Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/54

 heard starts crying. Through an inner door steps a deaconess silently crossing herself: the mother of the house is dead.

These incidents in themselves are not necessarily miraculous. There are none of them but might be accounted for on perfectly natural grounds. In fact, very plausible explanations do offer themselves for the weirdest things that come to pass. So, especially, it was a real, ordinary mower that chanced to whet his scythe; yet the apparition of the Old Reaper in person could not cause the chilling consternation produced by this trivial circumstance coming as it does as the climax of a succession of commonplace happenings exaggerated and distorted by a fear-haunted imagination. To produce an effect like that upon an audience whose credulity refuses to be put to any undue strain is a victorious proof of prime artistic ability.

Les Aveugles ("The Sightless"), (1891), is pitched in the same psychological key. The atmosphere is surcharged with unearthly apprehension. A dreary twilight—in the midst of a thick forest—on a lonely island; twelve blind people fretting about the absence of their guardian. He is gone to find a way out of the