Finale

“ As the concluding laps of a race are generally marked by increased energy incident to the final spurt—the supreme effort to reach, the end in glory and triumph, as in a powerful drama, interest becomes more intense, and action more concentrated with the approach of the finale, so, in this great undertaking, the fact that the end was looming above the horizon of sight called forth redoubled energies on the part of the people. ”

“ Our aesthetics demand that the drama must have a climax and a finale: though we have abandoned the Aristotelian unities. Given a little more time, however, dramatic writers will have got rid of this restriction also. They will frankly confess that they do not know how, or with what event to end their dramas. Stories have already learnt to dispense with an ending. ”

“ To the cultured esthetic sense the tragical tendency carries more meaning than the catastrophic finale; our author accordingly scorns, and perhaps inordinately, whatsoever may appear as merely adventitious in the action of plays. ”

“ One of the surest tags of the American short story has been its happy ending. No matter what vicissitudes the hero or heroine may have undergone, what problems and tragedies may have overtaken them, what unmendable exploits of circumstance or fate they may have been subjected to, in the end all must be well with them. The happy ending is a direct result of our uplift optimism, of our Pollyanna philosophy of life, of our fear of reality. We have always justified it on the ground of our national psychology, which, we claim, is buoyant and aggressive and won’t accept defeat. ”

“ The scene of the roisterers, rousing the night-owl in a catch, rouses the heart, as all real creation does, with the thought that life is too wonderful to end. The next, most lovely scene, where the Duke and Viola talk of love that keeps life from ending, and so often brings life down into the dust, assures the heart that even if life ends for us it will go on in others. ”

“ I feel no excitement, rather as if another act in the drama of life was ended, that is all, and that to-morrow I am starting upon a new one which will decide whether the end of the play shall be tragedy or content? ”

“ If marriage be the proper ending for a novel,—the only ending, as this writer takes it to be, which is not discordant,—surely no tale was ever so properly ended, or with so full a concord, as this one. ”

“ The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that good wine until now. ”

“ Tragedy and the pathos of failure have their places in literature as well as in life. I only say that, artistically, a good ending is as proper as a bad ending.
Perhaps the most inane thing ever put forth in the name of literature is the so-called domestic novel, an indigestible, culinary sort of product, that might be named the doughnut of fiction. ”

“ The Collect of the day should have its full ending. If two collects are said, the second also, ordinarily, should have the full ending. If more than two collects are said, only the first and the last should have the full ending. If the collect is addressed to the Father, the full ending should be Through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. ”

“ The climax of a story must be a genuine climax—that is, it must be the culmination of the interest of the story, and it must definitely end and eliminate the element of suspense. The climax, or its immediate consequences, must decide the destinies of all your characters, and the fate of all their schemes. If the heroine is hesitating between her two lovers she must decide in the climax or on account of it; if the hero is in a position of great danger he must be killed or saved. ”

“ Is anything human final, except one's twenty-ninth birthday? I choose it to be final for the present, and 'the subject then dropped,' as the papers say about debates in Congress. Let us have done now with this troublesome verb altogether, and conjugate our return to Oxford instead. ”

“ For the purpose of clearness, let me define the ending of a playlet as a scene that lies between the climax or culminating scene—in which the audience has been made to feel the coming-to-an-end effect—and the very last word on which the curtain descends. If you have ever watched a sailor splicing a rope, you will know what I mean when I say that the worker, reaching for the loose ends to finish the job off neatly, is like the playlet writer who reaches here and there for the playlet's loose ends and gathers them all up into a neat, workmanlike finish. ”

“ Such an ending is exalting or deadly in its depressiveness, as you please; just as the story itself is a thing of magnificence or of utter drabness. Like the powerful war novel by Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat, a violent reaction in one direction or another is to be expected of the reader. ”

“ Well, but life is full, also, of endings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completed dramas. And we expect and give, in the stories we hear and tell in ordinary intercourse, some point, some outcome, an end of some sort. If you interest me in the preparations of two persons who are starting on a journey, and expend all your ingenuity in describing their outfit and their characters, and do not tell me where they went or what befell them afterwards, I do not call that a story. ”

“ Decreed by God Omnipotent it is, that Death should be the last scene of the last act of man's play;—a play, which begin how it may, in farce or comedy, ever hath its tragic end; the curtain inevitably falls upon a corpse. ”

“ Does an act cease to be an act and become a prologue or epilogue, when the space of time between it and the other acts is twenty-five years, or should it be thirty? The absurdity of making the use of the words Prologue or Epilogue depend upon the space of time between one division and another is evident. ”

“ Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject, suspense is the one that most gnaws, and cankers into, the frame. One little month of that suspense, when it involves death, we are told, in a very remarkable work lately published by an eye-witness. [Note: See Mr. Wakefield's work on 'The Punishment of Death.'] is sufficient to plough fixed lines and furrows in the face of a convict of five-and-twenty—sufficient to dash the brown hair with grey, and to bleach the grey to white. And this suspense—suspense of this nature, for more than eight whole months, had Madeline to endure! ”

“ In the first place, we must find something to write about; some condition, experience or deed that is worthy of a plot, a story or a play. As we consider this or that item of plot material, in our search for a plot germ, we pause and ask of it: To what end? To what good? The moment we discern the culmination of a big moment, or the performance of a decisive action, or the accomplishment of a great deed, we have found our plot germ. This is not the beginning of our play, but its culmination, or climax. ”

“ Whether in dialogue or in monologue, 'The Revenger's Tragedy' is so equally admirable for instinctive obedience to nature and imaginative magnificence of inspiration, so equally perfect in the passionate harmony of its verse and the inspired accuracy of its locution, that years of study and elaboration might have seemed necessary to bring about this inexpressible improvement in expression of yet more sombre and more fiery thought or feeling. ”

“ Beauty in distress—beauty that made a powerful impression on judge, jury and spectators, intensified a hundredfold the dramatic climax of the trial.{79} Frail, young, her fair name shattered, her love for husband surpassing that of Thisbe for Pyramus, she laid down her bleeding heart upon the altar of the soul, and gave herself a living sacrifice to save her husband from the electric chair. ”

“ Now, let me sum up these four elements of surprise:
A surprise finish must be fitting, logical, vitally important, and revealingly dramatic; if you cannot give a playlet a surprise-finish that shall be all of these four things at once, be content with the simpler ending.
The importance of a playlet's ending is so well understood in vaudeville that the insistence upon a "great finish" to every playlet has sometimes seemed to be over-insistence, for, important as it is, it is no more important than a "great opening" and "great scenes." ”

“ Something in the perfection of the saga is to be traced to the long winter’s evenings, when the whole household, gathered together at their spinning, weaving, and so on, would listen to one of their number who told anew some old story of adventure or achievement. In very truth the saga is a prose epic, and marked by every quality an epic should possess. ”

“ In fiction you settle upon the final chapter before you begin the first, and every event is described and placed in the fabric of the story to suit an end already in view. A story of real life, like real life itself, has no beginning, no end. ”

“ The theatrical necessity of a happy ending forbade either tragedy or a serious study of life. It compelled the dramatist to devote a large part of a play to preparing for the reconciliation, to spend much time on youthful love, to maintain a lightness of tone throughout ”

“ EPILOGUE ROSALIND.
It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue, but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. ”

“ One at least is obvious, and indeed it is followed not merely during the conflict but from beginning to end of the play. There are, of course, in the action certain places where the tension in the minds of the audience becomes extreme. We shall consider these presently. But, in addition, there is, all through the tragedy, a constant alternation of rises and falls in this tension or in the emotional pitch of the work, a regular sequence of more exciting and less exciting sections. ”

“ I began to think how everything ends at last. Love ends, sorrow ends, and to our mortal sense everything that is mortal ends, whether that which is spiritual has a perpetual effect beyond these eyes or not. ”

“ What makes wit an unalloyed pleasure?
QUERIES FOR DISCUSSION Is the serious ending of this Comedy a disappointment? Is seriousness an ending artistically called for by this plot, or only morally called for? Compare with the serious strain in the "Comedie of Errors." What does the contradictory little final dialogue between Winter and Spring add to the significance of the Play? ”

“ Technically, the plot is the underlying plan “of which no part can be removed without ruin to the whole”; it is the development of the struggle or conflict which every “short-story” possesses in common with the drama.
What in “The Excursion” is the struggle? What part does the dialogue between the two sisters play in the revelation of the struggle? If the struggle were made dominant, what lamentable result would follow for the “situation” value of the whole narrative? Is there a hint near the conclusion that the struggle may have an outcome? ”

“ But this is not enough for the highest class of fiction, and I am aware that a hankering after a good end is a vulgar thing. Now, the good ending of a novel means generally that the hero and heroine should be married and sent off with blessings upon their wedding tour. ”

“ The contemplation of the final judgment, and the sentence to be passed upon the wicked, is truly a solemn one, and should startle every mind, But oh, how few, comparatively, seem to stop and reflect upon this momentous subject? And yet all are rapidly hastening on to their final doom. Few are aware of the vast numbers that are passing from time into eternity—even each year, each month, each day each hour, or each minute. ”

“ The conclusion of a book in an epic poem, or of an act in a play, cannot be altogether arbitrary; nor be intended for so slight a purpose as to make the parts of equal length. The supposed pause at the end of every book, and the real pause at the end of every act, ought always to coincide with some pause in the action. ”

“ Complete conviction was in her tones.
"Then, for the first time in my life, I'm wondering what destiny has in store for the immediate future," he said with a long stare of his gray eyes, and in them was that which set her heart throbbing. ”

“ An end, on the other hand, is that which from its nature is after something else, either necessarily, or usually, but after which there is nothing, A middle, what is itself after some other thing, and after which also there is something. ”

“ Yes, this one single, simple act of love brings forth an infinite variety of 184 flowers to celebrate the death of the finite outward shape and the eternal essence of life perennial. In complete surrender lies the divineness of things eternal. ”

“ And again a spasm passed over his frame, his eyes grew fixed and glazed, and he earnestly exclaimed: “Gather near me all who love me, and all to love whom is my duty. Quick, quick; for a film overspreads my eyes, the throes of death are tearing down this frame. ”

“ Particularly, the Action is so much one, that it is the only of the kind without Episode, or Underplot; every Scene in the Tragedy conducing to the main design, and every Act concluding with a turn of it. ”

“ William Black, when discussing with me one day the question of the sad ending, said, "People may say what they like, but I know, as a matter of experience, that a book which ends sorrowfully is always remembered far more vividly than one that winds up in the usual fashion with the ringing of marriage-bells." ”