Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/44

Rh on "Silence" "for Heaven to open at the strike of the thunderbolt? Ye should attend upon the blessed hours when it silently opens—and it is incessantly opening."

His purpose, then, is to reveal the working of hidden forces in their intricate and inseparable connection with external events; and in order that the vie intérieure might have the right of way, drama in his practice emancipates itself very far from the traditional realistic methods. "Poetry," he maintains, "has no other purpose than to keep open the great roads that lead from the visible to the invisible." To be sure, this definition postulates, rather audaciously, a widespread spiritual susceptibility. But in Maeterlinck's optimistic anthropology no human being is spiritually so deadened as to be forever out of all communication with the things that are divine and infinite. He fully realizes, withal, that for the great mass of men there exists no intellectual approach to the truly significant problems of life. It is rather through our emotional capacity that our spiritual experience brings us into touch with the final verities. Anyway, the poet of mysticism appeals from the impasse of pure reasoning to the voice of the