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climax which tortures the conventions of art to no purpose. He treats his audience like sheep who are unmercifully urged along a certain road only at the last, without warning, to be rudely turned in an opposite direction. Their sympathies which have been projected ahead of them pull them forward and it requires more than the brief time allotted before the fall of the curtain for them to recover their balance and pursue the new direction so abruptly indicated. In antithesis to the tableau of Guido's sufferings is the spectacle of Vanna and Prinzivalle in a new version of Paolo and Francesca, or innocence made guilty by the suspicions which encompass it. Vanna begins her confession truthfully. She has come from the besieger's quarters unharmed. However, since Guido will not have the truth, she resolves to give him the acceptable lie which shall liberate her. Here one might have fancied a suggestion of Cordelia and Lear but that Monna Vanna, having more than herself to save, has not dared to be obstinate. And she has no sooner told the lie than, in the transition of feeling she experiences, it becomes half truth, or at least she desires it to become true and anticipates its fulfilment. In the erudite moral sense she is already guilty of the act which she falsely states as having been accomplished. Here is more than the stereotyped romance of the woman who becomes enamoured of the ruthlessness of her erstwhile captor. The miraculous falsehood which makes itself true is companion to the prophetic doubt which beholds already the end of destruction. They are the truly significant outgrowths of this turgid and grandiloquent play, and neither is peculiar to the circumstances of a lively external setting. Indeed nothing results from this mediaeval environment which cannot be produced from the surroundings of the present day; for (and I quote M. Maeterlinck again) ". . . the passions and feelings of a modern poet must, in despite of himself, be entirely and exclusively modern. . . ." However, we confess our inability to follow the motions of this mental prestidigitator whose tricks create the illusion of surmounting inconsistencies impassable to the mind which depends for its effects on the ponderous mechanism of reason.

Maeterlinck's art persists in a continuation of mystery, it is true, for mystery is the term we apply to all that is nameless; but the more accurate our classification of our experiences the more they are likely to remain outside us. We fancy that the key to under-