ent on the coming ordeal, and would welcome an interlude of
aesthetic theory.

There are times, moreover, when it is not only permissible to suspend
the tension, but when, by so doing, a great artist can produce a
peculiar and admirable effect. A sudden interruption, on the very brink
of a crisis, may, as it were, whet the appetite of the audience for what
is to come. We see in the Porter scene in Macbeth a suspension of this
nature; but Shakespeare used it sparingly, unless, indeed, we are to
consider as a deliberate point of art the retardation of movement
commonly observable in the fourth acts of his tragedies. Ibsen, on the
other hand, deliberately employed this device on three conspicuous
occasions. The entrance of Dr. Rank in the last act of _A Doll's House_
is a wholly unnecessary interruption to the development of the crisis
between Nora and Helmer. The scene might be entirely omitted without
leaving a perceptible hiatus in the action; yet who does not feel that
this brief respite lends gathered impetus to the main action when it is
resumed? The other instances are offered by the two apparitions of Ulric
Brendel in _Rosmersholm._ The first occurs when Rosmer is on the very
verge of his momentous confession to Kroll, the second when Rosmer and
Rebecca are on the very verge of their last great resolve; and in each
case we feel a distinct value (apart from the inherent quality of the
Brendel scenes) in the very fact that the tension has been momentarily
suspended. Such a _rallentando_ effect is like the apparent pause in the
rush of a river before it thunders over a precipice.

The possibility of suspending tension is of wider import than may at
first sight appear. But for it, our dramas would have to be all bone and
muscle, like the figures in an anatomical textbook. As it is, we are
able, without relaxing tension, to shift it to various planes of
consciousness, and thus find leisure to reproduce the surface aspects of
life, with some of its accidents and irrelevances. For example, when the
playwright has, at the end of his first act, succeeded in carrying
onward the spectator's interest, and giving him something definite to
look forward to, it does not at all follow that the expected scene,
situation, revelation, or what not, should come at the beginning of the
second act. In some cases it must do so; when, as in _The Idyll_ above
cited, the spectator has been carefully induced to expect some imminent
conjunctur