solid, full-blooded, concrete; he can jest and laugh; his spectres are even more substantial than his living men. The father of Hamlet is perfectly capable of knocking Bernardo and Marcellus down when they try to stop him; the ghost of Banquo is more vindictive than any living person. The characters of the early plays of Maeterlinck, on the contrary, are paler and more empty than the phantoms they pursue, and the spirits that disturb them are but the deliquescent reflections of an invisible silence. If the ingenuous Mirbeau, instead of suggesting Shakespeare, had read the plays of Villiers de l’Isle Adam—Axel, for example—and had known that Villiers was the first prominent writer visited by Maeterlinck in Paris, he would have perceived more clearly the origins of Maeterlinck’s drama of metaphysical marionettes. Later on Maeterlinck himself grew tired of fantastications sobbed forth in a dim light and ending in the chatter of delirious idiots. In The Blue Bird he tried his hand at the folktale, with much less wit than our own Gozzi; in Monna Vanna he sank into the drama of Fate, with less gorgeousness than our own d’Annunzio.
III
Remy de Gourmont, in a moment of kindliness, wrote an essay on the originality of Maeter-
