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 hesitatio