Camille Lemonnier, of Liège, wrote three or four novels before 1880. He was a brilliant writer, who “touched modern society at almost every point” in his books, but will perhaps be remembered chiefly as the doyen of the little band of “la jeune Belgique.”
The students at Louvain in 1880, with their rival magazines, really laid “the foundation of a literature which is in many respects the most remarkable of contemporary Europe.” At the head stand Maeterlinck and Verhaeren. Edmond Glesener, a hero of Liège, is well known for his novels.
In 1887, with the publication of the periodical, La Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique, began a renaissance of poetry, which became distinctly modern Belgian in character. Maurice Warlemont (Max Waller) was the generally recognized founder of this paper. Verhaeren and other noted contributors also wrote for the Pléiade, which was a famous Parisian periodical at that time.
Maeterlinck is the best known of these modern Belgian writers, for many of his plays have been well translated into English, and some have been produced with great success in this country. He wrote at first in Flemish, but soon changed to French. I admire his symbolic and allegorical language, so mysterious and full of charm. It is said of his earlier poems that “they require a key and are not literature but algebra.“ Maeterlinck ”has the happy faculty of making people think they think.”
Apropos of this mysticism of Maeterlinck’s I may give the bon mot of a witty Frenchman in regard to the Jeune Ecole Belge. He said that their ambition was to write obscurely, and if the first writing seemed easy to understand, they would scratch it out, and try again. At the second attempt, if no one could understand it but the writer—that was still too simple. If the public could not understand the third, nor the writer himself, it was quite perfect.
Maurice Maeterlinck was born on August 29, 1862. As a boy, he lived at Oostacker, in Flanders, and was sent to the College of Sainte Barbe, a Jesuit school, where he studied for seven years. Among his friends in this college was Jean Grégoire le Roi, who later became a well-known poet. Even in those days Maeterlinck contributed to a literary review, and like Verhaeren, he studied for the bar. At the age of twenty-four he went to Paris, where he continued his friendship with le Roi. Maeterlinck had a thin, harsh voice, which was much against him as a lawyer, and he soon gave up that profession and turned his entire attention to literature. He is short, stocky, Flemish in appearance, but is a dreamer, shy, solitary, and moody.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK.
In 1889, his first book of poems, “Serres Chaudes,” was published. After this he returned to Oostacker, and when he was not writing tended his bees, which have always interested him.
In reading his earlier poems, I find they are principally concerned with souls, hothouses, and hospitals. Some of them have a strange prophetic note, and are also good examples of his style.[9]