Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/21

Rh sympathies of the broadest catholicity. He even had a peculiar affection for the Germans, because doubtless he perceived the existence of a strong kinship between certain essential traits in his spiritual composition and the fundamental tendencies of German philosophy and art. But when Belgium was lawlessly invaded, her ancient towns heinously destroyed, her soil laid waste and drenched with the blood of her people, Maeterlinck, as a son of Belgium, learned to hate the Germans to the utmost of a wise and temperate man's capacity for hatred, and in his war papers collected in Les Débris de la Guerre, (1916), which ring with the passionate impulse of the patriot, his outraged sense of justice prevails over the disciplined self-command of the stoic.

He refuses to acquiesce in the lenient discrimination between the guilty Government of Germany and her innocent population: "It is not true that in this gigantic crime there are innocent and guilty, or degrees of guilt. They stand on one level, all those who have taken part in it. ... It is, very simply, the German, from one end of his country to the other, who stands revealed as a beast of prey which the firm will of our planet finally