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312 . He often seems to be the lawyer of the subconscious, the attorney of the spirit-world.

In 1886, when he went to Paris, Symbolism was in full swing—and he became a Symbolist. Symbolism is a brief, magnificent movement in French poetry, created by the genius of three or four real Frenchmen, but developed and exploited by Belgians, Flemings, North Americans, and Greeks. The Flemings in particular—suffice it to mention the names of Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, both of them of Teutonic stock, and popular in Germany—succeeded in turning Symbolism to their own great advantage. While Rimbaud was dying forgotten in a hospital at Marseilles, while Verlaine was dragging his poverty and his diseases from one hospital to another, while Mallarme was giving English lessons to ward off starvation, these Belgians were winning glory—and Maeterlinck was winning wealth.

Maeterlinck was revealed to the hydra-headed public through a generous and exaggerated essay by Octave Mirbeau. Mirbeau was precisely the opposite of Maeterlinck in talent and in nature, but he was carried off his feet by his first reading of the Princess Maleine, and declared that the unknown beginner was greater than Shakespeare.

Yet nothing could be less Shakespearean than the plays of Maeterlinck. Shakespeare is virile,