s inclined to "bite," and goes off,
leaving the merchant under the impression that he is saved. This is an
interesting and natural, but scarcely a thrilling, crisis. It does not,
therefore, discount the supreme crisis of the play, in which a cold,
clear-headed business man, who has been deputed by the banks to look
into the merchant's affairs, proves to him, point by point, that it
would be dishonest of him to flounder any longer in the swamp of
insolvency, into which he can only sink deeper and drag more people down
with him. Then the bankrupt produces a pistol and threatens murder and
suicide if the arbiter of his fate will not consent to give him one more
chance; but his frenzy breaks innocuous against the other's calm,
relentless reason. Here we have, I repeat, a typically dramatic theme: a
great crisis, bringing out vivid manifestations of character, not only
in the bankrupt himself, but in those around him, and naturally
unfolding itself through a series of those lesser crises, which we call
interesting and moving scenes. The play is scarcely a great one, partly
because its ending is perfunctory, partly because Bjoernson, poet though
he was, had not Ibsen's art of "throwing in a little poetry" into his
modern dramas. I have summarized it up to its culminating point, because
it happened to illustrate the difference between a bankruptcy, dramatic
in its nature and treatment, and those undramatic bankruptcies to which
reference has been made. In _La Douloureuse_, by Maurice Donnay,
bankruptcy is incidentally employed to bring about a crisis of a
different order. A ball is proceeding at the house of a Parisian
financier, when the whisper spreads that the host is ruined, and has
committed suicide in a room above; whereupon the guests, after a moment
of flustered consternation, go on supping and dancing![4] We are not at
all deeply interested in the host or his fortunes. The author's purpose
is to illustrate, rather crudely, the heartlessness of plutocratic
Bohemia; and by means of the bankruptcy and suicide he brings about what
may be called a crisis of collective character.[5]

* * * * *

As regards individual incidents, it may be said in general that the
dramatic way of treating them is the crisp and staccato, as opposed to
the smooth or legato, method. It may be thought a point of inferiority
in dramatic art that it should deal so largely in shocks to the nerves,
and should appeal by