MAETERLINCK, MAURICE. - Poet, b. in Ghent on 29 Aug. 1862 into a wealthy Flemish family, d. in Nice on 6 May 1949. Started on a legal career, but a not-long stay in Paris (1886) was enough to make his literary aspirations, already shared with his friends G. Le Roy, C. Van Leberghe, E. Verhaeren, converge on the symbolism represented by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911.
A volume of verse, Serres chaudes, and a dramatic fairy tale, La princesse Maleine, published in 1889, marked his definitive consecration to literary activity. This was at first 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), Aglavaine et Sélysette (1896) and "little dramas for marionettes" such as Alladine et Palomides, Intérieur, La mort de Tintagiles (1894), Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (published in 1899 in German translation, and set to music by Dukas in 1907). A theater of the inner life, seized by the vivacity of symbolism and also of fatalism and pessimism. And an attempt to understand, or at least to mirror, the secret, elusive soul at the bottom of the world and of things, like the contemporary essays Le trésor des humbles (1896), La sagesse et la destinée (1898) and La vie des abeilles (1901) itself — rather a celebration and presentation, as of an "object known and loved," of the "spirit of the world" as it manifests itself in a humble beehive, than a scientific-popularizing monograph.
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 how the tremulous and vague mysticism of the early M., in which the influence of J. Braybroeck ("l'admirable": in 1891 he had translated his L'ornement des noces spirituelles) had made itself felt, resolved itself into love for nature and, generally, into a more optimistic vision of life. To this last phase of his thought and his art belong the most successful dramas and féeries: Monna Vanna (1902); Joyzelle (1903), Le miracle de St Antoine (1904), L'oiseau bleu (1908), Marie Magdeleine (1909), of a rather equivocal religiosity.
Bibliography5 works
Enzo Bottasso
M. AND RELIGION. - All of M.'s works are permeated by a sophistical and inconsistent philosophy of his, yet firm and constant in its atheism, in its irreligion, in its contempt for every morality. Supernatural Revelation does not exist, "it never has existed"; God is a creation of human reason: "why should man fear the God whom he himself has created?"; the doctrine of Christ is nothing but a mutilated branch of the great mother religion, Buddhism; morality is a kind of ill-defined superior instinct, a "mystical reason," without, that is, either obligations or sanctions; the immortality of the soul is merely its fusion into the universal consciousness; men do not have responsibility for their own actions, desires, thoughts, because otherwise they would cease to be men and become as many divinities; there is no finality in life, because finality is the negation of being, of life, of everything. Whence a heavy fatalism, a crushing pessimism. "One fears and despairs only when one seriously believes." This is the reason why the Church condemned all his works by decree of 26 Jan. 1914 (cf. M. Lecat, Le Maeterlinckianisme, 2 vols., Bruxelles 1937-41; G. Casati, L'Indice dei libri proibiti, II, Milano 1936, pp. 159-80).