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A dead man may be judged by his works, and if his creations have elusive components these are accepted with reverence as expressions appropriate to a posthumous existence. Having himself passed on to final inscrutability, it is meet that there be in what he has left something too large for the judgement of the times. But to write well for one's contemporaries one must be resigned to the necessity of defending oneself against a continual suspicion. The first impulse of a narrow egoism when it is confronted by something new is an impulse of destruction, the instinct to take the thing to pieces and catalogue its parts. Curiosity is defensive. It is this strong instinct of defense, that inheres in creatures conscious of their weakness, which makes women the more curious of the sexes. And on the purely subjective plane what is commonly regarded as understanding is the mental image of the typically annihilating act. The new mental experience is looked at fearfully, is destroyed into its parts, and is laid away in the limbo of facts where it ceases to menace, for once it becomes fact it remains eternally extraneous and our personality is safe from its invasion. Thus the helpless curiosity of the American woman of the nouveau riche who desires to understand art! Through the cultivation of luxurious perceptions, foreign as yet to her self-sacrificing mate, she has become aware that art exists, and so she organizes clubs for its defeat; for her frantic pursuit of culture is inspired by nothing further than the age-old terror of the unknown. Once she has performed the mysterious psychological feat which is equivalent to an outwardly destructive act she may become as oblivious to superfluous creation as are her English sisters bred in familiarity with it. The gorgeous social events celebrated in honour-of Maeterlinck's American visit are rather like propitiatory offerings to the representative of an unknown God; for Maeterlinck has been an artist. However, when he decided to write for his own generation instead of posterity he was arranging an anti-climax, and he now continues a suicidal progress by way of the lecture platforms from which he elucidates himself.

In The Measure of the Hours there is an essay on drama which is of interest to the psychologist who would study the unconscious elements of genius, for in it Maeterlinck, with unbelievable obtuseness, displays the contradiction of his own method. "Of all the ancient weapons, not one is left," he mourns. ". . . The further we penetrate into the consciousness of man the less struggle we dis-