| By my own experience I can tell Those who love truly do not argue well. |
Bulwer-Lytton was thinking of the weakness of self-descriptive woe when he wrote Macready, while composing Richelieu, “In Act 4—in my last alteration, when Richelieu, pitying Julie, says, ‘I could weep to see her thus—But’—the effect would I think be better if he felt the tears with indignation at his own weakness—thus:
| ‘Are these tears? O, shame, shame, Dotage’—” |
Emotion, if given free way, finds the right words by which to express itself. When a character stands outside itself, describing what it feels, the speaker is really the author in disguise, describing what he is incompetent, from lack of sympathetic power, to phrase with simple, moving accuracy. M. de Curel has described perfectly the right relation of author to character and dialogue.
During the first days of work I have a very distinct feeling of creation. Later I move on instinctively and that is much better. When the sentiments of my characters are in question I am absolutely in their skins, for my own part indifferent as to their griefs or joys. I can be moved only later in re-reading, and then this emotion seems to arise from the fact that I have to do with characters absolutely strange to me. I experience sometimes, and then personally, a feeling of irony, of flippancy, in regard to my characters who tangle themselves up and get themselves into difficulties. That transpires sometimes in the language of some other character who, at the moment, ceases to speak correctly because he speaks as I should. As a result, corrections later. At the end of a year, my play, when I re-read it, seems something completely apart from me, written by another.[15]
Allowing a character to express itself exactly raises inevitably the question of dialect. On the one hand it must be admitted that nothing more quickly characterizes a figure, as far as type is concerned, than to let him speak like a Yankee, a Scotchman, a Negro, etc. If the character utters phrases which an audience recognizes instantly as characteristic of his supposed type, there is special satisfaction to the audience in such recognition. On the other hand, very few audiences know any dialect thoroughly enough to permit a writer to use it with absolute accuracy. The moment dialect begins to show the need of a glossary, it is defeating its own ends. As a result a compromise has arisen, dating from the very early days of the drama—stage dialects. A character made up to represent Scotchman, Welshman, Frenchman, Negro, or Indian, speaks in a way that has become time-honored on the stage as representing this or that figure among these types. Till recently most dialect on the stage has been at best a mere popular approximation to real usage. Until within a few years the peasant dialogue of Gammer Gurton’s Needle, the famous sixteenth-century Interlude, was supposed to represent dialect of its time in the neighborhood of Cambridge, England. Recently philologists have shown that the speech of these peasants is unlike any dialect of the period of the play, and was obviously a stage convention of the time. Study the Welshmen and other dialect parts in Shakespeare, and you will reach approximately the same conclusion. With our developing sense of historical truth and of realism, we have, in recent years, been trying to make our characters speak exactly as they would in real life. The plays of the Abbey Theatre are in large part a revolt from the Irish dialogue which the plays of Dion Boucicault had practically established as true to life. Today we try not only phonetically to represent the ways in which words are spoken by the people of a particular locality, but by the use of words and phrases heard among such people to make the characterization vivid and convincing. Here, in Mr. Sheldon’s play, The Nigger, is care to reproduce phonetically the speech of negroes:
Jinny. (Wearily.) I speck yo’ right. Hev yo’ got suthin’ fo’ me t’night? Seems lak I might take it down wif me t’ de cabin.
Simms. (Grumbling.) Fo’ dat young good-fo’-nuffin hawg-grubbah t’ swallow w’en he done come home? Laws me, w’y Marse Phil ’lows his fried chicken en’ co’n-braid t’ feed dat wo’thles rap-scallion, I jes’ cain’t see! Clar out o’ heah, yo’ ern’ry yallah gal!
Jinny. (Crushingly.) Yallah gal—! Sho’! I was livin’ heah fo’ yo’ was bawn! Don’ fo’get dat, yo’ imperent, low-down li’tle niggah yo’!
Simms. (Pacifically.) Hol’ on, Jinny! I ain’t said nuffin’. Dat I ain’t! Yo’ g’ long now en’ I’ll sen’ down a gal t’ yo’ cabin wif a basket.