And it is by passion, this innermost flame of Verhaeren's poetry, that his dramas live too. Their qualities are those of the lyrics; they have, above all, that vast power of vision which sets _Philip II_. against the tragic landscape of Spain; over the drama of Helen arches the heaven of Greece, blue, and mild, and open like a flower; and behind the tragedy of modern cities unrolls the inflamed scenery of the sky with the black arms of chimneys. And then the immense fervour of the ecstasy which, not in a slow, regular progression, but in savage, convulsive thrusts, whirls the action onward to the moments of the solution. Thus Verhaeren's first drama derives its strength from the lyric source of a man's accusation of himself. _Le Cloître_ is a paraphrase of _Les Moines_, the book of the monks. Here again all the characters are gathered together in the cool corridors of a monastery--the gentle, the wild, the feudal, the wrathful, the childlike, the learned monk; here, however, they do not act in isolation, but with all their strength the one against the other. They fight for the prior's chair, which is really the symbol of something higher. For just as in _Les Moines_ every individual monk expressed symbolically some virtue of Catholicism and a distinct idea of God, here the prior's chair decides the question who is the most deserving of God. For his successor the old prior has designated Balthasar, a nobleman whom the monastery has sheltered for years. But he had only taken refuge there because he had killed his own father, thus escaping secular justice, and now he feels the consciousness of his guilt burning, feels the exasperated struggle between his own conscience and the lighter conscience of the others, who have long since forgiven him. And he cannot feel himself free before he has made his confession before the assembled monks, and even then only when he has repeated the confession, against the will of the monastery, to the people, and surrendered himself to the secular judges. The Roman Catholic idea of confession is here wonderfully in agreement with Dostoieffsky's conception of salvation by confession, of deliverance by suffering self-imposed. In three climaxes of equal force at the end of each of the three acts the tragic confession bursts into flame--first born of fear, then of a sense of justice, and at the last positively conceived as a pleasure; and here in these superb lyric ecstasies rest the strong pinions which bear the tragedy.