Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/45

Rh inner oracles. But how to detect in the deepest recesses of the soul the echoes of universal life and give outward resonance to their faint reverberations? That is the artistic, and largely technical, side of the problem.

Obvious it is that if the beholder's collaboration in the difficult enterprise is to be secured, his imagination has to be stirred to a super-normal degree. Once a dramatist has succeeded in stimulating the imaginative activity, he can dispense with a mass of descriptive detail. But he must comply with two irremissible technical demands. In the first place, the "vie intérieure" calls forth a dialogue intérieur; an esoteric language, I would say, contrived predominantly for the "expressional" functions of speech, as differenced from its "impressional" purposes. Under Swedenborg's fanciful theory of "correspondences" the literal meaning of a word is merely a sort of protective husk for its secret spiritual kernel. It is this inner, essential meaning that Maeterlinck's dialogue attempts to set free. By a fairly simple and consistent code of intimations the underlying meaning of the colloquy is laid bare and a basis created for a more fundamental understanding of the dramatic transactions. Maeterlinck going, at first,