In artistic merit "Pélléas and Mélisande" marks a nearer approach to mastery, once the integral peculiarities of the form and method have been granted. Despite a noticeable lack of force, directness, and plasticity in the characterization, the _vie intérieure_ is most convincingly expressed. In one of the finest scenes of the play we see the principals at night gazing out upon a measureless expanse of water dotted with scattered lights. The atmosphere is permeated with a reticent yearning of love. The two young creatures, gentle, shy, their souls tinged with melancholy, are drawn towards one another by an ineluctable mutual attraction. Yet, though their hearts are filled to overflowing, not a word of affection is uttered. Their love reveals itself to us even as to themselves, without a loud and jarring declaration, through its very speechlessness, as it were. The situation well bears out the _roi sage_ in _Alladine et Palomides_: "There is a moment when souls touch one another and know everything without a need of our opening the lips." There are still other scenes in this play so tense with emotion that words would be intrusive and dissonant. There is that lovely picture of Mélisande at the window; Pélléas cannot reach up to her hand, but is satisfied to feel her loosened hair about his face. It is a question whether even that immortal love duet in "Romeo and Juliet" casts a poetic spell more enchanting than this. At another moment in the drama, we behold the lovers in Maeterlinck's beloved half-light, softly weeping as they stare with speechless rapture into the flames. And not until the final parting does any word of love pass their lips. In another part of the play Goland, Mélisande's aging husband, who suspects his young stepbrother, Pélléas, of loving Mélisande, conducts him to an underground chamber. We are not told why he has brought him there, and why he has led him to the brink of the pitfall from which there mounts a smell of death. If it be a heinous deed he is brooding, why does he pause in its execution? His terrible struggle does not reveal itself through speech, yet it is eloquently expressed in the wildness of his looks, the trembling of his voice, and the sudden anguished outcry: "Pélléas! Pélléas!" Evidently Maeterlinck completely achieves the very purpose to which the so-called Futurists think they must sacrifice all traditional conceptions of Art; and achieves it without any brutal stripping and skinning of the poetic subject, without the hideous exhibition of its _disjecta membra_, and above all, without that implied disqualification for the higher artistic mission which alone could induce a man to limit his service to the dishing-up of chunks and collops, "cubic" or amorphous.