In German aesthetic theory, the conception tragische Schuld—­“tragic guilt”—­plays a large part.  It descends, no doubt, from the Aristotelian maxim that a tragic hero must neither be too good nor too bad; but it also belongs to a moralizing conception, which tacitly or explicitly assumes that the dramatist’s aim ought to be “to justify the ways of God to man.”  In these days we look at drama more objectively, and do not insist on deciding in what degree a man has deserved death, if only we feel that he has necessarily or probably incurred it.  But in order that we may be satisfied of this, we must know him intimately and feel with him intensely.  We must, in other words, believe that he dies because he cannot live, and not merely to suit the playwright’s convenience and help him to an effective “curtain.”

As we review the series of Ibsen’s modern plays, we cannot but feel that, though he did not shrink from death, he never employed it, except perhaps in his last melancholy effort, as a mere way of escape from a difficulty.  In five out of his thirteen modern plays, no one dies at all.[2] One might even say six:  for Oswald, in Ghosts, may live for years; but I hold it as only fair to count the death of his mind as more than equivalent to bodily death.  Solness, on the plane of literal fact, dies by an accident; on the plane of symbolic interpretation, he dies of the over-great demands which Hilda makes upon his “sickly conscience.”  Little Eyolf’s death can also be regarded from a symbolic point of view; but there is no substantial reason to think of it otherwise than as an accident.  John Gabriel Borkman dies of heart seizure, resulting from sudden exposure to extreme cold.  In the case of Solness and Borkman, death is a quite natural and probable result of the antecedent conditions; and in the case of Eyolf, it is not a way out of the action, but rather the way into it.  There remain the three cases of suicide:  Rebecca and Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, and Hedvig.  I have already, in Chapter XIX, shown how the death of Rebecca was the inevitable outcome of the situation—­the one conclusive proof of her “ennoblement”—­and how it was almost equally inevitable that Rosmer should accompany her to her end.  Hedda Gabler was constitutionally fated to suicide:  a woman of low vitality, overmastering egoism, and acute supersensitiveness, placed in a predicament which left her nothing to expect from life but tedium and humiliation.  The one case left—­that of Hedvig—­is the only one in which Ibsen can possibly be accused of wanton bloodshed.  Bjoernson, in a very moving passage in his novel, The Paths of God, did actually, though indirectly, make that accusation.  Certainly, there is no more heartrending incident in fiction; and certainly it is a thing that only consummate genius can justify.  Ibsen happened to possess that genius, and I am not far from agreeing with those who hold The Wild Duck to be his greatest work.  But for playwrights who are tempted to seek for effects of pathos by similar means, one may without hesitation lay down this maxim:  Be sure you are an Ibsen before you kill your Hedvig.