Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/371

"We should, it is true, in nature have other splendid manifestations of luxury, exuberance, and grace; other dazzling efforts of the superfluous forces: the sun, the stars, the varied lights of the moon, the azure and the ocean, the dawns and twilights, the mountain, the plain, the forest and the rivers, the light'and the trees, and, lastly, nearer to us, birds, precious stones, and woman. These are the ornaments of our planet . . . which belong to the same smile of nature. . . ."

Has Bernard Shaw lived in vain that the public still accepts with avidity such innocent profession of belief in the harmlessness and superfluousness of a beautiful exterior? Simplicity of soul is an admirable thing. The emotions eliminate complexity by their very intensity, which concentrates all in a single instant of feeling. But reflection at once detaches happenings and connects them with each other, and through the very angularity of relations growing more and more remote in a complex intelligence the past emotion is illuminated as with a prismatically refracted light. As we become more and more aware of self, our fastidiousness increases and we wish to be equally appraising of the thing we desire and the thing we refuse. So emotional surrender becomes more and more difficult as, at the cross-roads of action, we are crucified on the two arms of this double recognition, transfixed between the opposite appearances of paradox like a Messiah between two thieves.

Maeterlinck is totally lacking in this fastidious awareness of self. His impulse toward self-analysis might be described as one huge futile undulation toward the light. Like the hippopotamus, the mammoth survival of another age, he is amphibious. Never truly at home in the arid soil of exposition, he remains always by the side of the pool where he may sink to rest, or float voluptuously at will on the surface of the subconsciousness. It seems difficult to believe that this huge being floundering in platitudes was capable, before he abandoned his most familiar element, of such delicate movements and such subtle recognitions. In the dream life of Pelléas and Mélisande and even in Aglavaine and Selysette, this creature was aware not only of passion, but of love, that appreciation of some common weakness which unites human beings. When love enters into a relation between the sexes it is because of something in the lovers that stands outside of their abandon so that each may per-