phrases such as this: “II est fort possible et même assez probable que les morts nous entourent, puisqu’il est impossible que les morts ne vivent pas.”
In short, his book gives the impression of a merry-go-round of useless chatter about ambiguous mysteries. The only thing that is clear is that he is earning money by means of this chatter. The only thing he has done that called for personal exertion was to go to Elberfeldt to see the educated horses of Herr Krall. But his visit adds nothing to what we had learned from the reports of the psychologists who had preceded him. And Maeterlinck himself destroys all the significance which the calculations of the German steeds might be thought to have as a proof of animal intelligence, by pointing out that human calculating prodigies are in general children or half-witted persons who guess mathematical results by a strange sort of intuition, but do not carry through real mathematical operations. What is more, Maeterlinck (who has read Shakespeare, it would seem) ought to have recognized that the horses of Elberfeldt are not a novelty. At the end of the sixteenth century a certain Bankes exhibited in London, before St. Paul’s, a horse so well trained that he could count coins, and could carry things to a spectator whose name his master pronounced. Shakespeare refers to him in Love’s Labour Lost.
