INTRODUCTION

“The Miracle of St. Anthony”—whatever the exact date of its writing, and that is a point which the author himself has probably forgotten,—belongs in flavour and spirit, to that early period of the career of the Belgian seer and mystic to which Mr. James Huneker referred when he wrote “There is no denying the fact that at one time Maeterlinck meant for most people a crazy crow, masquerading in tail feathers plucked from the Swan of Avon.” For it was to Shakespeare that he was first compared, though the title “the Belgian Shakespeare” was applied ironically by some, just as later manifestationsof his genius won for him the appellation of “the Belgian Emerson.” But “The Miracle of St. Anthony” differs from the other plays of what may be called “the early Maeterlinck.” Most of them, to quote Mr. Edward Thomas, have a melancholy, a romance of unreality, a morbidity, combined with innocence, which piques our indulgence. He has no irony to put us on the defensive. But irony is the very essence of “The Miracle of St. Anthony.” Nor does the scene of the little play belong to that land of illusion, that mystic border country, half twilight and half mirage, in which so many of the early plays were laid. The St. Anthony from whom the satire takes its title may be the blessed St. Anthony of Padua, but the atmosphere is unmistakably the gray, sombre Flemish atmosphere that Maeterlinck knew in his early youth, while theMarionettes who speak the lines were drawn, not from Fairy-land, but from some town of the Low-Countries.

Maeterlinck’s nationality was not a mere chance of birth, but a heritage of many generations. The Flemish family of which he was born in Ghent on August 29, 1862, had for six centuries been settled in the neighborhood. His childhood was passed at Oostacker, in a house on the bank of a canal connecting Ghent with Terneuzen. So near was the water that the ships seemed to be sliding through the garden itself. The seven years spent at the Jesuit college of St. Barbe were not happy years, but there were developed his first literary aspirations, and there he formed certain friendships that lasted into later life. At the University, where he studied for the Bar, he met Émile Verhaeren, who was destined to stand out withKing Albert, Cardinal Mercier, and Maeterlinck, as one of the great figures of the land when Belgium came to experience her agony.

But it was not in Maeterlinck to settle down to a lawyer’s work and a bourgeois life. “Like Rodenbach,” said M. Edouard Schuré, “he had dreamed alongside the sleeping waters of Belgium and in the dead cities, and, though his dream did not become a paralysing reverie, thanks to his vigorous and healthy body, he was already troubled in such a way that he was unlikely to accept the conditions of a legal career.” So, when at twenty four, he made his first trip to Paris, though the visit was professedly in the interests of his studies, it was with the result that he plunged definitely and whole heartedly into literature. To Villiers de l’Isle Adam, and others of the ultra modern school, hewas introduced by an oldcopainof the Jesuit college, Gregoire Le Roy. Le Roy read to the group Maeterlinck’s “The Massacre of the Innocents,” a perfectly Flemish piece of objective realism. It was applauded, and soon after appeared in “La Pléïde,” a short-lived review which also printed some of the poems collected in “Serres Chaudes.”

That first stay in Paris was one of about six months. Returning to Ghent, he conformed to the wishes of his family to the extent of dabbling a little at the Bar. But his heart was with “La Jeune Belgique,” to which he had been introduced by Rodenbach, author of “Bruges la Morte,” and for which he was writing his poems. Then in 1889, when he was twenty-seven years of age, “Serres Chaudes” was published, and with it went the last tie binding him to the law.

Continuing to live in his native Oostacker, his days were divided between writing, tending his bees, and outdoor pastimes. As a member of the Civic Guard of Ghent he was as poor an amateur soldier as Balzac had been when enrolled in the National Guard of the France of his time. His musket was allowed to rust until the night before an inspection. Material surroundings meant little to him. As with Barrie, the four walls were enough. He could people the homely room to suit his fancy. In imagination a table became a mountain range, a chair the nave of a superb cathedral, a side-board a limitless expanse of surging ocean. Through the window he could look out over a country suggesting the scene of his early play, “Les Sept Princesses,” “A dark land of marshes, of pools, and of oak and pine forests. Between enormous willows a straight andgloomy canal, on which a great ship of war advances.”

“La Princesse Maleine,” which also appeared in 1889, had been first privately printed by the author himself, on a hand press. With it Maeterlinck was launched into the fierce light of fame. Octave Mirbeau wrote of it in theFigaroof Paris. He said that no one could be more unknown than the author, but that his book was a masterpiece, “comparable—shall I dare say it? superior in beauty to the most beautiful in Shakespeare.” There were less generous critics who suggested that the play was Shakespeare, because it had been made with scraps of Shakespeare. A champion of Maeterlinck retorted that in comparison with Maleine and Hjalmar the characters of Shakespeare were marionettes. So the storm raged, to the author’s infinite disgust. Finally in a spirit ofmodesty and frank acknowledgment he called the play “Shakespearterie.” There was no pose in that assumption of humility. From all testimony he has ever been the same. Invited to a dinner his acceptance has been conditional on absolute simplicity. “After all, I am a peasant.” It was Gerard Harry who quoted that. Again, at the end of a first night of one of his plays, he has been described as “modest, simple, altogether without display in dress or manner.” His gestures were gentle with reflection, his voice low and rarely heard. He had no pride of success, but an air at once uneasy and detached, as if tired of being there. His deep blue eye was cold and mournful, like a mirror that retains the images of indefinite and impalpable things, as Barbey d’Aurevilly says the eyes always are of those who look more within than without.His brow was deep and square and shone pale. He made the observer think of his own untranslatable words:

Sous l’eau du songe qui s’élèveMon âme a peur, mon âme a peur.

Sous l’eau du songe qui s’élève

Mon âme a peur, mon âme a peur.

The same writer says that, by way of contrast, the playwright keeps bees and teaches a dog to sing; he calls him a sportsman, a man always getting about, a great drinker of ale—a great boy, a Bohemian. Here also may be discerned the writer in praise of the sword, the fist, and the automobile, the friend of the bull-dog and the creator of Tylo. That was describing the Maeterlinck of the early days. He seems never to have greatly changed. Was not almost the last picture of him that we had before the outbreak of the Great War one of poet playing with pugilist at the manly art of self-defense—the author of“L’Oiseau Bleu” sparring and wrestling daily with the French champion Carpentier?

New influences began to show in Maeterlinck’s work. His Introduction to his translation from the Flemish of Ruysbroeck l’Admirable’s “L’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles” made public his interest in Plato, Plotinous, Novalis, Jacob Behman, and Coleridge. He published a translation of Novalis’s “Disciples et Sais.” His feeling for Emerson had become such that he wrote an Introduction to the Essays of the American that had been translated into French by I. Will. To that period of his career as a playwright belong “Les Sept Princesses,” the little plays, “L’Intruse,” and “Les Aveugles,” “Pélléas et Mélisande,” “Alladine et Palomides,” “Interieur,” and “La Mort de Tintagiles.” Then, in 1896, he leftOostacker for good, and settled in Paris. In the same year he published “Le Tresor des Humbles,” his first volume of Essays, and “Aglavaine et Selysette.” In a letter to Madame Maeterlinck he said that Aglavaine brought him “a new atmosphere, a will to happiness, a power to hope.” Henceforth her light will direct him in a “serene, happy and consoling course.” Also it was about that time that his life was joined to the life of Georgette Leblanc.

In “La Vie Belge,” published in 1905, Camille Lemonnier told of Maeterlinck’s first meeting with the talented woman who was to become his wife. It took place in a house in the Rue Ducale in Brussels, the home of Edmond Picard, the great barrister and patron of Belgian literature. One midnight, after a performance of Strindberg’s “Father” at the Théâtredu Parc, all were invited there for supper. Maeterlinck, who still lived in Flanders, had left his bees, and was there, grave, silent, dreaming, a little out of his element, as he always was in the city. He was truly himself only in the country, his pipe in his coarse peasant fingers, filling its black bowl with a fresh pinch of tobacco from time to time. I had known him at the house of the painter, Claus, at whose door he sometimes leaped from his wheel, bare-necked, muscular, broad of shoulders and loins, a regular country boy from the village. This great, silent, contemplative spirit little knew that he was about to see appear, under the guise of the charming Georgette Blanc, the very visage of his destiny. A great silence spread from the far end of the hall, and suddenly she entered, stately and slow, with the jewel of herferronièreon her forehead, like a signof the empire, in the long swishing of her train. Picard presented them; she gave a little cry; and he looked at her, embarrassed, with his deep-set peasant eyes, bowing awkwardly, while, with a deep reverence like a rite, the beautiful actress, with the ceremonious grace of a little queen of Byzantium, dedicated to him, without a word, the homage of her artist’s worship. Maeterlinck looked at her a great deal, but scarcely spoke to her during supper.

But if his tongue was backward, there were other ways of wooing. “Le Tresor des Humbles” was dedicated to her. “La Sagesse et la Destinée” was dedicated to her, “as the result of her collaboration in thought and example: he had only to listen to her words and follow her life with his eyes when he wrote the book; for to do so was to follow the words, themovements, the habits of wisdom itself.” At any rate the woman understood. Perhaps she helped matters along a little. Perhaps her poise served to put the shy peasant at his ease. It was a wise union, a union destined for happiness. “Truly,” said Gerard Harry of it, “henceforward he looks upon life less desperately and less fearfully.” The glimpses that Mr. Edward Thomas gave of theménageshow Maeterlinck as he was in the last year or two of world peace, come to fifty years, in the full vigor of his mature powers, at the height of his popularity and material success. Nearly all his books are multiplied and repeated, by new editions and translations into many languages. Always independent, money could only add ease and opportunities for gratifying minor tastes. He spends the winter at Quatre Chemins near Grasse, in the south of France, thesummer at the ancient Benedictine Abbey of St. Wandrille, in the Department of Seine-Inferieure. But there is hardly a moment when Madame Maeterlinck is not a part of his life and work. She plays “Macbeth” in her husband’s translation, while he smokes a pipe of peace as well as in solitude. The pipe, according to Gerard Harry, contains a denicotinised herb; for thus, by a piece of heroism discovered by his hero-worshipper, Maeterlinck circumvents his insatiable craving for tobacco in his working hours. “By wise disposition,” says Madame Maeterlinck, “he has reduced his weakness, economised his strength, balanced his faculties, multiplied his energies, disciplined his instincts.”

“Yet,” says Mr. Thomas, “he continues to write. He is early to rise and go to his garden and his bees, for which his liking is now near thirty years old.Two hours, always exactly two hours, of work follow. Then he goes out again, canoeing, motoring, cycling, or walking. He reads in the evening and goes to bed in good time.” The work of these two hours is prepared easily and quietly during the pleasures and other duties of the day. Madame Maeterlinck compares him taking up his work to a child leaving its games and going on with them as soon as allowed—an innocent and ambiguous comparison. She implies that his work is sub-consciously matured and methodically put on paper, and that his natural tranquillity and the surroundings and conditions of his life have long been felicitously combined; and she says it might seem that the mysterious powers have woven between him and the world a veil which allows him a clear vision whilst yet himself invisible, as they have favored him by the gift of a homenot less wonderful than the castles he imagined for Alladine and Selysette and Maleine.

However in a consideration of “The Miracle of St. Anthony,” the life of the man, his place as a philosopher, and his achievements as a poet are only indirectly concerned. The little play counts first of all in its relation to “La Princesse Maleine,” “Les Sept Princesses,” and especially, “Les Aveugles,” and “L’Intruse.” Perhaps closest to it of them all is “L’Intruse.” To recall that play. It does not need the Dutch clock in the corner to fix the scene in the Lowlands. In a dimly lighted room in an old country house the grandfather, the father, the uncle, the three daughters are sitting about a table. It has rained the whole week and the night without is damp and cold. In the next room lies the sick mother. Thefather is hopeful, relying on the assurances of the doctors. But not the grandfather. They are expecting some one. They speak in low voices, at random. Besides the woman in the other room there is a young child.

The Uncle—The little one would cause me more anxiety than your wife. It is now several weeks since he was born, and he has scarcely stirred. He has not cried once all the time! He is like a wax doll.The Grandfather—I think he will be deaf—dumb, too, perhaps—the usual result of marriages between cousins. (A reproving silence.)The Father—I could almost wish him ill for the suffering he has caused his mother.The Uncle—Be reasonable. It isnot the poor little thing’s fault. He is quite alone in the room.

The Grandfather—I think he will be deaf—dumb, too, perhaps—the usual result of marriages between cousins. (A reproving silence.)

The Father—I could almost wish him ill for the suffering he has caused his mother.

The Uncle—Be reasonable. It isnot the poor little thing’s fault. He is quite alone in the room.

More and more is the old man troubled. He complains that he can no longer hear the nightingales, and that some one must be in the garden. The trees in the park are trembling as if some one was brushing a way through, the swans are scared, and the fishes diving in the pond, but the watch-dog does not bark. Through the glass door, that some mysterious agency has opened, the cold rushes into the room. The sound of a scythe being sharpened is heard outside. The child that has before been silent, begins to cry. There is a knock at the door. The Father partly opens it, and speaks to the servant, who answers, remaining on the outside.

The Grandfather—Your sister is at the door?The Uncle—I can see only the servant.The Father—It was only the servant. (To the servant) Who was that, that came into the house?

The Grandfather—Your sister is at the door?

The Uncle—I can see only the servant.

The Father—It was only the servant. (To the servant) Who was that, that came into the house?

A note is struck similar to one used later by Lord Dunsany in “A Night at an Inn.” Some invisible force is pushing open the door. The servant protests that it is not she, as she is standing three yards away from the door. The Grandfather is conscious of a new presence. “And who is that sitting there?” he asks. “But there is no one there,” he is told. But he will not believe them, maintaining that in pity they are deceiving him. A ray of moon-light penetrates, throwing strange gleams. The clock strikes midnight; at the last stroke there is a sound as of some one rising in haste. Cries of terror from the child’s room: quick and heavy steps.Then silence. The door of the sick woman’s room slowly opens, and the Sister of Mercy appears on the threshold. She bows as she makes the sign of the Cross.

In “Les Aveugles” Maeterlinck turned from a typically Flemish setting to a forest on a small island—“a very ancient northern forest, eternal of aspect, beneath a sky profoundly starred.” Six old blind men are on the right, and six old blind women on the left. They are from a Home for the Blind and they are in the charge of a priest—a very old priest, wrapped in a wide black cloak, and whose eyes, “dumb and fixed, no longer gaze at the visible side of eternity, and seem bleeding beneath a multitude of immemorial sorrows and of tears.” Fear is in the hearts of the priest’s charges. They are startled by the flutter of wings, by the touch of the falling snow, by the barking of dogs. They understandnothing save the sound of the sea and they do not know how near that is. In the priest’s company they have been exploring their island, which has “a mountain that no one has climbed, valleys with no one to go down to, and caves that have not been entered to this day.” They know not yet that the priest is dead, but they are conscious that something has happened to him. They offer conjectures, they dig into the past, they deplore their state. At length one of the men is led by a dog to the center, where the body of the priest is. He touches a face. The others follow and recognise by feeling the features of their protector. What are they to do? The only seeing eyes are those of a child at its mother’s breast. The child cries at a noise, and they think that it must be something and move towards the sound that has provoked the cry. Their hope is that themen from the light-house will see them. At last the footsteps stop. “Who are you?” asks the child’s mother. But only silence. “Have pity on us,” cries the oldest blind woman.

“It is not necessary to the effectiveness of this piece,” Mr. Thomas has written, “that we should believe the blind to represent mankind bewildered after the loss of religion, their old guide. Whether it is true or not that religion is dead and men blind without it, the thought is so stale that in its nakedness it could be of no value to any piece of writing. But the sight of a blind man sitting still or tapping in the street is always impressive; and to the blind company in the play are added many elements of mystery and terror which enhance this impressiveness. They have at the start little more humanity than the rocks and trees among which they sit, exceptthat they are conscious of themselves and one another. They are like creatures suddenly made out of the rocks and trees; and it is easy to picture beings of equal humanity standing in the depths of a misty wood when rain falls all through the day at autumn’s end. Or they are like personifications, so that we feel no curiosity with the name of any but that one who says for Maeterlinck:

We have never seen one another. We ask one another questions, and we reply; we live together, we are always together, but we know not what we are.”

It was Maeterlinck’s very first play, “La Princesse Maleine,” that won for him the dangerous title of “The Belgian Shakespeare.” Now and then a writer of our own land has done something that hascaused limited or injudicious critics to speak of him as “The American Dickens” or “The American Thackeray.” As a rule he has paid a sad price for the unfortunate comparison. No matter how innocent the man himself has been, the chorus of mocking, unthinking laughter has been inevitable. In the case of Maeterlinck ridicule was only momentary. The rush of subsequent achievement was so swift. The world had had hardly time to gasp at Octave Mirbeau’s “The Belgian Shakespeare” before some one else was referring to Maeterlinck as “The Belgian Emerson.” But it did not need the acute mind of a Mirbeau to find the first comparison. That was obvious. How obvious a few references to “La Princesse Maleine” will show. To Maleine herself there is a flavor of Ophelia. The castle of Marcellos, her father, king of a part of Holland,might be the Castle of Elsinore. There, when the play opens, is being held the banquet to celebrate the betrothal of Maleine and Prince Hjalmar. The watching guards gossip of the attentions that the Prince’s father, old Hjalmar, king of another part of Holland, has been paying to the exiled Queen Ann of Jutland. A quarrel between the two kings over the table leads to war, and in an attack on the castle most of the defenders are killed and Maleine disappears. Through a hole in the wall of the tower in which Maleine and her nurse are shut up for safety, they see that the whole land has been laid waste by war and fire.

In the course of subsequent adventures Maleine becomes the attendant of Uglyane, the daughter of the wicked Queen Ann, whom Hjalmar is now to marry. In that capacity she carries to her mistress afalse message saying that Hjalmar is not going to keep a tryst, and instead goes herself. Later there is a knocking at a door, and Maleine enters in the white robes of a bride. Queen Ann tells old Hjalmar that he must choose between herself and the returned Princess, and plans to make use of a poison, which the physician determines to make harmless. Then there is another storm, and Maleine is alone in the night with a large black dog quivering in a corner of the room. Old Hjalmar and Queen Ann come to her door, and pretending to do her hair, the Queen twists a rope round Maleine’s neck and strangles her. The madman, who at Maleine’s previous appearance, pointing at her, had made the sign of the cross, thrusts his head in at the window but is hurled back into the moat by the king. The murderess puts the corpse to bed. In the fifth and last act thesame storm is raging. The castle is struck by lightning and a mass falls into the moat. Within all are asking for the king and Queen Ann. When they enter there are bloodstains in the king’s white hair. Maleine’s dead body is discovered, and the king drags in Ann, proclaiming her guilt and his own. Hjalmar stabs the murderess and then kills himself.

In “Les Sept Princesses” there is a vast hall of marble with seven white marble steps covered by seven pale silken cushions on which the seven princesses are sleeping. The sun is setting, and in its fading light may be seen a black marshy country and oak and pine forests. Along the canal between dark willows, a great warship advances. On the terrace the old king and queen and a messenger watch the approaching vessel. The king’s vision fails him and it is the queen who describes the full spreadof sail touching the willows, and the oars like a thousand legs. From the ship, when the anchor drops, the prince descends. He is shown the seven sleepers, who are not to be awakened, as the doctor has forbidden it. “How white they are, all seven! Oh, how beautiful they are, all seven! How pale, how strange they are, all seven! But why are they asleep, all seven?” says the prince. He indicates his preference for one of the seven. “That,” says the queen, “is Ursula, who has waited seven years for her lover.” The others are Genevieve, Helen, Cristabel, Madeleine, Claire, and Claribella. Why was Marcellus so long in coming? Night and day they have been watching along the canal. The sailors turn the ship to a monotonous song with the burden, “We shall return no more, we shall return no more.”The sisters still sleep. The queen is frightened at the plight of her granddaughters and sobs against the window, the watchers seek to enter, but neither door nor window can be opened. The king and Marcellus make their way in through a subterranean passage. All the sleepers but Ursula awake. “She is not asleep,” says the queen. “Pour water on her.... Open the door.... It is too late.... Shut! shut!” All cry, shaking the door, and knocking at the window: “Open, open!” A black curtain falls.

“Nobody,” says Mr. Thomas, “who has read ‘Les Aveugles’ and ‘L’Intruse’ could doubt the authorship of ‘Les Sept Princesses.’ Here are the same agitated, helpless people speaking in abrupt, simple, and oft-repeated phrases. Here again, something is going on which they do not understand, and are impotent to arrest or change. But the matter of both earlierplays was a not improbable incident which was developed, it may be extravagantly, but in a manner that touched human beings. If ‘Les Aveugles’ was extraordinary, while ‘L’Intruse’ was not extraordinary in any way, both were easy to understand. But ‘Les Sept Princesses’ is a picture drawn for its own sake. It has its logic, but the elements in it seem chosen, like those of ‘La Princesse Maleine,’ because they are attractive in themselves—the marble hall and stairs, the terrace, the dark land of marshes and forests, the canal and the warship, the seven princesses in white sleeping on the stairs, the swans, the prince arriving to claim one of them and finding her at last dead, the old king and queen shut outside the hall and knocking vainly at the windows; only, these elements are combined without any of the unwieldiness of ‘La Princesse Maleine,’ without interferingwith themselves or with anything else. It is simply a picture in Maeterlinck’s manner, and this manner has the effect of creating a feeling of helplessness and smallness in the presence of fate and the earth.”

It was not until a later period that Maeterlinck came under the influence of the American Emerson. “A Belgian Emerson,” Mr. James Huneker has said, “but an Emerson who had in him much of Edgar Allan Poe.” Surely it was not through Emerson that Maeterlinck found the author of “The Raven.” Nor is it certain that there was any direct inspiration at all. More likely it is that the same visions burned early in the brain of the Flemish mystic that had seethed in the mind of the gifted, erratic American half a century before. There was no need for him to know “The House of Usher” ofthe Poe tale. Was there not a House of Usher perched on every Flemish hill, at the bottom of every Flemish valley? Was not the man a forerunner of Maeterlinck who wrote this?

“Now there are fine tales in the volumes of the Magi—in the iron-bound melancholy volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say, are glorious histories of the heaven and of the earth, and of the mighty sea—and of the genius that over-ruled the sea, and the earth, and the lofty heaven. There was much lore, too, in the sayings that were said by the Sybils, and holy, holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves which trembled round Dodona, but as Allah liveth, that fable which the Demon told me as he sat by my side in the shadow of the tomb, I hold to be the most wonderful of all.”

Or this?

“And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror and stand trembling and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.”

The landscape of most of those early Maeterlinck plays is the landscape of “Ulalume”:

The skies they were ashen and sober,The leaves they were crisped and sear,It was night in the lonesome OctoberIn my most immemorial year.It was hard by the dim lake of AuberIn the misty mid-region of Weir,It was down by the dark tarn of AuberIn the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

The skies they were ashen and sober,

The leaves they were crisped and sear,

It was night in the lonesome October

In my most immemorial year.

It was hard by the dim lake of Auber

In the misty mid-region of Weir,

It was down by the dark tarn of Auber

In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

But it was a more material setting thatMaeterlinck gave to “The Miracle of St. Anthony.” Not the intangible Nowhere or the impalpable At any Time, but the present day, a commonplace house, and a small provincial town in the Low Countries. Instead of stately marble pillars, or primeval forest, or limitless sea, a room with leather-covered benches against the walls, two wooden stoves and an umbrella stand, on which are hats, a cape and wraps. Instead of swans and sleeping beauties, the old drudge Virginie, with her skirts turned up and her legs bare, swabbing the floor. In the next room is lying the body of the Maiden Lady Hortensia, who in her lifetime had been exceedingly generous in her donations to the church, and especially devoted to the memory of the blessed St. Anthony of Padua. It is the Saint himself, come to restore her to life as a reward for her piety, who presents himself at thedoor-sill as the curtain rises. In appearance he is not as the dead woman might have expected. Bare-headed and bare-footed, his beard and hair are scrubby and tangled, and he is clothed in a soiled, sack-like, and much dirtied cowl. The story of how he was received by the relatives, the doctor, the parson, and the gathered guests may be read by those who turn to the following pages. It was first presented to American play-goers by the Washington Square Players under the direction of Mr. Edward Goodman at the Bandbox Theatre in New York, the evening of May 7th, 1915. It had the quality of novelty, for it was one of the least known of all the plays. There was a story current at the time that it was produced from the manuscript. What Maeterlinck himself thinks of it, what place in his mind it has in his whole scheme of literary production, the writercannot say. That is a matter as elusive as the man himself is elusive. To illustrate that elusiveness by a personal reminiscence:

It was six years ago, in the days when the world was happy with the blessedness of a peace that seemed likely to endure, and when the occasional cloud on the political horizon was regarded as nothing more than a mirage, that the writer and a friend—the latter one of the firm of M. Maeterlinck’s American publishers—made a journey to the south of France for the purpose of paying their respects to the Belgian mystic in his Nice home. In London we had been advised by Mr. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, whose admirable translations have done so much to make Maeterlinck’s name a household name to English-speaking readers. “Here is his latest letter,” said Mr.Teixeira. “It is dated from his villa in the Quartier des Beaumettes, which is the rising ground at the western end of the town. You will find him there; that is, if you succeed in finding him at all. For he is a very difficult man to find. That is one of his peculiarities.”

It was the night before the departure from Nice. Our time was limited. At its môle in the swarming harbor of Marseilles, the Sant Anna, which was to carry us on its roundabout, five thousand mile journey, with New York as the ultimate destination, was preparing for its leaving of the next day. We started on the quest. At the hotel they could tell us nothing. The driver of the fiacre engaged was no better informed. Surprised but undaunted we were soon winding slowly between high stone walls, up the beautiful Beaumettes slope. From villa to villa wetravelled, to be met everywhere by puzzled, negative headshakes. “M. Maeterlinck? We do not know him. We have never heard of him. We do not think that he is of the Quartier. Perhaps if you enquire at the villa beyond you will learn something.” For two hours in the darkness sweet scented by the breath of the semi-tropical plants and flowers, we kept up the search. But it was in vain. Here indeed was a prophet unknown in his own country. What was the reason for the mystery? Was there a vast conspiracy of silence and pretended ignorance on the part of his neighbors? Were solitude and freedom from interruption so necessary to his being that the great man had sworn them to secrecy? Or had he draped himself in some mysterious veil, some figurative coat of invisible green, through which the eyes of those who dwelt in theQuartier des Beaumettes had never been able to see? We never found out. There was about the enigma something weird, something almost uncanny. We had been told to seek him in a mansion by the sea. We could hear the waves of the Mediterranean beating against the rocks below. But was it another ocean—an ocean of the Never, Never Land that had been meant?

It was many and many a year agoIn a kingdom by the sea,That a maiden lived, whom you all may knowBy the name of Annabel Lee;And this maiden she lived with no other thoughtThan to love and be loved by me.

It was many and many a year ago

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden lived, whom you all may know

By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

Than to love and be loved by me.

Is there a real Maeterlinck house? we asked ourselves. Or is his habitation of such dream stuff as the House of Usher? Is the land of Maeterlinck a material land,or is it somewhere “hard by the dim lake of Auber, in the misty mid-region of Weir: down by the dark tarn of Auber, in the Ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir?”

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