Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/48

Rh receive warnings from within, but the voices are not unequivocal and emphatic enough to save us from ourselves.

Probing the abysses of his subliminal self, the mystic may sense, along with the diviner promptings of the heart, the lurking demons that undermine happiness, — "the malignant powers," — again quoting Schiller — "whom no man's craft can make familiar" — that element in human nature which in truth makes man "his own worst enemy." It is a search which at this stage of his development Maeterlinck, as a mystic, cannot bring himself to relinquish, even though, pessimistically, he anticipates that which he most dreads to find; in this way, fatalism and pessimism act as insuperable barriers against his artistic self-assertion. His fixed frame of mind confines him to the representation of but one elemental instinct, namely, that of fear. The rustic in the German fairy tale who sallied forth to learn how to shudder, — gruseln, — would have mastered the art to his complete satisfaction if favored with a performance or two of such plays as "Princess Maleine," "The Intruder," or "The Sightless." Perhaps no other dramatist has ever commanded a similarly well-equipped arsenal of thrills and terrible foreshadowings. The