A goodly list of absurdities could be collected from Serres Chaudes also, if the collector detached odd passages from their context:
"Perhaps there is a tramp on a throne,
You have the idea that corsars are waiting on a pond,
And that antediluvian beings are going to invade towns."
And a scientist of Lombroso's type could easily, by culling choice quotations, draw an appalling picture of a degenerate:
"Pity my absence on
The threshold of my will!
My soul is helpless, wan,
With white inaction ill."
So incoherent and strange have these poems[4] appeared to some people who are ardent Maeterlinckians that they assume he may, for a period, have been mentally ill.[5] If he had been, it would have been historically significant. Verhaeren went through such a period of 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 assimilation; and the period we live in is busy creating a new type of man.[6] It is the glory of Verhaeren to have sung the advent of this new man; it is the glory of Maeterlinck, as we shall see, to have proved that a species forcibly adjusts itself to existing conditions.
To a Victorian the poems in Serres Chaudes must of necessity seem diseased; just as the greater part of Tennyson's poetry must of necessity seem ordinary to us. How many "Dickhäuter" 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 English style—to Yeats's dim visions, or to Arthur Symons's harpsichord dreaming through the room, and you have the difference between yesterday and to-day.
At all events Serres Chaudes, whether mad or not, is bathed in the same atmosphere as the dramas soon to follow. As to the relative value of the book from the point of view of art, opinion differs. Some good critics who are not prone to praise think highly of it; but the general 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 form of a criticism of the book. Compared with other Belgian lyric verse, Verhaeren's, or Charles van Lerberghe's, or Max Elskamp's, it is inferior work. Not that there are no good poems; some of them, indeed, are excellent, and not seldom the poet is on the track of something fine:
"Attention! the shadow of great sailing-ships passes
over the dahlias of submarine forests;
And I am for a moment in the shadow of whales
going to the pole!"
Whatever value the book may have as poetry, the rhymeless poems in it have, as we have seen, considerable importance as being attempts to reproduce Walt Whitman's manner. They are interesting, too, because they attempt to create a mood by the use of successive images.[7] Perhaps, elsewhere (Tancrède de Visan suggests the Song of Solomon) this method has been applied successfully. The poems in Serres Chaudes are experiments.