stances of the action
([Greek: peripeteia])--as in _Coriolanus_, where the Roman story lends
itself so admirably to dramatic demands. In any case, the art of the
dramatist is in this part of his work called upon for the surest
exercise of its tact and skill. The effect of the climax was to
concentrate the interest; the fall must therefore, above all, avoid
dissipating it. The use of episodes is not even now excluded; but, even
where serving the purpose of relief, they must now be such as help to
keep alive the interest, previously raised to its highest pitch. This
may be effected by the raising of obstacles between the height of the
action and its expected consequences; in tragedy by the suggestion of a
seemingly possible recovery or escape from them (as in the wonderfully
powerful construction of the latter part of _Macbeth_); in comedy, or
wherever the interest of the action is less intense, by the gradual
removal of incidental difficulties. In all kinds of the drama
"discovery" will remain, as it was in the judgment of Aristotle, a most
effective expedient; but it should be a discovery prepared by that
method of treatment which in its consummate master, Sophocles, has been
termed his "irony." Nowhere should the close or catastrophe be other
than a consequence of the action itself. Sudden revulsions from the
conditions of the action--such as are supplied with the aid of the _deus
ex machina_, or the revising officer of the emperor of China, or the
nabob returned from India, or a virulent malaria--condemn themselves as
unsatisfactory makeshifts. However sudden, and even in manner of
accomplishment surprising, may be the catastrophe, it should, like every
other part of the action, be in organic connexion with the whole
preceding action. The sudden suicides which terminate so many tragedies,
and the unmerited paternal blessings which close an equal number of
comedies, should be something more than a "way out of it," or a signal
for the fall of the curtain. A catastrophe may conveniently, and even
(as in _Faust_) with powerful effect, be left to the imagination; but
to substitute for it a deliberate blank is to leave the action
incomplete, and the drama a fragment ending with a--possibly
interesting--confession of incompetence.

Probability of action.

The action of a drama, besides being one and complete in itself, ought
likewise to be _probable_. The probability or necessity (in the
Aristotelian sense of the terms