Maurice Maeterlinck The moon shines down upon Brussels. You knock at the door of a house in the Rue du Marais. It is a small house, humble and reticent; but in the window of the first-pair-front there shines a light, like a human soul. To the little Walloon maid who comes to your to your knock you say, "M. Maurice Maeterlinck." Carelessly, indifferently as one points to a mile-stone, she points up the dark staircase. "First on your right, M'sieu," she says. You tap on the panel. It is M. Maeterlinck who admits you. Though he makes his home in Ghent, he has this pied-à-terre in Brussels; for now and again he comes up to enjoy the distractions of a great city. It is a plain little apartment, grimly like your own pied-à-terre in the Rue du Prince Albert. There is the same acacia-wood furniture,— the bed, the table, the sofa, the chairs,- the vulgar rugs, the brass candlestick, the dusky mirror. The walls, however, are beneficed with engravings and photographs of Burne-Jones's pictures of "The Golden Stair," "Flamma Vestalis," and the "Mirror of Venus," and many others. "He is the greatest of painters," says Maurice Maeterlinck; "and his soul is sib to my soul." In a few weeks Burne-Jones is to die; but that hangs yet in the future, undreamed of. Maurice Maeterlinck sits on the sofa, his long legs crossed. With his square shoulders, his brusque mustaches, his short, stiff blond hair, and his steady blue eyes, he has the air of a trooper out of a man's novel. You speak to him of Ghent, his ancient city. "It is the soul of Flanders," he says, "at once venerable and young. In its streets the past and the present elbow each other." And then he tells you of the changes that have taken place in the old city since last you were there : how the small shops that clung like limpets round the base of St. Nicolas are being chopped away; how the old Château des Comtes de Flandres is being put into fourteenth-century condition, even to the archers' turrets, scarps and counter-scarps; how the band of the Eleventh Foot plays in the Place d'Armes every Wednesday evening; and many other notable things. The moon shines down upon Brussels town, and yet in the air are hints and instigations of rain. Maurice Maeterlinck clothes himself in a long gray mackintosh, and sets on his head a little round hat, - pitifully small and round. He leads the way into the street, and you follow. In the Rue du Marais he glances up at the moon, sombrely, as one who should say: It is not a large moon that shines down on Brussels. No, it is not a large moon that shines down upon the gas-lit streets and upon the gray towers of St. Gudule and upon the shadowy mannikin,eternal and shadowy protest. It is a moon of mansuetude and poverty, mirroring itself in the lassitude of the canals and in the sweetness of the flowers and in the eyes of sad women. And it is a moon pale as an agonizing tree; and it is a moon all-weary, so old it is, a very old moon, a moon before Christ, a moon that saw the antique Pan die and Hylas die among the white nymphs in the fountain; and it is a moon of La Jeunesse. And the sky floats darkly; and it is small and blue, like the cloak of a poet. I A warm, thin rain falls; but the moon is not hid. At the Galeries St. Hubert, Maurice Maeterlinck says: "I rarely go to the theatre. When I go, am always deceived." In the Galerie de la Reine, he adds: "What is there in these plays produced every year, here and in Paris and everywhere? Little jests about little intrigues, little people playing with little passions. Little sketches of the superficies of life,- little adulteries, little sins. Seen from the moon, how trivial it must seem!" You are in the Rue de la Madeleine, and Maurice Maeterlinck looks up at the moon. His blue eyes beckon it. His yellow mustaches mime to it. Slowly you climb the hill, and he says: “Of what possible significance is it that a husband avenges |