y, we might hazard a
shrewd guess at the success of the piece. If the talk be favorable, and
the immediate reception of the obligatory scene has been hearty, it
would appear as if the playwright's troubles were over. But hardly so.
Even with his climax a success, he is not quite out of the woods. A
task, difficult and hedged in with the possibilities of mistake, awaits
him; for the last act is just ahead, and it may diminish, even nullify
the favorable impression he has just won by his manipulation of the
_scene a faire_. And so, girding himself for the last battle, he enters
the arena, where many a good man before him has unexpectedly fallen
before the enemy.

CHAPTER X

ENDING THE PLAY

To one who is watchful in his theater seat, it must have become evident
that many plays, which in the main give pleasure and seem successful,
have something wrong with the last act. The play-goer may feel this,
although he never has analyzed the cause or more than dimly been aware
of the artistic problem involved. An effect of anti-climax is produced
by it, interest flags or utterly disappears; the final act seems to lag
superfluous on the stage, like Johnson's player.

Several reasons combine to make this no uncommon experience. One may
have emerged from the discussion of the climax. It is the hard fortune
of the last act to follow the great scene and to suffer by contrast;
even if the last part of the play be all that such an act should be,
there is in the nature of the case a likelihood that the auditor,
reacting from his excitement, may find this concluding section of the
drama stale, flat and unprofitable. To overcome this disadvantage, to
make the last act palatable without giving it so much attraction as to
detract from the _scene a faire_ and throw the latter out of its due
position in the center of interest, offers the playwright a very
definite labor and taxes his ingenuity to the utmost. The proof of this
is that so many dramas, up to the final act complete successes and
excellent examples of sound technic, go to pieces here. I am of the
opinion that in no one particular of construction do plays with matter
in them and some right of existence come to grief more frequently than
in this successful handling of the act which closes the drama. It may
even be doubted if the inexperienced dramatist has so much trouble with
his climax as with this final problem. If he had no _scene a faire_ he
would hardly have written