As for Maeterlinck, he owes something to Emerson; but his mellow wisdom and clairvoyance are his own. He is a seer, and his crepuscular pages are pools of glimmering incertitudes, whereas of Verhaeren we may say, as Carlyle said of Landor's prose: "The sound of it is like the ring of Roman swords on the helmets of barbarians."
Henry James tells a story of an argument between Zola, Flaubert, and Turgenev, the Russian novelist declaring that for him Châteaubriand was not the Ultima Thule of prose perfection. This insensibility to the finer nuances of the language angered and astounded Zola and Flaubert. They set it down to the fact that none but a Frenchman can quite penetrate the inner sanctuary of his own language; which may be true, though I believe that for Turgenev the author of Atala was temperamentally distasteful.
Therefore, when an American makes the statement that the two Belgians are superior to the living Frenchmen it may be classed as a purely personal judgment. But the proposition first mooted by a distinguished critic, Remy de Gourmont, that Maeterlinck and Verhaeren be elected to the French Academy, was not a bizarre one. The war has effaced many artistic frontiers. The majority of the little circles that once pullulated in Paris no longer exist. Both Verhaeren and Maeterlinck are now Frenchmen of the French. Their inclusion in the Academy would have honoured that venerable and too august body as much as the Belgian poets.
As to the war's influence on French letters, that question is for soothsayers to decide, not for the present writer. After 1870 certain psychiatrists pretended that a degeneration of body and soul had blighted artistic and literary Europe. Well, we can only wish for the new France of 1920 and later such a galaxy of talents and genius as the shining groups from 1875 to 1914. No need to finger the chaplet of their names and achievements. Such books as those by Catulle Mendès, Florian-Parmentier, Lanson, and Walch prove our contention.
Time was when a fame-craving young man could earn a reputation for originality by merely going to the market-place and loudly proclaiming his disbelief in a deity. It would seem that modern critics of Richard Wagner, busily engaged in placing the life of the composer under their microscopes, are seeking the laurels of the ambitious chap aforesaid.
