This shrinking is particularly marked, though I do not say it is carried
too far, in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy. Even the most innocent tricks
of emphasis are to him snares of the Evil One. He would sooner die than
drop his curtain on a particularly effective line. It is his chief
ambition that you should never discern any arrangement, any intention,
in his work. As a rule, the only reason you can see for his doing thus
or thus is his desire that you should see no reason for it. He does not
carry this tendency, as some do, to the point of eccentricity; but he
certainly goes as far as any one should be advised to follow. A little
further, and you incur the danger of becoming affectedly unaffected,
artificially inartificial.

I am far from pleading for the conventional tableau at the end of each
act, with all the characters petrified, as it were, in
penny-plain-twopence-coloured attitudes. But it is certainly desirable
that the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by
surprise, and even that the spectator should feel the moment to be
rightly chosen, though he might be unable to give any reason for his
feeling. Moreover--this may seem a super-subtlety, but one has seen it
neglected with notably bad effect--a playwright should never let his
audience expect the fall of a curtain at a given point, and then balk
their expectancy, unless he is sure that he holds in reserve a more than
adequate compensation. There is nothing so dangerous as to let a play,
or an act, drag on when the audience feels in its heart that it is
really over, and that "the rest is silence"--or ought to be. The end of
Mr. Granville Barker's fine play, _The Voysey Inheritance_, was injured
by the fact that, several minutes before the curtain actually fell, he
had given what seemed an obvious "cue for curtain." I do not say that
what followed was superfluous; what I do say is that the author ought to
have been careful not to let us imagine that the colloquy between Edward
and Alice was over when in fact it had still some minutes to run. An
even more remarkable play, _The Madras House_, was ruined, on its first
night, by a long final anticlimax. Here, however, the fault did not lie
in awakening a premature expectation of the close, but in the fact that
we somehow were more interested in the other characters of the play than
in the pair who held the stage throughout the long concluding scene.

Once more I turn to _La Douloureuse_ for an in