characteristic work, he emphasizes this thought--he would have us
realize that we are the unconscious protagonists of an overshadowing,
vast, and august drama whose significance and _dénouement_ we do not and
cannot know, but of which mysterious intimations are constantly to be
perceived and felt. The characters in his plays live, as the old king,
Arkël, says in _Pelléas et Mélisande_, like persons "whispering about a
closed room," This drama--at once his most typical, moving, and
beautiful performance--swims in an atmosphere of portent and bodement;
here, as Pater noted in the work of a wholly different order of artist,
"the storm is always brooding;" here, too, "in a sudden tremor of an
aged voice, in the tacit observance of a day," we become "aware suddenly
of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of
the world." Mystery and sorrow--these are its keynotes; separately or in
consonance, they are sounded from beginning to end of this strange and
muted tragedy. It is full of a quality of emotion, of beauty, which is
as "a touch from behind a curtain," issuing from a background vague and
illimitable. One is aware of vast and inscrutable forces, working in
silence and indirection, which somehow control and direct the shadowy
figures who move dimly, with grave and wistful pathos, through a no less
shadowy pageant of griefs and ecstasies and fatalities. They are little
more than the instruments of a mysterious will, these vague and
mist-enwrapped personages, who seem always to be unconscious actors in
some secret and hidden drama whose progress is concealed behind the
tangible drama of passionate and tragic circumstance in which they are
ostensibly taking part.

"Maeterlinck's man," says S.C. de Soissons in a penetrating study of the
Belgian's dramatic methods, "is a being whose sensuous life is only a
concrete symbol of his infinite transcendental side; and, further, is
only a link in an endless change of innumerable existences, a link that