By an "unemphatic ending" I am far from meaning a
makeshift ending, an ending carelessly and conventionally huddled up.
Nor do I mean an indecisive ending, where the curtain falls, as the
saying goes, on a note of interrogation. An unemphatic ending, as I
understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or
philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much
higher tension. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is
what I am here pleading against. It is sometimes assumed that the
playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes
of its culmination; but for such a hard-and-fast rule I can find no
sufficient reason. The consequences of a great emotional or spiritual
crisis cannot always be worked out, or even foreshadowed, within so
brief a space of time. If, after such a crisis, we are unwilling to keep
our seats for another half-hour, in order to learn "what came of it
all," the author has evidently failed to awaken in us any real interest
in his characters.
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