And therein the old ghost of the Romantics comes to life asserting its "claims of the ideal," as Ibsen has the phrase. Crushed to dust by the hammers of the realists, sneered at in the bitter-sweet epigrams of Heine, Romance returns to us wearing a new mask. We name this mask Symbolism; but joyous, incarnate behind its shifting shapes, marches Romance, the Romance of 1830, the Romance of--Before the Deluge. The earth-men, the Troglodytes, who went delving into moral sewers and backyards of humanity, ruled for a decade and a day; then the vanquished reconquered. In this cycle of art it is Romance that comes to us more often, remains longer when it does come. Maurice Maeterlinck employs the symbol instead of the sword; the psyche is his _panache._ His puppets are all poetic--the same poetry as of eld informs their gestures and their speech. He so fashions them of such fragile pure stuff that a phrase maladministered acts as the thrust of a dagger. The Idea of Death slays: the blind see; bodies die, but the soul persists; voices of expiring lovers float through vast and shadowy corridors--as in Alladine and Palomides--children speak as if their lips had been touched by the burning coal of prophecy; their souls are laid bare with a cruel pity; love is strangled by a hair; we see Death stalk in the interior of a quiet home, or rather _feel_ than see; or in our ears is whispered a terrible and sweet tale of the Death of Tintagiles--it is all moonlight music, mystery with a nightmare _finale_; or a tender original soul is crushed by the sheer impact of a great love hovering near it--Aglavaine and Sélysette. Then we get fantasy and miracle play, librettos, full of charm, wonder, and delicious irony. Maeterlinck recalls life, beckons to life, and in Monna Vanna smashes the stained-glass splendours hemming him in from the world; and behold--we are given drama, see the shock of character, and feel the mailed hand of a warrior-dramatist. In a dozen years he has traversed a kingdom, has grown from _wunderkind_ to mature artist, from a poet of few moods to a maker of viable drama. The chronology of the Maeterlinckian dramatic works is this: Princess Maleine (1889); The Intruder, The Blind (1890); The Seven Princesses (1891); Pelléas and Mélisande(1892); Alladine and Palomides, Interior, The Death of Tintagiles (1894); Aglavaine and Sélysette (1896); Ariane and Barbe-Bleu, Sister Beatrice (1901); Monna Vanna (1902); Joyzelle (1903). Though the first attempts are emotional presentations of ideas, though the dramatic form is, from a Scribe standpoint, amateurish, yet the unmistakable _flair_ of the born dramatist is present. In the beginning Maeterlinck elected to mould poetic moods; later on we shall see him a moulder of men and women.