The littlest child of all flings his arms instinctively about this shadowy unknown and hails her with the honored name of mother; and five other children, only slightly taller, add their voices to this indicated harmony. It is, of course, the littlest child of all who is permitted first to lift the veil from the enshrouded face of his predestined mother. This face is very lovely; but Tyltyl does not, at the moment, recognize it. There are so many, many other matters to occupy the mind of humankind at the interested age of seventeen.

When, after all of these adventures, Tyltyl awakens in his bed, he is vaguely aware that many things have come to pass; but, as yet, he knows not what they are. At the hour of awakening, he is called back to the realm of actuality and invited to give welcome to the widow Berlingot, his former neighbor, who shows a strange resemblance to the fairy Bérylune, imaginatively privileged to wand his recent dreams. This widow Berlingot has brought along with her a little daughter whom Tyltyl had negligently ceased to think of, several years before, the same little girl to whose hands he had entrusted the blue bird, which had forthwith fluttered freely from her grasp, "to be recovered some day." . . . So soon as Tyltyl looks clearly into the eyes of this young girl, who, for so long, has followed him in dreams as a veiled and shrouded figure, he perceives her to be, in very truth, the bride that all along has been predestined for him. Their betrothal is exchanged within the winking of an eye; and, as they march, hand in hand, to sit at table, a wicker-basket overhead bursts spontaneously into song. They look

aloft; and, lo, it contains the blue bird which had flitted and fluttered from their grasp ten years before!

Whistler, with his happy habit of talking of one art in the terms of another, might have called this parable a harmony of blue and silver. It suggests somehow the color of the sky before the dawn, in that moment when the deep blue grows aware and waiting, and the morning-star trembles with imagining of day. It is in this mood that the scenic investiture of The Betrothal was conceived by Mr. Ames and executed by the able collaborators that he judiciously assembled. The spectacle was presented very simply on an inner and outer stage. The transitional passages were narrated on the front-stage before a variable background of blue and silver curtains. For the more dramatic passages, these curtains were withdrawn, and a full-stage was opened to the vision, deep and high, and lyric with the beckoning of unobtrusive hints to lead the eye to wander through infinity. The scenes were designed by Herbert Paus and painted by Unitt and Wickes. The costumes were imagined by Mrs. O'Kane Conwell. The dancing numbers were arranged by the school of Isadora Duncan. The incidental music was composed by Eric Delamater. But this reportorial catalogue is not to be regarded merely as a list of names; it ought, rather, to be carved on granite as a roll of honor. The American theatre has never before disclosed, throughout its whole long century of effort, a production so completely harmonized as this.

The Betrothal may or may not be finally accepted as an equal of The Blue Bird in importance or in popu

larity. But, considering the author of this play, a final little word must certainly be said in praise of him; for it is always hallowing to feel ourselves alive in the same world that looks so lovely to the clear eyes of the laureate poet of that laurelled little nation which, throughout uncounted future centuries, will be remembered with respect and admiration and saluted with the gentlemanly gesture of "Hats off!" The work of Maurice Maeterlinck, to quote an ineffable simile of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's, is like a hand laid softly on the soul.

XVII

THE SECRET OF "SALOMÉ "

There is a point of absolute intensity beyond which sensations that differ utterly in origin become indistinguishable from each other. This fact has been established by a familiar experiment in physiological psychology. Within ordinary limits, it is easy enough to feel the difference between heat and cold; but, if a man be blindfolded and if his back be pricked in quick succession with a red-hot needle and with a needle-point of ice, he will be unable to distinguish between the two impressions. Similarly, in the more exalted region of æsthetics, there is also a point of absolute intensity beyond which all emotions, regardless of their origin, produce upon the spirit an effect of beauty.

Oscar Wilde, in all his works, was a deliberate and conscious craftsman; and, in Salomé, he attempted the psychological experiment of producing an effect of beauty by intensifying an emotion that in itself is inconsistent with our ordinary notions of the beautiful. As a student and experimenter in the realm of theoretical æsthetics, Wilde was always singularly sane. He understood, of course, that the most revolting of all reactions is the response of the normal human being to the emotion of horror; but it occurred to him, also, that if horror were sufficiently augmented, it might

cease to seem disgusting and might assume a virtue that is commonly accorded to many less intense emotions of another kind. In answer to this philosophical intention, the author set himself the task of composing a piece in which horror should be piled on horror's head until the finally accumulated monument should take the moonbeams as a thing serenely and superbly beautiful. This, according to my understanding, was the goal that Oscar Wilde was aiming at with Salomé.

Maeterlinck had proved already, with La Mort de Tintagiles, that the emotion of terror might be intensified to a point beyond which it would become indistinguishable from the more abstract emotion of the vaguely tragic. But terror is to horror as the soul is to the body; and it is far less difficult to raise to the nth power an abstract sense of fear than a concrete sense of physical repulsion. This latter task was attempted by Oscar Wilde in Salomé. Actuated by that careful niceness which always guided him in his æsthetical decisions, Wilde wrote the play in the French language and refused until his very death to translate it into English. [The current English version of the text was paraphrased from the original French by Lord Alfred Douglas.] The medium of the clearest-minded critics in the modern world was picked out as the only proper vehicle for this adventurous incursion into a domain of metaphysics that had scarcely ever been explored in English art.

This neat and simple language, selected by the Irish Oscar Wilde, was the same language that had been chosen previously, for the same æsthetic reasons, by