rst act will do well to possess at least some slight
heightening of the interest maintained progressively from the opening of
the drama; an added crispness perceptible to all who look and listen.
And the crisis of the second act must be differentiated from that of the
first in that it has a tenser emotional value, while yet it is
distinctly below that of the climax, if the obligatory scene is to come
later. Sad indeed the result if any curtain effect in appeal and power
usurp the royal place of the climactic scene! And this skillful
gradation of effects upon a rising scale of interest, while always aimed
at, is by no means always secured. This may happen because the
dramatist, with much good material in his hands, has believed he could
use it prodigally, and been led to overlook the principle of relative
values in his art. A third act climax may secure a tremendous sensation
by the device of keeping the earlier effects leading up to it
comparatively low-keyed and quiet. The tempest may be, in the abstract,
only one in a teapot; but a tempest in effect it is, all the same.

Ibsen's plays often illustrate and justify this statement, as do the
plays of the younger British school, Barker, Baker, McDonald, Houghton,
Hankin. And the reverse is equally true: a really fine climax may be
made pale and ineffective by too much of sensational material introduced
earlier in the play.

The climax of the drama is also the best place to illustrate the fact
that the stage appeal is primarily emotional. If this central scene be
not of emotional value, it is safe to say that the play is doomed; or
will at the most have a languishing life in special performances and be
cherished by the elite. The stage story, we have seen, comes to the
auditor warm and vibrant in terms of feeling. The idea which should be
there, as we saw, must come by way of the heart, whence, as George
Meredith declares, all great thoughts come. Herein lies another
privilege and pitfall of the dramatist. Privilege, because teaching by
emotion will always be most popular; yet a pitfall, because it sets up
a temptation to play upon the unthinking emotions which, once aroused,
sweep conviction along to a goal perhaps specious and undesirable. To
say that the theater is a place for the exercise of the emotions, is not
to say or mean that it is well for it to be a place for the display and
influence of the unregulated emotions. Legitimate drama takes an idea of
the brain, or