]
_CHAPTER XX_
BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS
A blind-alley theme, as its name imports, is one from which there is no
exit. It is a problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all
possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The
playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a
no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic,
happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us--our sense of
truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or,
at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human
nature, and the vanity of human aspirations. But a play which satisfies
neither our higher nor our lower instincts, baffles our sympathies, and
leaves our desires at fault between equally inacceptable
alternatives--such a play, whatever beauties of detail it may possess,
is a weariness of the spirit, and an artistic blunder.
There are in literature two conspicuous examples of the blind-alley
theme--two famous plays, wherein two heroines are placed in somewhat
similar dilemmas, which merely paralyse our sympathies and inhibit our
moral judgment.
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