| Count your many blessings, count them one by one, Count your blessings, see what God has done. Count your blessings, count them one by one, And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.[55] |
Is not the irony of this group of unsatisfied or dissatisfied people singing “Count your many blessings,” fully climactic?
Not quietness of speech or action, then, but appropriateness makes any of these approved endings climactic and artistic.
There can hardly be any question that the original ending of Still Waters Run Deep is theatrical in the sense that it is climactic only by the dramatic convention of its time. Except when theatricality is intentionally part of the artistic design, it is, of course, undesirable. Rostand, letting the figures in The Romancers comment on their own play as a kind of epilogue, has a really artistic though theatrical climax.
Sylvette. (Summoning the actors about her.) And now we five—if Master Straforel please—
Let us expound the play in which we’ve tried to please.
(She comes down stage and addresses the audience, marking time with her hand.)
Light, easy rhymes; old dresses, frail and light;
Love in a park, fluting an ancient tune. (Soft music.)
Bergamin. A fairy-tale quintet, mad as Midsummer-night.
Pasquin. Some quarrels. Yes!—but all so very slight!
Straforel. Madness of sunstroke; madness of the moon!
A worthy villain, in his mantle dight.