an inspiration of the imaginative faculties, and conveys
it by the ruddy road of the feelings to the stirred heart of the
audience; it should be, and is in its finest examples, the happy union
of the head and heart, so blended as best to conserve the purpose of
entertainment and popular instruction; popular, for the reason that it
is emotional, concrete, vital; and instructive, because it sinks deeper
in and stays longer (being more keenly felt) than any mere exercise of
the intellect in the world.

The student, whether at home with the book of the play in hand or in his
seat at the theater, will scrutinize the skilled effects of climax,
seeking principles and understanding more clearly his pleasure therein.
In reading Shakespeare, for example, he will see that the obligatory
scene of _The Merchant of Venice_ is the trial scene and the exact
moment when the height is reached and the fall away from it begins, that
where Portia tells the Jew to take his pound of flesh without the
letting of blood. In modern drama, he will think of the scene in
Sudemann's powerful drama, _Magda_, in which Magda's past is revealed to
her fine old father as the climax of the action; and in Pinero's
strongest piece, _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, will put his finger on the
scene of the return of Paula's lover as the crucial thing to show. And
so with the scene of the cross-examination of the woman in Jones's _Mrs.
Dane's Defense_, and the scene in Lord Darlington's rooms in Wilde's
_Lady Windermere's Fan_, and the final scene in Shaw's _Candida_, where
the playwright throws forward the _scene a faire_ to the end, and makes
his heroine choose between husband and lover. These, and many like them,
will furnish ample food for reflection and prove helpful in clarifying
the mind in the essentials of this most important of all the phenomena
of play-building.

It is with the climax, as with everything else in art or in life:
honesty of purpose is at the bottom of the success that is admirable.
Mere effectivism is to be avoided, because it is insincere. In its place
must be effectiveness, which is at once sincere and dramatic.

The climax, let it be now assumed, has been successfully brought off.
The curtain falls on the familiar and pleasant buzz of conversation
which is the sign infallible that the dramatist's dearest ambition has
been attained. Could we but listen to the many detached bits of talk
that fly about the house, or are heard in the lobb