The act-division positively enhances the amount of pleasurable emotion
through which the audience passes. Each act ought to stimulate and
temporarily satisfy an interest of its own, while definitely advancing
the main action. The psychological principle is evident enough; namely,
that there is more sensation to be got out of three or four
comparatively brief experiences, suited to our powers of perception,
than out of one protracted experience, forced on us without relief,
without contrast, in such a way as to fatigue and deaden our faculties.
Who would not rather drink three, four, or five glasses of wine than put
the bottle to his lips and let its contents pour down his throat in one
long draught? Who would not rather see a stained-glass window broken
into three, four, or five cunningly-proportioned "lights," than a great
flat sheet of coloured glass, be its design never so effective?
It used to be the fashion in mid Victorian melodramas to give each act a
more or less alluring title of its own.
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