Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/31

Rh cruder endowment to appreciate his meaning, a grievance from which in the beginning many of them sought redress in facile scoffing. Obtuse minds are prone to claim a right to fathom the profound meanings of genius with the same ease with which they expect to catch the meaning of a bill of fare or the daily stock market report.

It must be confessed, however, that even those to whom Maeterlinck's sphere of thought is not so utterly sealed, enter it with a sense of mixed perplexity and apprehension. They feel themselves helplessly conducted through a world situated beyond the confines of their normal consciousness, and in this strange world everything that comes to pass appears at first extremely impracticable and unreal. The action seems "wholly dissevered from common sense and ordinary uses;" the figures behave otherwise than humans; the dialogue is "poised on the edge of a precipice of bathos." It is clear that works so far out of the common have to be approached from the poet's own point of view. "Let the reader move his standpoint one inch nearer the popular standpoint," thus we are warned by Mr. G. K. Chesterton, "and his attitude towards the poet will be