never want to say more than he can allow them to say—­that they never rush headlong into blind alleys, or do things that upset the balance of the play and have to be resolutely undone—­that aspirant will do well not to be over-confident of his dramatic calling and election.  There may be authors who can write vital plays, as Shakespeare is said (on rather poor evidence)[7] to have done, without blotting a line; but I believe them to be rare.  In our day, the great playwright is more likely to be he who does not shrink, on occasion, from blotting an act or two.

There is a modern French dramatist who writes, with success, such plays as I might have written had I combined a strong philosophical faculty with great rhetorical force and fluency.  The dramas of M. Paul Hervieu have all the neatness and cogency of a geometrical demonstration.  One imagines that, for M. Hervieu, the act of composition means merely the careful filling in of a scenario as neat and complete as a schedule.[8] But for that very reason, despite their undoubted intellectual power, M. Hervieu’s dramas command our respect rather than our enthusiasm.  The dramatist should aim at being logical without seeming so.[9]

It is sometimes said that a playwright ought to construct his play backwards, and even to write his last act first.[10] This doctrine belongs to the period of the well-made play, when climax was regarded as the one thing needful in dramatic art, and anticlimax as the unforgivable sin.  Nowadays, we do not insist that every play should end with a tableau, or with an emphatic mot de la fin.  We are more willing to accept a quiet, even an indecisive, ending.[11] Nevertheless it is and must ever be true that, at a very early period in the scheming of his play, the playwright ought to assure himself that his theme is capable of a satisfactory ending.  Of course this phrase does not imply a “happy ending,” but one which satisfies the author as being artistic, effective, inevitable (in the case of a serious play), or, in one word, “right.”  An obviously makeshift ending can never be desirable, either from the ideal or from the practical point of view.  Many excellent plays have been wrecked on this rock.  The very frequent complaint that “the last act is weak” is not always or necessarily a just reproach; but it is so when the author has clearly been at a loss for an ending, and has simply huddled his play up in a conventional and perfunctory fashion.  It may even be said that some apparently promising themes are deceptive in their promise, since they are inherently incapable of a satisfactory ending.  The playwright should by all means make sure that he has not run up against one of these blind-alley themes.[12] He should, at an early point, see clearly the end for which he is making, and be sure that it is an end which he actively desires, not merely one which satisfies convention, or which “will have to do.”