There's a tune burns, bums in my head, And I hear it beat to the sound of my feet, For that was the tune we used to walk to In the days that are over and dead.
Another tune turns under and over. And it turns in my brain as I think again Of the days that are dead, and the ways she walks now, To the self-same tune, with her lover.
I see, for instance, Mallarmé, with his exquisite manner of welcome, as he opens the door to me on the fourth floor of the Rue de Rome; I hear Jean Moréas thunder out some verses of his own to a waitress in a Bouillon Duval, whose name was Celimène, who pretended to understand them; Stuart Mérill at the Rue Ballier, Henri de Regnier silent under his eye-glass in one of the rooms of the _Mercerie de France_; Maurice Maeterlinck in all the hurry of a departure, between two portmanteaux. That was, I suppose, one of the most surprising meetings I ever had; for, as a matter of fact, one night in Fountain Court, it was in 1894--I was equally surprised when I opened his _Alladine et Palamides_ which he had sent me with a dedication. After that time I saw him, during several years, fairly often in Paris and once in Rome, in 1903, when one performance was given of his _Joyzelle_--the most unsatisfactory performance I ever saw, and of certainly an unsatisfactory play. Nervous as he always was--he used, for one thing, to keep a loaded revolver always beside him in his bedroom--he shirked the occasion and went to Naples. I have never forgotten the afternoon when he read to me in his house in Paris whole pages of _Monna Vanna._ After I had left the house, I said to a certain lady who was with me: "Rhetoric, nothing but rhetoric! It may be obviously dramatic; but the worst of it is, all the magic and mystery of his earlier plays had vanished: there is logic rather than life."
It is very unfortunate for a man to be compared to Shakespeare even by his enemies, when he is only twenty-seven and has time before him. That is what has happened to Maurice Maeterlinck. Two years ago the poet of _Serres Chaudes_ was known to only a small circle of amateurs of the new; he was known as a young Belgian of curious talent who had published a small volume of vague poems in monotone. On the appearance of _La Princesse maleine_, in the early part of 1890, Maeterlinck had an unexpected "greatness thrust upon him" by a flaming article of Octave Mirbeau, the author of that striking novel _Sébastian Roch_ in the _Figaro_ of August 24th. "Maurice Maeterlinck," said this uncompromising enthusiast,