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_, and _When we Dead awaken_. In nearly all of these the death is not accidental but inevitable. _The Wild Duck_ has a tragic death in it which is by no means conclusive; indeed, it is a horrible humour of the work that the last idea of all is the suggestion of a continuing tragic comedy.