n lay down
this maxim: Be sure you are an Ibsen before you kill your Hedvig.

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 t