The Unknown Guest | Page 3

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THE UNKNOWN GUEST
BY MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

INTRODUCTION
1
My Essay on Death[1] led me to make a conscientious enquiry into the
present position of the great mystery, an enquiry which I have
endeavoured to render as complete as possible. I had hoped that a
single volume would be able to contain the result of these
investigations, which, I may say at once, will teach nothing to those
who have been over the same ground and which have nothing to
recommend them except their sincerity, their impartiality and a certain
scrupulous accuracy. But, as I proceeded, I saw the field widening
under my feet, so much so that I have been obliged to divide my work
into two almost equal parts. The first is now published and is a brief
study of veridical apparitions and hallucinations and haunted houses, or,
if you will, the phantasms of the living and the dead; of those
manifestations which have been oddly and not very appropriately
described as "psychometric"; of the knowledge of the future:
presentiments, omens, premonitions, precognitions and the rest; and
lastly of the Elberfeld horses. In the second, which will be published
later, I shall treat of the miracles of Lourdes and other places, the
phenomena of so called materialization, of the divining-rod and of
fluidic asepsis, not unmindful withal of a diamond dust of the
miraculous that hangs over the greater marvels in that strange
atmosphere into which we are about to pass.
[1] Published in English, in an enlarged form, under the title of Our
Eternity (London and New York, 1913)--Translator's Note.
2
When I speak of the present position of the mystery, I of course do not
mean the mystery of life, its end and its beginnings, nor yet the great
riddle of the universe which lies about us. In this sense, all is mystery,
and, as I have said elsewhere, is likely always to remain so; nor is it

probable that we shall ever touch any point of even the utmost borders
of knowledge or certainty. It is here a question of that which, in the
midst of this recognized and usual mystery, the familiar mystery of
which we are almost oblivious, suddenly disturbs the regular course of
our general ignorance. In themselves, these facts which strike us as
supernatural are no more so than the others; possibly they are rarer, or,
to be more accurate, less frequently or less easily observed. In any case,
their deep-seated cause, while being probably neither more remote nor
more difficult access, seem to lie hidden in an unknown region less
often visited by our science, which after all is but a reassuring and
conciliatory espression of our ignorance. Today, thanks to the labours
of the Society for Psychical Research and a host of other seekers, we
are able to approach these phenomena as a whole