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THE "Belgian Shakespeare" is among us. A man not yet in his last years, he comes to us shrouded in the dust of glory stirred by the feet of worshippers. When we see a genius so acclaimed by his contemporaries we smell death. The crowd has the propensities of a jackal. Is it possible that this robust man, this sage with the white hair and vaguely benevolent face, is already dead without knowing it? One fancies that Death would approach this always half somnolent being imperceptibly, with the leisure of familiarity.

In eighteen eighty-nine this good but inspired burgher of Ghent published his first book, Serres Chaudes, and in the same year The Princess Maleine cajoled from the pen of Octave Mirbeau the immortally inappropriate epithet which compared the young Belgian to the Bard of Avon.

From the center of an emotional conviction we may express that conviction in its own terms, terms of the senses, of the subconsciousness which the senses feed. Then our thoughts, liquid with emotion, unfurl mysteriously from the depths like aquatic plants seeking the light. When we speak in this manner we become poets whether the medium of our utterance be the pen, the chisel, or the brush. That Maeterlinck—the Maeterlinck who gave us, in eighteen The Sightless; in eighteen ninety-one, The Seven Princesses; in eighteen ninety-two, Pelléas and Mélisande; and in eighteen ninety-four, Alladine and Palomides, The Intruder, and The Death of Tintagiles—was a poet of sluggish but powerful feeling, no one will deny. These are twilit dramas in which objectified human beings do not exist. Their language is musically repetitive and the tendency of this emotionalized monotony is to excite our receptive faculties while benumbing our powers of expression. Of life nothing less than all can be taken. While we live our give and take is but an adjustment of emphasis. And Maeterlinck, by reducing self-awareness to the vanishing point, leaves the individual intact but enlarges the background of his subconsciousness, so that he is able