In recent French drama, La Douloureuse, already cited, affords an excellent instance of a quiet last act.  After the violent and heartrending rupture between the lovers in the third act, we feel that, though this paroxysm of pain is justified by the circumstances, it will not last for ever, and Philippe and Helene will come together again.  This is also M. Donnay’s view; and he devotes his whole last act, quite simply, to a duologue of reconciliation.  It seems to me a fault of proportion, however, that he should shift his locality from Paris to the Riviera, and should place the brief duologue in a romantic woodland scene.  An act of anticlimax should be treated, so to speak, as unpretentiously as possible.  To invent an elaborate apparatus for it is to emphasize the anticlimax by throwing it into unnecessary relief.

This may be a convenient place for a few words on the modern fashion of eschewing emphasis, not only in last acts, but at every point where the old French dramaturgy demanded it, and especially in act-endings. Punch has a pleasant allusion to this tendency in two suggested examination-papers for an “Academy of Dramatists”: 

  A—­FOR THE CLASSICAL SIDE ONLY.
    1.  What is a “curtain”; and how should it be led up to?

  B—­FOR THE MODERN SIDE ONLY.
    1.  What is a “curtain”; and how can it be avoided?

Some modern playwrights have fled in a sort of panic from the old “picture-poster situation” to the other extreme of always dropping their curtain when the audience least expects it.  This is not a practice to be commended.  One has often seen an audience quite unnecessarily chilled by a disconcerting “curtain.”  There should be moderation even in the shrinking from theatricality.

This shrinking is particularly marked, though I do not say it is carried too far, in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy.  Even the most innocent tricks of emphasis are to him snares of the Evil One.  He would sooner die than drop his curtain on a particularly effective line.  It is his chief ambition that you should never discern any arrangement, any intention, in his work.  As a rule, the only reason you can see for his doing thus or thus is his desire that you should see no reason for it.  He does not carry this tendency, as some do, to the point of eccentricity; but he certainly goes as far as any one should be advised to follow.  A little further, and you incur the danger of becoming affectedly unaffected, artificially inartificial.

I am far from pleading for the conventional tableau at the end of each act, with all the characters petrified, as it were, in penny-plain-twopence-coloured attitudes.  But it is certainly desirable that the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by surprise, and even that the spectator should feel the moment to be rightly chosen, though he might be unable to give any reason for his feeling.  Moreover—­this may seem a super-subtlety, but one has seen it neglected