The Nobel Prize in Literature 1911
Maurice Maeterlinck
Presentation Speech by C.D. af Wirsén, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, on December 10, 1911
This year highly competent persons have
proposed several men of letters as candidates for the Nobel Prize
in Literature. Several among them presented such great and
unusual qualities that it has been very difficult to weigh their
respective merits. In giving this year's award to Maurice
Maeterlinck, who has been proposed and seriously considered
several times before, the Swedish Academy has been determined
first by the profound originality and singularity of his talent
as a writer, so different from the usual forms of literature. The
idealistic character of this talent is elevated to a rare
spirituality and mysteriously causes delicate and secret strings
to vibrate in us. He is certainly not of a shallow nature, this
unusual man, who has not yet reached the age of fifty and who, as
an author, follows his own quite personal voice and possesses the
marvellous faculty of being at once mystical, profound, and
popular through the charm of his expression. While reading him
one sometimes recalls the words of Sophocles, «Man is only a
trivial shadow», or the words of Calderon that life is a
dream; and yet Maeterlinck knows how to render the fine nuances
of our moral life with the force of a visionary. What in ordinary
circumstances dwells in us latently and belongs to the secret
depths of our being, he calls up with the tap of a wand, and we
acknowledge that he has evoked features of our most intimate
being, which ordinarily remains hidden in a mysterious twilight.
He does it without affectation and mannerisms and mostly with an
unfailing sureness and classical refinement, although action and
scenery are often vague - like a Chinese shadow show - and in
keeping with the great subtlety of his poetry. Legendary and
fantastic as the narration may be, the dialogue is pointed. With
the sounds of muted music, the poet introduces us to unsuspected
regions of our inner being, and we feel with Goethe that
«Alles Vergängliche/Ist nur ein Gleichnis». We
have the foreboding that our true home is far away, well beyond
the limits of our earthly experiences. We hardly ever pass beyond
this foreboding with Maeterlinck, although his poetry opens for
us glimpses of inaccessible distances.
Maurice Maeterlinck was born in 1862 at Ghent. His family appears
to have been well-to-do. He was educated at the Jesuit college of
Saint-Barbe. He did not like it, but this conventional school
probably influenced his intellectual development very strongly by
orienting him toward mysticism. After finishing school and
passing the baccalaureate, Maeterlinck followed the wishes of his
parents, read law, and established himself in Ghent as a lawyer.
But he succeeded, according to his biographer Gerard Harry, only
in demonstrating brilliantly his ineptitude for the legal career,
having the «happy defects» that render a man absolutely
unfit for the pettifogging quarrels and public counsel's speeches
in the law court. He was attracted by literature, and this
attraction increased during a stay in Paris where he became
acquainted with a number of writers, one of whom, Villiers de
l'Isle Adam, apparently had a great influence on him. Paris
fascinated Maurice Maeterlinck so much that he established
himself there in 1896. Nonetheless, the great metropolis did not
really suit this solitary contemplative mind as a permanent place
to live. He goes there, from time to time, to deal with his
editors, but in the summer he likes to live at Saint-Wandrille,
an old Norman abbey which he bought and saved from imminent
vandalism. In the winter he seeks refuge in the mild climate of
the town of Grasse, known for its flowers.
The first work published by Maurice Maeterlinck was a slim
collection of verses entitled Serres chaudes (1889)
[Ardent Talons]. These poems appear more tormented than one would
have expected from his calmly meditative disposition. The same
year (1889) he published a dramatic fantasy, La Princesse
Maleine. It is sombre, terrifying, and deliberately
monotonous due to numerous repetitions intended to give an
impression of duration; but a delightful fairy-tale charm reigns
in this little drama, which is written with a vigour one would
not have suspected in the author of the Serres chaudes. It
is in any case an important work of art. La Princesse
Maleine was enthusiastically praised by Octave Mirbeau in
Le Figaro, and from that day on Maurice Maeterlinck was no
longer unknown. Later on, Maeterlinck wrote a whole series of
dramatic compositions. Most unfold in eras that we could not
determine and in places not to be found on any map. The scene is
usually a fairy castle with underground passages, a park with
lovely shady places, or a lighthouse with the sea in the
distance. In these melancholy regions figures often move veiled
like the idea itself. In several of his most perfect scenic
works, Maurice Maeterlinck is a symbolist and an agnostic; but
one should not conclude that he is a materialist. With the
instinct and imagination of the poet he feels that man does not
belong solely to the tangible world, and he expressly says that
poetry does not satisfy if it does not make us perceive a
reflection of the more profound and secret reality that is the
source of phenomena. Sometimes this background appears to him in
an obscure and misty fashion like an ensemble of occult powers of
which men are easily the victims, and he then attributes to the
occult force a fatal omnipotence that destroys our freedom. But
in several dramatic works he has mitigated this conception; he
has given more room to hope and to mixed mystic influences, less
to reality. The main idea which always dominates, especially in
his best works, is that the spiritual, real, intimate, and
profound life of man, which is manifested precisely in his most
spontaneous acts, must be sought in the realms beyond thought and
discursive reason. It is these acts which Maeterlinck excels in
representing with the almost somnambulant imaginative power and
dreaming spirit of a visionary but with the precision of a
perfect artist. At the same time the expression is stylized; the
simplification of the technique is pushed as far as possible
without harming the understanding of the drama.
A more pronounced deism would have had a beneficial influence on
his dramas because it would have made them less similar to shadow
plays; but one should not disparage the creations of his genius.
Like Spinoza and Hegel, who were great thinkers though not
deists, Maeterlinck is a very great poet although his conception
of things and of life is not that of a deist. He does not deny
anything: he simply finds the principle of existence hidden in
the shadows. Besides, is not agnosticism in some degree
excusable, since no human reason could ever formulate an exact
notion of the origin of existence which in many aspects is
accessible only to intuition and to faith? And if Maurice
Maeterlinck's characters are sometimes creatures of dreams, they
are still very human, for Shakespeare was not wrong in
stating:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Besides, Maeterlinck is in no way a
polemist; in almost all his works there breathes a sweet,
sometimes melancholy soul, so that in poetic beauty he excels
many writers whose conception of the world rests perhaps more on
the concept of personality. Maurice Maeterlinck is evidently a
man who has felt and thought profoundly. Homage must be rendered
to his sincere thirst for truth, and it must be remembered that
there exist for him a law and an inner right which invariably
command and direct man in the midst of a world where so many
things seem to encourage injustice. If Maurice Maeterlinck, who
has passed through so many stages of inner development, sometimes
speaks of «gravitation» as the power that rules the
world, and apparently wants to substitute it for religion, one
would hardly be wrong (considering his symbolism) in taking the
word «gravitation» as a symbolic expression of that law
of religio-ethical gravity to which, if I may say so, all are
obedient.
There is no time to list all of Maeterlinck's works; however, it
seems right to me on this solemn occasion to recall very briefly
the most characteristic ones.
The pitiless, mysterious power of death has rarely been rendered
in more poignant fashion than in Maeterlinck's little piece,
L'Intruse (1890) [The Intruder ]. Among all those
who surround the sick mother and who hope for her recovery, only
the old blind grandfather notices furtive and sliding steps in
the garden where the cyprus trees are beginning to rustle and
where the nightingale is hushed; he feels a cold breeze pass, he
hears a scythe being whetted, he reckons that someone invisible
to the others has entered to sit in their circle. On the stroke
of midnight there is a noise as if someone had suddenly stood up
and gone away; at the same instant the sick one dies. The guest
no one can escape has passed there. The portent is described with
great force and subtlety. The short play Les Aveugles
(1890) [The Blind ], which shows the same foreboding of
disaster, is perhaps even more melancholy. The sightless have
followed their guide, an old sick priest; and there in the middle
of the forest they believe they have lost him. In reality he is
in the middle of them but he is dead. Little by little they
realize his death. How will they now find their refuge?
In Pelléas et Mélisande (1892) and Alladine
et Palomides (1894) we find in different variants the fatal
power of love which Maeterlinck describes with a fantastic
imagination - that love which, fettered by other bonds or by
external circumstances, neither could nor should attain a happy
ending, but which is crushed by a fatality against which human
strength breaks.
The most inspired of Maeterlinck's dramas is unquestionably his
Aglavaine et Sélysette (1896), one of the purest
jewels in world literature. This play is deeply melancholic but
contains poetic treasures. Méléandre, who has married
the sweet, timid Sélysette, begins to love the noble
Aglavaine, a love Aglavaine returns. Theirs is a pure love which
raises them above the common lot. But Sélysette suffers from
not possessing Méléandre's heart alone. The tender
creature, full of abnegation, resolves to sacrifice herself for
the happiness of her husband and Aglavaine. She leans so far out
of the embrasures of an old turret that a crumbling part of the
wall collapses and Sélysette falls, not into the sea as she
had thought, but onto the sand of the beach. Wounded, she is
carried to the house, and even on the verge of death she is
unselfish; wishing to spare them remorse, she tries to pretend to
Méléandre and Aglavaine that her fall from the tower
was accidental. In this drama in which delicately shaded states
of soul abound, all the characters are noble and generous. Both
Aglavaine and Méléandre feel that a happiness that is
purchased at the price of another's suffering is fugitive and
vain and, if they do not feel less irresistibly drawn to one
another, they do not by any means yield to low desires but to a
powerful, spiritualized attraction. They struggle against fate, a
struggle all the more painful as they well suspect that fraternal
love will ultimately be impossible and that everything will lead
them to the complete union which they flee as a sin. These words
of Aglavaine are beautiful: «If somebody must suffer, it
should be us. There are a thousand duties, but I think one is
rarely mistaken in the attempt to relieve a weaker creature by
taking its suffering upon oneself» This play has a charm
which ranks it among the most beautiful poetic creations of the
century.
Aglavaine et Sélysette, Maeterlinck's masterpiece,
appeared in 1896. In 1902 the author published the drama of
Monna Vanna, known and played even here in Sweden. The
action takes place against the historical background of the
Renaissance in Italy; its composition is very clear-cut and
entirely free from that kind of twilight which generally
characterizes Maeterlink's art. The dramatic idea of duty which
sustains the action has often been disputed, with very diverse
opinions. The play is certainly bold and of great psychological
interest, but Maeterlinck is perhaps more himself in the short,
delicately symbolic plays in which the great, flooding light of
day does not hold sway but which open up marvellous perspectives
for the most intimate presentiments of the human heart.
Maurice Maeterlinck, a many-sided writer, has written works of a
philosophical nature, if not purely philosophical works. Such,
for example, is Le Trésor des humbles (1896) [The
Treasure of the Humble] which, among other interesting
studies, contains inspired pages about the mystic Ruysbrock and
about the spiritual life. Maeterlinck's idealism finds a happy
expression here in his words on the most exalted poetry, which,
he says, aims at keeping open the principal paths which lead from
the visible to the invisible world. In many places in this book
appears the thought mentioned earlier that there is behind our
visible self another self which is our true being. This idea may
appear mystical to the empiricists; at bottom it is quite as
plausible as Kant's doctrine of intelligibility which, after all,
is the source of the empirical character. In Le Temple
enseveli (1902) [The Buried Temple] is found the idea
of an invisible personality, the basis of the visible and earthly
personality. If, however, Maeterlinck is accused of fatalism, one
should remember the glowing optimism of his book La Sagesse et
la destinée (1893) [Wisdom and Destiny], in which
man's fate is said to reside in himself and to depend on the way
in which he exercises his will. The downfall of great historical
personages is represented here as caused by their own faults or
originating from the fact that they lost their old confidence in
themselves through errors, and indeed through evil actions, and
thereby lost the strength to combat perils victoriously.
In 1900 La Vie des abeilles [The Life of the Bee]
appeared. This book had strong repercussions. Although Maurice
Maeterlinck is an enthusiastic beekeeper and thoroughly familiar
with the life of the bees, he did not intend to write a
scientific treatise. His book is not an abstract of natural
history but an exuberantly poetic work abounding in reflections,
the sum total of which is almost a declaration of incompetence.
It is useless, the author seems to say, to inquire if the strange
cooperation among the bees, their apportionment of work, and
their social life are the product of a reasoning mind. It matters
little whether the term «instinct» or the term
«intelligence» is used, for they are but ways of
revealing our ignorance in the matter. What we call instinct
among the bees is perhaps of a cosmic nature, the emanation of a
universal soul. One immediately thinks of Virgil's immortal
description of the bees in which he says that a thinker
attributes to them a share of divina mens, the divine
thought, the divine spirit.
L'Intelligence des fleurs (1907) [The Intelligence of
Flowers], another of Maeterlinck's works, is interesting for
its bold representation of plants as having wisdom and
self-interest. Here one finds the same richness of poetic
imagination and, occasionally, profound reflections.
With his creative force, which never runs dry, Maeterlinck
composed in 1903 the fascinating dramatic phantasy
Joyzelle, which shows, through difficult trials and sombre
episodes, the triumph of love faithful to its own nature.
Marie Magdeleine (1909) represents the change in the soul
of the repentant sinner and her victory over a temptation that
was all the stronger as it touched precisely the noblest side of
her nature and urged her to save the Messiah at the sacrifice of
herself and of the new moral life which he himself had created in
her; that is to say, at the sacrifice of the vital work of the
Messiah. Finally, we admire the spectacle L'Oiseau bleu
(1909) [The Blue Bird], a profound fairy tale which
sparkles with the poetry of childhood, even if it seems to
include too much reflection to have quite enough naive
spontaneity. Alas! the blue bird of happiness exists only beyond
the limits of this perishable world, but those who have pure
hearts will never seek it in vain, for their emotional lives and
their imaginations will enrich them and purify them in their
journey across the countries of the land of dreams.
And so we return to the place we started from, the land of
dreams. Perhaps we would not be wrong in saying that for Maurice
Maeterlinck, all reality in time and space, even when it is not a
product of the imagination, always carries a veil woven of
dreams. Under this veil is hidden the real truth of existence,
and when the veil is lifted someday, the essence of things will
be discovered.
I have tried to give an account of Maeterlinck's conception of
life, using his works as a guide. One cannot doubt the beauty and
nobility of this conception; moreover, it is presented in the
original form of a poetry that is strange and sometimes bizarre
but always inspired.
Maurice Maeterlinck belongs to the chosen ones in the field of
poetry. Tastes may change, but the charm of Aglavaine et
Sélysette will remain. Today Sweden, the land of sagas
and folk songs, offers her world prize to the poet who has made
us perceive the tender vibrations of the melody that is hidden in
the hearts of men.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1911
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