A thinker may view the visible universe as a symbol, as the garment wherewith the gods conceal themselves; this Goethe did. Or this globe, upon the round of which move sorrowful creatures whirled through space from an unthinkable past to an unthinkable future, may be apprehended as a phantasmagoria, shot through with misery, a cage of dreams, a prison wherein the echoes of what has been thought and done meet in cruel confluence within the walls of the human brain. All pessimistic cosmogonists, poets, dramatists, dwell, with the obsession of an _idée fixe_, upon this scheme of things terrestrial. And then there is De Maupassant, an _eye,_ which photographed the salient profiles of his fellow-beings; or Poe, who, suffering from an incurable disease, felt the horror of the pulse-beat, the hideous drama of mere sentience. Charles Darwin, with pitiless objectivity, displays a map of life whereon the struggle is eternal--a struggle from protoplasm to Super-Man (the latter a mad idea in a poet's skull). Carlyle thunders at the Sons of Belial and we shrivel up in the fiery furnace of his eloquent wrath; or John Henry Newman wooes us to God with beautiful, gentle speech. To every man his illusion. Maeterlinck's is the apprehension of the helplessness of mankind, though not its hopelessness. His optimism, the germ of which is in the poems, has grown steadily with the years. And the tinge of pessimism, of morbidity, in his earlier productions has vanished in the dialectic of his prose. Maeterlinck first saw his drama as music--this is a contradiction in terms, but it best expresses the meaning intended. As in music there are ebb and flow, rhythmic pulse, so his little landscapes unroll themselves with iteration to the accompaniment of mournful voices. No dramatist, ancient or modern, so depends upon vocal _timbre_ to embody his dreams as this one. In reality his characters are voice or nothing. From the deeps of haunted gardens come these muffled voices, voices suffocated by sorrow, poignant voices and sinister. Allusion has been made to the Poe-like machinery of Maeterlinck--atmosphere. It is, however, only external. He works quite differently from Poe, and the _dekoration_ with its dreamy forests, skies lowering or resonant with sunshine, parks and fountains, stretch of sea and dreary moats, is but a background for his moods. He pushes much farther than Ibsen and Wagner the rhythmic correspondences of man and his artistic environment. But the voice dominates his drama, the human voice with all its varied intonations, its wealth of subtle _nuance_.