Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/49

Rh commonest objects are fraught with ominous forebodings: a white gown lying on a prie-dieu, a curtain suddenly set swaying by a puff of air, the melancholy soughing of a clump of trees,—the simplest articles of daily use are converted into awful symbols that make us shiver by their whisperings of impending doom.

Nor in the earlier products of Maeterlinck are the cruder practices of melodrama scorned or spared,—the crash and flash of thunder and lightning, the clang of bells and clatter of chains, the livid light and ghastly shadows, the howling hurricane, the ominous croaking of ravens amid nocturnal solitude, trees illumined by the fiery eyes of owls, bats whirring portentously through the gloom,—so many harbingers of dread and death. And the prophetic import of these tokens and their sort is reinforced by repeated assertions from the persons in the action that never before has anything like this been known to occur. To such a fearsome state are we wrought up by all this uncanny apparatus that at the critical moment a well calculated knock at the door is sufficient to make our flesh creep and our hair stand on end.

Thus, the vie intéricure would seem to prerequire for its externalization a completely furnished