If we take into account this composite attitude of the Flemish mind we shall be less surprised at the remarkable evolution of a poet-philosopher whose creations seem at first blush to bear no resemblance to the outward complexion of his own age; who seems as far removed temperamentally from his locality and time as were his lineal spiritual ancestors: the Dutchman Ruysbroeck, the Scandinavian Swedenborg, the German Novalis, and the American Emerson--and who in the zenith of his career stands forth as an ardent advocate of practical action while at the same time a firm believer in the transcendental. Maeterlinck's romantic antipathy towards the main drift of the age was a phenomenon which at the dawn of our century could be observed in a great number of superior intelligences. Those fugitives from the dun and sordid materialism of the day were likely to choose between two avenues of escape, according to their greater or lesser inner ruggedness. The more aggressive type would engage in multiform warfare for the reconstruction of life on sounder principles; whereas the more meditative professed a real or affected indifference to practical things and eschewed any participation in the world's struggle for progress. And of the quiescent rather than the insurgent variety of the romantic temper Maurice Maeterlinck was the foremost exponent. The "romantic longing" seems to have come into the world in the company of the Christian religion with which it shares its partly outspoken, partly implied repugnance for the battle of life. Romantic periods occur in the history of civilization whenever a sufficiently influential set of artistically minded persons have persuaded themselves that, in quite a literal sense of the colloquial phrase, they "have no use" for the world; a discovery which would still be true were it stated obversely. The romantic world-view, thus fundamentally oriented by world-contempt, entails, at least in theory, the repudiation of all earthly joys--notably the joy of working--and the renouncement of all worldly ambition; it scorns the cooperative, social disposition, invites the soul to a progressive withdrawal into the inner ego, and ends in complete surrender to one sole aspiration: the search of the higher vision, the vision, that is, of things beyond their tangible reality. To such mystical constructions of the inner eye a certain group of German writers who flourished in the beginning of the nineteenth century and were known as the Romantics, darkly groped their way out of the confining realities of their own time. The most modern spell of romanticism, the one through which our own generation was but yesterday passing, measures its difference from any previous romantic era by the difference between earlier states of culture and our own. Life with us is conspicuously more assertive and aggressive in its social than in its individual expressions, which was by no means always so, and unless the