Émile Verhaeren's dramas seem to stand outside his work. Verhaeren is essentially a lyric poet. His whole feeling springs from lyric enthusiasm, and all neighbouring domains are merely sources whose strength flows into and feeds this one vital instinct. Verhaeren has almost always used the dramatic and the epic only as a means, never as an end in themselves: from the epic he has taken over into the vast sweep of his dithyrambic poems its broad, calm development, and from the drama the swift, abrupt contrast of transitions. The dramatic and the epic only serve him as a tonic, as a means to strengthen the blood of his lyric art. Although Verhaeren beside his lyric work has written dramas--four up to the present--these, in the edifice of his complete production, must be appreciated from a different point of view: from an architectural point of view. For the dramas are to him, in a certain sense, only a survey, a concentration of individual lyric crises, a synopsis of certain ideal complexes which have occupied some moment of his past; they are final settlements; the last point in lines of development; milestones of individual epochs. All that in the lyric poems, which never systematically bounded a domain, fell apart, is here made to converge to the focus of a programme. The lyric juxtaposition is fused into an inner relationship, the circle of ideas is co-ordinated like a picture in the frame of a play. Verhaeren's four tragedies represent four spheres of a conception of the universe: the religious, the social, the national, and the ethical. _Le Cloître_ is a re-creation of the book of verse _Les Moines_, is the tragedy of Catholicism; _Les Aubes_ is a condensation of the sociological trilogy _Les Villes Tentaculaires, Les Campagnes Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires. Philip II._ shapes the tragedy of the Antichrist, the contrast of Spain and Belgium, of sensuality and asceticism. And _Hélène de Sparte_, which in its outward form manifests a return to classicism, handles purely moral, eternal problems. As far as their contents are concerned, Verhaeren's dramas show no deviation, no change of the inner centre of gravity, and his new dramatic style is in perfect harmony with his new lyric style. For just as on the one hand he has used the dramatic element as a substance of his lyric work, here in his dramas he has transmuted the lyric element to a dramatic element. Here, too, we have nothing but visions intensified into exaltation. Here, as everywhere else, Verhaeren can only create by enthusiasm. What goads him on is the lyric moment in his enthusiasm, that second of the highest tension when passion, if it is not to shatter the frame of its generator, must have explosive words. The characters of his dramas are never anything but symbols of great passions, the bridge for this ascension of the exaltation. To him the action is no more than the way to the crises, to those seconds when some mighty force seizes on these characters and