The author's purpose
is to illustrate, rather crudely, the heartlessness of plutocratic
Bohemia; and by means of the bankruptcy and suicide he brings about what
may be called a crisis of collective character.[5]
* * * * *
As regards individual incidents, it may be said in general that the
dramatic way of treating them is the crisp and staccato, as opposed to
the smooth or legato, method. It may be thought a point of inferiority
in dramatic art that it should deal so largely in shocks to the nerves,
and should appeal by preference, wherever it is reasonably possible, to
the cheap emotions of curiosity and surprise. But this is a criticism,
not of dramatic art, but of human nature. We may wish that mankind took
more pleasure in pure apprehension than in emotion; but so long as the
fact is otherwise, that way of handling an incident by which the
greatest variety of poignancy of emotion can be extracted from it will
remain the specifically dramatic way.
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