to the
playwright's uses. Certainly there are few things more impressive in
drama than to see a man or woman--or a man and woman--come upon the
stage, radiant, confident, assured that

"God's in his heaven,
All's right with the world,"

and leave it crushed and desperate, after a gradual and yet swift
descent into Avernus. Such a scene is of the very marrow of drama. It is
a play within a play; a concentrated, quintessentiated crisis.

In the third act of _Othello_ we have a peripety handled with consummate
theatrical skill. To me--I confess it with bated breath--the
craftsmanship seems greatly superior to the psychology. Othello, when we
look into it, succumbs with incredible facility to Iago's poisoned
pin-pricks; but no audience dreams of looking into it; and there lies
the proof of Shakespeare's technical mastery. In the Trial Scene in _The
Merchant of Venice_ we have another great peripety. It illustrates the
obvious principle that, where the drama consists in a conflict between
two persons or parties, the peripety is generally a double one--the
sudden collapse of Shylock's case implying an equally sudden restoration
of Antonio's fortunes. Perhaps the most striking peripety in Ibsen is
Stockmann's fall from jubilant self-confidence to defiant impotence in
the third act of _An Enemy of the People_. Thinking that he has the
"compact majority" at his back, he assumes the Burgomaster's insignia of
office, and lords it over his incensed brother, only to learn, by blow
on blow of disillusionment, that "the compact majority" has ratted, that
he is to be deprived of his position and income, and that the commonest
freedom of speech is to be denied him. In _A Doll's House_ there are two
peripeties: Nora's fall from elation to despair in the first scene with
Krogstad, and the collapse of Helmer's illusions in the last scene
of all.

A good instance of the "great scene" which involves a marked peripety
occurs in Sardou's _Dora_, once famous in England under the title of
_Diplomacy_. The "scene of the three men" shows how Tekli, a Hungarian
exile, calls upon his old friend Andre de Maurillac, on the day of
Andre's marriage, and congratulates him on having eluded the wiles of a
dangerous adventuress, Dora de Rio-Zares, by whom he had once seemed to
be attracted. But it is precisely Dora whom Andre has married; and,
learning this, Tekli tries to withdraw, or minimize, his imputation. For
a moment a duel seems imminent;