In these last plays, with their many splendid qualities, not bound together and concentrated as in _Ghosts_, we see the revenge of the imagination upon the realist, who has come to be no longer interested in the action of society upon the individual, but in the individual as a soul to be lost or saved. The man of science has discovered the soul, and does not altogether know what to do with it. He has settled its limits, set it to work in space and time, laid bare some of its secrets, shown its 'physical basis.' And now certain eccentricities in it begin to beckon to him; he would follow the soul into the darkness, but it is dark to him; he can but strain after it as it flutters. In the preface to the collected edition of his plays, published in 1901, Maeterlinck has pointed out, as one still standing at the cross-roads might point out to those who have followed him so far on his way, the great uncertainty in which the poet, the dramatist of to-day, finds himself, as what seems to be known or conjectured of 'the laws of nature' is forced upon him, making the old, magnificently dramatic opportunities of the ideas of fate, of eternal justice, no longer possible for him to use. _Le poete dramatique est oblige de faire descendre dans la vie reelle, dans la vie de tous les jours, l'idee qu'il se fait de l'inconnu. Il faut qu'il nous montre de quelle facon, sous quelle forme, dans quelles conditions, d'apres quelles lois, a quelle fin, agissent sur nos destinees les puissances superieures, les influences inintelligibles, les principes infinis, dont, en tant que poete, il est persuade que l'univers est plein. Et comme il est arrive a une heure ou loyalement il lui est a peu pres impossible d'admettre les anciennes, et ou celles qui les doivent remplacer ne sont pas encore determinees, n'ont pas encore de nom, il hesite, tatonne, et s'il veut rester absolument sincere, il n'ose plus se risquer hors de la realite immediate. Il se borne a etudier les sentiments humains dans leurs effets materiels et psychologiques._ So long as Ibsen does this, he achieves great and solid things; and in _Ghosts_ a scientific dogma, the law or theory of heredity, has for once taken the place of fate, and almost persuaded us that science, if it takes poetry from us, can restore to us a kind of poetry. But, as Maeterlinck has seen, as it is impossible not to see, _quand Ibsen, dans d'autres drames, essaie de relier a d'autres mysteres les gestes de ses hommes en mal de conscience exceptionelle ou de ses femmes hallucinees, il faut convenir que, si l'atmosphere qu'il parvient a creer est etrange et troublante, elle est rarement saine et respirable, parce qu'elle est rarement raisonnable et reele._