The thirty-six dramatic situations

NINETEENTH SITUATION
SLAYING OF A KINSMAN UNRECOGNIZED
(The Slayer; the Unrecognized Victim)
Whereas the Eighteenth Situation attains its highest
degree of emotion after the accomplishment of the act,
(doubtless because all the persons concerned in it survive,
and the horror of it lies chiefly in the consequences), the
Nineteenth, on the contrary, in which a victim is to perish
and in which the interest increases by reason of the blind
premeditation, becomes more pathetic in the preparations
for the crime than in the results. This permits a happy
ending, without the necessity of recourse, as in the Eighteenth,
to a comedy-process of error. A simple recognition
of one character by another will suffice, --of which
our Situation XIX is, in effect, but a development.
A (1) Being Upon the Point of Slaying a Daughter
Unknowingly, by Command of a Divinity or an
Oracle: -- Metastasio's "Demophon." The ignorance
of the kinship springs from a substitution of infants; the
interpretation of the oracle's words is erroneous; the
"jeune premiere," at one point in the action, believes
herself the Bister of her fiance. This linking of three or
four mistakes 'unknown kinship, in the special lighl of the
situation we are now studying, a supposed danger of incest
as in B 2 of the preceding, and finally a misleading ambiguity
of words, as in the majority of comedies) suffices to
constitute what is called "stirring'' action, characteristic
of the intrigues brought back into vogue by the Second
Empire, and over whose intricate entanglements our
chroniclers waxed so naively enthusiastic.
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