Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/43

Rh fully appreciated. To the mystic temper of mind, all life is secretly pregnant with great meaning, so that none of its phenomena can be deemed inconsequential. Thus, while Maeterlinck is a poet greatly preoccupied with spiritual matters yet nothing to him is more wonderful and worthy of attention than the bare facts and processes of living. Real life, just like the theatre which purports to represent it, manipulates a multiform assortment of stage effects, now coarse and obvious and claptrap, now refined and esoteric, to suit the diversified taste and capacity of the patrons. To the cultured esthetic sense the tragical tendency carries more meaning than the catastrophic finale; our author accordingly scorns, and perhaps inordinately, whatsoever may appear as merely adventitious in the action of plays. "What can be told," he exclaims, "by beings who are possessed of a fixed idea and have no time to live because they have to kill off a rival or a mistress?" The internalized action in his plays is all of one piece with the profound philosophical conviction that the inner life alone matters; that consequently the small and unnoticed events are more worthy of attention than the sensational, cataclysmic moments. "Why wait ye," he asks in that wonderful