BELGIAN POET AND NATURALIST FASCINATED BY WONDERFUL NEW SPIRIT IN THIS COUNTRY

"I am fascinated by this wonderful new America that has sprung up across the seas," said Maurice Maeterlinck, world famed Belgian poet, naturalist, and mystic, when interviewed by a CIRMSON reporter. M. Maeterlinck arrived in this country a fortnight ago for the first time to deliver a series of lectures on his views of the world beyond and of immortality. At present in New York, Maeterlinck will deliver an address in Boston at Symphony Hall on January 14.

"When the proposition of coming to the United States was first broached to me," continued the Belgian poet, "I was little inclined to accept it as I had heard so much of American materialism and commercialism. I allowed myself to be persuaded, however, and today I am contradicting for myself the unpleasant accounts of your country that have been so prevalent abroad.

Belgian Finds Our Women Charming.

"The reception that has been tendered me and the whole-hearted enthusiasm of this great city have alone convinced me that America has been much misrepresented in Europe. Never have I met with such hospitality as I have found here in New York. And your American women-they are more charming than I had dared to imagine and I shall be ever grateful to them for the kindness they have shown me.

"It is pleasant also to leave for a moment the war ravaged cities and fields of Belgium and to come to this land which has been so fortunate as to escape the destruction which the Germans have wrought every where in Europe. Although the work of reconstruction has started, it must of necessity progress slowly and it will be many years before we in Belgium can live as freely and happily as it is possible for you to do in America.

"The war is too recently completed for us to be able to discover yet whether or not it has brought to humanity that uplift of spirit which was, supposedly, to follow it. In such a great catastrophe involving all the nations of the world we cannot judge immediately what permanent changes it has brought to pass. I am confident that the spirit of sacrifice and the realization of the meaning of Christianity which the war brought to the world will not disappear now that we have returned to peace. The war left too deep an impress on the human mind to let us turn again to our former selfish, shallow ways."

"Soul Can Never Die," Says Author

Asked as to his views on spiritualism and immortality. Maeterlinck declined to go fully into the subject saying that it was too large a problem to be handled satisfactorily in the few minutes at his disposal.

"I can say, however," he answered, "that in my mind there can be no question that the human being continues in one form or other. There is no death and it should be impossible for us to conceive of any save as a passing on to some higher sphere. Death should not be a matter for grief but for rejoicing -when the body dies the soul continues unhampered to a happier, completer world.

"There is a brain beyond the individual brain of men which controls the world. For me the existence of the soul previous to and independent of the body wherein it it housed is a fact as indisputable as that the sun, moon, and stars exist. We shall some day find in nature marvelous processes of which we are at present unaware and these will give definite proof to the skeptical that the soul can never die."

M. Materlinck also expressed himself as greatly pleased by the production of the "Blue Bird," Perhaps his best known drama, as an opera in New York. One of the most important reasons for Maeterlinck's making the trip at this time was that he might be able to witness the world premier of this recently completed opera.