ter-past eleven.

Real tragedies, whether of the classic, modern or romantic type, end in
death or deaths. Obviously there is no other solution in most cases.
Perhaps in real life Hamlet would have remained letting I dare not wait
upon I would until his mother and stepfather died in the ordinary course
of nature; without any amazing interposition of Providence, Romeo and
Juliet might have healed the quarrel between their hostile houses and
established a large family of little Montague-Capulets, and so on; but
one accepts the proposition that such outcomes would be contrary to the
essential laws of the existence of such plays.

Difficulties grow when we come to comedy that seeks to represent,
however timidly, the life of real human beings. The bold dramatists who
endeavour to represent a slice of life--Jean Jullien invented the
phrase--find more difficulty in the beginning of their plays than the
conventional writer: to bring them to anything like a full stop is a
very rare achievement. A great many end at a comma, a semi-colon is
noteworthy, a colon superb, and very often one has a mere mark of
interrogation at the last fall of the curtain. Of course a full stop
sometimes is achieved, for instance in the case of _The Second Mrs
Tanqueray_; but _Iris_ ends with something very much like a comma, and
_The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith_ can scarcely boast of more than a colon.

Ibsen has not always been successful in coming to his conclusions. In a
sense _A Doll's House_ might be called a failure: the case is one of the
note of interrogation, and the audience is left in a mood of
dissatisfaction, since, being deeply interested in the character of
Nora, it is intensely curious to know what she will do next. Homes have
been broken up and friendships wrecked by discussion upon the question,
though it must be admitted that most of the quarrels concerning the play
have been upon the irrelevant question whether the child-wife ought to
have left her husband and children. One half of the disputants fail to
see that the fact that she does abandon them is the catastrophe and not
the conclusion of the comedy. In _An Enemy of Society_ and _A Lady from
the Sea_ the author has been remarkably adroit in getting to a definite
conclusion.

On the other hand, one sees that even such a master of his craft was
forced to call death to his aid in many cases; for instance, _Hedda
Gabler_, _The Master-Builder_, _Rosmersholm_, _John Gabriel Borkmann_,