The climax is reached with the third stage, which is the most difficult.  There the drama aims at being tragic.  We are brought face to face with great suffering and the storm and stress of existence; and the outcome of it is to show the vanity of all human effort.  Deeply moved, we are either directly prompted to disengage our will from the struggle of life, or else a chord is struck in us which echoes a similar feeling.

The beginning, it is said, is always difficult.  In the drama it is just the contrary; for these the difficulty always lies in the end.  This is proved by countless plays which promise very well for the first act or two, and then become muddled, stick or falter—­notoriously so in the fourth act—­and finally conclude in a way that is either forced or unsatisfactory or else long foreseen by every one.  Sometimes, too, the end is positively revolting, as in Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, which sends the spectators home in a temper.

This difficulty in regard to the end of a play arises partly because it is everywhere easier to get things into a tangle than to get them out again; partly also because at the beginning we give the author carte blanche to do as he likes, but, at the end, make certain definite demands upon him.  Thus we ask for a conclusion that shall be either quite happy or else quite tragic; whereas human affairs do not easily take so decided a turn; and then we expect that it shall be natural, fit and proper, unlabored, and at the same time foreseen by no one.

These remarks are also applicable to an epic and to a novel; but the more compact nature of the drama makes the difficulty plainer by increasing it.

E nihilo nihil fit.  That nothing can come from nothing is a maxim true in fine art as elsewhere.  In composing an historical picture, a good artist will use living men as a model, and take the groundwork of the faces from life; and then proceed to idealize them in point of beauty or expression.  A similar method, I fancy, is adopted by good novelists.  In drawing a character they take a general outline of it from some real person of their acquaintance, and then idealize and complete it to suit their purpose.

A novel will be of a high and noble order, the more it represents of inner, and the less it represents of outer, life; and the ratio between the two will supply a means of judging any novel, of whatever kind, from Tristram Shandy down to the crudest and most sensational tale of knight or robber. Tristram Shandy has, indeed, as good as no action at all; and there is not much in La Nouvelle Heloise and Wilhelm Meister.  Even Don Quixote has relatively little; and what there is, very unimportant, and introduced merely for the sake of fun.  And these four are the best of all existing novels.