MALEINE. I am afraid. Oh! who can be digging so at the ground around us? HJALMAR. That is nothing. ‘Tis but a mole--a poor little mole at work. (The mole in Hamlet! To our old acquaintance greeting!) MALEINE. I am afraid. After some more conversation in the same style: HJALMAR. What are you thinking of? MALEINE. I feel sad. HJALMAR. Sad? Now, what are your sad thoughts about, Uglyane? MALEINE. I am thinking of Princess Maleine. HJALMAR. What do you say? MALEINE. I am thinking of Princess Maleine.[229] HJALMAR. Do you know Princess Maleine? MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine. HJALMAR. You are not Uglyane? MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine. HJALMAR. What! you Princess Maleine? Dead! But Princess Maleine is dead! MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine. Has anyone anywhere in the poetry of the two worlds ever seen such complete idiocy? These ‘Ahs’ and ‘Ohs,’ this want of comprehension of the simplest remarks, this repetition four or five times of the same imbecile expressions, gives the truest conceivable clinical picture of incurable cretinism. These parts are precisely those most extolled by Maeterlinck’s admirers. According to them, all has been chosen with a deep artistic intention. A healthy reader will scarcely swallow that. Maeterlinck’s puppets say nothing, because they have nothing to say. Their author has not been able to put a single thought into their hollow skulls, because he himself possesses none. The creatures moving on his stage are not thinking and speaking human beings, but tadpoles or slugs, considerably more stupid than trained fleas at a fair. Moreover, _Princesse Maleine_ is not altogether a Shakespearian dream. The ‘seven nuns,’ _e.g._, belong to Maeterlinck. They are an astounding invention. They are ever marching like demented geese through the piece, winding in and out, with their psalm-singing, through all the rooms and corridors of the King’s castle, through the court, through the park, through the forest, coming unexpectedly round a corner in the middle of a scene, trotting across the stage and off at the other side without anyone understanding whence they come, whither they go, or for what purpose they are brought on at all. They are a living ‘obsession,’ mixing itself irresistibly in all the incidents of the piece. Here also we find all the intellectual fads which we noticed in the _Serres Chaudes_. The Princess Maleine is herself the embodiment of the hungry, sick, strayed princesses, wandering over the meadows, who haunt these poems, and undoubtedly sprang from Swinburne’s ballad of _The King’s Daughters_. The canals also play their part (p. 18). ‘And the expression of her eyes! It seemed as though one were all of a sudden in a great stream [Fr. _canal_] of fresh water....’ (p. 110). ‘We have been to look at the windmills along the canal,’ etc. And sick people and illness are mentioned on almost every page (p. 110): ANNE. I was fever-stricken myself.