unfolding itself through a series of those lesser crises, which we call
interesting and moving scenes. The play is scarcely a great one, partly
because its ending is perfunctory, partly because Björnson, poet though
he was, had not Ibsen's art of "throwing in a little poetry" into his
modern dramas. I have summarized it up to its culminating point, because
it happened to illustrate the difference between a bankruptcy, dramatic
in its nature and treatment, and those undramatic bankruptcies to which
reference has been made. In _La Douloureuse_, by Maurice Donnay,
bankruptcy is incidentally employed to bring about a crisis of a
different order. A ball is proceeding at the house of a Parisian
financier, when the whisper spreads that the host is ruined, and has
committed suicide in a room above; whereupon the guests, after a moment
of flustered consternation, go on supping and dancing![4] We are not at
all deeply interested in the host or his fortunes. 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