In short, there was no Shakespearean merit in which _La Princesse Maleine_ was lacking, and it followed that the author of _La Princesse Maleine_ was the Shakespeare of our age--the Belgian Shakespeare. The merits of Maeterlinck were widely discussed in France and Belgium, and it was not long before the five-act drama was followed by two pieces, each in one act, called _L'Intruse_ and _Les Aveugles._ In May, 1891, _L'Intruse_ was given by the Théâtre d'Art at the Vaudeville on the occasion of the benefit of Paul Verlaine and Paul Gauguin. He is not entirely the initiator of this impressionistic drama; first in order of talent, he is second in order of time to another Belgian, Charles van Lerberghe, to whom _Les Aveugles_ is dedicated. It was Van Lerberghe (in _Les Flaireurs_, for example) who discovered the effect which might be obtained on the stage by certain appeals to the sense of hearing and of sight, newly directed and with new intentions. But what is crude and even distracting in _Les Flaireurs_ becomes an exquisite subtlety in _L'Intruse._ In _La Princesse Maleine_, in _L'Intruse_, in _Les Aveugles_, in _Les Sept Princesses_, Maeterlinck has but one note, that of fear--the "vague spiritual fear" of imaginative childhood, of excited nerves, of morbid apprehension. In _La Princesse Maleine_ there is a certain amount of action--action which is certainly meant to reinvest the terrors of Macbeth and of Lear. In _L'Intruse_ and _Les Aveugles_ the scene is stationary, the action but reflected upon the stage, as if from some other plane. In _Les Sept Princesses_ the action, such as it is, is "such stuff as dreams are made of," and is literally, in great part, seen through a window. From first to last it is not the play, but the atmosphere of the play, that is "the thing." In the creation of this atmosphere Maeterlinck shows his particular skill; it is here that he communicates to us the nouveau frisson, here that he does what no one has done before. _La Princesse Maleine_, it is said, was written for a theater of marionettes, and it is, certainly, with the effect of marionettes that these sudden, exclamatory people come and go. Maleine, Hjalmar, Uglyane--these are no characters, these are no realizable persons; they are a mask of shadows, a dance of silhouettes behind the white sheet of the "Chat Noir," and they have the fantastic charm of these enigmatical semblances--"luminous, gem-like, ghost-like"--with, also, their somewhat mechanical eeriness. Maeterlinck has recorded his intellectual debt to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, but it was not from the author of _Axel_ that he learned his method. The personages of Maeterlinck--are only too eloquent, too volubly poetical. In their mystical aim Villiers and Maeterlinck are at one; in their method there is all the difference in the world. This is how Sara, in _Axel_, speaks:-- _Songe! Des coeurs condamnés à ce supplice de pas m'aimer! ne sont-ils pas assez infortunés d'être d'une telle nature?_