In the mystics alone is certitude. ‘If it be true, as has been said, that every man is a Shakespeare in his dreams, we have to ask ourselves whether every man, in his waking life, is not an inarticulate mystic, a thousandfold more transcendental than those circumscribed by speech.’ In silence is our only chance of knowing one another. And ‘mystic truths have over ordinary truths a strange privilege; they can neither age nor die.’ From all this you see M. Maeterlinck’s train of thought. He would fix our minds upon the obscure, pre-conscious, what M. Faguet calls the _incunabulary_ life of the soul. He finds no epithets too fine for this: the higher life, the transcendental life, the divine life, the absolute life. Whatever we may think of these ideas in themselves, there is no doubt that the man who expresses them sounds a new and individual note. They show a reaction against the whole effort of modern literature, which has been nothing if not positive, quasi-scientific, ever on the prowl for ‘documents.’ And if for no other reason than that, this book, I submit, would have peculiar significance and value. But there is at least one other reason. M. Maeterlinck puts forward a plea, and a plea not lightly to be dismissed, for a new æsthetic of the drama. The mystery which he finds everywhere around us and within us he would bring into the theatre. If there is one position which the whole world supposed itself to have definitively taken up, it is the position that the theatre lives by action and to offer us an exhibition of the will. Therein, for instance, M. Ferdinand Brunetière finds the _differentia_ of drama; it is the struggle of a will, conscious of itself, against obstacles. Traversing this position M. Maeterlinck boldly asks whether a ‘static’ theatre is impossible, a theatre of mood not of movement, a theatre where nothing material happens and where everything immaterial is felt. Even as it is, the real beauty and purport of a tragedy is not seldom to be found in that part of its dialogue which is superficially ‘useless.’ ‘Certain it is that in the ordinary drama the indispensable dialogue by no means corresponds to reality.... One may even affirm that the poem draws the nearer to beauty and loftier truth in the measure that it eliminates words that merely explain the action and replaces them by others that reveal not the so-called “soul-state,” but I know not what intangible and unceasing striving of the soul towards its beauty and its truth.’ The frivolous will be reminded here, perhaps, of the old stage direction for the miser: ‘Leans against a wall and grows generous.’ Others who remember their Xenophon will bethink them of a certain discussion which Socrates had with Parrhasius on the question, ‘Can the unseen be imitated?’ (_Soc. Memorabilia_, iii. 10). It may be that M. Maeterlinck’s ‘static’ theatre is an unrealisable dream; but it is a seductive one, by contrast with the reality. Do not all of us who