Well, probably the fact is that Maeterlinck is no more a "socialist" than Goethe was a "patriot." All such terms may be interpreted variously. Goethe _was_ a patriot if you consider that his fatherland was the world. Maeterlinck _is_ a socialist if you look away from the din of the mere present to the future his writings undoubtedly prepare. Maeterlinck is first and foremost a _futurist_, a seer of the future. Even as a dramatist (apart from his later dramas, which must, on the whole, be rejected) he is a futurist. And in this sense he has his public among the élite. M. Dumont-Wilden would not call Johannes Schlaf a philistine of culture? And to Johannes Schlaf, as to me, Maeterlinck's importance lies in the fact that he is _the_ perfect type of Nietzsche's _New European_, in himself a prophecy of the race our descendants will be when patriotism is: to be a citizen of the whole world, and religion is: to be noble for nobility's sake. As for his Christian readers, why should they not, if they can, find confirmation of their own creed in the teaching of an enemy of it? The fact of Maeterlinck's vogue with Christian readers only proves that Christianity has much in common with the religion of the future.
In an article, which created a sensation, in La _Nouvelle Revue Française_ for September, 1912, M. Dumont-Wilden compares Maeterlinck's popularity with that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre three generations ago. He says:
"La gloire de Bernardin n'est point négligeable, et la comparaison s'impose d'elle-même entre Maeterlinck et lui. En écrivant _Les Etudes de la Nature_, cet auteur vieilli dont on ne lit plus guère qu'une bluette charmante qu'il composa en se jouant, apportait une nourriture salutaire au public de son temps, à ce public moyen que Jean-Jacques dépassait. Son finalisme ingénu calmait les inquiétudes de ceux que la sécheresse d'une morale utilitaire et d'un matérialisme sans grandeur avait déçus et qui, pourtant, se refusaient à faire, même avec Chateaubriand, le voyage du pénitent vers les autels délaissés."
Now, if Jean-Jacques was to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre what Nietzsche is to Maeterlinck, it would not be difficult to prove that Maeterlinck appeals to Nietzscheans, and that his teaching has points of contact with that of Nietzsche. To be quite short, Maeterlinck's man of the future is essentially the superman. And even if it were true that Maeterlinck's writings will be no more read in the future than are those of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to-day, that would not reduce him to the rank of a minor writer. Voltaire's writings, which prepared a revolution, are now little read; and yet how much of Voltaire's thinking, or abstract of thinking (was Voltaire "original"?) is woven into the fabric of the mental life of to-day? We cannot, it is true, draw a close comparison between Voltaire and Maeterlinck, for Maeterlinck has no venom, and no disposition to thrust himself forward into the forefront of public interest; but it would be possible to compare his present position with that of Goethe (another writer the great mass of whose writings, as far as the non-German reading public is concerned, is dead). What Goethe was to the élite of Europe in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Maeterlinck is to-day. His position, too, was assailed by a younger school of authors; but they could not shake it. Goethe, by the final moral of _Faust_, taught his generation to channel their activities and, confident of the result, to pour their strength into unselfish work; Maeterlinck teaches the same doctrine, and it may be said again of him, as he has said of Goethe, that he has brought us to the shores of the sea of serenity.