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objective world, but to its own underlying elements. We cannot intellectually realize our most intense moments until we have escaped from them. It is the instinct for spiritual self-preservation that demands and justifies the critic. His is the gesture of destruction that opposes art but at the same time permits us to remain artists and live, for he continually reaffirms the half vanishing ego and saves it to behold itself. Perhaps it was the unanalyzed instinct to escape inundation from a purely emotional outlook that drove Maeterlinck from his vague art to the outposts of analysis. And here at the outposts one may say he has halted ever since, for even in his essays his resistance to the soft overflow from his emotional make-up is very slight. He remains a critic only long enough to halt the annihilation of his intellectual faculties. Here and there, for a paragraph perhaps, appear a few harshly consistent lines, but imperceptibly his argument changes, and from appealing to the intelligence detached from the senses, his style relaxes and almost without knowing it we find ourselves borne onward in the easy flow of a fatuously gracious technique.

In eighteen ninety-five Maeterlinck published The Disciples at Sais and The Fragments of Novalis, and at the same time a translation of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, under the title Annabella. A year later he presented us with The Treasure of the Humble, his first volume of letters in the characteristic manner which has made his present day fame, though his style and point of view have since undergone modifications. It is here one might say Maeterlinck begins to grow cool, for at thirty-four the Death, which I hope may long be merciful to his flesh, had already imprinted upon his emotions the first petrifying kiss. True, Aglavaine and Selysette appeared the same year and Monna Vanna, Joyzelle, and Mary Magdalene were written sometime later. Nevertheless the sad appearance remains that after the year ninety-six M. Maeterlinck began to think and painlessly to acquire that knowledge of the world in which he grew out of communion with the superior ignorance from which his inspiration had hitherto been drawn. It is a strange thing that this man who, when enveloped in a mask and domino, speaks with the wisdom of the sphinx, has no more than to remove this trivial disguise and talk to us in his own person when all that he utters is marked with the blight of superficiality. In The Treasure of the Humble we have the repeated gesture of one draw-