To illustrate what is meant by the carrying-forward of interest, let me cite one or two instances in which it is achieved with conspicuous success.

In Oscar Wilde’s first modern comedy, Lady Windermere’s Fan, the heroine, Lady Windermere, has learnt that her husband has of late been seen to call very frequently at the house of a certain Mrs. Erlynne, whom nobody knows.  Her suspicions thus aroused, she searches her husband’s desk, discovers a private and locked bank-book, cuts it open, and finds that one large cheque after another has been drawn in favour of the lady in question.  At this inopportune moment, Lord Windermere appears with a request that Mrs. Erlynne shall be invited to their reception that evening.  Lady Windermere indignantly refuses, her husband insists, and, finally, with his own hand, fills in an invitation-card and sends it by messenger to Mrs. Erlynne.  Here some playwrights might have been content to finish the act.  It is sufficiently evident that Lady Windermere will not submit to the apparent insult, and that something exciting may be looked for at the reception in the following act.  But Oscar Wilde was not content with this vague expectancy.  He first defined it, and then he underlined the definition, in a perfectly natural and yet ingenious and skilful way.  The day happens to be Lady Windermere’s birthday, and at the beginning of the act her husband has given her a beautiful ostrich-feather fan.  When he sends off the invitation, she turns upon him and says, “If that woman crosses my threshold, I shall strike her across the face with this fan.”  Here, again, many a dramatist might be content to bring down his curtain.  The announcement of Lady Windermere’s resolve carries forward the interest quite clearly enough for all practical purposes.  But even this did not satisfy Wilde.  He imagined a refinement, simple, probable, and yet immensely effective, which put an extraordinarily keen edge upon the expectancy of the audience.  He made Lady Windermere ring for her butler, and say:  “Parker, be sure you pronounce the names of the guests very distinctly to-night.  Sometimes you speak so fast that I miss them.  I am particularly anxious to hear the names quite clearly, so as to make no mistake.”  I well remember the effect which this little touch produced on the first night.  The situation was, in itself, open to grave objections.  There is no plausible excuse for Lord Windermere’s obstinacy in forcing Mrs. Erlynne upon his wife, and risking a violent scandal in order to postpone an explanation which he must know to be ultimately inevitable.  Though one had not as yet learnt the precise facts of the case, one felt pretty confident that his lordship’s conduct would scarcely justify itself.  But interest is largely independent of critical judgment, and, for my own part, I can aver that, when the curtain fell on the first act, a five-pound note would not have bribed me to leave the theatre without assisting