the
action are infinite; it is here that the greatest freedom is manifestly
permissible; that in the Indian drama the personages make long journeys
across the stage; and that, with the help of their under-plots, the
masters of the modern tragic and the comic drama--notably those
unequalled weavers of intrigues, the Spaniards--are able most fully to
exercise their inventive faculties. If the growth is too rapid, the
climax will fail of its effect; if it is too slow, the interest will be
exhausted before the greatest demand upon it has been made--a fault to
which comedy is specially liable; if it is involved or inverted, a vague
uncertainty will take the place of an eager or agreeable suspense, the
action will seem to halt, or a fall will begin prematurely. In the
contrivance of the "climax" itself lies one of the chief tests of the
dramatist's art; for while the transactions of real life often fail to
reach any climax at all, that of a dramatic action should present itself
as self-evident. In the middle of everything, says the Greek poet, lies
the strength; and this strongest or highest point it is the task of the
dramatist to make manifest. Much here depends upon the niceties of
constructive instinct; much (as in all parts of the action) upon a
thorough dramatic transformation of the subject. The historical drama at
this point presents peculiar difficulties, of which the example of
_Henry VIII._ may be cited as an illustration.

Fall.

Return.

Close or catastrophe.

From the climax, or height, the action proceeds through its "fall" to
its "close," which in a drama with an unhappy ending we still call its
"catastrophe," while to terminations in general we apply the term
_denouement_. This latter name would, however, more properly be applied
in the sense in which Aristotle employs its Greek equivalent [Greek:
lysis]--the untying of the knot--to the whole of the second part of the
action, from the climax downwards. In the management of the climax,
everything depends upon producing the effect; in the fall, everything
depends upon not marring it. This may be ensured by a rapid advance to
the close; but neither does every action admit of such treatment, nor is
it in accordance with the character of those which are of a more subtle
or complicated kind. With the latter, therefore, the "fall" is often a
revolution or "return," i.e. in Aristotle's phrase a change into the
reverse of what is expected from the circum