If it were as easy to write a good last act as a good first act, we should be able to reckon three masterpieces for every one that we can name at present.  The reason why the last act should offer special difficulties is not far to seek.  We have agreed to regard a play as essentially a crisis in the lives of one or more persons; and we all know that crises are much more apt to have a definite beginning than a definite end.  We can almost always put our finger upon the moment—­not, indeed, when the crisis began—­but when we clearly realized its presence or its imminence.  A chance meeting, the receipt of a letter or a telegram, a particular turn given to a certain conversation, even the mere emergence into consciousness of a previously latent feeling or thought, may mark quite definitely the moment of germination, so to speak, of a given crisis; and it is comparatively easy to dramatize such a moment.  But how few crises come to a definite or dramatic conclusion!  Nine times out of ten they end in some petty compromise, or do not end at all, but simply subside, like the waves of the sea when the storm has blown itself out.  It is the playwright’s chief difficulty to find a crisis with an ending which satisfies at once his artistic conscience and the requirements of dramatic effect.

And the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we approach to reality.  In the days when tragedy and comedy were cast in fixed, conventional moulds, the playwright’s task was much simpler.  It was thoroughly understood that a tragedy ended with one or more deaths, a comedy with one or more marriages; so that the question of a strong or a weak ending did not arise.  The end might be strongly or weakly led up to, but, in itself, it was fore-ordained.  Now that these moulds are broken, and both marriage and death may be said to have lost their prestige as the be-all and end-all of drama, the playwright’s range of choice is unlimited, and the difficulty of choosing has become infinitely greater.  Our comedies are much more apt to begin than to end with marriage, and death has come to be regarded as a rather cheap and conventional expedient for cutting the knots of life.

From the fact that “the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we approach to reality,” it further follows that the higher the form of drama, the more probable is it that the demands of truth and the requirements of dramatic effect may be found to clash.  In melodrama, the curtain falls of its own accord, so to speak, when the handcuffs are transferred from the hero’s wrists to the villain’s.  In an adventure-play, whether farcical or romantic, when the adventure is over the play is done.  The author’s task is merely to keep the interest of the adventure afoot until he is ready to drop his curtain.  This is a point of craftsmanship in which playwrights often fail; but it is a point of craftsmanship only.  In plays of a higher order, on the other hand, the difficulty is often inherent in the theme, and not