e which cannot be postponed. But this can scarcely be called a
typical case. More commonly, when an author has enlisted the curiosity
of his audience of some definite point, he will be in no great hurry to
satisfy and dissipate it. He may devote the early part of the second act
to working-up the same line of interest to a higher pitch; or he may
hold it in suspense while he prepares some further development of the
action. The closeness with which a line of interest, once started, ought
to be followed up, must depend in some measure on the nature and tone of
the play. If it be a serious play, in which character and action are
very closely intertwined, any pause or break in the conjoint development
is to be avoided. If, on the other hand, it is a play of light and
graceful dialogue, in which the action is a pretext for setting the
characters in motion rather than the chief means towards their
manifestation, then the playwright can afford to relax the rate of his
progress, and even to wander a little from the straight line of advance.
In such a play, even the old institution of the "underplot" is not
inadmissible; though the underplot ought scarcely to be a "plot," but
only some very slight thread of interest, involving no strain on the
attention.[2] It may almost be called an established practice, on the
English stage, to let the dalliance of a pair of boy-and-girl lovers
relieve the main interest of a more or less serious comedy; and there is
no particular harm in such a convention, if it be not out of keeping
with the general character of the play. In some plays the substance--the
character-action, if one may so call it--is the main, and indeed the
only, thing. In others the substance, though never unimportant, is in
some degree subordinate to the embroideries; and it is for the
playwright to judge how far this subordination may safely be carried.

One principle, however, may be emphasized as almost universally valid,
and that is that the end of an act should never leave the action just
where it stood at the beginning. An audience has an instinctive sense
of, and desire for, progress. It does not like to realize that things
have been merely marking time. Even if it has been thoroughly
entertained, from moment to moment, during the progress of an act, it
does not like to feel at the end that nothing has really happened. The
fall of the curtain gives time for reflection, and for the ordering of
impressions which, while the