It is scarcely necessary to enter into details here about Maeterlinck; he needs no introduction to English readers. He has only published one volume of lyrics, Serres Chaudes (1889), which is now printed with the fifteen songs he wrote later. In a music laden with sleep rise the faint, forced lilies of a super-sensitive soul, looking through glass darkly at a world whose contradictions seem irreconcilable. Verhaeren has characterized these poems as follows: "C'était d'une inattendue angoisse, d'une extraordinaire et infinie tristesse, d'une plainte profonde et simple sortie de l'instinct scellé au fond de nous-mêmes. Cela ne s'expliquait pas, mais cela perforait le fond de notre âme et trouvait sa justification dans tout l'inexplicable et dans tout l'inconnu. L'inconscient ou plutôt la subconscience y reconnaissait son langage, ou plutôt son balbutiement...."
Grégoire Le Roy has been an electrician, and is now Librarian of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts at Brussels. He is the poet of retrospection, as Maeterlinck is the poet of introspection. His heart "pleure d'autrefois." He is the hermit bowed down by silver hair, bending at eventide over the embers of the past, visited by weird guests draped with legend. The weft of his verse is torn by translation, it cannot be grasped, it is wafted through shadows.
Max Elskamp is a poet who reminds one that Mariolatry is Minnesong. There is no reason why the devout should not be edified by his poems, but his intention is rather to give a subtle idealization of Flemish life. Those who know Flemish painting will easily read themselves into the enchanting version of Flanders that he gives us, a Flanders how different to that of Verhaeren and yet how equally true!
"Et c'est alors un pays d'ailes
Aux hirondelles,
Flandres des tours
Et de naïf et bon séjour;
Et c'est alors un pays d'ailes
Et tout d'amour."
Thomas Braun, Victor Kinon, and Georges Ramaekers are fervent Roman Catholics. Braun's Livre des Bénédictions is a beautifully printed book illustrated by the quaint woodcuts of his brother, who is a Benedictine monk. It is a thoroughly Flemish book; but a volume of verse which he has just published, J'ai plié le genou (published by Deman), is Walloon in feeling. His other volume, Philatélie (Bibliothèque de l'Occident, Paris, 1910) is poetry for stamp-collectors! Braun and Kinon are bucolic poets, somewhat in the manner of the French poet Francis Jammes, who aims at uncompromising fidelity to nature and the utmost simplicity of diction. But part of Kinon's work is in the style of Max Elskamp, fascinating poetry concerning pilgrimages,[10] and the devotional life of Flanders. Ramaekers, the editor of Le Catholique, is inspired "par la vision si riante et si forte du Brabant jovial, intime, et monastique." Le Chant des Trois Règnes is a forest of mysticism. The "Three Reigns" are those of the Father = the cult of minerals; the Son = of plants; the Holy Ghost = of Love. Some of the poems would delight an architect. His knowledge of paintings appears equally well in his other volume of verse, Les Saisons mystiques (Librairie moderne, Brussels, 1910).
André Fontainas is a symbolist of the symbolists. Mallarmé himself could not have bettered the following exciting sonnet:
Le givre: vivre libre en l'ire de l'hiver,
Rumeur qui se retrait au regard d'une vitre
Où, peut-être, frémit éphémère l'élytre
De tel vol ou d'un souffle épais de menu-vair.
Le ciel gris s'est, fanfare! à soi-même entr'ouvert:
N'est-ce pas qu'y ruisselle au front morne une mitre?
Non! sénile noblesse où nul n'élude un titre
A se mentir moins vil que ne rampe le ver.
L'heure suit l'heure encore, aucune n'est la seule:
Pareille à soi, voici venir qui l'enlinceule
Pour brusque naître d'elle et pour mourir soudain.
Un chardon bleu, pas même, au suaire, ni cirse
Offrant, rêve chétif et dédain du jardin,
Ne fût-ce qu'une épine à s'en former un thyrse.
But the great mass of his poetry is perfectly intelligible. He is a romanticist, but in a new sense; for whereas the old romanticists turned from the sordid present to the motley middle ages and the choral pomp of Rome, Fontainas haunts the labyrinths of his soul, and projects his conscience beyond the bounds of space and time. In Fontainas, as in Gérardy, knights ride through pathless forests, but these are not the knights of Spenser. The Faëry Queen is a record of events in the outer world; Fontainas is a chevalier errant in the inner world of the spirit, and his castles are only settling-places for the dove of thought winging out of the unknown.
Iwan Gilkin and Albert Giraud are Satanists. Gilkin's La Nuit, "une vision terrifiante des turpitudes humaines," is the most interesting book in Baudelaire's style since Baudelaire. He began it with the intention of continuing his pilgrimage in two following books through Purgatory and Paradise; but, as he warns his readers in the preface to La Nuit: This is Hell! Gilkin seems to have had no aptitude for Purgatory and Paradise after Hell; at all events, his following works have nothing to make an Englishman blush. Le Cérisier Fleuri (1899) is a collection of verse in the classical style; but Gilkin has since given his best work to the drama: Prométhée (1899), Etudiants russes (1906), Savonarole (1906). Jonas (1900) is a satire predicting the conquest of Europe by Asia.
Albert Giraud is undoubtedly a poet of high rank. His colouring is marvellous. Above all, he is a very personal poet; one can always hear the beating of his heart—"À maint endroit le sentiment mal contenu crève l'enveloppe de sérénité."[11] He is a pessimist and a Baudelairian: "Il se plaît," says Désiré Horrent, "à remuer le fond vaseux des âmes, à goûter le charme morbide des voluptés rares et raffinées."