orking out of an equation.
Humanity, as Mr. Shaw sees it, moves like clockwork; and must be
regulated as a watch is, and praised or blamed simply in proportion to
its exactitude in keeping time. Humanity, as Mr. Shaw knows, does not
move by clockwork, and the ultimate justice will have to take count of
more exceptions and irregularities than Mr. Shaw takes count of. There
is a great living writer who has brought to bear on human problems as
consistent a logic as Mr. Shaw's, together with something which Mr. Shaw
disdains. Mr. Shaw's logic is sterile, because it is without sense of
touch, sense of sight, or sense of hearing; once set going it is
warranted to go straight, and to go through every obstacle. Tolstoi's
logic is fruitful, because it allows for human weakness, because it
understands, and because to understand is, among other things, to
pardon. In a word, the difference between the spirit of Tolstoi and the
spirit of Mr. Shaw is the difference between the spirit of Christ and
the spirit of Euclid.

"MONNA, VANNA"

In his earlier plays Maeterlinck invented a world of his own, which was
a sort of projection into space of the world of nursery legends and of
childish romances. It was at once very abstract and very local. There
was a castle by the sea, a "well at the world's end," a pool in a
forest; princesses with names out of the "Morte d'Arthur" lost crowns of
gold; and blind beggars without a name wandered in the darkness of
eternal terror. Death was always the scene-shifter of the play, and
destiny the stage-manager. The people who came and went had the blind
gestures of marionettes, and one pitied their helplessness. Pity and
terror had indeed gone to the making of this drama, in a sense much more
literal than Aristotle's.

In all these plays there were few words and many silences, and the words
were ambiguous, hesitating, often repeated, like the words of peasants
or children. They were rarely beautiful in themselves, rarely even
significant, but they suggested a singular kind of beauty and
significance, through their adjustment in a pattern or arabesque.
Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was everything; and in
an essay in "Le Tresor des Humbles" Maeterlinck told us that in drama,
as he conceived it, it was only the words that were not said which
mattered.

Gradually the words began to mean more in the scheme of the play. With
"Aglavaine et Selysette" we got a drama of the inner li