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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. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is what I am here pleading against.
From the moment that the trumpet sounded, and the guards grew as rigid as the basalt statues in the niches of the columned walls, it was a punishable crime to speak or even to move until Caesar appeared and was seated. Nor was Caesar himself an anticlimax.
"Oh, buck up, old man, the worst is yet to come!" Kent gave him an affectionate push just as a taxicab came lumbering on the far end of the bridge and he saw a blue scarf floating in the breezes, a blue scarf that could belong to no one but his dear sister Molly. "What did I tell you? There they are now. Now get ready for the anticlimax that you so scorn. I bet it will out-climax the climax!"
In their eyes it was a great occasion the true commencement of national life in the Colony. The irony of fate, or the perversity of man, turned it into a curious anticlimax. The Parliament, indeed, duly assembled. But it dispersed after weeks of ineffectual wrangling and intrigue, amid scenes which were discreditable and are still ridiculous.
"You've made me feel sorry for myself. What's the use?" she answered in a little sigh, keeping her reddened eyes turned away from him. "Hush! Wait a moment! I was forgetting," she added, in comedy anticlimax, like a housewife who in the midst of a scene of sentiment should smell the dinner scorching.
"It's my heart," she whispered. "I mustn't talk." She lay back with closed eyes. Sir James kept his finger on her wrist a minute longer, then withdrew it with a nod. "She'll do now." All three moved away, and stood together talking in low voices. One and all were conscious of a certain feeling of anticlimax. Clearly any scheme for cross-questioning the lady was out of the question for the moment.
Persons who do not penetrate beneath the flickering surfaces of life, regard these last years of Roosevelt's as an anticlimax which he passed in eclipse; as if they were the eight lean and overshadowed years, following the splendid decade in which as Governor and President he had the world's admiration and consent. But this view wholly misconceives him.
"You have hit the nail on the head, Miss Olive, distinctly on the head," he assured her, with a bow and smile so suave as to be devoid of meaning. "Really," and Olive felt as if she were a young child and he were offering her a stick of candy; "it was a very smart little tap. Yes, as you say, a Mamie is an anticlimax to one's best endeavours.
After Entrevaux, picturesque Puget-Theniers was an anticlimax; though other fairy towns peered down from high crags and sheer hillsides where they hung by wires caught in spider webs and though we passed through other gorges of grim beauty, my thoughts had flown ahead of our swift car.
There was no appreciable increase in the number of vessels sunk by Teutonic submarines, and armed merchantmen did not especially figure among the victims. In the face of this tame execution of the terrible decree, providing a sorry anticlimax to its noisy proclamation, the German press called for a policy of no compromise with the United States.
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