The Belgian symbolist dramatist whom Steiner presented in 1898 as a religious nature rather than an artist, a prophet of the soul's coming awakening.
Maurice Maeterlinck in Anthroposophy is the Belgian symbolist dramatist (1862-1949) whom Rudolf Steiner presented to the Berlin Dramatic Society on 23 January 1898 as primarily a religious nature rather than an artist. In the address collected in Collected Essays on Drama 1889-1900 (GA 29), Steiner reads Maeterlinck as a prophet of the soul's approaching awakening: a poet who believes souls will one day communicate without the mediation of the senses and the intellect, and whose blind grandfather in L'Intruse perceives the approach of death that the seeing around the table cannot. Steiner places him in kinship with Jacob Boehme, who recognized the mystery of the world in a pewter bowl, and with the mystics generally. For Steiner the artistic means are almost childlike; the value lies in the religious feeling for the great unknown that speaks through the smallest things. Modern theatre scholarship treats his static drama as a forerunner of Beckett.
Maurice Maeterlinck entered Steiner's Berlin circle as the playwright of silence. Introducing L'Intruse in January 1898, Steiner told his audience that ordinary artistic judgment must fall quiet before this work, because a prophet speaks here, not a dramatist of jealous husbands and wounded honor. The essay preserved in GA 29 remains Steiner's clearest portrait of a contemporary writer as a herald of the soul.
In Steiner's Own Words
Maeterlinck is not primarily an artist. The artistic means he uses are imperfect, almost childlike. Those who long for perfect art cannot derive any satisfaction from Maeterlinck's poetry. He has a religious nature. He believes that there are infinite depths to the human soul and that man can descend into these infinite depths. Then he finds within himself powers that enable him to embrace the great unknown, which all ages have worshipped as a divine. Whoever awakens this soul force within himself, the most mundane things in life take on a mysterious, divine meaning. As a poet, Maeterlinck only wants to express what he sees as a religious man; the beauty of external form is unimportant to him, he wants his poems to reveal the marvelous and sublime in the world, the great, unknown powers that are hidden in things.
What it Means Today
A century after Steiner's Berlin address, academic theatre history caught up with his instinct. Patrick McGuinness, in Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford University Press, 2000), argues that Maeterlinck's early one-act plays invented what the playwright himself called static drama: theatre in which nothing external happens, an old man waits at a table, a family listens, and the tension lives entirely in what cannot be seen. McGuinness traces the discovery forward into the twentieth century, where the waiting stages of Beckett and the interior theatre of the symbolists' heirs carry the experiment on. What the Oxford study describes in dramaturgical terms, Steiner had described in 1898 in religious ones: the blind grandfather of L'Intruse perceives the intruder, death itself, precisely because his senses no longer stand between his soul and the world. Where McGuinness sees a technique, Steiner saw a faculty.
Thalira synthesis: Maeterlinck marks the point in Steiner's early Berlin years where dramatic criticism becomes soul-science in embryo, for the claim that souls will one day meet without the mediation of senses and intellect is the same claim Steiner later develops as Imagination and Inspiration in his mature accounts of supersensible knowledge.
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