The miracle of Saint Anthony

by Maurice 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 has caused 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 a false 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 the same 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 spread of 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 earlier plays 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 interfering with 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” of the 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.”