to be overcome by any feat of craftsmanship.  If the dramatist were to eschew all crises that could not be made to resolve themselves with specifically dramatic crispness and decisiveness, he would very seriously limit the domain of his art.  Many excellent themes would be distorted and ruined by having an emphatic ending forced upon them.  It is surely much better that they should be brought to their natural unemphatic ending, than that they should be either falsified or ignored.

I suggest, then, that the modern tendency to take lightly Aristotle’s demand that the drama should have a “beginning, a middle, and an end,” arises from the nature of things, and implies, not necessarily, nor even probably, a decline in craftsmanship, but a new intimacy of relation to life, and a new sincerity of artistic conscience.  I suggest that the “weak last act,” of which critics so often complain, is a natural development from which authors ought not, on occasion, to shrink, and of which critics ought, on occasion, to recognize the necessity.  To elevate it into a system is absurd.  There is certainly no more reason for deliberately avoiding an emphatic ending than for mechanically forcing one.  But authors and critics alike should learn to distinguish the themes which do, from the themes which do not, call for a definite, trenchant solution, and should handle them, and judge them, in accordance with their inherent quality.

Let us, however, define our terms, and be sure that we know what we are talking about.  By an “unemphatic ending” I am far from meaning a makeshift ending, an ending carelessly and conventionally huddled up.  Nor do I mean an indecisive ending, where the curtain falls, as the saying goes, on a note of interrogation.  An unemphatic ending, as I understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much higher tension.  The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is what I am here pleading against.  It is sometimes assumed that the playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes of its culmination; but for such a hard-and-fast rule I can find no sufficient reason.  The consequences of a great emotional or spiritual crisis cannot always be worked out, or even foreshadowed, within so brief a space of time.  If, after such a crisis, we are unwilling to keep our seats for another half-hour, in order to learn “what came of it all,” the author has evidently failed to awaken in us any real interest in his characters.

A good instance of the unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur Pinero’s Letty.  This “epilogue”—­so the author calls it—­has been denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable anticlimax.  An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not follow that it is an artistic blemish.  Nothing would have been easier than not to write it—­to make the play end with Letty’s awakening from