he characters are not large enough, true
enough, living enough--that the play does not probe deep enough into
human experience--to make the august intervention of death seem other
than an incongruity. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has
been much criticized, is a very different matter. Inevitable it cannot
be called: if the play had been written within the past ten years, Sir
Arthur would very likely have contrived to do without it. But it is, in
itself, probable enough: both the good and the bad in Paula's character
might easily make her feel that only the dregs of life remained to her,
and they not worth drinking. The worst one can say of it is that it sins
against the canon of practical convenience which enjoins on the prudent
dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap
to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, _Mid-Channel_,
is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made
a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of
heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal
satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has
intervened disastrously in the destinies of others. She is ill; her
nerves are all on edge; and she is, as it were, driven into a corner,
from which there is but one easy and rapid exit. Here is a case, if ever
there was one, where the end is imposed upon the artist by the whole
drift of his action. It may be said that chance plays a large part in
the concatenation of events--that, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had
not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not
have encountered the sudden temptation to which she yields. But this, as
I have tried to show above, is a baseless complaint. Chance is a
constant factor in life, now aiding, now thwarting, the will. To
eliminate it altogether would be to produce a most unlifelike world. It
is only when the playwright so manipulates and reduplicates chance as to
make it seem no longer chance, but purposeful arrangement, that we have
the right to protest.

Another instance of indisputably justified suicide may be found in Mr.
Galsworthy's _Justice_. The whole theme of the play is nothing but the
hounding to his end of a luckless youth, who has got on the wrong side
of the law, and finds all the forces of society leagued against him. In
Mr. Granville Barker's _Waste_, the artistic justification for T