MAETERLINCK, MAURICE. - Poet, born in Ghent to a wealthy Flemish family on 29 August 1862, died in Nice on 6 May 1949. Destined for a legal career, a not particularly lengthy stay in Paris (1886) sufficed to direct his literary aspirations, which he had already shared with his friends G. Le Roy, C. Van Leberghe, and E. Verhaeren, toward the Symbolism represented by Villier de l'Isle-Adam. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911.
A volume of verse, Serres chaudes, and a dramatic fairy tale, La princesse Maleine, published in 1889, marked his definitive dedication to literary activity. At first this was chiefly theatrical, with L'intruse (1890), Les aveugles (1890), Les sept princesses (1890), Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), later set to music by Debussy and presented in 1902 at the Opéra Comique, Aglawaine et Sélissette (1896), and “little dramas for puppets” such as Alladines et Palomides, Intérieur, La mort de Tartaigles (1894), and Ariane et Barbe Bleue (published in German translation in 1899 and set to music by Dukas in 1907). A theater of the inner life, imbued with the vitality of Symbolism and also of fatalism and pessimism. And an attempt to understand, or at least mirror, the secret, elusive soul at the foundation of the world and of things, as in the contemporary essays Le trésor des humbles (1896), La sagesse et la destinée (1898), and La vie des abeilles (1901) itself—more a celebration and presentation, as of a “known and beloved object,” of the “spirit of the world” as manifested in a humble beehive than a work of scientific popularization.
Other books of the same kind followed (L'intelligence des fleurs, 1907; La vie des termites, 1927; La vie des formes, 1930), almost as if to reaffirm the resolution, into love of nature and, in general, into a more optimistic vision of life, of the tremulous and vague mysticism of the early M., upon which the influence of J. Braybroeck (“the admirable one”) had made itself felt: in 1891 he had translated L'ornement des noces spirituelles. To this final phase of his thought and art belong his most successful dramas and féeries: Monna Vanna (1902); Joyzelle (1903), Le miracle de St Antoine (1904), L'oiseau bleu (1908), and Marie Magdeleine (1909), marked by a somewhat equivocal religiosity.
M. AND RELIGION. - All M.’s works are permeated by a sophistical and insubstantial philosophy of his, yet steadfast and constant in its atheism, irreligion, and contempt for every morality. Supernatural Revelation does not exist, “has never existed”; God is a creation of human reason: “why should man fear the God whom he himself has created?”; the doctrine of Christ is merely a mutilated branch of the great mother religion, Buddhism; morality is a kind of ill-defined higher instinct, a “mystical reason,” that is, without either obligations or sanctions; the immortality of the soul consists only in its fusion with universal consciousness; human beings do not bear responsibility for their actions, desires, or thoughts, because otherwise they would cease to be human and become so many divinities; there is no purpose in life, because purpose is the negation of being, of life, of everything. Hence a heavy fatalism and a devastating pessimism. “One fears and despairs only when one believes seriously.” This is the reason why the Church condemned all his works by decree of 26 January 1914 (cf. M. Lecat, Le Maeterlinkianisme, 2 vols., Bruxelles 1937–41; G. Casati, L'Indice dei libri proibiti, II, Milano 1936, pp. 159–80).