Wisdom and Destiny | Page 6

true to him. And whereas in the "Treasure of
the Humble" he looked on life through a veil of poetry and dream, here
he stands among his fellow- men, no longer trying to "express the
inexpressible," but, in all simplicity, to tell them what he sees.
"Above all, let us never forget that an act of goodness is in itself an act
of happiness. It is the flower of a long inner life of joy and contentment;
it tells of peaceful hours and days on the sunniest heights of our soul."
This thought lies at the root of his whole philosophy--goodness,
happiness, love, supporting each other, intertwined, rewarding each
other. "Let us not think virtue will crumble, though God Himself seem
unjust. Where could the virtue of man find more everlasting foundation
than in the seeming injustice of God?" Strange that the man who has
written these words should have spent all his school life at a Jesuit
college, subjected to its severe, semi-monastic discipline; compelled, at
the end of his stay, to go, with the rest of his fellows, through the
customary period of "retreat," lasting ten days, when the most eloquent
of the fathers would, one after the other, deliver sermons terrific to
boyish imagination, sermons whose unvarying burden was Hell and the
wrath of God--to be avoided only by becoming a Jesuit priest. Out of
the eighteen boys in the "rhetorique" class, eleven eagerly embraced
this chance of escape from damnation. As for M. Maeterlinck himself-
-fortunately a day-boarder only--one can fancy him wandering home at
night, along the canal banks, in the silence broken only by the pealing
of church bells, brooding over these mysteries ... but how long a road
must the man have travelled who, having been taught the God of Fra
Angelico, himself arrives at the conception of a "God who sits smiling
on a mountain, and to whom our gravest offences are only as the
naughtiness of puppies playing on the hearth-rug."
His environment, no less than his schooling, helped to give a mystic
tinge to his mind. The peasants who dwelt around his father's house

always possessed a peculiar fascination for him; he would watch them
as they sat by their doorway, squatting on their heels, as their custom
is--grave, monotonous, motionless, the smoke from their pipes almost
the sole sign of life. For the Flemish peasant is a strangely inert
creature, his work once done--as languid and lethargic as the canal that
passes by his door. There was one cottage into which the boy would
often peep on his way home from school, the home of seven brothers
and one sister, all old, toothless, worn--working together in the daytime
at their tiny farm; at night sitting in the gloomy kitchen, lit by one
smoky lamp--all looking straight before them, saying not a word; or
when, at rare intervals, a remark was made, taking it up each in turn
and solemnly repeating it, with perhaps the slightest variation in form.
It was amidst influences such as these that his boyhood was passed,
almost isolated from the world, brooding over lives of saints and
mystics at the same time that he studied, and delighted in, Shakespeare
and the Elizabethans, Goethe and Heine. For his taste has been catholic
always; he admires Meredith as he admires Dickens, Hello and Pascal
no less than Schopenhauer. And it is this catholicity, this open mind,
this eager search for truth, that have enabled him to emerge from the
mysticism that once enwrapped him to the clearer daylight of actual
existence; it is this faculty of admiring all that is admirable in man and
in life that some day, perhaps, may take him very far.
It will surprise many who picture him as a mere dreamy decadent, to be
told that he is a man of abiding and abundant cheerfulness, who finds
happiness in the simplest of things. The scent of a flower, the flight of
sea-gulls around a cliff, a cornfield in sunshine-- these stir him to
strange delight. A deed of bravery, nobility, or of simple devotion; a
mere brotherly act of kindness, the unconscious sacrifice of the peasant
who toils all day to feed and clothe his children--these awake his warm
and instant sympathy. And with him, too, it is as with De Quincey
when he says, "At no time of my life have I been a person to hold
myself polluted by the touch or approach of any creature that wore a
human shape"; and more than one unhappy outcast, condemned by the
stern law of man, has been gladdened by his ready greeting and
welcome. But, indeed, all this may be read of in his book--I desired but
to make it clear that the book is truly a faithful mirror of the man's