“It is not necessary to the effectiveness of this piece,” Mr. Thomas has written, “that we should believe the blind to represent mankind bewildered after the loss of religion, their old guide. Whether it is true or not that religion is dead and men blind without it, the thought is so stale that in its nakedness it could be of no value to any piece of writing. But the sight of a blind man sitting still or tapping in the street is always impressive; and to the blind company in the play are added many elements of mystery and terror which enhance this impressiveness. They have at the start little more humanity than the rocks and trees among which they sit, except that they are conscious of themselves and one another. They are like creatures suddenly made out of the rocks and trees; and it is easy to picture beings of equal humanity standing in the depths of a misty wood when rain falls all through the day at autumn’s end. Or they are like personifications, so that we feel no curiosity with the name of any but that one who says for Maeterlinck: We have never seen one another. We ask one another questions, and we reply; we live together, we are always together, but we know not what we are.” It was Maeterlinck’s very first play, “La Princesse Maleine,” that won for him the dangerous title of “The Belgian Shakespeare.” Now and then a writer of our own land has done something that has caused limited or injudicious critics to speak of him as “The American Dickens” or “The American Thackeray.” As a rule he has paid a sad price for the unfortunate comparison. No matter how innocent the man himself has been, the chorus of mocking, unthinking laughter has been inevitable. In the case of Maeterlinck ridicule was only momentary. The rush of subsequent achievement was so swift. The world had had hardly time to gasp at Octave Mirbeau’s “The Belgian Shakespeare” before some one else was referring to Maeterlinck as “The Belgian Emerson.” But it did not need the acute mind of a Mirbeau to find the first comparison. That was obvious. How obvious a few references to “La Princesse Maleine” will show. To Maleine herself there is a flavor of Ophelia. The castle of Marcellos, her father, king of a part of Holland, might be the Castle of Elsinore. There, when the play opens, is being held the banquet to celebrate the betrothal of Maleine and Prince Hjalmar. The watching guards gossip of the attentions that the Prince’s father, old Hjalmar, king of another part of Holland, has been paying to the exiled Queen Ann of Jutland. A quarrel between the two kings over the table leads to war, and in an attack on the castle most of the defenders are killed and Maleine disappears. Through a hole in the wall of the tower in which Maleine and her nurse are shut up for safety, they see that the whole land has been laid waste by war and fire.