An incident which occurred during the rehearsals for the first production of A Doll’s House, at the Novelty Theatre, London, illustrates the difference between the old, and what was then the new, fashion of ending a play.  The business manager of the company, a man of ripe theatrical experience, happened to be present one day when Miss Achurch and Mr. Waring were rehearsing the last great scene between Nora and Helmar.  At the end of it, he came up to me, in a state of high excitement.  “This is a fine play!” he said.  “This is sure to be a big thing!” I was greatly pleased.  “If this scene, of all others,” I thought, “carries a man like Mr. Smith off his feet, it cannot fail to hold the British public.”  But I was somewhat dashed when, a day or two later, Mr. Smith came up to me again, in much less buoyant spirits.  “I made a mistake about that scene,” he said.  “They tell me it’s the end of the last act—­I thought it was the end of the first!”

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[Footnote 1:  The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to excellent advantage in Professor Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy.]

[Footnote 2:  It is true that in A Doll’s House, Dr. Rank announces his approaching demise:  but he does not actually die, nor is his fate an essential part of the action of the play.]

[Footnote 3:  The duel, even in countries whose customs permit of it, is essentially an inartistic end; for it leaves the catastrophe to be decided either by Chance or Providence—­two equally inadmissible arbiters in modern drama.  Alexandre Dumas fils, in his preface to Heloise Paranquet, condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient.  “Not to mention,” he says, “the fact that it has been much over-done, we are bound to recognize that Providence, in a fit of absence of mind, sometimes suffers the rascal to kill the honest man.  Let me recommend my young colleagues,” he proceeds, “never to end a piece which pretends to reproduce a phase of real life, by an intervention of chance.”  The recommendation came rather oddly from the dramatist who, in L’Etrangere, had disposed of his “vibrion,” the Duc de Septmonts, by making Clarkson kill him in a duel.  Perhaps he did not reckon L’Etrangere as pretending to reproduce a phase of real life.  A duel is, of course, perfectly admissible in a French or German play, simply as part of a picture of manners.  Its stupid inconclusiveness may be the very point to be illustrated.  It is only when represented as a moral arbitrament that it becomes an anachronism.]

[Footnote 4:  I am glad to see, from Mr. Malcolm Salaman’s introduction to the printed play, that, even in those days of our hot youth, my own aesthetic principles were less truculent.]

[Footnote 5:  This image is sometimes suggested by an act-ending which leaves a marked situation obviously unresolved.  The curtain should never be dropped at such a point as to leave the characters in a physical or mental attitude which cannot last for more than a moment, and must certainly be followed, then and there, by important developments.  In other words, a situation ought not to be cut short at the very height of its tension, but only when it has reached a point of—­at any rate momentary—­relaxation.]