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 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 that Maeterlinck 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 the door-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 writer cannot say. That is a matter as elusive as the man himself is elusive. To illustrate that elusiveness by a personal reminiscence: