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Not infrequently, he begins a new play under the impression that he is finishing the old one. That is what Shakespeare did in The Merchant of Venice. The fifth act is an independent afterpiece, though its independence is slightly disguised by the fact that the erregende Moment of the new play follows close upon the end of the old one, with no interact between.
It is curious to note that, in another play, Ibsen did actually transfer the erregende Moment, the joining of issue, from the second act to the first. In his early draft of Rosmersholm, the great scene in which Rosmer confesses to Kroll his change of views did not occur until the second act. There can be no doubt that the balance and proportion of the play gained enormously by the transference.
The beginner, however, is far more likely to put too little than too much into his first act: he is more likely to leave our interest insufficiently stimulated than to carry us too far in the development of his theme. My own feeling is that, as a general rule, what Freytag calls the erregende Moment ought by all means to fall within the first act. What is the erregende Moment?
I suggest, then, that this erregende Moment ought always to come within the first act if it is to come at all There are plays, as we have seen, which depict life on so even a plane that it is impossible to say at any given point, "Here the drama sets in," or "The interest is heightened there."
In such a scene the mind stretches forward, no longer to something vague and distant, but to something instant and imminent. In discussing what Freytag calls the erregende Moment, we might have defined it as the starting-point of the tension.
My criticism of the first act of Pillars of Society may be summed up in saying that the author has omitted to place in it the erregende Moment.
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