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notion of Destiny so mysterious as this double thraldom of ours—thraldom to the dead and to the unborn? Conclusion: mysticism is your only wear. In the mystics alone is certitude. 'If it be true, as has been said, that every man is a Shakespeare in his dreams, we have to ask ourselves whether every man, in his waking life, is not an inarticulate mystic, a thousandfold more transcendental than those circumscribed by speech.' In silence is our only chance of knowing one another. And 'mystic truths have over ordinary truths a strange privilege; they can neither age nor die.' From all this you see M. Maeterlinck's train of thought. He would fix our minds upon the obscure, pre-conscious, what M. Faguet calls the incunabulary life of the soul. He finds no epithets too fine for this: the higher life, the transcendental life, the divine life, the absolute life.

Whatever we may think of these ideas in themselves, there is no doubt that the man who expresses them sounds a new and individual note. They show a reaction against the whole effort of modern literature, which has been nothing if not positive, quasi-scientific, ever on the prowl for 'documents.' And if for no other reason than