"Dans la chaleur muette le ciel lisse ses plumes
Comme un grand épervier aux ailes floconneuses;
Mais ce soir, l'oiseau d'or entravé dans les brumes,
Blotti contre la terre humble et délicieuse,
Dormira sur le cur des femmes amoureuses."
Georges Rency's Pegasus was a delicate steed with iridescent blue wings when he took it out into the shadows, and the moonlights, and the dawns, and recorded its flights on excellent paper. Since then it seems to have died of inanition, but he himself has produced a robust body of novels and criticism.
As to Sylvain Bonmariage, he is a prodigy. He is twenty-four years of age, and he has written twelve books. Every one of his plays has seen the footlights. "Précoce à épouvanter le diable et candide à ravir les saints," is Albert Giraud's description of him.
Our collection does not exhaust the poetry of Belgium. Perhaps no poem we have selected has so good a chance of immortality as a snatch of song by Léon Montenaeken:
La vie est vaine:
Un peu d'amour,
Un peu de haine....
Et puis—bonjour!
La vie est brève:
Un peu d'espoir,
Un peu de rêve ...
Et puis—bonsoir!
J. BITHELL.
April 1911.
[1] Charles van Lerberghe was directly inspired by Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Verhaeren has written much art criticism. Fontainas, who has translated Keats, and Milton's Samson Agonistes and Comus, is a historian of painting (Histoire de la Peinture française au xixe siècle 1801-1900, Mercure de France, 1906). Max Elskamp illustrates his own books with quaint, mediæval woodcuts; see, especially, his Alphabet de Notre Dame la Vierge (Antwerp, 1901). Mockel has written a study of Victor Rousseau (1905). Le Roy is an amateur painter.
[2] Verhaeren heard Wagner's Walküre twenty times running. Mockel is a learned musician; of his two volumes of verse Chantefable un peu naïve and Clartés contain musical notations of rhythms. Gilkin found it difficult to decide whether to be a musician or a poet.
[3] Verhaeren, who is a Fleming pur sang, and who was brought up in an exclusively Flemish-speaking district, knows practically no Flemish. Maeterlinck, on the other hand, might have written equally well in Flemish.