her dream, and her flight from Letchmere’s rooms.  But the author has set forth, not merely to interest us in an adventure, but to draw a character; and it was essential to our full appreciation of Letty’s character that we should know what, after all, she made of her life.  When Iris, most hapless of women, went out into the dark, there was nothing more that we needed to know of her.  We could guess the sequel only too easily.  But the case of Letty was wholly different.  Her exit was an act of will, triumphing over a form of temptation peculiarly alluring to her temperament.  There was in her character precisely that grit which Iris lacked; and we wanted to know what it would do for her.  This was not a case for an indecisive ending, a note of interrogation.  The author felt no doubt as to Letty’s destiny, and he wanted to leave his audience in no doubt.  From Iris’s fate we were only too willing to avert our eyes; but it would have been a sensible discomfort to us to be left in the dark about Letty’s.

This, then, I regard as a typical instance of justified anticlimax.  Another is the idyllic last act of The Princess and the Butterfly, in which, moreover, despite its comparatively subdued tone, the tension is maintained to the end.  A very different matter is the third act of The Benefit of the Doubt, already alluded to.  This is a pronounced case of the makeshift ending, inspired (to all appearance) simply by the fact that the play must end somehow, and that no better idea happens to present itself.  Admirable as are the other acts, one is almost inclined to agree with Dumas that an author ought not to embark upon a theme unless he foresees a better way out of it than this.  It should be noted, too, that The Benefit of the Doubt is a three-act play, and that, in a play laid out on this scale, a whole act of anticlimax is necessarily disproportionate.  It is one thing to relax the tension in the last act out of four or five; quite another thing in the last act out of three.  In other words, the culminating point of a four-or five-act play may be placed in the penultimate act; in a three-act play, it should come, at earliest, in the penultimate scene.[1]

In the works of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones we find several instances of the unemphatic last act—­some clearly justified, others much less so.  Among the former I unhesitatingly reckon the fourth act of Mrs. Dane’s Defence.  It would not have been difficult, but surely most inartistic, to huddle up the action in five minutes after Mrs. Dane’s tragic collapse under Sir Daniel Carteret’s cross-examination.  She might have taken poison and died in picturesque contortions on the sofa; or Lionel might have defied all counsels of prudence and gone off with her in spite of her past; or she might have placed Lionel’s hand in Janet’s, saying:  “The game is up.  Bless you, my children.  I am going into the nearest nunnery.”  As a matter of fact, Mr. Jones brought his action to its natural close in a quiet, sufficiently adroit, last act; and I do not see that criticism has any just complaint to make.