ised 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