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 instance 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?