Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/63

Rh slowly relaxing grip, yet a changed ethical outlook is manifest. Also, this play for the first time proclaims, though in no vociferous manner, the duty of the individual toward himself, the duty so emphatically proclaimed by two of Maeterlinck's greatest teachers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henrik Ibsen.

The inner philosophic conflict was but of short duration. In 1898 La Sagesse et La Destinée ("Wisdom and Destiny") saw the light. The metaphor might be taken in a meaning higher and more precise than the customary, for, coming to this book from those that preceded is indeed like emerging from some dark and dismal cave into the warm and cheering light of the sun. "Wisdom and Destiny" is a collection of essays and aphorisms which stands to this second phase of Maeterlinck's dramaturgy in a relation closely analogous to that existing between "The Treasure of the Humble" and the works heretofore surveyed. Without amounting to a wholesale recantation of the idea that is central in the earlier set of essays, the message of the newer set is of a very different kind. The author of "Wisdom and Destiny" has not changed his view touching the superiority of