o concern himself with the old material, lies or
misunderstandings, the irony of things happening as they do; but will
have fierce hatreds, and a kind of incipient madness in things. In _When
we Dead Awaken_ all the people are quite consciously insane, and act a
kind of charade with perfectly solemn faces and a visible effort to look
their parts.

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._