air young bodies. A
better mood for leaving the playhouse is thus created, without any lying
about life. The Greeks did this by the use of lyric song at the end of
their tragedies; melodrama does it by an often violent wresting of
events to smooth out the trouble, as well as by lessening our interest
in character as such.

Also, and here is, I believe, its prime function, the last act can show
the logical outflow of the situation already laid down and brought to
its issue in the preceding acts of the drama. Another danger lurks in
this for the technician, as may be shown. It would almost seem that, in
view of the largely supererogatory character of this final act, inasmuch
as the play seems practically over with the _scene a faire_, it might be
best honestly to end the piece with its most exciting, arresting scene
and cut out the final half hour altogether.

But there is an artistic reason for keeping it as a feature of good
play-making to the end of the years; I have just referred to it. I mean
the instinctive desire on the part of the dramatic artist and his
cooeperative auditors so to handle the cross-section of life which has
been exhibited upon the stage as to make the transition from stage scene
to real life so gradual, so plausible, as to be pleasant to one's sense
of esthetic _vraisemblance_. To see how true this is, watch the effect
upon yourself made by a play which rings down the last curtain upon a
sensational moment, leaving you dazed and dumb as the lights go up and
the orchestra renders its final banality. Somehow, you feel that this
sudden, violent change from life fictive and imaginative to the life
actual of garish streets, clanging trolleys, tooting motor cars and
theater suppers is jarring and wrong. Art, you whisper to yourself,
should not be so completely at variance with life; the good artist
should find some other better way to dismiss you. The Greeks, as I said,
sensitive to this demand, mitigated the terrible happenings of their
colossal legendary tragedies by closing with lofty lyric choruses. Turn
to the last pages of Sophocles's _OEdipus Tyrannus_, perhaps the most
drastic of them all, for an example. I should venture to go so far as to
suggest it as possible that in an apparent exception like _Othello_,
where the drama closes harshly upon the murder of the ewe lamb of a
wife, Shakespeare might have introduced the alleviation of a final
scene, had he ever prepared this play, or his plays in