More strictly, he is a Neo-Platonist. His remark about the Admirable Ruysbroeck’s idea is equally true of his own. ‘I fancy that all those who have not lived in the intimacy of Plato and of the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, will not go far with this reading.’ He quotes Plotinus, ‘the great Plotinus, who, of all the intellects known to me, draws the nearest to the divine.’ He cites Porphyry and the Gnostics and Swedenborg. These are not exactly popular authors of the moment. But M. Maeterlinck, it is plain, has devoured them; his is not what Pope called ‘index-learning.’ Plotinus (205-270 A.D.) stood between two worlds, the old and the new; and he made the best of both. He enlarged the boundaries of art by discerning in the idea of beauty an inward and spiritual grace not to be found in the ‘Platonic idea.’ That, too, is what M. Maeterlinck is striving for: a larger idea of beauty, and a better apprehension of its inward and spiritual grace. His cardinal doctrine will, I conjecture, prove to be something like this. What should be of most account for us all is not external fact, but the supra-sensuous world. ‘What we know is not interesting’; the really interesting things are those which we can only divine—the veiled life of the soul, the crepuscular region of subconsciousness, our ‘borderland’ feelings, all that lies in the strange ‘neutral zone’ between the frontiers of consciousness and unconsciousness. The mystery of life is what makes life worth living. ‘’Twas a little being of mystery, like every one else,’ says the old King Arkel of the dead Mélisande. We are such stuff as dreams are made of, might be the ‘refrain’ of all M. Maeterlinck’s plays, and of most of these essays. He is penetrated by the feeling of the mystery in all human creatures, whose every act is regulated by far-off influences and obscurely rooted in things unexplained. Mystery is within us and around us. Of reality we can only get now and then the merest glimpse. Our senses are too gross. Between the invisible world and our own there is doubtless an intimate concordance; but it escapes us. We grope among shadows towards the unknown. Even the new conquests of what we vainly suppose to be ‘exact’ thought only deepen the mystery of life. There is, for example, the Schopenhauerian theory of love. We had fancied we could at least choose our loves in freedom: but ‘we are told that a thousand centuries divide us from ourselves when we choose the woman we love, and that the first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal which thousands of hands, craving for birth, have impressed upon the lips of the mother they desire.’ And so with the ‘heredity’ of the men of science. ‘We know that the dead do not die. We know that it is not in our churches they are to be found, but in the houses, the habits of us all.’ What was there in the old notion of Destiny so mysterious as this double thraldom of ours—thraldom to the dead and to the unborn? Conclusion: mysticism is your only wear.