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 adored to learn that it was her husband who was the
real coward and traitor. He knew that the lady detested her husband; he
knew that they had no children to suffer by the husband's disgrace; he
knew that there was a quite probable way by which he might have cleared
his own character without casting any imputation on the other man. But
in a sheer frenzy of self-sacrifice he blasted his own career, and
thereby inflicted far greater pain upon the woman he loved than if he
had told the truth or suffered it to be told. And twenty years
afterwards, when the villain was dead, the hero still resolutely refused
to clear his own character, lest the villain's widow should learn the
truth about her wholly unlamented husband. This was an extravagant and
childish case; but the superstition of heroic self-sacrifice still
lingers in certain quarters, and cannot be too soon eradicated. I do not
mean, of course, that self-sacrifice is never admirable, but only that
it can no longer be accepted as a thing inherently noble, apart from its
circumstances and its consequences. An excellent play might be written
with the express design of placing the ethics of self-sacrifice in their
true light. Perhaps the upshot might be the recognition of the simple
principle that it is immoral to make a sacrifice which the person
supposed to benefit by it has no right to accept.

Another motive against which it is perhaps not quite superfluous to warn
the aspiring playwright is the "voix du sang." It is only a few years
since this miraculous voice was heard speaking loud and long in His
Majesty's Theatre, London, and in a play by a no less modern-minded
author than the late Clyde Fitch. It was called _The Last of the
Dandies_,[3] and its hero was Count D'Orsay. At a given moment, D'Orsay
learned that a young man known as Lord Raoul Ardale was in reality his
son. Instantly the man of the world, the squire of dames, went off into
a deliquium of tender emotion. For "my bo-o-oy" he would do anything and
everything. He would go down to Crockford's and win a pot of money to
pay "my boy's" debts--Fortune could not but be kind to a doting parent.
In the beautiful simplicity of his soul, he looked forward with eager
delight to telling Raoul that the mo