ls; and if we do not naturally think
of the crisis as a knot, we naturally do not think of its close as an
unknotting.

Nevertheless, there are frequent cases in which the end of a play
depends on something very like the unravelling of a tangled skein; and
still more often, perhaps, is it brought about through the loosening of
some knot in the mind of one or more of the characters. This was the
characteristic end of the old comedy. The heavy father, or cantankerous
guardian, who for four acts and a half had stood between the lovers,
suddenly changed his mind, and all was well. Even by our ancestors this
was reckoned a rather too simple method of disentanglement. Lisideius,
in Dryden's dialogue,[1] in enumerating the points in which the French
drama is superior to the English notes that--

You never see any of their plays end with a conversion, or simple
change of will, which is the ordinary way which our poets use to end
theirs. It shew little art in the conclusion of a dramatick poem,
when they who have hindered the felicity during the four acts,
desist from it in the fifth, without some powerful cause to take
them off their design.

The remark of Lisideius is suggested by a passage in Corneille, who
instances, as an apt and artistic method of bringing about the
conversion of a heavy father, that his daughter's lover should earn his
gratitude by rescuing him from assassination!

Conversions, closely examined, will be found to fall into two classes:
changes in volition, and changes in sentiment. It was the former class
that Dryden had in mind; and, with reference to this class, the
principle he indicates remains a sound one. A change of resolve should
never be due to a mere lapse of time--to the necessity for bringing the
curtain down and letting the audience go home. It must always be
rendered plausible by some new fact or new motive: some hitherto untried
appeal to reason or emotion. This rule, however, is too obvious to
require enforcement. It was not quite superfluous so long as the old
convention of comedy endured. For a century and a half after Dryden's
time, hard-hearted parents were apt to withdraw their opposition to
their children's "felicity" for no better reason than that the fifth act
was drawing to a close. But this formula is practically obsolete.
Changes of will, on the modern stage, are not always adequately motived;
but that is because of individual inexpertness, not because of any
fai