very seams of the floor trodden by the wife whose respect you will
have learned to covet! You may drag her into the crowded
streets--there is the same vile growth springing up from the chinks
of the pavement! In your house or in the open, the scent of the
mildewed grain always in your nostrils, and in your ears no music
but the wind's rustle amongst the fat sheaves! And, worst of all,
your wife's heart a granary bursting with the load of shame your
profligacy has stored there! I warn you--Mr. Lawrence Kenward!
If we compare this passage with any page taken at random from Mid-Channel, we might think that a century of evolution lay between them, instead of barely twenty years.
The convention of wit-at-any-price is, indeed, moribund; but it is perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference between what the French call the "mot d'auteur" and the "mot de situation." The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class ought to be added--the "mot de caractère." The "mot d'auteur" is the distinguishing mark of the Congreve-Sheridan convention. It survives in full vigour--or, shall one say, it sings its swan-song?--in the works of Oscar Wilde. For instance, the scene of the five men in the third act of Lady Windermere's Fan is a veritable running-fire of epigrams wholly unconnected with the situation, and very slightly related, if at all, to the characters of the speakers. The mark of the "mot d'auteur" is that it can with perfect ease be detached from its context. I could fill this page with sayings from the scene in question, all perfectly comprehensible without any account of the situation. Among them would be one of those; profound sayings which Wilde now and then threw off in his lightest moods, like opals among soap-bubbles. "In the world," says Dumby, "there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." This may rank with Lord Illingworth's speech in A Woman of No Importance: "All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of." When we hear such sayings as these--or the immortal "Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people"--we do not enquire too curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none the less do they belong to an antiquated conception of drama.