Aglavaine and Sélysette is more shadowy in its treatment than Pelléas and Mélisande, and no doubt to the lovers of the "precious" in Maeterlinck more interesting than Monna Vanna. It deals with the love of two women, Aglavaine and Sélysette, for Méléandre. The delicacy of technic displayed is almost inconceivable, and the note of irony, faint as it is, enters a new element in this spiritual duel. To be brief, Aglavaine is the mouthpiece for Maeterlinck in his Treasure of the Humble. She is an _esprit fort_, who attracts the husband of Sélysette by her beauty of soul, vigour of brain, and temperamental intensity. Poor Sélysette is crushed between the upper and nether millstone of the man and woman. They both love her devotedly, but being of the Mélisande type, in her sweet, submissive nature, she fades away until death, self-sought, comes. She has a fragrant soul, and its fragrance exhales itself on her deathbed. The dynamics of love prove too much for this creature. There is tragic pathos in her taking off, and Maeterlinck is at his best in delineating the tower, with its crumbling walls, the wheeling birds frightened by the apparition of a falling body, and the terror and alarm of the little sister. Less, much less, fitted for theatrical representation than Pelléas and Mélisande, this drama is charged with symbolism and with rather too severe strain for its poetic build--too much intellectual freightage. It was composed after the essays, and it is because of this, perhaps, that I find Aglavaine just a trifle _doctrinaire._ There is wise and charming talk, the action _nil._ We get instead _états d'âmes_. The two women expand before our eyes; it is a rare spiritual growth, psychology in the veritable sense of that overworked word. Yet the friendship of Aglavaine slays Sélysette. There is mystery, beauty, of a high order in the play, and in some things it betrays a distinct advance upon its predecessors. Sister Beatrice and Ardiane and Barbe Bleu are librettos for music. The first is a delightful setting of that old Dutch legend made familiar to English readers by John Davidson in his The Ballad of a Nun. There are homely pathos and mystic exaltation in Maeterlinck's interpretation of this nun, who left her convent for the love of man, only to return, decades later, wrecked in body and soul. But her absence has not been missed, for the Virgin Mary has stepped down from her niche in the hall and played the rôle of porteress disguised as the runaway.