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at the same time to sleep and to remain awake. The artificiality of this method, however, is in a sense more somnolent than sleep itself, for dreams, uncontrolled by the will, are turgid, broken by flashes of spontaneous logic, while the movements of this trance-weaver are in unshattered undulations. In The Seven Princesses in particular, the seven sleepers, the old queen, the prince returning from a voyage too late are figures of a wilful delirium. Maeterlinck here seems to refuse to recognize himself in order to pity his own confusion. When we approach the atmosphere of Pelléas and Mélisande the sleep is more natural, more profound, and we are able to enter more deeply into the torments of the life of feeling. The silences unroll like dim canvases crowded with worn scenes and half distinguishable faces. The oppression of nightmare increases. Golaud finds the strange princess weeping by the well into which her crown has fallen. He takes her home and marries her. Pelléas, the brother, is called to remain at the castle by his father's bedside. He and Mélisande meet. They love each other. They do not know why. "Why" belongs to the outer world. It is the subjective reflection of our progress through space. Here time and space are non-existent. The lovers struggle for a moment to beat back the iron darkness, but are broken against it. However, it is in The Death of Tintagiles that the nightmare, which has progressed through so many scenes under the titles of different plays, reaches its most excruciating height. The cry of Ygraine before the unyielding door is the cry of the darkness itself bewildered and asking for light. The voice of the stolen child as he calls to his sister, the little voice thin through the impenetrable partition, stabs one like the ray of a star that strains through the distance in the infinity of night, the distance that separates the dead from the living. So much has been denied and given over to chaos that this purposefully tiny affirmation is like a shrieking thread of silver woven on limitless blackness. "Monster, Monster! Curse you! Curse you!" shrieks Ygraine. "I spit on you!" So she challenges the hidden tormentor. Exhausted by her emotions she sinks down and continues to sob softly, her arms outspread against the gate in the gloom. And at the moment when his pen visualized for us this last picture of despair, somewhere before the year eighteen ninety-four, it is to be presumed, Maeterlinck abandoned the chaste role of creator. Two years later he definitely began to preach.

Our consciousness exists only in opposition, not alone to the