Much has been made of the Censor's refusal to license Monna Vanna; but I think there is more to be said for his action in this than in many other cases. In those countries where the play has succeeded, I cannot but suspect that the appeal it made was not wholly to the higher instincts of the public.
I am not sure what was the precise relationship of this play to the same author's Beau Brummel. D'Orsay's death scene was certainly a repetition of Brummel's.
The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to excellent advantage in Professor Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy.
It is true that in A Doll's House, Dr. Rank announces his approaching demise: but he does not actually die, nor is his fate an essential part of the action of the play.
The duel, even in countries whose customs permit of it, is essentially an inartistic end; for it leaves the catastrophe to be decided either by Chance or Providence--two equally inadmissible arbiters in modern drama. Alexandre Dumas fils, in his preface to Héloïse Paranquet, condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient. "Not to mention," he says, "the fact that it has been much over-done, we are bound to recognize that Providence, in a fit of absence of mind, sometimes suffers the rascal to kill the honest man. Let me recommend my young colleagues," he proceeds, "never to end a piece which pretends to reproduce a phase of real life, by an intervention of chance." The recommendation came rather oddly from the dramatist who, in L'Etrangère, had disposed of his "vibrion," the Duc de Septmonts, by making Clarkson kill him in a duel. Perhaps he did not reckon L'Etrangère as pretending to reproduce a phase of real life. A duel is, of course, perfectly admissible in a French or German play, simply as part of a picture of manners. Its stupid inconclusiveness may be the very point to be illustrated. It is only when represented as a moral arbitrament that it becomes an anachronism.