Page:The treasure of the humble (IA cu31924072557063).pdf/16

These are not exactly popular authors of the moment. But M. Maeterlinck, it is plain, has devoured them; his is not what Pope called 'index-learning.' Plotinus (205-270 A.D.) stood between two worlds, the old and the new; and he made the best of both. He enlarged the boundaries of art by discerning in the idea of beauty an inward and spiritual grace not to be found in the 'Platonic idea.' That, too, is what M. Maeterlinck is striving for: a larger idea of beauty, and a better apprehension of its inward and spiritual grace.

His cardinal doctrine will, I conjecture, prove to be something like this. What should be of most account for us all is not external fact, but the supra-sensuous world. 'What we know is not interesting'; the really interesting things are those which we can only divine—the veiled life of the soul, the crepuscular region of sub-consciousness, our 'borderland' feelings, all that lies in the strange 'neutral zone' between the frontiers of consciousness and unconsciousness. The mystery of life is what makes life worth living. ' 'Twas a little being of mystery, like every one else,' says the old King Arkel of the dead Mélisande. We are such stuff as dreams are