The fact that tragedy has from of old been recognized as a higher form than comedy is partly due, no doubt, to the tragic poet’s traditional right to round off a human destiny in death.  “Call no man happy till his life be ended,” said Sophocles, quoting from an earlier sage; and it needed no profundity of wisdom to recognize in the “happy ending” of comedy a conventional, ephemeral thing.  But when, after all the peripeties of life, the hero “home has gone and ta’en his wages,” we feel that, at any rate, we have looked destiny squarely in the face, without evasion or subterfuge.  Perhaps the true justification of tragedy as a form of art is that, after this experience, we should feel life to be, not less worth living, but greater and more significant than before.

This is no place, however, for a discussion of the aesthetic basis of tragedy in general.[1] What is here required, from the point of view of craftsmanship, is not so much a glorification of the tragic ending, as a warning against its facile misuse.  A very great play may, and often must, end in death; but you cannot make a play great by simply killing off your protagonist.  Death is, after all, a very inexpensive means of avoiding anticlimax.  Tension, as we saw, is symbolized in the sword of Damocles; and it can always be maintained, in a mechanical way, by letting your hero play about with a revolver, or placing an overdose of chloral well within your heroine’s reach.  At the time when the English drama was awaking from the lethargy of the ’seventies, an idea got abroad that a non-sanguinary ending was always and necessarily inartistic, and that a self-respecting playwright must at all hazards kill somebody before dropping his curtain.  This was an extravagant reaction against the purely commercial principle that the public would not, on any terms, accept a tragic ending.  As a matter of fact, the mortality was not very great; for managers were resolute in the old belief, and few dramatists had the courage or authority to stand up against them.  But I have often heard playwrights lamenting their inability to massacre the luckless children of their fancy, who, nine times out of ten, had done nothing to incur such a doom.  The real trouble was that death seemed to be the only method of avoiding anticlimax.

It is a very sound rule that, before you determine to write a tragedy, you should make sure that you have a really tragic theme:  that you can place your hero at such odds with life that reconciliation, or mere endurance, would be morally base or psychologically improbable.  Moreover, you must strike deep into character before you are justified in passing capital sentence on your personages.  Death is a disproportionate close for a commonplace and superficially-studied life.  It is true that quite commonplace people do die; indeed, they preponderate in the bills of mortality; but death on the stage confers a sort of distinction which ought not to be accorded without due and sufficient cause.  To one god in particular we may apply the Horatian maxim, “Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus.”