How would you explain, in your own words, the fundamental shift in M. Maeterlinck's creative and intellectual approach between "Treasure of the Humble" and "Wisdom and Destiny," using the provided metaphor of the canals versus the broad river of life?

From the book

Produced by Steve Harris, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines. WISDOM AND DESTINY By MAURICE MAETERLINCK Translated by ALFRED SUTRO TO GEORGETTE LEBLANC I OFFER THIS BOOK, WHEREIN HER THOUGHT BLENDS WITH MINE INTRODUCTION This essay on Wisdom and Destiny was to have been a thing of some twenty pages, the work of a fortnight; but the idea took root, others flocked to it, and the volume has occupied M. Maeterlinck continuously for more than two years. It has much essential kinship with…

uisite visions, alluring or haunting images; he probes into the soul of man and lays bare all his joys and his sorrows. It is as though he had forsaken the canals he loves so well--the green, calm, motionless canals that faithfully mirror the silent trees and moss-covered roofs--and had adventured boldly, unhesitatingly, on the broad river of life. He describes this book himself, in a kind of introduction that is almost an apology, as "a few interrupted thoughts that entwine themselves, with more or less system, around two or three subjects." He declares that there is nothing it…

for ever thrust it back to its source, bubbling in impotent fury, divided for all time from its goal and its gladness. But, in another direction, at right angles almost to the distraught, unhappy, useless stream, a force superior to the force of instinct had traced a long, greenish canal, calm, peaceful, deliberate; that flowed steadily across the country, across the crumbling stones, across the obedient forest, on its clear and unerring, unhurrying way from its distant source on the horizon to the same tranquil, shining lake. And I had at my feet before me the image of the two great…

e." In this book, morality, conduct, life are Surveyed from every point of the compass, but from an eminence always. Austerity holds no place in his philosophy; he finds room even "for the hours that babble aloud in their wantonness." But all those who follow him are led by smiling wisdom to the heights where happiness sits enthroned between goodness and love, where virtue rewards itself in the "silence that is the walled garden of its happiness." It is strange to turn from this essay to Serres Chaudes and La Princesse Maleine, M. Maeterlinck's earliest efforts--the one…

each other, intertwined, rewarding each other. "Let us not think virtue will crumble, though God Himself seem unjust. Where could the virtue of man find more everlasting foundation than in the seeming injustice of God?" Strange that the man who has written these words should have spent all his school life at a Jesuit college, subjected to its severe, semi-monastic discipline; compelled, at the end of his stay, to go, with the rest of his fellows, through the customary period of "retreat," lasting ten days, when the most eloquent of the fathers would, one after the other, deliver…