rtistic 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