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._

From the time when, in _A Doll's House_, Ibsen's puppets came to life,
they have refused ever since to be put back into their boxes. The
manager may play what tricks with them he pleases, but he cannot get
them back into their boxes. They are alive, and they live with a weird,
spectacular, but irrevocable life. But, after the last play of all, the
dramatic epilogue, _When we Dead Awaken_, the puppets have gone back
into their boxes. Now they have come to obey the manager, and to make
mysterious gestures which they do not understand, and to speak in images
and take them for literal truths. Even their spectral life has gone out
of them; they are rigid now, and only the strings set them dancing. The
puppets had come to life, they had lived the actual life of the earth;
and then a desire of the impossible, the desire of a life rarefied
beyond human limits, took their human life from them, and they were
puppets again. The epilogue to the plays is the apostasy of the man of
science, and, as with all apostates, his new faith is not a vital thing;
the poet was not really there to reawaken.

Before Ibsen the drama was a part of poetry; Ibsen has made it prose.
All drama up to Ibsen had been romantic; Ibsen made it science. Until
Ibsen no playwright had ever tried to imitate life on the stage, or
even, as Ibsen does, to interpret it critically. The desire of every
dramatist had been to create over again a more abundant life, and to
create it through poetry or through humour; through some form, that is,
of the imagination. There was a time when Ibsen too would have made
poetry of the drama; there was a time when verse seemed to him the only
adequate form in which drama could be written. But his power to work in
poetry was not equ