ns not a few when the dramatist shows
himself unequal to his opportunities if he does not at least attempt to
bring hitherto unrecorded or unscrutinized phases of character within
the scope of our understanding and our sympathies.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I
am sorry. Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not
otherwise.]

[Footnote 2: Chapter XIX.]

_CHAPTER XXIII_

DIALOGUE AND DETAILS

The extraordinary progress made by the drama of the English language
during the past quarter of a century is in nothing more apparent than in
the average quality of modern dialogue. Tolerably well-written dialogue
is nowadays the rule rather than the exception. Thirty years ago, the
idea that it was possible to combine naturalness with vivacity and
vigour had scarcely dawned upon the playwright's mind. He passed and
repassed from stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere
punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little
nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity
or flat commonness.

Criticism has not given sufficient weight to the fact that English
dramatic writing laboured for centuries--and still labours to some
degree--under a historic misfortune. It has never wholly recovered from
the euphuism--to use the word in its widest sense--of the late sixteenth
century. The influence of John Lyly and his tribe is still traceable,
despite a hundred metamorphoses, in some of the plays of to-day and in
many of the plays of yesterday. From the very beginnings of English
comedy, it was accepted as almost self-evident that "wit"--a factitious,
supererogatory sparkle--was indispensable to all dialogue of a
non-tragic order. Language was a newly discovered and irresistibly
fascinating playground for the fancy. Conversation must be thick-strewn
with verbal quibbles, similes, figures, and flourishes of every
description, else it was unworthy to be spoken on the stage. We all know
how freely Shakespeare yielded to this convention, and so helped to
establish it. Sometimes, not always, his genius enabled him to render it
delightful; but in most of the Elizabethans--though it be heresy to say
so--it is an extremely tedious mannerism. After the Restoration, when
modern light talk came into being in the coffee-houses, the fashion of
the day, no doubt, favoured a straining afte