For two reasons.  The lesser, but not negligible, reason is that we possess no convenient English word for the unknotting or disentangling of a complication.  Denouement itself cannot be plausibly Anglicized, and no native word has as yet, by common consent, been accepted as its equivalent.  I sometimes wish we could adopt, and print without italics, the excellent and expressive Greek word “lusis”; but I cannot, on my own responsibility, attempt so daring an innovation.  The second and determining reason for not making the denouement one of the heads of my argument, is that, the play of intrigue being no longer the dominant dramatic form, the image of disentangling has lost some of its special fitness.  It is only in a somewhat strained and conventional sense that the term nodus, or knot, can be applied to the sort of crisis with which the modern drama normally deals; and if we do not naturally think of the crisis as a knot, we naturally do not think of its close as an unknotting.

Nevertheless, there are frequent cases in which the end of a play depends on something very like the unravelling of a tangled skein; and still more often, perhaps, is it brought about through the loosening of some knot in the mind of one or more of the characters.  This was the characteristic end of the old comedy.  The heavy father, or cantankerous guardian, who for four acts and a half had stood between the lovers, suddenly changed his mind, and all was well.  Even by our ancestors this was reckoned a rather too simple method of disentanglement.  Lisideius, in Dryden’s dialogue,[1] in enumerating the points in which the French drama is superior to the English notes that—­

You never see any of their plays end with a conversion, or simple change of will, which is the ordinary way which our poets use to end theirs.  It shew little art in the conclusion of a dramatick poem, when they who have hindered the felicity during the four acts, desist from it in the fifth, without some powerful cause to take them off their design.

The remark of Lisideius is suggested by a passage in Corneille, who instances, as an apt and artistic method of bringing about the conversion of a heavy father, that his daughter’s lover should earn his gratitude by rescuing him from assassination!

Conversions, closely examined, will be found to fall into two classes:  changes in volition, and changes in sentiment.  It was the former class that Dryden had in mind; and, with reference to this class, the principle he indicates remains a sound one.  A change of resolve should never be due to a mere lapse of time—­to the necessity for bringing the curtain down and letting the audience go home.  It must always be rendered plausible by some new fact or new motive:  some hitherto untried appeal to reason or emotion.  This rule, however, is too obvious to require enforcement.  It was not quite superfluous so long as the old convention of comedy