have taken him most seriously: they have devoted several books to him, and have written treatises on that which in their kindly condescension they term his philosophy.
Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck went to a Jesuit school, and later studied and practiced law. The Jesuits, to be sure, are not very strong on mystery. The more intransigent they are in matters of religion, the more accommodating and mundane they are in school and in life. But it was perhaps from the Jesuits that Maeterlinck got that habit of softening down and smoothing away asperities, that rather sickish sweetness that is almost unctuous, that fondness for unfinished sentences uttered in a low voice, that continual distinguishing and redistinguishing, that saying without saying anything, that love of nuances, that silent walking on the chemin de velours. Some of his books are but the casuistry of mysticism clad in a dress suit.
He did not long continue the practice of law, and yet he has retained certain forensic traits: the ability to see only what he wants to see, the art of insinuations withdrawn as soon as they are made, a quibbling type of argumentation, a tendency to undertake unsound causes and to indulge in elegant and complicated disquisitions, the habit of methodological procedure, the constant repetition of the very fact that he is seeking to establish as if it were an element of evi-
