stance of an admirable
act-ending of the quiet modern type. The third act--the terrible
peripety in the love of Philippe and Helene--has run its agonizing
course, and worked itself out. The old dramaturgy would certainly have
ended the scene with a bang, so to speak--a swoon or a scream, a tableau
of desolation, or, at the very least, a piece of tearful rhetoric. M.
Donnay does nothing of the sort. He lets his lovers unpack their hearts
with words until they are exhausted, broken, dazed with misery, and have
nothing more to say. Then Helene asks: "What o'clock is it?" Philippe
looks at his watch: "Nearly seven." "I must be going"--and she dries her
eyes, smoothes her hair, pulls herself together, in a word, to face the
world again. The mechanical round of life re-asserts its hold upon them.
"Help me with my cloak," she says; and he holds her mantle for her, and
tucks in the puffed sleeves of her blouse. Then he takes up the lamp and
lights her out--and the curtain falls. A model "curtain"!

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with
impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of
D'Annunzio's _La Gioconda_.]

_CHAPTER XIX_

CONVERSION

The reader may have noticed, possibly with surprise, that some of the
stock terms of dramatic criticism occur but rarely in these pages, or
not at all. One of them is _denouement_. According to orthodox theory, I
ought to have made the _denouement_ the subject of a whole chapter, if
not of a whole book. Why have I not done so?

For two reasons. The lesser, but not negligible, reason is that we
possess no convenient English word for the unknotting or disentangling
of a complication. Denouement itself cannot be plausibly Anglicized, and
no native word has as yet, by common consent, been accepted as its
equivalent. I sometimes wish we could adopt, and print without italics,
the excellent and expressive Greek word "lusis"; but I cannot, on my own
responsibility, attempt so daring an innovation. The second and
determining reason for not making the _denouement_ one of the heads of
my argument, is that, the play of intrigue being no longer the dominant
dramatic form, the image of disentangling has lost some of its special
fitness. It is only in a somewhat strained and conventional sense that
the term _nodus_, or knot, can be applied to the sort of crisis with
which the modern drama normally dea