Maeterlinck began with a volume of poems entitled Serres Chaudes, often compared to the unrhymed, loose rhythmic prose of Walt Whitman. They do bear a certain superficial resemblance to Whitman's effusions, though not in idea. It is rather a cataloguing, aimless apparently, of widely disparate subjects. But the substance derives more from that extraordinary book of an extraordinary poet, Les Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, than from the ragged, epical lines of Whitman. Take, for example, the following specimen of Maeterlinck's _âme_ in Serres Chaudes:-- "One day there was a poor little festival in the suburbs of my soul. They mowed the hemlock there one Sunday morning, and all the convent virgins saw the ships pass by on the canal one sunny fast day, while the swans suffered under a poisonous bridge. The trees were lopped about the prison; medicines were brought one afternoon in June and meals for the patients were spread over the whole horizon." Now read Rimbaud, translated admirably by Aline Gorren: "As soon as the Idea of the Deluge had sunk back into its place, a rabbit halted amid the sainfoin and the small swinging bells and said its prayers to the rainbow, through the spider's web.... The caravans started. And the splendid hotel was erected upon the chaos of ice and night at the Pole.... In hours of bitterness I imagine balls of sapphire, of metal. I am master of the silence. Why should the semblance of a vent-hole seem to pale up there at the corner of a vault?" Both these hallucinations illustrate what Rémy de Gourmont would call disassociation of ideas. Maeterlinck fervently studied the English dramatic classics. The result was wild ferment. In 1889 he published Princess Maleine, and such an impression did its whirling words create that Octave Mirbeau wrote his famous article in the Paris _Figaro_, August 24, 1890, in the course of which he made this statement, "M. Maurice Maeterlinck nous a donné l'œuvre la plus géniale de ce temps, et la plus extraordinaire et la plus naïve aussi, comparable et--oserai-je le dire?--supérieure en beauté à ce qu'il y a de plus beau dans Shakespeare ... plus tragique que Macbeth, plus extraordinaire en pensée que Hamlet." Either M. Mirbeau, who has often played the rôle of poet-anarchist, had not read Shakespeare reasonably, or else he was indulging in a pleasing mystification. Ah, that fatal _plus_, the uncritical overplus, how it does jump up from the page smiting the optics with rude humour! As a matter of sheer fact, Princess Maleine is an undigested compound of Macbeth, Hamlet, Leaf, and, as Arthur Symons sagely remarks, with more of the Elizabethan violence we find in Webster and Tourneur than in Shakespeare. And its author was only a youth in his twenties.