said Albert Samain, 'is a state of soul.' The landscape may be false,
but the state of soul is veracious. What interests them in life is the
image of life, not lucidly reflected but exquisitely transformed. Yet
the vision of the world caught in that transforming mirror was not
without strange revealing glimpses, invisible, like stars mirrored in a
well, to the plain observer. They could hear the music of the spheres;
or in the language of Samain's sonnet

'Feel flowing through them, like a pouring wave,
The music-tide of universal Soul;
Hear in their heart the beating pulse of heaven.'[13]

In the earlier poetry of Maurice Maeterlinck, the inner life imposes a
more jealous sway. The poet sits not before a transforming mirror, where
the outer world is disguised, but in a closed chamber, where it is only
dreamed of, and it fades into the incoherence and the irrelevance of a
dream. But the chamber is of rare beauty, and in its hushed and perfumed
twilight, dramas of the spirit are being silently and almost
imperceptibly enacted, more tragic than the loud passion and violence of
the stage. He has written an essay on Silence,--silence that, like
humility, holds for him a 'treasure' beyond the reach of eloquence or of
pride; for it is the dwelling of our true self, the spiritual core of
us, 'more profound and more boundless than the self of the passions or
of pure reason.' And so there is less matter for drama in 'a captain who
conquers in battle or a husband who avenges his honour than in an old
man, seated in his arm-chair waiting patiently with his lamp beside him,
giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about his
house, interpreting without comprehending, the silence of door and
window, and the quivering voice of the light; submitting with bent head
to the presence of his soul and his destiny.'