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 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.