Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/377

standing is in the new name which we search for vainly, but as a matter of fact names are the means which we use to separate ourselves from the immediate actuality; and when we perceive the primary mission of nomenclature we will agree that the term mysterious can be correctly applied only to those things which we know with all our souls because we experience them in the very depths of our being. "And yet," says Maeterlinck in Our Eternity, "I would not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousandfold loftier, a thousandfold mightier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to grasp the last atom." In the light of such observation what may we think of his yearning toward profounder things, of his desire to penetrate beyond this life into another? Even death becomes voluptuous to those who approach it deliberately and without necessity, as some men and women approach love. Is this the mood which the apostle of optimism brings to a serious discussion of our future state? Then surely he must have ceased to believe in death, for faith is an ideal and no ideal survives the repeated warm baths of a torpid sensuousness. So the easy sensualist ceases to believe in the passion which absorbs his life. Nevertheless we prefer to go behind M. Maeterlinck's words, which are merely words, and seek their contradiction, as before, in the art of which he no longer deserves to be the author; for the mystery in which his art springs to life is the mystery of which we have spoken, nameless because so intimate.

"And what poetry—if we probe to the root of things—what poetry is there that does not borrow nearly all of its charm, nearly all of its ecstasy from elements that are wholly eternal? . . . Last of all there is no longer a God to widen or master the action: nor is there an inexorable fate to form a mysterious, solemn, and tragical background for the slightest gesture of man; nor the sombre and abundant atmosphere that was to ennoble even his most contemptible weaknesses, his least pardonable crimes. Accidental, adventitious beauty exists no longer: there remains only an external poetry that has not yet become poetic."

Here again are direct quotations, though I confess to taking advantage of their sequence and rearranging the order to stress the