eir 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 a