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.'

It is on this side that symbolism discloses its kinship with the Russian
novel,--with the mystic quietism of Tolstoy and the religion of
self-sacrifice in Dostoievsky; and its sharp antagonism to the
Nietzschean gospel of daemonic will and ruthless self-assertion, just
then being preached in Germany. The two faiths were both alive and both
responded to deep though diverse needs of the time; but the immediate
future, as we shall see, belonged to the second. They had their first
resounding encounter when Nietzsche held up his once venerated master
Wagner to scorn as the chief of 'decadents' because he had turned from
the superhuman heroism of Siegfried and the boundless passion of
Tristram to glorify the mystic Catholicism of the Grail and the
loveliness of the 'pure fool' Parzifal.

Outside France symbolism found eager response among young poets, but
rather as a literary than as an ethical doctrine. In Germany Dehmel, the
most powerful personality among her recent poets, began as a disciple of
Verlaine; in Italy, D'Annunzio wove esoteric symbols into the texture of
t