July 17, 1915

THE BELLMAN

performance of his plays, and it is most difficult to even get him to attend a hearingal. After he has written a play, he is; in a way, through with it. Then, though his work undoubtedly possesses that universal quality peculiar to great artists, generally speaking he appeals intensely only to a certain comparatively small audience. He is distinctly not a "mob" success.

One other thing he is not, —let me say this absolutely and finally,—neither as a poet, dramatist nor essayist: He is not "highbrow." Let us disabuse our minds of that hideous term, at least, in respect to this artist, once and for all time. Maeterlinck is a very modest, unpretentious man who writes with a lovely innocence and a bewitching guilelessness of the inner life and of the world not seen or felt by the physical senses. His work has a parallel in the position of the aloof Eleanora Duse; what she is among actresses he is among dramatists.

"In an insect's death is hinted all disaster," says Rostand in "Chantecler"; so, too, there is nothing strange in the experience of these two artists. All that they say has happened to every one more or less—only they differ from other craftsmen in that they deal with the unseen world, indeed, to some of us, the more real world. Of what one might call the external dramatists, Sardou is perhaps the best known. He

represents the other plane of endeavor, and is absolute master of his field. But Maeterlinck teaches us that, although a runaway in the street may be sensational, the picture of an old man alone, thinking in an attic, can be no less significant. To dub him a symbolist, however, is absurd. All life is a symbol, and has myriad meanings. Maeterlinck is distinct from all other writers in that he is different, aloof, if you will, from his confreres, but still intimately akin to life.

In "Aglavaine and Selysette," his characters unconsciously disclose his very self. "Is she beautiful?" asks Selysette concerning Aglavaine. And Meleander replies: "Her beauty is different, that is all, ...

The Theatre at Mount Kisco and its Entrances