Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/326

310 ignorance, and the mystery of our inevitable death are too hard and too strong for the souls of ladies and gentlemen who can spare only odd moments for metaphysical anxiety.

Maeterlinck breaks up and subdivides his mysteries. He distributes them in digestible doses; he makes them into biscuits, cakes, and candies, he sweetens them with the sugar of poetry and serves them up in the pastry of literature. Thus the mysteries of life, of the spirit, and of the universe, disguised and powdered, thinned and triturated, appear presentable and edible to men of fashion, to Anglo-Saxon ladles, to young occultists, and to German Fräulein; and the books of Maeterlinck take their place on the tea-table between the steaming samovar and the cigarette box.

But though his books are full of mystery, there is nothing mysterious in the financial success of this cosmopolitan Belgian who, born at Ghent of a Flemish family, writes in French, publishes by preference in English, and is studied chiefly in German. Paris gave him his reputation, through the famous essay of Mirbeau, published in 1890. The English and the Americans pay him best for his magazine articles. The Germans, naturally,