It is an hour of anticlimax.

The rich and the great will smile at the anticlimax, presumed to lie in these two short words.

He observed, however, to Dr. Johnson, that the expression as to the family of Errol, 'A thousand years have seen it shine,' compared with what went before, was an anticlimax, and that it would have been better 'Ages have seen,' &c. Dr. Johnson said, 'So great a number as a thousand is better.

And the colossal set-piece of the evening having been duly exploded, no sequel whatever could expect anything better than relegation to the cheerless limbo of anticlimax.

Disappointment N. disappointment; blighted hope, balk; blow; anticlimax; slip 'twixt cup and lip; nonfulfillment of one's hopes; sad disappointment, bitter disappointment; trick of fortune; afterclap; false expectation, vain expectation; miscalculation &c 481; fool's paradise; much cry and little wool.

Ridiculousness N. ridiculousness &c adj.; comicality, oddity &c adj.; extravagance, drollery. farce, comedy; burlesque &c (ridicule) 856; buffoonery &c (fun) 840; frippery; doggerel verses; absurdity &c 497; bombast &c (unmeaning) 517; anticlimax, bathos; eccentricity, monstrosity &c (unconformity) 83; laughingstock &c 857.

LOGIC CHAPTER XVII KEEPING A SECRET BOOK IV THE END CHAPTER XVIII CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX CHAPTER XIX CONVERSION CHAPTER XX

It is sometimes said that a playwright ought to construct his play backwards, and even to write his last act first.[10] This doctrine belongs to the period of the well-made play, when climax was regarded as the one thing needful in dramatic art, and anticlimax as the unforgivable sin.

BOOK IV THE END CHAPTER XVIII CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX

An unemphatic ending, as I understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much higher tension.

This "epilogue"so the author calls ithas been denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable anticlimax.

An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not follow that it is an artistic blemish.

This, then, I regard as a typical instance of justified anticlimax.

It should be noted, too, that The Benefit of the Doubt is a three-act play, and that, in a play laid out on this scale, a whole act of anticlimax is necessarily disproportionate.

An act of anticlimax should be treated, so to speak, as unpretentiously as possible.

To invent an elaborate apparatus for it is to emphasize the anticlimax by throwing it into unnecessary relief.

An even more remarkable play, The Madras House, was ruined, on its first night, by a long final anticlimax.

[Footnote 1: The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of D'Annunzio's La Gioconda.]

Ralph was too deep in his own troubles to waste any wonder over this anticlimax; but the frequent appearance of Moffatt's name in the morning papers acted as an unconscious suggestion.

But Neef, in his zeal for reformation, carries the anticlimax fairly off the brink; and declares, "In the grammar which shall be the work of my pupils, there shall be found no nouns, no pronouns, no articles, no participles, no verbs, no prepositions, no conjunctions, no adverbs, no interjections, no gerunds, not even one single supine.

It was such an unexpected anticlimax.

Any man would be an anticlimax to me after him.

But after the Achensee, the Königsee was something of an anticlimax, although the natives were perfectly satisfactory, and not an English word was spoken outside of our party.

Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax.

Its sickening anticlimax to poor Queen Louise was so exactly in keeping with the smaller disappointments which assail her more humble sister women in every walk of life that it takes on the air of a heart tragedy.