Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Maeterlinck: The Playwright of Things Unsaid

In August 1890 Octave Mirbeau gave his column in Le Figaro to a play almost nobody had read, by a Ghent lawyer almost nobody had heard of. The notice was ecstatic, and it worked: within weeks Maurice Maeterlinck, twenty-seven and lately escaped from a legal practice he disliked, was the most discussed dramatist in France. He had written a play in which the decisive events happen offstage, the characters cannot see, and the dialogue is mostly evasion. It was precisely what Europe wanted.

A Notary's Greenhouses

He was born on August 29, 1862, in Ghent, into a wealthy French-speaking family. His father, Polydore, was a notary who kept greenhouses on the family estate; his mother, Mathilde Colette Françoise van den Bossche, came from money of her own. The hothouse would supply the governing image of his first book, and arguably of his whole imagination — enclosed, humid, airless, full of things growing in the dark.

In September 1874 he was sent to the Jesuit College of Sainte-Barbe, where theatrical works were restricted on religious grounds. The confinement produced a lifelong distaste for the Catholic Church and for organised religion generally, a grudge the Vatican eventually repaid by placing his complete works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1914. He read law at the University of Ghent, took his degree in 1885, and practised briefly before abandoning it.

Paris, and the Symbolist Turn

In Paris he found the Symbolists, and in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam a decisive influence. The poems of *Serres chaudes* — hothouses — appeared in 1889, the same year as *La Princesse Maleine*, the play Mirbeau would make famous the following August. Maeterlinck was suddenly a public figure, and he had a method to go with the fame.

The Theatre of the Unsaid

The method was subtraction. *L'Intruse* and *Les Aveugles*, both 1890, are the purest statements of what came to be called static drama: theatre with the action taken out. A family sits in a room while something approaches that nobody will name. A group of blind people waits in a forest for a guide who is already dead among them, unnoticed. The lines are deliberately flat, almost clumsy, and the dread is manufactured entirely by what they decline to say.

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Silence became an instrument he could write for, as a composer writes rests. He was drawn to marionettes, using puppet figures to present human beings as things moved by an unseen hand, and he made fate audible precisely by refusing to describe it. Suggestion did the work that statement does in other people's plays.

Pelléas, and Debussy

*Pelléas et Mélisande* (1892) is the masterwork of that method and the reason the method survived. Claude Debussy spent the better part of a decade, from 1893 to 1902, turning it into the opera that carried Maeterlinck's atmosphere far beyond the theatre.

From 1895 the singer and actress Georgette Leblanc became his partner and the interpreter of his female roles; they lived in Passy, then from 1906 at Grasse in the south, and staged plays in a Normandy monastery. The association lasted until 1918. Not every success was clean: *Monna Vanna* drew accusations that he had borrowed from Robert Browning's *Luria*. Belgium gave him its Triennial Prize for Dramatic Literature in 1903.

The Bee, the Flower, the Blue Bird

The essays made him rich. *Le Trésor des humbles* (1896) laid out his mysticism; *La Vie des abeilles* (1901) treated the hive as a poem about collective purpose; *L'Intelligence des fleurs* (1907) extended the argument to plants and carried a distinct sympathy with socialist ideas. Then came *L'Oiseau bleu* (1908), the fairy play in which the children Tyltyl and Mytyl hunt for happiness — his greatest contemporary success by a distance.

In 1911 the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration."

The Termite Affair

In 1926 he published *La Vie des termites*, which reproduced a great deal of *Die Siel van die Mier*, published the previous year in Afrikaans by the South African naturalist Eugène Marais. Marais accused him directly of appropriating the idea of the termite nest as an organic unity. Maeterlinck's bibliography does not list him. The Afrikaans of the original had kept it out of European view, and the theft went largely unpunished. Professor V. E. d'Assonville later described the culprit as "the Nobel Prize winner who had never seen a termite in his whole life."

Why Maurice Is Called a Genius

The claim is technical, narrow and real. Maeterlinck worked out how to put dread on a stage without an event. European drama had run on action — a murder, a recognition, a reversal — and in *L'Intruse* and *Les Aveugles* he removed all of it and found that the tension held anyway. What replaced plot was atmosphere under pressure: banal speech, blind or waiting characters, and an approaching something the text will not identify. Silence stopped being a gap between lines and became material he could shape. His use of marionettes was of a piece with it, presenting people as figures worked by a hand they cannot see. The Swedish Academy, reaching for terms, praised his "wealth of imagination" and the "deep inspiration" hidden in fairy-tale dress.

The counter-case is severe, and honesty requires it. Almost everything justifying the word was written between 1889 and 1894 — a five-year window at the opening of a career that ran another fifty-five years. What followed was a fairy play and a shelf of graceful popular essays. He was accused of borrowing from Browning for *Monna Vanna*, and far more damningly of lifting Marais's central idea for the termite book without acknowledgement. The nature writing that made his fortune was the work of a man who, on one scholar's account, had never examined the insect he wrote a book about. The invention was genuine and permanent. Much of the output built on its reputation was neither.

Legacy

Rejected by the French Foreign Legion on grounds of age when Germany invaded in 1914, he retreated to Nice, and in 1940 fled the Nazis by way of Lisbon to the United States, returning to Nice on August 10, 1947. King Albert I made him a count in 1932, though he never completed the formalities of nobility. He presided over PEN International from 1947 to 1949 and took the Académie française's Medal for the French Language in 1948. He died in Nice on May 6, 1949, after a heart attack.

His reputation still rests where it settled in the 1890s, on a handful of short plays in which nothing happens and everything is felt. That is a smaller monument than the Nobel implied, and a more durable one than his imitators managed.