"There was a great massacre on the pond, in the midst of huddling sheep, and cows that looked on the battle and the moon."
This transposition of the mood (_Stimming_) of old paintings (not by any means word-painting or descriptive writing) is the secret of much of the verse of two other Flemings--Elskamp and Verhaeren. It is an immense pity that Maeterlinck did not write more in this fashion; many of us would have given some of his essays for this pure artistry. Not that he threw his gift of seeing pictures away; he made good use of it even when he had' given up the direct painting of moods for the indirect suggestion of them (or, in other words, when from a realist he had become a symbolist).
Maeterlinck, at the time he wrote _The Massacre of the Innocents_, must have been trying his hand at various forms of literature. Adolphe van Bever in his little book publishes a letter from Charles van Lerberghe to himself which shows that the two young poets corrected each other's efforts. The letter, too, draws a portrait of Maeterlinck as he appeared at this time:
"Maeterlinck sent me verses, sonnets principally in Heredia's manner, but Flemish in colour, short stories something like Maupassant's, a comedy full of humour and ironical observation, and other attempts. It is characteristic that he never sent me any tragedy or epic poem, never anything bombastic or declamatory, never anything languorous or sentimental either. Neither the rhetorical nor the elegiac had any hold on him. He was a fine handsome young fellow, always riding his bicycle or rowing, the kind of student you would expect to see at Yale or Harvard. But he was a poet besides being an athlete, and his robust exterior concealed a temperament of extreme sensitiveness...."
It was certainly van Lerberghe's own idea that it was he who had trained Maeterlinck; and Maeterlinck would certainly admit it. It was van Lerberghe, too, more than any other, who won Maeterlinck over to symbolism. But Maeterlinck met Mallarmé personally during his stay in Paris; in short, various influences worked upon him to turn him from Heredia's and Maupassant's manner to that of Mallarmé's disciples.
The tide was flowing in that direction. Verhaeren was soon to desert the Parnassian camp.[14] Henri de Régnier was on the point of doing so.[15] Two years before Jean Moréas had published his first book: _Les Syrtes_ (December 1884). In 1885 René Ghil's _Légendes d'âmes et de sangs_ and Jules Laforgue's _Les Complaintes_ came out; in 1886, René Ghil's _Le Traité du Verbe_, Jean Moréas's _Les Cantilènes_, Rimbaud's _Les Illuminations_, Vielé-Griffin's _Cueille d'Avril_. In the pages of _La Vogue_, launched on the 11th of April, 1886, were appearing some of the poems which Gustave Khan was to publish in 1887, as _Les Palais Nomades_. All these books are landmarks in the onward path of symbolism;[16] not because they are all, technically, symbolistic, but because each is in a new manner.