Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck[1][a] (29 August 1862 – 6 May 1949), also known asCount/ComteMaeterlinck from 1932,[6] was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was Flemish but wrote in French. He was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature in 1911 "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth ofimagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deepinspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers' own feelings and stimulate their imaginations". The main themes in his work are death and themeaning of life. He was a leading member of the groupLa Jeune Belgique,[7] and his plays form an important part of theSymbolist movement. In later life, Maeterlinck faced credible accusations ofplagiarism.
Maeterlinck was born inGhent, Belgium, to a wealthy, French-speaking family. His mother, Mathilde Colette Françoise (née Van den Bossche), came from a wealthy family.[8][9] His father, Polydore, was a notary who enjoyed tending thegreenhouses on their property.
In September 1874, he was sent to theJesuit College ofSainte-Barbe, where works of the FrenchRomantics were scorned and only plays on religious subjects were permitted. His experiences at this school influenced his distaste for theCatholic Church and organized religion.[10] One of his companions at that time was the writerCharles van Lerberghe, the poems and plays of whom went on to act as mutual influences on each other at the start of theSymbolist period.[11]
Maeterlinck had written poems and short novels while still studying, but his father wanted him to go into law. After gaining a law degree at theUniversity of Ghent in 1885, he spent a few months in Paris, France. He met members of the new Symbolist movement;Villiers de l'Isle Adam in particular, who would have a great influence on Maeterlinck's subsequent work.[citation needed]
He had a relationship with the singer and actressGeorgette Leblanc from 1895 until 1918. Leblanc influenced his work for the following two decades. With the playAglavaine and Sélysette (1896) Maeterlinck began to create characters, especially female characters, who were more in control of their destinies. Leblanc performed these female characters on stage. Even though mysticism and metaphysics influenced his work throughout his career, Maeterlinck slowly replaced his Symbolism with a more existential style.[12]
In 1895, with his parents frowning upon his open relationship with an actress, Maeterlinck and Leblanc moved to the district ofPassy in Paris. The Catholic Church was unwilling to grant her a divorce from her Spanish husband. The couple frequently entertained guests, including Mirbeau,Jean Lorrain, andPaul Fort. They spent their summers inNormandy. During this period, Maeterlinck published hisTwelve Songs (1896),The Treasure of the Humble (1896),The Life of the Bee (1901), andAriadne and Bluebeard (1902).[12]
In 1903, Maeterlinck received the Triennial Prize for Dramatic Literature from the Belgian government.[13] During this period, and up until the Great War of 1914–1918, he was widely looked up to, throughout Europe, as a great sage, and the embodiment of thehigher thought of the time.
In 1906, Maeterlinck and Leblanc moved to a villa inGrasse in the south of France. He spent his hours meditating and walking. As he emotionally pulled away from Leblanc, he entered a state of depression. Diagnosed withneurasthenia, he rented theBenedictine Abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy to help him relax. By renting the abbey he rescued it from the desecration of being sold and used as a chemical factory and thus he received a blessing from the Pope.[14] Leblanc would often walk around in the garb of an abbess; he would wear roller skates as he moved about the house.[15] During this time, he wrote his essay "The Intelligence of Flowers" (1906), in which he expressed sympathy with socialist ideas. He donated money to many workers' unions and socialist groups. At this time he conceived his greatest contemporary success: the fairy playThe Blue Bird (1908, but largely written in 1906).
Stanislavsky's 1908 Moscow production, of extraordinary visual beauty, is still over a century later regularly performed in Moscow, in a shortened version as a children's matinee. After the writing of "The Intelligence of Flowers", he suffered from a period of depression and writer's block. Although he recovered from this after a year or two, he never became so inventive as a writer again. His later plays, such asMarie-Victoire (1907) andMary Magdalene (1910), provided with lead roles for Leblanc,[16] were notably inferior to their predecessors, and sometimes merely repeat an earlier formula. Even though alfresco performances of some of his plays at St. Wandrille had been successful, Maeterlinck felt that he was losing his privacy. The death of his mother on 11 June 1910 added to his depression.[17]
In 1910 he met the 18-year-old actressRenée Dahon during a rehearsal ofThe Blue Bird. She became his companion. After having been nominated byCarl Bildt, a member of theSwedish Academy, he received theNobel Prize for Literature in 1911,[18] which served to lighten his spirits. By 1913, he had become more openly socialist and sided with the Belgian trade unions against the Catholic party during a strike.[19] He began to study mysticism and lambasted the Catholic Church in his essays for misconstruing the history of the universe.[20] By a decree of 26 January 1914, theRoman Catholic Church placed hisopera omnia on theIndex Librorum Prohibitorum.
WhenGermany invaded Belgium in 1914, Maeterlinck wished to join theFrench Foreign Legion, but his application was denied due to his age.[citation needed] He and Leblanc decided to leave Grasse for a villa nearNice, where he spent the next decade of his life. He gave speeches on the bravery of the Belgian people and placed the blame upon all Germans for the war.[citation needed] His reputation as a great sage who stood above current affairs was damaged by his political involvement.[citation needed]
While in Nice, he wroteThe Mayor of Stilmonde (1918), which the American press quickly labeled a "Great War Play", and which becamea British film in 1929. He also wroteThe Betrothal (French:Les Fiançailles, 1922), a sequel toThe Blue Bird, in which the heroine of the play is clearly not a Leblanc archetype.[21]
Maeterlinck in 1915
On 15 February 1919, Maeterlinck married Dahon. He accepted an invitation to the United States, whereSamuel Goldwyn asked him to produce a few scenarios for film. Only two of Maeterlinck's submissions still exist; Goldwyn didn't use any of them. Maeterlinck had prepared one based on hisThe Life of the Bee. After reading the first few pages Goldwyn burst out of his office, exclaiming: "My God! The hero is a bee!"[citation needed]
After 1920, Maeterlinck ceased to contribute significantly to the theatre, but continued to produce essays on his favourite themes of occultism, ethics and natural history. The international demand for these fell off sharply after the early 1920s, but his sales in France remained substantial until the late 1930s. Dahon gave birth to a stillborn child in 1925.[citation needed]
In 1926, Maeterlinck publishedLa Vie des Termites (translated into English asThe Life of Termites orThe Life of White Ants), anentomological book thatplagiarised the bookThe Soul of the (White) Ant, by the Afrikaner poet and scientistEugène Marais,[22] David Bignell, in his inaugural address as Professor of Zoology at theUniversity of London (2003), called Maeterlinck's work "a classic example of academic plagiarism".[23]Marais accused Maeterlinck of having appropriated Marais' concept of the "organic unity" of thetermite nest in his book.[24] Marais had published his ideas on termite nests in the South African Afrikaans-language press, inDie Burger (January 1923) and inHuisgenoot, which featured a series of articles on termites under the title "Die Siel van die Mier" (The Soul of the (White) Ant) from 1925 to 1926. Maeterlinck's book, with almost identical content,[23] was published in 1926. It is conjectured that Maeterlinck had come across Marais' articles while writing his book, and that it would have been easy for him to translate Afrikaans into French, since Maeterlinck knew Dutch and had already made several translations from Dutch into French.[25] It was common at the time, moreover, for worthy articles published in Afrikaans to be reproduced in Flemish and Dutch magazines and journals.
Marais wrote in a letter to Dr. Winifred de Kock in London about Maeterlinck that
The famous author had paid me the left-handed compliment of cribbing the most important part of my work ... He clearly desired his readers to infer that he had arrived at certain of my theories (the result of ten years of hard labour in the veld) by his own unaided reason, although he admits that he never saw a termite in his life. You must understand that it was not merely plagiarism of the spirit of a thing, so to speak. He has copied page after page verbally.[26][25]
Supported by a coterie ofAfrikaner Nationalist friends, Marais sought justice through the South African press and attempted an international lawsuit. This was to prove financially impossible and the case was not pursued. All the same, he gained a measure of renown as the aggrieved party and as an Afrikaner researcher who had opened himself up to plagiarism because he published inAfrikaans out of nationalistic loyalty. Marais brooded at the time of the scandal: "I wonder whether Maeterlinck blushes when he reads such things [critical acclaim], and whether he gives a thought to the injustice he does to the unknownBoer worker?"[24]
Maeterlinck's own words inThe Life of Termites indicate that the possible discovery or accusation of plagiarism worried him:
It would have been easy, in regard to every statement, to allow the text to bristle with footnotes and references. In some chapters there is not a sentence but would have clamoured for these; and the letterpress would have been swallowed up by vast masses of comment, like one of those dreadful books we hated so much at school. There is a short bibliography at the end of the volume which will no doubt serve the same purpose.
Whatever Maeterlinck's misgivings at the time of writing, the bibliography he refers to does not include Eugène Marais.
Professor V. E. d'Assonville referred to Maeterlinck as "the Nobel Prize winner who had never seen a termite in his whole life and had never put a foot on the soil of Africa, least of all in the Waterberg".[25]
Robert Ardrey, an admirer of Eugène Marais, attributed Marais' later suicide to this act of plagiarism and theft of intellectual property by Maeterlinck,[27] although Marais' biographer, Leon Rousseau, suggested that Marais had enjoyed and even thrived on the controversy and the attention it generated.[28]
Another allegation of plagiarism concerned Maeterlinck's playMonna Vanna, which was said to have been based onRobert Browning's little-known playLuria.[29]
According to an article published inThe New York Times in 1940, he arrived in the United States fromLisbon on the Greek LinerNea Hellas. He had fled to Lisbon in order to escape theNazi invasion of both Belgium and France. While in Portugal, he stayed in Monte Estoril, at the Grande Hotel, between 27 July and 17 August 1939.[32] TheTimes quoted him as saying, "I knew that if I was captured by the Germans I would be shot at once, since I have always been counted as an enemy of Germany because of my play,The Mayor of Stilmonde, which dealt with the conditions in Belgium during the German Occupation of 1918." As with his earlier visit to America, he still found Americans too casual, friendly andFrancophilic for his taste.[33]
He returned to Nice after the war on 10 August 1947. He was President ofPEN International, the worldwide association of writers, from 1947 until 1949. In 1948, theFrench Academy awarded him the Medal for the French Language. He died in Nice on 6 May 1949 after suffering a heart attack.
1932: Admitted by Royal Decree to start the procedure to join the Belgian nobility with the title of count. However, he never fulfilled the obligations to lift the patent letters (including the obligation to create a coat of arms). Since the necessary registrations and tax payments were never fulfilled, he as well as his family were never incorporated into the Belgian nobility.
Maeterlinck's posthumous reputation depends entirely[dubious –discuss] on his early plays (published between 1889 and 1894), which created a new style of dialogue, extremely lean and spare, where what is suggested is more important than what is said. The characters have no foresight, and only a limited understanding of themselves or the world around them. That the characters stumble into tragedy without realizing where they are going may suggest that Maeterlinck thought of man as powerless against the forces of fate, but the kinship is not with ancient Greek tragedy but with modern dramatists such as Beckett and Pinter who bring out human vulnerability in a world beyond our comprehension.
Maeterlinck believed that any actor, due to the hindrance of physical mannerisms and expressions, would inadequately portray thesymbolic figures of his plays. He concluded thatmarionettes were an excellent alternative. Guided by strings operated by a puppeteer, Maeterlinck considered marionettes an excellent representation of fate's complete control over man. He wroteInterior,The Death of Tintagiles, andAlladine and Palomides for marionette theatre.[35]
From this, he gradually developed his notion of the "static drama". He felt that it was the artist's responsibility to create something that did not express human emotions but rather the external forces that compel people.[36] Maeterlinck once wrote that "the stage is a place where works of art are extinguished. ... Poems die when living people get into them."[37]
He explained his ideas on the static drama in his essay "The Tragic in Daily Life" (1896), which appeared inThe Treasure of the Humble. The actors were to speak and move as if pushed and pulled by an external force, fate as puppeteer. They were not to allow the stress of their inner emotions to compel their movements. Maeterlinck would often continue to refer to his cast of characters as "marionettes".[38]
Maeterlinck's conception of moderntragedy rejects the intrigue and vivid external action of traditional drama in favour of a dramatisation of different aspects of life:
Othello is admirably jealous. But is it not perhaps an ancient error to imagine that it is at the moments when this passion, or others of equal violence, possesses us, that we live our truest lives? I have grown to believe that an old man, seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside him; giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about his house, interpreting, without comprehending, the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice of the light, submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny—an old man, who conceives not that all the powers of this world, like so many heedful servants, are mingling and keeping vigil in his room, who suspects not that the very sun itself is supporting in space the little table against which he leans, or that every star in heaven and every fiber of the soul are directly concerned in the movement of an eyelid that closes, or a thought that springs to birth—I have grown to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or "the husband who avenges his honor."[39]
He cites a number ofclassical Athenian tragedies—which, he argues, are almost motionless and which diminish psychological action to pursue an interest in "the individual, face to face with the universe"—as precedents for his conception of static drama; these include most of the works ofAeschylus andSophocles'Ajax,Antigone,Oedipus at Colonus, andPhiloctetes.[40] With these plays, he claims:
It is no longer a violent, exceptional moment of life that passes before our eyes—it is life itself. Thousands and thousands of laws there are, mightier and more venerable than those of passion; but these laws are silent, and discreet, and slow-moving; and hence it is only in the twilight that they can be seen and heard, in the meditation that comes to us at the tranquil moments of life.[41]
Les Disciples à Saïs andFragments de Novalis from the German ofNovalis, together with anIntroduction by Maeterlinck on Novalis and German Romanticism (1895)
The 100th anniversary of Maurice Maeterlinck's greatest contemporary success, his playThe Blue Bird, was selected as the main motif of a high-value collectors' coin: the Belgian 50 euroMaurice Maeterlinck commemorative coin, minted in 2008.
Le Bourgmestre de Stilmonde (The Burgomaster of Stilemond) was translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and performed several times in Britain between 1918 and 1927.[44]
