revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in
a supersensual world is at hand again; and when the notion that we are
'phantoms of the earth and water' has gone down the wind, we will trust
our own being and all it desires to invent; and when the external world is
no more the standard of reality, we will learn again that the great
Passions are angels of God, and that to embody them 'uncurbed in their
eternal glory,' even in their labour for the ending of man's peace and
prosperity, is more than to comment, however wisely, upon the tendencies
of our time, or to express the socialistic, or humanitarian, or other
forces of our time, or even 'to sum up' our time, as the phrase is; for
Art is a revelation, and not a criticism, and the life of the artist is in
the old saying, 'The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the
sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth;
so is every one that is born of the spirit.'

1895.

THE RETURN OF ULYSSES

I

M. Maeterlinck, in his beautiful _Treasure of the Humble_, compares the
dramas of our stage to the paintings of an obsolete taste; and the dramas
of the stage for which he hopes, to the paintings of a taste that cannot
become obsolete. 'The true artist,' he says, 'no longer chooses Marius
triumphing over the Cimbrians, or the assassination of the Duke of Guise,
as fit subjects for his art; for he is well aware that the psychology of
victory or murder is but elementary and exceptional, and that the solemn
voice of men and things, the voice that issues forth so timidly and
hesitatingly, cannot be heard amidst the idle uproar of acts of violence.
And therefore will he place on his canvas a house lost in the heart of the
country, a door open at the end of a passage, a face or hands at rest.' I
do not understand him to mean that our dramas should have no victories or
murders, for he quotes for our example plays that have both, but only that
their victories and murders shall not be to excite our nerves, but to
illustrate the reveries of a wisdom which shall be as much a part of the
daily life of the wise as a face or hands at rest. And certainly the
greater plays of the past ages have been built after such a fashion. If
this fashion is about to become our fashion also, and there are signs that
it is, plays like some of Mr. Robert Bridges will come out of that
obscurity into which all poetry, that is not lyrical poetry, has fal