Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/372

cceive in the other his own helplessness before their common desire. In the triangular problem of Aglavaine and Selysette, Maeterlinek, the formless thinker, intrudes himself, and his huge shadow blurs the tableau of these three persons who find it impossible to endure life together even though they do not hate. This conception of the two women who love the same man, yet are able to regard each other with a generous vision, does not properly belong to the dramas of the half darkness. It is an Ibsenesque motif in which the reactions of the individuals toward each other are modified by complex reflections. No such detachment as these two women exhibit could blossom in the formlessness of the submerged mind. In treatment it needs the mingling of subjective and objective themes which we have in The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken, or Little Eyolf. The mediaeval setting seems to connote something erroneous, and the emotions of the trio involved are thinned by the meagre quality of their falsely simplified intelligence.

It is the genius of certain natures, chiefly Latin, to appreciate without analysis. This is the true metier of art, and perhaps it is the Anglo-Saxon alone who believes that abstractions hold the only depths. He is the victim of his analytical tendency. Analysis develops only in the consideration of parts; and this mania for regarding each manifestation of life as separated from all that has gone before, and at the same time a part of something else, has prevented him from appraising individuality which is complete in itself. So it is that he demands a moral or useful basis for art, something which shall relate it to the practical phases of life. Maeterlinck seems to have come more and more under the influence of the utilitarian genius of the English. His later essays, where he is not indulging in Jesuitical pleading for spiritism, are made up of pleasant and apparently irrelevant descriptions which lead in the end to the cautious injection of a moral. Not that the moral is ever very clear. On the contrary, M. Maeterlinck is pleasingly vague with the generosity of an indolent soul. It is a moral for every day, an accommodating moral which we are encouraged to obey where it is not too difficult. This man who dedicates one of the most typical productions of his pen to Silence has none of the austerity which is bred in the poverty of a lonely spirit. Success sucks the passion from his veins. She is like the spider whose triumphant sting paralyzes her victim so that he lives on numbed and allows her to consume him.