One is always meeting with curious literary and artistic affinities where one least expects them. The human mind, of course, is really homogeneous throughout. We have all to build up our inner and outer universe out of very much the same kind of brain and sense organs: so that it is hardly surprising if here and there one feels that the work of this or that musician or artist is the counterpart of the work of this or that poet or prose writer, or vice versÂ. One sees, for example, a good deal of Weber and the German Romanticists in the stories of Hoffmann; of Lessing and Diderot in the work of Gluck; of Tourgeniev and Dostoievski in the music of Tchaikovski; of Berlioz's music—as Heine suggested—in the pictures of Martin. This phenomenon is so frequent as to excite little wonder. What is rather more curious is to find, here and there, that one of the main spiritual principles of a certain artist is implicit in the Æsthetic system of another artist who works in an entirely different medium, and whose whole work, at first sight, seems to be of a diametrically opposite order. Between Wagner and Maeterlinck, for instance, who would say that there is a fundamental sympathy of soul and a community of artistic outlook—between the musician of stupendous passion and restless activity and the quiet mystic who seems to be serenely poised far above all activity and all passion, placing, in his lofty philosophising, so little store by all the things that appeared so vital, so real, to the musician? Nevertheless there is, as I shall try to show, a curious similarity between the Æsthetic systems of the two men. [56] They share something of the same excellencies; they break down or find their limitations almost at the same point. Let us cursorily examine the two systems.

I

If we did not possess Maeterlinck's own dramas, we might be able to judge from his essays what his position towards the drama and fiction would be. Here we have revealed to us a manner of apprehending life and of looking out upon the world that could find expression only in some such novel dramatic form as Maeterlinck has adopted. The dramatist himself, however, has given us, in his exquisite chapters on "The Tragical in Daily Life" and "The Awakening of the Soul," in The Treasure of the Humble, a statement, at once explicit and impassioned, of his creed. He advances the theory that the ordinary tragedy of startling incident is, or ought to be, a thing of the past, a concept of barbaric ages, when men could be thrilled by the secret under forces of life only by reaching towards them through crude and violent action. In a more refined and subtle age like this, we should be able to trace the hand of destiny even when it does not work through media so coarse and palpable. It is not the primitive sensation of seeing one man act the murder of another that is the essence of tragedy. It is the sense of spiritual enlightenment that comes to us; the feeling that, somehow or other, the murder itself, the passion and the events that led up to it, the consequences that flow from it, are all subtly interwoven threads of the great indwelling laws of things. Most of the action, indeed, that is associated with our current notion of tragedy is, from a higher point of view, both Æsthetically superfluous and an evidence of our earthiness. We should be capable of being moved to pity, of feeling the most refined tragic sorrow, by a play that eliminates the coarser and more obvious facts, and relies on gentler and more intimate suggestions of universal truth. Our present age, he thinks, is capable, or is becoming capable, of this. "In former days," he says in his essay on "The Awakening of the Soul," "if there was question, for a moment, of a presentiment, of the strange impressions produced by a chance meeting or a look, of a decision that the unknown side of human reason had governed, of an intervention or a force, inexplicable and yet understood, of the sacred laws of sympathy and antipathy, of elective and instinctive affinities, of the overwhelming influence of the thing that had not been spoken—in former days these problems would have been carelessly passed by; and, besides, it was but seldom that they obtruded themselves upon the serenity of the thinker. They seemed to come about by the merest chance. That they are ever pressing upon life, unceasingly and with prodigious force—this was unsuspected of all; and the philosopher hastened back to familiar studies of passion, and of incident that floated on the surface."

This is clearly part of a philosophy of life and art in which the cruder nervous strands are put aside, as useless for that spiritual illumination which the thinker desires. They are too thick to be sensitive to the finer currents that pass through them; only the more delicate nerve-tracts, alive to every wave of feeling, can be stimulated to philosophic light and heat. The essence of all Maeterlinck's work, of course, is this supersensitiveness. He is endowed with other senses than ours, other modes of apprehending the universe. He is a mystic, and by reason of being a mystic he is at the same time out of touch with many things that the normal man calls real, and delicately sensitive to many currents in the spiritual atmosphere of the universe of whose very existence the normal man is all his life unaware. We have to remember that this world is after all only what our own senses and intellect make it for each of us. The little we can see and feel must be as nothing compared with the immensities that we can neither see nor feel, but that always attend our thoughts, our footsteps, our very breathing, like silent, invisible spectators. Even the world of the animal is not our world, for the animal is alive to many things that never penetrate our consciousness; and there are exceptionally constituted human beings on whose nerves the universe seems to write different messages from those that are communicated to the ordinary soul. The mystic catches vibrations in life to which duller natures are, except in moments of abnormal exaltation, for the most part insensitive. When we find fault with him for the apparent weakness of his hold upon reality, we need to remember that his realities are not always ours. He frequently has difficulty in expressing himself in our ordinary speech, for the reason that this is mainly the instrument of normal cerebration, not of the sub-normal or the super-normal. Hence Maeterlinck's theorem—which is not half such a paradox as it looks—that the profounder vibrations of the soul are more easily communicated by silence than by speech. We are beset by intuitions that can never find adequate expression in words. "How strangely," he says, "do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words!" Speech hardly seems necessary to him as a means of carrying on his thoughts, which, as they lie in deeper, more obscure places than language has ever visited, must seek a more immediate way of passage from his own brain to that of another. "A time will come, perhaps, when our souls will know of each other without the intermediary of the senses.... A spiritual epoch is perhaps upon us...." Thus the favourite means of communication between the soul of the spiritual elect is not speech, but silence—silence, which is far more eloquent, far more illuminative of the profoundest depths of being, than language can ever be. "It is idle," he writes, "to think that by means of words any real communication can ever pass from one man to another.... It is only when life is sluggish within us that we speak." And just as the mystic despises words as instruments of communication, so he looks down upon facts as guides to illumination. As the inner life is too subtle to be expressed in ordinary language, so its interests are too refined to be spent upon crude facts. These are "nothing but the laggards, the spies and camp followers, of the great forces we cannot see." [57]

II

Here, then, is a philosophy of life which, in the hands of the artist, aims at creating a new type of "static" drama, in which speech shall give way, as far as possible, to suggestion, incident and action to the immediate revelation of soul-states. Though the drama is to deal with real life in a way that Maeterlinck would regard as most rigorously real, there is to be a progressive withdrawal from most of the points that the average man regards as the essence of reality. In the first place, naked facts and violent actions are to be passed over, as not necessary for the communication to us of the essential thing that the dramatist has to say; in the second place, mere words are no longer to be looked upon as indispensable intermediaries between the thought and the expression. Now all this, in its main features, finds a very close parallel in the work and the arguments of Wagner. Let us look for a moment at his theories as they figure in actual practice, taken out of the wordy metaphysic in which he delighted to obscure them.

The drama and the novel represent an attempt to fire the reader with a certain emotion that has already flamed up in the writer. The tragedy of King Lear, for example, aims at inspiring in us a sentiment of pity for an old man who is shattered by filial ingratitude. Othello aims at enlisting our sympathies for an affectionate man and wife whose happiness is broken to pieces, partly by misunderstanding, partly by diabolical machinations. There are innumerable other points in the plays, but these are the great central forces. These are what moved Shakespeare to the composition of the dramas. These are the ideas from which he started; and these are the ideas that finally remain with us when we have seen or read the plays. But owing to the clumsy, intractable nature of the material in which he works, the dramatist can stimulate this central idea or feeling in us only by a most roundabout process. He cannot plunge at once into his subject. He must commence at a point far distant from that to which he wishes to lead us, and then work up to it gradually. He cannot adequately communicate an emotion without unfolding before our eyes the long and complex scenes or set of circumstances that give rise to this emotion. He cannot confine himself to the characters and the events that make up the real drama; he has to illustrate these—to draw sparks from them, as it were—by the impact of minor incidents and persons. In a word, he has to fill us with a multiplicity of more or less superfluous feelings before he can communicate to us the feeling that is really essential.

In music all this is altered. (The reader will of course remember that I am expounding Wagner.) There being no distinction between the feeling and the expression, no bar between the emotion and the speech, the musician can plunge at once into the very heart of his subject. Further, he need never leave the heart of it; he can devote all his energies to elucidating the really necessary factors; he has no need to waste half his time in showing, from the description of extraneous things, how such and such a situation has come about, or how a man comes to feel in such and such a way. It takes half-an-hour's reading of the Tristan legend, or any poem on the subject, before we feel the atmosphere of tragedy closing round us, or know precisely why it should come. In Wagner's opera, not only is the fact that there is a tragedy suggested in the first bars of the music, but the very tint and spiritual quality of the tragedy are painted for us at once. All through the work, again, we live in the very centre of the metropolis of that territory of emotion—love, grief, and pity—to which the legend and the poets have to guide us by devious and frequently uninteresting paths. We see Tristan and Isolde in the first bar and in the last; we never leave them for a moment. Thus not only does the musician draw us at once to the point he wishes us to reach, but his independence of all the scaffolding necessary to the poet gives him more freedom of development. He can wring from the souls of his characters the last bitter juice of their emotions. Wagner himself was fond of pointing out the gradual growth of his art in these respects. In the Flying Dutchman he tried "to keep the plot to its simplest features; to exclude all useless detail, such as the intrigues one borrows from common life." The plot of TannhÄuser will be found "far more markedly evolving from its inner motives"; while "the whole interest of Lohengrin consists in an inner working within the heart of Elsa, involving every secret of the soul." Wagner's aim was to shake himself clear of the wearisome mass of detail that, in the poetical drama, is necessary to show the "whence and wherefore" of each feeling. "I too, as I have told you," he writes, "felt driven to this 'whence and wherefore'; and for long it banned me from the magic of my art. But my time of penance taught me to overcome the question. All doubt at last was taken from me, when I gave myself up to the Tristan. Here, in perfect trustfulness, I plunged into the inner depth of soul-events, and from out this inmost centre of the world I fearlessly built up its outer form. A glance at the volume of this poem will show you at once that the exhaustive detail-work which an historical poet is obliged to devote to clearing up the outward bearing of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole import and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul. The whole affecting Action comes about for the reason only that the inmost soul demands it, and steps to light with the very shape foretokened in the inner shrine."

Here the analogy with Maeterlinck's theory becomes evident. Both men despise the cruder, external, historical, active facts on which the drama has felt itself till now compelled to rely; both aim at a subtle form of drama in which the soul-states shall be the first and last thing. There is more in life, they say, than conscious reason; it is the innermost processes of the soul that we desire to have laid bare to us in drama. This reflection led Wagner to the choice of the myth as the best material on which to work. "I therefore believed," he writes, "I must term the 'mythos' the poet's ideal Stuff—that native nameless poem of the Folk, which throughout the ages we ever meet new handled by the great poets of periods of consummate culture; for in it there almost vanishes the conventional form of man's relations, merely explicable to abstract reason, to show instead the eternally intelligible, the purely human." This is not clarity itself, but what Wagner means is that in music as he conceives it you come face to face with the essential truth of things at once, without having to make a wearisome journey through a mass of unimportant detail, as you have to do in the novel and the poetical drama before you can get to the heart of the emotion. And this is quite true, so far as it goes. If you conceive life like the mystic or his soul's brother the musician, if you prefer the general to the particular, the vague to the definite, the suggested to the spoken, you will naturally seek a medium that shall allow free passage to your emotion in its broadest form. Like Wagner, you will not want to stop and explain for half-an-hour who Tristan and Isolde were, who were the people round them, what the causes were that led to their tragic end, and so on. You will want to get to the centre of your subject at once; you abandon all attempts at demonstration and plunge at once into expression. And if, with Maeterlinck, it seems quite unimportant to know the names and histories of two or three given men and women, the scenes in which they live, the commonplace routine of their daily lives—if you only want to know how destiny is dealing with them, what bitter-sweet emotion is being distilled from their souls in some quiet hour that is pregnant with vital meaning—then you will pass over, like the musician, every detail that seems to you unimportant, and concentrate yourself on that supremely fateful hour. You will not depict anything happening, because it is not the event that is the essential thing, but the soul-states that are born of the event. To Maeterlinck, as to Wagner, the "purely human"—the whole man, the essential man—lies deeper than what is "merely explicable to abstract reason." "A new, indescribable power," he says, in speaking of Ibsen's Master Builder, "dominates this somnambulistic drama. All that is said therein at once hides and reveals the source of an unknown life. And if we are bewildered at times, let us not forget that our soul often appears, to our feeble eyes, to be but the maddest of forces, and that there are in man many regions more fertile, more profound, and more interesting than those of his reason or his intelligence."

For these obscure perceptions of the soul, words alone are plainly an inadequate mode of expression. Hence both Wagner and Maeterlinck feel that some more direct kind of utterance is required, some more immediate means of communication between the feeling of the artist and the feeling of the auditor. Wagner finds this in music, which substitutes a direct appeal for the indirect appeal of the ordinary poet. The dramatic poem must be drafted "in such a fashion that it may penetrate the finest fibres of the musical tissue, and the spoken thought entirely dissolves into the feeling." Not that there is to be any surrender of that grip upon the inner life that is the essence of thoughtful drama. On the contrary, Wagner maintains, after the manner of Maeterlinck, that it is only when the soul is set free from the disturbing accidents of the temporary life that it can see clearly into the movements of the universal life. Wagner holds that in the Beethoven symphony, for example, a world-view is presented, quite as philosophical, quite as logically connected, as any that can be put together in words. "In this symphony, instruments speak a language whereof the world at no previous time had any knowledge; for here, with a hitherto unknown persistence, the purely musical expression enchains the hearer in an inconceivably varied mesh of nuances; rouses his inmost being to a degree unreachable by any other art; and in all its changefulness reveals an ordering principle so free and bold that we can deem it more forcible than any logic, yet without the laws of logic entering into it in the slightest; nay, rather, the reasoning march of thought, with its track of causes and effects, here finds no sort of foothold. So that this symphony must positively appear to us a revelation from another world; and in truth it opens out a scheme of the world's phenomena quite different from the ordinary logical scheme, and whereof one foremost thing is undeniable: that it thrusts home with the most overwhelming conviction, and guides our feeling with such a sureness that the logic-mongering reason is completely routed and disarmed thereby."

Now set beside this view of the relations of the musical drama to the poetical drama Maeterlinck's comparison of his own dramatic ideals with those of the "active" poet. The latter passes unthinkingly over many of the feelings that give to a tragic event its real significance. Why should not these feelings, the essential core of the drama, be given fuller play, and the mere incidents be looked upon as either superfluous or purely ancillary? He too, like Wagner, wants to show the heart of a tragic situation without the customary tedious cataloguing of all its limbs. He wants the spiritual essence of drama, and the essence alone, not the crude material facts from which this essence has to be distilled. The whole of Maeterlinck's magnificent passage must here be quoted: "The mysterious chant of the Infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon, the destiny or fatality that we are conscious of within us, though by what tokens none can tell—do not all these underlie King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet? And would it not be possible, by some interchanging of the rÔles, to bring them nearer to us, and send the actor farther off? Is it beyond the mark to say that the true tragic element, normal, deep-rooted, and universal—that the true tragic element of life only begins at the moment when so-called adventures, sorrows, and dangers have disappeared?... When we think of it, is it not the tranquillity that is terrible, the tranquillity watched by the stars? And is it in tumult or in silence that the spirit of life quickens within us? Is it not when we are told, at the end of the story, 'They were happy,' that the great disquiet should intrude itself? What is taking place while they are happy? Are there not elements of deeper gravity and stability in happiness, in a single moment of repose, than in the whirlwind of passion? Is it not then that we at last behold the march of time—ay, and of many another on-stealing besides, more secret still—is it not then that the hours rush forward? Are not deeper chords set vibrating by all these things than by the dagger-stroke of conventional drama? Is it not at the very moment when a man believes himself secure from bodily death that the strange and silent tragedy of the being and the immensities does indeed raise its curtain on the stage? Is it while I flee before a naked sword that my existence touches its most interesting point? Is life always at its sublimest in a kiss? Are there not other moments, when one hears purer voices that do not fade away so soon? Does the soul flower only on nights of storm? Hitherto, doubtless, this belief has prevailed. It is only the life of violence, the life of bygone days, that is perceived by nearly all our tragic writers; and truly may one say that anachronism dominates the stage, and that dramatic art dates back as many years as the art of sculpture."

He places the spiritual purposes of painting and music on a higher plane; "for these," he says, "have learned to select and reproduce those obscurer phases of daily life that are not the less deep-rooted and amazing. They know that all that life has lost, as regards mere superficial ornament, has been more than counterbalanced by the depth, the intimate meaning, and the spiritual gravity it has acquired. The true artist no longer chooses Marius triumphing over the Cimbrians, or the assassination of the Duke of Guise, as a fit subject for his art; for he is well aware that the psychology of victory or murder is but elementary and exceptional, and that the solemn voice of men and things, the voice that issues forth so timidly and hesitatingly, cannot be heard amidst the idle uproar of acts of violence. And therefore will he place on his canvas a house lost in the heart of the country, an open door at the end of a passage, a face or hands at rest, and by these simple images will add to our consciousness of life, which is a possession that it is no longer possible to lose."

III

The excellence and the wisdom of these thoughts need no pointing out. What is the defect in them—or, rather, wherein are they incomplete?

This may be seen, in the first place, by playing off Maeterlinck's theory against that of Wagner. It is quite true, as Wagner says, that his kind of music-drama has one great advantage over the poetical drama: that by surrendering certain outlying interests it can concentrate all its power on the central interest—giving full play, as Wagner would express it, to the inner motives of the dramatic action. But, on the other hand, music must, from its very nature, fail to touch a score of ideas and passions that are within us, and for whose expression we are compelled to go to poetry that is unhampered by music. Thus there are certain mental states with which music can have practically no communion. The girl can sing, as Ruskin has told us, of her lost love, but the miser cannot sing of his lost money-bags. For a study of the miser, then, and of all the shades of character that resemble his, we must look, not to music, but to poetry or prose. Again, any one who has seen Verdi's Otello on the stage must have been struck with the relative feebleness of the character-drawing of Iago. A monster of this kind, made up entirely of cunning and deception, is a concept almost entirely foreign to the art of music, which does indeed give a heightened value to the primary emotions, but, on the other hand, has difficulty in reaching beyond these. One frequently finds it hard to believe that Wagner's Mime, who sings such pleasant music, is really a hateful character, owing to the difficulty music has in expressing the mean and despicable. It can render, mainly by physical means, the horrible and the terrible, but the contemptible, the abortive, are practically beyond its sphere.

Nor, again, even in the field where music and poetry meet, does music so far cover the ground, as Wagner would contend, as to make non-musical poetry a superfluity, a mere echo of what can be heard in fuller tones in the drama that is a blend of poetry and music. For the sheer emotional beauty of pity, for exquisite tenderness and complete consolation, nothing, in any art, could surpass certain portions of Parsifal. But it is essentially emotion here, not thought; it is wholly esoteric; it achieves its miracle by withdrawing into its own lovely atmosphere the crude, hard facts of the world, and there transforming them. If we want an expression of pity that shall bear more closely on our real life, give us the emotional balm at the same time that it allows free play to our philosophic thought, we must go to poetry. Look at the colloquy of the pots in the Rubaiyat, in which the humanist Omar empties the vials of his compassion upon the marred and broken beings of this world:—

There is not here the sensuous anodyne of Wagner's music, but there is something equally precious; the thought is farther flung; it brings more elements of reality back with it to be bathed and softened in emotion; it stirs the more vital philosophic depths. As one reads the verses, one thinks sadly of all the bruised and broken beings of the world, the poor misshapen souls who carry within them, from no fault of their own, the seeds of the things that are to blight or slay them—the men afflicted with incurable vices of body or mind or will, the criminals, often more sinned against than sinning, upon whom society wreaks its legalised vengeance. We have not merely a warm wave of pity passing through us, as in the case of Parsifal; the exquisite art of the thing is strengthened by the closeness of its association with innumerable problems of theology, of philosophy, and of social science. So, again, with the line Maeterlinck himself places in the mouth of old Arkel, after one of the most terrible scenes in Pelleas and Melisanda: "If I were God, how I should pity the heart of men!" Music, in its grave, wise speech after a dire catastrophe, may almost compass some such wealth of ethical significance as this; but there is in Maeterlinck's line a peculiar fulness of divination that can be conveyed to us only in words. Numberless other instances might be cited, all proving this existence of a philosophic sphere to which even the greatest music can, by reason of its indefiniteness, never have access. Matthew Arnold may have been a prejudiced witness, being a poet himself; yet one feels that he has the right with him in that passage, in his Epilogue to Lessing's LaocÖon, in which he points out how the painter and the musician excel respectively in expressing "the aspect of the moment" and "the feeling of the moment," but that the poet deals more philosophically with the total life and interlacement of things:—

Arnold's expression might perhaps have been a little more artistic, but there is no controverting the general truth he voices—that poetry looks before and after in a way that music cannot possibly do; is wider in its philosophic sweep than music, clearer in its vision, making up for its weaker idealism by its sympathetic evocation of a hundred notes that are denied to music.

IV

And just as we pass from music to poetry to reach certain emotions that are not to be found in the more generalised art, so we pass from Maeterlinck's Æsthetic world to that of the cruder realist, in the search for certain further artistic satisfactions. Mysticism has this in common with music—that it gives voice to the broader, more generalised feelings of mankind, and hesitates to come into contact with the less ecstatic faculties that are exercised upon the harder facts of life. Maeterlinck, like Wagner, tries to lay hold upon the universal in art; but he does so simply because, again like Wagner, he is comparatively insensitive to other stimuli. And as Wagner's Æsthetic holds good for the most part only of those who, like him, apprehend the world through music, so Maeterlinck's theory of drama is completely valid only for those who share his general attitude toward life and knowledge. If it is really the mystics who have the key to the knowledge of things; if, as Maeterlinck himself says in his introduction to Ruysbroeck's L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, "toute certitude est en eux seuls," and that "les vÉritÉs mystiques ont sur les vÉritÉs ordinaires un privilÈge Étrange—elles ne peuvent ni vieillir ni mourir"; if in the hypnotic semi-swoon of the faculties before the abyss of the universal we come closest to the real secret of things, then is there nothing to be added to or taken from Maeterlinck's statement of the essence of drama. If, on the other hand, the evolution of the more acutely specialised perceptions in us points to man's need of a mental system that shall embrace ever more and more of the phenomena of the world, then must we have an art that can shape these perceptions too into a beauty of their own. Did we all apprehend the universe as Maeterlinck and the mystics do—through a kind of sixth sense that is an instantaneous blend of the ordinary five; could we all arrive at his serenely philosophical outlook, and be content with so much understanding of the world as came to us in immediate intuitions—we should then see in his kind of art a mode of expression co-extensive with all that we could know or feel. But since we do not all look at life with the semi-Oriental fatalism of Maeterlinck, in whose soul the passive elements seem to outweigh the active, we have to turn to other types of dramatic art for the satisfaction of our cravings. "The poet," he says in one place, "adds to ordinary life something—I know not what—which is the poet's secret: and there comes to us a sudden revelation of life in its stupendous grandeur, in its submissiveness to the unknown powers, in its endless affinities, in its awe-inspiring misery." Well, for a great many of us there are moments when "submissiveness to the unknown powers" does not express the be-all and the end-all of life—more vivid moments of revolt, of struggle with uncertainties, of passionate assertions of personality, that have little kinship with the grey resignation of the mystic. If life is ugly and bitter, there is an art that can interest us deeply in this bitterness and ugliness, because it ministers to that deep-seated need of ours to leave no corner of life and nature unexplored. This art of the mercilessly real may not be so "philosophical" as Maeterlinck's; it may not speak to us so clearly of the "mysterious chant of the infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon," for these voices can make themselves heard only in a wider, serener, less turbid space than ours. But just as the poet foregoes some of the formal perfection of the musician, finding his compensation in his power to touch a wider range of things, so the realist finds in the bracing, ever-interesting contact with the cruder facts of life something that compensates him for missing the broader peace of the mystic—a sense of energetic personality, of struggle with and dominion over inimical forces, that the languor of mysticism cannot provide. "No human reason," says Maeterlinck, in our actions, "no human reason; nothing but destiny." Well, thought and action, to the mystic, may be only the children of illusion; but may there not be as much illusion in passivity, in the ecstatic collapse of the intellect under the pressure of an incomprehensible world? In the Maeterlinck drama, beautiful as it is, we cannot all of us find complete satisfaction. To quote the words that he himself has used in another context: "Here we are no longer in the well-known valleys of human and psychic life. We find ourselves at the door of the third enclosure—that of the divine life of the mystics. We have to grope timidly, and make sure of every footstep, as we cross the threshold." And when we have crossed the threshold, we find ourselves hungering and thirsting for the more troubled but at any rate broader life we have left behind us; just as the Wagnerian drama, mighty as it is, brings home to us the fact that there are needs of our nature that music cannot satisfy. Formal perfection, absolute homogeneity, are obtainable in an art only when we abstract it from outer incident and long reflection. Music comes before poetry in this respect, poetry before the drama, the drama before fiction. Take, from a master of reticence, an example of apparent dissipation of artistic force that Wagner would have held to prove his own theories. It is the scene in Madame Bovary where LÉon, expecting to see Emma, is detained at dinner by Homais. "At two o'clock they were still at table, opposite each other. The large room was emptying; the stovepipe, in the shape of a palm tree, spread its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white basin, where, in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in a pile on their sides." "Watercress! asparagus! quails! three torpid lobsters!" Wagner would have said, "what have these to do with art? Music's manner of describing the impatience of two separated lovers is that of the mad prelude to the duet in Tristan. Here we have all the essential soul-states, without the admixture of crude external realities." Yet there is something in LÉon's impatience that music cannot express—the dreary boredom inflicted by his companion, the helpless wandering of the mind over the insignificant uglinesses of his surroundings. This also is part of human psychology, and a part that can find expression only in words. In consideration of the wider sweep of the artistic net, we gladly abate our demands for perfection of quality in the yield; for the phenomena of the extensive and the intensive are meant to be compensatory, the one taking the burden upon itself where the strength of the other fails. Wagner erred in thinking that the union of all the arts in music-drama could render each separate art superfluous; Maeterlinck errs in thinking that the mystic, in his withdrawal to the centre of consciousness, can tell us all we desire to know of the outer circle. [58]