THE BOXING POET.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1244, 19 February 1914, Page 28

THE BOXING POET.

M. MAETERLINCK SPARS WITH KID McCOY. “Tim©!” was called by Gastand, the well-known French boxer (writes G. Ward Price in the London “ Daily Mail”). M. Maurice Maeterlinck, poet and philosopher, and “ Kid ” McCoy, late middleweight champion of the world, touched gloves in the boxers’ absolution for hard knocks given and received and came to the chairs under the palm trees of the rose-scented garden. Look well at those two men —alert, vigorous, each with every faculty of his mind and bjody engrossed in the one object of striking home on the other’s frame. One is a master of this supposed brutal art —a fighter of bouts that make the history of the sport. The other is Maurice Maeterlinck, the mystic, the dreamer of beautiful dreams who searches among the eternal mysteries and has brought back secrets that thrill us all with wonderful, yet with instinctive conviction. Maeterlinck, the gentle philosopher, and here he is with his birain that instrument of delicate fancy, that master scalpel that lays bare truths hidden of all time —finding keen pleasure in anticipating the left jabs of long-armed “Kid” McCoy; here is the same genius that conceived “The Life of the Bee” and “The Treasure of the Humble” concentrated upon the apt timing of a counter. We had all stripped for boxing. The rest of us were M. Georges Maurevert, the well-known French author and the master’s intimate friend; Gastand, the heavyweight; Raymond Bon, M. Maeterlinck’s clever little boxing instructor; and myself. Each with each for a three-minute round was the rule, and at last I found myself faced by M. Maeter.inck. A strongly built man in a sweater, knickerbockers, and well-filled brown stockings, standing some two inches under six feet in height. Full face, flushed a healthy red colour. Heavy, clear blue eyes, with a whimsical look in them. Here was Maurice Maeterlinck, the philosopher, and for three minutes 1 was free to drub him to the best of my ability under the rules of the game. But to land on M. Maeterlinck even one blow towards a drubbing needed all the speed I could attain after four years away from the gloves. In and out he darted on those sturdy legs, springing back to avoid a lead, blocking a counter, side-stepping in a flash, and on two occasions at least stepping in to send a cross-right to the head and away again before one could reply. I had twenty-four years of advantage in age, and I would not have surrendered a single one of them. M. Maeterlinck stands straight up to box in the English style. He holds his guard high—the left arm bent a little more] than is usual, so that both gloves are near the face. His defence is very good indeed, and he is lighter on his feet than many men at half his age. By the time one round had finished I had a heaving chest and a throbbing heart, but M. Maeterlinck was for another round with no more than the regulation one minute rest. M. Maeterlinck is more than modest he is shy. Strangers make him ill at ease, but not when he has once punched them on the jaw. So, as we sat in deep chairs in a dim room of the white Mauresque Villa des Abelles he talked without constraint of the boxing which is his passion. “It is the supreme intellectual exercise of the muscles,” he said. “AU others are but dead bodies of exercise. That complete harmony of every factor of mind and body—where else is it to be found? There is no particle of energy in the whole being which has not its pole in those two fists.” “In England,” I said, “boxing is not what it was. We are told that it is brutal, and that we ought to try to eliminate all violence from life and not to encourage it.”

“Is that really true of England, which owes so much of her greatness to fighting?” exclaimed M. Maeterlinck starting upright in his chair. “ But how can it be? Boxing encourages violence? But boxing is the discipline of violence. It is violence civilised by conventions that are almost courtesies. It is an insurance against violence. “Is a boxer ever rowdy? On the contrary, it is his knowledge which gives him self-confidence and calm. Man is a creature very sensitive before his own opinion of himself. When he is insulted or in danger of attack and knows he has no skill to defend himself he becomes nervous. “But the boxer, sure of himself in the last resource, is patient and longsuffering. If every boy were taught to box the world would ere long come to hold human life in greater sanctity.”