Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck, in full Maurice Polydore-Marie-Bernard Maeterlinck,
also called (from 1932) Comte Maeterlinck (b. August 29, 1862, Ghent,
Belgium—d. May 6, 1949, Nice, France), Belgian Symbolist poet, playwright,
and essayist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911 for his
outstanding works of the Symbolist theatre. He wrote in French and looked
mainly to French literary movements for inspiration.
Maeterlinck studied law at the University
of Ghent and was admitted to the bar in that city in 1886. In Paris in
1885–86 he met Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam and the leaders of the
Symbolist movement, and he soon abandoned law for literature. His first
verse collection, Serres chaudes (“Hothouses”), and his first play, La
Princesse Maleine, were published in 1889. Maeterlinck made a dramatic
breakthrough in 1890 with two one-act plays, L’Intruse (The Intruder) and
Les Aveugles (The Blind). His Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), produced in Paris
at the avant-garde Théâtre de l’Oeuvre by the director Aurélien Lugné-Poë,
is the unquestioned masterpiece of Symbolist drama and provided the basis
for an opera (1902) by Claude Debussy. Set in a nebulous, fairy-tale past,
the play conveys a mood of hopeless melancholy and doom in its story of the
destructive passion of Princess Mélisande, who falls in love with her
husband’s younger brother, Pelléas. Though written in prose, Pelléas et
Mélisande may be considered the most accomplished of all 19th-century
attempts at poetic drama.
Maeterlinck wrote many other plays,
including historical dramas such as Monna Vanna (1902). Gradually, his
Symbolism was tempered by his interest in English drama, especially William
Shakespeare and the Jacobeans. Only L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird)
rivaled Pelléas et Mélisande in popularity. An allegorical fantasy conceived
as a play for children, it portrays a search for happiness in the world.
First performed by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1908, this somewhat sentimental
dramatic parable was highly regarded for a time, but its charm has
evaporated, and the optimism of the play now seems facile. After he won the
Nobel Prize, however, his reputation declined, although his Le Bourgmestre
de Stilmonde (1917; The Burgomaster of Stilmonde), a patriotic play in which
he explores the problems of Flanders under the wartime rule of an
unprincipled German officer, briefly enjoyed great success.
In his Symbolist plays, Maeterlinck uses
poetic speech, gesture, lighting, setting, and ritual to create images that
reflect his protagonists’ moods and dilemmas. Often the protagonists are
waiting for something mysterious and fearful that will destroy them. The
profound and moving atmosphere of the plays, though lacking in intellectual
complexity, is augmented by tentative dialogue, based on half-formed
suggestions, at times naively repetitious, and occasionally sentimental, but
sometimes possessed of great subtlety and power. As a dramatist, Maeterlinck
influenced Hugo von Hofmannsthal, W.B. Yeats, John Millington Synge, and
Eugene O’Neill. Maeterlinck’s plays have been widely translated, and no
Belgian dramatist had greater effect on worldwide audiences.
Maeterlinck’s prose writings are remarkable
blends of mysticism, occultism, and interest in the world of nature. They
represent the common Symbolist reaction against materialism, science, and
mechanization and are concerned with such questions as the immortality of
the soul, the nature of death, and the attainment of wisdom. Maeterlinck
presented his mystical speculations in Le Trésor des humbles (1896; The
Treasure of the Humble) and La Sagesse et la destinée (1898; “Wisdom and
Destiny”). His most widely read prose writings, however, are two extended
essays, La Vie des abeilles (1901; The Life of the Bee) and L’Intelligence
des fleurs (1907; The Intelligence of Flowers), in which Maeterlinck sets
out his philosophy of the human condition. Maeterlinck was made a count by
the Belgian king in 1932.
