This analysis of Ibsen’s practice points to the fact—­for such I believe it to be—­that what the modern playwright has chiefly to guard against is the temptation to overdo suicide as a means of cutting the dramatic knot.  In France and Germany there is another temptation, that of the duel;[3] but in Anglo-Saxon countries it scarcely presents itself.  Death, other than self-inflicted, is much less tempting, and less apt to be resorted to in and out of season.  The heroine, whether virtuous or erring, who dies of consumption, has gone greatly out of vogue.  A broken heart is no longer held to be necessarily fatal.  The veriest tyro realizes that death by crude accident is inadmissible as a determining factor in serious drama; and murder is practically (though not absolutely) relegated to the melodramatic domain.  The one urgent question, then, is that of the artistic use and abuse of suicide.

The principle is pretty plain, I think, that it ought to be the artist’s, as it is the man’s, last resort.  We know that, in most civilized countries, suicide is greatly on the increase.  It cannot be called an infrequent incident in daily life.  It is certain, too, that the motives impelling to it are apt to be of a dramatic nature, and therefore suited to the playwright’s purposes.  But it is, on the other hand, such a crude and unreasoning means of exit from the tangle of existence that a playwright of delicate instincts will certainly employ it only under the strongest compulsion from his artistic conscience.

Sir Arthur Pinero has three suicides on his record, though one of them was, so to speak, nipped in the bud.  In The Profligate, as presented on the stage, Dunstan Renshaw changed his mind before draining the fatal goblet; and in this case the stage version was surely the right one.  The suicide, to which the author still clings in the printed text, practically dates the play as belonging to the above-mentioned period of rebellion against the conventional “happy ending,” when the ambitious British dramatist felt that honour required him to kill his man on the smallest provocation.[4] Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since then, and the disproportion between such a play and such a catastrophe is now apparent to everyone.  It is not that we judge Renshaw’s delinquencies to be over-punished by death—­that is not the question.  The fact is simply that the characters are not large enough, true enough, living enough—­that the play does not probe deep enough into human experience—­to make the august intervention of death seem other than an incongruity.  The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has been much criticized, is a very different matter.  Inevitable it cannot be called:  if the play had been written within the past ten years, Sir Arthur would very likely have contrived to do without it.  But it is, in itself, probable enough:  both the good and the bad in Paula’s character might easily make her feel that only the dregs of life