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cover." And it is with Romeo and Juliet that he illustrates his text. "All the poetry, the splendour, the passionate life of this desire result from the glamour, the nobility, the tragedy of the environment in which it has come to flower . . . for it is not in the kiss itself that the sweetness and beauty are found, but in the circumstance, hour, and place wherein it was given." To be consistently objective he should have more faith in the mechanical operation. What a text for Belasco! A suggestion for the production of The Seven Princesses with all the mediaeval paraphernalia authentically duplicated! And this from a man whose dramatic instinct is all, as it were, under water, for not once, except for a brief while in Monna Vanna, is Maeterlinck's inspiration drawn from the hour or circumstance. What we presume that he feels is the necessity for a concrete symbol of evocation and for this purpose the material conventions of mediaeval life have suited him best. But how entirely Ibsen has proven that emotion may be as easily concentrated or exalted by the commonplace as by the unfamiliar object! Interwoven with the dreary detail of The Wild Duck we have an exquisite and almost unmatched symbolism, and Gerhart Hauptmann, in his Assumption of Hannele, has staged his drama of plaintive and involuntary self-confession against a sordid contemporary background which throws into relief the riotousness of the mediaeval Christian's imagination. "The adventure of the modern Romeo," continues the plaintiff for the past—"to consider only the external events which it might provoke—would not provide material for a couple of acts." Nor would the external events of The Sightless or The Intruder provide either material or external interest for the one short scene which constitutes each. In The Intruder what happens? An old blind man complains, a scythe is sharpened off stage, an infant cries and a sister of charity, entering the room, announces the death of a mother. Yet the struggle depicted is tense. Here is Death, that power that would act, and here are all the frantic instincts of the living opposing it to the last instant. When the end arrives it is the true solution of an inevitably propelled climax.

Of all Maeterlinck's plays Monna Vanma, produced by a temporary resurrection of talent which occurred eight years after the demise of his glory, is the only one which lives up to a conception of the drama inspired from without, and even this has its best moments not in the action as it transpires, but in its secondary effects.