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ing his robes about him and speaking from a height, and the mysticism which in the dramas seems inscrutably profound here comes to us echoed in the language of lazy and complacent grandiloquence.

When Tolstoy began to preach, those of us who believed that art could embrace religion were downcast, seeing that he had forsaken the larger for the more restricted gesture. Tolstoy, it is true—especially in his transitional period—has, like most Christian writers, mirrored the reverse image of suffering in the desire for a heaven which should be a better earth; but his logical instinct was fearless and in its intensifying light his pessimism became more and more stark. More and more he ceased to confuse his intention by a mingling of affirmation and denial. Art fell away at last and only dogmatic criticism remained. One can truly say that in his relentless extremism he was as great a destroyer as a creator. M. Maeterlinck, on the contrary, emerges from his abandoned creations half formed, on his features the reflection of the monotonous confusion to which he has accustomed himself. He is like a Millet peasant suddenly become educated and remains somewhat impressive in spite of the incongruities in which he has wrapped himself, but the effect which he produces is not what he intends. In all that he aspires to be he has become ridiculous.

In eighteen ninety-eight comes Wisdom and Destiny; in nineteen one, The Life of the Bee. The prophet is now fully aware of his mission. He is his own audience, and with that mixture of guile and guilelessness with which children and wise men deceive themselves, he plays to himself. The Life of the Bee is a terrible thing. In it Nature, the victim of the pathetic fallacy, is debauched with all the vices and virtues of men. The bees work for the future with the conscious self-abnegation of Christian moralists. More than that, the bees work for M. Maeterlinck, for mankind who tempts them with kindness in order to destroy them and steal their honey. The nobility of the bees is so persistently a conscious expression of Christian ideals that we begin to wonder if this is an argument for reincarnation with man in the scale of descent. Everywhere in handling those physical facts which are most simple, if perhaps least obvious, M. Maeterlinck uses the too delicate touch of a spinster anxious to attract attention away from her virtue. But what, in a biological sense; can be hoped from the man who in a later essay, called Old-Fashioned Flowers, speaks like this?