"Jouons au plus fidèle!"--A quoi bon, ô Nature! "Autant à qui perd gagne." Alors, autre couplet. "Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j'en suis sûre." "Après vous, s'il vous plaît." Enfins, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres, Douce; feignant de n'en pas croire encor mes yeux, J'aurai un: "Ah çà, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre! C'était donc sérieux?" And yet one realises, if one but reads him attentively enough, how much suffering and despair, and resignation to what is, after all, the inevitable, are hidden away under this disguise, and also why this disguise is possible. Laforgue died at twenty-seven: he had been a dying man all his life, and his work has the fatal evasiveness of those who shrink from remembering the one thing which they are unable to forget. Coming as he does after Rimbaud, turning the divination of the other into theories, into achieved results, he is the eternally grown up, mature to the point of self-negation, as the other is the eternal _enfant terrible._ He thinks intensely about life, seeing what is automatic, pathetically ludicrous in it, almost as one might who has no part in the comedy. He has the double advantage, for his art, of being condemned to death, and of being, in the admirable phrase of Villiers, "one of those who come into the world with a ray of moonlight in their brains." MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC The secret of things which is just beyond the most subtle words, the secret of the expressive silences, has always been clearer to Maeterlinck than to most people; and, in his plays, he has elaborated an art of sensitive, taciturn, and at the same time highly ornamental simplicity, which has come nearer than any other art to being the voice of silence. To Maeterlinck the theatre has been, for the most part, no more than one of the disguises by which he can express himself, and with his book of meditations on the inner life, _Le Trésor des Humbles,_ he may seem to have dropped his disguise.