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.

It is useless to begin to give specimens of the "mot de caractere" 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 o