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."

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,