Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck

uses). We have seen that several of the poems which compose it had a

d, and helplessly inactive[1] in a hot-house whose doors are closed for ever. The tropical atmosphere is created by pictures (seen through the deep green windows of the hot-house) as of lions drowned in sunshine, or of mighty forests lying with not a leaf stirring over the roses of passion by night. But

of the fight waged by the reviews, and by the poets in their books; and it is perhaps owing to the hostility of the public that such a great mass of good poetry was written. Year after year Charles van Le

hich shocked the honest burghers; they were rather horrified at the absurdities of the new style. Rodenbach, who was a real poet, wrote crazy things; as, for instance, when he compared a muslin curtain to a communicant parta

! nom trè

plus biz

x, le s

uprès de t

ted from Serres Chaudes also, if the collect

re is a tram

that corsars are

ian beings are goi

easily, by culling choice quotations, d

my abs

shold of

is helpl

te inact

mental illness. It might be asserted that the modern man must be mad. The life of to-day, especially in cities, with its whipped hurry, its dust and noises, is too complex to be lived with the nerves of a Victorian. But the human organism is capable of infinite assimi

us. How many "Dickh?uter" have called Hoffmansthal's poetry diseased? If it is, so is Yeats's. Turn from Robert Bridges's poems of outdoor life-the noble old

impression seems to be that these poems are chiefly of interest as marking a stage in the author's development. If Maeterlinck had written nothing more he would have been quite forgotten, or only remembered because, for instance, Charles van Lerberghe wrote some poetry in the for

hadow of great sa

lias of subm

moment in the s

to the

oduce Walt Whitman's manner. They are interesting, too, because they attempt to create a mood by the use of successive images.[7] Perhaps, els

ch, Le Règne du

s pourtant entr

souffrir de le

les aime a b

e vie exigüe

son destin de poète, les lui avait généreusement refusées, et pour reconna?tre ce service, Maeterlinck ne lui rend que mépris et dédain et refuse même les

3

s de songe! Elle

lus beaux que

ute chose au S

ideau pale un

de mousseli

bord des vitre

du Silen

; poems, melodious merely and full of beautiful words, but absolutely without sense or connection-at

brain was always as healthy as his body. At the time he wrote Serres Chaudes disease was fashionable, that

y favourable conditions, create a new race, thanks to the happy deformation of his brain fixing itself firs

erpretation in L'Attitude du Ly