It is useless to begin to give specimens of the "mot de caractère" and "mot de situation." All really dramatic dialogue falls under one head or the other. One could easily pick out a few brilliantly effective examples of each class: but as their characteristic is to fade when uprooted from the soil in which they grow, they would take up space to very little purpose.
But there is another historic influence, besides that of euphuism, which has been hurtful, though in a minor degree, to the development of a sound style in dialogue. Some of the later Elizabethans, and notably Webster and Ford, cultivated a fashion of abrupt utterance, whereby an immensity of spiritual significance--generally tragic--was supposed to be concentrated into a few brief words. The classic example is Ferdinand's "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young," in The Duchess of Malfy. Charles Lamb celebrated the virtues of this pregnant, staccato style with somewhat immoderate admiration, and thus helped to set a fashion of spasmodic pithiness in dialogue, which too often resulted in dense obscurity. Not many plays composed under this influence have reached the stage; not one has held it. But we find in some recent writing a qualified recrudescence of the spasmodic manner, with a touch of euphuism thrown in. This is mainly due, I think, to the influence of George Meredith, who accepted the convention of wit as the informing spirit of comedy dialogue, and whose abnormally rapid faculty of association led him to delight in a sort of intellectual shorthand which the normal mind finds very difficult to decipher. Meredith was a man of brilliant genius, which lent a fascination to his very mannerisms; but when these mannerisms are transferred by lesser men to a medium much less suited to them--that of the stage--the result is apt to be disastrous. I need not go into particulars; for no play of which the dialogue places a constant strain on the intellectual muscles of the audience ever has held, or ever will hold, a place in living dramatic literature. I will merely note the curious fact that English--my own language--is the only language out of the three or four known to me in which I have ever come across an entirely incomprehensible play. I could name English plays, both pre-Meredithian and post-Meredithian, which might almost as well be written in Chinese for all that I can make of them.
Obscurity and precocity are generally symptoms of an exaggerated dread of the commonplace. The writer of dramatic prose has, indeed, a very difficult task if he is to achieve style without deserting nature. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the difficulty lies in getting criticism to give him credit for the possession of style, without incurring the reproach of mannerism. How is one to give concentration and distinction to ordinary talk, while making it still seem ordinary? Either the distinction will strike the critics, and they will call it pompous and unreal, or the ordinariness will come home to them, and they will deny the distinction. This is the dramatist's constant dilemma. One can only comfort him with the assurance that if he has given his dialogue the necessary concentration, and has yet kept it plausibly near to the language of life, he has achieved style, and may snap his fingers at the critics. Style, in prose drama, is the sifting of common speech.
It is true, however, that, with equal concentration and equal naturalness, one man may give his work a beauty of cadence and phrasing which another man may entirely miss. Two recent writers of English dramatic prose have stood out from their fellows in respect of the sheer beauty of their style--I need scarcely name Oscar Wilde and J.M. Synge. But Wilde's dialogue can by no means be called free from mannerism,[[111]] while Synge wrote in a language which had a music of its own, even before his genius took hold of it.
It does not seem very profitable to try to concentrate into a definition the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue. The late Mrs. Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes") attempted to do so in the preface to a charming play, The Ambassador; and the result at any rate the sequel--was that her next play, The Wisdom of the Wise, was singularly self-conscious and artificial. She found in "emotion" the test of dramatic quality in any given utterance. "Stage dialogue," she says, "may or may not have many qualities, but it must be emotional." Here we have a statement which is true in a vague and general sense, untrue in the definite and particular sense in which alone it could afford any practical guidance. "My lord, the carriage waits," may be, in its right place, a highly dramatic speech, even though it be uttered with no emotion, and arouse no emotion in the person addressed. What Mrs. Craigie meant, I take it, was that, to be really dramatic, every speech must have some bearing, direct or indirect, prospective, present, or retrospective, upon individual human destinies. The dull play, the dull scene, the dull speech, is that in which we do not perceive this connection; but when once we are interested in the individuals concerned, we are so quick to perceive the connection, even though it be exceedingly distant and indirect, that the dramatist who should always hold the fear of Mrs. Craigie's aphorism consciously before his eyes would unnecessarily fetter and restrict himself. Even the driest scientific proposition may, under special circumstances, become electrical with drama. The statement that the earth moves round the sun does not, in itself, stir our pulses; yet what playwright has ever invented a more dramatic utterance than that which some one invented for Galileo: "E pur si muove!"? In all this, to be sure, I am illustrating, not confuting, Mrs. Craigie's maxim. I have no wish to confute it, for, in the largest interpretation, it is true; but I suggest that it is true only when attenuated almost beyond recognition, and quite beyond the point at which it can be of any practical help to the practical dramatist. He must rely on his instinct, not numb and bewilder it by constantly subjecting it to the dictates of hard-and-fast aesthetic theory.
We shall scarcely come much nearer to helpful truth than the point we have already reached, in the principle that all dialogue, except the merely mechanical parts--the connective tissue of the play--should consist either of "mots de caractère" or of "mots de situation." But if we go to French critics for this principle, do not let us go to French dramatists for models of practice. It is part of the abiding insularity of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama. Here, for instance, is a quite typical passage from Le Duel, by M. Henri Lavedan, an author of no small repute; and it would be easy to find even more magniloquent tirades in the works of almost any of his contemporaries. I translate from the concluding scene between the Abbé and the Duchess:
THE ABBÉ: "In our strange life, there are sometimes unexpected and
decisive moments, sovereign, though we know not why. We feel it,
that is all!--fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of
lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth