Instead of the idea-complexity we find in Browning, in Maeterlinck the single motif is elaborated. He is not polyphonic,--to borrow a musical metaphor,--but monophonie. Where he is a psychologist of the most modern stamp lies in his perception of the fact that there is no longer an autonomous _I_, the human ego is an orchestra of collective egos. _We,_ not _I_, is the burden of our consciousness. Through countless ages the vast chemistry of the Eternal retort has created a bubble, an atom, which says _I_ to itself in daylight, when looking in mirrors, but in the dark when the inutile noise of life is ceased then the _I_ becomes a multitudinous _We_. All the head hums with repercussive memories of anterior existences. Some call it dreaming; others nerve-memory; others again--recollection of anterior life. Other dramatists have hinted this pantheism before Maeterlinck. Shakespeare was a symbolist; so was Ibsen when he penned his The Master Builder. But the younger man makes a formula of the idea. His is the dramaturgy of the subconscious. His people say things and thereby reveal their multiple personalities, even the colour of their souls. Here, then, is the symbolist. To put the case more clearly, let Aline Gorren be heard,--a writer who is imbued with the beauty of symbolic ideas:-- "Your documents, details, verified facts, are precisely the least worth considering," says, in effect, the Symbolist. "They are appearances; impalpable shadows of clouds. Nothing ye think to see is what it seems." Nothing outside of our representation exists. All visibilities are symbols. Our business is to find out what these symbols are. Any book that does not directly concern itself with the hints concealed beneath the diversified masks and aspects of matter is a house built out of a boy's toy blocks. Science, after promising more things than it could fulfil, has many hypotheses just now that float about one central idea--the existence of one essence, infinite in moods, by reference to which alone anything whatsoever can be understood. Those of our creed only and solely have a philosophic basis for their art. Emil Verhaeren, Belgian mystic, anarchist, poet, sings of The Forest of Numbers in his hate-saturated chants, Les Flambeaux Noirs. Je suis l'halluciné de la forêt des Nombres.