Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/32

Rh harsh, hostile, unconquerable mirth." There are some works that can be appreciated for their good story, even if we fail to realize the author's moral attitude, let alone to grasp the deeper content of his work. "But if we take a play by Maeterlinck we shall find that unless we grasp the particular fairy thread of thought the poet rather lazily flings to us, we cannot grasp anything whatever. Except from one extreme poetic point of view, the thing is not a play; it is not a bad play, it is a mass of clotted nonsense. One whole act describes the lovers going to look for a ring in a distant cave *when they both know they have dropped it down the well. Seen from some secret window on some special side of the soul's turret, this might convey a sense of faerie futility in our human life. But it is quite obvious that unless it called forth that one kind of sympathy, it would call forth nothing but laughter. In the same play, the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword, the wife remarking at intervals, 'I am not gay.' Now there may really be an idea in this; the idea of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon the opportunism of innocence; that the lonely human heart says, like a child at a party, 'I am not enjoying myself as I thought I should.' But it is