ir, facing
that wedding tour at fifty, and secretly longing to give it up and
settle down comfortably at home. They have been playing young during
the New York whirl, why not be natural now and enjoy life in the decade
to which they belong? So, in the charming garden scene they confess, and
agree to grow old gracefully together. It is excellent comedy and sound
psychology; to some, the last act is the best of all. Yet, regarded from
the act preceding, it seemed superfluous.

Still another trouble confronts the playwright as he comes at grapples
with the final act. He falls under the temptation to make a
conventionally desirable conclusion, the "pleasant ending" already
animadverted against, which is supposed to be the constant petition of
the theater Philistine. Here, it will be observed, the pleasant ending
becomes part of the constructive problem. Shall the playwright carry out
the story in a way to make it harmonious with what has gone before, both
psychologically and in the logic of events? Shall he make the conclusion
congruous with the climax, a properly deduced result from the situation
therein shown? If he do, his play will be a work of art, tonal in a
totality whose respective parts are keyed to this effect. Or shall he,
adopting the tag line familiar to us in fairy tales, "and so they lived
happily ever after," wrest and distort his material in order to give
this supposed-to-be-prayed-for condiment that the grown-up babes in
front are crying for? Every dramatist meets this question face to face
in his last act, unless his plan has been to throw his most dramatic
moment at the play's very end. A large percentage of all dramas weaken
or spoil the effect by this handling of the last part of the play. The
ending either is ineffective because unbelievable; or unnecessary,
because what it shows had better be left to the imagination.

An attractive and deservedly successful drama by Mr. Zangwill, _Merely
Mary Ann_, may be cited to illustrate the first mistake. Up to the last
act its handling of the relation of the gentleman lodger and the quaint
little slavey is pitched in the key of truth and has a Dickens-like
sympathy in it which is the main element in its charm. But in the final
scene, where Mary Ann has become a fashionable young woman, meets her
whilom man friend, and a match results, the improbability is such (to
say nothing about the impossibility) as to destroy the previous illusion
of reality; the auditor,