Among the most interesting of recent dramatic contributions are William Butler Yeats’s “Plays for an Irish Theatre.” Mr. Yeats’s recent visit to this country is still fresh in recollection; and doubtless many of my readers have seen his beautiful little fairy piece, “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” Probably allegory, or at least symbolism, is the only form in which the supernatural has any chance in modern drama. The old-fashioned ghost is too robust an apparition to produce in a sceptical generation that “willing suspension of disbelief” which, says Coleridge, constitutes dramatic illusion. Hamlet’s father talks too much; and the ghosts in “Richard III” are so sociable a company as to quite keep each other in countenance. The best ghost in Shakespeare is Banquo’s, which is invisible—a mere “clot on the brain”—and has no “lines” to speak. The elves in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the elemental spirits in “The Tempest” are nothing but machinery. The other world is not the subject of the play. Hauptmann’s “_Die Versunkene Glocke_” is symbolism, and so is “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” Maeterlinck’s “_Les Aveugles_” and Yeats’s “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” are more formally allegorical. The poor old woman, in the latter, who takes the bridegroom from his bride, is Ireland, from whom strangers have taken her “four beautiful green fields”—the ancient kingdoms of Munster, Leinster, Ulster, and Connaught. These Irish plays, indeed, are the nearest thing we have to the work of the Belgian symbolist, to dramas like “_Les Aveugles_” and “_L’Intruse_.” And, as in those, the people are peasants, and the dialogue is homely prose. No brogue: only a few idioms and sometimes not even that, the whole being supposed to be a translation from the Gaelic into standard English. Maeterlinck’s dramas have been played on many theatres. Mr. William Sharp, who twice saw “_L’Intruse_” at Paris, found it much less impressive in the acting than in the reading, and his experience was not singular. As for the more romantic pieces, like “_Les Sept Princesses_” and “_Aglavaine et Sélysette_,” they are about as shadowy as one of Tieck’s tales. Those who saw Mrs. Patrick Campbell in “_Pelléas et Mélisande_” will doubtless agree that these dreamlike poems are hurt by representation. It may be that Maeterlinck, like Baudelaire, has invented a new shudder. But the matinée audiences laughed at many things which had thrilled the closet reader.