the immaculate soul of the sinner, according to M. Maeterlinck's theory, may carry 'dans ses yeux le sourire trans'parent de l'enfant,' the tears of Mélisande's last hour may be truly, as the old king watching says, the tears of son 'âme qui pleure,' mourning the childhood of which the frail passion of an anticipated womanhood has robbed her.

And as in his love dramas M. Maeterlinck has discarded the ideal union of the soul and body of love, so his death dramas translate us into an atmosphere far removed from the illuminated cloud-land of Novalis's mysticism. The attitude of the elder mystic towards death was definite, it was one of resolute serenity; 'la mort est une victoire 'sur soi-même qui, comme toute victoire sur soi-même, 'procure une nouvelle existence plus légère.' Death is thegreat illusion,' it is not the subjugation but the triumphant emancipation of life, the gallant exit of the soul from its earthly exile. L'homme peut devenir enthou'siaste de la maladie . . . et considérer la mort comme une ' union plus étroite d'êtres aimants.' 'Une pièce de la vie 'du monde,' wrote old Michel Montaigne. Novalis saw yet further. Regarding life as a possession wholly desirable he epitomises his optimisms in one brief faith, La mort est la vie.' Nor were his doctrines concerning that most formidable of earth's catastrophes impersonal imaginations. The figure of death had confronted him at every turn during his twenty-eight years of life. Not only Sophie von Kühn, his betrothed, but Erasmus, his twin-spirit and best loved brother, mit dem er Sinn und Herz theilte,' his sister, his youngest brother, the tidings of whose death precipitated his own, had one and all died in youth, but the sentences in letters, diaries, and poems recording his overwhelming sorrows ring-with transitory lapses-in unison with his creed of hope. Sei getröst. Erasmus hat über'wunden.' 'Für Sophien kann ich nicht klagen;' death is ' der Heimgang;' dying, his sister is die Siegerin.' The separation of the grave only served to transfer the venue of his life to the regions of eternal reality, where the dead are the living, but where souls yet detained in their mortal tenement, detaching themselves from earthly preoccupations, may enter by faith and effort of the will. Nor when the silent feet of the great messenger approach his own threshold does the accent change: Ich will fröhlich wie ein jun'ger Dichter sterben.' In heiterer Ruh will ich den Augen'blick erwarten.' Mein Tod soll Beweis meiner Gefühle für ' das Höchste sein; ächte Aufopferung, nicht Nothmittel.'

1

For M. Maeterlinck death, as he has elected to represent it, is a stroke of fate dealt from behind a curtain as inscrutable, as impenetrable as the 'grande porte de fer uni sous 'les voûtes très sombres' against which Ygraine beats her torn hands in vain as Tintagiles, the frail child of life, is slain by the savage, monstrous, but always unseen figure in whose image we may be intended to discern the symbol of Destiny itself. M. Maeterlinck has drawn death, albeit symbolically, from the life-from this, as Novalis from the other, side of life. He has drawn it as, indeed, we see it, 'un événement masqué,' and for once the mask is real, as darkness is real and mist; it is a mask of nature's own making, where only the mask is visible of the actuality beyond and beneath.

He has lent the whole force of his art-and it here excels itself to enhance the impression of an ineradicable instinct of dread, the animal dread of the blindness of mankind, at the neighbourhood of death. His appeal is to the involuntary sensation of fear which Montaigne combated with resolute manhood, denouncing every artificial environment that would serve to unhinge the courage of men at the approach of what 'est moins à craindre que rien, s'il 'y avait quelque chose de moins que rien.' 'Les enfants,' he writes in the same essay, using an unwontedly imaginative image, 'ont peur de leurs amis mesmes quand ils les voyent masquez. . . aussi avons-nous.. il faut oster 'le masque Thus earlier eyes than ours, less, it may be, intellectualised races, had striven to deprive death of its mask of terror. They had encompassed it with ideals of courage, fortitude, and dignity. In the death scenes of the great epoch of English tragedy the idea of death in itselfas distinct from the evils attendant upon it, the remorses of conscience, the anticipation of future punishment-is presented continually under aspects that preclude the possibilities of fear.

'Tis less than to be born, a lasting sleep,

A quiet resting from all jealousy,

A thing we all pursue: I know besides
It is but giving over of a game

That must be lost.'

Ordella seeks it,

'Tis of all sleeps the sweetest,
And those are fools who fear it.'

Ford's Calantha dies with her note of bridal triumph, the

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Duchess of Malfy in the utter fearlessness of her unshaken dignity,

'Come, violent death,

Serve for Mandragora to make me sleep.'

'Dost thou lie still?' asks Cleopatra of Iras, who for once has cheated her great mistress of her due precedence in that death scene which keeps above all other its halo of imperious glory;

'If thus thou vanishest, thou tell'st the world

It is not worth leave-taking.'

So each, whatever the circumstances of violence and horror, encounters the invisible presence-death itself-with the concurrence of the will and the equable calm befitting, in Montaigne's phrase, les âmes bien nées.'

But M. Maeterlinck has transferred the accent in art from the courage of death to the terror of death. He has pourtrayed in its most sinister semblance the mask Montaigne would have had withdrawn, which Novalis, without withdrawing, penetrated. And while he has outlined his death episodes, with touches that give them the accurate familiarity of personal experience, he has surrounded and enveloped them with an atmosphere of a strangeness as great as if death came to earth but once in an eternity.

He has drawn the mask under the symbol of a phantasmal perceptibility. Je n'ai rien vu,' the old king exclaims, incredulous that death could have passed him by unrecognised in Mélisande's chamber; 'je n'ai rien entendu.' All M. Maeterlinck's figures of romance-kings, queens, men, women, children-fade into phantoms, ghosts who walk in dreams, beside the imageless spectre, the unembodied force which in L'Intruse' enters the long avenue by the cypress wood, where the nightingales are suddenly mute and the swans seek the further edge of the moon-lit water. Step by step, steps that leave no print upon the path, we track the advent of the unbidden guest. In a lamp-lit room a group of six watchers sit. Beyond are the chambers of the new-born baby and the mother. And the night with its disquietude deepens, and the sound of the spectral scythe haunts the brain (Death, thou art a mower too'), and there are feet upon the threshold.

'Le Père (à la servante): Quelqu'un n'est-il pas entré tout à l'heure?

La Servante: Mais non, monsieur.

Le Père: Mais nous avons entendu ouvrir la porte.

La Servante: C'est moi qui ai fermé la porte.

Le Père: Elle était ouverte ?

La Servante: Oui.'

Footfall by footfall heavily death mounts the stair. A seventh watcher sits at the table.

" 'Aïeul: Vous êtes tous autour de la table?

La Fille: Oui, grand-père.'

And each in turn makes reply as one by one the blind old man calls them by name.

'Aïeul: Et qui est-ce qui s'est assis là?

La Fille: Mais il n'y a personne, grand-père.

Aïeul Pourquoi tremblez-vous toutes les trois, mes filles? (tressaillant d'une épouvante spéciale) qui est-ce qui s'est levé?'

Death has passed to the inner room, la chambre mortuaire.' No artist has ever excelled M. Maeterlinck in making that invisible passing felt, in surrounding it with an atmosphere which is not, as it were, only an effect but an emanation. Minimising as far as possible our interest in death's victims, he rivets our attention upon the idea as distinct from its human association. We never see the face of the dying woman in 'L'Intruse.' Of the dead priest in 'Les Aveugles' we know scarcely more than that he is dead. Death, not the priest, is the leading actor around whom les aveugles,' blind age, blind man and womanhood, youth and infancy, grope forlorn in the double darkness of eyes that see not and of night that falls.

In

Intérieur the drowned girl, l'étrange petite âme,' remains from first to last unseen; an unnamed figure upon a bier of broken boughs, borne slowly homewards by the crowd of villagers to the quiet house where (once more it is old age, manhood, youth and infancy) all rest in peace, unconscious, in that interim hour when the shaft is sped but the heart is still unpierced, that the bearers of death's tidings watch them from without. One by one the news-bringers come, and one by one their courage fails.

'Le Vieillard: Ils sont si sûrs de leur petite vie, et ils ne se doutent pas que tant d'autres en savent davantage; et que moi, pauvre vieux, je tiens ici, à deux pas de leur porte, tout leur petit bonheur, comme un oiseau malade, entre mes vieilles mains que je n'ose pas ouvrir

...

L'Etranger: Pourquoi faut-il que je vous accompagne?

seul

Le Vieillard: Je ne sais pas pourquoi j'ai perdu tout courage

Allez

Je croyais qu'il n'y avait qu'à frapper à la porte; à entrer simplement, à chercher quelque phrase et à dire . . .

[Entre Marie, petite-fille du Vieillard.]

Marie: Vous l'avez dit, grand-père ?

Le Vieillard: Vous voyez bien que nous n'avons rien dit. Ils attendent encore sous la lampe . . . Regardez . .

Marie Grand-père, ne le dites pas ce soir.

:

Le Vieillard: Vous voyez que vous perdez courage aussi

[Entre Marthe, petite-fille du Vieillard.]

Marthe Tout est-il prêt? Que faites-vous ici? (Elle regarde aux fenêtres.) Ils ne pleurent pas ? . . . ils . . . vous ne l'avez pas dit? . . . C'est moi qui vais le dire.

Le Vieillard: Reste ici, mon enfant, et regarde un instant . . . Marthe (se retournant): Où êtes-vous, grand-père? Je suis si malheureuse que je ne vous vois plus Moi-même, je ne sais plus que faire..

It is a scene where M. Maeterlinck's art, discarding the least tinge of melodrama, approaches something very near perfection. In this, as in 'L'Intruse' and 'Les Aveugles,' the romance element, with its symbolical royalties, recedes from sight; the playwright's use for crowns would appear to be over when man has set forth-again to employ the Gaelic phrase 'on the journey of truth." Life itself is here before us-the pity of it; death-not, as in 'L'Intruse' and 'Les 'Aveugles,' the horror, but the sorrow of it, with a dim suggestion added of that laggard unconsciousness of brain and sense with regard to those great events which the soul in its swifter foreshadowings knows as it were by anticipation; 'toutes choses arrivent en nous bien avant qu'elles aient ' lieu.' All is painted with the finest strokes of the artist's pen. The emotional effect is never severed, as sometimes, from the true source and root of emotion, and in making those upon whom the sorrow is about to descend personnages muets' of the dramatis persona he has by the slightest of structural touches expressed something of the elemental silence of the deepest grief. They are the silent 'griefs which cut the heart-strings

les

Sympathy as a creed of morals, the assertion and reassertion of the supremacy of things spiritual over things material both in power and importance, la foi ... l'argument des choses qui n'apparaissent pas,' are to be found throughout M. Maeterlinck's writings. The true artist's gift of finished expression in the sensitive graduation of the literal meaning of words by their sound and rhythm