Another theme which ought to be relegated to the theatrical lumber-room is that of patient, inveterate revenge.  This form of vindictiveness is, from a dramatic point of view, an outworn passion.  It is too obviously irrational and anti-social to pass muster in modern costume.  The actual vendetta may possibly survive in some semi-barbarous regions, and Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (as in Mark Twain’s immortal romance) may still be shooting each other at sight.  But these things are relics of the past; they do not belong to the normal, typical life of our time.  It is useless to say that human nature is the same in all ages.  That is one of the facile axioms of psychological incompetence.  Far be it from me to deny that malice, hatred, spite, and the spirit of retaliation are, and will be until the millennium, among the most active forces in human nature.  But most people are coming to recognize that life is too short for deliberate, elaborate, cold-drawn revenge.  They will hit back when they conveniently can; they will cherish for half a lifetime a passive, an obstructive, ill-will; they will even await for years an opportunity of “getting their knife into” an enemy.  But they have grown chary of “cutting off their nose to spite their face”; they will very rarely sacrifice their own comfort in life to the mere joy of protracted, elaborate reprisals.  Vitriol and the revolver—­an outburst of rage, culminating in a “short, sharp shock”—­these belong, if you will, to modern life.  But long-drawn, unhasting, unresting machination, with no end in view beyond an ultimate unmasking, a turn of the tables—­in a word, a strong situation—­this, I take it, belongs to a phase of existence more leisurely than ours.  There is no room in our crowded century for such large and sustained passions.  One could mention plays—­but they are happily forgotten—­in which retribution was delayed for some thirty or forty years, during which the unconscious object of it enjoyed a happy and prosperous existence.  These, no doubt, are extreme instances; but cold-storage revenge, as a whole, ought to be as rare on the stage as it is in real life.  The serious playwright will do well to leave it to the melodramatists.

A third theme to be handled with the greatest caution, if at all, is that of heroic self-sacrifice.  Not that self-sacrifice, like revenge, is an outworn passion.  It still rages in daily life; but no audience of average intelligence will to-day accept it with the uncritical admiration which it used to excite in the sentimental dramas of last century.  Even then—­even in 1869—­Meilhac and Halevy, in their ever-memorable Froufrou, showed what disasters often result from it; but it retained its prestige with the average playwright—­and with some who were above the average—­for many a day after that.  I can recall a play, by a living English author, in which a Colonel in the Indian Army pleaded guilty to a damning charge of cowardice rather than allow a lady whom he chivalrously