rebell'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.

The suicide which brings to a close Mr. Clyde Fitch's very able play,
_The Climbers_, stands on a somewhat different level. Here it is not the
protagonist who makes away with himself, nor is his destiny the main
theme of the play. Mr. Fitch has painted a broad social picture, in
which, if there is any concentration of interest, it is upon Blanche and
Warden. Sterling's suicide, then, though it does in fact cut the chief
knot of the play, is to be regarded rather as a characteristic and
probable incident of a certain phase of life, than as the culmination of
a spiritual tragedy. It has not the artistic significance, either good
or bad, that it would have if the character and destiny of Sterling were
our main concernment.

* * * * *

The happy playwright, one may say, is he whose theme does not force upon
him either a sanguinary or a tame last act, but enables him, without
troubling the coroner, to sustain and increase the tension up to the
very close. Such themes are not too common, but they do occur. Dumas
found one in _Denise_, and another in _Francillon_, where the famous "Il
en a menti!" comes within two minutes of the fall of the curtain. In
_Heimat_ (Magda) and in