studio happy and serene, she leaves it broken-hearted; but the effect of
the scene is not a whit greater because, in the two previous acts, we
have been studiously deprived of the information that would have led us
vaguely to anticipate it.
To sum up this question of secrecy: the current maxim, "Never keep a
secret from your audience," would appear to be an over-simplification of
a somewhat difficult question of craftsmanship. We may agree that it is
often dangerous and sometimes manifestly foolish to keep a secret; but,
on the other hand, there is certainly no reason why the playwright
should blurt out all his secrets at the first possible opportunity. The
true art lies in knowing just how long to keep silent, and just the
right time to speak. In the first act of _Letty_, Sir Arthur Pinero
gains a memorable effect by keeping a secret, not very long, indeed, but
long enough and carefully enough to show that he knew very clearly what
he was doing. We are introduced to Nevill Letchmere's bachelor
apartments. Animated scenes occur between Letchmere and his
brother-in-law, Letchmere and his sister, Letchmere and Letty, Marion
and Hilda Gunning. It is evident that Letty dreams of marriage with
Letchmere; and for aught that we see or hear, there is no just cause or
impediment to the contrary. It is only, at the end of the very admirable
scene between Letchmere and Mandeville that the following little
passage occurs:
MANDEVILLE: ... At all events I _am_ qualified to tell her I'm
fairly gone on her--honourably gone on her--if I choose to do it.
LETCHMERE: Qualified?
MANDEVILLE: Which is more than you are, Mr. Letchmere. I _am_ a
single man; you ain't, bear in mind.
LETCHMERE: (_imperturbably_): Very true.
This one little touch is a masterpiece of craftsmanship. It would have
been the most natural thing in the world for either the sister or the
brother-in-law, concerned about their own matrimonial difficulties, to
let fall some passing allusion to Letchmere's separation from his wife;
but the author carefully avoided this, carefully allowed us to make our
first acquaintance with Letty in ignorance of the irony of her position,
and then allowed the truth to slip out just in time to let us feel the
whole force of that irony during the last scene of the act and the
greater part of the second act. A finer instance of the delicate grading
of tension it would be difficult to cite.
One thing is certain; namely, that if a secret is to be kept at all, it
must be worth the keeping; if a riddle is propounded, its answer must be
pleasing and ingenious, or the audience will resent having been led to
cudgel its brains for nothing. This is simply a part of the larger
principle, before insisted on, that when a reasonable expectation is
aroused, it can be baffled only at the author's peril. If the crux of a
scene or of a whole play lie in the solution of some material difficulty
or moral problem, it must on no account be solved by a mere trick or
evasion. The dramatist is very ill-advised who sets forth with pomp and
circumstance to perform some intellectual or technical feat, and then
merely skirts round it or runs away from it. A fair proportion should
always be observed between effort and effect, between promise and
performance.
"But if the audience happens to misread the playwright's design, and
form exaggerated and irrational expectations?" That merely means that
the playwright does not know his business, or, at any rate, does not
know his audience. It is his business to play upon the collective mind
of his audience as upon a keyboard--to arouse just the right order and
measure of anticipation, and fulfil it, or outdo it, in just the right
way at just the right time. The skill of the dramatist, as distinct from
his genius or inspiration, lies in the correctness of his insight into
the mind of his audience.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: For instance: "If you can get a word with him by pretending
that you are his wife, tell him to hold his tongue until morning; _that
will give me all the start I need_."]
[Footnote 2: In _The Idyll_, by Herr Egge, of which some account is
given in Chapter X, the author certainly does right in not allowing the
audience for a moment to share the hero's doubts as to the heroine's
past. It would have been very easy for him to have kept the secret; but
he takes the earliest opportunity of assuring us that her relations with
Ringve were quite innocent.]
_BOOK IV_
THE END
_CHAPTER XVIII_
CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX
If it were as easy to write a good last act as a good first act, we
should be able to reckon three masterpieces for every one that we can
name at present. The reason why the last act should offer special
difficulties is not far to seek. We have agreed to regard a play as
essentially a crisis in the lives of one or more persons; and we all
know that crises are much more apt to have a definite beginning than a
definite end. We can almost always put our finger upon the moment--not,
indeed, when the crisis began--but when we clearly realized its presence
or its imminence. A chance meeting, the receipt of a letter or a
telegram, a particular turn given to a certain conversation, even the
mere emergence into consciousness of a previously latent feeling or
thought, may mark quite definitely the moment of germination, so to
speak, of a given crisis; and it is comparatively easy to dramatize such
a moment. But how few crises come to a definite or dramatic conclusion!
Nine times out of ten they end in some petty compromise, or do not end
at all, but simply subside, like the waves of the sea when the storm has
blown itself out. It is the playwright's chief difficulty to find a
crisis with an ending which satisfies at once his artistic conscience
and the requirements of dramatic effect.
And the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we approach to reality. In
the days when tragedy and comedy were cast in fixed, conventional
moulds, the playwright's task was much simpler. It was thoroughly
understood that a tragedy ended with one or more deaths, a comedy with
one or more marriages; so that the question of a strong or a weak ending
did not arise. The end might be strongly or weakly led up to, but, in
itself, it was fore-ordained. Now that these moulds are broken, and both
marriage and death may be said to have lost their prestige as the be-all
and end-all of drama, the playwright's range of choice is unlimited, and
the difficulty of choosing has become infinitely greater. Our comedies
are much more apt to begin than to end with marriage, and death has come
to be regarded as a rather cheap and conventional expedient for cutting
the knots of life.
From the fact that "the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we
approach to reality," it further follows that the higher the form of
drama, the more probable is it that the demands of truth and the
requirements of dramatic effect may be found to clash. In melodrama, the
curtain falls of its own accord, so to speak, when the handcuffs are
transferred from the hero's wrists to the villain's. In an
adventure-play, whether farcical or romantic, when the adventure is over
the play is done. The author's task is merely to keep the interest of
the adventure afoot until he is ready to drop his curtain. This is a
point of craftsmanship in which playwrights often fail; but it is a
point of craftsmanship only. In plays of a higher order, on the other
hand, the difficulty is often inherent in the theme, and not to be
overcome by any feat of craftsmanship. If the dramatist were to eschew
all crises that could not be made to resolve themselves with
specifically dramatic crispness and decisiveness, he would very
seriously limit the domain of his art. Many excellent themes would be
distorted and ruined by having an emphatic ending forced upon them. It
is surely much better that they should be brought to their natural
unemphatic ending, than that they should be either falsified or ignored.
I suggest, then, that the modern tendency to take lightly Aristotle's
demand that the drama should have a "beginning, a middle, _and an end_,"
arises from the nature of things, and implies, not necessarily, nor even
probably, a decline in craftsmanship, but a new intimacy of relation to
life, and a new sincerity of artistic conscience. I suggest that the
"weak last act," of which critics so often complain, is a natural
development from which authors ought not, on occasion, to shrink, and of
which critics ought, on occasion, to recognize the necessity. To elevate
it into a system is absurd. There is certainly no more reason for
deliberately avoiding an emphatic ending than for mechanically forcing
one. But authors and critics alike should learn to distinguish the
themes which do, from the themes which do not, call for a definite,
trenchant solution, and should handle them, and judge them, in
accordance with their inherent quality.
Let us, however, define our terms, and be sure that we know what we are
talking about. By an "unemphatic ending" I am far from meaning a
makeshift ending, an ending carelessly and conventionally huddled up.
Nor do I mean an indecisive ending, where the curtain falls, as the
saying goes, on a note of interrogation. An unemphatic ending, as I
understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or
philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much
higher tension. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is
what I am here pleading against. It is sometimes assumed that the
playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes
of its culmination; but for such a hard-and-fast rule I can find no
sufficient reason. The consequences of a great emotional or spiritual
crisis cannot always be worked out, or even foreshadowed, within so
brief a space of time. If, after such a crisis, we are unwilling to keep
our seats for another half-hour, in order to learn "what came of it
all," the author has evidently failed to awaken in us any real interest
in his characters.
A good instance of the unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur
Pinero's _Letty_. This "epilogue"--so the author calls it--has been
denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable
anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not
follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier
than not to write it--to make the play end with Letty's awakening from
her dream, and her flight from Letchmere's rooms. But the author has set
forth, not merely to interest us in an adventure, but to draw a
character; and it was essential to our full appreciation of Letty's
character that we should know what, after all, she made of her life.
When Iris, most hapless of women, went out into the dark, there was
nothing more that we needed to know of her. We could guess the sequel
only too easily. But the case of Letty was wholly different. Her exit
was an act of will, triumphing over a form of temptation peculiarly
alluring to her temperament. There was in her character precisely that
grit which Iris lacked; and we wanted to know what it would do for her.
This was not a case for an indecisive ending, a note of interrogation.
The author felt no doubt as to Letty's destiny, and he wanted to leave
his audience in no doubt. From Iris's fate we were only too willing to
avert our eyes; but it would have been a sensible discomfort to us to be
left in the dark about Letty's.
This, then, I regard as a typical instance of justified anticlimax.
Another is the idyllic last act of _The Princess and the Butterfly_, in
which, moreover, despite its comparatively subdued tone, the tension is
maintained to the end. A very different matter is the third act of _The
Benefit of the Doubt_, already alluded to. This is a pronounced case of
the makeshift ending, inspired (to all appearance) simply by the fact
that the play must end somehow, and that no better idea happens to
present itself. Admirable as are the other acts, one is almost inclined
to agree with Dumas that an author ought not to embark upon a theme
unless he foresees a better way out of it than this. It should be noted,
too, that _The Benefit of the Doubt_ is a three-act play, and that, in a
play laid out on this scale, a whole act of anticlimax is necessarily
disproportionate. It is one thing to relax the tension in the last act
out of four or five; quite another thing in the last act out of three.
In other words, the culminating point of a four-or five-act play may be
placed in the penultimate act; in a three-act play, it should come, at
earliest, in the penultimate scene.[1]
In the works of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones we find several instances of the
unemphatic last act--some clearly justified, others much less so. Among
the former I unhesitatingly reckon the fourth act of _Mrs. Dane's
Defence_. It would not have been difficult, but surely most inartistic,
to huddle up the action in five minutes after Mrs. Dane's tragic
collapse under Sir Daniel Carteret's cross-examination. She might have
taken poison and died in picturesque contortions on the sofa; or Lionel
might have defied all counsels of prudence and gone off with her in
spite of her past; or she might have placed Lionel's hand in Janet's,
saying: "The game is up. Bless you, my children. I am going into the
nearest nunnery." As a matter of fact, Mr. Jones brought his action to
its natural close in a quiet, sufficiently adroit, last act; and I do
not see that criticism has any just complaint to make.
In recent French drama, _La Douloureuse_, already cited, affords an
excellent instance of a quiet last act. After the violent and
heartrending rupture between the lovers in the third act, we feel that,
though this paroxysm of pain is justified by the circumstances, it will
not last for ever, and Philippe and Hélène will come together again.
This is also M. Donnay's view; and he devotes his whole last act, quite
simply, to a duologue of reconciliation. It seems to me a fault of
proportion, however, that he should shift his locality from Paris to the
Riviera, and should place the brief duologue in a romantic woodland
scene. An act of anticlimax should be treated, so to speak, as
unpretentiously as possible. To invent an elaborate apparatus for it is
to emphasize the anticlimax by throwing it into unnecessary relief.
This may be a convenient place for a few words on the modern fashion of
eschewing emphasis, not only in last acts, but at every point where the
old French dramaturgy demanded it, and especially in act-endings.
_Punch_ has a pleasant allusion to this tendency in two suggested
examination-papers for an "Academy of Dramatists":
A--FOR THE CLASSICAL SIDE ONLY.
1. What is a "curtain"; and how should it be led up to?
B--FOR THE MODERN SIDE ONLY.
1. What is a "curtain"; and how can it be avoided?
Some modern playwrights have fled in a sort of panic from the old
"picture-poster situation" to the other extreme of always dropping their
curtain when the audience least expects it. This is not a practice to be
commended. One has often seen an audience quite unnecessarily chilled by
a disconcerting "curtain." There should be moderation even in the
shrinking from theatricality.
This shrinking is particularly marked, though I do not say it is carried
too far, in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy. Even the most innocent tricks
of emphasis are to him snares of the Evil One. He would sooner die than
drop his curtain on a particularly effective line. It is his chief
ambition that you should never discern any arrangement, any intention,
in his work. As a rule, the only reason you can see for his doing thus
or thus is his desire that you should see no reason for it. He does not
carry this tendency, as some do, to the point of eccentricity; but he
certainly goes as far as any one should be advised to follow. A little
further, and you incur the danger of becoming affectedly unaffected,
artificially inartificial.
I am far from pleading for the conventional tableau at the end of each
act, with all the characters petrified, as it were, in
penny-plain-twopence-coloured attitudes. But it is certainly desirable
that the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by
surprise, and even that the spectator should feel the moment to be
rightly chosen, though he might be unable to give any reason for his
feeling. Moreover--this may seem a super-subtlety, but one has seen it
neglected with notably bad effect--a playwright should never let his
audience expect the fall of a curtain at a given point, and then balk
their expectancy, unless he is sure that he holds in reserve a more than
adequate compensation. There is nothing so dangerous as to let a play,
or an act, drag on when the audience feels in its heart that it is
really over, and that "the rest is silence"--or ought to be. The end of
Mr. Granville Barker's fine play, _The Voysey Inheritance_, was injured
by the fact that, several minutes before the curtain actually fell, he
had given what seemed an obvious "cue for curtain." I do not say that
what followed was superfluous; what I do say is that the author ought to
have been careful not to let us imagine that the colloquy between Edward
and Alice was over when in fact it had still some minutes to run. An
even more remarkable play, _The Madras House_, was ruined, on its first
night, by a long final anticlimax. Here, however, the fault did not lie
in awakening a premature expectation of the close, but in the fact that
we somehow were more interested in the other characters of the play than
in the pair who held the stage throughout the long concluding scene.
Once more I turn to _La Douloureuse_ for an instance of an admirable
act-ending of the quiet modern type. The third act--the terrible
peripety in the love of Philippe and Hélène--has run its agonizing
course, and worked itself out. The old dramaturgy would certainly have
ended the scene with a bang, so to speak--a swoon or a scream, a tableau
of desolation, or, at the very least, a piece of tearful rhetoric. M.
Donnay does nothing of the sort. He lets his lovers unpack their hearts
with words until they are exhausted, broken, dazed with misery, and have
nothing more to say. Then Hélène asks: "What o'clock is it?" Philippe
looks at his watch: "Nearly seven." "I must be going"--and she dries her
eyes, smoothes her hair, pulls herself together, in a word, to face the
world again. The mechanical round of life re-asserts its hold upon them.
"Help me with my cloak," she says; and he holds her mantle for her, and
tucks in the puffed sleeves of her blouse. Then he takes up the lamp and
lights her out--and the curtain falls. A model "curtain"!
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with
impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of
D'Annunzio's _La Gioconda_.]
_CHAPTER XIX_
CONVERSION
The reader may have noticed, possibly with surprise, that some of the
stock terms of dramatic criticism occur but rarely in these pages, or
not at all. One of them is _dénouement_. According to orthodox theory, I
ought to have made the _dénouement_ the subject of a whole chapter, if
not of a whole book. Why have I not done so?
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. Dénouement 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 _dénouement_ 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 endured. For a century and a half after Dryden's
time, hard-hearted parents were apt to withdraw their opposition to
their children's "felicity" for no better reason than that the fifth act
was drawing to a close. But this formula is practically obsolete.
Changes of will, on the modern stage, are not always adequately motived;
but that is because of individual inexpertness, not because of any
failure to recognize theoretically the necessity for adequate
motivation.
Changes of sentiment are much more important and more difficult to
handle. A change of will can always manifest itself in action but it is
very difficult to externalize convincingly a mere change of heart. When
the conclusion of a play hinges (as it frequently does) on a conversion
of this nature, it becomes a matter of the first moment that it should
not merely be asserted, but proved. Many a promising play has gone wrong
because of the author's neglect, or inability, to comply with this
condition.
It has often been observed that of all Ibsen's thoroughly mature works,
from _A Doll's House_ to _John Gabriel Borkman_, _The Lady from the Sea_
is the loosest in texture, the least masterly in construction. The fact
that it leaves this impression on the mind is largely due, I think, to a
single fault. The conclusion of the play--Ellida's clinging to Wangel
and rejection of the Stranger--depends entirely on a change in Wangel's
mental attitude, _of which we have no proof whatever beyond his bare
assertion_. Ellida, in her overwrought mood, is evidently inclining to
yield to the uncanny allurement of the Stranger's claim upon her, when
Wangel, realizing that her sanity is threatened, says:
WANGEL: It shall not come to that. There is no other way of
deliverance for you--at least I see none. And therefore--therefore
I--cancel our bargain on the spot. Now you can choose your own path,
in full--full freedom.
ELLIDA (_Gazes at him awhile, as if speechless_): Is this
true--true--what you say? Do you mean it--from your inmost heart?
WANGEL: Yes--from the inmost depths of my tortured heart, I mean
it.... Now your own true life can return to its--its right groove
again. For now you can choose in freedom; and on your own
responsibility, Ellida.
ELLIDA: In freedom--and on my own responsibility? Responsibility?
This--this transforms everything.
--and she promptly gives the Stranger his dismissal. Now this is
inevitably felt to be a weak conclusion, because it turns entirely on a
condition of Wangel's mind of which he gives no positive and convincing
evidence. Nothing material is changed by his change of heart. He could
not in any case have restrained Ellida by force; or, if the law gave him
the abstract right to do so, he certainly never had the slightest
intention of exercising it. Psychologically, indeed, the incident is
acceptable enough. The saner part of Ellida's will was always on
Wangel's side; and a merely verbal undoing of the "bargain" with which
she reproached herself might quite naturally suffice to turn the scale
decisively in his favour. But what may suffice for Ellida is not enough
for the audience. Too much is made to hang upon a verbally announced
conversion. The poet ought to have invented some material--or, at the
very least, some impressively symbolic--proof of Wangel's change of
heart. Had he done so, _The Lady from the Sea_ would assuredly have
taken a higher rank among his works.
Let me further illustrate my point by comparing a very small thing with
a very great. The late Captain Marshall wrote a "farcical romance" named
_The Duke of Killiecrankie_, in which that nobleman, having been again
and again rejected by the Lady Henrietta Addison, kidnapped the obdurate
fair one, and imprisoned her in a crag-castle in the Highlands. Having
kept her for a week in deferential durance, and shown her that he was
not the inefficient nincompoop she had taken him for, he threw open the
prison gate, and said to her: "Go! I set you free!" The moment she saw
the gate unlocked, and realized that she could indeed go when and where
she pleased, she also realized that she had not the least wish to go,
and flung herself into her captor's arms. Here we have Ibsen's situation
transposed into the key of fantasy, and provided with the material
"guarantee of good faith" which is lacking in _The Lady from the Sea_.
The Duke's change of mind, his will to set the Lady Henrietta free, is
visibly demonstrated by the actual opening of the prison gate, so that
we believe in it, and believe that she believes in it. The play was a
trivial affair, and is deservedly forgotten; but the situation was
effective because it obeyed the law that a change of will or of feeling,
occurring at a crucial point in a dramatic action, must be certified by
some external evidence, on pain of leaving the audience unimpressed.
This is a more important matter than it may at first sight appear. How
to bring home to the audience a decisive change of heart is one of the
ever-recurring problems of the playwright's craft. In _The Lady from the
Sea_, Ibsen failed to solve it: in _Rosmersholm_ he solved it by heroic
measures. The whole catastrophe is determined by Rosmer's inability to
accept without proof Rebecca's declaration that Rosmersholm has
"ennobled" her, and that she is no longer the same woman whose
relentless egoism drove Beata into the mill-race. Rebecca herself puts
it to him: "How can you believe me on my bare word after to-day?" There
is only one proof she can give--that of "going the way Beata went." She
gives it: and Rosmer, who cannot believe her if she lives, and will not
survive her if she dies, goes with her to her end. But the cases are not
very frequent, fortunately, in which such drastic methods of proof are
appropriate or possible. The dramatist must, as a rule, attain his end
by less violent means; and often he fails to attain it at all.
A play by Mr. Haddon Chambers, _The Awakening_, turned on a sudden
conversion--the "awakening," in fact, referred to in the title. A
professional lady-killer, a noted Don Juan, has been idly making love to
a country maiden, whose heart is full of innocent idealisms. She
discovers his true character, or, at any rate, his reputation, and is
horror-stricken, while practically at the same moment, he "awakens" to
the error of his ways, and is seized with a passion for her as single
minded and idealistic as hers for him. But how are the heroine and the
audience to be assured of the fact? That is just the difficulty; and the
author takes no effectual measures to overcome it. The heroine, of
course, is ultimately convinced; but the audience remains sceptical, to
the detriment of the desired effect. "Sceptical," perhaps, is not quite
the right word. The state of mind of a fictitious character is not a
subject for actual belief or disbelief. We are bound to accept
theoretically what the author tells us; but in this case he has failed
to make us intimately feel and know that it is true.[2]
In Mr. Alfred Sutro's play _The Builder of Bridges_, Dorothy Faringay,
in her devotion to her forger brother, has conceived the rather
disgraceful scheme of making one of his official superiors fall in love
with her, in order to induce him to become practically an accomplice in
her brother's crime. She succeeds beyond her hopes. Edward Thursfield
does fall in love with her, and, at a great sacrifice, replaces the
money the brother has stolen. But, in a very powerful peripety-scene in
the third act, Thursfield learns that Dorothy has been deliberately
beguiling him, while in fact she was engaged to another man. The truth
is, however, that she has really come to love Thursfield passionately,
and has broken her engagement with the other, for whom she never truly
cared. So the author tells us, and so we are willing enough to
believe--if he can devise any adequate method of making Thursfield
believe it. Mr. Sutro's handling of the difficulty seems to me fairly,
but not conspicuously, successful. I cite the case as a typical instance
of the problem, apart from the merits or demerits of the solution.
It may be said that the difficulty of bringing home to us the reality of
a revulsion of feeling, or a radical change of mental attitude, is only
a particular case of the playwright's general problem of convincingly
externalizing inward conditions and processes. That is true: but the
special importance of a conversion which unties the knot and brings the
curtain down seemed to render it worthy of special consideration.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: _Of Dramatic Poesy_, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 51.]
[Footnote 2: In Mr. Somerset Maugham's _Grace_ the heroine undergoes a
somewhat analogous change of heart, coming to love the husband whom she
has previously despised. But we have no difficulty in accepting her
conversion, partly because its reasons are clear and fairly adequate,
partly because there is no question of convincing the husband, who has
never realized her previous contempt for him.]
_CHAPTER XX_
BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS
A blind-alley theme, as its name imports, is one from which there is no
exit. It is a problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all
possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The
playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a
no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic,
happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us--our sense of
truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or,
at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human
nature, and the vanity of human aspirations. But a play which satisfies
neither our higher nor our lower instincts, baffles our sympathies, and
leaves our desires at fault between equally inacceptable
alternatives--such a play, whatever beauties of detail it may possess,
is a weariness of the spirit, and an artistic blunder.
There are in literature two conspicuous examples of the blind-alley
theme--two famous plays, wherein two heroines are placed in somewhat
similar dilemmas, which merely paralyse our sympathies and inhibit our
moral judgment. The first of these is _Measure for Measure_. If ever
there was an insoluble problem in casuistry, it is that which
Shakespeare has here chosen to present to us. Isabella is forced to
choose between what we can only describe as two detestable evils. If she
resists Angelo, and lets her brother die, she recoils from an act of
self-sacrifice; and, although we may coldly approve, we cannot admire or
take pleasure in her action. If, on the other hand, she determines at
all costs to save her brother's life, her sacrifice is a thing from
which we want only to avert the mind: it belongs to the region of what
Aristotle calls to _miaron_, the odious and intolerable. Shakespeare,
indeed, confesses the problem insoluble in the fact that he leaves it
unsolved--evading it by means of a mediaeval trick. But where, then, was
the use of presenting it? What is the artistic profit of letting the
imagination play around a problem which merely baffles and repels it?
Sardou, indeed, presented the same problem, not as the theme of a whole
play, but only of a single act; and he solved it by making Floria Tosca
kill Scarpia. This is a solution which, at any rate, satisfies our
craving for crude justice, and is melodramatically effective.
Shakespeare probably ignored it, partly because it was not in his
sources, partly because, for some obscure reason, he supposed himself to
be writing a comedy. The result is that, though the play contains some
wonderful poetry, and has been from time to time revived, it has never
taken any real hold upon popular esteem.
The second glaring instance of a blind-alley theme is that of _Monna
Vanna_. We have all of us, I suppose, stumbled, either as actors or
onlookers, into painful situations, which not even a miracle of tact
could possibly save. As a rule, of course, they are comic, and the agony
they cause may find a safety-valve in laughter. But sometimes there
occurs some detestable incident, over which it is equally impossible to
laugh and to weep. The wisest words, the most graceful acts, are of no
avail. One longs only to sink into the earth, or vanish into thin air.
Such a situation, on the largest possible scale, is that presented in
_Monna Vanna_. It differs from that of _Measure for Measure_ in the fact
that there can be no doubt as to the moral aspect of the case. It is
quite clear that Giovanna ought to sacrifice herself to save, not one
puling Claudio, but a whole city full of men, women, and children. What
she does is absolutely right; but the conjuncture is none the less a
grotesque and detestable one, which ought to be talked about and thought
about as little as possible. Every word that is uttered is a failure in
tact. Guido, the husband, behaves, in the first act, with a violent
egoism, which is certainly lacking in dignity; but will any one tell me
what would be a dignified course for him to pursue under the
circumstances? The sage old Marco, too--that fifteenth-century
Renan--flounders just as painfully as the hot-headed Guido. It is the
fatality of the case that "he cannot open his mouth without putting his
foot in it"; and a theme which exposes a well-meaning old gentleman to
this painful necessity is one by all means to be avoided. The fact that
it is a false alarm, and that there is no rational explanation for
Prinzivalle's wanton insult to a woman whom he reverently idolizes, in
no way makes matters better.[1] Not the least grotesque thing in the
play is Giovanna's expectation that Guido will receive Prinzivalle with
open arms because he has--changed his mind. We can feel neither approval
nor disapproval, sympathy nor antipathy, in such a deplorable
conjunction of circumstances. All we wish is that we had not been called
upon to contemplate it.[2] Maeterlinck, like Shakespeare, was simply
dallying with the idea of a squalid heroism--so squalid, indeed, that
neither he nor his predecessor had the courage to carry it through.
Pray observe that the defect of these two themes is not merely that they
are "unpleasant." It is that there is no possible way out of them which
is not worse than unpleasant: humiliating, and distressing. Let the
playwright, then, before embarking on a theme, make sure that he has
some sort of satisfaction to offer us at the end, if it be only the
pessimistic pleasure of realizing some part of "the bitter, old and
wrinkled truth" about life. The crimes of destiny there is some profit
in contemplating; but its stupid vulgarities minister neither to profit
nor delight.
* * * * *
It may not be superfluous to give at this point a little list of
subjects which, though not blind-alley themes, are equally to be
avoided. Some of them, indeed, are the reverse of blind-alley themes,
their drawback lying in the fact that the way out of them is too
tediously apparent.
At the head of this list I would place what may be called the "white
marriage" theme: not because it is ineffective, but because its
effectiveness is very cheap and has been sadly overdone. It occurs in
two varieties: either a proud but penniless damsel is married to a
wealthy parvenu, or a woman of culture and refinement is married to a
"rough diamond." In both cases the action consists of the transformation
of a nominal into a real marriage; and it is almost impossible, in these
days, to lend any novelty to the process. In the good old _Lady of
Lyons_ the theme was decked in trappings of romantic absurdity, which
somehow harmonized with it. One could hear in it a far-off echo of
revolutionary rodomontade. The social aspect of the matter was
emphasized, and the satire on middle-class snobbery was cruelly
effective. The personal aspect, on the other hand--the unfulfilment of
the nominal marriage--was lightly and discreetly handled, according to
early-Victorian convention. In later days--from the time of M. George
Ohnet's _Maître de Forges_ onwards--this is the aspect on which
playwrights have preferred to dwell. Usually, the theme shades off into
the almost equally hackneyed _Still Waters Run Deep_ theme; for there is
apt to be an aristocratic lover whom the unpolished but formidable
husband threatens to shoot or horsewhip, and thereby overcomes the last
remnant of repugnance in the breast of his haughty spouse. In _The
Ironmaster_ the lover was called the Duc de Bligny, or, more commonly,
the Dook de Bleeny; but he has appeared under many aliases. In the chief
American version of the theme, Mr. Vaughn Moody's _Great Divide_, the
lover is dispensed with altogether, being inconsistent, no doubt, with
the austere manners of Milford Corners, Mass. In one of the recent
French versions, on the other hand--M. Bernstein's _Samson_--the
aristocratic lover is almost as important a character as the virile,
masterful, plebeian husband. It appears from this survey--which might be
largely extended--that there are several ways of handling the theme; but
there is no way of renewing and deconventionalizing it. No doubt it has
a long life before it on the plane of popular melodrama, but scarcely,
one hopes, on any higher plane.
Another theme which ought to be relegated to the theatrical lumber-room
is that of patient, inveterate revenge. This form of vindictiveness is,
from a dramatic point of view, an outworn passion. It is too obviously
irrational and anti-social to pass muster in modern costume. The actual
vendetta may possibly survive in some semi-barbarous regions, and
Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (as in Mark Twain's immortal romance) may
still be shooting each other at sight. But these things are relics of
the past; they do not belong to the normal, typical life of our time. It
is useless to say that human nature is the same in all ages. That is one
of the facile axioms of psychological incompetence. Far be it from me to
deny that malice, hatred, spite, and the spirit of retaliation are, and
will be until the millennium, among the most active forces in human
nature. But most people are coming to recognize that life is too short
for deliberate, elaborate, cold-drawn revenge. They will hit back when
they conveniently can; they will cherish for half a lifetime a passive,
an obstructive, ill-will; they will even await for years an opportunity
of "getting their knife into" an enemy. But they have grown chary of
"cutting off their nose to spite their face"; they will very rarely
sacrifice their own comfort in life to the mere joy of protracted,
elaborate reprisals. Vitriol and the revolver--an outburst of rage,
culminating in a "short, sharp shock"--these belong, if you will, to
modern life. But long-drawn, unhasting, unresting machination, with no
end in view beyond an ultimate unmasking, a turn of the tables--in a
word, a strong situation--this, I take it, belongs to a phase of
existence more leisurely than ours. There is no room in our crowded
century for such large and sustained passions. One could mention
plays--but they are happily forgotten--in which retribution was delayed
for some thirty or forty years, during which the unconscious object of
it enjoyed a happy and prosperous existence. These, no doubt, are
extreme instances; but cold-storage revenge, as a whole, ought to be as
rare on the stage as it is in real life. The serious playwright will do
well to leave it to the melodramatists.
A third theme to be handled with the greatest caution, if at all, is
that of heroic self-sacrifice. Not that self-sacrifice, like revenge, is
an outworn passion. It still rages in daily life; but no audience of
average intelligence will to-day accept it with the uncritical
admiration which it used to excite in the sentimental dramas of last
century. Even then--even in 1869--Meilhac and Halévy, in their
ever-memorable _Froufrou_, showed what disasters often result from it;
but it retained its prestige with the average playwright--and with some
who were above the average--for many a day after that. I can recall a
play, by a living English author, in which a Colonel in the Indian Army
pleaded guilty to a damning charge of cowardice rather than allow a lady
whom he chivalrously adored to learn that it was her husband who was the
real coward and traitor. He knew that the lady detested her husband; he
knew that they had no children to suffer by the husband's disgrace; he
knew that there was a quite probable way by which he might have cleared
his own character without casting any imputation on the other man. But
in a sheer frenzy of self-sacrifice he blasted his own career, and
thereby inflicted far greater pain upon the woman he loved than if he
had told the truth or suffered it to be told. And twenty years
afterwards, when the villain was dead, the hero still resolutely refused
to clear his own character, lest the villain's widow should learn the
truth about her wholly unlamented husband. This was an extravagant and
childish case; but the superstition of heroic self-sacrifice still
lingers in certain quarters, and cannot be too soon eradicated. I do not
mean, of course, that self-sacrifice is never admirable, but only that
it can no longer be accepted as a thing inherently noble, apart from its
circumstances and its consequences. An excellent play might be written
with the express design of placing the ethics of self-sacrifice in their
true light. Perhaps the upshot might be the recognition of the simple
principle that it is immoral to make a sacrifice which the person
supposed to benefit by it has no right to accept.
Another motive against which it is perhaps not quite superfluous to warn
the aspiring playwright is the "voix du sang." It is only a few years
since this miraculous voice was heard speaking loud and long in His
Majesty's Theatre, London, and in a play by a no less modern-minded
author than the late Clyde Fitch. It was called _The Last of the
Dandies_,[3] and its hero was Count D'Orsay. At a given moment, D'Orsay
learned that a young man known as Lord Raoul Ardale was in reality his
son. Instantly the man of the world, the squire of dames, went off into
a deliquium of tender emotion. For "my bo-ô-oy" he would do anything and
everything. He would go down to Crockford's and win a pot of money to
pay "my boy's" debts--Fortune could not but be kind to a doting parent.
In the beautiful simplicity of his soul, he looked forward with eager
delight to telling Raoul that the mother he adored was no better than
she should be, and that he had no right to his name or title. Not for a
moment did he doubt that the young man would share his transports. When
the mother opposed his purpose of betraying her secret, he wept with
disappointment. "All day," he said, "I have been saying to myself: When
that sun sets, I shall hear him say, 'Good-night, Father!'" He
postulated in so many words the "voix du sang," trusting that, even if
the revelation were not formally made, "Nature would send the boy some
impulse" of filial affection. It is hard to believe--but it is the
fact--that, well within the present century, such ingenuous nonsense as
this was gravely presented to the public of a leading theatre, by an
author of keen intelligence, who, but for an unhappy accident, would now
be at the zenith of his career. There are few more foolish conventions
than that of the "voix du sang." Perhaps, however, the rising generation
of playwrights has more need to be warned against the opposite or
Shawesque convention, that kinship utters itself mainly in wrangling and
mutual dislike.
Among inherently feeble and greatly overdone expedients may be reckoned
the oath or promise of secrecy, exacted for no sufficient reason, and
kept in defiance of common sense and common humanity. Lord Windermere's
conduct in Oscar Wilde's play is a case in point, though he has not even
an oath to excuse his insensate secretiveness. A still clearer instance
is afforded by Clyde Fitch's play _The Girl with the Green Eyes_. In
other respects a very able play, it is vitiated by the certainty that
Austin ought to have, and would have, told the truth ten times over,
rather than subject his wife's jealous disposition to the strain he
puts upon it.
It would not be difficult to prolong this catalogue of themes and
motives that have come down in the world, and are no longer presentable
in any society that pretends to intelligence. But it is needless to
enter into further details. There is a general rule, of sovereign
efficacy, for avoiding such anachronisms: "Go to life for your themes,
and not to the theatre." Observe that rule, and you are safe. But it is
easier said than done.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: I have good reason for believing that, in M. Maeterlinck's
original scheme, Prinzivalle imposed no such humiliating condition.
Giovanna went of her own motive to appeal to his clemency; and her
success was so complete that her husband, on her return, could not
believe that it had been won by avowable means. This is a really fine
conception--what a pity that the poet departed from it!]
[Footnote 2: Much has been made of the Censor's refusal to license
_Monna Vanna_; but I think there is more to be said for his action in
this than in many other cases. In those countries where the play has
succeeded, I cannot but suspect that the appeal it made was not wholly
to the higher instincts of the public.]
[Footnote 3: I am not sure what was the precise relationship of this
play to the same author's _Beau Brummel_. D'Orsay's death scene was
certainly a repetition of Brummel's.]
_CHAPTER XXI_
THE FULL CLOSE
In an earlier chapter, I have tried to show that a certain tolerance for
anticlimax, for a fourth or fifth act of calm after the storm of the
penultimate act, is consonant with right reason, and is a practically
inevitable result of a really intimate relation between drama and life.
But it would be a complete misunderstanding of my argument to suppose
that I deny the practical, and even the artistic, superiority of those
themes in which the tension can be maintained and heightened to the
very end.
The fact that tragedy has from of old been recognized as a higher form
than comedy is partly due, no doubt, to the tragic poet's traditional
right to round off a human destiny in death. "Call no man happy till his
life be ended," said Sophocles, quoting from an earlier sage; and it
needed no profundity of wisdom to recognize in the "happy ending" of
comedy a conventional, ephemeral thing. But when, after all the
peripeties of life, the hero "home has gone and ta'en his wages," we
feel that, at any rate, we have looked destiny squarely in the face,
without evasion or subterfuge. Perhaps the true justification of tragedy
as a form of art is that, after this experience, we should feel life to
be, not less worth living, but greater and more significant than before.
This is no place, however, for a discussion of the aesthetic basis of
tragedy in general.[1] What is here required, from the point of view of
craftsmanship, is not so much a glorification of the tragic ending, as a
warning against its facile misuse. A very great play may, and often
must, end in death; but you cannot make a play great by simply killing
off your protagonist. Death is, after all, a very inexpensive means of
avoiding anticlimax. Tension, as we saw, is symbolized in the sword of
Damocles; and it can always be maintained, in a mechanical way, by
letting your hero play about with a revolver, or placing an overdose of
chloral well within your heroine's reach. At the time when the English
drama was awaking from the lethargy of the 'seventies, an idea got
abroad that a non-sanguinary ending was always and necessarily
inartistic, and that a self-respecting playwright must at all hazards
kill somebody before dropping his curtain. This was an extravagant
reaction against the purely commercial principle that the public would
not, on any terms, accept a tragic ending. As a matter of fact, the
mortality was not very great; for managers were resolute in the old
belief, and few dramatists had the courage or authority to stand up
against them. But I have often heard playwrights lamenting their
inability to massacre the luckless children of their fancy, who, nine
times out of ten, had done nothing to incur such a doom. The real
trouble was that death seemed to be the only method of avoiding
anticlimax.
It is a very sound rule that, before you determine to write a tragedy,
you should make sure that you have a really tragic theme: that you can
place your hero at such odds with life that reconciliation, or mere
endurance, would be morally base or psychologically improbable.
Moreover, you must strike deep into character before you are justified
in passing capital sentence on your personages. Death is a
disproportionate close for a commonplace and superficially-studied life.
It is true that quite commonplace people do die; indeed, they
preponderate in the bills of mortality; but death on the stage confers a
sort of distinction which ought not to be accorded without due and
sufficient cause. To one god in particular we may apply the Horatian
maxim, "Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus."
In German aesthetic theory, the conception _tragische Schuld_--"tragic
guilt"--plays a large part. It descends, no doubt, from the Aristotelian
maxim that a tragic hero must neither be too good nor too bad; but it
also belongs to a moralizing conception, which tacitly or explicitly
assumes that the dramatist's aim ought to be "to justify the ways of God
to man." In these days we look at drama more objectively, and do not
insist on deciding in what degree a man has deserved death, if only we
feel that he has necessarily or probably incurred it. But in order that
we may be satisfied of this, we must know him intimately and feel with
him intensely. We must, in other words, believe that he dies because he
cannot live, and not merely to suit the playwright's convenience and
help him to an effective "curtain."
As we review the series of Ibsen's modern plays, we cannot but feel
that, though he did not shrink from death, he never employed it, except
perhaps in his last melancholy effort, as a mere way of escape from a
difficulty. In five out of his thirteen modern plays, no one dies at
all.[2] One might even say six: for Oswald, in _Ghosts_, may live for
years; but I hold it as only fair to count the death of his mind as more
than equivalent to bodily death. Solness, on the plane of literal fact,
dies by an accident; on the plane of symbolic interpretation, he dies of
the over-great demands which Hilda makes upon his "sickly conscience."
Little Eyolf's death can also be regarded from a symbolic point of view;
but there is no substantial reason to think of it otherwise than as an
accident. John Gabriel Borkman dies of heart seizure, resulting from
sudden exposure to extreme cold. In the case of Solness and Borkman,
death is a quite natural and probable result of the antecedent
conditions; and in the case of Eyolf, it is not a way out of the action,
but rather the way into it. There remain the three cases of suicide:
Rebecca and Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, and Hedvig. I have already, in Chapter
XIX, shown how the death of Rebecca was the inevitable outcome of the
situation--the one conclusive proof of her "ennoblement"--and how it was
almost equally inevitable that Rosmer should accompany her to her end.
Hedda Gabler was constitutionally fated to suicide: a woman of low
vitality, overmastering egoism, and acute supersensitiveness, placed in
a predicament which left her nothing to expect from life but tedium and
humiliation. The one case left--that of Hedvig--is the only one in which
Ibsen can possibly be accused of wanton bloodshed. Björnson, in a very
moving passage in his novel, _The Paths of God_, did actually, though
indirectly, make that accusation. Certainly, there is no more
heartrending incident in fiction; and certainly it is a thing that only
consummate genius can justify. Ibsen happened to possess that genius,
and I am not far from agreeing with those who hold _The Wild Duck_ to be
his greatest work. But for playwrights who are tempted to seek for
effects of pathos by similar means, one may without hesitation lay down
this maxim: Be sure you are an Ibsen before you kill your Hedvig.
This analysis of Ibsen's practice points to the fact--for such I believe
it to be--that what the modern playwright has chiefly to guard against
is the temptation to overdo suicide as a means of cutting the dramatic
knot. In France and Germany there is another temptation, that of the
duel;[3] but in Anglo-Saxon countries it scarcely presents itself.
Death, other than self-inflicted, is much less tempting, and less apt to
be resorted to in and out of season. The heroine, whether virtuous or
erring, who dies of consumption, has gone greatly out of vogue. A broken
heart is no longer held to be necessarily fatal. The veriest tyro
realizes that death by crude accident is inadmissible as a determining
factor in serious drama; and murder is practically (though not
absolutely) relegated to the melodramatic domain. The one urgent
question, then, is that of the artistic use and abuse of suicide.
The principle is pretty plain, I think, that it ought to be the
artist's, as it is the man's, last resort. We know that, in most
civilized countries, suicide is greatly on the increase. It cannot be
called an infrequent incident in daily life. It is certain, too, that
the motives impelling to it are apt to be of a dramatic nature, and
therefore suited to the playwright's purposes. But it is, on the other
hand, such a crude and unreasoning means of exit from the tangle of
existence that a playwright of delicate instincts will certainly employ
it only under the strongest compulsion from his artistic conscience.
Sir Arthur Pinero has three suicides on his record, though one of them
was, so to speak, nipped in the bud. In _The Profligate_, as presented
on the stage, Dunstan Renshaw changed his mind before draining the fatal
goblet; and in this case the stage version was surely the right one. The
suicide, to which the author still clings in the printed text,
practically dates the play as belonging to the above-mentioned period of
rebellion against the conventional "happy ending," when the ambitious
British dramatist felt that honour required him to kill his man on the
smallest provocation.[4] Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since
then, and the disproportion between such a play and such a catastrophe
is now apparent to everyone. It is not that we judge Renshaw's
delinquencies to be over-punished by death--that is not the question.
The fact is simply that the characters are not large enough, true
enough, living enough--that the play does not probe deep enough into
human experience--to make the august intervention of death seem other
than an incongruity. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has
been much criticized, is a very different matter. Inevitable it cannot
be called: if the play had been written within the past ten years, Sir
Arthur would very likely have contrived to do without it. But it is, in
itself, probable enough: both the good and the bad in Paula's character
might easily make her feel that only the dregs of life remained to her,
and they not worth drinking. The worst one can say of it is that it sins
against the canon of practical convenience which enjoins on the prudent
dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap
to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, _Mid-Channel_,
is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made
a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of
heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal
satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has
intervened disastrously in the destinies of others. She is ill; her
nerves are all on edge; and she is, as it were, driven into a corner,
from which there is but one easy and rapid exit. Here is a case, if ever
there was one, where the end is imposed upon the artist by the whole
drift of his action. It may be said that chance plays a large part in
the concatenation of events--that, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had
not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not
have encountered the sudden temptation to which she yields. But this, as
I have tried to show above, is a baseless complaint. Chance is a
constant factor in life, now aiding, now thwarting, the will. To
eliminate it altogether would be to produce a most unlifelike world. It
is only when the playwright so manipulates and reduplicates chance as to
make it seem no longer chance, but purposeful arrangement, that we have
the right to protest.
Another instance of indisputably justified suicide may be found in Mr.
Galsworthy's _Justice_. The whole theme of the play is nothing but the
hounding to his end of a luckless youth, who has got on the wrong side
of the law, and finds all the forces of society leagued against him. In
Mr. Granville Barker's _Waste_, the artistic justification for Trebell's
self-effacement is less clear and compulsive. It is true that the play
was suggested by the actual suicide, not of a politician, but of a
soldier, who found his career ruined by some pitiful scandal. But the
author has made no attempt to reproduce the actual circumstances of that
case; and even if he had reproduced the external circumstances, the
psychological conditions would clearly have eluded him. Thus the appeal
to fact is, as it always must be, barred. In two cases, indeed, much
more closely analogous to Trebell's than that which actually suggested
it--two famous cases in which a scandal cut short a brilliant political
career--suicide played no part in the catastrophe. These real-life
instances are, I repeat, irrelevant. The only question is whether Mr.
Barker has made us feel that a man of Trebell's character would
certainly not survive the paralysing of his energies; and that question
every spectator must answer for himself. I am far from answering it in
the negative. I merely suggest that the playwright may one day come
across a theme for which there is no conceivable ending but suicide, and
may wish that he had let Trebell live, lest people should come to regard
him as a spendthrift of self-slaughter.
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.
* * * * *
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.