Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/66

Rh by proclaiming in jubilant accents the concrete reality of happiness. L'Oiseau Bleu ("The Blue Bird"), above all other works, illustrates the fact that human lives suffer not so much for the lack of happiness as for the want of being clearly conscious of the happiness they possess. It is seen that the seed of optimism in "The Treasure of the Humble" has sprouted and spread out, and at last triumphantly shot forth through the overlaying fatalism. The newly converted, hence all the more thoroughgoing, optimist, believing that counsel and consolation can come only from those who trust in the regenerative power of hope, throws himself into a mental attitude akin to that of the Christian Scientist, and confidently proceeds to cure the ills of human kind by a categorical denial of their existence. Or perhaps it would be more just to say of Maeterlinck's latter-day outlook, the serenity of which even the frightful experience of the present time has failed to destroy, that instead of peremptorily negating evil, he merely denies its supremacy. All about him he perceives in the midst of the worst wrongs and evils many fertile germs of righteousness; vice itself seems to distil its own antitoxin.

Together with Maeterlinck's optimistic strain,