are condemned to spend much of our time in the playhouse occasionally share M. Maeterlinck’s feeling of repugnance? ‘When I go to the theatre, I feel as though I were spending a few hours in the midst of my ancestors, who looked upon life as something that was primitive, arid, and brutal; but this conception of theirs scarcely even lingers in my memory, and surely it is not one that I can any longer share.... I had hoped to be shown some act of life traced back to its source and to its mystery by connecting links that my daily occupations afford me neither power nor occasion to study. I had gone thither hoping that the beauty, the grandeur, and the earnestness of my humble day-by-day existence would for one instant be revealed to me ... whereas, almost invariably, all that I beheld was but a man who would tell me at wearisome length why he was jealous, why he poisoned, or why he killed.’ And so he would have the drama make an effort to show us ‘how truly wonderful is the mere fact of living’; he would have it tackle ‘presentiments, the strange impression produced by a chance meeting or a look, a decision that the unknown side of human reason had governed, an intervention or a force inexplicable and yet understood, the secret laws of sympathy and antipathy, elective and instinctive affinities, the overwhelming influence of things unsaid.’ How is it all to come about? When we ask this question we find ourselves in the position of the lady who had been discussing the subject of a future state with Dr. Johnson. ‘She seemed desirous of knowing more,’ says Boswell, ‘but he left the question in obscurity.’ It is there that M. Maeterlinck, like a true mystic, is content to leave most of his questions. ‘The time has not yet come,’ he says with an engaging candour, ‘when we can speak lucidly of these things.’ One thinks of Sir Thomas Browne’s quaint fancy. ‘A dialogue between two infants in the womb concerning the state of this world might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Plato’s den, and are but embryon philosophers.’ Maybe M. Maeterlinck is but an embryon philosopher, one who discourses in Plato’s den. But I think we must all recognise the native distinction of his mind, the fastidious delicacy of his taste, his abiding and insatiable love of beauty. What he says, exquisitely enough but perhaps too liberally, of every man—‘to every man there come noble thoughts that pass across his heart like great white birds’—is certainly true of himself. Wherefore one may venture to invite people to his book as Heraclitus welcomed guests to his kitchen: ‘Enter boldly, for here also there are gods.’ A. B. W. SILENCE SILENCE