immortality. Conjointly, and in the union of the two, the fire that consumes becomes the flame that aspires, and love's strength, in a new sense, is 'centred in his wings.' The form, truly, fades, but 'on ne peut aimer vraiment que ' l'amour,' and love, redeemed of earth, is no longer of time but of eternity. 'Was mich so unzertrennlich zu dir ' zieht,' so Heinrich confesses his creed, ist nicht aus dieser Zeit.' The stream, the rushing death-river, that in Heinrich's vision divides for an hour the lovers who love upon earth, becomes, as the dream progresses, the blue firmament over their heads in the land where the divided meet. And in one fragmentary sentence, which a half-drawn breath, as it were, of personal passion sets apart from the rest, he writes, 'Une union qui se fait aussi pour la mort est un 'mariage qui nous donne une compagne pour la nuit.'

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For the nature of the passion as drawn by M. Maeterlinck neither body nor soul can claim or share responsibility. Four of his plays only, strictly speaking, are love dramas. In three out of the four the abstract theme is an involuntary, semi-conscious, and wholly emotional passion, an ambushed calamity of la destinée extérieure. In two, Alladine et Palo'mides,'' Pélléas et Mélisande,' the circumstances and the march-the funeral march-of events are more or less similar: love gives what is not its own to give, and love takes what belongs in honour to another. In La Princesse 'Maleine,' a grim and complicated version of the ever recurrent Märchen of the True Bride, love seeks, though even so with defect of truth, what is its own, but what, if it were not its own, we divine it would equally seek. In 'Aglavaine ' et Sélysette' the mental scene changes. The soul takes its part in the passion of both women, but, in Aglavaine's own words, the ways of the soul are still the ways of the soul, and the ways of the heart-the hearts of woman and man-are still the ways of hearts, whether the soul participate or no.

'Aglavaine (to Sélysette): Je t'aime, j'aime Méléandre, Méléandre m'aime, il t'aime aussi, tu nous aimes l'un et l'autre, et cependant nous ne pourrions pas vivre heureux, parce que l'heure n'est pas encore venue où les êtres humains peuvent s'unir ainsi.'

One and all are tragedies; love allowed, no less than love disallowed, comes only to end in disaster. In Mélisande, Alladine, and Maleine-figures typically representative of the central feminine figures of M. Maeterlinck's creationthe love and the fashion of loving scarcely admit of distinction; and it is love, so far as Mélisande and Alladine are

concerned, represented in antagonism to all loyalties, truths, and generosities of human nature. In both plays it obliterates for man and woman alike every affection which controverts the egoism of passion. Alladine loves Palomides, in spite of the bonds existing between her and the old king, in whom pain and jealousy unhinge reason. Palomides loves Alladine, in spite of his troth-giving to Astolaine, sacrificing the faith in which he dimly discerns his frustrated soul's true destiny with the avowal, made to Astolaine, 'Je t'aime aussi . . . plus que celle que j'aime.' Mélisande, succoured, shielded, cherished by Goland, under the shelter of her husband's tenderness and trust, carrying his unborn child at her heart, keeps lover's tryst with Pélléas, supplementing untruth of deed with untruth of tongue. While Pélléas, despite his soul's faint protest, the futile stirrings, the whispering remorses of his nobler manhood, signs a truce with disloyalty, and betrays his brother's honour with tame self-acquittal, nous' (himself and Mélisande) nous 'ne faisons ce que nous voulons.'

Love romance of all times since Cressida forsook Troilus, Francesca loved Paolo, Iseult Tristram, have familiarised readers with results no less disastrous of the supremacy of passion over will. And it is not in the effects, but in the nature of love, as M. Maeterlinck pourtrays it, that his dramas stand thrice removed from the lovers' tales of the days of Gottfried von Strasburg, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, and his fellows. It is, to repeat the definition, a purely emotional passion, upspringing, a graft from without, in some neutral region of a human personality, a graft generated in that destinée extérieure from whose shut hands the soul alone could have wrested another fate. And here the soul holds itself silent and apart. It is no factor in the tragedy; fate, the hazard of destiny, is sole agent, and usurps undisputed sway. Je croyais que tu avais agi comme 'nous agissons presque tous. . . sans que rien de notre 'âme intervienne,' the old forsaken king tells Alladine; while Palomides in his troth-breaking confesses himself the helpless victim of chance. Un hasard est venu, et j'ai ' reconnu qu'il devait y avoir une chose plus incompréhen'sible que la beauté de l'âme la plus belle ou du visage le 'plus beau, et plus puissant,' and in the contradictions of the dialogue between Pélléas and Mélisande

'Pelléas: Depuis quand m'aimes-tu ?
Mélisande: Depuis toujours.

Pelléas: Je ne t'aimais pas la première fois que je t'ai vue.
Mélisande: Moi non plus.'-

we are given to understand that fate, le hasard noir,' is again responsible. But if the soul, exempt from every blame, uncontaminated by every wrong-doing, remains unstirred within its citadel of wisdom, if it has neither lot nor part in emotions, neither blameless nor white-handed, neither can we feel for one moment that we are, on the other hand, in the saving presence of those earth-born instincts les animaux supérieurs,' as Novalis names the healthful senses of the material man, whose impulses dominated for good or ill the lives of the love-heroines of earlier days. From them sprang the passions of unspiritualised natures, of an Iseult for a Tristram, of Shakespeare's Cleopatra for an Anthony. But fierce, vital, jealous, reckless, and free, leading to evil it may be, they retain the virtues of their guilt. They are passions of instinct, but not of ignoble instincts, passions of sense, but of undegraded senses, passions of natures which have, even in their fever, health, and possess every strength of manand womanhood, save the climax and concentration of strength, self-control. That they lack something in their materialism is doubtless true. In passion, as in all things else, spirit is the extension of matter. It is, to quote Novalis's metaphor, borrowed from the grammar of sound, as the vowel to the consonant.' Yet, if the soul has denied to them that admixture of spirituality which, surmounting all earthly barriers, possesses the horizonless infinite, they lack that alone, and as genius has painted them touch the outmost boundary of mortality.

But, mortal or infinite, no such primitive storm-winds sweep across the misted seas or shake the dim forests in M. Maeterlinck's dramas. In them the senses are summoned only to a semi-conscious automatic co-operation with the emotions. The will, the brain, all faculties of action succumb, as if blunted under a spell. They become as the will, thought, deeds of the somnambulist, and the passiveness of sleep underlies the utmost violence of word or act. Moreover, in part it would seem from the characteristically modern taste for the juxtaposition of incongruities, but also from a desire to emphasise the incorporeal origin of the emotional passion, it is depicted as (or at least it produces the effect of) an emotion of womanhood transplanted into a childhood, a parasite which, like the strangling creepers with close-leaved tendrils and strange-hued, heavy-scented blossoms, of sudden tropical growths, enfolds its child prey, bringing in its embrace sickness of heart and body, chill languors, fever, contagion, and death.

Euphrasia, who plays the time-honoured part of the girlpage in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster,' perhaps comes nearest in English dramatic romance to the type of l'enfantfemme, to which category all M. Maeterlinck's heroines belong; but the points of likeness do little more than enhance the sense of dissimilitude between the older and later dramatists. Euphrasia loves Philaster with as reckless and selfless devotion as, with a more complete self-oblivion than, Maleine Hjalmar or Mélisande Pélléas. Yet Euphrasia's passion formulates no pleas of ignorance; it is no blind, unconscious instinct coming nowhence, and so far as the will is concerned, tending nowhither. It is love sharply defined, a child's wholly imaginative worship springing from a child's preconceived ideal of the manhood she sees embodied in visible shape by the hero of her visions. Her passion asks for and wins no recompense of love, demands no response, claims nothing save the inalienable right to give, and throughout no jarring note of premature womanhood taints the freshness and freedom of the image, and no words in all the play ring truer than her own appraisement of the life she is eager to surrender:

''Tis not a life,

'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away,'

a piece of childhood, of which are the kingdoms of loyalty, truth, and honour.

M. Maeterlinck's conception is a creation of a later phase of the world imagination. The framework of his figureswhose youth is insistently accentuated-is still, indeed, that of a childhood. We are shown the fragile childhood of a fragile child with the hands, the voice, eyes, feet, lips of an unawakened life, while far within a silent soul sleeps untroubled upon a distant throne. And the emotional passion by which her heart is overtaken penetrates neither body nor soul. It is barely more than a vaporous poisoning breath that blurs the crystal surface of the vase of lifebut all the clearness of the crystal is gone. The frame of childhood fades, childhood itself withers to death. Maleine sickens of a nameless malady even before the queen has drawn the cord around the small throat of her victim.

'Maleine: Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! comme je suis malade! Et je ne sais pas ce que j'ai . . . et personne ne sait pas ce que j'ai, le médecin ne sait pas ce que j'ai, ma nourrice ne sait pas ce que j'ai, Hjalmar ne sait pas ce que j'ai.'

Alladine and Palomides, rescued from the subterranean

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grotto of their last love scene, where daylight—ʻla lumière qui n'a pas eu pitié'-had changed the crystallised gems of the darkness and the fire-hearted roses of the night into sombre flints and damp earth stains,

die, though the peril of the waterpools is overpast.

:

'Le Médecin Ils souffrent tous les deux du même mal, et c'est un mal que je ne connais pas.'

Mélisande, wounded with a wound of which 'un petit oiseau 'ne serait pas mort,' dies, as she was born, sans raison.' And reading a symbol within a symbol into such death scenes, it may well seem that it is not Maleine, Alladine, Mélisande, but childhood itself which there expires, stricken to a hereafterless death by emotions whose association with childhood is a malady of the imagination. Such emotions, rooted in their fitting soil, set in their proper groundwork of womanhood, transpierced with the love of a woman's soul, and welded with the earth-born love of a woman's instincts-no less God-given because more overtly human- are the vitality of life. Severed from the true conditions of health by a morbid prematurity of developement, they become, as M. Maeterlinck has evidenced, the vitality of disease physical and moral. Childhood has come too recently from the freedom of the infinite to bear the narrow yoke of passion's servitude. At the first touch of the chain it sickens for the wide horizon of its pre-natal homeland, and, though life may survive, the woman in all the years to come must bear with her the burden of that slain childhood she has lost for ever. Il y a des enfants qui ne sont pas des enfants,' says Novalis, and Alladine, Mélisande, Maleine are of that all-pitiful race. It will take more than the genius of M. Maeterlinck to make the type acceptable; it will also take more than his genius, with all the accessory mists, the obscurities, and unrealities of symbolic drama to reconcile us with his conception of an innocence unimpaired by untruth of word and deed, 'la 'morale mystique,' as here set in action.-As-tu-avezvous été coupables?' asks Goland, claiming the truth that he may absolve the sin. Mélisande : Non, non, nous n'avons pas été coupables.'-'L'innocence,' wrote Novalis, 'est un 'instinct moral.' Setting aside the question of purity of heart and clean-handedness of life, it is an instinct which recognises, even if it has not strength to renounce, that lies are not truth, and deception is not honour, and though

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