, surcharged with poetry.

A group of blind men and women have strayed from their asylum down to the sea border, under the guidance of an old priest, upon whom, in their heart-appealing helplessness, they utterly depend. There they sit and have converse in the shadows of an ancient forest, under a southern sky thick-sown with stars ; and the consummate delicate art wherewith their evil case is figured, and with them the plight of all mortals blind of eyes or soul; the shadowy sketch of their solemn isle, magical as Prospero’s ; and the slow, awful terror up to which the beholder is led when the dénoûment announces, by the hand-gropings and guessings of these unfortunates, that the priest and guide sits dead in the midst of them, so that they may not return to safe harborage as the night waxes and wanes, — all this makes a deep impression, however gloomy in tone and forced in conception. Each line, each moment, has its symbolic, hint, and the sphinx-like inevitableness of Fate has seldom been bodied forth more convincingly, more subtly, within the confines of art. A psychologic tour de force, this, but such as only a man of puissant gift would have dared and been able to achieve. Defend it as drama we may not, yet how, save in the actual stage spectacle, obtain the scenic quality entering into the very warp and woof of the texture ? To read Blind is to start a whole hive of imaginings buzzing in one’s brain, for many things seem to be implied and prefigured in the play. Whether such particular conventions as religion, art, and society are in the dramatist’s purview may be left to the individual imagination ; they, and more than they, are certainly suggested in a hundred subtle indirections.

Of Maeterlinck’s plays it is peculiarly true that they repay in exact proportion to the amount of sympathy and responsiveness that is brought to bear on them ; they are a stumbling-block to the Philistine, who demands, above all, his meaning and his moral. For such, here and elsewhere, he is a sealed book ; but to whom impressionism has a preciousness of its own, Blind will prove an alluring if baffling piece of literature. Viewed simply as a pathological study it is remarkable, while as aesthetic product and pictorial representation it has claims on our interest. Maeterlinck’s fondness for the analysis of psychic states has awakened the ire of others beside Philistines. Thus, the brilliant German critic Max Nordau, in his striking study called Degeneration (Entartung), discusses our playwright along with such other “ degenerates ” as Whitman, Wagner, Tolstóy, and Ibsen, as examples of a disease of the age. He regards these workers in art and literature as unsound, mentally and emotionally, and he fixes some picturesquely contemptuous phrases on the Belgian. He explains his vogue as originating in Octave Mirbeau’s whimsical championing of Maeterlinck, the French critic having sufficient authority to cram his new “ find ” down the throat of the public. Nordau is an ardent disciple of Lombroso, and inclines to the theory of the cousin ship of insanity and genius ; his interest is of the scientist rather than of the literary student. Hence, what he says is to be accepted with reservation. Nevertheless, only the blinded admirer of Maeterlinck will blink at the grain of truth in his strictures.

In the remaining play which has the one-act form, and presents but a single scene to the spectator, The Seven Princesses, still more stress is put on symbol, and the action is harder to explain and to justify. Such a production is to be taken as one takes a Chopin nocturne. That it begets a sensation, and that it appeals to the feeling for poetry, is all that one would claim for it, and to some this will be sufficient. Impressionism in the dramatic form, nay, in literature, can no further go. To secure this effect, all Maeterlinck’s, art is expended in the setting of the piece. The dilapidated castle, with its circumambient moat, its sad, still cypresses, and its nearness to the sea, stands in some remote land, one knows not where, and is inhabited by an old king and queen who seem to typify the dead past. To them return from his travels their grandson prince, to find his kinswomen, the seven princesses, asleep in a mysterious hall which is out of sight, and looked into through windows by those on the stage, not by the spectators. In this arrangement the curiosity and apprehension of the audience are played upon, for, naturally, that hall, those seven fair sleepers (with reminiscences of Grimm and Andersen), are tenfold more suggestive and stimulating than if shown to aught but the eye of the imagination. For some occult reason this great salon may not be entered for fear of waking the princesses, who have ailed during the day, and grandfather and grandmother restrain the impetuous youth, who would in and greet Ursule. whom he sees less plainly than the rest. Most of the time and action is thus expended, until the old queen tells Prince Hjalmar of a subterranean ingress by which he may come at the sisters without disturbing their slumbers too violently, which he does, whereupon the beautiful maidens awake and lift themselves up in stately wise, all save one, — Ursule, whom he loves. She is dead, and the six remaining cousins bear her up the broad marble steps as the curtain falls. To fashion such a scene as this, which I summarize in a way to strip it of all light and color, and to call it drama, is to lay one’s self open to several charges, prominent among them being improbability and bêtise. Yet many will feel the charm of the episode as treated : the piquant allurement of that dimlighted hall we are permitted to look into only through the eyes of others ; the vanishing song of the sailors who bring Hjahnar, —

the delicate allegory, too, hanging over the whole picture like a flower-scent in the air ; the imaginative stimulus resultant on leaving so much to be tilled out by the spectator ; the subtle implication of that old chateau, with our dramatist’s stock properties of mild decay and dark tones of nature, creaking doors and morbid memories, backward-dreaming illusions, indefiniteness of place and misty accessories of mise en scène. In some respects this Seven Princesses may be called the most poetic .of Maeterlinck’s dramatic work, though the least satisfactory. It tantalizes, sets many chords to vibrating, and its spell is of the kind which deepens with greater familiarity, the severest of tests. One of the plays hardest to justify, it is one the student would be most loath to give up.

The dramas which illustrate the playwright’s method in the more customary five-act form of workmanship are The Princess Maleine, and Pelleas and Melisande. In the former, a characteristic of Maeterlinck’s is so marked as to strike even the most careless : this maker of fantasies, has himself said that he tries to write Shakespeare for a theatre of marionettes, which may be interpreted to mean a re-handling of the plots and personages of the master poet adapted to modern psychologic demands. The imitation is plain enough in this case, and stands for much of his work: a king living with his paramour wishes his son to marry the daughter of this evil queen from another country ; but the son loves the inoffensive, sweet Maleine, and the weak monarch is egged on by the aforesaid paramour to do her to death, — which the pair effect. Hints and tokens of Shakespeare are to be found in the plot and action of this story : the bloodyminded, masculine woman luring the royal man on to murder inevitably recalls Macbeth ; the king’s final crazed remorse, upon which the curtain goes down, Lear; Hjalmar, the son, is Hamlet, in his irresolution and pale cast of thought; the nurse reminds one of Romeo and Juliet; and Maleine herself has suggestion both of the heroine of that starcrossed tragedy and of witless Ophelia. Nordau’s remarks on the play are sufficiently amusing, and in some measure just. A few sentences may be translated. “ When one begins to read this piece,” he says, “ one pauses to inquire, Why is all this so familiar ? Of what does it remind me ? After a few pages it suddenly becomes clear : the whole thing is a sort of cento out of Shakespeare ! ” And further on in his analysis he adds, “ Maeterlinck’s Princess Maleine is a Shakespeare anthology for children, or Patagonians.” While these resemblances, however, are unmistakable, and none of the devices are new or striking, it is equally true that some strong and individual effects are secured ; the manner and setting, at least, have personality and attraction. This dim chateau with its mysterious doors and echoing corridors, and, without, the silent cypresses and weeping willows, its black pools and moon-glimpses through the ebon-wood, its mournful cemetery hard by, whither the body of the hapless girl shall be borne before she has fairly begun to live, — all this is conveyed with a marvelous result of weird night-witchery and wan fatalism. The physical, animal fear of the play is begotten by keeping one on the qui vive for something anticipant, vague, creepy ; it is, again, not so much what happens as the imaginative dread of the may-be that produces the magnetism and shock of The Princess Maleine. There is always a horror not visible, veiled, on the other side of the door, an hour hence. Indirection, implication, ghoulish suggestiveness, walk like mutes between the lines of the dialogue, and hide just back of every scene. The episode of the strangling of poor Maleine is not a whit more horrible than that preceding it, where she lies in her deserted, far-removed room, while a night storm comes up, and her big dog crouches in a corner, shaken with dumb fear, Maleine dies several deaths through nervous agony of lonesomeness and apprehension before the guilty couple burst into her chamber and dispatch her. One is reminded. in reading this scene, of Guy de Maupassant’s terrible little tale Lui, wherein the same sensory nerves are tortured. The two speeches most often made by the main characters are, “ Je ne sais pas ” and “ J’ai peur.” The acute remark of Mr. H. M. Alden, that the playing upon the primitive sensations of fear and apprehension lies at the basis of Maeterlinck s art or method, is nowhere truer or better illustrated than in The Princess Maleine.

In the five-act play Pelleas and Melisande we get another unwholesome castle, with an ill-smelling subterranean vault, and much made of the opening of doors and what, is on the other side. Our dramatist harps on these details in a way that implies deep meaning, and which certainly has a high-wrought effect upon the reader. Melisande is the girl wife of an old king, innocent, weak, the creature of events too big and potent for her to cope with. She is in love with Pelleas, a young kinsman of her husband, their passion being vague and symbolic, never grossly guilty. In the tragic catastrophe, the husband, Golaud, surprises them together, kills Pelleas, and wounds Melisande to her death, she leaving a babe born out of time to struggle in her stead in a world which proves too much for the girl mother. Both the murder scene at the fountain, closing the fourth act, and the final act, which shows the young wife dying, while her grisly husband probes her with questions in respect of her innocence, have in Maeterlinck’s hands decided dramatic value of his genre, though the mere incidents are threadbare enough. Again, one thinks of As You Like It, in the wood scene in the first act ; and the situation in which King Golaud surprises the lovers may suggest to one quick to scent literary resemblances the deathless story of Francesca da Rimini. Be this as it may, the play is rich in symbolism, in its marginal notes on the meanings and mysteries of life. To some, fond of a cryptic or allegorical significance in Maeterlinck, Melisande is the type of the new world of ideas and aspirations, wrecked because cooped up in old conventions, symbolized by her loveless marriage, gloomy palace, and groping childish ignorance of men and things. But perhaps it were better to look on her simply as the creature of an honest art impulse, a ewe lamb fallen on evil days and ways. Whatever its inner intent, the play has a sort of fascination, and scattered through it are pictures and passages of deep beauty. There is a constant temptation to quote, yet this impressionist, for the very reason that he is such, yields remarkably few brief excerpts that at all do him justice. So much, with him, depends on atmosphere and setting. This may account in part for Nordau’s apparent success in his satiric illustrations of what he is pleased t o deem Maeterlinck’s incompetence and sheer lunacy.

III.

From the vantage of this cursory survey of his dramatic product, a few words by way of summarizing the significance and claim of Maeterlinck. M. Mirbeau has dubbed him the “ Belgian Shakespeare,” but this surely may be taken as a phrase born of over-enthusiasm, descriptive rather than discriminating. His apparent aim has been to make drama of psychologic interest and power, and full of suggestion from the teeming literary past, the modern auditor being wrought upon by these associative effects. He has tried to substitute the spiritual, the subtle, the self-conscious, for that play of more elemental passions, that lust for objective life, that romantic atmosphere, which both conditioned and inspired earlier play-making. He has displayed a conspicuous talent in the application of this idea. Yet he has done too little and too much to assure his place either as dramatist or littérateur. On the one hand, his work is so sketchy, so impressionistic, as to disqualify it as drama in any true sense : it lacks reality, progress, action. On the side of literary art more broadly viewed, and looking aside from the play as a form, the morbid introspection, the esoteric nature of the appeal, the want of red blood and open-air oxygen in Maeterlinck, must all be taken into account in any serious and calm estimate. He is, be it confessed, an expression of a mood of today ; but a healthy skepticism that he will be a master holding his own for a long to-morrow may well be the critic’s attitude. Healthiness, and its close kinsman naturalness, are saving qualities in literature, and the young Belgian hardly possesses either. Nor by healthiness is meant a merry theme and a cheap-john optimism, but simply a recognition of Life as many-sided, actual, big, tragicomic, and above all, the best thing we have, and not mere dream-stuff. Yet literature is literature, whether it be morbid or mellow with wholesome humanity ; otherwise would John Ford, Cyril Tourneur, and Otway, Poe, Beddoes, and Emily Bronte he ruled out of court. Subjectively, too, we all have our twilight moods, our moments when obscurant thoughts are welcome for a dream-while or so, as Lamb would say. The man who can make fear poetical, who can fill the chambers of memory with visions and crowd the imagination thick with phantom fancies, elusive, yet not to be forgotten, is a conjurer after his kind, though not the coequal of one who stands in the sunlight, looking outward and upward for inspiration.

While deprecating the ill-judged attempt to place this dramatist on his pedestal as a statue of heroic size, one may still feel grateful that he has widened our conception of dramatic and poetic possibilities, and achieved work strong in suggestion and distinctly personal. So much it would be as idle to deny him as it is mistakenly generous to hurry him on to his niche while yet in the claymould.

Richard Burton.