leads at times to magnificent absurdities. Two theories are superposed one on the other: all is a dream; yet one should act, and act worthily. But the first thesis implies the annihilation of action; and the second thesis by implication denies the first. If life is a dream and a fiction, why should we act? And if we must act, and act as Christians rather than beasts, we are forced to conclude that there is something certain in the world, that life has a purpose, that choice is inevitable. But if you thus deny the first thesis, you take away the whole imaginative and moral coloring of the drama, and you have merely a discursive elegiac exhortation, for which a few phrases would have sufficed. If you accept the common Christian thesis, the drama loses background and relief, and becomes an ordinary play in which the sudden and utter transformation of the protagonist has not the slightest motivation. The two theses are interwoven not by logical but by theatrical necessity. Life is a Dream might then be defined, in the last analysis, as a pair of old and contradictory ideas combined in old and lifeless forms.

Farinelli is perfectly well aware of the ideological and artistic bankruptcy of Calderón:

The true drama lies outside the action of the play. It consists in the impossibility of reconciling the doctrine of the nullity of life with the demands of life itself, the world of shadows with the concrete world of this our earth, which

leads us on from stress to stress, from pain to pain. A mere doctrine pretends that it can absorb the practical experience of life, seeks even to make itself identical with life; but its endeavor is arrogant and hopeless. The chasm remains. The idea that life is a dream falls into emptiness, yet Calderón does not realize it. He moves his phantoms hither and yon in a dream-world remote alike from nature and from truth.

Quite so: even in the dream-world there is a certain law of nature, a certain truth. For the dream-world is purely an artistic creation. And the man who does not recognize the power of that truth and the reign of that law is beyond the pale of poetry.

XXIII

MAETERLINCK1

I

LET a solemn man with a black cat in his hands lead you into a dark room. Let him begin patiently to rub the cat's fur the wrong way, singing a nonsense song sotto voce. If you don't fall asleep too soon you will see sparks fly from the cat's fur. Then the man will begin to talk to you about sparks. Speaking in the low tone that is used in incantations, he will tell you that sparks are products of animal electricity, but that they may well be reflections of the fires of Hell-unless forsooth they be glimmerings of a celestial illumination. The cat, in dread uncertainty, will purr a little, and every now and then will venture a languid meow or will spit in dismay. The solemn man, unmoved, will go on talking in his white and specious voice. He will direct your glance to the pale window, and try to persuade you that the points of light out yonder are stars lost in the sky, or else will-o'-the

1 Written à propos of Maeterlinck's l'Hôte Inconnu, Paris, 1917.

wisps of ancient cemeteries, or possibly fireflies rising from the damp grass; and he will finally suggest that fireflies may well be stars of the infernal world, and that stars may well be willo'-the-wisps of the world above, and so on ad infinitum.

The solemn man is Maurice Maeterlinck. The ambiguous and labyrinthine discourses, interspersed with the meowings of the cat, are the books of Maurice Maeterlinck. Such, at least, is the impression his books have made on me for some time past. And that impression has been strengthened by the reading of his recently published Unknown Guest, a little breviary of subliminal marvels.

Maeterlinck's specialty in the field of contemporary literature is the manipulation of mystery for the use of delicate souls. He creates little enigmas in order that he may provide three or four equally possible solutions. He stirs up little anguishes, he plays with quivers and shivers, he prepares dark recesses that he may walk through them with a lantern in his hand and his finger on his lips. He invents terrible problems -and solves them with the utmost amiability. He is a sort of austere Puck, a Puritan clown, a religious gnome. Real mysteries, the true and terrible mysteries, are too much for delicate souls; they cannot swallow them whole. The mystery of dogmas, the mystery of our universal

ignorance, and the mystery of our inevitable death are too hard and too strong for the souls of ladies and gentlemen who can spare only odd moments for metaphysical anxiety.

Maeterlinck breaks up and subdivides his mysteries. He distributes them in digestible doses; he makes them into biscuits, cakes, and candies, he sweetens them with the sugar of poetry, and serves them up in the pastry of literature. Thus the mysteries of life, of the spirit, and of the universe, disguised and powdered, thinned and triturated, appear presentable and edible to men of fashion, to Anglo-Saxon ladies, to young occultists, and to German Fräulein; and the books of Maeterlinck take their place on the teatable between the steaming samovar and the cigarette box.

II

But though his books are full of mystery, there is nothing mysterious in the financial success of this cosmopolitan Belgian who, born at Ghent of a Flemish family, writes in French, publishes by preference in English, and is studied chiefly in German. Paris gave him his reputation, through the famous essay of Mirbeau, published in 1890. The English and the Americans pay him best for his magazine articles. The Germans, naturally,