t ludicrous
anticlimax. To obviate this, he made Grace, at the beginning of the act,
write a letter of confession, and address it to Claude; so that all
through the discussion we had at the back of our mind the question "Will
the letter reach his hands? Will the sword of Damocles fall?" This may
seem like a leaf from the book of Sardou; but in reality it was a
perfectly natural and justified expedient. It kept the tension alive
throughout a scene of ethical discussion, interesting in itself, but
pretty clearly destined to lead up to the undramatic alternative--a
policy of silence and inaction. Mr. Clyde Fitch, in the last act of _The
Truth_, made an elaborate and daring endeavour to relieve the
mawkishness of the clearly-foreseen reconciliation between Warder and
Becky. He let Becky fall in with her father's mad idea of working upon
Warder's compassion by pretending that she had tried to kill herself.
Only at the last moment did she abandon the sordid comedy, and so prove
herself (as we are asked to suppose) cured for ever of the habit of
fibbing. Mr. Fitch here showed good technical insight marred by
over-hasty execution. That Becky should be tempted to employ her old
methods, and should overcome the temptation, was entirely right; but the
actual deception attempted was so crude and hopeless that there was no
plausibility in her consenting to it, and no merit in her desisting
from it.

In light comedy and farce it is even more desirable than in serious
drama to avoid a tame and perfunctory last act. Very often a seemingly
trivial invention will work wonders in keeping the interest afoot. In
Mr. Anstey's delightful farce, _The Brass Bottle_, one looked forward
rather dolefully to a flat conclusion; but by the simple device of
letting the Jinny omit to include Pringle in his "act of oblivion," the
author is enabled to make his last scene quite as amusing as any of its
predecessors. Mr. Arnold Bennett, in _The Honeymoon_, had the audacity
to play a deliberate trick on the audience, in order to evade an
anticlimax. Seeing that his third act could not at best be very good, he
purposely put the audience on a false scent, made it expect an
absolutely commonplace ending (the marriage of Flora to Charles Haslam),
and then substituted one which, if not very brilliant, was at least
ingenious and unforeseen. Thus, by defeating the expectation of a
superlatively bad act, he made a positively insignificant act seem
comparatively go