The suicide which brings to a close Mr. Clyde Fitch’s very able play, The Climbers, stands on a somewhat different level.  Here it is not the protagonist who makes away with himself, nor is his destiny the main theme of the play.  Mr. Fitch has painted a broad social picture, in which, if there is any concentration of interest, it is upon Blanche and Warden.  Sterling’s suicide, then, though it does in fact cut the chief knot of the play, is to be regarded rather as a characteristic and probable incident of a certain phase of life, than as the culmination of a spiritual tragedy.  It has not the artistic significance, either good or bad, that it would have if the character and destiny of Sterling were our main concernment.

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The happy playwright, one may say, is he whose theme does not force upon him either a sanguinary or a tame last act, but enables him, without troubling the coroner, to sustain and increase the tension up to the very close.  Such themes are not too common, but they do occur.  Dumas found one in Denise, and another in Francillon, where the famous “Il en a menti!” comes within two minutes of the fall of the curtain.  In Heimat (Magda) and in Johannisfeuer, Sudermann keeps the tension at its height up to the fall of the curtain.  Sir Arthur Pinero’s Iris is a case in point; so are Mr. Shaw’s Candida and The Devil’s Disciple; so is Mr. Galsworthy’s Strife.  Other instances will no doubt occur to the reader; yet he will probably be surprised to find that it is not very easy to recall them.

For this is not, in fact, the typical modern formula.  In plays which do not end in death, it will generally be found that the culminating scene occurs in the penultimate act, and that, if anticlimax is avoided, it is not by the maintenance of an unbroken tension, by its skilful renewal and reinforcement in the last act.  This is a resource which the playwright will do well to bear in mind.  Where he cannot place his “great scene” in his last act, he should always consider whether it be not possible to hold some development in reserve whereby the tension may be screwed up again—­if unexpectedly, so much the better.  Some of the most successful plays within my recollection have been those in which the last act came upon us as a pleasant surprise.  An anticlimax had seemed inevitable; and behold! the author had found a way out of it.

An Enemy of the People may perhaps be placed in this class, though, as before remarked, the last act is almost an independent comedy.  Had the play ended with the fourth act, no one would have felt that anything was lacking; so that in his fifth act, Ibsen was not so much grappling with an urgent technical problem, as amusing himself by wringing the last drop of humour out of the given situation.  A more strictly apposite example may be found in Sir Arthur Pinero’s play, His House in Order.  Here the action