The virtues and failings of humanity are hinted at with gentle irony. One blind man, when he goes out in the sunshine, suspects the great radiances; another prefers to stay near the good coal fire in the refectory.... The oldest blind woman dreams sometimes that she sees; the oldest blind man only sees when he dreams.... The young beauty smells the scent of flowers around them (the promptings of sense guide us; and the beautiful are the sensuous); one who was born blind only smells the scent of the earth (Philistines).... Heaven is mentioned, and all raise their heads towards the sky, except the three who were born blind--they keep their faces bent earthwards....
Lessing thought no man could write a good tragedy till he was thirty. Here are two written by a man of twenty-eight.
[1] "Les Avertis" (in _Le Trésor des Humbles_), p. 53.
[2] Cf. also "L'Evolution du Mystère" (in _Le Temple Enseveli_) Chapters V., XXI., and XXII.
[3] See Chapter XXVIII. of _L'Intelligence des Fleurs_.
[4] In a letter inserted in the programme when _Les Flaireurs_ was staged by Paul Fort at the Théâtre d'Art (after _The Intruder_ had gone over the same boards). This statement of Maeterlinck's is a noble defence of his friend, and, as such, not to be trusted.
[5] But Death, in _The Intruder_, is understood to have made some noise while coming upstairs.
[6] Is. van Dijk, _Maurice Maeterlinck_, pp. 81-82.
Few men entirely outgrow the influences of their education: the mind is made by what it is fed on while it is growing just as much as the body is. Carlyle was always more or less of a Scotch preacher threatening the world with hell. Gerhart Hauptmann (who, by the way, was born in the same year as Maeterlinck) never got over his Moravian upbringing. Maeterlinck came to hate the Jesuits; but his monastic training lingered in his love of the mystics. Mysticism is in any case a Flemish _trait_; and it is one of the outstanding features of Flemish literature as it is of Flemish painting. It is not astonishing, then, that Maeterlinck should have felt drawn to the most famous of Flemish mystics. He published, in 1891, _L'Ornement des Noces spirituelles_, a translation, illuminated by a preface, of Jan van Ruysbroeck's _Die Chierheit der gheesteleker Brulocht_. The "doctor ecstaticus" was born in 1274 at the little village of Ruysbroeck, near Brussels. He was a curate in the Church of Sainte Gudule in Brussels; but in his old days he with several friends founded the Monastery of Groenendal (Green Dale) in the Forêt de Soignes, two miles from Brussels. The fame of his piety attracted many pilgrims to his retreat, among others the German mystic, Johannes Tauler, and the Dutch scholar who founded the Brotherhood of the Common Life, Geert Groote. He died in 1381. His contemporaries called him "the Admirable."