It is not a human drama. If Jesus has the power to awaken the dead, and to summon the living so that they walk as in sleep (Mary comes to Him in this way), there is no human conflict. One might suspect sexual attraction in Mary's conversion, but she gives one the impression of being a sexless blue-stocking; we are forced to the conclusion that she is mesmerised. Jesus is a mesmerist;[3] from a dramatic point of view. He is no more convincing than Svengali. Maeterlinck's play is on a level with those of Hall Caine; his Roman villain especially might have been conceived by Hall Caine.
In 1911 appeared, in an English translation (the French original was not published till 1913), another book of essays under the title of _Death_. Maeterlinck takes up the thread of what he had said about death in his previous writings, especially in the noble essay on Immortality in _Life and Flowers_:
"For us, death is the one event that counts in our life or in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it battens but on our fears lie who seeks to forget it burdens his memory with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But though we think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously without learning to know death."
The book shocked many of its critics, who found one of Maeterlinck's ideas repugnant--his plea that it is to no purpose to prolong the agonies of the sick-bed.
"Why should the doctors," asks the essayist, "consider it their duty to protract even the most excruciating convulsions of the most hopeless agony? Who has not, at a bedside, twenty times wished and not once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to show mercy?... One day this prejudice will strike us as barbarian. Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions which have long since died out in the mind of men. That is why the doctors act as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown.... The day will come when science will turn against this error, and no longer hesitate to shorten our misfortunes."