Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, to give him his full baptismal name, was born in Ghent on August 29, 1862. He was sent to the Jesuit College de Sainte-Barbe, the institution which another great Belgian, Emile Verhaeren, also attended. In 1885, Maeterlinck entered the University of Ghent to study law, but his practice of this profession was confined to a scant year or two. Maeterlinck's chief interest in his college years seems to have been the modern movement in Belgian literature. But the frequency of his visits to Paris increased in the years between 1886 and 1896, and finally in the latter year he settled there.
The following word picture supplements the photographs of Maeterlinck that are so frequently reproduced in our magazines and newspapers: "Maeterlinck is easily described: a man of about five feet nine in height, inclined to be stout; silver hair lends distinction to the large round head and boyish fresh complexion; blue-gray eyes, now thoughtful, now merry, and an unaffected off-hand manner. The features are not cut, left rather 'in the rough,' as sculptors say, even the heavy jaw and chin are drowned in fat; the forehead bulges and the eyes lose color in the light and seem hard; still, an interesting and attractive personality."
Maeterlinck's fame rests on his poetry and his essays no less than on his plays. _L'Intruse_, _The Intruder_, reprinted here, belongs to the early years of his activity as a playwright. It was printed in 1890 in a Belgian periodical, _La Wallonie_, and was acted for the first time a year later at Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art in Paris, at a performance given for the benefit of the poet, Paul Verlaine, and the painter, Paul Gauguin. Maeterlinck, though publishing volumes of essays from time to time, continues to write for the theatre.[52] In 1908 _The Blue Bird_, dramatizing the quest for Truth, one of the most popular of modern plays, was given for the first time in Moscow, to be followed ten years later by the première in New York of a sequel, _The Betrothal_, similarly dramatizing the search for Beauty. In 1910 came his translation of _Macbeth_ into French. A year later he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature.
[Footnote 52: For bibliography, see Jethro Bithell, _Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck_, London and New York, 1913.]