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which is and therefore is true and has life? But to reply fully to all this is beyond us who have not M. Maeterlinck's eloquence. It is at any rate certain that life indivisible, which is symbolized in the God of omnipotence, could only be evoked since it exists everywhere, and contains everything, so that it may only represent itself, and in imagining an eternity which arises from this conception we are able to see but a succession of mirrors each reflecting the other along an infinite distance. And so one might think of the attempt of religionists who desire to elongate space indefinitely. Space, non-existent in Maeterlinck's plays, or at least interchangegble with time as two appearances of an identical operation, is a dogmatic reality to his more conscious intellect. Yet he thinks it as impossible for us to believe in an infinity that has limitations as to conceive of a nothingness. As a matter of fact infinity can be represented only by a succession of limitations each bounding and exceeding the other until the mind grown weary in pursuit relaxes and admits that accession of chaos comprised in the suggestion of nothingness.

In Maeterlinck's plays there is a true evocation of the illimitable, like the religious emotion which is the elusive perfume of longing and unsatisfied sense. No doubt his latterly acquired admirers have it that he has escaped from the sensuality of a primitive outlook into a true perception of spirit. Regarding spirit as they do as a kind of dilution of flesh, they would base this assertion on the thinning texture of his emotions. And in their judgement of effects they would be correct. The richness and warmth of sensuous inspiration have gone from his work, even from such things as The Blue Bird and The Betrothal, which offer themselves as spontaneous productions of the imagination. The Blue Bird is a sophisticated masquerade of guilelessness, the kind of thing that, poorly done, was circulated in the church libraries of a generation ago. The privilege of a fairy tale is to make appealing those traits to which we all confess with a secret inner longing but which society has arbitrated out of frank speech. The fairy tale preserves for us the innocence of our faults, and a specious fairy tale in which the protagonists are educated to desire only what is best for the group is an attempt to rob us of the last treasure of language which remains to depict so plaintively our fundamental irreconcilability to the compromise which society has forced upon us. The Blue Bird and The Betrothal belong to that most awful category of fairy tales for grown-