remained to her, and they not worth drinking.  The worst one can say of it is that it sins against the canon of practical convenience which enjoins on the prudent dramatist strict economy in suicide.  The third case, Zoe Blundell’s leap to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, Mid-Channel, is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny.  Zoe has made a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life.  In spite of her goodness of heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source.  She has intervened disastrously in the destinies of others.  She is ill; her nerves are all on edge; and she is, as it were, driven into a corner, from which there is but one easy and rapid exit.  Here is a case, if ever there was one, where the end is imposed upon the artist by the whole drift of his action.  It may be said that chance plays a large part in the concatenation of events—­that, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not have encountered the sudden temptation to which she yields.  But this, as I have tried to show above, is a baseless complaint.  Chance is a constant factor in life, now aiding, now thwarting, the will.  To eliminate it altogether would be to produce a most unlifelike world.  It is only when the playwright so manipulates and reduplicates chance as to make it seem no longer chance, but purposeful arrangement, that we have the right to protest.

Another instance of indisputably justified suicide may be found in Mr. Galsworthy’s Justice.  The whole theme of the play is nothing but the hounding to his end of a luckless youth, who has got on the wrong side of the law, and finds all the forces of society leagued against him.  In Mr. Granville Barker’s Waste, the artistic justification for Trebell’s self-effacement is less clear and compulsive.  It is true that the play was suggested by the actual suicide, not of a politician, but of a soldier, who found his career ruined by some pitiful scandal.  But the author has made no attempt to reproduce the actual circumstances of that case; and even if he had reproduced the external circumstances, the psychological conditions would clearly have eluded him.  Thus the appeal to fact is, as it always must be, barred.  In two cases, indeed, much more closely analogous to Trebell’s than that which actually suggested it—­two famous cases in which a scandal cut short a brilliant political career—­suicide played no part in the catastrophe.  These real-life instances are, I repeat, irrelevant.  The only question is whether Mr. Barker has made us feel that a man of Trebell’s character would certainly not survive the paralysing of his energies; and that question every spectator must answer for himself.  I am far from answering it in the negative.  I merely suggest that the playwright may one day come across a theme for which there is no conceivable ending but suicide, and may wish that he had let Trebell live, lest people should come to regard him as a spendthrift of self-slaughter.