Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Maeterlinck (Ghent, 1862 - Nice, 1949) was a Belgian playwright, poet and essayist who wrote in French and became the leading figure of Symbolist theatre. He is remembered mainly for his plays, but his reflections on nature, death and the meaning of life occupied much of his career. In 1911 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He was born into a wealthy, French-speaking family in Ghent. As a student at the Jesuit college of Sainte-Barbe, where French Romantic literature was looked down on, he developed a lasting distrust of the Church and of organised religion. His father, a notary, wanted him to study law, and Maeterlinck took his degree at Ghent in 1885, though he had already written poems and short prose. After a few months in Paris he met the Symbolists, above all Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, whose influence would shape his later work.

His first play, Princess Maleine, won enthusiastic praise in 1890 from Octave Mirbeau, the critic of Le Figaro, and made him a public figure overnight. Further plays such as Intruder, The Blind and Pelléas and Mélisande (1892) followed, marked by fatalism and mysticism. His characters barely act. They wait, motionless, before the unknown, and the tragedy lies in the bare fact of living rather than in heroic deeds. Meaning was meant to emerge through suggestion rather than explicit action on stage.

From 1895 he lived with the singer and actress Georgette Leblanc, who performed many of his heroines and with whom he hosted a literary salon in Paris. With Aglavaine and Sélysette he began to create female characters who were more in charge of their own destinies. Around 1906, during a personal crisis, he wrote The Blue Bird, a fairy play that Stanislavski staged in Moscow in 1908 and that became a lasting international success.

After 1910 his theatre lost momentum and his attention turned toward the essay. In books such as The Treasure of the Humble, The Life of the Bee and The Intelligence of Flowers, he looked at nature with a philosophical eye, finding in insects and plants lessons about collective life and mystery. During the First World War he became involved in Belgian politics and social causes, which somewhat dented his image as a sage detached from worldly affairs.

In 1919 he married Renée Dahon. In the 1920s he went to the United States, where he worked on film projects with little result, and he later spent much of the Second World War there. His essay on termites, The Life of the White Ants (1926), was accused of plagiarising a book on the same subject by the South African naturalist Eugène Marais, and the controversy tarnished his later reputation. His influence is above all theatrical. His static drama and his sublime character helped renew European stage writing alongside Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg, and he left a mark on writers such as Federico García Lorca in his early plays.