Such avowals of ignorance are possible only from the height of a great intellectual pride. Villiers' revolt against Science, so far as Science is materialistic, and his passionate curiosity in that chimera's flight towards the invisible, are one and the same impulse of a mind to which only mind is interesting. _Toute cette vieille Extériorité, maligne, compiquée, inflexible,_ that illusion which Science accepts for the one reality: it must be the whole effort of one's consciousness to escape from its entanglements, to dominate it, or to ignore it, and one's art must be the building of an ideal world beyond its access, from which one may indeed sally out, now and again, in a desperate enough attack upon the illusions in the midst of which men live. And just that, we find, makes up the work of Villiers, work which divides itself roughly into two divisions: one, the ideal world, or the ideal in the world (_Axël, Elën, Morgane, Isis,_ some of the _contes,_ and, intermediary, _La Révolte_); the other, satire, the mockery of reality (_L'Eve Future,_ the _Contes Cruels, Tribulat Bonhomet_). It is part of the originality of Villiers that the two divisions constantly flow into one another; the idealist being never more the idealist than in his buffooneries. [1] "I am far from sure," wrote Verlaine, "that the philosophy of Villiers will not one day become the formula of our century." 2 _Axël_ is the Symbolist drama, in all its uncompromising conflict with the "modesty" of Nature and the limitations of the stage. It is the drama of the soul, and at the same time it is the most pictorial of dramas; I should define its manner as a kind of spiritual romanticism. The earlier dramas, _Elën, Morgane,_ are fixed at somewhat the same point in space; _La Révolte,_ which seems to anticipate _The Doll's House,_ shows us an aristocratic Ibsen, touching reality with a certain disdain, certainly with far less skill, certainly with far more beauty. But _Axël,_ meditated over during a lifetime, shows us Villiers' ideal of his own idealism.