One of the strongest pieces of imaginative writing for children that the past decade has produced and one of the most delicate and beautiful of all times, is “The Blue Bird,” by Maurice Maeterlinck, written as a play, and very successfully produced on the stage.
Georgette Leblanc (Madame Maurice Maeterlinck), has rendered this play in story form for children, under the title “The Children's Blue Bird,” and in this form it has now been carefully edited and arranged for schools.
Maurice Maeterlinck was born in Ghent, Belgium, August 29, 1862. Although trained for the practice of the law and moderately successful in it, he very early became dissatisfied with the prospect of a career at the bar. In 1887, the young man moved to Paris and turned his attention to writing. Shortly after, at the death of his father, Maeterlinck returned to Belgium where he has since resided most of the time. His career as an author practically began in 1889, when he published two plays. At this time he was quite unknown, except to a small circle, but soon, because of his remarkable originality, we find him being called “The Belgian Shakespeare,” and his reputation firmly established.
Amidst his Belgian roses he continued to work and dream, and upon his youthful dreams he built his plays. They are all shadowy, brief transcripts of emotion, and illustrate beautifully his unity of purpose, of mood and of thought. Whether in philosophy, drama or poetry, Maeterlinck is exclusively occupied in revealing or indicating the mystery which lies only just out of sight beneath the ordinary life. In order to produce this effect of the mysterious he aims at extreme simplicity of style and a very realistic symbolism. He allows life itself to astonish us by its strangeness, by its inexplicable elements. Many of his plays are really pathetic records of unseen emotions.
