III. Will the two be reconciled, and how? Ibsen's _A Doll's House_ may be thus expressed in a proposition: I. A young wife has been babified by her husband. II. Experiences open her eyes to the fact that she is not educated to be either wife or mother. III. She leaves her husband until he can see what a woman should be in the home: a human being, not a doll. These examples will serve to show what is meant by proposition and indicate more definitely the central purpose of the dramatic author and the technical demand made upon him. Be assured that under whatever varied garb of attraction in incident, scene and character, this underlying stern architectural necessity abides, and a drama's inability to reduce itself thus to a formula is a confession that in the structural sense the building is lop-sided and insecure, or, worse, that there is no structure there at all: nothing, so to put it, but a front elevation, a mere architect's suggestion. As the spectator breathlessly enjoys the climax and watches to see that unknotting of the knot which gives the French word _denouement_ (unknotting) its meaning, he will notice that the intensity of the climactic effect is not derived alone from action and word; but that largely effective in the total result is the picture made upon the stage, in front of the background of setting which in itself has pictorial quality, by the grouped characters as the curtain falls. This effect, conventionally called a _situation_, is for the eye as well as for the ear and the brain,--better, the heart. It would be an unfortunate limitation to our theater culture if we did not comprehend to the full how large a part of the effect of a good play is due to the ever-changing series of artistic stage pictures furnished by the dramatist in collaboration with the actors and the stage manager. This principle is important throughout a play, but gets its most vivid illustration in the climax; hence, I enlarge upon it at this point.