[10] One of his companions at that time was the writer Charles van Lerberghe, the poems and plays of whom went on to act as mutual influences on each other at the start of the Symbolist period.

He met members of the new Symbolist movement; Villiers de l'Isle Adam in particular, who would have a great influence on Maeterlinck's subsequent work.

[citation needed] Maeterlinck instantly became a public figure when his first play, Princess Maleine, received enthusiastic praise from Octave Mirbeau, the literary critic of Le Figaro, in August 1890.

In the following years he wrote a series of symbolist plays characterized by fatalism and mysticism, most importantly Intruder (1890), The Blind (1890) and Pelléas and Mélisande (1892).

His later plays, such as Marie-Victoire (1907) and Mary Magdalene (1910), provided with lead roles for Leblanc,[16] were notably inferior to their predecessors, and sometimes merely repeat an earlier formula.

After having been nominated by Carl Bildt, a member of the Swedish Academy, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911,[18] which served to lighten his spirits.

When Germany invaded Belgium in 1914, Maeterlinck wished to join the French Foreign Legion, but his application was denied due to his age.

Although his patriotism and his indifference to the harm he was doing to his standing in Germany do him credit, his reputation as a great sage who stood above current affairs was damaged by his political involvement.

While in Nice, he wrote The Mayor of Stilmonde (1918), which the American press quickly labeled a "Great War Play", and which became a British film in 1929.

After 1920, Maeterlinck ceased to contribute significantly to the theatre, but continued to produce essays on his favourite themes of occultism, ethics and natural history.

In 1926, Maeterlinck published La Vie des Termites (translated into English as The Life of Termites or The Life of White Ants), an entomological book that plagiarised the book The Soul of the (White) Ant, by the Afrikaner poet and scientist Eugène Marais,[22] David Bignell, in his inaugural address as Professor of Zoology at the University of London (2003), called Maeterlinck's work "a classic example of academic plagiarism".

Marais wrote in a letter to Dr. Winifred de Kock in London about Maeterlinck that The famous author had paid me the left-handed compliment of cribbing the most important part of my work ...

He clearly desired his readers to infer that he had arrived at certain of my theories (the result of ten years of hard labour in the veld) by his own unaided reason, although he admits that he never saw a termite in his life.

[26][25]Supported by a coterie of Afrikaner Nationalist friends, Marais sought justice through the South African press and attempted an international lawsuit.

All the same, he gained a measure of renown as the aggrieved party and as an Afrikaner researcher who had opened himself up to plagiarism because he published in Afrikaans out of nationalistic loyalty.

Marais brooded at the time of the scandal: "I wonder whether Maeterlinck blushes when he reads such things [critical acclaim], and whether he gives a thought to the injustice he does to the unknown Boer worker?

"[24] Maeterlinck's own words in The Life of Termites indicate that the possible discovery or accusation of plagiarism worried him: It would have been easy, in regard to every statement, to allow the text to bristle with footnotes and references.

Professor V. E. d'Assonville referred to Maeterlinck as "the Nobel Prize winner who had never seen a termite in his whole life and had never put a foot on the soil of Africa, least of all in the Waterberg".

Maeterlinck's posthumous reputation depends entirely[dubious – discuss] on his early plays (published between 1889 and 1894), which created a new style of dialogue, extremely lean and spare, where what is suggested is more important than what is said.

Maeterlinck believed that any actor, due to the hindrance of physical mannerisms and expressions, would inadequately portray the symbolic figures of his plays.

Guided by strings operated by a puppeteer, Maeterlinck considered marionettes an excellent representation of fate's complete control over man.

"[38] Maeterlinck's conception of modern tragedy rejects the intrigue and vivid external action of traditional drama in favour of a dramatisation of different aspects of life: Othello is admirably jealous.

I have grown to believe that an old man, seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside him; giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about his house, interpreting, without comprehending, the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice of the light, submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny—an old man, who conceives not that all the powers of this world, like so many heedful servants, are mingling and keeping vigil in his room, who suspects not that the very sun itself is supporting in space the little table against which he leans, or that every star in heaven and every fiber of the soul are directly concerned in the movement of an eyelid that closes, or a thought that springs to birth—I have grown to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or "the husband who avenges his honor.