We have observed in all the plays so far a marked simplicity of construction. _Aglavaine et Selysette_, (1896), denotes a still further simplification. Here the scenic apparatus is reduced to the very minimum, and the psychological premises are correspondingly plain. The story presents a "triangular" love entanglement strangely free from the sensual ingredient; two women dream of sharing, in all purity, one lover--and the dream ends for one of them in heroic self-sacrifice brought to secure the happiness of the rival. However, more noteworthy than the structure of the plot is the fact that the philosophic current flowing through it has perceptibly altered its habitual direction. The spiritual tendency is felt to be turning in its course, and even though fatalism still holds the rule, with slowly relaxing grip, yet a changed ethical outlook is manifest. Also, this play for the first time proclaims, though in no vociferous manner, the duty of the individual toward himself, the duty so emphatically proclaimed by two of Maeterlinck's greatest teachers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henrik Ibsen. * * * * * The inner philosophic conflict was but of short duration. In 1898 _La Sagesse et La Destinée_ ("Wisdom and Destiny") saw the light. The metaphor might be taken in a meaning higher and more precise than the customary, for, coming to this book from those that preceded is indeed like emerging from some dark and dismal cave into the warm and cheering light of the sun. "Wisdom and Destiny" is a collection of essays and aphorisms which stands to this second phase of Maeterlinck's dramaturgy in a relation closely analogous to that existing between "The Treasure of the Humble" and the works heretofore surveyed. Without amounting to a wholesale recantation of the idea that is central in the earlier set of essays, the message of the newer set is of a very different kind. The author of "Wisdom and Destiny" has not changed his view touching the superiority of the intuitional function over the intellectual. The significant difference between the old belief and the new consists simply in this: the latent force of life is no longer imagined as an antagonistic agency; rather it is conceived as a benign energy that makes for a serene acceptance of the world that is. Of this turn in the outlook, the philosophic affirmation of life and the consent of the will to subserve the business of living are the salutary concomitants. Wisdom, in expanding, has burst the prison of fatalism and given freedom to vision. The world, beheld in the light of this emancipation, is not to be shunned by the wise man. Let Fortune bring what she will, he can strip his afflictions of their terrors by transmuting them into higher knowledge. Therefore, pain and suffering need not be feared and shirked; they may even be hailed with satisfaction, for, as is paradoxically suggested in _Aglavaine et Selysette_, they help man "_être heureux en